Tower Of The Medusa

14. MAGIC MAZE

Kirin went forward in utter darkness. The passage ran straight for a time, deep into the god-made mountain of iron-hard stone. The portal through which he had come dwindled behind him, a dim rectangle of faint light. Then the passage took a sharp turn to the right, and the distant gateway vanished. He went forward into unbroken gloom.

Now that he was actually within the Iron Tower, his dread and awe vanished. He felt fully alert, poised, cool. Every sense was honed to razor-sharpness. His nerves were steady, his pulse-beat was calm. He felt keyed up to maximum power; totally in command of himself and ready for anything.

From his belt-pouch he drew forth a curious device which he strapped to his brow. From brackets attached to the strap two black discs snapped down in front of his eyes. Protruding from the strap in the center of his forehead was a metal tube. From this a pulsating beam of force throbbed. It bathed space in front of him, and when the pulsations of force encountered a solid barrier, then they reflected back. The black discs in front of his eyes were rendered sensitive to the force beam. They pictured a three-dimensional image of the obstacles in front of him. It was like a 3D version of radar.

He could have used a simple light-beam: others in the past who had ventured within the tomb-like Tower may have used lights. That would account for the dry and brittle bones that crunched under his feet.

Above him, in niches along the walls of the passage, silver birds with cruel hooked beaks sat motionless. Life had been infused into eternal metal. But they slept: only visible light would awaken the rapacious robot birds, sending them forth to rend and slay. They did not react to the invisible pulsations of the force-probe. Which is why he wore the headdress mechanism instead of simply carrying a torch or light-tube.

Now he came to the first of the obstacles. Huge swinging blades, like meat-cleavers, swung down from the roof, and up from grooves in the floor, and out of the walls. They went snickering past, slashing at empty air in an eternal dance of death. He stood observing them, remembering the data given in the documents from Trevelon, memorizing the rhythm of their strokes. Then he sprang amidst the blades as they went hissing past. He maneuvered between them and through them, but it was chancy in the extreme. The force-probe was an alternative to sight, but not really a substitute. Half blinded, he moved among the flying knives. The sweat sprang out over his forehead. It trickled down his sides under his tunic. His inner thighs were clammy with perspiration.

Then he was through the area of the invisible scythes and he stood on safe ground once again. For a time he simply stood there until he stopped trembling; stood there breathing deeply, feeling the tension drain out of him like water draining from a squeezed sponge, recovering his self-control. He had passed the phototropic birds and the flying knives safely, but even deadlier traps lay before him.

When his self-control was complete, he went forward again, but slowly, cautiously, counting the footsteps.

Finally he came to an area of flat stone. He inched forward with extreme caution, slipping a harness from his pouch. He strapped curious gloves and bootlets to his hands and feet. Cups of tough plastic were fastened to the palms of the gloves and to the toes of the bootlets. He thrust his palms against the left wall of the passage, high up. The suction cups adhered. He levered himself up above the floor and stuck the toe-cups against the wall. Then, slowly and painfully, he inched his way along the wall of the passage, level with but a couple of feet above the floor.

For the floor here was an illusion. It was not solid rock, although it resembled it. It would have borne his weight for a few yards: thereafter it became a deadly quasi-solid state of matter like quicksand. It would have sucked him down greedily to a horrible death.

He moved across the face of the wall like a human fly.

It was slow going. In no time at all, the muscles of his arms and shoulders and thighs began to ache abominably. He gritted his teeth and struggled on.

After an eternity he passed the area of the liquid stone and was able to come down to the solid floor again. He felt exhausted. But he could not rest yet. Greater tasks lay ahead of him and he must press on before his strength failed.

He came to a region where the floor was covered with a raised design. Eight inches tall, a wandering maze of narrow stonework scrawled over the flooring. The edges of this miniature maze were sharp as razors and hard as diamond.

He must go forward, threading through the maze, avoiding contact with the knife-like edges. Even the tough plastic of his boots could not protect him from the savage keenness of the blade-edged maze. Nor could he continue using the suction harness on the walls, unless he were a superman. For the knife-maze extended for three hundred yards and his muscles could not endure the torment of wall-walking for such a distance.

But the maze could be traversed, and safely, if one kept cool and kept one’s nerve. To do it in utter darkness was agony. But he inched his way forward slowly, step by step, using the force-probe to read the ground ahead of him, holding in his mind a clear picture of the one safe route through the maze. He could do it. He knew he could do it. And he did.

It took two hours of excruciating effort and patience. But he came through it safely, although his nerves were frayed clear to the bone.

He rested for a time, and took nourishment from the concentrated rations he carried with him, washed down with a healthy draught of strong brandy.

Then, when he felt rested and restored, he went forward again into the blackness deep within the heart of the Iron Tower…

Seven more tests he passed, each more difficult and ingenious than the last. Some of them took every ounce of strength and limberness in his body; others demanded a clear head and a steady nerve. He only managed to endure the torment because he knew what was coming and how to surmount it. It would have been impossible to penetrate the maze safely not knowing the way.

There was a forest of howling pillars through which he wove a narrow and perilous path. Carven mouths roared at him and empty black eye-pits glared with inanimate hate…

There was a knife-thin bridge that arched across a chasm of living flames whose curling tendrils clutched and lashed at his limbs…

There was a bottomless pit whereover he must cross by an Invisible bridge that was as slick as glass. Great winds rose in this pit out of the center of the world and strove to thrust him off balance…

There was a resonant echo-chamber hung with dangling spears of stone where the slightest sound reverberated deafeningly and the stone spears could be dislodged by the slightest whisper…

Through these and other perils he passed by the use of caution and patience and strength and grim nerve… aided, it must be confessed, by certain clever devices he bore with him against the hour of need. Fore-warned is fore-armed, and the grey philosophers of Trevelon had searched well through their magic skills.

In a safe place he rested and even slept for a time, napping huddled in his cloak against the shelter of the wall. He must husband every atom of strength against further need. And when he awoke, he went forward again.

No man had ever come this far before. At least, there were no bones here.

He felt very alone. The god still slept within him. He could have used a few miracles, he thought with a grim, weary smile. He felt as if he had come many miles by now. And, for all he knew, perhaps he had—despite the known dimensions of the Tower.

Space and time were distorted here, twisted into new contours by the spell of the god. He felt so weary, he wondered if he had been in the maze hours… or days?

He went on.

He was past the greater number of the death-traps now. He had passed the corridor of stone gladiators where living statues, their arms honed to stone swords, listened alertly for the slightest sound, ready to kill. He had traversed the fiery corridor where jets of flame lashed erratically at any passing shadow. He had survived the chamber of ice where blasts of freezing cold congealed any warm-blooded thing that ventured therein. His supply of protective devices was now exhausted.

He would need no more artificial aid, he had been told, from this point on. He hoped the mages of Trevelon know what they were talking about. He went forward warily.

And came at last to the door of the treasure chamber itself. He had come through a thousand perils untouched. And as he stood gazing at the door to the chamber wherein the Heart of Kom Yazoth was kept (so the inscription read), he felt his heart sink within him. For one last peril lay before him. A peril he had not been prepared to face.

He tasted the bitterness of defeat and failure. He growled a despairing curse at the distant philosophers who had not warned him of this…

Between where he stood and the door to the inmost chamber, the floor fell away in a bottomless abyss.

An abyss a hundred yards across!

Kirin groaned and rubbed his brows. He could not fly, he could not jump, and his suction harness had been discarded, together with all surplus weight, far behind him, when he passed over a pit of knives on a slender rope that could bear only his weight alone.

This was the end of the quest. He could neither go back nor go forward.

He was doomed.

He slept there on the brink of the abyss. He was utterly exhausted in body and mind; worn out, with a weariness that ran bone-deep.

He awoke to hunger and thirst, but his food supplies had been cast aside together with the no-longer-needed equipment. The mages had warned him, through Temujin, that at the area of the pit of knives he must abandon every bit of extra weight. Once he had reached the Medusa (said they), the return passage would be magically brief and without any perils.

He wished he had retained the suction harness. Although in his exhausted state he greatly doubted he would have been able to span the abyss by clinging with vacuum cups to the walls. Still, he would have had a fighting chance.

This way he had no chance at all.

He searched the edge of the abyss from one wall to the other, testing every inch of empty space along the edge. It was just possible there was an invisible bridge…

But there was none.

He sat on the edge of the abyss, dangling his heels, staring into emptiness.

What happened now?

Well, he could stay here and starve to death. Slowly.

Or he could try to retrace his path, and die under slashing knives or flailing limbs, or the searing lash of fire-jets, or one or another of the dooms he had passed through with the aid of his mechanisms.

Neither was a very attractive prospect.—

Or he could simply leap into the abyss. It looked bottomless, but it was choked with gloom and he could not tell. At any rate, it would be a swift and merciful death, over in moments. Better than a slow, agonizing death by starvation. Better than dying under the torment of a broken back from the stone gladiators, or burning alive in the fire-jets, or freezing in the chamber of cold.

He could not decide what to do. He sat there idly contemplating his doom. He had never been this close to death before. That is, to certain death. Oh, he had flirted with destruction many times in his perilous career. But always he had won through to freedom. This time, his position was hopeless. It was a rather unpleasant thought.

Strangely enough, he found himself thinking of his friends. His death would mean their deaths as well. For the robot ship would not open to admit Temujin or Caola. They would wait beyond the portal of the Tower for his return. But he would never return, and they would eventually be caught and slain by the Death Dwarves.

Nor could he do anything to prevent this! The thought galled him unbearably. His own death was one thing: grim enough, but at least he had gone into this with his eyes open, knowing the risks he took, and confident that he could surmount them. But to have the deaths of the old man and the girl on his conscience as well—that was an ugly burden to carry down into the eternal darkness with him. He cursed wearily, damning the wise men of Trevelon who had foreseen every hazard but this last one, damning the dead god within him who had built this accursed tower of stuff so dense he could not even use his signal bracelet to summon aid from the ship. Seven times he had tried to punch a rescue call through the dense stuff of the Tower and seven times he had failed. Nor would the ship do anything on its own initiative. Its intelligence was, after all, limited. It would sit there on the plain till doomsday, unless attacked. And since it was completely invisible and indetectible, he doubted if the Death Dwarves would attack it.

It was hopeless. Utterly.

What about the god who slept within his deepest mind? Could even Valkyr do anything to get him out of this predicament? He had tried to summon the god, to contact it, to communicate. But he had failed to rouse the ghost of the deity.

His situation was completely hopeless.

Idly, he wondered why the grey ones of Trevelon had not foreseen this last hazard. There must be a reason. They had anticipated everything else. What possible explanation could there be? He tried to think, tried to cudgel his wits into some semblance of their former alert acuteness. But he was too tired, too hungry. And thirst was becoming a torment to him. It seemed like days since he had last had anything to drink.

He napped again, falling into a light, fitful, uneasy slumber. He half hoped that in the extremity of his need he would contact the ghost of Valkyr within his ancestral memory, but nothing chanced. After a time he awoke, no longer quite as weary, but hungrier and thirstier than before. He knew he could not endure this for long. Thirst drives men mad long before hunger can kill them. He resolved to spare himself that kind of an end. Far better, a swift leap into the abyss, a fast, clean death in instants, than a lingering agony, giggling with madness, chewing on his own flesh. He would go out like a man, not like some animal thing, raving in the darkness of a mind gone mad.

He looked again at the abyss.

And, all of a sudden, an idea came to him. A mad idea, a wild concept, surely. But there was a dim chance.

He held the notion at arms’ length, turning it about, looking at it from every angle. There was just the slimmest chance in the world that it could be the answer…

He looked again at the abyss. For a very long time now, Kirin had gone forward through lighted corridors and chambers. He was long past the darkness that drenched the outer portions of the maze, long past the time he had depended on the force-probe, and had needed the black mirrors before his eyes to “see” his way. The probe equipment, too, had been thrown away when he had lightened his burden of everything superfluous.

Now he wished he had it.

For perhaps… perhaps … the abyss was only an illusion, a distortion of perspective alone. Perhaps it was only a yard across, and the optical laws were themselves twisted and bent to make the yard seem to stretch for a hundred times its actual length. Perhaps.

If it were so, the illusion would only be visible from his particular angle. That is how perspective works. And however the Master Mages of Trevelon had peered into the impenetrable depths of the Tower to map the path he must follow, perhaps they had looked down on the abyss: from that angle, perhaps it seemed only a yard or two wide, hence they had not deemed it worthy of mention, since a man could easily jump across it.

He examined the idea thoughtfully. He did not examine it very long. There was no use in spending time over it.

It was the only chance he had. Slim, but still a chance. And any chance is better than none, he thought grimly. Any chance at all…

He would try to leap across the abyss.

If his guess was correct, he would land safely before the door to the treasure-chamber.

If his guess would was wrong, he would fall to his death in the abyss.

At least it would be a swift death, and a clean one.

So he jumped…