The Spiral Labyrinth

by Matthew Hughes

  "What?" Lavelan and I said.

  But a light dawned in my other self's hairless face. "Of course!" he said. "Quick and easy." Then a look of concern came over him. "But the effects are widespread."

  "What does that mean?" I said as the disk touched down on the afterdeck and Bol beckoned us to hurry down the ladder to where he was adjusting his apparatus.

  "It means get ready to duck," Osk Rievor said.

  As we went singly down the ladder, Bol was calling to Shuppat: "Can you leave them?"

  The small magician looked over the plain and said, "I believe so. But Chay-Chevre's dragon is running dry."

  "We need not kill them," Bol said. "The threat will lapse once we have the avatar subdued."

  "Yes," said Shuppat, "I am coming. Summon Chay-Chevre."

  Bol's augmented voice boomed over the landscape again, calling the wizardress. This time she heeded the summons, the dragon barely able to spit sparks and inconsequential balls of fire that extinguished before they reached their targets. She banked the beast and glided toward us.

  Bol bent to consult some indicator on his mechanism and came back up with his smile at full glow. He rubbed his hands in happy anticipation and turned to the three of us -- or four, if I counted my assistant, as I was beginning to think I should.

  "Over here," the smiling magician said, indicating a spot on the deck near a part of the apparatus where several rods were tipped by complex shapes of glass. "When I say so, place your hands on those and take a deep breath."

  "What will happen?" I said.

  "You will play an important part in the future of the world," Bol said. "Streets will be named for you, perhaps whole cities."

  "Get ready," said my other self.

  "Hurry up," said Bol. Shuppat had come back onto the deck and was making a complex gesture in support of his colleague's efforts. Chay-Chevre was circling the fort to bring the dragon down on the platform above the afterdeck, her face grim. In the globe of light above the apparatus, the manlike avatar pushed its pale fists against the energies that held it. From its approximation of a mouth came a moan of uncomprehending pain.

  Bol looked our way. "Come, come," he said, "play your parts. Do not tarnish the moment by making me compel you. Truculence will avail you nothing."

  The three of us reached out our hands to the glass shapes. And as we did so, Osk Rievor said, softly, "Now."

  He reached with two fingers to touch his forehead, as if brushing away a midge. At the same time he voiced three soft syllables. I saw Bol give him a puzzled look, then the thaumaturge sniffed the air as if an odd odor had come his way and cocked his head as if to catch a distant sound.

  And then I saw comprehension take hold of the magician, and with its coming the unending smile ended. Bol's mouth shaped itself into a perfect circle of horror, then his teeth closed in a grimace of hate. His hands came up, fingers curled like claws, and I knew that he was about to spit a destruction upon us that would outdo anything Osk Rievor had collected from ages past.

  But as his teeth unclenched to speak the first syllable of doom, a vast pale hand broke through the surface of the globe of light. Its bloodless fingers closed around Bol's head and lifted him from his feet. It shook him once, twice -- I heard his neck bones snap -- then it flung him across the deck to that he rolled and tumbled like a marionette severed from its strings, fetching up against the inner side of the hull. Now the hand reached for Shuppat, but the small magician was already running away. He scaled the elongated prow, and stepped onto the ramparts at the front of the fort.

  There he stopped and turned to see if the avatar pursued him, and breathed a sigh of relief when he saw that it did not. But his solace was short-lived. Scarcely had he turned than his shoes and ankles were submerged in a glittering tide of wriggling, crawling and -- most of all -- biting things that came flowing up the wall and continued to climb until there was nothing to see of Shuppat but a moving mass of chitin, that produced quite awful screams until the horde filled his open mouth and began to eat him from the inside out.

  "To the disk," said Pars Lavelan. We had run toward the afterdeck the moment the avatar had seized Bol. As we scaled the ladder, I looked back to see the mass of insects come up over the prow of the ship and surge toward us like a dark flood. I put on extra speed and crossed the afterdeck as fast as I have ever crossed any space, my assistant clinging to my ears, its tail tight about my neck.

  We lifted off as smartly as Lavelan could manage, but when we were in the air I saw that the torrent of little creatures had not mounted to the afterdeck. Instead they were swarming over Bol's contraption. Whether the fungus was able to sense how the device worked, or whether the assemblage simply ceased to function under the weight of so many small bodies, I would never know. But the sphere above the rods and coils lost coherence. It pulsed and billowed, and suddenly it was no longer there.

  The insects turned, as one, and flooded back over the prow of the ship, down the front wall of the fort, and out over the plain. Where Shuppat had last been seen there was now only a scattering of corroded bones.

  As we rose higher, we saw that another struggle was going on. Over the space between the fort and the crevice from which the first insects had come, the yellow and blue dragon was executing curvets and sharp spirals in the air, its sinuous back arching and shimmying, while Chay-Chevre struggled frantically to keep from being thrown off.

  "That is truly a notable spell," said Pars Lavelan. "It has even broken the bonds that Chay-Chevre laid upon her dragon. The beast has reverted to its natural state. I doubt that anyone has seen such a sight in centuries."

  "Indeed," said Osk Rievor, "Lateef's Instantaneous and General Manumission cancels all geases, holds, layings and compellings within a certain radius."

  Now the wizardress lost her battle. She tumbled from the dragon's neck and fell to the plain, though she executed some cantrip that slowed her fall and allowed her to be gently deposited upright on the stony flat. She immediately drew her wand and with it described a circle around herself. But the ward she created did not serve to hold off the sea of insects that was flowing across the plain to the hillside crevice. Propelled by their symbiote's now unfettered will, they rolled over her barrier and swarmed onto the thaumaturge, toppling her into their heaving midst.

  But they did not devour her as they had Shuppat. Instead, ten thousand clicking mouths and a hundred thousand hooked limbs seized her by clothing, skin, and her long fall of hair. And though she flailed and cursed, they carried her supine toward the cleft in the rock, and down into the darkness.

  "I believe the fungus has what it wanted," I said.

  "Someone to tell it all it wants to know about magic," Osk Rievor confirmed. "I wonder what will be the outcome of such a will coupled to such knowledge."

  Pars Lavelan said, "Chay-Chevre's special competence was largely limited to the capture and control of dragons. Still, she had an excellent grounding in the basic arts." He looked past me and said, "But our problems are more immediate."

  I turned and looked. The insects had disappeared from the plain, leaving nothing on which a long-enslaved dragon could vent its wrath except three men and a grinnet on a slow-moving disk.

  The yellow and blue was arrowing toward us.

  Chapter Twelve

  The dragon passed by us at speed, slightly above the height of the disk. Its slipstream rocked us and I heard the little air elemental that supported us whooshing as it struggled to keep us level. As the great beast swept past, the golden eye that was toward us showed no hint of sympathy. The yellow and blue dipped one wing and banked to come around. Still at a distance, it tried a test-blast of fire, but nothing much emerged, so it turned away then beat its wings heavily and began to spiral upwards.

  Watching it climb, Pars Lavelan said, "I believe it means to stoop upon us, peregrane-style. We will not survive."

  "We cannot outrun it?" Osk Rievor said.

  He pointed at the whirlwind visible through the stuff of
the disk. "It is only a minor elemental. And that is a dragon. Have you any spell that would serve?"

  Osk Rievor consulted the grinnet. Our assistant said, "We have two or three that ought to give it pause for thought, if they are as effective on a dragon as on a human recipient. But by the time it is within the probable range of the spells, it will be moving so fast that momentum will carry it on to strike us."

  "We could take shelter in the ship," Pars Lavelan said, "but the beast could tear it apart. Or in a cave, but it will recover its fire and roast us."

  The dragon had reached a great height. I imagined it swirling through the thin air, reveling in its new-won freedom. In a little while, that pleasure would pale and it would seek new enjoyments down here. "How did Chay-Chevre control it?" I said.

  "She was adept at tricking them into telling her their names," Pars Lavelan said. "Then she used a potent binding spell. That was what your friend broke."

  The dragon had stopped circling. Its spread wings now folded and it began to drop toward us.

  "They keep their names secret?" I said.

  "Very much so. It is their sole weakness. That and a tendency toward sentimentality."

  It made sense. I watched the diving yellow and blue grow larger, and recalled my wild surmise of a short while ago.

  "Integrator," I said, "can you carry my voice clearly to the dragon before it gets too close?"

  "I doubt that it will be amenable to reason," the grinnet said. "It seems a very unreasonable sort of beast, much like that thing that slobbered after me in the ruins."

  "I am not going to employ reason. Now amplify my voice, or project it, whatever you can do."

  "Very well," said my assistant, "whenever you are ready."

  The dragon was halfway to us now, and dropping faster. I put all the stern firmness into my tone that I could muster and said, Gallivant! You mustn't hurt me! You owe me a great favor, Gallivant!"

  The yellow and blue did not slacken its descent. Indeed it rotated to change its angle of attack so that instead of diving head first, it now came at us with talons spread, wings streaming behind.

  "Louder," I told my assistant, then spoke again, "Gallivant, I've seen you looking at me, trying to place me. You know that you know me from long ago. I saved you from darkness and did you a great favor. Now is the time to repay."

  The dragon grew in size, its claws extended. It plummeted toward us, and I saw a fierce joy in its golden eye. But then, at the last instant, the eye blinked and the wings spread to catch the air. It swept over us and soared up, then banked to return, circling us at a close distance that meant that the little whirlwind had to work hard to compensate for the buffeting of the beast's wings.

  "Who are you, to know my name?" it said, and I recognized the voice.

  "I am," I said, "he who had you taken down from a shelf where you lay in helpless darkness. I gave you back your wings. I gave you purpose."

  I thought it must be rare to see uncertainty in a dragon's face, but I saw it now in this one. "When was this?" it said.

  "Long ago, at about the time your first memories begin."

  It ceased to circle us and flew out over the plain, its wings slowly flapping in a meditative way. In the far distance, it turned and came back to us, more quickly.

  "I cannot really remember it," it said when it circled us again. "It is from the time of dreams. But what you say has the odor of truth about it. I will not destroy you."

  "Nor my friends."

  "I do not owe them anything. I have a feeling that I never much cared for your pet."

  "For my sake," I said, "and bear in mind that, though we know your name, we have not used the knowledge to capture you."

  "Fair enough," said the dragon Gallivant. "But I am going to have to eat something to regain my strength."

  "Smiling Bol is in no condition to complain," I said.

  The dragon cast an eye toward the ship in its fort. "I often wondered if he would taste as good as he looked," it said, and let itself slide that way.

  #

  We waited at a distance until the dragon had fed. None of us had warm feelings for the dead magician, but the sight of him becoming energy for a dragon was not edifying. When Gallivant had done, it retired to the platform at the rear of the fort to lick the spatters from its scales and feathers. Then the three of us and the grinnet returned to the ship.

  Each of the five thaumaturges had had a cabin beneath the afterdeck. We explored them carefully, not knowing what their former occupants might have left to guard their baggage. In Bol's quarters, one of his interplanar guardians still stood watch, but when Pars Lavelan explained where their master had ended up, it turned sideways without a word and disappeared. A ravening beast snarled and fretted inside Tancro's cabin, but when we opened the door it rushed snarling out onto the deck only to become a second course for Gallivant. The other three had used more conventional wards to guard their privacy; these were broken by a cooperative effort among Osk Rievor, Lavelan and the grinnet's compendium of spells.

  We spread all their useful possessions on the floor in Bol's cabin. Some of them had obvious natures and purposes: a globe that showed events at a distance; a couple of grimoires; some books that discussed arcana of interplanar connections; various wands, rings and jewels that could harness and focus magical energies. Other items were obscure. Tancro had owned a book whose leaves were made of soft-tanned leather marked with curious designs and symbols -- eventually we decided it had no numinous qualities, that it was a collection of tattoos taken with the skin they had adorned, and that the book had had some sentimental value to its owner. Shuppat had kept the mummified corpse of some little creature in a golden box. Chay-Chevre had a soft chamois bag in which colored stones clicked together; when shaken out, they rose into the air and floated about as if seeking her. Their purpose could not be divined.

  "These are things they thought might come in useful on this expedition, or simply items they liked to have with them," I speculated.

  "Some of them are of interest to me," said Osk Rievor.

  "And to me," said Pars Lavelan. "I am, I believe, the most accomplished practitioner; hence, I should have the best items."

  "An interesting point of view," Osk Rievor said. "I suppose we could make a test of our abilities on each other." He turned to me. "May I borrow our assistant for a while?"

  "Wait," I said. "A duel would, I am sure, be quite entertaining, but I do not think we have the leisure for you two to indulge yourselves. Besides, we have larger issues to decide."

  Each of the two men cocked their heads questioningly, and Pas Lavelan said, "Such as?"

  "Well, for one, how do we get home?"

  Lavelan shrugged. "The dragon. It cares for you."

  "Maybe, but I have no experience with the gratitude of dragons. It may be permanent, or it may blow away on some draconian whim. Do you know a binding spell?"

  "There is probably one in a book here. Chay-Chevre would not have traveled without one."

  "Then I think finding that spell should be our second objective," I said.

  "Not the first?" said Osk Rievor.

  "No. The first is to determine whether or not the fungus and its partners will let us leave."

  #

  It was not hard to command the flying disk. One leaned in the direction of desired travel, and the elemental did all the rest. Simple one-word instructions -- stop, go, descend, faster, slower -- completed the skill set. I flew with the grinnet on my shoulder to the crevice and called into the darkness.

  A pale shape moved in the gloom. I had expected the pallid avatar to manifest itself, but apparently the symbiote could only project that form through interplanar means. Here at its front door it must send one of its partners. It sent the newest.

  Chay-Chevre came to the edge of the opening. "We have been expecting you," she said. The voice was not hers. And she had changed in more than just her mode of speaking. Her clothes were gone, as was every hair that had grown on her body, r
evealing that much of her skin was ornamented with complex tattooing. I suspected that the spell to control a dragon was not in one of her books, but somewhere on her person -- although that person could no longer be called hers.

  "The individuals who attacked you are no more," I said. "We who mean you no harm would like to depart, wishing you all the best in your further endeavors."

  The wizardress's face showed no emotion, but the symbiote's will was hard as stone in her eyes. "You must stay."

  "Why? For how long?"

  "You must teach me. We will. . . associate."

  The prospect set my back muscles ashiver. "We do not wish it."

  "Then what do you want?"

  "To go."

  "No. When we were associated, you were happy."

  "It was a false happiness," I said. "A cheap trick. And then you tortured me."

  "I will not torture you again."

  "No. We wish to leave."

  "I will not allow it."

  "You did once before."

  "Did I?"

  "It is where you remember me from."

  "My memory is unreliable, beyond a certain point. I remembered only your name and that you brought me knowledge when I needed it. I need knowledge now."

  "Chay-Chevre has a great deal of knowledge."

  "I have already encompassed it. She does not know the things I saw when I first met you."

  "But you and I were. . . associated before I escaped. Anything I knew, you would have found."

  "No, you hid it from me."

  "I could not possibly do so."

  "It is the only explanation."

  "No," I said, "there is another explanation: you are wrong. You said that your earliest memories are unreliable."

  "I am not wrong. Your mind was a great storehouse of knowledge. You knew many magic spells. Somehow you are able to hide the knowledge from me, but I will have it."

  My assistant spoke quietly in my ear. "We should go."

  I said to the symbiote, "I need to discuss this issue with my colleagues. We may be able to find a compromise."