The Spiral Labyrinth

by Matthew Hughes

  "I believe I would consider the absence of a house an anomaly," I said. I was about to have the integrator on my shoulder conduct another scan, when I sensed Osk Rievor's presence, figuratively, beside me. "It's all right, " he said. "Let me lead. I read of this place in the brochure for the auction."

  I was reluctant to relinquish control but it made no sense to quibble if he had a better lay of the land that I did. So, with my other self at the helm, we set off along one of broader paths, our boots crunching on a footing of bright blue pebbles. We rounded one of the larger hills and I found that on its other side, the slope was sheer and thickly covered in some climbing plant. The green wall was pierced by several tall stonework ovals set with panes of tinted glass. In the middle of the wall was a high, broad doorway, also framed in worked stone, with two portals of ancient polished wood whose fittings were of heavy copper that had been left to go to verdigris.

  "The generation of Arlems who founded the estate preferred to leave a soft footprint on the landscape," Osk Rievor said as we approached the doors. He pulled a heavy chain that hung from an opening in the carved stone jamb. Somewhere within the hollowed-out hill, I heard a dim tolling. We waited to see if anyone would answer.

  "Did you hear that?" Osk Rievor said to me a moment later.

  I told him I heard nothing but a slight sussuration of wind and what might have been the voices of birds, far off.

  "There it is again," he said, "the sound of someone speaking in a low voice, almost inaudible."

  "From behind the door?"

  He cocked our head, first this way, then the other, then put our ear to the old wood. "I don't think so."

  "Ask our assistant to use its extended sensorium," I said.

  He did so, but the grinnet reported that the only human-generated sounds it could hear were our own biological noises, and the slow approach of footsteps from within the hill.

  "I thought I heard someone speaking to me, but I just couldn't quite catch the words," Osk Rievor said, aloud.

  "No one was speaking within my range of hearing," said the integrator, then added, "The footsteps have now reached the other side of the door."

  I heard the clunk of a heavy mechanical latch being lifted, then one of the doors swung silently inward. A pallid, rounded face peered around the jamb, each of its features so individually unremarkable as to make the composite seem more of a preliminary sketch than a finished product. The skin was wan, with not so much as a single hair sprouting from it, not even eyelashes. The face bore no expression, although the colorless eyes possessed a curious intensity. The bloodless lips opened and closed a number of times, as if the equipment behind them was warming itself up before attempting speech. Finally, a whisper of a voice said, "Apthorn? Appa-thon?"

  Osk Rievor had prepared a story about having come for the auction, not knowing it was already finished. But it seemed we were expected. Or at least I was. I said, inwardly, "Let me speak to the fellow."

  But Osk Rievor was full of a strange energy. "No," he said to me, "let me handle this." Aloud, he said, "Apthorn, certainly, that's the name."

  The pale face did not change, although it seemed to me that something flashed deep inside the oddly intense gaze. "There is a message," the man said.

  "Give it to me," Osk Rievor said.

  "You must follow." He turned away.

  "Something is wrong with this fellow," I told my other self.

  "I think not," he said. We were going through the door.

  "This may be a trap."

  "I would sense it if it were. I am intuitive."

  "We have not addressed the question of whether your intuition is infallible. Perhaps it can be fooled."

  "How?" We were inside the house's foyer now. It was devoid of furnishings though its ceiling was gilded and domed while its white-washed walls were colorfully decorated by the sunlight that entered through the stained glass in the oval windows. Several doors were set in the walls, though none offered a deeper view into the interior of the hollow hill because all were closed. But directly opposite the front entrance a ramp sloped gently down.

  We went to the top of the incline and looked down into a corridor lit by daylight. The man who had answered the door was descending the slope at a measured pace. I saw now that he was naked and that there was a rudimentary quality to his whole body.

  "I do not think he is human," I said. "He is more like a facsimile."

  "You are probably right," Osk Rievor said, "but I sense no harm in him."

  "Again, we may be risking a great deal on your sense of things. Perhaps it can be fooled."

  "I think not."

  "Which is precisely what you would think if you were being beguiled," I said. "At least let our assistant conduct a preliminary surveillance before we go down the ramp."

  He sighed but agreed to my suggestion. The grinnet reported that it detected neither lurkers nor charged energies, nor even any security systems.

  "Ask it what it makes of the odd, little naked man," I said.

  Osk Rievor only half concealed a flash of irritation but again he agreed. This time, our assistant said that it was unable to register the man properly. "I have visual and sound input," it said, "but no biologicals."

  I would dearly have liked to put a few more queries -- was the man an artificial person, was he some kind of projected simulacrum? -- but Osk Rievor shrugged off the implications of the integrator's report. "He is of magical provenance, I am sure," he said. "The main thing is that he is harmless and wishes us well."

  "How can you be sure of that?" I said. We were descending the ramp. "Suppose he wears a spell that disguises his true nature, and behind that bland exterior are dire appetites and all the equipment needed to satisfy them?"

  "I know of no such spell."

  "The circumstances have been established by someone who knows my name, or at least an approximation of it, and knew that I would be coming here," I said. "We don't know who that person is, or how he comes to know what he knows. And we don't know how he intends to use that knowledge. If knowledge is power, and it usually is, we have too little, and the other side has too much."

  Osk Rievor made a dismissive sound in our head. "So we will find out by pressing forward."

  "A pell-mell dash into the unknown is rarely a wise strategy."

  "I am the intuitive one," he said, "and I sense no peril."

  "That is what worries me," I said. "I sense that you ought to."

  "Are you growing your own visceral senses now?" I heard mild mockery in his tone.

  "No," I said. "It is a matter of simple calculation. Listen--"

  But he did not listen, and I could do nothing to prevent him as we followed the pallid man down the ramp. Our quarry did not appear to notice. At the bottom of the slope the corridor continued only a short distance before opening out into a large, circular reception room whose floor was tiled in lozenges of an off-white stone rimmed by faience and turquoise. The place was bare, although I could see hooks on the walls from which tapestries must have recently hung, with niches between them that might have formerly held statuary. The empty space was lit from above by a transparent ceiling that served as the bottom of one of the estate's ponds. The clear water was full of languidly drifting water plants among which moved fishes of various sizes and of a varied palette of colors, while the old orange sun's rays dappled and danced about the room.

  But it was not the spectacle above that drew Osk Rievor's attention. The man we were following had crossed the floor to the room's far side, where a large pattern was traced on the tiles: a spiral mandala of sinuous as well as zig-zaggy lines, rendered in black and red, woven outward from a central circle that was occupied by a complex tangle.

  The pattern seemed to have been laid down in grains of red and black dust, thinly spread. But when the naked man shuffled across the mandala, his bare feet did not erase any part of it. Indeed, he seemed to be walking on air, just slightly above the lines. I would have liked to direct our eyes to examine the
phenomenon more closely, but my other self had control of them and was not interested. He was gazing at the center of the mandala, where the pale fellow was stooping to retrieve something. Now he turned and came back towards us, still not disturbing the pattern.

  He stopped before us as if he were a self-propelled toy that had exhausted its motive power. His bloodless hand tendered to us what looked like a piece of red paper, the same shade as the powder in the mandala. Osk Rievor took it and we turned away from mits deliverer to examine it. Something was handwritten on it in thick black ink.

  Osk Rievor studied the message. "Interesting," he said aloud.

  It was more than interesting to me, because I found that I could not make sense of the symbols. Indeed, I could not keep them in view: my eyes could focus on the individual lines and curves, but somehow my brain could not quite assemble them into a composite. "I cannot read it," I said with my inner voice. "It is like something seen in a dream."

  "Can you not?" he replied.

  I strove again to focus on the symbols, but they moved and mutated fluidly and would not hold a shape. "No," I said, after a few more moments' struggle, "not like in a dream." It was more like the shifting of colors and patterns in the portal through which our former colleague, the juvenile demon, could look through into our plane.

  But Osk Rievor disagreed. "I sense no interplanar quality to it."

  "Ask the grinnet," I said.

  "I see lines and shapes," it said, "but I am unable to fix an image. I have tried several dozen times, using a variety of techniques, yet each time I consult the place where the data should be stored, I find nothing there."

  "There is no mystery here," Osk Rievor said. "The message contains a straightforward set of coordinates."

  "Ah," I said. "We are expected somewhere?"

  "Obviously," he said.

  "Where?"

  In answer, he spoke to the grinnet. "Produce the screen and display the map we were last examining in our workroom."

  The screen appeared, with the grid of ley lines superimposed on the currents of the planet's magnetic field. Osk Rievor put out our finger and touched one of the points. "There," he said.

  It was the spot where three great lines met each other in Hember Forest.

  "We must go there," my other self said.

  "We must certainly not go there," I replied.

  "Then I must."

  "You will find that hard to do without me," I said, "and I have no desire to walk into an undefined situation that has been prepared by someone who commands powers neither you nor I can even identify."

  I felt him bridle at my tone, but then I also felt him control his irritation. "Perhaps the messenger can tell us something useful," he said.

  I had my doubts as to the possibility, but the point was never to be settled. For when we turned to question the pallid fellow, he was not there.

  "Where did he go?" Osk Rievor asked our assistant.

  "Nowhere," the integrator replied, consulting its record of the past few moments. "While we were occupied with the message, he walked to the center of the mandala. There he became smaller, until he finally ceased to be present at all."

  "And where," I asked Osk Rievor, "did the mandala go?" for the floor was bare.

  He had our assistant play its record. I saw the pallid man shrink, as if he were rapidly moving far away from us. Almost as soon as he winked out of view at the center of the spiral, the grains of red and black powder swirled as if caught in a miniature whirlwind, though there was no breath of air in the stillness of the room. The colors rapidly attenuated and swiftly ceased to be. And so, at the same time, did the piece of paper in our hand.

  "I do not like this," I said to Osk Rievor.

  "Someone wishes to do business with me," he said. "I am intrigued."

  "But we have no idea what kind of business that might be!" If I had had control of our body I would have been tugging at my hair in agitation. "Although we do know that it's the kind of business that dares not walk up to our front door and announce itself in plain speech. Instead, it employs disappearing messengers and sorcerous ciphers and the odd whirlwind in the corner of the room."

  "None of which have posed any harm to us," he said, "other than to activate your lifelong prejudice against sympathetic association."

  "You cannot," I said, "be reassured by all this hokem-pokem."

  "I doubt that it is meant to reassure me. I believe it is intended to catch my attention. And it has."

  "But it was my name, however distorted, that was mentioned."

  "Yet only I could read the message."

  "Perhaps there was no message. And no paper. Perhaps that, too, was an interplanar gateway, through which someone reached to dangle a bait before you."

  He paused to mull the idea for less time than it takes to say that he did. "No," he decided, "all is well. I am being offered a great opportunity."

  "From whence comes this certainty?" I said.

  "I just know it. Now, let us go."

  "Wait," I said, but he did not. We strode easily up the ramp, across the empty foyer and back onto the path of colored stones. All the way I protested and sought to regain control of our shared body. But I could not so much as move a mutually owned finger. He held me off as easily as a determined man might brush off a small child's attempt to restrain him by tugging on his sleeve, and I was carried along, will-I or nill-I.

  Shielding my thoughts from my other self, I deduced that his relative strength, and my corresponding weakness, must have something to do with our being at a point where two ley lines met. The first time he had manifested himself, in the dungeon below Turgut Therobar's estate on the edge of Dimpfen Moor, he had thrust me aside as easily as he now held me at bay. That, too, had been a place where two ley lines, a major and a minor, intersected. And now we were bound for the meeting point of three major lines. I did not like to think what the effects might be on me. I might fade until I was no more than a voice crying down the back corridors of my alter ego's mind.

  "Don't worry about it." His voice broke in on my thoughts, and I realized that my ability to shield them from him was equally diminished in this place.

  "That is so," he said, confirming my new concern. "But, again I say, 'Don't worry about it.' Everything will be fine."

  His confidence radiated from his side of our shared mental parlor, so strongly that it was as if he had switched on an uncomfortably bright and unshaded light. I turned away from it, but it still surrounded me. We had crossed the estate grounds and were stepping aboard the Gallivant, Osk Rievor giving orders to take us aloft and head for Hember Forest. I sought to reason with him.

  "Do you not think that 'everything will be fine' is an unjustifiably optimistic statement, given that we are flying into the unknown? Indeed, perhaps into the clutches of an unknown someone who has clearly demonstrated considerable power without bothering to demonstrate how he means to use it on us?"

  "If whoever is behind this means me harm, why go to all the trouble of inviting me to Hember Forest?" he said, as the Aberrator's in-atmosphere obviators lifted us and the ship carried us toward the coordinates. "The deserted Arlem estate, without even an integrator, was as good a place for an ambush as Hember."

  "More lines converge on Hember. So perhaps it is a better place for whatever our mysterious someone has in mind. That is a logical conclusion."

  "If I was heading into danger," he said, "my intuition would tell me so. It tells me otherwise. We are on our way toward something wonderful."

  "What?"

  "I don't know, but all will be well."

  It was a difficult point to counter. I had always trusted that intuitive faculty, even when it had been only an unreified element of my own mental furnishings, when I had innocently referred to it as my "insight." But I could not help but believe that, if I were the old undivided Hapthorn, my insight would have been warning me that I was flying blindly into peril. The fact that Osk Rievor was so sanguine about our situation led me to the
obvious conclusion.

  "I want you to consider the possibility that you have been ensorceled," I said.

  "All right," he said, then after a moment, "there, I've considered the possibility and found it unlikely. Indeed, highly unlikely."

  "Why?"

  "I don't do, 'why?'" he said. "I make intuitive leaps, springing out into the dark and always landing square on the unseen mark."

  "But magic could interfere with your aim, couldn't it?"

  "But I don't aim. That's the point. I wouldn't know how to aim."

  I had to suppress an emotion that had evolved from frustration to fear to a deepening dread. It was not that far, when one had a spaceship, from Arlem to Hember, especially when the ship had no need to dawdle while its occupants enjoyed punge, biscuits and fruit. We would be there shortly, and every permutation I could make out of the known facts argued for a nasty surprise when we touched down. "I'm asking you to approach this question reasonably," I said.

  "Reason is another one of the things I don't do," Osk Rievor said, his tone that of a fellow lightsomely on his way to a happy encounter.

  "But magic, as I understand it, involves more than just skill and technique," I said. "Its effects are also dependent on the strength of will of the wielder."

  "Yes, and as you are discovering, I have plenty of that commodity."

  "Indeed, but what if you encounter someone who has more, much more, than you?"

  "I think I would know."

  "Unless the other person willed that you were not to know."

  "You are playing with concepts you cannot truly grasp," he said. "I would know. How do I know I would know? Because I just do."

  "Listen," I said, "nobody knew we were coming to Arlem, yet when we arrived there was a message waiting for us. Its deliverer then disappeared. The message's contents were only visible to you, and they direct us to what may be one of the strongest magical 'dimples' on the planet."

  "You forgot to mention the low voice that only I could hear," he said.

  "I was about to add that to my heap of worry. Doesn't all of that give you some pause for concern?"