The Spiral Labyrinth

by Matthew Hughes

  I picked up my own glass, turned my head slightly to the side and made a quiet interrogatory noise. My assistant's voice stole softly into my ear, "Nothing I can detect. But if it's magicked, I would not know."

  I was willing to take the chance. I sipped for taste, found the liquid to be both tartly refreshing and full of spirit, and swallowed a good mouthful. Warmth glowed in my core and seeped steadily through my limbs and into my extremities.

  "We should be frank with each other," Lavelan said.

  It had been my experience that most conversations that were launched on such a declaration represented an attempt by the initiator to gain far more information than he intended to give. "Feel free to unburden yourself," I said.

  He sipped his drink and considered me a moment, as if weighing his words. Then he sighed and said, "You are a puzzlement. You come up from the wilderness looking as if you have just stepped out of your front door. You show signs of an incisive intelligence yet you are unaware of simple things that are common knowledge."

  He paused as if to invite me to comment. I said nothing and sipped the liquor.

  "You carry a magic weapon and are accompanied by a creature of unknown provenance. You can affect a gaming wheel. But you lack even the faintest shimmer of a practitioner's aura."

  "I am not a magician," I said again.

  "Then how do you account for being able to inflict a major spell on Ezzers and his cohorts? A spell that, though I am not unversed in the arts, I have never seen nor even heard of."

  The words Nor had I passed through my mind but I did not voice them.

  His gray eyes shifted from my face to a point above my left shoulder. "And then there is your 'pet.' I have the impression that there is a closer communion between the two of you than you have indicated to be the case."

  "We have been together a long time," I said.

  "Does it watch you on behalf of your patron?"

  "No. Definitely not."

  "And now we see that Ovarth has sent one of his senior facilitators and four of his retinue to intercept you. And he sent them equipped with serious weaponry, as if he expected them to face real resistance." Here he paused and gave me a pointed look. I saw no reason not to yield knowledge that he effectively already possessed.

  "I encountered the man you called Ezzers, along with two others, on the road south of Bridge-on-Scammon yesterday."

  "And you came away unruffled and in possession of his sket."

  "They presented themselves as robbers. I acquitted myself in a manner that the occasion called for." It would do no harm to appear formidable, since there was now no possibility of seeming harmless.

  "So," Lavelan said, pausing to take another taste of the liquor, "putting all of that together, we come to the question of who, and perhaps what, you are. As I said, I believe we should speak frankly."

  "So far," I said, "you have spoken frankly only about me."

  "Well, you are the mystery here. I am but a humble locator looking after my patron's interests."

  "You came after Ezzers. He came looking for this fellow, Apthorn."

  "Yes. Are you Apthorn?"

  "I have told you that is not my name." It was time to take the initiative. I said, "Let us be candid. From what you have told me of the Bambles Five, and from what I have experienced on the road, you are carrying me into a situation that is both complex and fraught with perils. Five equal powers jostle and contend for dominance, each watching to see a misstep by one of their number so that they can pounce and reduce the field to four."

  He moved his hand in a way that confirmed my assessment and invited me to continue.

  "One of these powers, Ovarth, has sent men to take me up, and given them arms and instructions to use them, even if an operative of one of his rivals," -- I flourished a hand in Lavelan's direction -- "happens to be in the way."

  "That did surprise me."

  "I do not know enough about the ambient situation," I said, "to be surprised. But I am seasoned enough in the ways of persons of power to be alarmed by the implications."

  "As am I," said Lavelan. "Events have clearly moved on since I followed Ezzers down south. I do not know how things stand in Bambles."

  "And I know even less, and am reluctant to reveal more about myself until I have an understanding of who is who, what is what, and where I fit in."

  He poured himself another measure and refilled my glass, though I had drunk much less than he had. He gazed into the distance for a while, and I could see that he was moving toward a decision. Finally he looked at me and said, "Often, when a stranger says, 'Trust me,' a wise man puts his hand on his purse and backs away."

  "That, too, has been my experience."

  "But in this case, I think you would do well to trust me."

  "Why?" I said.

  "Because, if I wanted you dead, I could have left you strolling down the road to become a peregrane's dinner."

  "There are other unpleasant fates."

  "True. Let me dispense with a few of the possibilities." He put down his glass to tick his fingers. "First, I am not interested in the contents of your purse -- Bol pays well and thievery is beneath my dignity. Second, I am not drawn to your person by any amorous yen -- I am simply not fashioned thus. Third, I covet neither your sword nor your pet."

  "I am glad to hear it," I said.

  "But, since we are being so open with each other," he said, "I will tell you that I cannot guarantee what my patron's point of view will be."

  "Thievery is not beneath his dignity?"

  "When persons of power wish to steal, especially from those who lack the means to prevent the theft, a different vocabulary comes into effect."

  "And there is no overarching authority to constrain the larcenous impulses of the powerful?"

  "Is there such an authority where you come from?" Lavelan said.

  I thought of my old colleague, Colonel-Investigator Brustram Warhanny of the Archonate Bureau of Scrutiny. "There is an authority, though its workings must allow for some imperfections."

  "Well, in Bambles, the situation is all imperfection. And, judging by Ovarth's sending out Ezzers as he did, conditions are becoming fluid. Ovarth is impulsive and may already have regretted giving Ezzers his head, but clearly he wants you for some purpose. Therefore each of the other four Powers will want you, even if they don't know why Ovarth does. Chay-Chevre is already involved, though because she is less impulsive than Ovarth her yellow and blue dragon is content merely to follow us, rather than to attempt to snatch you up."

  He gestured with his head and I turned to see a distant speck against the sky, above and behind us. I was reminded of the old tale of the three sisters who contended for ownership of a remarkable barnyard fowl. Each employed deception, thievery and, finally, brute force to win the prize, but the escalating struggle wreaked so much wear and tear on the object of their jealousy that it lost all of its allure. They threw the poor, ruined bird aside and fell to squabbling over who had done it the most harm.

  I mentioned the story to Pars Lavelan. He had not heard it but he understood its dynamic. "Wear and tear should be only one of your concerns," he said. "Neither of your three sisters was motivated to kill the prize just to deny it to his competitors. Some of the Bambles Five would see that as an acceptable outcome."

  "They would kill me rather than see a rival possess me?"

  "Theirs is not a game played for empty tokens."

  "But they don't know why Ovarth sent men to acquire me."

  He set down his glass and said, "I would be better able to advise you if I we came back to the underlying puzzle of who and what you are. It might suggest an answer to the question of why Ovarth wants you."

  I told him I needed to digest all that had happened and excused myself to go sit on another couch. Lavelan refilled his glass and turned away to give me privacy.

  "Integrator," I said, softly, "how much of what he was saying was the truth?"

  Its muted voice sounded in my ear. "I detected so
me quavers in his voice that indicated stress. But I would not say that he lied."

  "Though it was not the whole truth."

  "It never is. The 'whole truth' starts with the beginning of the world and its telling takes an inordinately long time."

  I resisted the urge to chide my assistant for indulging in pedantry. "But is the man trustworthy?" I said.

  "I am not your intuition. My analysis is that he means you no harm. He is intensely curious about you, and wishes to bring you to his master. About that, he feels some ambivalence. He is sincere when he implies that you are probably in danger."

  I stood and went to the rail at one side of the platform. I was facing west, into the rays of the bloated red orb that was sliding down from the zenith. Beneath me, the range of hills had also reached their highest ridge and now the land fell away in ever decreasing rumples until it eased into a green plain that, far off, met the glistening sea. Along the distant shore I could see a pattern in grays and whites that must be Bambles.

  I took stock of my situation and was not happy. Osk Rievor had brought me to this time, into which I did not fit, and had abandoned me. Whether he did so on purpose, which I doubted, or because of forces beyond his control, made no difference. Here I was, and ill-equipped, with only my rationality to guide me, in a world where it could not be relied upon.

  I was used to dealing with persons of rank and influence. I understood the ferocity of jealousy and spite. I could navigate the back channels of intrigue, having served the highest ranks of Olkney's stratified society. But I was accustomed to tease out the lineaments of plots and conspiracies by rigorous logic and the application of empirical principles. None of that would help me if I was enmeshed in the machinations of wizards. Pars Lavelan's patron and his four rivals would be prime exemplars of the abilities that powered this irrational age. They would operate by impulse and intuition, just as my other self did. I doubted I could match them, and would find myself placed in the role of having to react to their unexpected maneuvers, rather than being the initiator of events.

  As a youth I had enjoyed navigating light water craft on tumultuous rivers, reveling in the exhilaration of speed in a context of immediate danger. I had learned that, to paddle safely through water that boiled white with rapids, you must always propel your boat a little faster than the current. To go along with the current meant going wherever the flow carried you -- and that was all to often onto unseen, jagged rocks, or down into a whirlpool.

  Bambles looked fair to offer a rocky set of rapids, indeed. And I was hurtling into them without much of a paddle.

  #

  The jumble of regular shapes at the edge of the sea grew clearer as we flew north. I did not recognize the landscape and wondered if I had come so far into the future that Old Earth's sluggish but still active geological processes had had time to alter the face of the planet.

  I asked Pars Lavelan, "How long has this city been here?"

  He could give me no definite answer. Bambles was inarguably old, he said, dating from before the period known as the Lacuna. This was a long stretch of time -- decades at least, and some said centuries -- when there had been chaos and contention throughout the world. All was a violent flux of contesting wills, he said, until Albruithine and a handful of other great mages rose above the rapine and riot.

  "Since then we have had quieter times," he concluded. After a moment, he added, "Mostly."

  "And before the Lacuna?"

  I could see that it was a question to which he had not given much thought. "I suppose things were different. There are certainly plenty of ruins scattered about the world. Some are quite beautiful, though to the sensitive eye their beauty is shrouded in a veil of grief and pathos."

  "Have no records survived?"

  "Who would keep them?" he said. "Who bothers himself with the comings and goings of long-faded ghosts? Now is all the time we have. We seize it and wring from it sweet and sour drops of existence, until Albruithine's spell wanes and the sun blowses out to consume us."

  He became reflective then, looking down at the outskirts of Bambles and thinking his own thoughts. I left him and went to the forward railing, the better to see the place we were coming to. But my own thoughts were troubled: it seemed that the people of this age of magic were like children who had not properly grown up; they were governed by ungoverned impulse, and did not pause to weigh up what might or might not happen, but plunged toward their desires without care for the consequences. I thought of Osk Rievor's explanation of how he came to his conclusions through sheer intuition, leaping into the dark. I wondered how I would fare as a playing piece in a game amongst five grand impulsives, each with immense power and no need to consider my welfare.

  As we had overflown the plain, he had slowed the flying platform and set it to glide gradually down, so that now we flew not far above the rooftops. I was saddened to see that most of the city was derelict, its houses roofless and open to the elements, their glassless windows regarding each other across untraveled streets like the empty sockets of skulls arranged in an ossuary.

  It seemed that nine parts of the city were in ruins, including what appeared to have been great manses and public buildings. The tenth part was in a district that surrounded the harbor. I saw several ships drawn up at wharves, and others standing out in the open water. Some were recognizable as wind-driven vessels, others by up to six pairs of oars. Two were of incomprehensible design, one with an improbably extended prow and stern, the other appeared to stand on long, segmented legs; I took these to be magically powered.

  I searched my memory for cities that faced north onto a sea, discarding one after another candidate that did not fit the present landscape. Then I remembered Lakh, in the County of Carronada, a rich and tranquil place whose citizens excelled in the plastic and emotive arts. Lakh's statuary and mood-orchestrations were prized by collectors, not only on Old Earth but on many of the Ten Thousand Worlds of The Spray.

  To my assistant, I said, quietly, "Compare the features of this place with those of Lakh in Carronada."

  "They are the same. This was Lakh."

  "What ley lines connect here?"

  "Several."

  I looked down at a weed-choked walled garden behind a substantial house. Beneath the twining vegetation, I thought to see a trio of dancing figures, carved from Lakh's signature pink marble. The design of the garden, still roughly visible, suggested that the statues would have been centerpieces of a fountain set in a wide ornamental pool.

  I sighed. "We are far from home," I said.

  Lavelan stepped to the controls again and banked the platform off to the right. We flew parallel to the seashore for a minute or two, then he turned us left again, onto a heading that would take us to a large building that used as its foundation the harbor's crumbling seawall.

  I looked a question to him and he said, "Our previous course would have taken us over Ovarth's manse. Since we are coming home in his vehicle, though without his retainers, an overflight might have been seen as adding a snook to a swat."

  I signaled that I understood. Ovarth's must have been the wide, low dome of purplish stone, surrounded by tall, leafless trees whose black branches and trunks twisted and corkscrewed as if they were being slowly tortured. We were descending toward the palace on the shore, a multileveled pile of glass walls, shining green and copper in the red sunlight, set at a hundred different angles so that the composite effect was of a vast, distorted jewel.

  Halfway up the landward side of the building was a broad patio floored in flagstones of unpolished jade. Lavelan drifted the platform to it and gently set us down. He quieted the controls then went to the cupboard where he had stowed the black rods but after a moment's pause he closed the door and left them where they were. He did, however, collect the carafe of green liquor. At his touch a section of the railing swung open. We stepped down to the green floor. A moment later, the vehicle lifted off and slid away in the direction of the purple dome. Far off, I saw the blue and yellow dragon
spiraling down toward a dark tower with a crenelated top.

  "I must now conduct you to Bol," the gray-eyed man said. His face conveyed a silent warning: from here on in I was on my own.

  "Are there formalities I should observe?" I asked. I was thinking of Old Earth's inbred aristocracy, who had difficulty even seeing their social inferiors unless they wore badges of rank and struck formal postures.

  "Bol prefers direct speech and common manners," Lavelan said, then I saw a thought occur. "He is known as Smiling Bol, because his face is always wreathed in that expression. But you would do well to remember that there are smiles, and then there are smiles."

  I thanked him and said that I understood.

  "I hope so," he said, and took a swallow from the bottle. "So let us go see where the moment leads us."

  Inside Bol's manse, I had the impression of many different corridors that all looked much the same. They met each other at unusual angles, and some were so short as to cause me to wonder about the sizes and shapes of the rooms they must surround. All were floored in the same green stone as where we had landed, and the walls were of glass and copper or amalgams of the two.

  We seemed to be the place's only inhabitants. I saw no servants or dwellers, though I often thought I caught a hint of undefined motion from the corner of an eye, but when I looked directly I saw nothing. I remarked on this to my guide; he said something about "the Fourth Plane," that I took to be an explanation of where his patron drew his staff from.

  Our footsteps echoed continuously as we wove a zig-zag course to our destination. This turned out to be a pair of tall, narrow doors, sheathed in copper that had been allowed to go green with verdigris. Pars Lavelan bid me stop well clear of the portals. He advanced alone and laid the palm of one hand against the discolored metal. I felt a presence beside me, but when I glanced to the side I saw nothing, though my assistant's ruff was standing on end and the sword was vibrating softly in its scabbard.