by David Drake
“Maze?” said Gothelm. “It's just a path—there's no maze.”
“The path, then,” Tenoctris snapped. “Do you speak a word or make a gesture?”
“I told you, you just walk through to the gate,” Gothelm said peevishly. “You don't have to do anything. And the gate opens by itself too.”
“He's hungover,” Garric said. “Though I'll bet he usually snarls like that.”
“I'll bet he's usually drunk or hungover,” Carus said. “The trouble with making people obey because they're afraid is that the folks who're willing to work for you usually aren't worth dulling your blade on.” The king's fingers played with the pommel of his own great sword. He didn't grip the hilt, just gave it the sort of touch that one lover might give another in a moment of repose.
Tenoctris glanced to her right, then left. “I've heard all that I need,” she said.
“What?” Waldron demanded. “We've paid this insect a hundred crowns for that!”
“Look, I have to get back to the mansion!” Gothelm said. Both hands clutched the purse against his red sash. “I've told you what you want!” '
“He'll be of more use to us if we let him return,” Tenoctris said. “Quite apart from the fact that we made that agreement with him.”
“I say we haven't got a hundred crowns' worth of information from him!” Waldron said, rising to his feet. The stool on which he'd been sitting toppled behind him.
He didn't care about the money—Tadai had made the payment from his own resources, and all five of the conspirators were too wealthy for the sum to matter, though it was huge by the standards of Barca's Hamlet. Disgust at the traitor and anger that a venal commoner had dared raise his voice goaded Waldron to grope for the sword beneath his concealing robe.
For an instant Garric saw with two sets of eyes—his own, through the pupils of the mask, and the eyes of his mind viewing from the balcony. The dream vantage dissolved like smoke in the wind. He stood up from the table, his muscles trembling with the emotions coursing through his bloodstream. The king's knowing grin was still a presence in his mind.
“Our word is not a small thing!” Garric said. “If we lie to him, then with whom do we keep faith?”
“Boy—” Waldron said, clutching at the unfamiliar robe. It opened down the back. Waldron's hand found his sword through the thick velvet but couldn't draw the weapon.'
“Enough!” Royhas said. “She says we have what we wanted. What use is there to stay here?”
“We have use for Master Gothelm,” Tenoctris repeated in a surprisingly firm tone. Though all the men were getting to their feet, she sat with her fingers tented before her. “But he can't help us here.”
“Fagh!” said Waldron, turning away. He kicked his fallen stool aside and strode through the door into the member's robing room, where the diners donned their guild regalia.
“Go,” Royhas said, gesturing the traitor toward the stairway door that led down to the street. “We'll contact you when we have further need.”
Gothelm bolted from the room. “He'll never come to us again, not unless we snatch him like a prisoner,” Pitre said in a tone of despair. “What did Waldron think he was going to accomplish?”
Tenoctris laid her robe on the table. “He has nothing further to tell us,” she said. “Or tell anyone, I suspect. I want to watch as he returns to the queen's mansion.”
She nodded to the door. “There won't be much time. Garric, Liane?”
Liane was already in her street clothes. Garric was still struggling with the ties behind his back, but he started for the robing room.
“No, this way,” Tenoctris said as she walked around the table to the stairwell door. The hall was a warren. That, and its location near the queen's mansion, were why Royhas had chosen it for the meeting.
“You'll be seen!” Pitre said. The conspirators had entered through the Guild chambers, each by a separate entrance.
“That doesn't matter,” Tenoctris said. “I have to watch what happens, and I much prefer to do it directly rather than through my craft!”
Garric tossed his robe onto the floor behind him as he followed the women.
He found the afternoon sunlight a relief. Royhas had ordered guild servants to curtain the clerestory windows which could have lighted the dining hall at this hour, knowing that Gothelm would as quickly sell the conspirators to the queen as unveil the queen's secrets to the conspirators. It would have been safer still to interview Gothelm during darkness, but the traitor's duties—he was an underporter—required that he be within the mansion all night.
The Glassblowers Hall stood in a wealthy residential district. Marble swags and lintels set off the soft yellow limestone of the walls. The effect was pleasing where the materials had aged together, and strikingly brilliant when the surfaces had been recently cleaned with lye and stiff brushes.
Many buildings of the neighborhood—the hall included—dated from the Old Kingdom. Images out of Carus' memory flickered through Garric's mind, frequently coinciding with the three- and four-story structures still standing.
Streets in Valles were cobblestoned and straight, though here in the center of the city they were also narrow. The houses on either side of the road were owned by rich merchants or guilds, but the right-of-way was less than two paces wide. The front entrances were on the first floor rather than street level, so stone staircases encroached still further on the pavement.
“Liane?” Garric asked. “How did the queen come to live in this district? The ducal palace was on the northern city wall.”
Liane looked at him, puzzled as often before by the way Garric's questions showed a familiarity with the structures of former times. “The royal palace still is,” she said. “The queen built a separate residence here not long before I came to Mistress Gudea's Academy five years ago.”
“Was there space open?” Garric asked. Carcosa, the ancient capital of the Isles, was a vast ruin where the present population used the monuments of the Old Kingdom as quarries for new construction. Valles seemed to have suffered relatively little in the past millennium. It was hard to imagine space available for a building as big as he'd heard the queen's mansion was.
“There was a fire,” Liane explained. “Limited to properties which the queen's agents had tried but failed to purchase. There were rumors, of course, because the blaze had flared up so suddenly that no one got out of the buildings alive. That was before the first fire wraith had appeared in public.”
She looked at Garric with an expression as bland as her tone. “All the heirs were willing to sell. More than willing.”
Tenoctris set the trio's pace. Gothelm was drawing slowly ahead, even though he'd slowed down as soon as he was out of the guild hall.
A six-horse carriage came toward them, filling the street. Gothelm disappeared around the corner while Garric and the others sheltered behind a staircase.
The carriage passed, its iron tires roaring and sparking on the cobbles. There was a coat of arms on the door panel, but the isinglass windows were too cloudy for the passengers to be more than shapes.
“In a properly governed city,” Liane said in a cold voice, “coaches wouldn't be allowed till after sunset. Along with delivery wagons.”
“We know where Gothelm's going,” Garric said, “but we still ought to hurry if we're going to watch him arrive.”
By “properly governed,” Liane meant “governed like Erdin”—where she was born, and the sole present rival to Valles for the title of greatest city in the Isles. The fact that Liane had finished her education here—where local girls treated her as a Sandrakkan barbarian despite her wealth, culture, and noble birth—had reinforced her parochial feelings.
It wasn't something Garric needed to discuss with his friend. After all, Carcosa on Haft (though now decayed into a backwater) had been the capital of the real, unified Kingdom of the Isles. Nothing today could compare.
Tenoctris smiled as though she knew what Garric was thinking. He grinned back at her.
Whe
n they reached the intersection—three streets met at skewed angles and a fourth joined the widest a few paces down—Garric was surprised to see Gothelm just ahead of them. The traitor was hesitating before he stepped onto the clear pavement around the mansion.
The mansion was an even greater surprise.
The basalt building was five-sided. The street down which Gothelm had turned led to a gateway with rebated arches, the sole opening on this side of the ground door. There was only a single upper story, but the stone railing about the mansion's roof was as high as the nearby multistory buildings.
A dozen glazed windows pierced the second-story façade; flames leaped behind them. Garric had a moment of vertigo when he looked at them, as though he were hanging over a pit that plunged all the way down into the Underworld. He could understand why Gothelm paused, and why also those passing through the nearby intersection averted their eyes.
Gothelm put his hands to his cheeks. He didn't dare cover his eyes, but he obviously wanted to. He lurched forward.
“He looks as though he's jumping off a cliff,” Liane whispered.
“It would be a cleaner death,” Tenoctris said. “But it wouldn't help us.”
“Why do you—” Garric began. As Gothelm entered, the ten feet of pavement changed suddenly to a deep expanse of statues and dark-hued vegetation. Garric fell silent.
He'd been told what to expect, but the reality nonetheless amazed him. The mansion looked the same, though it seemed enormously larger because the foreground had increased. A line of pentagonal stones led to the entrance. Gothelm followed them, stepping deliberately.
“I thought he'd run,” Liane said. She had crossed her hands over her stomach, an instinctive response to tension—just as Garric found his right hand resting on the pommel of his sword.
“He's afraid of missing his step,” Tenoctris said. “Being careful won't help him. If the queen didn't bother to provide a password to keep her enemies out, it's because the maze itself can read the hearts of those within it.”
Yew trees and basalt planters bordered the path. The statues on low plinths within the landscape were basalt as well. Details of the carving were hard to make out because of the stone's dull surface; but from what Garric could see, he was happier for his relative ignorance.
Though the path seemed straight, Garric's view of the man walking down it shifted with each step. It was as though Gothelm were wandering through—well, through a maze, as Tenoctris had described the defenses when she questioned him.
Gothelm sometimes seemed to face Garric and his companions, but he obviously didn't see them. Each step the man took ended with his foot on the next stone nearer the mansion, even though the apparent motion of his leg should have taken him off the path or back the way he'd come.
“We're sacrificing him, then?” Liane asked. She kept her eyes on Gothelm.
“I want to watch the defenses in action,” Tenoctris said. Liane's question hadn't been an objection, quite; the old wizard's reply wasn't defensive. “To a degree I suppose I regret what's going to happen, but all men die.”
She smiled faintly. “I have greater responsibilities than to protect Gothelm from the consequences of his own dishonesty.”
“Better men have died,” Liane said. Garric agreed with her, but the harshness of Liane's tone would have surprised him —if he hadn't realized she was thinking of her father, gutted in a tomb by the demon her father had summoned.
Actions had consequences. Gothelm was about to pay for his actions, as others had paid for theirs.
As though the stones were hoarfrost and the sun had come out, the path vanished. Gothelm froze. His right leg was outstretched. He drew it back and clutched his arms to his body, slowly turning his head. He still didn't appear to understand what had happened.
Gothelm wore boots of red calfskin, but the toes were no longer visible. “His feet are sinking into the ground,” Liane whispered.
“The ivy's growing over him,” Tenoctris said. “It's harmless. Most of the effects are probably harmless, but I need to know which ones to prepare for.”
Gothelm screamed and began to run. His voice sounded as though it came from half a mile away. The traitor's course roughly paralleled the building's front wall. A willow waved tendrils toward him, though no breeze moved the other foliage.
“Why doesn't he come back this way?” Garric asked.
He didn't like watching cats toy with a vole. He understood the need sometimes to kill, but the quick snap/crunch of a dog's jaws were more to his taste. His hand gripped his sword hilt tightly, bringing the fierce strength of King Carus a little closer to him.
Tenoctris shrugged. “He can't see us,” she said. “Or the mansion. If he did happen to run in the right direction, something would drive him back like—”
A statue with the torso of a man and legs like the writhing tails of serpents stepped off its base. It slithered into Gothelm' s path. He screamed, as mindlessly as a baby shrieking in a tantrum.
“That's harmless also,” Tenoctris said dispassionately.
“Oh, it could crush you if you fell asleep in front of it, but it can't move with any speed.”
“Perverts!” someone called behind them.
Garric glanced around. A woman with a basket of fresh bread had paused in the intersection. “Perverts!” she repeated and hastened on.
“We have to know,” Garric said, his lips barely moving.
An outcrop of stone, apparently natural, had been carved into a demon's face. From the open mouth gushed a rivulet meandering through the landscape. Gothelm ran toward the humpbacked bridge, though the stream was narrow enough to jump.
When the traitor was in the middle of the bridge, the stone fabric flexed and flung him off. The water beneath lifted from its bed and caught him in midair.
Gothelm's limbs thrashed. His voice rose into a despairing wail like that of a rabbit with its legs in a snare. The water coiled like the tongue of a toad, sucking Gothelm with it into the stone mouth.
The gargoyle's jaws closed. The scream stopped. Bones crunched.
Garric swallowed. He'd thought a quick killing would be the result he preferred.
The stone face turned and looked at them. The jaws opened and belched. The gargoyle and all the landscape around it faded from view. Garric and his friends were looking at the flame-eyed mansion across a stretch of cobblestones no wider than a man in good health could leap.
On the stones lay half a red leather boot, bitten off in the middle of the shaft. Gothelm's foot and part of his leg were still inside.
“We've learned all we can here,” Tenoctris said quietly. “And I for one will be glad to put some distance between myself and what we've seen.”
Ilna os-Kenset was aching, hungry, and angry. Still, when she cast her mind back she couldn't remember many times that she wouldn't have described herself as angry about something. She'd ached and gone hungry often enough too.
She barked a laugh. The sailor trimming the sail looked down at her. She thought of kicking his ankles but nodded instead, the sort of limited courtesy she'd have offered a neighbor in Barca's Hamlet
The sailor wrapped the luff rope another turn around the bitt and walked forward. The Scaled Men had faces like frogs. It was impossible to tell what they were thinking or whether they thought at all.
Ilna had enough slack that she could have sat up, but that would have warned her captors of what she was doing to their knots. She was normally an active person; being forced to lie on her side made her stiff in every muscle.
The sun was slower making its way between the horizons than Ilna was used to. For the most part the sail shaded her, but even the direct light was reddish and only vaguely warm.
Her captors had twice let her drink by dipping a rag in a puncheon of water and putting it in her mouth so she could chew the moisture out. They'd have had to let her sit to use a cup, and they were taking no chances.
The water tasted foul. The rag had come from the breechclout of a m
an who'd been killed by a falling spar a decade earlier—the fabric told its story to Ilna whether she would or no. The drink would keep her alive; that was all that mattered.
She particularly wanted to survive for the next while. She had scores to settle.
Something drifted across the sky high above, shadowing them. She looked up. Among the clouds hung a creature with a pink body many times the size of the ship. Diaphanous wings undulated along both its sides like the fins of a turbot. Ilna couldn't see any eyes or other sensory organs, but jointed rods and cavities trembled within the pink envelope.
The sailors grunted in agitation. One of them opened a chest built into the front of the deckhouse and distributed arms. The sailor who took the crossbow cocked it by putting his foot through the loop on the forestock and pulling back the ears of the short wooden bow until the cord slipped over the nut of the trigger mechanism.
It didn't look like a particularly powerful weapon to Ilna. She guessed the ordinary bow that Garric and most Haft countrymen used for hunting would send an arrow farther as well as being, quicker to use.
But only an archer could use a simple bow with skill. Any fool could point a crossbow and send a missile in more or less the right direction by pulling the trigger bar.
Ilna sniffed. Human beings were good at finding ways around their lack of skill.
The creature took no notice of the ship. It entered a drifting cloud not much larger than itself, then came out the other side. Vaporous tatters quivered behind in the currents stirred by its long fins. The rest of the cloud had been swallowed.
The Scaled Men became calmer. The crossbowman uncocked his weapon and returned it to the arms chest, though several of the others continued to wear cutlasses hanging from loops on their broad leather belts.
Ilna heard a rhythmic thumping from the hold beneath her. There was a voice as well, but she couldn't hear well enough through the cover even to be sure that it was human.
The sound wasn't a major concern to her. Whoever or whatever made the commotion obviously couldn't free itself, so she needn't expect help from that quarter.
She continued working on her knots. A sailor was generally watching her, making the job more difficult, but Ilna had never expected her tasks to be easy.