Labyrinth

TWENTY-THREE

It was so narrow and weed-choked that I almost missed it, but I found the road that turned up the hill and away from the railroad track. Once we were on the path, finding the remains of the house was easy. The road went up through a slight fold in the hillside, twisting north and east of the cemetery into what was clearly no-man’s-land until the trees appeared, like the fringe of a pale-green cloak on the shoulders of a giant. The track—it wasn’t really wide or clear enough to call a road—ran along the edge of the thickening grove of trees and then turned suddenly to the left to end in a ragged dirt oval bordered on the east side with trees and on the west with scrub that fell away before rising again to hide the house from the railroad and the cemetery. No one would find this place by accident unless they came down the hill on the northeast, and that was covered in neat, cultivated rows of apple trees above the stark ocher rifts of the miniature valley’s walls that cupped the Rose house in its weathered palm. A lane of trees came right to the edge of the oval and led straight back to a pile of fieldstone rubble and half-buried wood, charred and broken among the stones. I used the oval to turn the Rover, figuring it was better to be prepared if we had to leave in a hurry, and got out.

The ground whispered under my boots like distant earthquakes. I found myself narrowing my eyes, suspicious and expecting trouble. The avenue of old pear trees—their blossoms whiter and more translucent than the apple’s—led directly to what had been the front steps. Now it was two broken marble slabs and a wasteland of ruin beyond the cracked front stoop. I stopped about halfway up the path and studied it. The approach was much too easy.

Quinton paused beside me, stuffing the two puzzle balls into his backpack. “What?”

“Something’s wrong. Cristoffer wouldn’t leave it this simple. Am I missing something? What do you see?”

“I just see . . . trees. Just a mess of trees.”

I huffed a strand of hair out of my face and crouched down, changing my viewpoint, and let my vision open to the Grey. But I didn’t slip in; if there was something there, I didn’t want to meet it just yet.

In the silvery world of the Grey, the house rose in blocks with a round central turret like a finger pointing into the sky. The trees tossed their shaggy heads in a spectral wind and cast moving patches of colored light onto the fog-shrouded ground. The thick, vibrant feeder lines of the grid—the leylines and main trunks of magic—throbbed below the earth and arrowed for the back of the house. I couldn’t see where they were leading from here, but I would have guessed they converged at the center of the labyrinth of moving trees.

Quinton had been right: It was a labyrinth. The apparently concentric rings of trees were strung with lines of light and mist, creating barriers that would confine and control whoever stepped into them, forcing them to wander a single, tortuous route until they reached the center. The ground was a sheet of silver marked with red, black, and white in scattered lines like runes or broken bones. I held Quinton back and inched forward, putting my hand against one of the barriers.

The broken lines on the ground stirred, rising into the air, and a shock wave of crows erupted from the nearest trees, plunging at us, shrieking and shattering the Grey. Quinton ducked, yanked his hat over his head, and turned up his collar, hugging his coat close against the ripping talons and clacking beaks of the flock. I turned my shoulder into the cloud of birds and tucked my head down until they lifted away again, circling into the sky and flocking to and fro as if waiting for my next move. A shadow shaped like a bear assembled itself from the clutter on the ground and roamed a restless path a few feet away, pacing just beyond the next wall of the labyrinth.

I looked at the trees and the ground, then back up and down again, studying the way the shadows fell and the returned detritus that lay along the labyrinth’s paths. “So that’s where the animals came from,” I whispered.

“Are they real?” Quinton demanded, raising his head warily.

“They are, but they’re not exactly normal. Did you get a look at any of them?”

“Hell no. Too busy hiding my eyes from their beaks.”

“They’re dead.” The cloud of crows fluttered and fell from the sky, breaking into bones and feathers, scattering back into the years of leaf rot and weeds. “Every animal that ever wandered in and died here guards this place. Guardian beasts by the score, animated by the energetic forces under the house. Probably tied to it by blood—seems like the blood mage sort of thing to do, doesn’t it?”

“Sounds like the creepy thing to do, you ask me.”

“But effective. That’s probably what attacked the kids who came here and thought they were chased by animals. These guardian beasts try to keep people out of the labyrinth or away from the house; cross the lines, walk in the wrong place, and they come after you. I’d bet that you encounter fewer of them if you stay on the right path. . . . You want to take the long way, or risk the dead things and run straight through?”

“To where?”

I pointed to the cleared place at the back of the tumbled-in foundation: a circular area of weedy grass about the size of a baseball infield. “There. The center of the labyrinth.” It was as clear as water to me, and as I named it, the misty walls of the orchard labyrinth thickened and brightened, increasing the electric sensation in my body.

Quinton gave it and me a considering look. “Much as I tend to live recklessly, I think this might be a better time for caution. And I could do without any more encounters with skeleton crows.”

I stared at the ground for a while, looking for the silver fog that marked the lines of the labyrinth’s walls, then led forward until we came to the first turn.

We must have looked insane, wandering around the orchard in looping arcs for no apparent reason. We were nearing the center and I was getting fatigued from staring at the Grey without vanishing into it. A thin silver fog covered the ground in my view and I was concentrating on the thicker shapes of the walls, so I missed the shadow bear, its tattered skin stretched over an incomplete skeleton of bones and twigs.

The eldritch creature grunted and charged us, rising on its back paws as it came on. Its breath was the scent of things rotting in the earth as it roared, swiping at me in the lead. Quinton grabbed for me, shouting, “Watch out!” as he tried to pull me backward. The massive, ruined paw of the shadow bear fanned over my shoulder, claws ripping into the leather of my jacket.

I threw myself sideways as Quinton tugged back, losing my footing and scrambling for a solid purchase. My foot descended on emptiness and I plunged straight down into a pit the Grey had concealed.

I landed on the damp-smelling earth with a thud and a burst of pain up my right leg. Quinton jumped down next to me and the shadow bear lumbered to stare down at us from empty eye sockets, too large to get through the narrow hole we’d come down. It pawed the earth a moment, thrusting its razor claws at us through the opening, snorting. Defeated, it finally shuffled off in disgust.

I let out my breath and leaned against the dirt wall of the hole. Jarred out of my observation of the Grey, I could see it was more of a ramp than a pit, a twist in the path that looped under the main way like a stream under a bridge.

Quinton pulled me to my feet, wincing in sympathy as I made a pained face. “You all right?”

“Yeah.” My ankle twinged and throbbed, but well-laced in my boot, it held up fine. “I’ll be OK, now the bear’s gone. What about you?”

“All right. Couple of cuts and scrapes but nothing dramatic. How did you miss seeing that hole?”

“I wasn’t looking for a normal trap,” I replied, a bit ashamed I hadn’t thought of it.

“The bear was a little distracting. You can’t watch everything, I guess. And why did the bear attack us anyway? I didn’t think we’d stepped off the path. . . .”

“Guardians are supposed to keep you out of things . . .” I started but petered out.

Standing under the path, we looked around. Even with normal eyes it would have been hard to detect the new path much earlier. The roots of the apple trees and decades of rain had camouflaged the entrance and filled it in slightly, making the hole smaller. I turned around several times, trying to get my bearings on the new elevation.

Another path took off under the bridge, heading off in strange twists and falls through the surface of the orchard labyrinth. The bridge wasn’t so innocent either: From the top it looked like just more surface dirt, but from below, it was a stonework arch that opened into a new landscape of passages below and through the orchard.

“It’s another maze,” I observed. “A hidden one under the surface labyrinth.”

“I don’t think it’s just ‘another maze.’ What if it’s the start of the real maze? Should have realized a labyrinth—even with ghost-bears and skeleton crows—was too easy. That bear was trying to keep us out of here. I’ll bet this leads into the center,” Quinton speculated.

Studying the visible part of it, I agreed. “I guess we’ll find out.”

“Can you make it?”

“Yeah. My ankle’s a little sore, but the boot’s as good as any brace. Let’s go.”

He shrugged and walked closer to me as we passed under the arch and into the new maze. This was different from the labyrinth above; the paths branched and twisted, rising up to the surface and falling back below it, ducking under more bridges and coming to sudden ends that turned us back again and again. But the closer we moved to the center, the stronger the sensation of electricity coursing through me became while the harmony of the grid grew—lounder and more like a single great voice.

We’d been in the maze nearly an hour when we saw a shaft of light from above. We were passing through a long, turning corridor choked with roots when we saw it cutting through the gloom ahead, plunging down from an opening above. The light was brighter and stronger than any we’d seen since entering the maze and we moved toward it with caution. It seemed too good to be true and that made us both wary.

At the base of the light, we came to another arch, this one leading to a cylinder of rising stairs. Going up them, we emerged into the edge of an empty circle at the heart of the original labyrinth, about a hundred and fifty feet from where the back door of the house must have stood. I paused at the top of the steps, looking through the Grey again before stepping out onto the weedy grass. Bright blue lines of energy crossed just to the west of the stairs at the center of the circle. Dru Cristoffer had enclosed a power nexus for herself in the secret walls of her labyrinth. A spiderweb of rich green and golden-yellow energy spun out from the crossed spokes of the nexus. One color I did not see was red.

I had a bad feeling.

I checked my shoulder where the shadow bear had hit me, but only the jacket showed any damage. If it had cut me, the wounds had already closed. I looked back at Quinton, blocking his path up the stairs. “Hey, how bad are those cuts and scrapes of yours?”

“Not bad. Kind of oozy, but nothing to worry about.”

“You have any bandages in those pockets of yours? Because I think this might be a very bad place to bleed.”

He frowned and squinted. “Why?”

“Cristoffer is a blood mage. This is, essentially, her workroom. What do you think?”

His face lit and then clouded with unhappy recognition. “Ah. Yeah. No bleeding here.”

I left him on the stairs and stepped cautiously onto the lawn, half expecting something to attack or flash or change, but nothing did. “Power must be off,” I muttered to myself and thought I heard the voices of the grid giggle. I walked to the point where the colored lines of energy crossed, figuring that was the most likely place to start with whatever came next.

“OK, Dad, I’m in the labyrinth,” I thought aloud. “So . . . what do I do?” I supposed now was the time to open one of the puzzle balls. The doors, the voice of the grid reminded me. Just one at a time. . . . But I didn’t have them. Quinton did. I called out to him. “Can you throw me the puzzle balls?”

“Sure.”

They were a little bigger than croquet balls, not as large as volleyballs, and well within my ability to catch, but while the first one was easy enough, the second spun off-center, wobbling as it came toward me, making an odd, thrumming counterpoint to the chorus of the Grey. I made a scooping motion to catch the ball, but it seemed to slide across my fingers with a slithering, impossible shimmy to fall willfully to the earth. The dark blotch of burned blood that Dru Cristoffer had made touched the ground with a clash that shook the foundations of the collapsed house behind me until they growled and grated together. Red light flashed across the lawn with a roar, sealing the center of the labyrinth in hot energy. I heard Quinton shout, but the sound seemed to come distantly, as if from behind a steel door.

“No!” I yelled, and darted for the stairs, but they were gone, hidden away behind an impenetrable shield of light. I grabbed for the crimson-glowing barrier, concentrating, reaching with all my will for the living fabric of the Grey, and felt the earth groan and bulge as the searing shock of the grid burned through my frame.

My ears rang as if I were surrounded by noise, but the silence was absolute with the rushing feeling of something pushing through me. The voice that wasn’t a voice but a million whispers told me to stop trying. To let go of the seal. Yes, I could break it, but not now. Stop. Stop and open the first door—just one—and all will be well.

I shuddered at the invasive sense of knowing. Something that wasn’t me—that wasn’t even a single thing but a collective of knowledge—spoke to me, not in my ear but directly. I raged around the room of red light until I was too tired and dizzy from its endless sameness. I didn’t slip out of it; I didn’t tear it apart. I could have. Knowledge hovered nearby, taunting me with the way but not allowing me to do it. Dragging my feet, I came back to where the two wooden balls lay on the ground, hovering on the scarlet surface like bubbles on water.

I picked up the first puzzle ball, the one Will had given me and in which I’d found the quiet one of Dru’s pair of earrings, and rolled it around in my hands until I found the odd slit in the surface into which my father’s key fit. I didn’t have to fumble around with the funny little wire puzzle this time. Once in my hand it shuffled into the right shape on the first try, adding its satisfied humming to the song of the grid. I was filled with disgust at the smug noise of it all.

The puzzle ball folded outward, opening wider and larger, moving away from me as it pushed a passage into the Grey. I started to step into the passage, but a distant voice shouted and made me pause:

“Theseus had a ball of yarn to mark his path through the labyrinth.”

It didn’t look like another labyrinth, just a hallway, but so far very little of this had been what it seemed. I didn’t have any yarn, though. I put my hands into my pockets, searching for anything I could use and finding only the hard, cool tin in which I’d stuck the strand of Todd Simondson. I pulled it out and looked it over. The writhing end of his energy fluttered from under the lid.

I opened the tin and Simondson flowed out, confused by his surroundings but still pissed off. Before he could start demanding anything, I shushed him and caught a twist of his strand on my finger while I stuffed the second puzzle ball—Cristoffer’s puzzle ball—into my jacket.

“Stay right here,” I ordered the ghost of my murderer, and I started into the doorway, trailing his angry color behind me. Nothing and no one seemed to object.

The red illumination of Dru Cristoffer’s labyrinth faded until I was able to see only by the shifting ghostlight that defined the hallway I was walking down. I cast a glance back over my shoulder, but though I’d never made a turn, the way behind me bent and vanished into darkness. The deeper I moved into the mist, the quieter my head became. I could feel more, feel the energy of the grid running through me as if I’d bled out completely and my veins were full of the living fire of magic. But of the chorus that had invaded my mind both dreaming and awake, I could hear almost nothing. I twisted to the left and found another, smaller round room with no other entrances or exits.

This had to be the center of whatever labyrinth I’d just run. Keeping Simondson’s thread looped around my finger, I dug the other puzzle ball from my jacket even as I felt the grid nexus below my feet as strong and loud as before; I had moved and yet ended up in the same place. I fiddled with the key and felt it click into shape. This time it only made a dull whisper and opened the next ball with a grating noise.

There was a stink of recent, bloody death, burned gunpowder, and the ice-blue odor of anesthetic. For a moment the silence was so profound I thought I’d gone deaf. Then came the distant sound of bone spines chiming against one another and a train wreck’s screech moving sideways and away from me. I recognized the strange underwater babble from a dream, and still trailing the red light of Simondson’s ghost from my fingers, I stepped into utter darkness that unfolded from the second puzzle like a blanket of night.