Voyage of the Elawn

by Ted Neill

  Her sobbing stopped and she looked at him again, as if considering him for the first time.

  “Do you know me, child?”

  “Yes. You are Master Beckham, translator and advisor to the court. You also tutor the children of some of the lords and ladies.”

  “That I am and so I have watched and studied all that is around me. I know, like you, all the phony faces of nobles present, all the petty games they play, and all the heavy responsibilities that come to your parents as rulers of it all.”

  “I don’t like it and I don’t want any of it,” she spat.

  “You want to stay a little girl?”

  She sniffed and nodded. “I miss when I was younger and mother, father, and I would go for picnics on the slopes and play down on the beach, catching crabs, digging for clams. I’d get dirty and mother would not mind. But now it is all about sitting like a lady, speaking like a lady, walking like a lady. I hate it.”

  Sade rubbed the hem of her dress between his fingers. Sparkling stones sewn into its lace winked in the light so that she glittered as she moved. “It is a beautiful dress.”

  “It is the last time I shall wear it. It is my favorite but mother says I must replace it, that it is for a little girl and that I will soon outgrow it.”

  “So much pressure to leave your childhood behind. It’s a tragedy we force children to grow up so soon. I miss being a child.”

  “I don’t want to stop being one.”

  “Then don’t,” Sade said, releasing the dress and reaching into a pocket of his cloak. He withdrew a wand made of pale wood. It radiated a faint blue light in the darkness. “Do you know what this is?”

  “A wand?”

  “Yes, made from the wood of the Silver Tree.”

  “The Great Tree, in the courtyard?”

  “Yes. It is powerful Sybil. And I give it to you as a birthday present. But it is the last one you will ever need, for with it you can accomplish wonders.”

  “But I do not have the gift of magic.”

  “You don’t need it. It is an endowed object. It is a lost art. Mages once wove spells into steel swords, wooden staffs, or canvass sails, so that people without the gift could call on magic when they needed it.”

  “Why was it lost?”

  “This is old lore which you do not need to be worried about. This wand, I made especially for you, so that it only responds to your will, your wishes.” He handed it to her and she immediately pointed its tip at his chest. Sade felt a great hallow open up in the pit of his stomach. Had he made a grave miscalculation? A bead of sweat formed on his temple and rolled down his face. He strained to project the same steady calm and compassion towards Sybil, while ever so gently taking her by the wrist and pointing the wand away. “You must be careful whom you point it at,” he said, clearing his throat.

  “Why, what will it do to you?”

  “You would experiment on the only friend who understands you?”

  Years living in the royal court had taught Sybil a few things. She was not naïve. “You want something. My father says everybody wants something from you when you are royal.”

  The best lies have a kernel of truth.

  “Sybil, you know me as Master Beckham, but I go by a different name I will share with you now. It is Sade. I am a member of an order of sorcerers. Once I was also a prince but I had no desire to take on the role of king. I wanted nothing to do with all the boring ceremony, the pompous nobles, the phony parasites. So the man who would become my mentor presented me a wand like this that allowed me to stop time, to keep myself from aging.”

  “But you are a grownup now.”

  Sade smiled and whispered, “I only appear so, but what if I told you I was a hundred years old.” He shared the lie the way a hunter would lay a trap.

  “I would not believe you.”

  “Very well, you might not. But you will believe me when the same gift is bestowed on you. But first, you must stop time for all those around you.”

  “How?”

  “Will it through the wand. No need for anyone to be hurt, just petrify them. The more you freeze, the more you lock into stone, the longer your life will be.”

  The tear tracks were drying on her face. A trembling smile was forming at the corner of her mouth. She held the wand with two hands, her thumbs rubbing its wood, her knuckles locked. He knew by the look in her eye that she was his.

  Chapter 16

  Slaves

  It took Gabriella and her brother some time before they could stagger forward into the hall. Dameon was especially unsteady. Gabriella knew she should have felt hatred towards Mortimer for his betrayal, but the effort required was simply not within her. She felt drained, like an empty cistern. It was all she could do to put one foot in front of the other.

  What a pathetic, defeated band we are, she thought. When she could, she risked looking back over her shoulder at Adamantus. The elk was limping, his foreleg drenched with blood. But if Gabriella’s eyes lingered too long, Libys would raise her wand from where she sat on Adamantus’ back and threaten her, so she turned away.

  Dameon hung on Gabriella’s arm, counting slowly by fives as she had asked him to. He mentioned once that his head was hurting. Gabriella knew that the pain had to be excruciating for him to give voice to his discomfort. Mortimer brought up the rear while Sybil explained breathlessly to him about the palaces she would build once she had the treasure. Mortimer feigned deep interest, even asked her questions, but Gabriella noticed how his eyes followed Sybil’s wand like a cat staring down a song bird.

  How long would it be before Mortimer betrayed his newest allies? Gabriella wondered. He was a trapper, a hunter, and he was after new prey: the wands. A struggle over a wand might provide an opportunity to escape, but the thought of Mortimer with one made her sick with worry.

  The corridor ended in front of a metal door with an intricate labyrinth etched on the front. More runes were carved over the entryway. Adamantus again translated: “‘If you enter these doors, wisdom must be your guide, learning your weapon, greed and avarice your enemies.’”

  “Is it a clue?” Mortimer asked.

  “It is a warning,” the elk said, the muscles of his chest twitching. Wisdom and learning versus greed and avarice—Gabriella knew what traits won out among their captors. At such a rate, the labyrinth would be sure to finish them all off.

  Libys ordered her to open the door. Gabriella tried to obey, but the blast from the wand had drained her muscles of strength. Adamantus bent his head and pushed the door open.

  They entered an octagonal room with open doorways in each of four walls—one directly ahead of them, and two on either side opening into rooms. The eight sides alternating between wall and doorway. They could glimpse identical octagonal rooms beyond each doorway, and then another and another, all lit by skylights. It was as if they had entered an enormous honeycomb of eight-sided cells.

  “Not much of a maze,” Mortimer said. “All the rooms are connected. I don’t see any dead ends.”

  “So many rooms,” Libys said dreamily from Adamantus’ back.

  “But there is only one safe way through,” the elk said.

  “Well, we don’t need a map then,” Mortimer said. “We can just check through each room.” He stepped through the doorway on the right. He was not more than two steps deep into the adjacent room before he lost his balance as a tile slid from beneath his foot. It was a trigger of some type. A noise came from within the walls like gears turning. One of the far walls snapped open. A machine lumbered out, a spinning dervish of sword blades and battle axes.

  Gabriella knew it immediately as one of the models from Nicomedes’ secret workshop come to life. Blades spun all about it like a deadly steel flower. Mortimer scrambled out of the way, half tripping over his own feet. The machine made three sharp phfftts like a man blowing dust out of a horn. Fractions of a second later three darts implanted themselves in the wall where Mortimer had been standing. Then as quickly as it had appeared, th
e machine rolled into another trap door and was gone, the walls rumbling with the sound of moving gears in its wake.

  Mortimer collapsed on the floor, panting.

  “That was the wrong room,” Adamantus said.

  Sybil peered into the room ahead. There was a heap of armor and bones on the floor, the remains of another explorer who had chosen poorly. “It appears this was the wrong choice as well.”

  “That leaves the room on the left,” Mortimer said. They all looked in the direction of the doorway, but no one moved to enter.

  “How can we know for certain?” Libys asked of no one in particular.

  “There, on the doorway,” Gabriella said, running forward. The keystone over the door was carved with one of the symbols from the map, this one like a sorrowful face drawn with long waving lines. Gabriella pulled out the map. The rune over the doorway matched the symbol in the top left corner of the map.

  “It’s not a map … it’s a key,” Gabriella said. “It tells us which symbols we follow through the maze.” She stepped into the next room.

  Nothing happened.

  She sighed, then waved to the others. “This is the way.”

  As they followed, Gabriella studied the keystones in the new room. One looked like a spinning scythe, another depicted a mountain range, and the last was a child’s drawing of a horse. Only the horse could be found on the piece of parchment. She proceeded through that doorway unscathed. Following the symbols on the map, they entered three more rooms.

  Mortimer licked his lips and rubbed his hands together while the princesses giggled and shot sparks from the ends of their wands. Gabriella tried to shut out their voices so she could concentrate.

  Dameon sat down beside her as she read the map. From beneath him, there was the sound of something metallic sliding, not unlike a sword across a stone. Gabriella pulled her brother up from the floor as a metal spike dropped, just missing his head. The tile where he had been sitting was depressed into the floor.

  “I thought this was the right way,” Mortimer said, wiping his face with his hand.

  “It is,” Gabriella insisted, yet the sound of turning levers and rolling gears in the ceiling above them did not stop. Two more spikes shot down in random succession, then retracted. One missed Mortimer by a hair.

  “Where do we go next?” Mortimer said, his face turning red.

  Gabriella looked at the key, her hands shaking, and she had trouble finding where she had left off. She jumped as another spike shot downward.

  Three symbols were on the doors around them—a drum, a crown, a woman’s figure. She checked her place on the map. There was a woman’s figure, but there was also something that looked like a crown. She tried to remember where she had last stopped.

  “Gabriella,” Mortimer screamed.

  Metal slid on stone above her. A gust of air, and the map shot down towards the ground, ripped from her hands. Gabriella gasped and staggered backwards from the spike that had just fallen. The spike speared the map, which rose towards the ceiling as the weapon retreated. Mortimer ran and leapt, pinching the paper between his fingers. He threw it back to Gabriella.

  “Pick a door or I will for us!” he insisted.

  “That one!” Gabriella decided on the door with the woman. She grabbed her brother’s hand and ran. The others followed. The whirring sound in the ceiling slowed and stopped. They all crammed in the doorway between rooms.

  “What happened there?” Mortimer panted.

  “It was the right room, but we must have to stay on the right track,” Gabriella said.

  “There must be only one safe path through each room. This way entering any room from the wrong door makes it a deadly choice, even if it is the ‘right’ room from another direction.”

  It made sense to her . . . this way all the rooms in the maze could be used. Adamantus nodded. “You have figured it out.”

  “This Nicomedes is lucky he is dead, or I would kill him,” Mortimer said, fingering the hilt of his sword.

  They entered the following rooms in single file, Gabriella the first to go. She tapped each tile with her foot before stepping on it with her full weight. When she reached the center of the room, she studied each keystone carefully before taking a step in any direction. The others stepped only on tiles she deemed safe. Mortimer followed at the rear, scratching x’s on each safe tile with the end of his sword to mark their way back.

  The symbols were becoming more intricate and difficult as they went deeper into the maze. In one room, Gabriella could not distinguish between two keystones. Both looked like a boat with three sails. Light from Sybil’s wand only cast confusing shadows. Gabriella asked Mortimer for some of the resin torches they had brought. She flung one end-over-end towards one of the doorways. Nothing happened. She flung a second torch towards the other door.

  There was the smallest of clicking noises, and then the floor on that side of the room dropped away briefly as if on a hinge. A yawning abyss opened up beside them. Cold air from the bowels of the mountain gusted into their faces, lifting shirt tails and skirt hems, and tousling the girls’ hair. Gabriella noticed that Sybil nearly lost her balance. Just as quickly as it had snapped open, the floor snapped shut with a bang. The torch was gone.

  Gabriella pointed to the torch that remained. “That way.”

  Their progress slowed as Gabriella searched for safe passage. She noted how the princesses and even her brother had gone from excited to scared to even bored. They had been exploring the maze for what felt like hours. Even she found it difficult to concentrate, but this, she knew, was part of Nicomedes’ stratagem. As one grew bored or fatigued, focus flagged and mistakes happened.

  It became more difficult to think. Sweat beaded on Gabriella’s forehead and dripped into her eyes. She wiped it away with her sleeve. Their progress had brought them close to the far end of the maze. They could see that just three rooms ahead, all the rooms came to an end. The doors in each room opened up into emptiness, a chasm. On the far side of the chasm, they could see other doorways to other rooms all lining the cliff face. It looked as if the builders had intended to build bridges between the doorways on either side but had abandoned their work before they had finished. Now empty doorways simply stared back at one another over an impossible gulf.

  “How will we cross that?” Mortimer asked.

  Gabriella had no answer. She simply hoped a way would present itself.

  Finally it did. One room they passed had a stone bridge that crossed the chasm. Gabriella sensed her own eagerness to take the bridge, but she checked her impulse. She knew the tricks of the maze well enough by now to second guess their every move. The keystone symbol above the door leading to the bridge room was similar to the next key on the map: three bottles of different sizes in a row. But the keystone above the opposite door leading away from the bridge was almost identical. The only difference: the sequence of the bottle sizes. The third door also had bottles carved above it, with another sequence from smallest to largest.

  But the stones were old, the map only a copy, and the differences between the bottles slight. She was not sure which was correct. Her instinct was the door leading away from the bridge; its symbol looked the most similar, but that would mean that they might run out of symbols by the time they got to the bridge to cross to the other side.

  But then the trick revealed itself. Anyone weary from the journey thus far, she realized, would have been keen to finish. It was obvious . . . but it was too obvious. Too easy. It was a distraction. Gabriella motioned for them to enter the opposite doorway, away from the bridge.

  Mortimer protested. “The bridge is that way.”

  “I know, but the key says this way.”

  “But that way you are leading us is in the direction of where we started.”

  “I don’t think we cross the bridge yet,” Gabriella said. “It is meant to tempt us.”

  “How many symbols are left on the key?” Mortimer asked.

  “Eight.”

  �
��If we go this way, will we be able to get back to the bridge in eight rooms?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And then what, we cross and there are no more symbols on the map?”

  Gabriella did not know. She wondered, did the symbols repeat themselves? Would they have to go back to the beginning of the map?

  “Don’t you think it is more likely that we cross to the bridge now, and we have eight more rooms left on the other side?” Mortimer persisted.

  Gabriella was tired. “I’m not sure. I just think this is the way. I think I understand what Nicomedes was thinking.”

  “How do we know you are not making a mistake? Maybe someone else should try the map,” Sybil said.

  “No, I think I understand the logic here,” Gabriella said.

  “Would you bet your life on it?” Mortimer asked.

  Angry now, Gabriella threw up her arms. “I’ve bet my life on it every time I’ve stepped into a room today, only because all of you are too cowardly to do it yourselves.”

  Mortimer was quiet now.

  Libys spoke, “Then make her bet someone else’s life. It will be fun. Send her brother. Let him go into the room without the bridge.”

  “No,” Gabriella said. “Leave him out of this.”

  Sybil perked up. “Oh, this is interesting. She won’t send her brother. Maybe this was all a trap. Maybe now that she knows we are nearing the end, she is trying to do away with us.”

  “I’m just trying to get through alive. I don’t care about you or the treasure.”

  “You hear that?” Libys asked. “She said she does not care about us.”

  Mortimer poked the tip of his sword into Dameon’s back. “Dameon is going.”

  Gabriella ground her teeth in rage. Adamantus volunteered to go, but Mortimer and the princesses were already set on Dameon. Gabriella checked and doubled-checked the keystones, squinting to make sure that the bottles were in the correct sequence above the door across the room.

  Dameon’s sleeves were torn at the shoulder now from where he had been clutching his own shirt while hugging himself. It took some time for Gabriella to reach him—his eyes were unfocused, and he hummed a flat note.