The Keeper

by David Baldacci

  I looked madly around for Delph and Harry Two. To my horror, they both were pinned flat against the wall. Delph’s mouth was open, but no words were coming out. I scrambled to my feet and started to run toward them.

  “No,” the creature said in a raspy voice.

  It was like my feet were sunk into the rock.

  I looked back at him over my shoulder. In his hand was a wooden cudgel intricately carved with evil-looking figures I did not recognize. He smacked one end of the cudgel on the rock floor, and my feet were released.

  I turned to face him.

  He leisurely circled, looking me over.

  His nose was unlike any nose I had ever seen. It had three openings instead of the usual two. And it had two humps in the bone as though it had been broken more than once. And it was so long it very nearly overtook the mouth on the way to the chin, which was as sharply angled as a cutting knife. And the eyes above the elongated nose were solid black. Not just the little orbs in the middle. Where I had white, his entire eye was black.

  I glanced down at the hand curled around the cudgel. It wasn’t really a hand. It was a claw, nails longer than my fingers. And they were covered in blood. That answered the question of where the blood on our clothes had come from. This bloke had pulled us down here.

  He pointed one claw at me. Destin seized up around me, lifting me off the ground, and I hung there in midair. My spine was nearly cracking as I was forced backward, my head growing perilously close to my heels.

  He croaked, “The chain of Destin ’tis indeed.”

  And then he stamped the floor with his cudgel once more and I fell hard to the rock. I lay there breathless. I glanced over at Delph. His mouth was still open, but his eyes were looking not at me but at a spot on the floor. I looked there.

  You idiot. Your wand!

  I snagged it, pointed it directly at the creature and cried out, “Impacto!”

  He instantly swept his cudgel across the air and my spell hit an invisible barrier. The collision caused dust and rock to fall from the ceiling of the tunnel.

  Although he’d blocked my incantation, the creature was now regarding me in a new light, it seemed to me.

  “You are a sorceress,” he hissed.

  I rose to my feet. “I know I am. What the Hel are you?”

  He said nothing, but continued to watch me.

  “Release my friends. Now!” I raised my wand threateningly.

  “I will see you again, certe,” he said.

  “What does that mean, certe?” I asked.

  In answer he pointed to the walls where the eyes blinked and the mouths opened. He opened his own mouth in a gruesome smile and I saw his teeth. They were black like his eyes. He hissed, “All come to me in the end. Certe.”

  He stamped the cudgel against the rock floor a third time, and I braced myself for another attack. But he simply pointed again to the wall where the eyes and mouths were. And now I could hear them! They seemed to be pleading with me to save them. Their cries rose and rose until I had to put my hands over my ears.

  He shouted out some word I had never heard and there was instant silence.

  When he turned back to me, he opened his mouth wide and out came his tongue. Only it was not really a tongue, not like mine, in any case. It was long and black and had three arrow points at the end of it.

  “I am Orco,” he said. “These are my offspring. And I will see you again, the timing of which remains with you, for now. But not always so. Something will intervene.” He smiled maliciously. “It always does.”

  With his free hand he reached inside his coal-black coat and pulled out an enormous timekeeper on a rusted chain. He held it up so I could see. Across the glass of the timekeeper, faces were swirling like shooting stars traversing the heavens. They came and went with astonishing speed, too fast to count, almost too fast to see at all.

  Orco intoned, “Life. And then death. Certe.”

  Everything went black again. I felt propelled upward. At last, I hit something hard and lay still. When I opened my eyes, there was Harry Two.

  I sat up and hugged him. Then I slowly rose and staggered over to where Delph lay on top of the grave of his ancestor Barnabas Delphia.

  “Delph! Delph!”

  I gripped his shoulder and pulled him up. He came around and looked at me.

  “D-did … did that just really h-happen?” he asked in a disbelieving voice.

  I nodded, my breaths coming in bunches.

  “It … it was horrible, Vega Jane. Them faces. Pleading-like.”

  “They were dead, Delph,” I said quietly.

  “But what did that thing want with us?”

  “Astrea said that escape from this place means imprisonment forever. I wonder if she meant down there, on that wall?”

  “So we’ll end up there? No matter what we do?”

  I couldn’t believe that Astrea would have trained me up just so I would end up stuck on a wall by that evil creature.

  I straightened and looked out ahead of us. “The First Circle,” I said.

  It was our only chance.

  IT DID NOT take us long to reach it.

  The battlement of bones, I instantly termed it, harkening back to the description Astrea had used.

  It was so tall that I could not honestly see to the top of the walls. It just appeared out of the gloom like a malignant giant blocking our path. Every last inch of it was built from bones of all sorts, taken from things once living.

  “I think … I think some of ’em are like us, Vega Jane. The bones, I mean.”

  I nodded but said nothing. It was too horrible to even think about.

  Delph saw it before I did. I don’t know if I expected some grand entrance, but the doorway was barely bigger than the one I had at my old home in Wormwood. It was battered planks with blackened hinges and a rusted, twisted iron handle for a latch.

  We approached it stealthily because that just seemed the natural thing to do here. When we reached it, we stopped and looked at each other.

  Delph reached out and opened the latch.

  The door swung inward, revealing, if it was possible, even greater darkness within. Taking the same tack I had underneath the graves, I stepped quickly through. Delph and Harry Two immediately followed. As soon as we were inside, the door slammed shut. And I doubted that any spell I cast would reopen it. From this point we could only go forward, not back.

  We were inside the First Circle. We were inside the perfect maze.

  I looked ahead of us and suddenly the place was awash in light. The walls in here were exactly like the ones out there: bones. From every nook and cranny, skulls with empty eye sockets stared back at us.

  The corridor turned sharply to the right about ten feet down. We walked ahead a bit, turned that way and were immediately confronted by eight different passages bleeding off the one we were on.

  I held up my wand and was about to say the Confuso, recuso spell to straighten out the maze.

  I never got the chance.

  The battlement of bones changed suddenly. The skulls became long vines that shot out and ensnared me, ripping my wand from my hand. I tried to call out, but a vine wrapped around my mouth. I looked over in terror to see Delph being lifted into the air like a small child, the vines pinning his arms and legs together.

  Then I saw something flash past me.

  It was Harry Two! My canine was dodging and leaping over the vines that clutched at him. When a vine grabbed his hind leg, he turned and bit it in half with one chomp of his strong jaws and razor-sharp teeth. Try as they might, the vines could not capture my canine. I wondered for a moment where he was going, until I saw him returning with the thing clamped between his teeth.

  My wand!

  He raced toward me and leapt between two vines, which shot out to intercept him.

  My hands were bound by vines, but my fingers were still free. Harry Two reached my outstretched right hand and my fingers closed around my wand.

  But my mouth was
still covered by a vine and another had encircled my neck and was squeezing the life literally out of me. My mind felt dark and dizzy as my chest started to heave with the effort of staying inflated.

  I could not cast a spell without saying it. I didn’t know what to do. I closed my eyes and felt the wand begin to slip between my fingers.

  I opened my eyes when I heard him.

  Delph was looking up at me even as a large vine encircled his body and started to tighten.

  “Your wand,” he cried out. “The Elemental!”

  The Elemental.

  I willed the Elemental to full size and though my arm was still bound tightly so I could not throw it hard, it didn’t matter. I had known for some time that I controlled the Elemental with my mind, not the strength of my arm.

  Do it, save us.

  The Elemental blasted off from my hand and hurtled down the passage. As it did so, the power of its mighty wake tore apart the vines holding us, throwing huge chunks of them against other vines, which in turn were smashed by the weight of these projectiles.

  Freed from the grip of the ravaged vines, Delph and I plummeted toward the ground. I was ready, though, because I doubted we would get a second chance. The Elemental had turned and was racing back to me, and I caught it before I hit the ground. I willed it to its normal size, made a slashing motion with my wand at the towers of vines and shouted, “Withero.”

  The vines instantly turned brown, shrank and collapsed.

  But I wasn’t done yet.

  “Confuso, recuso.”

  The maze straightened out.

  “Run, Delph. Come on, Harry Two.”

  We rushed past the dead vines because I had no idea if new ones would take their place. We ran and ran until, although we were not out of the maze, we had to stop, bend over and suck in long breaths to replenish our lungs. When I looked up, I was glad we had stopped. But that was the only thing I was glad about.

  The manticore was barely twenty feet from us, barring our way.

  The conjured image back at Astrea’s did not do the creature justice.

  It was twice as tall as Delph and three times as broad. It must have weighed a ton. Its lion’s head had a full mane of tawny fur; its serpent’s tail swished across the ground. The goat’s body in the middle did not seem substantial enough to merge these two fierce creatures.

  Mesmerized by all this, I never saw it coming.

  “Look out, Vega Jane!”

  Something hit me and knocked me down.

  The blast of flames passed over us an instant later.

  I had forgotten that the bloody beast could do that.

  I looked over to see that it was Delph who had pushed me down. And saved my life.

  I sat up, pointed my wand at it and prepared to send it to Hel.

  Only it wasn’t there.

  Blast, that’s right. It can read minds.

  Harry Two barked. I whirled.

  The manticore was behind us, barely five feet away.

  It roared and flames shot at us, but I had acted at the same moment, not giving the thing time to read my mind, which was racing like a runaway horse.

  “Embattlemento.”

  The ball of flames hit my shield spell, ricocheted off and hit the wall of the maze.

  A skull hit me in the head and I realized that the bones had come back. Other bones toppled down around us.

  I raised my wand and pointed upward. “Embattlemento.”

  The skulls hit the shield and bounced off.

  But I had taken my eyes off the manticore. Where was it?

  There it was, to my left, closer to Delph.

  I raised my wand to blast it, but then it was gone again. The bloody thing could move faster than my eye could follow.

  It reappeared on my right.

  “Hey,” shouted Delph. He was waving his arms at the manticore. He picked up a skull and hurled it at the beast. It shot out a lungful of flames and the skull disintegrated.

  “Impacto!” I screamed, my wand pointed straight at the manticore.

  The thing was blasted off the ground, soared backward and slammed into the wall of bones behind it. It slid down the wall and lay still. And dead.

  “You did it, Vega Jane,” gasped Delph. He was kneeling on the ground, holding his arm.

  The walls on either side of us shook and then started to tumble down.

  “Harry Two,” I screamed and struck the harness. He leapt and I attached him to it. I grabbed Delph and took to the air. We soared along, dodging and spinning past bones, skulls and other debris. Chunks and pieces still hit us, but I kept my gaze resolutely on the end of the maze.

  And then a tower of bones collapsed in front of us and the small square of black that I knew represented the end of the maze disappeared.

  I pointed my wand and shouted, “Engulfiado.”

  The bones were blasted out of the way by a tidal wave of water and we soared through. I landed too fast and we all sprawled on the ground. I unhooked Harry Two from his harness and stood.

  “Delph, you okay?” I said urgently.

  When he didn’t answer, I looked at him. “Delph?”

  He turned his face to mine. It was a sheet of pain.

  “Delph, what is it?”

  I ran to him, then stopped dead when he held up his arm.

  “G-guess it got m-me.”

  The manticore had gotten him. His left arm was burned nearly black; the skin was bubbled and cracked.

  I immediately pulled the Adder Stone from my pocket, waved it over his arm and thought good thoughts.

  “Thanks, Vega Jane,” he said. “Pain’s all gone.” He stretched his limb.

  Well, the pain might have been gone, but the arm was still blackened. The skin was still popped and cracked like meat kept too long over the flames. When Delph followed my gaze and saw the state of his arm, his face turned pale.

  “Delph,” I said. “I’m sorry. I guess the Stone can’t fully …” I could not finish.

  “ ’Tis okay, Vega Jane,” he said softly. “No more pain. That’s what’s important, eh. Like you done for me dad. Even if it don’t look … if it don’t look so good no more.”

  I felt tears creep to my eyes, but his look told me they were unwarranted.

  He gripped my arm. “We’re alive, Vega Jane. We’re ALIVE.”

  He opened his tuck and slipped on another shirt.

  I looked around as the walls of trees sprouted on either side of us, soaring up so high they seemed to touch the sky. In a few moments, we were totally engulfed in another maze.

  “Oh no!” I said, my spirits plummeting. I drew my wand and prepared to say the spell that would straighten the maze, when I started to feel funny. No, funny was the wrong word. I was feeling terrified. But what was making me terrified were things that I knew had not happened to me. I was a beast and then something was tearing me apart. I was a bird and I was being devoured. I was transformed into a hideous lycan and then I was disemboweled.

  With a rush, my mind cleared.

  A wendigo!

  I looked behind us and there it was, soaring straight at us.

  I grabbed Delph’s hand at the same time he scooped up Harry Two.

  “Go, Vega Jane. Go!”

  We shot upward until we had nearly cleared the maze’s treetops. Then I pointed us forward. I looked back. The wendigo was right behind us. The skylight spear and the resulting thunder-thrust hit so close to us that it nearly knocked us out of the sky. And I knew why.

  I was flying over the Quag. The storms had arisen to stop me, as Astrea had said they would.

  “Delph!” I screamed. “I can’t fly up here. The storms will stop me. We’ll have to go back into the maze.”

  Delph had been gazing down from his high perch. “Before you drop, light up the maze down there,” he called over the punishing noise of the storm.

  I had been glancing behind us to see the wendigo gaining, but I did what Delph asked.

  “Illumina.”

 
The maze was suddenly brilliantly lighted. I saw Delph run his gaze over all of it. Another skylight spear hit a tree directly behind us. The force of the collision sent shock waves out that tumbled us across the air.

  I lost my grip on Delph’s hand, and he and Harry Two fell away from me.

  At the same instant, my mind was filled once more with the terror of another. When I glanced back, the wendigo was within twenty feet of me. The storm seemed to have no impact on the ghastly thing.

  I forced my mind to clear and shot downward into the darkness, scanning everywhere for the falling pair.

  “Illumina!”

  I saw them and blasted toward them, the crown of my head pointed nearly straight to the ground. I had never gone this fast before and still it didn’t seem it would be fast enough. I was convinced we were all going to die and the bloody wendigo would feast on us.

  I put on a burst of speed at this thought, reached out my hand and snagged Delph by the back of his shirt. Harry Two was still in his arms. I started to head back up, but Delph cried out, “Keep in the maze, Vega Jane. Keep in the maze.”

  I looked at him and then back at the wendigo, which was still right on our tail.

  I could feel my mind seizing up with terror, none of it mine, but that didn’t make it any less horrible. I must have slowed down because I heard Harry Two let out an enormous growl that made every hair on my neck stick straight up.

  “No!” I screamed, as Harry Two leapt from Delph’s arms and directly at the wendigo, which was so close now that I could see its ghoulish, transparent shape nearly next to me.

  I snagged Harry Two with my hand and redoubled my speed, leaving the wendigo behind, at least for now. When I looked down at Harry Two, I gasped. Part of his left ear was missing. While Delph held on to my leg, I put my canine in his harness, snatched the Adder Stone from my pocket and waved it over the spot where Harry Two’s ear had been. The stone could not regrow parts of the body, but it ceased the bleeding. And my canine seemed all right otherwise.

  “Left, left!” screamed Delph.

  I hung a left so sharp that our boots smacked against the trees.

  “Right, then another right,” directed Delph.

  I did as he said. I marveled that he had apparently memorized the maze from looking at it for only a few moments.