Labyrinth

SEVENTEEN

I looked down and saw a thin red line shining through my shirt and jacket. It was right where Norrin had slashed through my skin. “I was . . . cut by a ghost—a wraith. In London.” “Ahhh ...I see. You become moreintriguing with each meeting. What was the circumstance?”

I felt exhausted and he could tell; he pushed the stool toward me. I took it and sat. I was too tired to argue or to tell him off. And I needed his help. So I told him about Alice, the vampires of London, and the wraith in the wreck of an abandoned prison beneath the streets of Clerkenwell; how the ghostly blade the thing wielded had cut into me; and how I’d grabbed the incorporeal knife and turned it on the specter. I would have gone on, but Carlos laughed then.

Not a pleasant laugh, but one of discomforting satisfaction. “The Pharaohn doesn’t know. . . .”

“What?” I stammered.

“That he succeeded. It was meant to happen much faster; you should have died, bleeding too fast to stop, until there was nothing left to sustain you but the magic. That cut should have been deeper, slashed from throat to thigh, through the heart. He didn’t expect you to have a more tempting target with you to distract the wraith. That cut is still enough: You bled into the magic and it bled into you. You can’t stop it: You’re growing toward the weft—the great, flowing web of magic.”

“But I didn’t die, and if it worked, how come Wygan didn’t notice?”

“When did he have the chance?”

“I saw him last night.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Indeed? What did he do?”

“He pushed me . . . toward the grid.”

Carlos looked puzzled for an instant. Then his expression cleared. “The grid. That is how you see it. I perceive it as an endless tapestry, color swirling through this woven darkness of magic. I stand on the warp and draw my threads through the pattern, while you reach toward the weft and change its shape and color.”

“No. I don’t. I don’t touch magic. I see it, but no more than that.”

“You will. You held Norrin’s knife. You pulled it from the weft because you knew its shape in the blood you spilled on it. If this continues, you will not have to know a shape to draw it. That is the power the Pharaohn desires in you. I don’t know what use he has for it, but I see the pattern of his plan.”

“Then tell me.” I tried to concentrate on that, hoping the knowledge would settle me and keep me in my own troubles enough to solve them, and not go shrieking mad with the impossibilities thrust upon me.

“Like us all, he sees the magical world differently than you or I. He lives much closer to it, needs it—the strength and frailty of the asetem-ankh-astet—more than we ever will. He is in the real as a near exile. I would pity him for such loneliness if either of us had a heart for pity. As it is, I hope for his most hideous and eternal isolation. Once he was worshipped as a god—the White Worm-man, the great snake of the desert—but as the world changed and he was forgotten as a god, he chose to take the form of a man rather than fade into the darkness. He found followers with what magic he still had and he made them his children. As he became more human, his powers ebbed and it drove him a bit mad. His followers fell away and he faded from a god to a mage, trapped in this world but remembering the glory of the other. He is quite insane and he dreams of his old world endlessly. More so than all his children, he is a shadow in this one. Were it not for Edward, that would not be true.”

I knew they were enemies; I knew from our first meeting that Edward had done something to Wygan that had caused the other to hate him with a cold fury. The asetem lived closer to magic than most vampires, so perhaps that had something to do with it. Wygan and Edward had almost been allies in London at one time, if the story I’d had from the London vampires were true. But then a rift had emerged and Edward had been forced to flee, all accord between him and the Pharaohn reduced to bitter wreckage. Yet Wygan’s overarching plan continued, in spite of—or maybe enhanced by—that destruction. Something Edward had done to Wygan two hundred years ago or more had sealed his own fate in the icy hatred of the Pharaohn-ankh-astet. “But what . . . ?” I muttered. “Why?”

Carlos tilted his head. “I don’t know what occurred between them, but somehow, by his overweening ambition, Edward . . . pushed the Pharaohn deeper into the shadow, into the warp of magic. He is a creature of magic, but he could not live as he was and he is too powerful to die, so . . . he is evolving. Toward what I do not know, but it draws him back, away from the world of his children and their service, which gives him life. Whatever the details, his plan must be to change that. He will need Edward since Edward was the trigger for the change that makes this possible—and, in the Pharaohn’s mind, necessary, not only in whatever design he practices but in his vengeance. He is not the magus he once was, so he must have another to work the spell—whatever it is. That is his role for me with freedom from the Lâmina the poisonous bait to bring me to heel. He has long sought his Greywalker, and now, seeing you as you are becoming, I know what he means to do: to break the curtain of the Grey so that he and his tribe might wield more power, live more fully, in both worlds.”

“He can’t!”

“With you under his sway, able to shape the weft, he could.”

I shook my head as much in negation as to shut the persistent, echoing song of the grid out of my head. “The Guardian Beast won’t allow that.”

“Then he must have a plan for the Guardian that we don’t yet know. Perhaps Goodall is meant to hold it until there is nothing the Guardian can do.” Carlos made a wry face. “Such a selfless task seems out of character for Goodall—perhaps he doesn’t know the whole of his master’s plan yet, either.”

“Too much guesswork,” I muttered. I couldn’t go forward with such a vague idea. “I need to talk to Dad.”

“Why? If the Pharaohn controls him, you cannot speak to him without risking your liberty. I assure you, if you come into the Pharaohn’s hands while I am still in thrall to the knife’s tip in my heart, I will not be able to help you. You will be at his mercy.”

“I can. If I can find the back door to him. My father said there’s a way into his prison—this magical oubliette—and something about puzzles and keys. He said I need to find a labyrinth. That a song would tell me. . . . No, he said ‘the song.’ ‘Know the song.’ Which song I don’t have any idea, but I have a key. If I can find the right maze, I can find the back door. My father must know what Wygan is up to—he tried it on Dad first. I get to him, I get the plan.”

The rumble of Carlos’s amusement made the floor quake. “Your father is a better man dead than he was alive.”

I went cold, everything hardening within me to icy fury. My eyes narrowed to slits and I found my feet braced on the black ground as if I meant murder, my hands fisted at my thighs. “Never say that.”

This time, both his eyebrows came up and Carlos stared at me with plain surprise. He resettled his face into its usual silent glower in a moment and said, “I meant you no disrespect, Blaine. I have touched a million of the dead and find suicides are rarely men of courage. Father, like daughter, astonishes me. Accept my apology.”

I wanted to kill him—the muttering in my head sounded like psychotic ranting urging me on—but I knew I needed his help; I needed him on my side. What was I thinking . . . ? I tried to shake it off but this time it wasn’t going. The sound swelled in screams and I felt sweat break on my skin—don’t let it be blood this time, gods, not this time. Something brushed my right leg. Another of the névoacria. I kicked it away in disgust, the thing of mist and shadow surprisingly solid on my boot.

The urge to do harm slid away, the raging in my head spiraling down to a whisper of nonsense: “a rose by any other name . . . superior, orientalis. . . .” I shuddered and looked down. A crimson line swept across the floor beside my right foot. A piece of Carlos’s circle. I had been standing on it; the feelings that had overwhelmed me were not mine but those of the circle’s voice and victims. I swallowed hard, tasting bile in the back of my throat as I edged away.

“Perhaps this place is no safer for this conversation, now that the knife is put away,” Carlos suggested, remaining still and waiting for me to move first.

“Yes. That is, I agree. But I . . .”

“You tire.”

I closed my eyes for a second. They were gritty and I did, indeed, feel tired. “There’s so much . . .”

“Yes, and you fight it. You can’t. It will come. You will change. Learn it.”

“That’s what he said. Wygan,” I spat.

“Better to know the tool you have been given than become one yourself. If you hope to stop him, you must use every weapon you have at your disposal. And we must not let him know of our . . . agreement. If he cannot hope to control us through our friends, the Pharaohn will destroy them. He must think us alone and powerless until the last minute.” He waved his arm toward the doorway and looked the question at me.

I nodded and swayed a little. Then I let him lead the way back up to the sitting room, muttering to myself as I went, “I have to get to my father. I have to find this labyrinth, this back door . . .”

“The back door . . .” Carlos echoed, his voice soft in thought as we came to the top of the steps. “If there is such a thing, and it leads to your father’s prison, then it also leads to the lost passages of the Grey, places that have been sealed away or broken beyond repair. That would be the place to make the knife whole again—where no one but you and I could see. You have a key?” He turned back to me, standing in the doorway of what started as the kitchen—a room I didn’t want to examine any closer after what I’d felt elsewhere in this house.

“Yes, my father’s key,” I explained. “It’s a kind of puzzle. Puzzle . . . I have another puzzle. . . . Maybe. . . .”

“Yes?”

“It’s crazy,” I objected, shrugging it off.

“Would any of this have seemed sane to you two years ago?”

I hacked a bitter laugh. “No.”

He gave me that damned look with the raised eyebrow again.

“All right,” I conceded. “I’ll think about it.”

“Look for the connections. Don’t reject what seems completely mad.”

“As I seem headed that way myself, I guess I shouldn’t.”

He nodded and walked me to the door. He watched me pass him but remained inside, in the shadow. Even in his death-black sanctuary, he was cautious. “Take care, Blaine, but move with speed: Our days are numbered.”

I would have turned back, but the door clicked closed behind me. This time I couldn’t hear it chime. All I had ahead of me was the narrow path. I put my hands in my pockets, disliking the thought of touching anything by accident in this garden of hell. The bundled knife lay like an uncanny weight beneath my fingers. I hated to touch it, but I couldn’t let it go, afraid to lose it.

The eyes of the seraphi-guardi blinked at me as I passed, and its rustling hisses sounded like whispers in the night. I wanted to hurry away from the silvery stares, but I walked forward with care, trying to keep my thoughts from breaking on the whispers and muttering of the grid. Forgetting, forgetting . . . there was something in the noise that haunted my mind. I was forgetting something.

“Goodall.” Damn it, I hadn’t figured him out yet. How had the Pharaohn’s ushabti come to work for Edward? Carlos had almost told me, but I hadn’t pressed and now I didn’t know. Maybe it didn’t matter, but it worried me nonetheless.

I made it to the end of the walkway and pulled the gate open. The road outside was as it had been before, still hot with energy and silvered with the mist of the Grey. But at least it wasn’t the black flames that burned ceaselessly behind me.

I stepped out and began to retrace my steps to the truck, forcing myself to think of something other than my self-righteous past. I thought about Goodall. Carlos had said something about a final offering. . . . It must have been a complicated ritual, whatever it was, taken a step at a time. Something like the demi-vampires, not quite vampires yet but only a bite or two away. . . .