The Spiral Labyrinth

by Matthew Hughes

  Then the sense of an impending something dissipated. Lavelan took his hand from the copper and stood back. Both doors smoothly opened emitting a waft of warm air, scented by a fragrant musk, and a green glow.

  He gestured to my sword. "You had better leave that here."

  "Why?"

  "In my patron's presence, it would probably lose some of the confidence that a magic weapon needs."

  I slipped the baldric over my head and set the sword on the floor.

  "Follow," my guide said, and stepped into the room. Once we were inside, the doors closed silently behind us and Lavelan said, "Wait here."

  The room was vast and lit by a sourceless green light that dimmed in the distance, as if I were peering through the waters of an emerald sea. The floor was checkered in green and copper, although as the sequences of alternating squares receded into the distance, the lines ceased to run parallel or to maintain the same relative size. In places, the floor seemed to slope up, but if I stared at the incline for a few moments, it was as if the angle subtly changed. The walls were also oddly aligned and shifted position even as I looked at them. A mutable room, I thought. The space must connect with other continua. I wondered what ley lines crossed at these coordinates, but thought it best not to ask my assistant.

  Pars Lavelan had advanced some considerable distance into the dimness to a spot that seemed to be elevated over the rest of the room and slanted up to the right. Beyond him, I could make out a vagueness of motion and shape without being able to focus clearly on either. Again, I resisted the impulse to ask the integrator to use its percepts.

  I saw Lavelan turn toward me and beckon. I went forward, at first careful of my footing on what looked to be an uneven surface. But I soon found that the flags beneath my feet remained uniformly level. Thus when I reached where he was standing we were on a perfectly level floor at the foot of an elevated dais, at the center of which was a large and complex assemblage of metal rods and glass coils, fitted together at improbable angles. Something about the apparatus struck me as familiar, but my attention could not remain on it long enough to make the connection. For from behind it, where he had been stooped to adjust some component, now stepped a figure that compelled the gaze.

  He wore a capacious robe of iridescent green, accented by seams and clasps of ruddy copper. Every part of him was rounded -- his hairless pate, cheeks, ears, chins, shoulders, belly, knees -- so that he resembled a cartoonist's exercise in drawing the image of a person using only curved lines. The roundness made him appear corpulent, yet the lazy grace with which he moved belied any lack of muscular strength. I reminded myself that this was a place where this man's will was paramount: I might be seeing Bol only as he willed himself to be seen, while the reality beneath the image might be quite different.

  From what Lavelan had said out on the patio, I had expected to see a smile that did not warm the eyes above it. But there was no lack of mirth in the pair of green orbs that now took me in between two lazy blinks. The grin that split the plump face even widened minimally.

  I executed a formal gesture of respectful greeting, partly out of policy, partly to give me an excuse to lower my gaze from his. Although I now lacked intuition, it having disappeared in the form of my other self, I did not lack instinct, and an instinct for self-preservation told me that it would not be wise to spend too long a time matching gazes with Smiling Bol.

  When I straightened up, Pars Lavelan was regaling his patron with an account of our meeting and subsequent travels. When he came to the point at which Ovarth's retainers entered the story, Bol's smile did not diminish, yet something in the magician's aspect changed. He asked a question -- for some reason I could not make out the words -- but Lavelan responded with a description of the weaponry.

  The magician asked another question, and I realized that as with sight, so with sound: he was heard only by those he willed to hear him. Still, it was not hard to deduce what Bol wanted to know, and I was not surprised when my guide said, "Barlo executed a spell that reduced our five assailants to dust."

  At that point the green eyes swung back to me, and though the rounded face remained possessed by its happy smile, a wave of coldness passed through me. Bol lifted a palm that might have been fashioned from a small ham and performed a complex motion of the five sausages attached to it. He looked into his hand then he looked at me, and now I saw curiosity behind the mad grin.

  I had no doubt that there was madness here. How could it be otherwise in a cosmos that was ordered solely by will? It did not mean that the insane would automatically rise to the apex of the social order; their efforts would be diffused by the randomness of the impulses that drove them. But those whose extraordinary powers of will propelled them to the heights of power and rank would always be vulnerable to going further than they should. And there would be none but their equally mad rivals to restrain them.

  Bol spoke, and this time I heard him clearly. His voice was easy and mellow, coasting it seemed on a barely restrained chuckle. "You are not a magician," he said.

  It was not a question, but I answered anyway. "No."

  "Yet you cast a powerful spell."

  "Yes."

  "Pars Lavelan thinks you are an associate of an able practitioner from some other place, a thaumaturge of an unknown school. He posits that your patron extends a protection over you."

  "That may be the case," I said.

  "What do you say?"

  "I say that I am a man who is trying to get home."

  "And where is home?"

  Of course, that was a dicey question. I avoided a direct answer. "I do not know how to get there from here," I said.

  "How did you come to be where Pars Lavelan found you?"

  Again, I temporized. "I am not entirely sure."

  As a discriminator, it was one of my useful skills to know when the subject of an interrogation was avoiding telling me all that he knew. I would not have been surprised to discover that Smiling Bol possessed the same capacity. The curiosity in his eyes had now been joined by a sharper emotion. It was time to offer something freely and thus divert the course of the encounter.

  "If you could assist me in returning home," I said, "I would be pleased to offer you any information I have that you may find interesting."

  For a long moment, he stared at me, and I could not tell -- not from his eyes, nor his expression, nor from the language of his body -- whether he was about to clasp me to his rounded bosom, or tear me to pieces with a word and a flick of his hand. Then the silence was broken by a hiss and a crackle from the apparatus Bol had been tending when we arrived. Immediately, his attention left me and he hurried back to his former position behind the assemblage of metal and glass. I now took a good look at the object and saw a distinct resemblance between it and a similar, though smaller and less intricate, device that the budding thaumaturge Turgut Therobar had constructed in a subterranean room at his estate, Wan Water.

  Therobar's device had been a trap for entities most often known as demons, a means not only of making a breach between our universe and an adjacent plane, but of seizing and holding one of that continuum's inhabitants. Bristal Baxandall, the first true magician I had encountered back in Olkney, when I had been blissfully innocent of magic, had also been trying to catch a demon. His methodology had been unsound and he had died after being turned inside-out.

  Smiling Bol looked to be a much more able practitioner. He stepped nimbly about the apparatus, tweaking and adjusting, and issuing unintelligible orders to some assistant that I could not see beyond the now humming and snapping assemblage. I glanced over at Pars Lavelan, caught his eye and gestured a question as to whether we should withdraw, but he signaled a negative. I saw no fear in his aspect but decided to step back a pace or two as the noise from the device grew louder and a sphere of colored light appeared in the air above it. My experience of demons told me that they had a long reach, even though the only one I had met was but a juvenile. Besides, the sight and smell of an everted Bristal Ba
xandall had inflicted upon my mind a memory that, though unwanted, remained indelible.

  The color-filled globe above the apparatus expanded in a series of stages as Bol bent to his task. He straightened and stepped back, and now he called Lavelan to assist him. The magician said something in an urgent tone and Lavelan gingerly inserted his hand among the rods and adjusted something. Now the globe above the apparatus brightened and, though it was still only a sphere of colored light, it somehow took on an appearance of solidity.

  Bol grunted, his gaze fixed on the constantly shifting shapes and swirls. His thick fingers paused above a part of the device then darted down to touch a rod. Instantly, the motion within the sphere became violent flashes of red and yellow, chartreuse and umber, shot through with stark eruptions of black and electric blue.

  He has caught one, I said to myself, and it is not pleased.

  But Bol was. His perpetual grin grew wider and there was genuine pleasure in his pale green eyes. He languidly stroked a rod, and I saw a bolt of deep violet shoot through the swirling colors. A bellow of rage and pain reverberated around the room. Bol touched the rod again, more firmly this time, and the violet spasm was deeper and longer. The bellow became a howl, then diminished to a whimper.

  "Speak," said the magician.

  The swirls in the globe flashed vermilion and pale yellow, with ripples of ice blue. "What do you seek?" said a deep basso voice.

  "Who plots my downfall?"

  "Only those who most dislike you."

  "Who most dislikes me?"

  "Those who plot your downfall."

  Bol's smile did not shrink, yet it took on a new character. He struck the pain rod firmly, and the demon roared its hate and agony while the sphere ached with pulses of violet. "Let us begin again," the magician said. He paused for thought, then said, "What of Ovarth?"

  This time, the demon did not equivocate. "He fears you."

  "Why?"

  "He believes you seek to undermine him, to isolate him from his peers, rendering him weak. When he is at his most vulnerable, you will strike."

  "Why does he believe this?

  "Because it is true."

  Bol reached for the pain rod again, then stayed his hand. "What evidence tells Ovarth that I am working against him?"

  "He has only suspicions. He believed he would find evidence on the road south of Bridge-on-Scammon. He sent his retainer to find the evidence. His man was almost killed and fled back to Bambles. Ovarth sent him again with more strength. His men have not come back but his flying platform has."

  "What was the evidence Ovarth sought?"

  "I do not know."

  Bol tapped the pain rod firmly, twice. "Do not lie to me."

  "I cannot lie," howled the demon.

  "Then why do you say you do not know, when all that happens on our plane is known to you?"

  "It is not happening on your plane."

  That gave the magician pause. He stroked his several chins with the backs of one hand's fingers, then said, "Then on which of the Nine Planes do you refer to?"

  "None of them."

  Bol touched a control and the demon roared in anguish.

  "Which of the Nine Planes?" he said again.

  "None. It is. . . a new plane."

  "A Tenth Plane?" Bol said. "Is that possible?"

  "It must be."

  "And this new, other plane, is it perceptible to you?"

  "Not fully. It comes and goes. Lately, it has come more often."

  "Yet Ovarth has access to it? While I, who am his superior in interplanar arts, do not?"

  "I do not know."

  "How else would he have learned about this 'evidence' if he could not connect to that other continuum?"

  "You ask me to speculate?" the demon said.

  "Within the limits of plausibility."

  "I doubt that Ovarth has access to that plane, but it may be that some entity from that plane has access to Ovarth."

  "Which is the likelier?"

  "The latter."

  Bol paused and stroked his chins again. "This other plane," he said, after a long silence, "how does it manifest itself to you?"

  The demon did not immediately reply and Bol's hand began to reach for the pain rod. "Wait," said the captive, "I am seeking a means of expressing the answer in terms you can understand."

  "I grow impatient," said Bol.

  The colors in the sphere, swirled dizzyingly, silver chasing crimson then melting under a wave of turquoise infiltrated by flecks of diamond brilliance. "It is," the demon said, "like a roar. Like a great shout. It comes as if from a distance and, though loud, it is indistinct."

  Bol's smile did not diminish, yet somehow it turned sour. "What does this shout say?"

  "It is no more than the bellow of a beast."

  "Yet Ovarth has taken sense from it."

  "Perhaps it does not hurt him to listen to it," the demon said. "For us, it brings pain."

  Bol said, "For you, I bring pain."

  "True."

  "And I have not yet applied even half of what this device can do."

  "You wish me to listen to the bellowing?"

  "I do. When can you do this?"

  "At once," said the demon. "The shout used to be intermittent. Now it has become almost constant."

  "Then listen and report."

  "The effort will. . . deplete me. Afterwards, I will need to revivify myself. I will be of no use to you."

  "We will see. Make the effort."

  "The demon went silent. The colors in the sphere began to fade, their swirls and ripples grew less intense. Finally, when the globe was reduced to flickering pastels, the demon spoke again, its voice weak and hoarse.

  "I have listened," it said. "The shout is a summons."

  Smiling Bol cocked an ear toward the fading orb. "Who or what is summoned?" he said.

  "Apthorn," the demon whispered. "The voice bellows 'Bring me Apthorn!'"

  Chapter Eight

  Bol adjusted the apparatus and the sphere shrank and dimmed further, but did not disappear. He stroked his chins in what I now understood to be a characteristic gesture accompanying concentrated thought. "'Apthorn,'" he said, in a musing tone. "What is an 'Apthorn?'"

  I contrived to look politely interested. "Some sort of tree?" I said. "Perhaps a kind of fruit?"

  Bol's eyes focused on me. "I wish to have a talk with you," he said.

  I assured him that I would be delighted, but he moved his hand in a way that gave me to understand that I had interrupted him. And though the smile remained broad, I understood that being interrupted was not an experience he welcomed. I made a gesture of apology and waited.

  "I wish to have a talk with you," he said again, "but conditions require that I exert myself in other directions."

  I waited again. It was quite possible that we were now playing some game of his devising, the rules known only to him, and me already a point down. I did not speak until he let me know, by a slight turn of his head, that it was my turn. I again assured him of my great pleasure at the prospect of conversing with him and that I would make myself available at his convenience.

  "Pars Lavelan will find you quarters," he said. "Have you any special requirements? Dietary taboos? Pernicious allergies?"

  "None," I said.

  He waved vaguely in Lavelan's direction to indicate that I was now his servant's responsibility. I executed a formal gesture of leave-taking and, as I would have done if I were departing the presence of an Old Earth aristocrat, I backed up three paces before turning away. The tall narrow doors seemed distorted in the peculiar green light of the room, but they grew straight as we neared them, and I was glad to pass through them, retrieve my sword, and see the portals swing silently closed behind us.

  "Where to?" I asked Lavelan.

  He said that he would take me to quarters close to his own. We set off again through the manse's bewildering zigs and jinks, everywhere rendered in green and copper. A question occurred to me. "Everything in thi
s place is rendered in the same two colors. Is there a purpose to it?"

  Again I received that look that wondered if I was truly the worst-informed person on the planet, but when my guide saw that I was seriously desirous of receiving an answer he explained. "Colors," he said, "are expressive of numinous qualities. Call them the different strains of magic. High-ranking practitioners command two such, in contrast with each other, drawing some of their power from their ability to contain the conflict and channel its energies to their purposes."

  "Your patron commands green and copper. What do they signify?"

  "As is usual, one is dominant and the other recessive. In Bol's case, he wields green as his major idiom, with copper as its minor accompaniment. By judiciously balancing the relationship, an art that takes years to master -- and many do not survive the seasoning -- he brings finesse to the raw power of green, while simultaneously augmenting the softer force of copper. When both are used together, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts."

  "Indeed?" I said, having understood almost nothing of what he had said. "And Ovarth favors black and purple?"

  He corrected me. "Deep purple. There are several shades, each expressive of its own domain. But, yes, Ovarth wields black as his dominant, with deep purple as his minor. So, of course, he has a great facility with elementals."

  "Of course," I said.

  "Though his interplanar capabilities are rough. They scarcely rise beyond second-level. That is why the master grew skeptical when the demon seemed to imply that Ovarth had been reaching into planes beyond the immediately adjacent. Bol, wielding green as his dominant, has great interplanar reach. And grasp: most of the servants here were imported from adjacent continua."

  "I see," I said, though I didn't really. But I thought the discussion might be leading me somewhere useful, although it would have been nice if my intuition had been there to steer me toward a harbor. "Do some practitioners command more than two colors of magic?"