The Obelisk of Ashkar — hints

The blind alley, west of the lane of lamps. Look at the wall — one brick has been in and out of that hole a great many times.

She says it herself: water first, words after. You need something to carry water in. Try the rooftops.

He wants proof that is printed. There is a newspaper lying on the harbour steps where you started.

He is a coward, and Nasrin tells you so. Search the refuse heap in the alley for the thing he is afraid of, and show it to him.

Ask her — she lists exactly what you are short of. The whip and rope are in the cellar under the carpet shop, and the cellar is dark.

Read the lintel over the temple door with the glyph primer. It states all three puzzles of this act in one line each.

Walk where the jaguar walks. Examine the floor — with the lamp lit — before you take a step west.

Two answers, and both work. There is a pillar on this side to tie a line to, and a dead root over the middle that a whip will reach.

"Take nothing that is given freely — pay the stone its weight." Examine the pedestal. Then think about where you might find something that weighs about the same as a fist of gold. There is a sand bar east of where the plane put you down.

Two things have to be true at once: light in the watcher's eye, and the watcher facing the door.

Read the tide board in the chapel before you go down the stair. It is the whole act. Everything after it is arithmetic.

The capstan has no handle. The board told you where the handle is — and it told you that room floods first, which is why you should have gone there before anything else.

The gap between door and jamb is about the width of an iron claw. There is a pry-bar leaning against the abbot's tomb in the bone-room. Without it you can shoulder the door out, but it costs you four minutes and some blood.

That is why the sea gate in the choir is worth prising open on the way in, when it costs you one minute instead of your life.

The primer gives you two of the six signs on its first page. The other three are cut in the three open tombs — the scribe's, the brothers', and the child's. Take a rubbing in each.

Read the door again and write the six letters down, left to right. Then read the door's own instruction: I am read as the dead read. Salima's grandfather said the same thing. Every hand on that door faces left.

The slab over the inner doorway is hanging in a slot with nothing holding it up, and the threshold under it is a separate stone. There is a cedar prop lying in the corner of that same room, put there by the people who built the trap.

The oasis well is sweet and free. The cistern in the necropolis is not — count the dead birds. But there is good water deep under the cistern, and you are carrying forty feet of rope.

You do not walk in while forty men are working. Listen for the whistle: they clear the cut for a shot, and for about three minutes there is nobody in it.

Ask him about the floor, the balance and the doors. He has had eight days to get the wording right and he is the only warning you get.

Everything else in this game has taught you to test the ground and stop when something cracks. This is the act where that is the thing that kills you. Keep walking.

It weighs what a thing cost you, not what it weighs. A stone is not going to do it. If you have spent every treasure you own, you are still wearing something you have never once put down.

The sign between them says the light you carry is the lock. Two men are sitting against the wall with their torches still switched on.