by Rick Shelley
The elf remained in his birdcage. There was really no option to that. A short cord held the cage to the top of Harkane’s pack. We had given Harkane a bit less weight to carry, and he volunteered to carry Xayber’s son. Lesh and I were carrying the most weight. We were the biggest, the strongest. Harkane had less, mostly because of his injury. Timon carried the least. He was the lightest and youngest of us, far from full-grown.
“Okay, where do we start?” I asked Xayber’s son.
“Southeast end of this pass,” he said, so we started in that direction. I took the lead, with Harkane and the elf head just behind me, Timon next, then Lesh. The horses were busy grazing. They didn’t pay any attention to our departure.
When mountain climbing first entered my awareness, when I was ten or eleven, my impression was that climbers were always strung out along a sheer rock face, looped together with ropes, scrambling to find minuscule finger and toe holds. Sometime not long after that, I mentioned it to Dad, and the next thing I knew we had two books on climbing techniques. We went through the books together, did a little easy climbing in Kentucky and Tennessee, then spent two weeks one summer—when I was fourteen, I think—out in Colorado at a climbing school. We took the advanced course the following summer. I learned what climbing was really about. Sure, the exciting and dangerous work on rock walls is part of it, but there is a lot more. Working your way across thick scree can be just as dangerous, and there is considerable technical knowledge you need before you have any business getting on a rock wall. And, often, you have to hike for miles on the flat or on deceptively gentle slopes before you even unlimber a climbing rope.
We moved south and east for nearly two full days before we did any of the bits that look so exciting on film. Most of the time we followed ledges that gave us room to walk almost normally. Occasionally, we had to clamber up or down a slope. During those stretches, we roped ourselves together for safety, and to get into the habit, but they really taxed nothing but our endurance and our leg muscles. Walking along a sideslope, or spending hours going up and down those gentle rises, can be agony. We all had charley horses from the strain.
Just past midafternoon of our second day on foot, we went into a blind canyon. At the far end, the walls came close enough together to form a chimney, a route up to the next level, a good 150 feet above. The chimney looked fairly easy, but for people with no experience it could be touchy.
“We’re going up that?” Lesh asked.
I nodded. “It’s easier than it looks, easier than some things we may have to do. I’ll go up first with a rope, lower it back down.”
“Just tell me what to do, lord. I’ll go up first,” Lesh said. “It’s my place.”
“Not this time, Lesh. I know how to do this. I’ve done it before.”
When I was fifteen, I thought that shinnying up a rock chimney, feet on one side, back against the other, was the height of fun and adventure. Strange how it became draining work by the time I was twenty-four. I left my pack at the bottom, carried one rope coiled from shoulder to side, and paid out a second rope while I climbed. Dragon’s Death would be in the way going up a chimney, so I had it slung at my side, where it wasn’t quite as much of a nuisance. I stopped a couple of times to pound pitons into the rock for safety and laced the second rope through each piton. Lesh and Harkane were on the far end of the rope, ready to take up the slack if I lost my footing and fell.
The basic technique for climbing a chimney is simple. You walk up it, using the pressure of your back and shoulders on the other side to replace gravity. Move your feet, straighten up to push your back higher, and repeat as needed. If the walls of the chimney are at a comfortable distance, you can climb quite quickly—until the strain hits your shoulders and calves.
After fifty feet I had slowed considerably. By one hundred feet, I was wondering if I would ever finish. My breaks came more frequently and lasted longer. When my shoulders reached the top, I took a quick glance to make sure that I had somewhere safe to land, then pushed myself out of the chimney onto the flat and just lay there, perhaps for five minutes, before I tried to move. I stretched and rubbed at my legs to ease the aches before I looked back down and waved to let the others know that I was okay. I pounded two pitons into the rock on top to belay the ropes, the one I had strung coming up and the extra one to haul up our packs.
By the time everyone and everything was up—Lesh came up last and retrieved the pitons on the way because we might need them again later—it was time to look for a place to spend the night.
“Sure must not figure on folks coming to this shrine, or they’d make it simpler,” Lesh said when he came out of the chimney and caught his breath.
The elf didn’t bother to comment.
I was guessing, but I figured that we had to be about two miles up by then, maybe higher. We couldn’t find a cave or much cover of any kind, so we had our coldest night yet. There were no trees, so there was no deadwood to make a fire with. We had several cans of Sterno, but that wasn’t enough for warmth, just enough to heat water for our coffee and our freeze-dried meals. It was a long night, more than a match for our thermal underwear and the thermal blankets we used to save weight.
Luckily, that was the only night we spent totally in the open. The rest of the time we were able to find some cover, even if it was only a small niche in a rock face, open above and on one side.
Over the next three days we had a number of spots of hard climbing, some as touchy as anything I had ever attempted, like inching up a cliff along a six-inch-wide ledge that climbed at a fifty-degree angle, and a knob that I had to creep around with holds that were nearly imaginary just to set two pitons on the other side so my companions could use rope handholds to make it. Finally, at something approaching three miles up, we had to cross a sloping ice field, hacking out steps and using the primitive crampons Baron Kardeen had found for us. It was my first time on a high ice field, so my climbing experience didn’t help much there.
“It’s mostly downhill from here,” Xayber’s son said when we reached the ridge above the ice field.
It might not have been the top of the world, but it felt like it. I felt a giddy exhilaration that could hardly have been greater if I had been on top of Everest, a lightheadedness that was only partly a result of the thin air. We stood on the ridge looking around. There were mountain peaks in every direction. Many of the peaks south of us were clearly much higher than the one we stood on.
“How much farther?” I asked the elf. We were close to the midpoint on the food we had brought along and I hadn’t seen any game larger than a squirrel in days.
“To the maze, one more day. After that, who can tell?”
One more day would take us right to the halfway point on our victuals. We might yet be tightening our belts before we got back to our horses and the cache of food we had left behind.
The crest above the ice field was relatively ice-free, so we walked along it, then down it, losing five hundred feet in altitude before we had to leave the ridge. My biggest concern then was carelessness. The slope wasn’t extreme and there wasn’t much ice on the southeastern side, but the way was steep enough that a bad slip might send any of us tumbling toward a drop so far I couldn’t even estimate it.
But we found a dandy cave to sleep in that night, dry and deep enough to get us completely out of the wind. Harkane’s arm was healing nicely by then. There was only minor redness about the center of the cut, no soreness, swelling, or seepage.
The altitude was telling on all of us, though. We were tired most of the day, and any stretch that called for real exertion required a long rest afterward. That night, in the cave, I told the others to forget about taking turns as sentries. I made up my bedroll nearest the entrance and decided to trust my danger sense—and perhaps the extra sensitivity of our elf. We all needed the sleep, except for him, and maybe even including him. I never asked him if he slept, but he did close his eyes for long stretches of time.
I didn’t wake all night. In
fact, I didn’t wake until more than an hour after the mountain’s early dawn. We all slept well and woke moderately refreshed for the last push on to the shrine and its guardians.
When we emerged from the cave, we had a surprise. Snow had fallen during the night and the sky was still overcast. “I know we’re awfully high, and we’ve already crossed ice, but this is still August, the height of summer. What are we doing with fresh snow?” I wasn’t speaking to anyone in particular, but Xayber’s son chose to answer.
“It might be natural, of course. At this altitude, snow is possible any month of the year, but it might also be your first greeting from the defenders of the shrine.”
“Or maybe Santa Claus is coming to town early this year,” I replied, irritated by the elf’s tone. Snow was a nuisance, but unless we came to some really tricky stretches, it might not be that great a danger.
“Their first greeting,” the elf said. When I didn’t reply, he added, “We are getting close to the maze. Angle down this slope to the east. When we round that next shoulder there, we may be able to see the temple and its maze.”
It was closer than I thought.
The next shoulder was more than a mile away, and we had to take the slope very carefully because of the snow, losing another few hundred feet of altitude in the process and all but a dusting of snow. Then we maneuvered around the shoulder—a rock outcropping half the size of Basil Rock—along a path that was nowhere wider than two feet, and some places only half that. The drop at our right increased as we went along, and the earlier slope got precipitous. Before we made it around the hump, the drop at our side looked like several thousand feet straight down.
There was a long, broad valley beyond the rock shoulder, though, a high valley climbing slowly to the east-southeast beyond the end of the chasm at our side. There was a similar drop from the valley side, down to those unfathomable depths, and then a vista almost as inviting as the meadow where we left our horses.
“No snow there,” Lesh observed.
There was even lush, healthy grass visible in the nearer half of the valley. Beyond that, everything was rockslabs of rock like dominoes lying on their edges, or maybe like underfed children’s blocks, a dense field of regular stone formations.
“That is the maze,” the elf said. “And look beyond if you can.”
“Doesn’t look like much of a maze to me,” Lesh said.
I didn’t pay much attention to him. I was up on tiptoe trying to see what lay at the heart of the maze. The elf said that we might be able to see the shrine. There was something large and brilliantly white off in the distance, but not enough of it rose above the gray stones for me to tell anything about its appearance.
“That white?” I asked, glancing at the elf. We moved on a few steps to the end of the narrow ledge around the shoulder, where we had a little more elbow room.
“That white,” he agreed. “It is the entablature of the shrine. If you climb a few feet higher on this rock behind us, you should be able to see most of the facade.”
I looked at the rock to see if I could get up it without much loss of time or energy.
“We’ll see it soon enough,” I said. Then I had second thoughts. “But maybe I can get a better idea of the lay of the maze.”
The elf laughed. “Little good that will do you. You could map out every twist and turn and it wouldn’t help you in the least when you finally got down into the maze.”
With that kind of challenge, I had to try. I spent twenty minutes getting ten feet up the wall and finding an anchorage that let me turn my head to look. The maze was complex, much too intricate for me to hope to memorize even a small portion of it from my present perch. But I did have a a slightly better angle on the shrine.
“How far off is that temple?” I called down.
“Straight line, less than three miles,” the elf replied. He didn’t shout, but I had no trouble hearing him.
I whistled mentally. I had thought it might be a third of that, half of it at most. At one mile, the shrine looked like a Greek temple. At closer to three miles, it had to be colossal.
“How did anybody manage to build something that big up here?” I asked when I rejoined the others.
“The Great Earth Mother gave birth to it,” the elf said.
Any further comment I might have made would only have left my companions as depressed as I felt, so I kept my mouth shut.
14
The Defenders
“You know where we need to enter the maze?” I asked the elf as we started across the green end of the valley. We were lower than we had been while we skirted the rock shoulder, so now we were climbing an easy slope toward the nearest wall of the maze. The temple itself was out of sight.
“Choose as you will, Hero. It makes no difference. Every opening leads to the shrine and none gets there.”
“Is there a point to this riddle?” I asked.
“The maze lives, breathes, thinks, moves. It is the first defender of the shrine. It can admit anyone it chooses to admit. And if it doesn’t choose to admit you, the only way by is to kill it, and it can’t be killed.”
“The way you elves can’t be killed?” I asked.
“The maze has been there since before the beginning. It is promised that it will remain after the end.”
“And if we don’t get in there, and back out, the end is upon us, right?” I asked, to remind him of our position. His good cheer was really beginning to annoy me.
“And worlds lost or won!” he boomed. That such volume could come from a mouth with no lungs below it still astounded me. “Think what a tale they’ll tell of us in the Netherworld!”
“He’s fey,” Lesh said.
“He can’t be fey, he’s already dead,” I said. “Despite his feeble boasts, what more can he lose?” I didn’t try to keep him from hearing me. “Let’s get there,” I said, without giving the elf a chance to add another wisecrack. “If I listen to much more of this crap, I’ll teach him what soccer is all about.” That was for my own benefit. I didn’t expect the elf to understand the reference, and apparently he didn’t, but Timon got a laugh out of it.
There were tiny white flowers scattered throughout the grassy part of the valley. In some places, the flowers were so thick that there was hardly room for the grass. I knelt down in one patch and pulled a flower on a four-inch stem. I couldn’t smell any scent from the flower, but I slipped it into a buttonhole on my jacket. I was going to have something to show for this trek.
My danger sense had been relatively quiet until we rounded that rock shoulder and I got a good look at the shrine. It started doing a tarantella as we started moving toward the maze. Then the feeling built. I tried to deal with the concept of a field of rocks being a living creature and failed absolutely. Our elf was not being allegorical. The way he spoke, I was certain that he believed what he said, that the maze was a living defender of the shrine. The first defender.
“Where’s its brain? Where’s its heart?” Lesh asked, almost shouting at the head just in front of him.
“Wherever it chooses to be,” the elf replied.
“If you want to hold any hope of getting home to your father, you’d better come up with something better than useless riddles and inane patter,” I said. “If that’s all you can provide, we might as well dig a hole and bury you here, save ourselves the bother of toting you around and listening to the sound pollution you spout.”
He hesitated a moment before he answered. That was promising, even if his words weren’t.
“I can’t give you hope that doesn’t exist,” he said. “If you find your way through the maze, it will only be because another defender feels confident of destroying you later. I can only sense faint hints of their minds, but they have their politics, like all sentient gatherings.”
I reciprocated by taking my own time considering what he said before I spoke again.
“Can you guide us through the maze?”
“For what good it may do,” he said. “I can s
ense the proper course to take at any specific moment. An elf can’t be lost. But the maze can shift, and any correct choices can be made incorrect at its whim.”
I thought of one possible loophole, but I didn’t say anything, just in case the maze had good hearing. If it could read minds, we were out of luck anyway.
A mile isn’t far to walk on a sunny day, even if you’re loaded down with a heavy pack and a heavier heart. But not all miles are equal. We got to the top of the slope, and it looked as if we had a mile to go to the beginning of the maze. But that last mile was extraordinary. After ten minutes of level and then slightly downhill walking, we were still just as far away and the rock we had started from appeared to be a mile behind us.
I stopped walking. My danger sense had been getting progressively more agitated about what I would expect as I covered the distance separating me from a threat. But my eyes were telling me that the enemy, the wall, was no closer. The easy guess was that my eyes were wrong.
“What is it?” Lesh asked.
I told him. He looked at the wall of the maze, then back to where we had started. Timon and Harkane went through the same motions. Harkane’s movements gave the elf his chance to judge the distances too.
“You realize, of course, that we are almost on top of the maze,” the elf said.
“I figured that out,” I said. “That’s why I stopped. But my eyes don’t agree, so I have to try something else.”
There weren’t a lot of options popping into my head. All I could think of was If my eyes are lying, I’ve got to try it without them. I drew Dragon’s Death and closed my eyes while I started pacing forward carefully, sliding one foot in front of the other.
“Stay close to me,” I warned the others. I took only five steps before my blade encountered stone. I opened my eyes and the outer wall of the maze was right there.
“How did you do that?” Lesh asked.
“What did it look like to you?” I asked.