Tremain stopped her.
"We have no medical equipment with us." He said quickly. "If we pull it out, we open the wound. No tourniquets, no way to stop any blood loss." He looked grim. "He'll have to wait it out until we can get him some help." He looked at the man, his face softening. "I'm sorry." The man nodded, sweat pouring from his forehead.
"It's okay," he grunted. "Faced worse before."
She stood and turned to Tremain.
"Now what?" She snapped, her eyes challenging him. "How do we get across without getting skewered?" Tremain shook his head. Typical. Leaving her question hanging in the air, the turned away from her and took another look around the room. The blank walls gave him nothing to go on. He took stock of the wall they stood up against.
There were crude grids scratched into the white pigment on this wall. Excitedly, he took a look at them in turn. Each one was progressively more detailed than the last. The grids on the left showed only groupings of three or four squares, while the right-most one showed almost a complete grid. What did it all mean?
He puzzled over this as he compared the grids. Then he moved to study the floor. The grid pattern only covered the inside two thirds of the room. There was a perimeter around the walls. He wondered if they could just skirt around the room that way, then quickly brushed that aside. The ones who devised this puzzle would have thought of that too. He didn't want to risk any more injuries. He had to find the correct sequence of squares to walk on. That was the answer to this room.
Chapter 9
Christopher materialized behind a tent at the outskirts of the camp. Getting his bearings, he took a glance from behind the tent. He watched as the guard in front of the largest tent sat down on the ground next to it, folded his hands in his lap and hung his head. Soon, Christopher heard the sound of snoring.
Who is he guarding? Christopher thought as he slowly and quietly tip-toed over to the tent and entered. Jenkins gave a start as he saw the boy enter. Christopher put a finger to his lips, cautioning him to be quiet.
"The guard is asleep just outside." He whispered. Jenkins nodded. Hollis, came over, rubbing his hands together.
"Christopher, my boy," he said in a hoarse whisper, "did you bring the cavalry with you?" Christopher smiled, but shook his head. Hollis visibly slumped.
"They're on their way, though." he said. "I had to come help my uncle. We can't let that woman find any sort of weapon."
Hollis nodded.
"I think she's come unhinged," he agreed. "She was always so professional, I don't know what happened."
"Uncle Tremain has that effect on many people, I think." Christopher giggled to himself, then stopped when he again realized what kind of trouble his uncle was in. The tablet in Christopher's pocket gave a muted chirp. He unrolled it to see pictures had been added. "What the heck?" He whispered as he activated the icon.
Photo after photo of the entrance in the rock wall appeared. He quickly realized Tremain had taken these to show him where they went. Photos of Aziza and the men were there too.
"Ok, we have Tremain, Aziza and three of her men in the mountain." A photo of a skewered goon popped into the gallery too. "Oops, make that two men. One seems down for the count." He looked up at Hollis, whose eyes were wide in his puffy face. "Injured only." Christopher quickly added. He rolled the tablet back into his pocket. "I'm going after them. My uncle needs my help."
Hollis gave a sound of protest.
"Alone? You're only a boy, Christopher, what can you do against those men?" Making a decision, he pulled up his pants, straightened his sweat-stained shirt. He had a determined look in his eyes. "I'm coming with you. I can't allow you to do this alone."
Christopher gaped at the corpulent professor.
"I can go faster and quieter alone. Plus, I don't intend to confront them, just slow them down to give Senator Marcus enough time to get here with the police." he moved to the tent flap. "Just hang tight. We'll all be out of this soon."
Hollis Perlmutter puffed out a long breath as he watched Christopher slink away, turned, and sat back down. Jenkins stared incredulously at his professor.
"And you're just going to let him go alone?" His whisper was sharp and angry. Hollis blushed and looked away. Jenkins moved to the flap and looked out. He saw Christopher making his way through the tents. A young woman quickly ran after him. Jenkins shut the flap and sat back down. "He's not alone. He has a friend with him." He gave Perlmutter a baleful stare. "At least he'll have help."
Chapter 10
Tremain stared at the grids carved into the walls. Aziza stood by him, trying, and failing, to hide her impatience. The other two men knelt by their wounded comrade. Tremain, ignoring everything else, studied the carvings. The answer to this room was here, he knew it.
"What are you thinking?" Aziza asked in a loud whisper.
He jumped, not realizing she was so close.
"What happened to you?" He asked her quietly. "I don't recall any violent inclinations in you when we were in school."
She took a step back.
"What does that have to do with this puzzle?" She asked, sharply.
"Nothing. But it does help me figure out a different puzzle altogether."
She didn't answer him, just glared. Giving up, he waved a hand at the etchings in the wall in front of them.
"I'm trying to figure out which one of these carvings gives us the correct pathway out of this room." He waved at the wall. "Obviously, there is a pattern to follow which won't result in our being impaled." He gave her a glance. "Unless that's your plan."
She put her hands on her hips and glared at him.
"You don't trust me, do you?"
"Is it that obvious?" He shook his head. "I'll try to hide that better." He continued his study of the wall.
She huffed, walked a few paces away, then came back to him, pointing her finger at his face.
"You still hold that notebook incident against me, is that it?"
He sighed and turned to her.
"That was an annoyance, but you paid for it." He stared her down. "You broke any trust with those actions, though. And now you're here again, trying to steal something else."
"The weapon." she whispered, almost reverently.
He shook his head
"If it is a weapon. I can come up with at least twenty other things it might be. The problem, Aziza, is that you will not entertain any other idea." He pointed at her in return. "Your mind is made up. Brilliant though you may be, you are and have always been short-sighted and impatient." Finished, he turned back to the wall, trying to regain his concentration.
Aziza, her eyes blazing, took a deep breath.
"You had better hope I don't get impatient with you, Tremain,” she warned, "otherwise you might just find yourself on the receiving end of my gun."
Not looking at her, he quipped,
"No, I won't be. You need someone to do your thinking for you. And the goon squad over there is ill equipped for higher thought." He gestured to the three men. The wounded man had passed out. She huffed again and stormed over to them.
Tremain, ignoring her display, went back to the carvings.
Each successive grid, from left to right, became more and more complex, as if he were watching someone's thought process as they went through this puzzle. There was a sequence he had to follow. He turned to the floor. Yes, he could see it now. There was no discernible difference between the squares of the grid, but if he looked at the floor compared to the carvings, a pattern emerged. Quickly, he turned to the far wall. He skipped over the first row of squares, which caught Aziza's attention.
"Tremain, what are you doing?" She hissed. He ignored her. Sweat popping out on his brow, he avoided the next row and stepped two squares to his right, breathing a sigh of relief as he remained un-impaled. Looking back at the carvings, he turned and hopped, skipped and jumped his way across to the far side doorway. He wiped the sweat from his brow and turned to Aziza, to find she had been following him the entire ti
me, one of the remaining goons behind her. She came up to him, her eyes blazing once again. She pushed him into the wall. "Don't ever think you're going to ditch me here, Tremain." She pulled out her gun. "I hold all the cards."
Tremain pushed the business end of the gun away from his face.
"Don't threaten me, Zee, unless you intend to carry it out."
She fumed at the use of her nickname, but put the gun away.
"Don't use that name ever again." She hissed.
"Are you going to shoot me if I do?" Tremain taunted.
"I should."
He folded his arms and smirked at her.
"Then you will die here, probably impaled from some trap." He turned to the doorway. "You need me, so stop with the empty threats." He ran his hands over the outline of the doorway, gave a satisfied grunt and pushed. The doorway swung open, exposing darkness beyond. A cool breeze blew in, blowing back Tremain's hair. The air smelled sweet and humid.
Fresh air.
He shone his flashlight into the darkness. There was a wall, not ten yards in front of him, but he could see openings to the left and right of it. He pointed the flashlight up to see the tops of the walls, some twenty feet above them, the cavern roof hanging above that. He took a few tentative steps, shining the flashlight over the floor. Reaching the openings, he looked down one side, then the other. He turned to Aziza, his eyes wide and surprised.
"It's a labyrinth!" He exclaimed.
Chapter 11
Tremain stood in the first intersection of the labyrinth, playing his flashlight first down one corridor, then the next. He had originally thought they were in open air, but a quick look up disproved that. His flashlight beam had shown a cavernous ceiling, stalactites and all. He felt the walls and found the rock smooth and cool to the touch. There were no crevices or seams to be found. It seemed as though this labyrinth had been carved directly out of the mountain. Rubbing his chin with his free hand, he contemplated which corridor to take. Aziza, impatient, pushed past Tremain and pointed at one of her remaining men.
"You -- go that way and check it out. You,” she pointed to the other. "Go the other way." She crossed her arms and gave Tremain a smug look. "You worry and hesitate like an old woman." He frowned at her, but continued to try and make some sense of the rock wall. Each of the two henchmen walked slowly down their respective corridors, each away from Tremain and Aziza. Both had their flashlights shining along the floor, looking for tripwires or other traps. Tremain had just turned to Aziza when there was a yell from his left and a grinding stone-on-stone noise. He whirled to see in his flashlight beam the floor of the corridor tilting up at a sharp angle. The henchman slid down the smooth stone and disappeared. Tiptoeing to the hole in the floor, Tremain shone his flashlight beam down. He quickly grimaced and looked away. Aziza, questioning him with a look, moved to the hole herself. Tremain put his hand up.
"You don't want to see it. He's gone." Ignoring him, she pushed past him and looked down.
The trap was ingenious, she could see. The floor was hinged, the rock so seamlessly placed that there was no way they could have detected it. The hole was over ten feet deep, she surmised, the floor lined with sharpened spikes of stone. The body lay impaled by the spikes. She turned around to find the last of her men standing right behind her. He shook his head as he saw the body.
"That could have been me." He turned and retraced his steps back to the white grid-room. "That's it. I'm done. I'll wait here with Jasper." He pointed toward the injured man. "Won't die in there."
Aziza pulled her weapon and pointed it at the man.
"You will do what you are paid to do. Now get moving."
He shook his head.
"No. No paycheck is worth getting killed over." He turned his back to her and she pulled the trigger.
A flash of energy enveloped the man, who froze in surprise and shock. In seconds, he was disintegrated.
Tremain stared at the spot where the man had been.
"Why did you kill him?" He whispered.
She pointed the gun at Tremain.
"He was no longer of any use to me." She waved the business end of the gun. "Don't make the same mistake."
Tremain shook his head.
"Put that damned thing away, Zee." He indicated the open corridor. "For us to make it through this maze, we'll need both our wits." She didn't move. He kept his eyes on her, his breathing level, not giving in to her threat. Slowly, she lowered the gun and replaced it in her pocket. He turned and trained his flashlight along the floor, indicating she should do the same. With both their beams concentrated in the area, he was able to see more detail.
"There has to be a pattern here too. Some way of knowing which turn is safe, and which is leading to a trap." He glanced at the upturned stone. "We don't want to encounter any more, do we?"
Aziza didn't answer, just played her beam across the walls and floor.
"What are we looking for?" Her movements were frantic, the light jumping from one wall to the next.
Tremain put a steadying hand on her arm.
"First, you need to calm down." She glared at him, furious, then nodded and looked away. He didn't move his hand. "Second, what's the one thing I always preached when we were in school together?"
Again she bristled.
"I'm not a student anymore. Don't talk to me like I am."
He didn't move, just stared at her.
"The one thing, Zee." She didn't react to his using her familiar name, he noted.
She took her time answering. Eventually she shook her head.
"I don't remember. Probably wasn't too important anyway."
"Observing. The most important thing you can do in any situation is use your eyes." He moved away from her and studied the walls around the hole again. "There has to be an indicator of some sort. It might be subtle, but there has to be one. There should be a way to navigate this maze safely." She huffed and turned her attention to the wall on her side of the corridor. They studied the rock face for a few minutes until Tremain called her over.
"Look at this," he said as her flashlight beam augmented his. He ran a finger along a long gouge in the wall, about waist high. "This is the only anomaly in the entire wall that I can see." He scooted over to the open corridor and checked the walls in detail. "No scratches." He straightened up and pointed his beam directly down the corridor to illuminate the wall at the end. It shone greenish in the light. "I think we may have found our 'tell'." And started walking.
Aziza caught up to him but remained a pace or two behind, just in case.
"How do you know for sure? That the scratch in the rock is an indicator of safety?"
"I don't know anything for sure. I'm trusting my instinct."
She stopped dead.
"Your instinct?" She almost shouted. "I'm trusting my life to your instinct? I want certainty!"
He turned to her, shining his flashlight into her face.
"Considering we really have no other choice, my instincts are about as certain as you're going to get. There was a gouge in the wall where the trap was. Conversely, there was no gouge in the other direction. Until we find another gouge or more, we can't be certain, but I believe the gouges will tell us where the traps are." He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "Now, I can leave you here, but then you won't get the opportunity to threaten me later, so come along!" He turned and continued walking along the corridor. She hurried up to keep pace with him.
"How deep do you think this maze goes?" She eventually asked, peering into the darkness.
He waved a hand wildly.
"I have no idea. It probably extends through the rest of the mountain. I'd be more concerned with the next intersection, myself." They rounded the corner to find themselves in a small chamber with three openings in the walls. Two were in the wall facing them, the third was to their left. Tremain made a circuit of the room, shining his flashlight around the walls. Aziza stood in the center, watching.
"Three choices." He muttered to himse
lf. "Two must be traps or dead ends." He chuckled at his dark humor. "Not helping, am I?" He checked each opening, looking for gouges or some other indicator. He stepped back into the chamber, turning around slowly.
"Finding anything, or are you just trying to impress me?" Aziza asked, arms crossed. The sarcasm wasn't lost on him.
"It would go faster if there were help, but you disintegrated our last assistant." He looked her up and down. "You could exercise those eyes of yours too."
She laughed darkly.
"And I could probably test one of the exits too, can I?" She walked to the left opening, put one foot through the doorway as if she were going to take a step. "Is this what you're asking me to do?" Tremain, exasperated, stormed over to her as she placed her foot on the stone just outside the exit.
Tremain heard a faint click and yanked on Aziza's arm, pulling her back into the chamber at the same moment as a wooden lattice slammed into the stone wall where she had been about to stand. The points of the wood were sharpened. She would have been skewered had Tremain not pulled her to safety. She turned to him, her eyes awash with fright. She quickly composed herself and pushed him away. "Thanks." She said.
He grunted and shone his flashlight along the walls around them. There again, was a gouge about waist-high. He nodded
"Well, we know that one's a bust, and we have more confirmation of my hunch." He turned to the other two exits, his flashlight beam playing over the stone of the first of the remaining openings. "Now we need to figure out which one of these is the safe one." His flashlight beam criss crossed over the rock, looking for any sign. Aziza, deciding it was better to help, examined the last exit. She gave an excited intake of breath as she waved Tremain over. He hurried, his flashlight leading the way, until he spied what she had discovered. There was another neat gouge in the stone, again waist high. He looked down the corridor. It seemed to branch into a T intersection.
The Adventures of Tremain & Christopher BoxSet Page 16