:: Chara,:: Theseus snapped, but she clenched her fists and didn’t turn to him.
“No,” Ligeia said. “But he leaves bits. In piles. Bits he doesn’t want. I know it’s him, though. I could tell he was trouble; I should’ve killed him in his sleep. Shouldn’t have listened to her.”
“To her?” Theseus said.
Ligeia stared at him as if she hadn’t seen him clearly before now. “Who’re you? Why is your voice in my head?”
“Why, he’s Prince Theseus of Athens,” Melaina said. “Hadn’t you heard tell of his wondrous godmarked mind-voice? The voice he uses to bind his subjects to his will? The one he apparently used to woo Princess Ariadne of Crete?”
Theseus didn’t look at her, and he didn’t speak—not aloud, anyway.
Ligeia shrugged. “I’ve heard some of those things. A long time ago. And what’s that?” she said, gesturing to the ball of silver string in Theseus’s hand.
“Melaina?” he said, cocking his head at her. “Would you like to answer again?”
Melaina said nothing.
“I’ll answer,” said Chara, and saw the muscles in Theseus’s arms tense. Her head was still pounding. “It’s string fashioned by the Great Daedalus of Athens and Crete. It’s godmarked—never runs out. Or never yet—and I’ve seen it tested since I was a child, when it belonged to my friend Icarus. The other end of it is attached to the wall beneath the entrance to this place. Once we find whoever else is in here,” she went on, finally turning to Theseus, “we’ll follow it back and use it to climb up to the door.”
Ligeia cackled, on and on, until she had to bend over and lean on her own knees. Alphaios raised his new blade and held it shakily out.
“No,” she finally gasped. “No getting out. And special string’ll be useless, anyway, when the hallways change.”
“Huh,” Melaina said, as Theseus put his hand on Alphaios’s and pushed his blade slowly down. “Well, then—no need for you to come with us.”
Chara said, “No—we’ll come with you. Show us where you find these ‘bits’ you say he leaves. Show us the places you’ve found. The water.”
Ligeia sucked in her cheeks. At last she nodded, and pushed again at her mess of hair. “All right,” she said. “I’ll take you to the island.”
Gears ground. “Wait,” Ligeia said, and they did, in the blue and gold light of Daedalus-fireflies. Walls groaned and shifted. Dust fell. Tiny white spiders poured out of an old crack and into a new one; Chara heard the whisper of their legs, even though Phoibe was shrieking. When the walls settled, the fireflies were gone, and the corridor ahead of them rippled with reflected flame.
“Do things always change like that?” Phoibe whispered.
Ligeia nodded. Her right shoulder twitched, and she clamped her hand down on it, as if shoulder and hand belonged to different people. “Always. I never know when, but I know which parts leads to which. I know which parts danger’s in, and when to stay away. No need for your string at all.”
Theseus smiled and glanced back along the string’s gleaming length. “Still,” he said, “we’ll keep it.”
“But it can’t show you,” Ligeia said, sounding stronger, almost happy, “that the island is there.” She pointed toward the red-orange light and smiled, and Chara saw black gaps where teeth had been.
Chara heard Alphaios gasp, when they reached the corridor’s end. She stood beside him at the edge of a lake of fire. She wanted to gasp too, but couldn’t—the heat leaned against her, and she against it, helplessly. He won’t have been able to bear this heat, she thought. Not as a boy. He’ll always be the bull; he’ll always be hungry and fierce.
Theseus was the first to walk to the bridge that spanned the flames. “The island,” he said, cocking an eyebrow at Ligeia. A droplet of sweat ran from his eyebrow to his cheekbone. The string in his hand looked as if it were on fire too.
She nodded again. This time her left shoulder twitched, and her right hand gripped it.
“Lead us, then, Ligeia,” he said, probably with both of his voices.
She went first, and Theseus after her, then Alphaios, and Phoibe, though she whimpered about the heat, and being afraid. “Well, slave?” Melaina said to Chara, hands on hips, as the others shuffled up to the crest of the bridge.
“You first, my Lady,” Chara said, bitterly—because instead of a bald girl in a torn robe, she suddenly saw Ariadne, turning, lifting her skirts and tossing her glossy curls so that they slid across her breasts and shoulders. Ariadne, Melaina: Chara followed, as the flames lapped at her skin and seared away her breath.
The island was a lump made of cinders, ash, and obsidian flakes. Chara guessed that the altar stone at its centre had once been white, but now it was covered in images, some dark red, others nearly black. Chara leaned closer and saw tiny, delicate spirals, and arcing rows of bull’s horns. Blood, she thought, and, Asterion: was this you? Gods forgive me for wondering—but now I’m here, and I see . . . Was it you?
Ligeia bent and picked up a scorched piece of something. “Here,” she said. “One of the bits.”
Theseus took it from her and held it between his thumb and forefinger. It was mostly black, with some crimson beneath, and it looked like old, cracked leather.
“Eat it,” Ligeia said. “You must be hungry. Or you will be.”
Phoibe stepped forward and seized the thing. She put it between her lips; Melaina made a strangled noise and batted at Phoibe’s hand, and the thing fell.
“Don’t you realize what you’re eating?” Melaina said, and Phoibe frowned. “No, let me be clearer: don’t you realize who you’re eating?”
For a moment Phoibe’s eyes were blank; then they went wide with horror. “That was a person?” she gasped.
Melaina laughed. “What did you think—that the monster was feasting on wild boar? Of course that was a person—an Athenian, no less—but by all means, eat.”
Phoibe sat down hard on the altar stone.
Ligeia picked the leathery strip up and folded it into her mouth. “It’ll be hard for you to find anything else,” she said, chewing, as Phoibe whimpered and Melaina snorted. “Unless you go into the altar chamber. But I wouldn’t do that.”
“Isn’t this the altar chamber?” Theseus said. He was walking to the offering tables that stood around the stone, picking up goddess figurines and setting them gently down, but Chara saw that he was glancing at Ligeia with half-lidded eyes.
Ligeia swallowed the last of the Athenian and shook her head. “Oh, no. No.”
“Take us there,” Melaina snapped.
“Melaina,” Theseus said. They stared at each other, still as statues themselves. Chara thought, Gods, if only I knew what he was saying to her.
He turned back to Ligeia. “Take us there,” he said, evenly, and smiled.
She stared at him. Opened her mouth; closed it. At last she smiled back at him, with her yellow teeth and her no teeth. She lifted one of her feet and stared at its blackened sole. She set it down again, and walked slowly back to the bridge. The rest of them straggled after her.
Phoibe whimpered again, when she was halfway across the bridge. “I can’t,” she said breathlessly. “I’ll die. We’ll all die. There’s light in this place—Master Daedalus saw to that. You don’t need me. My Lord Theseus: let me lie down here. Leave me here.”
Theseus caught Phoibe as she sagged. “We must be strong,” he said, as the others came up behind them. “The Princess Ariadne has set me a task, and I will not disappoint her.”
“The Princess Ariadne isn’t here,” Phoibe said—but she let him draw her up and shuffled on again, with his hand against the small of her back.
“The Princess Ariadne is not here, no,” he said. “But she has helped us immeasurably—and she will be waiting for us. Thank all the gods for her—she has—”
The darkness came down suddenly.
One of Chara’s feet was raised, mid-step. She swayed so that she wouldn’t stumble, and groped for the bridge’s handrail. The fire’s glow had vanished. The light in the corridor across the chasm had vanished. The only light was the faintest sheen of silver, rippling like slow waves in the black.
“Melaina!” Theseus called. “Melaina! What are you doing?”
Melaina had been mere steps ahead of Chara; Chara had heard the dragging of her injured foot. There was no sound at all, now—just silence, vast and silver-dark. Silence and then a rhythmic, metallic sawing.
Theseus bellowed into the air, into their heads; Chara doubled over, her own cries soundless beneath his.
Phoibe’s godlight flooded the darkness, which thinned and squiggled away from them. Theseus was holding Melaina by the throat with one hand, and the ball of string with the other. Only her toes were touching the stone of the bridge. She was utterly still, except for one vein in her forehead, which pulsed with her heartbeat. Her eyes were on his; neither of them seemed to blink. A shard of obsidian lay glinting at her feet. Beside it lay one end of the string she’d cut.
“Explain yourself.” A whisper, hoarse and ragged.
“You promised you’d marry me,” Melaina croaked. “Remember? Remember how you did that, with your voice and your mind, the night before we sailed from Athens?”
What? Chara thought—and then she laughed. She laughed so hard that she fell to her knees on the bridge. “Quiet!” Alphaios said from behind her. She could see real fire again, blurring with steam and tears. When her vision cleared, she saw Melaina standing on her own, both hands splayed at her neck. Theseus was leaning on the bridge in front of her.
“I remember,” he said. He leaned his forehead on his clasped hands. His shoulder blades, and the muscles that bound them and everything else, bunched and jutted.
“And?” Melaina’s muscles and bones and skin were golden and smooth, so lovely that Chara thought again of Ariadne.
He straightened. “And you will knot the string together now, and hope that the knot holds.”
She knelt very slowly, as he walked back to her, tugging at the ball, trying to find its end. Just before her fingers closed around the end that lay on the ground, it leapt out of her reach. She stretched to grasp it but it leapt farther, and farther yet, and then, with a piercing whistle, it sped away from her, back along all the paths they’d taken.
“Godsblood,” Alphaios breathed.
Chara thought, It always was like a living thing—like an earthworm, this time, cut in half, with both halves moving on their own. Oh, Icarus: I’m sorry—even though it didn’t matter. He was already dead, and she would be too, soon. For even if Ligeia could lead them back to the wall beneath the door, there’d be no way of climbing it.
Theseus walked past Melaina, who was staring at the place where the end of string had been. He went past her, past all of them; he stepped onto the ground above the reaching, sucking flames.
::Where is Ligeia?:: he said.
They waited for what must have been hours, Theseus pacing back and forth in the corridor by the fiery lake, while the rest of them sat against its walls. His shadow was always there, even when he wasn’t.
“Why?” he hissed down at Melaina, on one of these passes. She stared back at him, her lips pressed together, and he made a snarling noise and set off again.
“She’s gone,” he snapped when he returned. “She’s gone, and she could have helped us—not that we would have even needed her help, if you hadn’t destroyed our only hope of escape.”
“Yes, well, she probably would have left anyway,” Melaina said, standing up to face him. “She was clearly mad. And anyway,” she went on quickly, as Theseus drew a deep breath, “she obviously taught herself how to find her way around this place. Now so will we—without the princess’s gift, which the wolf-girl claimed would be useless, eventually. If the gods truly favour Ariadne, and us, they’ll show us another way out.”
Chara thought Theseus’s eyes would burst from his head. He strode away again. This time Phoibe and Alphaios straggled after him.
Melaina sat down heavily beside Chara and wrapped her arms around her shins. She pressed her face against her knees.
Because the sound of Theseus’s steps was unbearable, and because the other girl was too still, Chara said, “I’m sorry.” She’d said the same thing to Ariadne once, on her sixteenth birthday, when Queen Pasiphae had given Chara to her daughter as a gift. There’d been a storm, just before that; Chara and Asterion had been hunkered in the storerooms, feeling the thunder in the jars at their backs. “I’m sorry,” Chara had said to Ariadne, who’d been small and sad and angry.
For a time Melaina made no sound. Only when Chara stretched her legs out, preparing to rise, did Melaina raise her head. “He used his mind,” she said in a small voice. “He told me he’d never felt so drawn to anyone.” She laughed a high, trembling laugh. “It was sunset. Goddesses of love and fury—how could I ever have believed him? And why did he even bother letting me think he’d give me this?”
Chara leaned back against the wall. “Maybe he meant it,” she said carefully, evenly. “Maybe he means it every time he says it to someone.”
Melaina dragged the back of her hand under her nose and gave a brief, hollow laugh.
“Why did you cut the string?” Chara said.
Melaina was silent for so long that Chara shifted, preparing again to get up. “I didn’t intend it to . . . But no matter. I cut it because he believed in it.” Melaina bit off another laugh. She stood and looked down the corridor at Theseus’s shadow. She walked toward it—Chara counted eleven paces—and sat down. This time she stared straight ahead, her chin on her fists.
Alphaios hunkered down where Melaina had been. “She was poor, you know,” he said, very quietly. “Really poor. When Theseus told her he loved her . . . well.”
“Yes,” Chara said. “Well.” At last she got up. She walked past Alphaios and Melaina, all the way to where Theseus was standing, with his hands against the corridor walls.
“No more,” she said. “No more godmarked string. No more proposing marriage to poor girls and princesses. Now it’s time to save a god.”
He raised his eyes to hers. ::I do not save. I slay—both men and monsters.::
“Take me to him, then,” he said, and walked away from her.
Chapter Thirteen
They heard no more wolf howls, though Theseus and Alphaios called for Ligeia until they were hoarse, and the mountain rang with their voices long after they’d stopped. They heard only the dripping, and the grinding of gears that kept them from finding water.
“I’m so thirsty,” Phoibe said once. They were in a cavern whose vaulted ceiling was impossibly high and covered in green points of light that looked like strange, sickly stars. The ground was a forest of stalagmites, some as tall as the grandest of the bull’s horns atop the palace at Knossos, others tiny and needle-sharp against bare feet.
“So thirsty,” Phoibe said again, and slid down to sit at the base of one of the large stalactites. Chara saw some of the little ones sink into Phoibe’s skin, and winced. “I can’t keep going. And I’m too weak to use my godmark, if I need to.”
Theseus crouched next to her and put the back of his hand on her cheek. “We’ll stay here for a bit,” he said. “You’ll feel better after a rest.” Melaina sucked her breath sharply in through her teeth and took a few steps away from them.
Alphaios called then, from the far edge of the cavern. “Come and see this!”
Chara reached him first. He was drawing his finger along the smooth, lumpy black of the wall. “This mark,” he said as she leaned closer, “someone made it. Look—it’s even and fairly straight, and it runs all the way to . . .” He walked slowly, and Chara walked behind him, her own fingertip following the deep groove. “. . . here.”
Their feet were touching the
lowest step of a staircase. It climbed and turned, carved out of the thickest stalactite Chara had yet seen. She squinted up and up and saw that it became a bridge that spanned air and ended in a corridor whose mouth shone with crimson light.
“Maybe this line was someone else’s godmarked string,” she said slowly. Melaina came up beside her; Chara saw her flinch, even though she wasn’t looking at her.
“Yes,” Theseus said as he approached, with Phoibe clinging to his arm. “Another Athenian has given us a direction. But we cannot go there yet,” he went on. “Not until Phoibe is feeling stronger.”
“I thought you were all ready to charge about looking for the beast,” Melaina said, and Chara winced at the weak, helpless anger in her voice.
Theseus was gazing down at Phoibe. “We wait,” he said, and wiped gently at the sweat that shone on her closed eyelids.
Melaina gave a laugh that echoed around them, and limped into silver-flecked darkness that was partly of her own making. A moment after she’d disappeared, Alphaios said, “My Prince: shouldn’t we go after her?”
Theseus looked up from Phoibe’s face at the green lights that weren’t stars. He said nothing. Another moment passed, and another.
In the silence, they heard singing.
It wound toward them like water—and even before she saw the song’s silver flowing out of the rock above them, Chara knew whose it was.
“Polymnia.” She could barely hear herself. “Polymnia!” she cried, over and over, as the others gaped and Melaina walked slowly back to them.
No, she thought as she shouted, it can’t be; she was so frightened, so sure of her own death—and she saw the girl as she’d seen her four years before: lying in front of the mountain door, singing a frightened, hopeless wash of silver into the morning air.
There was no fear in this song. It teased—loud, soft, joyous, strong—and wrapped their limbs in silver thread. The threads tightened around Chara’s arms and neck and the silver seeped into her blood, and she had to dig her fingernails into her palms to keep from lying down and staying there.
The Flame in the Maze Page 13