by F
He knew from his researches that Syce Voillute's maze had contained more than artworks and moving walls. In its punitive mode, the labyrinth could become the stalking ground of self-aware devices whose function was to pursue the aristocrat's victims, offering them no rest. They might also lurk in concealed bays or hide in the shadows of high ceilings, to spring or drop upon the unlucky passerby.
Some were fast-movers, clattering down the corridors on segmented legs to deliver a sudden small cut or pinch away a morsel of flesh from the harried prey, only to disappear for a short while—or a long one; irregularity was part of the horror—before appearing again.
Some were slow and steady in their pursuit. The prisoner might flee, but eventually he must rest, while the stalker tracked inexorably after, its plodding pace growing ever louder, ever nearer.
Lord Syce would assign the devices in pairs or trios, coordinating their activities with rearrangements of the maze, so that the object of his displeasure would experience sustained terror, a steady wearing down of the nerves punctuated by moments of sudden agony. Once, over a period of days, his mechanisms had gradually and methodically snipped off the fingers, one by one, and then the toes, of a tradesman who had offended the aristocrat by failing to offer a proper salute. After a lengthy pause, while the poor fellow limped and groped through the darkness, following a current of air that he hoped might lead to an exit—Syce Voillute understood the importance of hope in a context of despair—the stalker reappeared and announced that it would now begin to collect the victim's remaining appendages.
The aristocrat had died in an assault by the Brooshes, incinerated by a flash-weapon. Imbry had seen the recording. But now he believed he understood where the lord's essence had been stored. Instead of going to the Voillute family essentiary, as had been the custom then, it had pleased Lord Syce to install his ghost within one of the instruments of chase and butchery that populated his labyrinth.
The maze's integrator was not authorized to distinguish between essence and person because its owner, now somewhat preserved as a remnant inhabiting a device or devices housed within the underground complex, had at some time ordered it to take instructions from the Syce-essence in his absence. That way the master did not have to supervise the destruction of his victims constantly over several days or weeks—which would have been exhausting for him—but could leave his substitutes to manage the more tedious stretches. Lord Syce could refresh himself and indulge in other pastimes, coming back to the viewer when his devices informed him that a new cusp of agony was about to be reached.
When the estate was abandoned, a Syce-inhabited stalker must have been left alive. Perhaps it was finishing off some poor Broosh who had fallen into Voillute hands. Ever since, it had lingered in the labyrinth, a remnant of its master. From the maze's integrator's revelation that it had heard the injunction against mentioning the Broosh name almost a hundred and fifty million times, Imbry deduced that the Syce essence had deteriorated. He imagined some ancient pursuit-and-torture device, haunting the empty corridors, keeping sharp its blades and hooks, constantly talking to itself and the integrator, endlessly repeating its lord's maledictions and damnations against the Brooshes.
And now it was on its way to decide what to do with a thief whose head was surrounded by a half-mad ghost.
The stalker arrived while Imbry was seeking an exit from the chamber. It came silently, lowering itself by a thin cable from a trapdoor that had opened equally noiselessly in the ceiling, while the fat man's back was turned. When his movements about the chamber brought the device into the periphery of his vision, somewhat restricted by the mask, he immediately froze then rotated slowly to face the thing.
The spiderlike entrance was appropriate, Imbry thought. The mechanism stood about as tall as his waist, but its eight multijointed legs were bent, so it could reach higher if it needed to. Six of the limbs were primarily for locomotion, though the hooked feet were probably useful for seizing and restraining whomever its master sent it after. Each of the front pair were specialized: they ended in hand-sized rotatable disks that were edged with a selection of tools: pincers, loops, blades, a rough-toothed rasp, a saw, an igniter, a needle-sharp spike.
Imbry tried to disregard the implements and focused instead on the device's percept array. He was hoping that its vision was not acute enough to distinguish between Waltraut Voillute and her preserved essence. But that hope was dashed when the stalker turned its eight glittering lenses on him and the integrator's voice spoke for it: "His Potence says that you are not her Dominance, the Lady Waltraut Voillute. You are an intruder wearing her countenance."
Imbry's heart sank, but he rallied and spoke softly to the ghost to whose sensoria he was linked, "If we do not change its view, you will never commune with young Charan again."
The problem with communicating with the mask was that he had to speak loudly enough for his own ears to pick up the sound and transmit it to the essence. Of course, any integrator in the vicinity would also hear what he said. As would any multilegged lethality.
"Who speaks with her Dominance's voice?" said the integrator. "His Potence demands to know."
Imbry was waiting for Waltraut Voillute to suggest a reply, but nothing came to his inner ear. The setting and situation had apparently regressed her to young girlhood, and she had flung herself into a deep sulk. But continued silence would not serve Imbry; it must surely prompt the stalker to more intrusive means of interrogation, so he said, the mask transforming his voice, "It is I, Grandfather. Waltraut. Or at least my essence."
The stalker canted so that its back legs bent and its forward pair of locomotive limbs straightened, lifting its front and bringing its eyes closer to the mask. Imbry fought off an impulse to move back. A pair of the device's percepts extended themselves on segmented stalks and examined him at length.
"You've changed," came the voice from the air, this time in the querulous tones of an old man. Apparently, the stalker had no vocal apparatus but communicated with and through the labyrinth's integrator.
"It has been a long time," Imbry said.
The stalker returned to a more horizontal stance. "I remember you," said the voice of Lord Syce Voillute, "a little flibbertigibbet. You used to flaunt yourself in front of the young ones, especially that little dulldome of a Broosh..."
Waltraut Voillute was suddenly back in force, bending Imbry's inner ear with bitter protestations that she wanted him to make. The thief thought it better not to interrupt a murderous device animated by the essence of an even more murderous aristocrat.
"...but I did for that one," the voice went on, "didn't I just? And they all thought it was an accident. Ha! Shlumps! Pinchwits! I fooled them."
The ghost in Imbry's ear was now shrieking at him, in lieu of being able to acquaint her grandfather with her revised opinion of his worth and quality. His own voice overcame her resistance, however, and he said, "Oh, Grandfather, you always did know best."
"What are you doing here?"
Imbry improvised. "The Archon sent me."
"Oh, him." The voice made a sound like air escaping from a small aperture. "He spoiled everything."
"Indeed. But there is a new Archon now, and he regrets the injustice that was done to you. He sent me to offer a means for you to be reinstated in rank and for the estate of Grand Minthereyon to be restored to your name."
"Let me speak to him," Waltraut dinned in the fat man's ear. "Killed my affianced, did he? Consigned me to a life of spinsterhood? I'll blister his hairy eardrums."
"He has no eardrums, hairy or otherwise" Imbry said softly. "He is an essence in a device."
"Who's an essence in a device?" said the stalker through the integrator. The mechanism reared up and examined the mask again, then dropped and studied Imbry's figure beneath the globe. One of the forelimbs produced its spike and poked at his torso. He edged back. "Who's in there?" the integrator said.
"Waltraut, Grandfather," Imbry said.
The spider circled him, it
s percepts peering at him. "If you're Waltraut," the voice said, "what did I give you for the tenth anniversary of your naming day?"
Imbry waited for the information, but Waltraut was not helpful. She was embarked on a catalogue of insults, and Imbry was flabbergasted by the depth and breadth of the profanity at her command. So overpowering was the effect that he had lost track of whether the inventive calumnies were directed at him or at Lord Syce.
"Well," said the integrator. "Answer."
The thief considered several options and chose the most likely. "A pony?" he said.
There was a silence. Then the integrator said, "His Potence says, 'What was its name'?"
Imbry made a desperate attempt. "I always called him Syce, after my favorite relative."
This remark brought from Waltraut Voillute a torrent of new opprobria, even more scathing than hitherto. Aristocrats tended to indulge themselves in abstruse intellectual and artistic pursuits; he wondered if Waltraut Voillute's penchant had been for polysyllabic profanity. She had certainly mastered the genre.
"His Potence demands to know the name he bestowed on the beast."
"It has been a long time, Grandfather," Imbry said, over the internal din of abominations and obscenities. "I seem to have forgotten."
Another silence. The fat man wondered if the spider's limited intellectual resources, married to those of a deteriorated essence—whose original had likely not been entirely sane—were unable to cope with the ambiguities of the situation. He sought to direct the current of events and said, "About the Archon—"
Unfortunately, ambiguity was not a deterrent to action, he learned. The spider again reared on its high legs, though this time it was not interested in inspection. Imbry reacted by reaching for a pocket on his harness that held a device that would have been useful. But he was not fast enough. From four orifices on its abdominal surface shot jets of a thick pale liquid that, as they struck Imbry, simultaneously hardened and adhered. The device skittered about him with unnerving speed, its front limbs working rapidly to wrap him in a cocoon of confining threads that proved to be more than a match for human muscle. His hand ended up stuck fast to his chest.
In a trice he was trussed. The spider ended its circular dance, bent its limbs to lower itself, and used its forelimbs to hook the threads that bound his ankles. A swift yank and Imbry felt himself toppled backward like a short, plump tree, his fleshy padding offering no protection as his buttocks and shoulders painfully struck the floor. Then the back of his globular headgear smacked hard against the checkered stones; the clasp at the rear parted and the mask fell away, its connectors lacking time to disconnect, so that Imbry felt hair and skin tear loose.
The spider did not notice. It was dragging him now across the small chamber to where a portion of the floor had opened. A ramp led steeply down into pitch-blackness, and into this, Imbry was helplessly drawn. As he tipped feetfirst onto the incline, the lumens in the octagonal chamber extinguished. Darkness was absolute.
Their progress took an unmeasurable time. He was dragged across surfaces smooth and rough, over polished stone and plush carpet. In one place he heard dripping water, in another currents of dank air played across his face. Sometimes he was slid down other inclines; once he was pulled down a flight of steps, his skull bumping on each riser. Finally, he heard a grating of stone on stone and a few moments later their journey ended. He could hear the stalker clacking about on a hard floor, the harshness of the sounds telling him that he was in a substantial chamber that must also be walled in stone.
He felt a tug at the back of his neck, then suddenly he was rising, head first, to hang in the darkness. Blind, he could not know if he was suspended just above the floor or over a bottomless pit. Then the lumens came on and, blinking, he looked about and saw that he was in a utilitarian chamber of dressed stone. The walls were festooned with a welter of devices and equipment that might have been the tools of a mechanist—but Imbry soon saw that these tools had all been designed to work on human flesh and bone. And their function was the opposite of repair.
He remembered what Waltraut's ghost had said: The old man had built a concealed chamber at the heart of the labyrinth into which he would take only the most special visitors—so special that not one of them ever came out alive.
He turned his head to left and right, and from the corner of his eye he saw a hint of paleness. He wriggled and swung as best he could, trying to make his suspended form rotate, and was rewarded with a brief glimpse of an object that stood against the wall, behind him and to one side.
It was the Bone Triptych.
The stalker, meanwhile, was paying him no heed. It was making its way from one wall to another, examining and choosing different apparatuses of torture. It brought its selections to a low stone-topped table near the center of the room, laying them out like a cook preparing to attempt a complex recipe. Now it paused to eye Imbry critically, then returned one of the items to its place on the wall, choosing instead a loop of coarse wire along whose inner circumference were set several rows of small triangular teeth made of obscenely stained metal. When this last object had joined the others on the stone tabletop, the stalker minutely adjusted the positions of a few of its tools, then stepped back and regarded Luff Imbry.
"Well," it said through the integrator's voice, coming as always from a point that seemed to hover near the hanging man's ear, "and here we are." It studied him a moment, then said, "You no longer seem to resemble my granddaughter."
"Her essence accompanied me, but became detached in the octagonal chamber."
"How did that occur?"
Imbry began to explain the custom of setting essences into life masks, so that the ghosts' descendants could share perceptions with them. The essence of Syce Voillute took an interest in the issue and asked several questions, then followed up on the answers. But, at last, came the question Imbry wished to avoid. "But you are not one of her descendants nor mine. How came you to wear her essence? What is your rank?"
"Rank is irrelevant, since I am engaged on a mission for the Archon."
"So you said," replied the spider, its front limbs idly repositioning some of the implements on the stone tabletop. "But where is your sigil? Where is your plaque? How do you identify yourself?"
Imbry tried a smile. "Mine is an informal mission."
"So you are not an official of the Archonate?"
"Not as such. An independent contractor."
The eight glittering lenses regarded him through a lengthening moment. Then the voice spoke near his ear. "And the goal of this 'informal mission'?"
"As I said, to reinstate your rank and restore your family's title to this estate."
"Such magnaminity. And am I required to make some small gesture in return?"
Imbry saw hope. The question sounded like the opening of a negotiation, a territory in which he was at ease. "The Archon wishes to place the Bone Triptych in the Grand Connaissarium." He added quickly, "With full recognition to you and your family for having returned it to the world."
"Indeed?" said Syce-as-spider. "What a generous Archon."
"Such is his repute."
One set of the stalker's pincers picked up a short-bladed knife, while the other forelimb took up a fine-toothed file to slide along the implement's edge. "And how did he come to know it was here? After all these years?"
"Your granddaughter knew."
"Ah." File and knife went back to the tabletop. "That completes it."
"So can we dispense with these present...arrangements," Imbry said, "and proceed to the happy moment when all our goals are met?"
"Just one more question."
"Please," said Imbry, "ask."
"What does my granddaughter's essence gain from this general happiness?"
Imbry chose his words carefully. "The pleasure of bringing about your reinstatement?"
"That seems unlikely. She was never a doting child."
"To be of service to the Archon is a great honor."
The
spider had noticed a spot of rust on a heavy-bladed cleaver. It now scoured it away with a scrap of abrasive cloth. "Nor did she care much for honors."
"It is not for me," said Imbry, "to speculate on the motives of my social superiors."
"Yet I invite you to do so," said the ghost of Syce Voillute, while the spider flourished the cleaver encouragingly.
"There may have been something she mentioned. I don't recall."
"Try."
"An idle whim, nothing of importance."
"Tell me."
Imbry could think of nothing to say.
Syce said, "Let me guess: it had to do with some childhood infatuation."
Another silence grew. Then even the equanimity of an integrator's voice somehow managed to convey the depth of black hate and savage spite contained in the single syllable: "Broosh!"
"That might have been the name," Imbry said.
The spider was dancing on its six ambulatory limbs, the two forelimbs splitting the air, the one that still held the cleaver doing so quite close to the fat man's suspended form. A stream of invective, as rich and imaginative as any that Imbry had heard from the granddaughter— That's where she learned it, came the unbidden thought—poured into his ear in the integrator's disinterested tones.
After a considerable time, Syce Voillute's fury subsided. The spider returned the cleaver to the tabletop and stood for a while contemplating Imbry. Then the voice said, "Here is how I see it: the Archon is not involved. You are some kind of thief. My granddaughter has enlisted you to break into my private premises and steal the Bone Triptych."
"No. That is not—"
The voice cut him off. "She was always a willful child. That's why she took up with that noddy of a Broosh. Just to spite her old grandfather."
"No, no," said Imbry. "She revered—"