Chains of Gaia

by James Fahy

  *

  The chamber beyond was a wide open space of flagged, spiralling tiles, a circular high stone wall meeting in a root-covered dome above them. All of their attention however was drawn to the centre of the room. Here, there was a circle of stones, each as tall as a man, thin and black as polished jet. They circled a deep black pit, lining its edge. Suspended above this hole, strung from the arms by long thick chains, silver-grey lengths stretching away either side to the periphery of the large space, there hung the minotaur.

  “Bloody hell,” said Henry breathlessly, staring up at the great figure strung up and spread-eagled over the pit. “That’s … big.”

  The straining monster had the body of a man, enormously proportioned and covered in coarse, short black fur. It wore a chained belt around its waist, beneath which long legs dangled, ending in huge hooves hovering over the deep pit below it. Both of its massive arms were stretched out either side, held fast and taut by the thick chains that held it aloft, and its great head was the dark and horned face of a monstrous bull, lolling on its chest.

  The rank smell of wild animal filled the chamber. The minotaur raised its head as the three entered its domain, staring at them from where it hung with small, glowing red eyes like hot embers. It loosed a deafening bellow, the noise bouncing off the walls, amplified in the harsh acoustics of the room and rolling around the circular space, echoing up from the deep pit beneath it. The huge chains rattled, clanked and strained.

  Robin’s heart was hammering.

  “Why … why is it strung up like that?” he asked, as they stepped warily into the chamber. It was clear at least that the huge animal was not about to charge them. It could not move an inch. “It looks like a prisoner here.”

  “Well, of course,” Strife glanced at the commanding creature with only the barest hint of interest, as though he saw terrifying mythological beasts every day of his life. “Do you honestly think any sane creature would stay in this place of its own volition? Of course it’s restrained.”

  The minotaur rolled its large head angrily, casting huge shadows on the spiral flagstones at their feet with its long, wickedly pointed horns. To Robin it looked more like a demon than any natural animal, sinews and veins bulging on its neck and furred temples. Chained and secured here for so long, deep underground, away from the light. It bellowed again, deafening. Loose soil and dust fell in showers from between the cracks of the roof above, raining down softly on them. Henry had instinctively covered his ears with his hands.

  “But, I thought it walked the passageways … scaring people off, attacking anyone who entered,” Robin frowned, unable to tear his eyes from the straining beast as they cautiously approached. “It can’t move at all. It’s completely bound.”

  His eyes followed the long chains, the links of which were each as thick as his arm. He noticed that the tree roots which covered the ceiling, worming in from the earth above, had grown along these metal cords over time. They twined in and out of the metal links, using them as a trellis. Woody vines and pale, questing roots threaded up and over the hands of the minotaur itself, wrapping around its thick and hairy forearms.

  “The elder trees roots have grown all along … the chains I mean,” Robin observed. “This creature can’t have moved for ages. I mean, a seriously long time. It’s just been left hanging here.”

  “Too right!” Henry said with feeling, staring up at the bellowing creature with wide eyes. “It’d kill us in a second if it wasn’t. Look at it Rob, it’s just pure rage. Talk about mad cow disease! We should be grateful it’s not loose to gore us!”

  “One imagines …” Strife said thoughtfully, contemplating the dangling, straining beast as though it were an installation of modern art. “That perhaps the creature is rather put out that its sacred charge, the Shard of the Arcania, has been removed from the chamber. It is now, in every sense, a useless thing. Dangerous to the extreme of course, but it has no purpose now.”

  He frowned down at the circle of stones and the deep black pit which formed the prison of the bound minotaur. “Rather vexingly, whilst I do enjoy seeing a being suffer so, it is also entirely in my way. This is the Janus station of which I spoke. It is unlikely we can get close enough to activate it without being gored to death by this rabid creature. Its arms may be bound, but a flick of that head will still run anyone of us through.”

  The old man looked around thoughtfully. “I suggest we throw it the human boy,” he said to Robin. “It may distract the minotaur long enough for us to activate the doorway. Although it would be horribly messy of course.”

  “Oi!” Henry protested. “No one’s throwing me anywhere!”

  Robin ignored them both. He was staring, transfixed at the minotaur. It was a thing of pure anger, every muscle and bunched sinew straining uselessly against its chains, head tossing back and forth, mad red eyes rolling, filled with bloodlust. Danger rolled from it in waves. It exuded pure menace … and something, he decided, was wrong about it.

  “This isn’t right,” Robin said quietly. His companions didn’t hear him immediately. They were bickering amongst themselves.

  To Robin’s eye, the minotaur, held fast in mid-air, crucified above the deep pit, seemed … well … too scary. Too violent and large and feral. It was almost as though it was overblown in its efforts to convince them of its danger. Insisting a little too hard on its own great terribleness.

  “It's too pantomime,” he muttered to himself. “It’s like those houses with the fake dogs.”

  Henry had broken off with Strife and now looked at his friend curiously. “What are you on about, Rob?”

  Robin glanced at him briefly, then looked back up to the thrashing, violent ton of murderous man-bull above them.

  “You know, back home … in the human world, I mean. Mr Burrows, Gran’s neighbour, he had one of them.”

  Henry looked puzzled. “A … minotaur?” he hazarded.

  “No,” Robin shook his head. “A fake dog. It’s like a gadget, just a novelty item really,” he explained. “It’s a little voicebox thing and you leave it in the hall, near the front door. It’s got a motion sensor, and when people get near it, it lets out a recording of an angry dog barking.” He looked at Henry and Strife. “You know, scary, but fake. Mr Burrows had one of those stickers in his window too, the ones that show an angry dog, usually looking vicious and foaming with ‘warning; I live here’ written underneath. He didn’t have a dog at all though. He had a parakeet.”

  “Why would anyone have such a ridiculous thing?” Strife asked him spitefully.

  “A parakeet?” Henry asked. Strike glanced at him sidelong.

  “A fake dog.”

  “It’s supposed to warn off robbers and burglars,” Robin explained. “To put people off breaking in. A deterrent. It's supposed to make you think, hang on, there’s a big scary dog in there, no thanks. I like my arms attached, not chewed off. I’ll go rob a different house today.”

  Henry was looking bewildered. “Mate, you have totally lost me. What’s your old neighbour's fake dog alarm got to do with anything? My dad went through a phase of having one of those plastic fish on the wall that sing reggae songs. He thought it was hilarious. It wasn’t. So what? Bad taste isn’t going to help us fight Señor Steroids here.”

  “My point is, it was never convincing, the fake dog alarm,” Robin explained testily. “The recording, see? It was way too vicious. It sounded like a hellhound or something. Gran and I used to have a right old laugh about it every time we heard it going off through the walls of the bungalow. It wouldn’t fool anyone. It was…well, it was trying too hard.”

  Above them, the great beast, fur matted with sweat, let out another enormous bellow, shaking the floor beneath them. It clanked and writhed in its chains, threatening to break free at any given moment. Just looking at it gave them all the urge to flee, while they still had a few seconds head start. It radiated a powerful wave of imminent danger. One more second in here with me, it seemed to scream to every cell of th
eir bodies, and you’ll be dead. Run now!

  “Just like this,” Robin looked at the minotaur. He shook his head. “This isn’t real. I know it. I don’t know how I know it, I just feel it.”

  “Your Scion-senses tingling, are they?” Henry looked up at the monster from Robin’s side, although from a wise couple of steps further back. “'Cause it seems pretty real to me, mate. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything realer than those horns!”

  Robin nodded. “It’s all greasepaint and stage-decoration. Someone wants us to feel this place is full of anger, full of bloodlust and danger,” he said, looking around the room. “But it isn’t. It’s full of pain … and suffering.”

  He turned and looked directly at Strife.

  “This is a glamour,” he said firmly. “Illusion magic, Tower of Light stuff. Do you know how to dispel it? We don’t have any glam juice with us. Unless you have some in your cloak as well as that healing draught.”

  The Grimm curled his lip in an ugly way. “I am Strife of Dis. I do not need tinctures and vials to dispel a simple glamour, foolish brat,” he said, his voice full of scornful pride. “I am a Grimm. The true leader of the Grimms, no less. Light and illusion is no match for my darkness.”

  He rubbed his hands together, and then cast them wide at the floor, as though scattering seeds. Dark, inky shadow flowed from his fingertips. Coiling black smoke, which rolled around before him on the floor, growing into two great nebulous lumps. As Robin and Henry watched, and the chained minotaur roared above them, ferocious but unheeded, the shapes resolved themselves into two extremely large black dogs.

  Mr Burrows, Robin’s old neighbour of the unconvincing novelty alarm system, would have been impressed. These were true hellhounds. Formed of smoke, greasy and impenetrable, solid masses of ever-shifting shadow. Yellow eyes glowed, thin cruel slits, staring at the boys, and sharp, wolfish teeth shone wetly as they growled and grinned.

  “Spitak, Siaw,” Mr Strife said, with something almost close to repellent affection for his creations. They were his totems, Robin knew. All the Grimms could make them. It was their mana made solid, and Mr Strife’s huge hunting dogs, the skrikers, were the worst of them all.

  For a frozen, horrible moment, Robin was convinced that this was it. That for reasons unknown, perhaps only for his own amusement, Strife had faked this unlikely truce, luring the two boys here, deep underground and far from help or escape, only to let loose his beasts upon them. He and Henry wouldn’t stand a chance. Not without magic, without mana. They would be torn to shreds in seconds.

  But Strife did not set his skrikers at their throats. With a gesture, each of the two dogs set off around the circular chamber at full pelt, one in each direction, so that they met on the far side and passed one another, circling the room and returning to their master. They made another lap, fleet paws slapping on the ground, hulking shadows blurring, and then another. Robin and Henry saw that they were leaving shadows behind them, great black trails of smoke. With each lap of the speeding hounds, the black shadows grew thicker, climbing the walls, encasing the room, its inhabitants, the Janus station and the writhing suspended minotaur, in a thick black ring. Soon, there was nothing but darkness around them, a solid circling wall.

  Strife closed his eyes, and, head bent low, he clapped his hands together sharply. A small red gem just visible in the pocket-watch of his suit beneath his ragged travelling robe glimmered, and the wall of smoke collapsed inward on them, a tidal wave from all sides, smothering and blocking out the light and everything else as surely as volcanic ash.

  Robin and Henry spluttered, and in the darkness, the anger of the chained minotaur let out one final bellow.

  Then, as quickly as it had formed, the smoke was gone, dissipating swiftly and the skrikers with it. The air cleared and they were alone once more.

  “What …” Henry asked, staring in wonder, “… is that?”

  Robin stared too. The stones of the Janus station remained, although the deep black pit was gone, now merely stone floor, swirling tiles like the rest of the room. The minotaur too was gone. In its place, kneeling on the stones in the centre of the circle, still chained at the wrist with sagging metal and twining roots, there was a man.

  His body was painfully emaciated. Thin shoulders slumped, ribcage agonisingly visible through dark green skin. His wasted arms were splayed on the floor before him, and covering his head was a ragged sackcloth mask, to which two horns had been clumsily affixed, crudely sown. The mask, without eyeholes or any other feature, was tied on firmly at the throat with a thick rope. The cloth billowing and sucking back at the bony man panted with exhaustion.

  “It would appear to be a dryad,” Strife observed, with some degree of detached curiosity. “Or the tattered remains of one, at least. So, this is the real centre of the Labyrinth then.”

  Robin rushed forward toward the stooping figure and dropped to its side. It was horribly weak, its arms still wound all about with roots as tight as the chains.

  “Help me,” he said to the others. “Help me get this off.”

  Henry joined him, and together, with no resistance from the prisoner who was clearly too feeble to respond, they fumbled with the rope, loosening the sackcloth mask with some effort.

  Robin pulled off the horrible hood, casting it aside with revulsion. The dryad beneath was shivering, feverish and hollow-cheeked.

  “Give me your cloak,” Robin snapped at Strife. “Hurry.”

  Strife peered at Robin with interest, and the man almost collapsing by his side. The dryad’s eyes were bleary and confused, blinking in the sudden light after who knew how long, a prisoner under the glamour of the minotaur.

  “I said, give it to me!” Robin yelled.

  To Henry’s surprise, Strife complied, unhooking his tattered travelling cloak and tossing it gracelessly over to Robin, who quickly placed it around the shoulders of the dryad, covering his shivering form. “Can you open these chains?” Robin asked.

  Strife did not step toward them, but he raised a hand lazily and made a simple gesture in the air. Black shadows flickered around the dryad’s wrists, and with a clatter, the manacles fell open with a clunk. The green skin of his wrists was raw and sore, badly abraded and scarred.

  “It’s okay,” Robin told the dryad reassuringly. “You’re free now. You’re going to be alright.”

  “Rob,” Henry was staring at his friend. “What is going on? Who is this? You’re acting like you know the guy.”

  Robin looked up at Henry. “I do know who it is," he said grimly. “I’ve seen his face before. In someone else’s memory.”

  It was clear to Robin suddenly. All of it. The extent of Splinterstem’s ambition, his deception. This was Alder.

  “Alder?” Robin asked, kneeling before the huddled form. The dryad was rubbing his wrists weakly, still looking confused and shell-shocked, as though waking from a long and terrible dream. “Alder, my name is Robin. We freed you. It’s alright now.”

  He instructed Henry to fetch some water from his satchel, and after a few gulps, the dryad stopping shivering and began to look around. His faceted green eyes looked dulled and dazed.

  “Where … am I?” he said eventually, in a shaky voice.

  “Don’t talk, just keep sipping that,” Robin told him. At his insistence, Strife provided more of the same healing draught he had shared with Robin. The boy took the potion from the Grimm and forced the dryad to drink it.

  “Slowly,” he instructed, “Don’t gulp. This will bring you back. Well, this and about a hundred decent meals.”

  While the prisoner drank, Robin looked to the others.

  “Splinterstem was more dangerous than we knew,” he said, feeling a little sick. “He was willing to do anything to get what he wanted. This is Alder. He’s a dryad. He was presumed dead years ago, back when the Labyrinth was constructed. The story was that he wandered inside and was killed by the minotaur. But, obviously, that’s not what happened.”

  He remembered, when sear
ching Splinterstem’s memories, the day of the Labyrinth's completion, while the king gave his ceremonial speech and Splinterstem had felt such conflicting feelings of pride, and shame. Robin now understood why.

  “Alder, here, was the lover of the Princess Ashe, and therefore an obstacle in Splinterstem's way. They were clearly in love, and he couldn’t have that. He wanted the princess, and the throne she came with, for himself," Robin explained to the others. “When Hammerhand brought the Shard here and the Labyrinth was built, clearly he saw his chance. A way to get rid of Alder for good. Get him out of the way.”

  Alder nodded weakly, confirming this. His thin hands were still shaking, but to Robin’s amazement, the healing potion of the Grimm already seemed to be at work. His skin looked slightly less dull, and his eyes were beginning to clear.

  “Ambition can make a man do terrible things,” Strife observed. “How ingenious. Lure your rival to the Labyrinth. Overpower him and shackle him deep within, and then cast a glamour, turning him for all intents and purposes into a terrifying monster. One that no one would ever dare seek out. Better than being buried alive.” He sounded full of quiet approval. “I feel I may have gotten along well with this Splinterstem, had my sister not gotten her claws into his dark and hungry little heart first.”

  “But why?” Henry wanted to know. “I mean, if this guy was his rival for the princess, why didn’t he just, you know…kill him? The old fashioned way? Why fake his death and go to all this trouble, making up a story about a minotaur?”

  “Because a dryad cannot kill a dryad,” Alder croaked, surprising the boys. “Not without it showing. A dryad who kills one of its own kind … it shows on the skin, a sickening. It’s against the laws of the forest …”

  Alder rubbed at his eyes, exhausted.

  “So instead, he imprisoned you here," Robin said. “Returned to the treetop city crying minotaur, claiming to have already disposed of your body. No one ever checked, and no one ever dared entering the Labyrinth again. A perfect plan to keep the crime hidden and keep the Shard safe.”