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Time, caught out of reality in a sleep that could notbe broken. But he did not want that. There were likely to be enough ways, tonight, in which he would have to play with Time.
    Softly down the lower staircase into the front hall he went. The picture he had come to find hung on the wall just inside the big front door, beside the hat-rack and umbrella-stand. Will had brought a small flashlight with him, but he found he did not need it; the moonlight silvering the air through the hall windows showed him all the familiar figures the picture held.
    He had been fascinated by it since he was very small, so small that he had to clamber up on the umbrella-stand to peer inside the dark carved wood of the picture-frame. It was a Victorian print, done all in murky shades of brown; its great attraction was the enormous complicated clarity of its detail. In flowing script it was entitled
The Romans at Caerleon,
and it showed the construction of some complex building. Everywhere crowds of figures tugged ropes, led oxen straining on sturdy wooden yoks, guided slabs of rock into place. A paved central floor was finished, smooth and elliptical, flanked by columned arches; a wall or staircase seemed to be rising beyond. Roman soldiers, splendidly uniformed, stood overseeing the bands of men unloading and tugging the neatly cut stones into place.
    Will looked for one soldier in particular, a centurion in the far right-hand corner of the foreground, leaning against a pillar. He was the only still figure in the whole panorama of busy construction; his face, drawn in clear detail, was grave and rather sad, and he was gazing out of the picture, into the distance. That sad remoteness was the reason why Will, when small, had always found himself more intrigued by this one odd figure than by all the rest of the scurrying workers put together. It was also the reason why Merriman had chosen the man for the concealing of the Signs.
    Merriman. Will sat down on the stairs, chin on hands. He must think, think hard and deep. It was simple enough to remember the way in which he and Merriman had managedthe hiding of the linked circle of six Signs, the most powerful—and vulnerable—weapons of the Light. Back into the time of this Roman they had gone, and there among the stones whose picture hung before him now, he, Will, had slipped the Signs into a place where they could lie safe and unseen, buried by Time. But to remember that was one thing, to reverse it quite another….
    He thought: The only way is to live through that all over again. I have to go again, to go once more through everything we did in hiding the Signs—and then, instead of stopping, I shall have to find a way to take them out again.
    He was beginning to be excited now. He thought: Merriman can be there but I shall have to do it.
I shall be with you, but powerless,
he said. So he won’t be able to show me the moment when I have to say something, or do something, whatever it is; he may not even know when it comes. Only I can choose it, for the Light. And if I fail, we can go no further forward from here….
    Excitement dwindled beneath the appalling merciless weight of responsibility. There was one key only to the spell that would release the Signs, and only he could find it. But where, when, how?
    Where, when, how?
    Will stood up. The way out of the spell could be found only by going back into it. So, first he must re-enact the casting of it; turn Time so that once more he could live through the hours, more than a year earlier, when with Will at his side Merriman had—
    What had Merriman done? It must be an exact echo.
    Putting down his flashlight, Will stood before the picture on the wall, remembering. He reached out and put one hand on its frame. Then he stood very still, gazing in total concentration at a group of men in the picture’s middle distance: men straining at a rope that was pulling a slab of rock towards some point that could not be seen. He emptied