Labyrinth g-5

by Kat Richardson

  “We’re not burglars,” Quinton objected; his voice sounded a little strained and I noticed that the tendrils of red had twined around his legs. They must have been exerting something—pain or pressure at least.

  “Callers ring the bell.”

  “You don’t seem to have one,” he retorted.

  “Indeed. Possibly because I don’t want any callers in the first place! And especially not those of your sort.”

  “Pardon me, ma’am,” I cut in. “What sort do you mean?”

  “Stalkers or supplicants from that enclave of fools in Seattle. Since I heard your dislike for the Pharaohn, I assume you’re with Kammerling’s party. I’ve done quite enough for that spendthrift fool. Tell him to go to hell and shut the door behind him.”

  “I’m not here on anyone’s behalf but my own,” I replied.

  She snorted in derision. “You’re a Greywalker and it’s clear that you haven’t gone completely insane yet, so you must have someone’s help. Which means you’re someone’s slave.”

  I snapped at the haughty bitch. “I’m not anyone’s anything and I want to keep it that way. Is it a fair guess that you’re Chris Drew?”

  “Did you imagine I would be anyone else? And you’re backward. It’s Drusilla Cristoffer.”

  “What I imagined was that you bought a puzzle ball from Charlie Rice because it came from an old house out here that you had some attachment to.”

  She barked a laugh. “Quite an attachment: It was my house! You go away for a few years and someone tears your house down! I had to move into this common shack until I could make arrangements to remove my stakes and leave more permanently.”

  “Your house. Then you know how the puzzles work and where the maze is.”

  Her eyes grew narrow and cunning. “Oh, so that’s what you want.” I could tell she was thinking very hard: The red threads around Quinton’s legs drew back and slithered toward her, as if offering their substance to fuel her mental process. Finally she spoke, dropping each word on me with careful deliberation. “I made it to protect Kammerling. I should have taken more care with it. It was never meant for a prison.” She spat the word.

  My breath caught in my throat as I understood she was confirming that the puzzles somehow led to my father’s arcane cell. It wasn’t what they were meant for, but it was what they did now.

  “When the labyrinth is gone, my last tie here will be broken, but for this.” She put out her left hand and closed her eyes a moment. Blood welled in the palm of her hand though she had no cuts there. She murmured and a whiffling noise rose and rushed toward us. The other puzzle ball slammed into Cristoffer’s hand as if thrown from a great height, but she didn’t move from its impact. She let her breath out through her nose in a gust and opened her eyes.

  “And what would you give for it, Greywalker? I can see your desire for it, see the mark of its twin upon you. What will you give . . . ?” Her hand made a lazy turn toward Quinton, curling inward. . . .

  He shivered, rooted to the spot.

  I plucked the first, quiet earring from my pocket. “I think I have something of yours.” I held the garnet drop up so it swung, sparkling in the river’s light that crept and darted through the willows.

  Cristoffer cast an assessing glance at me and the bauble that dangled from my fingers. “That—But of course you’ve opened the other door. I wondered where it had gone. . . . Edward’s doing, I’m sure. Overly clever of him. He always was. But it’s of no moment. Just an ornament. Do you suppose me moved by sentiment?” Her laughter made the river falter in its banks. Quinton ground his teeth and shut his eyes until she gave him a glance and then looked back to me. “More.”

  I dug into my pocket and held up the second earring, its gem gleaming with unnatural light the color of dark venous blood. Brought together in the free air, the earrings sang a chord that made the grid thrum and spark.

  Cristoffer’s eyes shone as hard and glittering as the facets on the garnets. I could see her breath accelerate and she leaned, just a hair, toward the chiming earrings. “Oh . . .”

  “Do you want them back?” I asked. Of course they were hers: her puzzles, her jewels, her labyrinth—wherever it was. I could see her hunger for them reaching out like discorporate hands. As I stared at them the garnets seemed to run, turning to liquid blood that dripped slowly toward the ground, vanishing into red mist and river fog before it struck. I shook them, making the earrings cry and bleed. “Make up your mind.”

  “You think I care for such baubles . . . ?” But her voice quivered. The red creepers of her power scrolled across the ground toward me and an answering glow reached out from the earrings.

  I threw the live earring down and put my foot over it, pushing it into the mud with my boot until I felt the unyielding rock below. “I think you do.”

  I shifted my weight down, a bit at a time, feeling the frangible gem grind and groan against the riverbed rock. Dru Cristoffer’s face tightened in pain and she seemed to suck her chest in as if I’d struck her in the center of her rib cage. The words came up through the muttering in my mind: “I could crush this more easily than your heart. . . .”

  Her lips thinned to a frustrated line. Then she gave a sharp nod and sucked her tendrils of power back to the edge of the willow’s curtain. “All right.”

  “The earrings for the ball.”

  “Yes, yes. Give them to me.”

  “Say it: The earrings for the ball.”

  She growled. “The earrings for the ball.”

  The world seemed to shiver and the grid flashed, throbbing under us, the voices shouting with its energy. I stooped and dug the buried earring from the muddy ground. I held them both out.

  She turned the ball over into her right palm and spat on the bloody blot that marked where it had hit her. She chuckled quietly in her throat and drew a figure in the blood with the middle finger of her left hand. Then she blew on the figure, making the wet surface sizzle and smoke as if her breath were fire. Once it satisfied her, she smiled and lobbed the puzzle ball at me as I tossed the glittering earrings into the air near her.

  I caught the ball and winced from the heat of the thing. It smelled of singed flesh and teakwood. Where she’d drawn on it, a complex symbol remained as if branded into the surface.

  She snatched the earrings from the air and slipped their wire loops into her ears with a sigh. Then she looked at me, one side of her mouth curling upward. “Take it and go. You’ll only need that one, once you open the way. When you’re done, make sure they both burn to ash. The salamander’s call will start the fire,” she added, pointing at the symbol. “Be sure the other ball burns with it. You have three days, for I intend to raze the labyrinth to the very bedrock, and if the doors haven’t burned by then, they will by my command. You won’t want to be near them when they do, though I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to add an enemy or two to the pyre if you have some handy to throw in. Such things like blood sacrifices.”

  She started to walk away; then she cocked her head and half turned back, the dark-red gems glittering at her earlobes even through the gloom. She regarded us over her shoulder as the willow branches lifted aside like a theater curtain. “One other thing: Your friend’s trick might work on the wards I hung for Edward. It was quite a while ago that I raised them, so I may not have buried the tap as well as I would now.” Then she chuckled and it felt like hail on my skull. “Good luck with them.”

  She stepped through the open willow swag and over the red line of her own magic, which drew back in as soon as she was across. Quinton sighed in relief and I lunged forward, thrusting my empty hand through the willow fronds before the red lines closed completely.

  “Wait!” I shouted. The fiery marks snapped onto my forearm like teeth and I yelped in pain. “Where is the maze?” I gasped.

  Dru Cristoffer laughed on the other side of the green veil. “Find it yourself, Greywalker. I’ve done enough—more than enough—to save that pesthole city. And more than enough for you. Next time I sha
n’t open my door.”

  I felt blood running down the hidden side of my arm. The warm liquid seemed to loosen the clamp of the magical lines and I yanked my arm back, feeling invisible barbs scrape gouges in my skin as I withdrew. Cristoffer’s laughter receded into the fallen darkness beyond the tree’s swaying curtain of leaves. I didn’t want to stay there, but at the moment I was shaking too much to move and I sat down hard on the ground at the base of the willow.

  Quinton plopped down beside me. “Well, that was lovely, in a tea-party-with-Satan kind of way. You all right?”

  “I’ll heal,” I observed, closing my eyes to the sight of my skin knitting up over pinpricks of light and lines of blood. “How about you?”

  “I think I might have some welts, but I’ll be fine.”

  “Welts?”

  “Yeah, that magic of hers is like stinging nettle, only worse. Burning nettle might be more accurate. And that was just the friendly parts.”

  “Well . . . we did get the puzzle ball, and some useful information—maybe.”

  “But we still have to find the labyrinth.”

  I nodded, taking a couple of deep breaths and heaving to my feet. “I don’t think we’ll do it tonight, though. We need some sleep and we can start looking in the morning.”

  Quinton crept out of the willow’s shroud behind me. “Got any ideas where to start?”

  “Historical society. This is the sort of town where all the buildings are documented by someone, even the outlying ones and especially the interesting ones. I’d think a house with a maze would rate at least a mention.”

  “As long as we don’t have to go back to that . . . woman’s.”

  I saw the Rover still standing at the side of the road, trailing the tattered Grey rags that seemed to adhere to everything I owned for more than a week. Nothing had disturbed them and no new colors of magic clung to the truck.

  “She’s a blood mage,” I said as I climbed into the safety of the Rover’s front seat.

  “You mean Cristoffer?”

  I nodded. “Yeah. I probably would have guessed in a while, but that trick with the puzzle ball was pretty obvious. And she mentioned the wards in Edward’s bunker—those had to have been hung by a powerful blood-worker, which would be her.”

  “She’s got to be a lot older than she looks,” Quinton added. “Not that I want to know. . . . Do you suppose she actually knew Andrew Jackson . . .?”

  “I think she probably saw him in diapers.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  The hotels were full and we ended up sleeping in the Rover at a campground east of downtown Leavenworth—probably just as well since using a credit card for the deposit would have left a trace of our presence. Beside us the river gurgled to itself in the dark, lending a descant to the singing of the grid. The back of the Rover was a bit crowded and smelled of dog, but it was acceptable and Quinton fell asleep with ease. I lay on my side, tired and wanting to sleep but afraid to. The strange voices of the grid were increasingly present and increasingly loud. They chilled and compelled me, drawing me too close to the warp and weft of the Grey.

  I was certain that anyone I asked would say, “Just don’t listen to them; don’t do what they say.” But that wasn’t so easy and the voices, singing in ever-closer harmony, hadn’t always been wrong. If my dad’s advice was what I thought, then I needed to listen—to “know” what they sang. And yet . . . those voices had urged me to kill Goodall and to do something to Will. One of those I had recoiled from and the other hadn’t worked. I had destroyed Alice, but that didn’t seem to me the same as killing Goodall. But it was difficult for me to articulate the difference and why one was acceptable and the other wasn’t. I hated the hard shell of ice that seemed to be growing around me, dragging me away from compassion where it seemed most deserved.

  And I wondered what was I going to do once I got to Dad. Supposedly he would tell me Wygan’s plan and how to stop it. But what if he didn’t? What if it was a trap, as Mara had suggested? Or a wrong turn? Ghosts don’t know much and what they do know may be wrong or incomplete. I wasn’t sure why I assumed my father’s shade was different, but I did and I hoped that meant I hadn’t become a ruthless machine of some unknown retribution. “Paladin of the Dead” was what Carlos had called me. . . . What dread thing did that make me . . . ? In the dark, lying beside Quinton and yet feeling alone, I did not know what to do, which instinct or voice to give ear to. I felt I was not myself anymore, that my decisions were those of a foreigner in my skin.

  I’d thought I understood who and what I was two years earlier, before I’d died in an elevator. I’d thought I had control of my life—at last—that I was the person I wanted to be, doing the job I wanted. Part of that certainty had been torn away from me when I ceased being blind to the Grey, when I became something I did not want to be and didn’t understand. I thought I had regained some equilibrium since then. I had come to accept what I was and what I did and make the best of it. Sometimes I’d even gotten a little smug about it. But I’d still been wrong. I wasn’t what I’d thought, nor had anything about my life been what I’d believed. Deceptions, manipulations, and illusions had shaped the fabric of my life and I had not been blameless in making it—I’d destroyed my own memories and lived in the bitter confines of my anger at my parents. I’d clung to my beliefs without questioning them and learned I was wrong. I’d reacted, rather than acting. I’d done the predictable thing and run the maze like a good little rat. Was I still a rat, still going where I was pushed?

  Now I was further away from what I’d been—or thought I’d been—than ever. I felt something powerful and frightening coiling under my skin. This ability everyone pushed me to embrace would change me fundamentally. I knew this without any question; the rising, clarifying song in my mind and the cold electricity across my nerves told me it was so. It was one of the few certainties I had, and yet I did not think I had a choice to reject this power. Among the dozens of questions I couldn’t answer, one occupied and terrified me most: Would I, if I survived this, still be human? And if not, would I be able to stave off destruction of all that was dear? This sleepless horror held me until dawn.

  By the time Quinton opened his eyes to the morning light, I was damned tired of being damned tired. He noticed I was dragging.

  “Didn’t sleep?” he asked, sitting up and putting his arms around my shoulders.

  I rubbed at my eyes. “No. It’s awfully noisy in my head these days.”

  “I keep thinking I should be able to help you, but I’m not sure how.”

  I gave him a weak smile. “You do. Just keep on doing what you already do.”

  He made a rueful face. “You say so. . . .”

  “I do. Now, let’s get moving and see if we can find this maze.”

  We were still a bit ahead of the Maifest crowd, and the Upper Valley Museum, which housed the Upper Valley Historical Society, wasn’t open yet, so we were able to get some breakfast first and wait on the stonework terrace that surrounded the old house that was now the museum. It sat well back from everything else on the north side of the Wenatchee on a large swath of high riverbank land at the end of a small street that marked the eastern edge of Leavenworth’s Bavarian theme. The building itself—a fieldstone craftsman bungalow with a low, arched roof and lots of wood and windows—predated the theme by at least fifty years. Most of the houses and shops on Division Street were plain late-Victorian clapboard structures and a few much later condos, so the gracious low lines of the museum stood out even more as it rested in green isolation at the end of the road. From the back terrace I could see the willow trees where we’d stood the night before with Dru Cristoffer, but there was no sign from this distance across the river, other than a thin red haze in the Grey, that there was anything magical on the opposite bank.

  Quinton and I had done some reading up on the museum and historical society during breakfast. The building had been the summer home of the Lamb-Davis sawmill’s owners, and then the local banker’s house for
many years before becoming a bed-and-breakfast, and then the museum. There’d been some information about it online, but not much else about any other buildings, much less one with a labyrinth—plenty about Spring Bird Fest, though, which was upcoming at the museum in a week. I couldn’t say I was sorry to miss it, since I was just as glad not to be eyed by the wild raptors of the local bird rescue group or surrounded by children in songbird costumes. The old house was far enough removed from Front Street to still be peaceful that morning and the clear, constant babble of the river seemed to calm the chorus in my mind, so sitting and waiting suited me fine.

  Two women in their late fifties arrived on foot at 10:45. They smiled at us and waved. “We’ll be open in just a few minutes,” one of them called to us. “Just sit tight a bit longer.” They began unlocking and setting up the museum to welcome the day’s visitors. One of them struggled out carrying a sandwich board events sign and Quinton jumped up to help her take it down the steps to the driveway. I drifted toward the door she’d left ajar and slid inside the building.

  The house wasn’t very large, at least not on the main floor, and I imagined the one basement floor didn’t add much living space. I found myself in a wide, shallow entry with doors on each side and an open post-and-beam arch ahead of me. The remaining woman stepped out of the doorway on my left, which was labeled “Gift Shop.” She was a soft-looking woman, a little round everywhere without being fat, her blond hair fading but not to silver. She was wearing a brown sweater set over camel-colored trousers and brown loafers that cost more than I made in a week.

  She jumped with surprise when she saw me. “Oh, we’re not quite open yet. . . .”

  “Actually, I’m looking for some information about an old house in the area. It must have been torn down or otherwise destroyed about two years ago.”

  “Oh. A house. We don’t knock down many houses around here, you know. Most are historic one way or another.”

  “This one may have been historic in its way. Apparently it was very old, at least two stories, in one of the orchards, and it had a maze or labyrinth on the property.”