Labyrinth

by Kat Richardson

  “No. I don’t. I don’t touch magic. I see it, but no more than that.”

  “You will. You held Norrin’s knife. You pulled it from the weft because you knew its shape in the blood you spilled on it. If this continues, you will not have to know a shape to draw it. That is the power the Pharaohn desires in you. I don’t know what use he has for it, but I see the pattern of his plan.”

  “Then tell me.” I tried to concentrate on that, hoping the knowledge would settle me and keep me in my own troubles enough to solve them, and not go shrieking mad with the impossibilities thrust upon me.

  “Like us all, he sees the magical world differently than you or I. He lives much closer to it, needs it—the strength and frailty of the asetem-ankh-astet—more than we ever will. He is in the real as a near exile. I would pity him for such loneliness if either of us had a heart for pity. As it is, I hope for his most hideous and eternal isolation. Once he was worshipped as a god—the White Worm-man, the great snake of the desert—but as the world changed and he was forgotten as a god, he chose to take the form of a man rather than fade into the darkness. He found followers with what magic he still had and he made them his children. As he became more human, his powers ebbed and it drove him a bit mad. His followers fell away and he faded from a god to a mage, trapped in this world but remembering the glory of the other. He is quite insane and he dreams of his old world endlessly. More so than all his children, he is a shadow in this one. Were it not for Edward, that would not be true.”

  I knew they were enemies; I knew from our first meeting that Edward had done something to Wygan that had caused the other to hate him with a cold fury. The asetem lived closer to magic than most vampires, so perhaps that had something to do with it. Wygan and Edward had almost been allies in London at one time, if the story I’d had from the London vampires were true. But then a rift had emerged and Edward had been forced to flee, all accord between him and the Pharaohn reduced to bitter wreckage. Yet Wygan’s overarching plan continued, in spite of—or maybe enhanced by—that destruction. Something Edward had done to Wygan two hundred years ago or more had sealed his own fate in the icy hatred of the Pharaohn-ankh-astet. “But what . . . ?” I muttered. “Why?”

  Carlos tilted his head. “I don’t know what occurred between them, but somehow, by his overweening ambition, Edward . . . pushed the Pharaohn deeper into the shadow, into the warp of magic. He is a creature of magic, but he could not live as he was and he is too powerful to die, so . . . he is evolving. Toward what I do not know, but it draws him back, away from the world of his children and their service, which gives him life. Whatever the details, his plan must be to change that. He will need Edward since Edward was the trigger for the change that makes this possible—and, in the Pharaohn’s mind, necessary, not only in whatever design he practices but in his vengeance. He is not the magus he once was, so he must have another to work the spell—whatever it is. That is his role for me with freedom from the Lâmina the poisonous bait to bring me to heel. He has long sought his Greywalker, and now, seeing you as you are becoming, I know what he means to do: to break the curtain of the Grey so that he and his tribe might wield more power, live more fully, in both worlds.”

  “He can’t!”

  “With you under his sway, able to shape the weft, he could.”

  I shook my head as much in negation as to shut the persistent, echoing song of the grid out of my head. “The Guardian Beast won’t allow that.”

  “Then he must have a plan for the Guardian that we don’t yet know. Perhaps Goodall is meant to hold it until there is nothing the Guardian can do.” Carlos made a wry face. “Such a selfless task seems out of character for Goodall—perhaps he doesn’t know the whole of his master’s plan yet, either.”

  “Too much guesswork,” I muttered. I couldn’t go forward with such a vague idea. “I need to talk to Dad.”

  “Why? If the Pharaohn controls him, you cannot speak to him without risking your liberty. I assure you, if you come into the Pharaohn’s hands while I am still in thrall to the knife’s tip in my heart, I will not be able to help you. You will be at his mercy.”

  “I can. If I can find the back door to him. My father said there’s a way into his prison—this magical oubliette—and something about puzzles and keys. He said I need to find a labyrinth. That a song would tell me. . . . No, he said ‘the song.’ ‘Know the song.’ Which song I don’t have any idea, but I have a key. If I can find the right maze, I can find the back door. My father must know what Wygan is up to—he tried it on Dad first. I get to him, I get the plan.”

  The rumble of Carlos’s amusement made the floor quake. “Your father is a better man dead than he was alive.”

  I went cold, everything hardening within me to icy fury. My eyes narrowed to slits and I found my feet braced on the black ground as if I meant murder, my hands fisted at my thighs. “Never say that.”

  This time, both his eyebrows came up and Carlos stared at me with plain surprise. He resettled his face into its usual silent glower in a moment and said, “I meant you no disrespect, Blaine. I have touched a million of the dead and find suicides are rarely men of courage. Father, like daughter, astonishes me. Accept my apology.”

  I wanted to kill him—the muttering in my head sounded like psychotic ranting urging me on—but I knew I needed his help; I needed him on my side. What was I thinking . . . ? I tried to shake it off but this time it wasn’t going. The sound swelled in screams and I felt sweat break on my skin—don’t let it be blood this time, gods, not this time. Something brushed my right leg. Another of the névoacria. I kicked it away in disgust, the thing of mist and shadow surprisingly solid on my boot.

  The urge to do harm slid away, the raging in my head spiraling down to a whisper of nonsense: “a rose by any other name . . . superior, orientalis. . . .” I shuddered and looked down. A crimson line swept across the floor beside my right foot. A piece of Carlos’s circle. I had been standing on it; the feelings that had overwhelmed me were not mine but those of the circle’s voice and victims. I swallowed hard, tasting bile in the back of my throat as I edged away.

  “Perhaps this place is no safer for this conversation, now that the knife is put away,” Carlos suggested, remaining still and waiting for me to move first.

  “Yes. That is, I agree. But I . . .”

  “You tire.”

  I closed my eyes for a second. They were gritty and I did, indeed, feel tired. “There’s so much . . .”

  “Yes, and you fight it. You can’t. It will come. You will change. Learn it.”

  “That’s what he said. Wygan,” I spat.

  “Better to know the tool you have been given than become one yourself. If you hope to stop him, you must use every weapon you have at your disposal. And we must not let him know of our . . . agreement. If he cannot hope to control us through our friends, the Pharaohn will destroy them. He must think us alone and powerless until the last minute.” He waved his arm toward the doorway and looked the question at me.

  I nodded and swayed a little. Then I let him lead the way back up to the sitting room, muttering to myself as I went, “I have to get to my father. I have to find this labyrinth, this back door . . .”

  “The back door . . .” Carlos echoed, his voice soft in thought as we came to the top of the steps. “If there is such a thing, and it leads to your father’s prison, then it also leads to the lost passages of the Grey, places that have been sealed away or broken beyond repair. That would be the place to make the knife whole again—where no one but you and I could see. You have a key?” He turned back to me, standing in the doorway of what started as the kitchen—a room I didn’t want to examine any closer after what I’d felt elsewhere in this house.

  “Yes, my father’s key,” I explained. “It’s a kind of puzzle. Puzzle . . . I have another puzzle. . . . Maybe. . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s crazy,” I objected, shrugging it off.

  “Would any of this have seemed sane to
you two years ago?”

  I hacked a bitter laugh. “No.”

  He gave me that damned look with the raised eyebrow again.

  “All right,” I conceded. “I’ll think about it.”

  “Look for the connections. Don’t reject what seems completely mad.”

  “As I seem headed that way myself, I guess I shouldn’t.”

  He nodded and walked me to the door. He watched me pass him but remained inside, in the shadow. Even in his death-black sanctuary, he was cautious. “Take care, Blaine, but move with speed: Our days are numbered.”

  I would have turned back, but the door clicked closed behind me. This time I couldn’t hear it chime. All I had ahead of me was the narrow path. I put my hands in my pockets, disliking the thought of touching anything by accident in this garden of hell. The bundled knife lay like an uncanny weight beneath my fingers. I hated to touch it, but I couldn’t let it go, afraid to lose it.

  The eyes of the seraphi-guardi blinked at me as I passed, and its rustling hisses sounded like whispers in the night. I wanted to hurry away from the silvery stares, but I walked forward with care, trying to keep my thoughts from breaking on the whispers and muttering of the grid. Forgetting, forgetting . . . there was something in the noise that haunted my mind. I was forgetting something.

  “Goodall.” Damn it, I hadn’t figured him out yet. How had the Pharaohn’s ushabti come to work for Edward? Carlos had almost told me, but I hadn’t pressed and now I didn’t know. Maybe it didn’t matter, but it worried me nonetheless.

  I made it to the end of the walkway and pulled the gate open. The road outside was as it had been before, still hot with energy and silvered with the mist of the Grey. But at least it wasn’t the black flames that burned ceaselessly behind me.

  I stepped out and began to retrace my steps to the truck, forcing myself to think of something other than my self-righteous past. I thought about Goodall. Carlos had said something about a final offering. . . . It must have been a complicated ritual, whatever it was, taken a step at a time. Something like the demi-vampires, not quite vampires yet but only a bite or two away. . . .

  EIGHTEEN

  I stopped on the sidewalk, still about half a block from the truck. A cluster of névoacria paused in the yard beside me and waited for me to go on—some kind of honor guard sent along by Carlos, or just spies? The whispers in my head were loud in the former graveyard. I didn’t want to hear my own reflections on what Carlos had accused me of. They were too dreadful, and anything, even the shredded and stinging melodies of the Grey, had to be better. It was hard to sort them, to concentrate, but something seemed to answer my question. I could hear it; like someone singing very far away, it dipped and swelled through the mist and magic, buzzing with energy. I closed my eyes and tried to listen for that one line in the clashing harmonies of the grid.

  Not an answer, just another question: What if the origin is different from the end? Huh. That didn’t make a lot of sense, but it gave me something else to occupy my mind for the rest of the distance, and that seemed to help push the noise back a bit.

  The creeping things of mist and shadow followed me, some coming when others vanished but always there until I reached the edge of the road by the Rover and let myself in. Then they sparkled away.

  It was much quieter in the truck. Something about the heavy steel and glass filters out most of the ghosts and lowers the effects of the Grey. That had contributed to my decision to replace the old Rover with another despite the cost. Even so, I didn’t want to linger in Carlos’s neighborhood.

  I started the truck and drove, glancing at the clock in the dash. It was eleven thirty. The bar at Louie’s didn’t close until one, but I would have to rush a little if I wanted to spend any time there with Quinton—and I did want to.

  But the question in my head started me thinking as I drove, and I poked the last-number redial on my cell phone and put it on the console while I waited through the rings from the speaker until Cameron answered.

  “Harper?”

  “Yeah. I’ve seen him.”

  He didn’t say anything for a moment, the silence growing long and sad.

  “He’s all right,” I said, finally getting it.

  “Ah. Good.”

  “I have a very rude question for you.”

  “OK.”

  “Becoming a vampire. Is that . . . umm, that is, is it a one-shot kind of process or does it take a few steps?” It was hard to talk like a normal person; the strangeness lingering in my head made me want to scream or babble or just curl in a corner and rock while I muttered to myself. I hope I didn’t sound as unhinged as I felt.

  “There’s a lot to it. Over time. It’s . . . complicated.”

  The memory of the singing voice pushed me on, as if it were still moving in my head. “I don’t need to know the details, but here’s the real question: What happens if the vampire who finishes the process isn’t the one who started it?”

  “That can be a bad thing. Usually you just die . . . pretty horribly. Sometimes other things result.”

  “Like the kreanou?”

  “No, they’re a different problem. But, yeah, there are bad results, depending on the details. We don’t do that. The . . . umm, community agrees not to. It’s too dangerous.”

  “When you next hear from him—you know—ask him if that’s what caused Goodall. He’ll understand. It’s not important, but I’d like to know, just the same and there wasn’t a good chance to ask.”

  “Oh. All right.” He paused, but I could hear his fingers rubbing against the surface of the phone, making papery noises. “Harper. Thank you.”

  “Don’t. I’ve started something terrible and I doubt you’ll thank me when it’s done.”

  “You don’t know what you’re doing.”

  “In a nutshell, yeah.”

  “No. I mean, there’s a lot more going on and you’re affecting it more than you know.”

  “Gods, I hope not because I really don’t know what I’m doing. I’m just improvising as fast as I can and . . . hoping it’s the right thing.”

  A car braked hard in front of me to let a couple of kids dart across the road. I tromped on my own brakes and fought the wheel to keep the Rover straight. The rear end tried to slide to the left and I let up, steering into it and rebraking as I cleared the other car, trying not to hit the running teenagers as they bounded across the road to the sidewalk. My cell phone and purse tumbled off the seat and into the footwell as the truck lurched to a halt.

  The other driver accelerated away without a glance. I found the phone under my feet, but the call was dead and Cameron’s phone was off when I tried again. I didn’t leave a message. He’d call me when Carlos answered the question and then I could ask him about his portentous words. I had had enough for one night: I was creeped out and all I wanted was a drink in the unhaunted dark with Quinton. I turned the Rover back into the lane and drove with that as my only focus.

  Louie’s is not a real late-night place and the lingering crowd in the lounge was small and quiet. Three regulars huddled at the bar, chatting up the female bartender, while Quinton had a tiny table—and the rest of the room—to himself. The place was dark and done in moody browns and golds straight out of the 1970s. The dim steam-shapes of ghosts and the colors of the grid made the place a little cheerier as livelier times replayed in silent silver loops.

  I waved to Quinton and stopped at the bar to order a drink before I joined him. He looked relieved at my appearance, though he gave me a puzzled look as I sat down.

  “You look odd.”

  “In what way? Do I have blood on my face?” Why did I say that? I didn’t seem to have control of my mouth at the moment.

  He scowled and shook his head. “No. Should you?”

  “I hope not.”

  The bartender strolled over and put down a couple of glasses: a whiskey, neat, for me and a beer for Quinton. We paid up and Quinton glanced at the drinks.

  “It was like that, was it?
”

  I picked up my drink and sipped it, though I had the urge to bolt the alcohol and hope it masked the cacophony in my head. “Yeah. That kind of night. Kind of like last night, but without someone actively trying to kill me.”

  “Passively trying to kill you?”

  “No, nobody trying to kill anyone, but a lot creepier: I cry blood.”

  “That is creepy.”

  I nodded and took another drink. “Carlos is going to help me with the Pharaohn problem, but I have to figure out the way to my father first. That’s the back door and that gets me into the Grey without being in someone’s sight. Which would be a good thing since the someone still wants to kill me ’cause he doesn’t know he doesn’t have to. It seems I’m already developing the power he wants; I’m just doing it slower. And I have a better idea of what’s going on but not the details. The usual sort of evil villain, rule-the-world stuff, except this is my world we’re talking about, not some comic book.”

  I think I got a little shrill there; Quinton put his arm around my shoulder and pulled me against him. He kissed my temple. “We’ll stop them. Don’t worry.”

  “What if we can’t? It can’t be just stop them for now; it has to be stop them forever. And it’s all so complex that it ought to be easy to break it down, but he’s got control of everything. No one can help me until I break that control and if I can’t . . . then what?” I lowered my voice to a whisper, partially because I knew I was too loud and partially because I didn’t want anyone else to hear what I was about to say. “He used to be a god. How do I stop that? How do I stop a god?”

  Quinton kept his head next to mine and whispered back. “He’s not a god now. You’ve done harder things than undermining the plans of a megalomaniac.”