by Kate Elliott
“Just following the earl down,” said the professor.
“Wait a moment, Father. I’ll go with you.”
Below, the flickering light vanished. Maretha and the professor started down as the rest hurriedly lit lanterns and went singly behind them, all except Charity, who kept hold of Julian’s arm. Thomas Southern descended last, his lips set tight as if only by keeping them closed could he prevent himself from delivering a sharp rebuke.
Inconstant figures accompanied them in the dimness, following along the walls, suggestions of shapes and long-forgotten events rubbed away by centuries of elemental erosion. Chryse, going down one tentative step at a time, was halted more than once by Sanjay’s back as he stopped to peer at the indistinct tracery of lines along the wall. Ahead, the excited chattering of Mog and Pin reverberated up and down the stairwell. Gloom and rock closed in above, and abruptly the floor was level and they ducked under a low lintel and came into a small, square room.
A kind of collective gasp caught in their throats. Thomas Southern stopped in the lintel opening and crossed himself.
The frescos in the room were brilliant, even by lantern glow, beautiful in execution, but macabre in detail. Directly opposite the door a fine horse walked, golden and proud, and on its back sat a fine, golden-haired man dressed in some ancient costume, heavy sword in one hand, the other cupped around a shimmering ball of light, or fire. A beautiful young woman, sorrow etched on her face, babe at her breast, walked alongside, holding onto the fine hem of his trailing robe. Behind her another figure walked, and another, each detailed, each progressively closer to death, and then passing beyond it, deteriorating, rotting, wasted to bone, until the final figure, as in an unending circle, walking just in front of the horse, was a capering, empty-eyed skeleton.
And in the center of the room, on a thin pillar of white stone, stood a cup, a golden chalice. It had no decoration whatsoever, but from it emanated a force that both attracted and repelled the eye.
“The treasure,” whispered Charity, gaze locked on the cup.
Chryse, too, stared at it, just as fascinated, sure that at any moment the plain burnished gold of its surface would shift to reveal in simple patterns the secret of the city. Sanjay nudged her.
“Almost too like to be coincidence,” he said in an undertone into her ear. The warmth of his breath on her skin broke her from her hypnotized stare. She followed the touch of his arm to look beyond the golden cup.
The earl stood just below the figure of Lord Death. In the light his hair shone like the gold of the chalice, and in one hand, extended before him, he cupped a shimmering ball of sorcerous fire. He could just have dismounted from the fine horse painted on the wall behind him. His gaze, unlike almost everyone else’s, was not on the cup. Instead, he watched Maretha as she slowly circled the room, lantern lifted high to illuminate as much of the detail of the frescos as possible. His gaze could have been death’s, it was so piercing.
Then she reached the end of the procession and passed back by her husband to stand before the chalice. Professor Farr was scribbling hasty notes in the journal she had bought for him.
“Lift it up for me, Maretha,” he said in a distracted tone. “I need to see if there is any mark at its base.”
She extended her hand and touched the cup.
Every light in the little room vanished. Someone swore. It was so black that Chryse could not discern her own hand in front of her face until her breath brushed it.
A soft grating echoed in the chamber, like the scraping of stone. Laughter sounded, as if from the walls, from the very air, from the depths, but it was neither crazed nor mocking; it was the laughter of young women sharing sweet secrets about their admirers.
Then a snap, like the first spark of fire, and light blossomed at the earl’s hands, casting their shadows high on the painted walls. Mog and Pin yelped with fear and cast themselves on Julian.
“Where is Maretha?” asked Sanjay sharply.
“She couldn’t have come past me,” said Southern from his stand in the doorway. “There isn’t room, and I didn’t move.”
“Damnation.” The earl’s tone fairly dripped fury. Fire blazed in his hands. Maretha was gone. “I knew there was another level.” He moved so abruptly that no one could react until it was too late. “She will be mine,” he said, and he charged out past Thomas Southern and raced up the stairs, plunging the room into darkness again.
“Bloody hell,” said Kate. “I don’t know what happened to her, but we’d better find her before he does. Got any matches?”
Julian felt Charity remove her hand from his arm and move away from him. Cloth rustled against cloth. Chryse grabbed for Sanjay, found his belt, and gripped there. She started violently when a hand touched her back, relaxed when Lucias breathed her name and huddled in under her arm. Professor Farr was mumbling indistinguishably. A match snapped and hissed, and a second later Thomas Southern’s lantern flared to life.
“Hell in a basket,” said Kate in the gloom. “The treasure is gone, too.”
Sanjay’s lantern flickered and caught. In the double light the white pillar could be seen; there was no cup. It might as well have been an apparition that had dissolved into the air.
“I feel ill,” said Charity abruptly. She was hunched forward next to the pillar, arms crossed over her abdomen. Sanjay and Thomas Southern stepped forward at the same moment. There was an instant’s hesitation, and then Southern turned and retreated up the steps, his lantern held as a beacon for the rest, while Sanjay went to aid her.
“Wasn’t Maretha the one who—” Chryse was surprised to discover that her voice was unsteady. “—who didn’t believe that the city itself had magic?”
“She can’t simply have vanished,” said Julian. “There’s got to be another way down.”
“Can’t she?” muttered Kate. “And why Maretha? Was it something to do with the cup?” She shook her head. “This is pointless, Julian. If this stairwell was miraculously cleared out, the others might be, too.” She had gotten her lantern lit and now scoured the floor and walls for some sign of a seam. “We’ll never find anything here. I feel sure of it.”
“Then we’d better go,” said Chryse. “I don’t like the way the earl ran out of here any better than you do.”
Lucias shrank away from her, into the center of the glow generated by Kate’s lantern. His eyes were wide, half dazed. “‘The labyrinth.’” His voice held fear and the hypnotic dullness of one reciting at the behest of some stronger will. “‘The hunter seeks the labyrinth as well.’” He backed up, away from a sight the others could not see. Kate put out a hand, touched him, and he jerked as if he had been shot and shuddered and began to cry. “Don’t go,” he muttered under his ragged sobs. “Don’t go there.”
“Something very strange—” murmured Kate, holding him against her with one arm. She looked at the others as if for confirmation.
“We don’t have any choice,” said Chryse. “We have to find Maretha. And we’ll have to take the children.”
“I’ve got to take Charity back to camp,” said Sanjay. Charity was leaning against him; she moaned and tightened her grip around her belly.
Julian rose. Mog and Pin clung each to one of his legs. “Kate. You and I and those three can go to the western entrance, beyond the evening palace—”
“Sanjay and I will go to the western stairwell,” interrupted Chryse. “It’s too hard a climb for the children. You go to the east.”
Julian nodded.
“I’ll meet you there,” Sanjay said to his wife. “And I’ll bring more lanterns. We’ll leave Thomas at camp—he’ll have to handle any problems with the workers who are left.”
“I say.” Professor Farr looked up from the scribbled notes in his journal. “Where did the chalice get to? Did Maretha take it back to the tent for cataloging and packing?” He slipped his pen into his coat pocket and closed the journal. “Always anticipating me, that child. Always has.” He harrumphed once or twice, clearing his t
hroat, and walked back to the stairs. “I trust you are all coming,” he continued as he began to climb. “It must be about suppertime.”
It was quite the strangest thing that had ever happened to Maretha. As she touched the cup she felt, not metal, but a hand clasping hers: a soft, feminine hand, warm and reassuring. Her surroundings were dim and hazy and seemed unimportant.
A woman stood before her. She was young, no older than Maretha, with hair so black that it seemed painted. Her face had a slightly alien cast, high-cheeked, deep eyes rimmed by black coloring, a striking cosmetic touch. Her lips, by contrast, were so pale as to be almost bloodless, insubstantial. Jewels studded the lobes of her ears like a dual sickle of stars. Huge skirts of yellow-and-green-striped, stiff cloth belled out from her slender waist; her yellow jacket was tight and close-fitting and exposed her beasts. Each nipple was startlingly red—daubed with some deep textured color. At her throat hung a pendant. Maretha could not quite make it out.
“Set the cup back on its pedestal,” said the priestess in a low voice full of music.
“Will it be safe?”
The priestess smiled. “Only a virgin’s touch opens this door.” She turned her head and chimes tinkled in her hair as she moved. “Come with me.”
Maretha followed as if in a glamour, but the priestess’s hand was firm. Lord Death fell away before them to reveal a staircase curving down into darkness. They descended step by step, feet a light scuff on the stone: The curve of the stairwell was tight at first, on her left, but expanded gradually as if they walked down on an opening spiral. On her right lay only air, so profoundly still that the gulf beyond might have been bottomless. All was black.
Eventually they passed through an arch and the curve of the stair began to compress again, the wall on her right now, the air on her left close and confined, until at last they came to a deep end, a tiny, circular chamber with a single door. Maretha lifted her lantern and saw on that door a picture. A young woman dressed much as the priestess sat before a mirror, pots of rouge and black kohl and fine bits of jewelry on a table beside her; roses were woven through her dress. In the mirror was reflected a passageway, bright with frescos, that led into some torchlit mystery.
—Except that it was not reflected in the mirror, it was beyond the painting itself, and the priestess drew Maretha forward and they passed through the place the painting had been and walked down the passageway itself. Smaller, darker ways branched off at intervals that seemed to have some pattern.
“That was The Heiress,” said Maretha. “It is one of the Gates, the—” She faltered. The priestess turned to look at her with a high echo of chimes.
“She is the Chosen One,” said the priestess. “Have you not guessed?”
Maretha shook her head.
“You are she.”
At that moment they came out into a large circular chamber. The light of the lantern was too dim for Maretha to see more than the vague tracery of wall paintings around her and a low slab of stone in the very center of the room.
“What is this place?” she asked. She passed a hand along one side of her neck; it was hot down here. The slight stirring of air did not cool her.
The priestess disengaged her hand from Maretha’s. “Here is the very center.” She took one smooth step back. “Here you will receive the treasure of the labyrinth.”
And she was gone, vanished, as if she had never been.
Maretha lifted her lantern higher—at first to look for the priestess, but then to study more closely the frescos that decorated the walls.
A young woman dressed in an elaborate version of the priestess’s garb, head crowned by a wreath of blazing white roses, crowned in her turn a young man with a circlet of lit candles. Contiguous with it ran a line of glyphs. As Maretha stared, moving slowly along as the fresco unfolded in a long sequence, she began to see a pattern emerge in the writing.
“Lady,” she breathed, feeling understanding rise until it was about to break to the surface, “how great a treasure, indeed.”
She had to pause, it was so hot, to remove her jacket and, a little later, her kid boots, and on to an extended tableau of a great fair of artists and craftsmen rendered in loving detail, where she felt impelled to unbutton the neck of her dress; removed her stockings as she studied the rite of spring sowing. It grew ever more stifling as she reached the feast of the goddess of the flowering, bride and groom resplendent at high table, surrounded by celebrants. As she at last slipped out of her gown to stand clad only in her shift, she found herself looking at the bedding ceremony of the newlywed couple.
A sound behind her, something dropped. She turned, lantern held out in front of herself, so that it illuminated her more than the person beyond. But she knew who it would be. It seemed inevitable.
She walked across the chamber. Her hair came unbound, falling loose down around her shoulders. They met at the low slab of stone, she and her husband. She did not know how he had found her. He, too, had lost his jacket, his waistcoat, his boots, his gloves. His white shirt was unbuttoned halfway down, and she could see the fine down of light hair across his chest.
His was a beauty made finer by the dimness; the shadows lent tiny imperfections to a face otherwise too cold and pure of feature. His expression was not cold now; neither was it warm—it was anticipatory.
She stretched out a hand to touch his lips, to be sure that he was real and not a vision. There was a kind of desire in him that woke the desire in her she had tried to suppress. He was the treasure she longed for—golden and dangerous. The very stone beneath her seemed to throb with it, as if it was at one with her, this room, this labyrinth, this entire city.
His lips parted under her fingers, and she felt their moistness. She took, he took, a step forward; the lantern set down; a shifting; a sinking; and they lay together on the couch of stone, unaware of anything but each other. They made love by the indistinct light casting shadow over all but the glow on their faces, a ring of light around their necks and chests, the fading in and out of their hands as they moved.
At the moment of consummation she saw his face, the widening of his eyes, the shock, and she felt, she knew—as if the stone, being one with her, could communicate of him to her because his flesh also touched it—that he had been, like her, a virgin.
At first she thought it was she, trembling with astonishment. Until she felt power welling up, from the walls, from the floor, the air, from the stone itself so strongly she felt as if it were heating around her, melting into her flesh—
It was this act that the city had been waiting for. Gold, jewels, chalices, frescos, writing and rituals; all this was nothing. The city, the labyrinth, had been waiting for long centuries, patient in its sessile way, until two would come to reenact the ritual that gave it life, renewed its life. There was no treasure here that one could hold in one’s hands, unless it were the body, the warm flesh, of the beloved.
He kissed her, like a consecration, and she stared at him in sudden wonder, and sudden fear.
“You’re a virgin,” she breathed. “You’re never done this before either.”
His eyes bore a disturbing glow in the wavering gleam of lantern light. “What do you think is the source of my power?” His voice was almost inaudible. He shifted with her, and for a long moment she could not speak or even think.
But when she could, she lifted a hand to brush at the gilded line of his hair. “But if it—if it was—then where will you get your power now?”
“From the sacrifice,” he whispered.
When he put his hands on her throat, she thought at first that it was a caress.
Chapter 21:
The Madman
WHEN HE SAW THAT Maretha had disappeared from the square chamber at the base of the stairs, he felt such a swell of hard, cold fury that he knew he could immolate the very stone if he did not contain himself. The golden cup still stood on its white pillar, but Maretha was gone. He pushed past the others and fled up into the late afternoon light.
He returned to his tent, paced there a time among the bits and pieces of his art: a deck of Gates, seldom used, a small stove always lit, and burning within, the tiny creatures, half dragon, half fire salamander, that attended him. Somehow Maretha had gone below, through an entrance closed to him—
But there were other entrances. And if there were entrances east and west, then there must be one north, far away in the forest, and one south. With this thought he left his tent and set out to search.
Whether by scent, or good fortune, or some other force, it did not take long. The trenches the workers had dug partially around the little camp to protect it from that dawn fire had never been filled in. The stairwell had evidently never been noticed, but now, as he walked, it seemed abruptly to be there, gaping open at his feet.
He descended. When the light grew too dim, he called fire to his hands. Eyes of flame winked at him and curled into a ball at his bidding. He had learned when quite young that emotion can be channeled into power, separated and distilled until it coalesces into a source for the magical arts. Leaving, of course, its practitioners quite free of the impediments of joy and fear, hate and sorrow. Only one thing threatened him, as he got older—a stirring so insidious and compulsive that he recognized at once its danger and its promise.
He embraced chastity not with enthusiasm, since by the age of fifteen he had pretty much destroyed that capacity within himself, but with ruthless purpose, and felt his power grow hotter, and his heart grow colder. To protect himself from a temptation stronger than he cared to admit, he let rumors and gossip spread, fueled them himself by providing the material on which other men and women, prisoners of their basest instincts, could act out their twisted desires and then blame the damage and horror on him. It sometimes shocked even him, with what ability was left him to be shocked, what such people were capable of. But the subterfuge kept women away from him, even the most fortune-hungry. Only the discovery that at heart he was a bit of a prude had enough force to make him smile at the irony of it all. He was content, and very powerful.