The Spiral Labyrinth

by Matthew Hughes

  Ovarth drew himself up to an even greater height. "I will not be interrogated. Besides, what was your man, Pars Lavelan, doing there?"

  "Watching Ral Ezzers," said Bol. "Nor was he the only one interested. One of Chay-Chevre's dragons was seen in the sky."

  Ovarth had been about to speak, but Bol's news had clearly thrown his train of thought onto another route. "Which one?" he said.

  The smiling magician gestured to Lavelan. The retainer said, "The yellow and blue. It chased off a peregrane that was shadowing us."

  Ovarth steepled his root-like fingers and took thought. After a moment, he said, "The yellow and blue -- that one would not be allowed out to roam, save at Chay-Chevre's specific behest."

  "I agree," said Bol. "She sent it, just as you sent Ezzers and I sent Lavelan."

  "So that makes three of us."

  "At least."

  The tall man spread his hands in a gesture of acquiescence. "Well, there it is. We must call a conclave."

  Bol sat down again and picked at the bowl of sweetmeats. "Unless it was just we three," he said.

  Ovarth stiffened. "No," he said.

  "I merely posit a possibility. You and I and Chay-Chevre pool our capacities, peel the mystery, then follow where events may lead us."

  As the mystery in question, I did not relish the idea of being peeled. I was trying to put together an appropriate contribution to the debate when Ovarth responded.

  "Let us speak frankly," he said, "you are proposing that we three quietly determine what this man's presence signifies. If we derive sufficient advantage from that knowledge, we use it in a sudden strike against Tancro and Shuppat, despoiling them of their assets. The Five become the Three. Is that the 'possibility' you 'posit' to me?""

  "You were ever the bluntest of us," Bol said, "but yes."

  Ovarth's thin, pale hands spread themselves again, this time palms down. "No."

  Bol shrugged his rounded shoulders. "It was worth the asking."

  "May I make a suggestion?" I said.

  "You will have to make it to the conclave," Ovarth said.

  "In the meantime," Bol said, "he will remain here."

  That prospect clearly did not please the purple and black magician, but Smiling Bol spoke to mollify him. "I have been able to learn nothing useful him, though I am sure I would be able to once my demon recovers its wits. He is something of a simpleton, lacking a full complement of mental attribute. Moreover, there is an odor of time about him. Also, a residue of interplanar travel. My man Lavelan thinks he may be a facsimile. I suspect he is an unintended echo of a person who has been projected from one continuum to another."

  Bol's unsmiling eyes lingered on me. Now Ovarth studied me again, his fingers working in the air. "I thought, perhaps a masking spell?" he said, then, "No. He is only what he appears to be."

  "Is he important? Or is it just that someone wants us to think he is?" Bol said.

  "You think he may be a distraction? A decoy meant to unsettle us?"

  "Possibly. Whatever is going on, I sense that he is not a key player."

  Ovarth tapped a lean finger against the sharp blade of his nose. "Shuppat is good at puzzles," he said.

  Bol ate another sugared ball. "And Tancro is gifted in the arts of interrogation."

  "Then that settles it."

  Bol dusted his palms together and said, "Let us go to my mirror and make the call jointly."

  "Agreed," said Ovarth. "And your man can escort him back to his quarters until arrangements are made."

  During their conversation I had been searching for some gambit that would retrieve the situation. I found none, and when Lavelan beckoned me to go with him, his face full of regret, I could only follow where he led.

  Back in my quarters, I asked him, "How would you advise me?"

  He avoided meeting my eyes, making a noise in the back of his throat that I took as an expression of discomfort. But I pressed the point, reminding him that I was a traveler lost among strangers, and that I had perhaps saved his life in the encounter with Ral Ezzers.

  "I do not know that there is any good advice I can give you," he said, at last. "You have become a piece on the playing board of a game among Powers. When great wills collide, we lesser folk must be nimble. You do not seem to be skilled in the steps of the dance."

  "Perhaps," I said, "another devastating spell will come to me."

  "Then it had better be very quickly launched. At the first sign of a casting, five very accomplished practitioners would concentrate their aim. All that would be left of you would be a wisp of smoke and a fading cry of horror."

  "This is not encouraging."

  He made a gesture of fatalism. "Every life must end," he said, "else existence would be insupportable. Comfort yourself with the thought that you are probably only a shadow of the true Barlo, who is probably enjoying a fine and fulfilling life somewhere or somewhen else."

  "Strangely," I said, "that thought does not comfort me."

  He made the same gesture again, which did not endear him to me, then went to look out the window. His tone became melancholy. "Your situation does cause me to wonder if I have chosen the right path. My plan was to serve power in order to acquire power, then use my acquisition to better the world rather than just myself. But even though Bol is not the worst of the Bambles Five, I often find myself involved in deeds that lead me away from my first desire."

  "Perhaps," I said, "my arrival offers you a new point of departure. We could flee here together, me to continue my search for a way home, you to begin a worthy new chapter in your life."

  He was silent, gazing out at the forlorn vista that had once been glorious Lakh. Then he said, "No. But if things do not go well for you, I will look after your pet."

  #

  The five Powers of Bambles met on neutral ground: an open courtyard of a dilapidated palace that sprawled over several blocks in a section of the ruined city that had formerly boasted many imposing structures. The cloister had once been graced with several of the previous age's finest sculptures, human and allegorical figures rendered in black, white or pink stone, grouped around a now-empty reflective pool. The statues were weathered now, some of their extremities broken off by vandals or windblown debris sent flying by winter storms. Their sightless eyes looked down from cracked and gouged faces on the five magicians seated in a ring on the cracked stone floor of the pool, on chairs that they had brought from their own seats of power.

  No one had thought to bring a chair for me, so I stood outside the circle, attended by Pars Lavelan. Each of the other thaumaturges had brought their own retinues. My sword had not been returned to me, but was now in the hands of Ovarth, who turned it over to examine its scabbard then drew the blade and scanned the runes etched into its strange metal.

  "I cannot read this," he said. He looked around to the others. "Can anyone?"

  Shuppat, a thin, mouse-like man in robes of brown and ocher, took the weapon. He laid the black blade across his knees and traced the runes with small, pink fingers. "No," he said, after a few moments, "though I can sense that the sword's power and sentience are bound up in what is written here." He sheathed the sword and brought the pommel to his forehead, then said, "It is a different order of magic from any that I know. It feels both simpler, yet more elegant, than our schools."

  "You are saying it is more advanced?" asked Chay-Chevre, a woman of middle height and proportions. Her raven-black hair fell straight to the backs of her knees when she was standing, and lay like a stygian river over her shoulders and down her breast when, as now, she was seated. She wore a gown of scarlet and a headband of dull gold, which I took to be the colors of the occult arts she commanded.

  "Yes," said Shuppat. "This man, or echo of a man, may be from the future."

  "Bring him amongst us," said Ovarth. Bol signaled Lavelan to lead me into the circle. The retainer then returned his place behind his patron's chair, leaving me under the scrutiny of five pairs of eyes. Each pair, I noticed, was of a differ
ent color, but each pierced and probed me with an equal intensity.

  Tancro, a small, square man who wore tights and a padded jacket harlequined in white and silver, announced that he would take charge of my interrogation. He sat in a throne-like chair of intricately carved white stone that also served him as a means of transport. It had silently carried him across the ruined city from his manse atop a rise to the east while several of his retainers had come riding on a long, segmented creature with dozens of legs. Tancro leaned an elbow on an arm of the chair and rested his cheek on his fist. He studied me as a boy might examine an odd-shaped insect found under an up-turned rock. "Well," he said, after a long inspection, "just what are you?"

  "A traveler," I said, "lost and seeking my way home."

  "How did you come to be lost?"

  I was honest but careful. "Through powers that I neither possess nor understand."

  I heard a murmur from the others. It stopped as Tancro raised an admonitory finger. "Who wielded these powers?"

  "I do not know."

  "Were you the target of them? Or were you caught up in someone else's doings?"

  It was an interesting question. "I do not think I was the target," I said. I had come to the conclusion that Osk Rievor had been the object of our being spirited away, that he had been the seed that was prized, while I had been merely its husk to be discarded.

  Tancro came at me from a different angle. "What does your intuition tell you?"

  "Nothing," I said. "I am without intuition."

  Again a murmur went around the circle, louder this time. Tancro did not still it. He was staring at me in consternation. "How do you get by?" he said.

  "Through reason."

  Snorts and expostulations came from all sides. "It is true," I said. "I demonstrated as much to Pars Lavelan before we had even met."

  The retainer was called back into the circle. Bol bade him tell what he knew. The magicians listened as Lavelan recounted the business of the wheel in the common room of the inn at Bridge-on-Scammon. Chay-Chevre dismissed the account as "an underling's inability to recognize a luck spell."

  Bol answered by supporting his man's abilities, saying, "Find a trace of a spell about him, if you can."

  I had to stand while the woman circled me, her hands shaping the air around me, a look of increasing frustration on her harsh-planed face, the skepticism in her startlingly gray eyes turning to anger. Finally, she sniffed at me, like a dog hunting truffles, then made a noise of exasperation. "A trick!" she snapped, and stalked back to her seat.

  "No trick," said Bol. "He is a genuine anomaly." He called to Pars Lavelan again. "Tell them about the coin."

  The retainer stepped forward again and told of the tossing of the coin. The magicians scoffed, but Shuppat was intrigued. "Show us," he said, producing a round of silver.

  I felt like a performing mountebank as I took the coin and presented it to each of the Powers, saying, "Please examine this to make sure that it is not magically influenced." When all had declared it to be unprejudiced, I took up a position in the center of the circle and said, "Now, each of you must maintain an attitude of neutrality. None must will the coin to come up one way or the other."

  I handed the coin to Pars Lavelan and had him toss it several times so that it landed on the stone floor of the empty pool. As the tosses added up, I drove my mind up through the ladder of mathematical consistencies and soon had the pattern established. I then correctly called the next ten tosses.

  "I could go on doing it indefinitely," I said.

  The magicians looked at each other. "I sensed no one exercising a power toward the coin," Shuppat said.

  "Nor did I," said Tancro, "and I would have known."

  "So," said Bol, "we are left to ask: what does it mean?"

  "It means nothing," Chay-Chevre said. "It is a silly parlor trick."

  "No," said Shuppat, "it means something -- he means something -- but I cannot put a shape to it."

  Now the time had arrived when I could offer them the answer I wanted them to accept. "Have you ever heard," I said, "of the theory that sympathetic association and rationality alternate with each other as the underlying principle of existence?"

  "A lot of blether," said Ovarth, to a chorus of agreement from the others.

  Chay-Chevre said, "Pure foopery. How could mere reason hope to overcome will? How does a pale abstraction overpower the most elemental force in the universe?"

  "It does not overpower," I said. "It replaces."

  Shuppat, at least, was willing to listen. He stilled the others' protests and scorn. "Let him have his say. All right, mysterious traveler, tell us: what has this off-center little theory have to do with the price of pease?"

  And so I explained. As I did so, I was reminded of an occasion in my youth: at school, some fellow had tried to make a case for a workable theory of magic. We, his fellow students, had scarcely let him get more than a few sentences into his explanation before we began to jibe him with catcalls and facetious questions. He had finally given up and soon after he left the school and engaged a private tutor. Now it was my turn to tell the truth, as I all too bitterly knew it, to these five thaumaturges. I saw on their faces the same scorn and derision as that young man had seen on mine and my fellow ignoramuses. I had long been accustomed to being recognized as the brightest mind in almost any room I entered. Now I knew what it was to be received as just some prating ninny.

  "Enough!" Chay-Chevre said, when I had laid out the basic structure of a rational universe and was attempting to answer a question from Shuppat as to how a cosmos built on randomness could avoid simply falling apart.

  I tried to ignore her interjection, explaining to the brown and ocher magician how a subtle order underlies seeming chaos. "Just as will is not supreme in this universe, but must be channeled through forms and processes," I said, "so does apparent randomness have an understructure that--"

  The wizardress stamped a foot in irritation. Worse, she spoke a two-syllable word while pointing three fingers at me, at which my throat closed up and no more words could come.

  "Oh, release him," said Shuppat. "I was interested to see how many eggs he could keep in the air at once." He looked around at the others. "Quite remarkable, don't you think?"

  But his colleagues thought less of my dissertation than he did. "Let us come to practicalities," Bol said, linking his plump fingers one with another and leaning forward. "Some of us have had," -- he paused, seeking the precise word, finally settling on, "intimations from our various sources that something of importance was about to happen on the road from the south."

  He looked around the circle and received confirmatory gestures from the others. "Ovarth," he continued, "sent his man, Ral Ezzers, to investigate. Pars Lavelan went to keep an eye on Ezzers. Chay-Chevre, you sent a dragon. Shuppat?"

  Shuppat said, "I enlisted the eyes and ears of my little friends -- birds in the woods, mice at the inn."

  Tancro would not divulge the means of his surveillance but admitted that he had been aware of events in the area.

  Bol's smile became knowing. "You sent a ghost," he said. "We all know you dabble in the necromantic arts."

  Tancro folded his arms across his chest and elevated his chin. "Get on with it," he said.

  Now the smile became that of a one who has scored a point but is too occupied with other concerns to gloat. "Very well. So we all send our assets south and what do we find? A man who cannot account for himself, with an odd-looking pet. He wields a magic sword whose provenance is unknown, and wields it effectively enough to slay two local bravos whom Ezzers has hired. He controls one of Ezzers's skets, not an easy skill to master, and he manipulates the wheel at the Bridge-on-Scammon inn. Finally, he blasts Ezzers and four of Ovarth's retinue to dust and ashes, using a spell that none of us can name."

  The smiling magician paused for effect, then said, "And on top of all, he exhibits not the tiniest trace of thaumaturgical ability. Not a glimmer of an aura. Even the lowliest street s
weeper who knows a simple charm or two gives off an odor of magic. This man is blank, without mana, void, inert."

  "We know all this. What is your point?" said Tancro.

  "I'm coming to it," Bol said, and now his smile became sly. "While we have all been so interested in the man of mystery, this odd fish, something else has been happening."

  "Yes," said Shuppat, "the reverberations that have caused the ground to tremble, though you probably haven't noticed it."

  "A shout, my captive demon called it," Bol continued. "This immense bellowing cry of a word or name without known referent."

  "Eppthorn," said Tancro.

  "I heard it as Apthorn," Bol said.

  "I saw it graven on a cliff face in a dream," Chay-Chevre said, "in ancient glyphs that spelled Appa-thonn."

  "Yes," said Bol, "we've all been touched by this shout, in one way or another. Some of us also felt an intuition to watch the south road. Or at least to watch the watchers."

  Ovarth drew his long face into a frown. "But what does it all mean?"

  "That," said Bol, "is the question."

  Shuppat nodded. "You're saying this man may have something to do with the disturbance in the Nine Planes, or. . ." He let Bol finish his thought.

  "Or," the smiling magician said, "he may be a distraction sent to keep us busy--"

  Tancro leaped to his feet, his fist balled, his eyes snapping from one point of the compass to the next. "While whatever's behind the other thing steals upon us."

  "Perhaps," said Bol. "Therefore I propose that we bind ourselves together in a new pact to meet the threat."

  "Are we sure it is a threat?" Shuppat said.

  "It is immensely powerful and unknown," said Tancro. "That's good enough for me. I concur with Bol. None of us will do harm to any of us, neither by word, by deed nor by will, until this matter is resolved. I will give seven oaths and accept the direst of penalties."

  So, it became clear, would the others. The air above the circle shimmered, coruscating with streams of sparks, as the covenant was established.

  "Now," said Tancro, when all was settled, "while we're all here, we'll find out whatever there is to find out about this odd fellow."