They ripped his blindfold up over his head so quickly that he felt strands of hair go with it. His wrist bonds fell away at the same time. The world lurched around him; he flapped his arms and tipped forward, into what he saw too late was an abyss made of sky and water. “Whoa, there: that’s not the way down,” said the same voice, as hands wrapped around his arms and tugged him away from the cliff’s edge.
Daedalus was at Icarus’s right shoulder, blinking at the white-crested waves far below. His teeth were still bared, but not in a smile. Naucrate was beside him; as Icarus tried to catch her eye, she rounded on one of the six men who stood behind them in a ragged line. “Explain yourselves!” she spat.
The one nearest Icarus laughed, and the rest of them did too, loudly, as if they were making up for not having done so immediately. Their loincloths were plain, their weapons unadorned, but Icarus thought he recognized two of the faces. Before he could try to puzzle this out, a new voice bellowed, “Silence!”
King Minos strode into the glow of the torches.
Daedalus’s laugh was high and wavering in the quiet. He didn’t turn to look at the king. “My old friend,” he said, when he’d finished laughing. “I wondered why you’d let us go so graciously.”
Silver-orange fire kindled beneath the skin of Minos’s neck. Icarus watched it spread up beneath his jaw, pulsing under the dark hair of his beard. “I couldn’t let you go at all,” he said. “Old friend.” He waved a smoky trail through the air. “Take them down,” he said, and there were hands on Icarus again, pushing him to sit, prodding him to turn and flatten so that the stone of the edge ground into his belly and his legs flailed in empty air. He lowered his legs and poked at the cliff with his bare toes and found an indentation that was barely a step—but the man above him said, “That’s it: down you go,” and Icarus went, groping and shaky. He tried to ignore the wind that buffeted him, but couldn’t: he sprouted feathers as he always did, when his body felt called to the sky. The ones on his arms tickled his cheeks.
Another pair of hands steadied him, as his feet settled onto something that felt like ground. The hands turned him so that he was facing the chasm once more—and he saw that he was on a narrow ledge. “Here,” the man beside him said, and pulled him along for a few paces. Icarus pressed his back to the rock as his father descended, then his mother. “Steady, now: wouldn’t want you taking a tumble before you get to your fine new quarters.” The man grinned—or perhaps it was more of a leer. His face was pockmarked and sallow in the starlight.
“Theron?” the king called from above them, and the pockmarked man shouted, “Ready, my Lord!”
A strangled shout drifted down; a body followed it, and another, another, until all six of Minos’s men had fallen, flailing, past the ledge and into emptiness. Icarus didn’t hear their bodies meet the water; the waves were too loud. His own voice, circling wordlessly in his head, was too loud.
Minos dropped onto the ledge with a grunt that Icarus did hear.
“Monster,” Daedalus said, quite calmly.
The king shrugged. Silver-red light bloomed on the curve of his shoulder. “The fewer people know about this, the better. Do you not agree, Theron?”
Theron bent his chin to his chest. “I do, my Lord.”
“Lead on, then!” the king cried, as gaily as if he were summoning his people to a feast. Theron grasped Icarus’s arm and shuffled along the ledge, and Icarus followed. He kept his eyes on his own feet; if he’d looked at his parents, his dizziness would have pitched him into the sea.
After only a few careful paces, Theron said, “On your knees.”
Icarus eased himself down, his back to the emptiness. He saw a low, rounded door in the cliffside. Rusty bolts; rusty lock, already unlatched.
Push him, Icarus thought. Turn around and push both of them: nothing good is waiting behind this door. But he couldn’t move—not until Minos said, “In you go,” and Theron set his hand on Icarus’s head and pushed him.
Theron’s torch flickered off a low, curving ceiling and root-encrusted walls. Icarus crawled until he reached an open space: a cavern with a soaring ceiling that glittered with crystal veins and hardened drippings of something that looked gold. There was a low, flat rock in the centre, and an opening that might have been a jagged doorway beyond the reach of the flame—he saw it for only a breath before his parents pressed in behind him.
“Theron?” Minos said. His teeth glinted in his beard. “The bonds.”
“Back on your knees,” Theron said to Icarus. Icarus glanced at his mother, who shook her head helplessly, and then at his father, who was rocking a bit, his eyes closed. Icarus knelt. Theron crouched behind him and tied his wrists behind his back. As Icarus thought, Gods and gulls—so tight—my wrists must be bleeding, Theron thrust him onto his side. He lashed once, twice, like a fish in a net; the third time he felt his feet hit something hard, and heard Theron grunt.
“Stop,” snapped the king. “It will go even worse for you if you struggle.”
There’s nothing I can do, Icarus thought, and went still. Theron bound his ankles. With a jerk that made Icarus’s teeth knock together, Theron tied the ankle and wrist bonds with yet another length of rope. Icarus gasped as his back bowed inward. His hands and feet were already prickling; soon they’d be completely numb.
Naucrate cried out and Daedalus bellowed as if someone had hurt him, but Icarus couldn’t see either of them. He blinked grit out of his eyes, and the king’s legs swam into focus. The king’s legs, bending; the king’s face, angled sideways so that it was level with Icarus’s. Minos’s cheeks were glowing with pinpoints of fire—stars scattered on flesh. He put out a finger and stroked the feathers that had sprouted along Icarus’s shoulder. Don’t move, Icarus told himself, as his insides roiled and squirmed.
“Your god has made you a monster,” the king murmured, “just as Asterion’s made him. May you both think on this, in your deep, dark holes.”
He rose and swivelled on his heels. Icarus craned and saw him staring down—at Naucrate and Daedalus, no doubt. He stared for a very long time. At last he arched his brows and waved an orange and silver hand languidly. “Sleep well, children,” he said, and laughed. A moment later the torchlight was in the passageway, twisting the men’s shadows; a moment after that, the door clanged, and all the light was gone.
No time and all time passed, in this darkness Icarus had never even imagined. No one spoke, and all of them did, in hushed, urgent voices.
“Even your underground workshop wasn’t this dark,” he whispered to his father. He could smell Daedalus beside him: sweat and urine and blood. He tried to remember that workshop, which had always frightened him, a little. It had been hot—the air, and the water that lapped over his feet, stirred by the beasts that lurked beneath it. But there had always been daylight, above and behind him; if he held his arm up, its hairs and feathers turned gold.
He couldn’t lift his arms, now; couldn’t even feel them, except when he ground his wrists together. He did this several times, because the knife-cut pain reminded him that he had a body.
“No,” Daedalus said, after a silence. The word was vague and soft; Icarus wondered if his father even knew that he’d said it.
After a longer silence, Naucrate said, “They’re not done.” Her voice was raw. Icarus had seen her cry only once, when he was five, and his sister had been born and died, in the same day.
“The king—he’s wanted to hurt us since I spurned him, all those years ago. His plan for us will be terrible, cruel beyond anything we can imagine. I’m sorry,” she breathed, and this time it was Icarus who said, “No.”
He rolled from his right side to his left, gasping at the pain. That was all he could do. There was no way he’d be able to get to his knees, let alone his feet—not trussed as he was. He rolled again. Dirt and stones stuck to his cheeks and lips; he spat and spat, but the grit was between his te
eth, coating his tongue. He tasted blood.
No time and all time; nothing but the dark. He felt the weight of sky, pressing at the rock above them, and at the rusty metal door. He heard it, pressing on his ears—and then he heard the screech of lock and hinges.
Light wavered at the edge of the chamber.
“Turn away,” Daedalus said. “Don’t look at him.” The three of them lurched and scuffed and lay still, in a tight, curved row. Icarus stared up at the stone wall nearest him. Its bands of ochre and grey glistened with moisture that made his throat constrict with thirst.
“Go closer, Daughter,” the king said. “Go and see this secret that is now ours.”
Icarus turned his head toward the king’s voice and had to close his eyes against the brilliant blur of orange, gold, silver and red. When he opened them and squeezed his tears away, Minos was standing by the flat stone.
He rolled his head and saw her: towering, too bright, too beautiful.
“Ari.” He hardly recognized his own voice. He felt a bead of fresh blood well between his lips. He flexed the talons at the end of his fingers and heard them scrabble weakly at the dirt.
Ariadne turned to her father. “The pirate attack,” she said. “Was there one?”
He smiled down at her. “Oh, yes. The ship went down—after my men got these three off. Just before it burned. It sank, and everyone else with it. But these three . . .” He was smiling down at Icarus and his parents, now. “They deserved more.”
Daedalus lifted his head and spat. He’d probably meant the mucus to land on the king’s feet, but instead it clung to Daedalus’s chin. “And now,” he rasped, “you have come to give us this ‘more.’”
Minos’s laugher echoed off the cavern’s walls and up into the emptiness above them. “I have,” he said. “And my daughter, who deserves to know this secret, will be here to watch.”
A sour taste surged into Icarus’s mouth as Minos spun on his heel and strode back toward the cavern’s opening. “I thought about starting with Naucrate,” he said as he picked something up from the ground there, “but I have reconsidered. I believe I will start with the great and clever Daedalus.”
He walked back. His hand was wrapped around a hammer—one that Daedalus or Karpos might use to work their colossal blocks of stone. Minos’s other hand closed around Daedalus’s collar and hauled him up and over to the low, flat rock. Daedalus choked, and his bent-back body lashed like a worm in a beak. Icarus groaned.
“Now, then,” said the king, and drew a dagger from his boot. He cut the rope that attached Daedalus’s wrist and ankle bonds. “Let us get you settled properly. You are an artisan, after all; arrangement and order matter to you.” He pulled Daedalus’s bound hands onto the rock and pinned them there, pressing down on the rope around his wrists. His fingers jerked inward as if he wanted to make fists, but Minos adjusted his hold and flattened them out.
“Little Queen,” he said. “Come and help me.”
Ariadne walked to her father, who took her hand. Her head and shoulders were very straight.
“Kneel behind him. Yes. Now press here on the rope, as I did. Good. He will try to move, in a moment. Use all your strength to keep him still.”
She licked her lips. “Yes, Father,” she said.
Daedalus turned his head so that one bright eye was on her. “Ariadne,” he said, in a low, rough voice. “Minnow.”
“No. Don’t call me that. Do not.” Her knuckles whitened as she tightened her grip on his wrists.
Minos raised the hammer and brought it down on Daedalus’s right palm.
His hands flapped and a tremor went through the rest of him—it bent his spine, from buttocks to skull. He hardly moved, otherwise. He screamed, but only once. As the hammer came down on his other palm and all his fingers, one by one, he dug his chin into his chest and shuddered. Bones cracked in skin. Icarus was shouting; he didn’t know when he’d started, but it filled his ears now, along with the cracking bones and Naucrate’s wailing.
When Minos was done, he laid the hammer down and crouched in front of Daedalus. “You will never make anything again, old friend,” he said, shaking his head regretfully. Red light glowed behind his teeth. Cinders drifted between them and into his beard. “Surely this will be a relief: first exile, then endless seeking for things you could never quite touch; your art has only ever caused you pain.”
Ariadne let go of Daedalus’s wrists.
“Little Queen,” Minos said, rising, “would you agree that it is not just the great Daedalus’s hands that have caused unhappiness in our palaces?”
“I would agree,” she said firmly. “He has also spoken wrongly—yes; I remember the feast at which he said my noble brother Androgeus’s name over and over, in defiance of your command.”
Minos nodded. A blotch of flame appeared beneath his flesh, at the hinge of his jaw. Icarus watched it wriggle up past his ear to the pouch beneath his left eye, where it stopped and pulsed, perhaps in time with his heart. “Precisely, dearest. His words have wounded us. What else, then, might we do to him?”
The knife was in his hand. His fingertips stained the haft with coursing, molten orange.
Icarus’s talons were still scritching at dirt and pebbles; he couldn’t seem to stop them from moving. Naucrate was whispering Daedalus’s name over and over.
“We might cut . . .” Ariadne’s voice shook, just a little. “We might cut out his tongue,” she went on.
The king smiled at her. He thrust Daedalus onto the ground, fell to his knees beside him, pried open his jaws—which stayed open, gaping, fish-like—and with that same hand he pulled Daedalus’s tongue out between his teeth. With his other hand he raised the knife and set it to the tongue and sliced.
Icarus stopped moving. Naucrate stopped murmuring. The only sounds were a far-off, steady dripping and the low moan that bubbled from Daedalus’s weeping mouth.
“Minnow.”
Naucrate spoke softly, but the cavern’s rock caught the word and made it louder.
Minos dropped the wet, dark tongue onto the dirt. Ariadne turned to look behind her.
“You will not call me that, either.” She sounded both calm and threatening.
Naucrate was holding her head up as best she could, but it was trembling, bent at an angle. Tears had made clean streaks on her skin. “Princess,” she said, “I loved you. Even as I watched you grow and change and scheme, I loved you, because when I looked at you I always saw the little girl who used to bury her face in my lap and cry. The little girl who ached for her life to be different.”
“I do not know why you expect me to feel mercy. I do not know why you even try. After all, I am my father’s daughter.”
Naucrate’s head sagged back onto the ground. Her eyes were wide and fixed on nothing. A long, tangled strand of hair slid across her forehead and nose. It rose and fell gently, with her breath.
Minos pointed at her. Sparks hissed and fell from his forearm. “Look here: the beautiful, brave Naucrate does know how to fear!” He went to stand above her. More sparks fell; they lit and lingered on Naucrate’s hair. Icarus smelled burning, through the clot of tears in his nostrils. “You have never feared me enough,” he said, suddenly quiet. “Even when I took you as my lover, you never trembled. I would have killed you then, except that I grew too bored with you to bother. And I am glad. For this, now, will be far more pleasing.”
Naucrate’s head came up again. Her lips parted and the singed strand of hair sank between them, but she didn’t seem to notice. “I have always hated you,” she said in the cold, flat voice Icarus had heard only a few times before, “but I have never feared you. So do this pleasing thing. Do it quickly or do it slowly. It will not matter. And remember: I hate, but I do not fear.”
Minos made a growling noise deep in his throat. The fire that had lit him from beneath throbbed brighter and higher until it lea
pt from his skin and out into the air. It fell on Naucrate like a sheet of rain. Her hair, her neck, the grimy cloth stretched tight over her back: all of it kindled and glowed. She thrashed until she was on her stomach. Minos chuckled as he bent down and cut all of her bonds. The stench of filth and burning was still terrible.
Naucrate rose, somehow. She wrenched herself around and up, streaming, screaming, and reached her blazing hands out to Icarus. He felt his body curl away from her and her terrible heat. She reached for Daedalus, who was crouching with his hands swollen and limp behind him, his mouth still dribbling blood. He tipped toward her but she was already past him, stumbling for the hole that led out to the sky. Minos held his hands up and sent flames after her. It didn’t matter: she was gone, leaving smoke and skirling sparks in her wake.
Ariadne stumbled after her.
For a moment there was quiet in the cave. Then Icarus heard a long, high, warbling bird cry, swelling and dying over the sea.
When Ariadne ducked back into the cavern, Icarus found his voice. “What now? How will you break me, great king?”
Minos didn’t turn to him, but Ariadne did. Icarus didn’t look at her.
“Poor bird-boy,” the king said, still smiling at Ariadne. “He cannot fashion anything—certainly not wings that fly, despite the mark his god has given him. I shall let him stay here to keep his father company.” At last he looked down at Icarus. “Perhaps you will chirp while he gabbles?”
The Flame in the Maze Page 19