by Dorian Hart
Aravia steeled herself. “What must I do?”
“You? Nothing. I didn’t lie to Lapis, not about that. It is a thing easily done. There’s usually some grand ceremony when the maze is passed on to a new Keeper, but I am impatient. Here.”
She wasn’t ready. Couldn’t have been ready. His fingers touched her temples, and it felt as though her mind exploded into fragments, every thought a sliver of flickering glass shooting outward into the impossible infinity of the universe. But just as quickly her consciousness drew back, pieced itself together like a puzzle whose pieces now formed a shape infinitely more complex than before.
Her awareness, her sense of self, had become thin and transparent. Beyond the boundary of her identity, beckoning her, yawning before her like a bottomless gulf, swirled a cacophony of images and strange ideas and vast spaces and lines of power and endless magic and churning light clouds and multi-colored planets and…
Here. Come back, Aravia. You are not ready to plumb its depths, though it will call to you.
Solomea, it is too much! How can all the universe fit into a human mind?
Don’t think of it that way. Think instead that your mind has been set into the universe, like a jewel in a crown or an eye in a face. Always remember that you are the center; otherwise you will quickly become lost. The reflected universe is a dangerous place and not meant to be casually explored. It exists to power the maze, but it will tempt you, and if you are not careful it will swallow you as surely as an ocean consumes the rain.
Aravia floated in a space she could not identify, and Solomea hovered before her. The edges of his body, of his clothes, were fuzzy, wispy, as though he were sublimating into vapors.
You will wake soon in Calabash. As an arcanist, you know that one cannot normally teleport out of a pocket dimension, but that is a rule the Crosser’s Maze will allow you to break. Draw upon its aether, but lightly, lest you drown in it. As for using it to seal the rift between Spira and Volpos, that will take all of your intelligence, all of your creativity and focus. Were you anyone else, I would say that nineteen days was not nearly enough time. But you fit to the maze like a key to a lock. If anyone can learn quickly how to reweave the fabric of reality, it is you, Aravia Telmir.
But won’t it be Abernathy? Or one of the other archmagi? Surely they are better suited to the task.
Solomea’s whole body was vapor now, breaking apart, drifting away.
Farewell, Keeper. His voice sounded ever more faint.
Wait! I had so much to ask you! So many questions!
You’d best hurry then. I am nearly gone. I want so badly to be gone…
She forced herself to focus through the overwhelming confusion of possessing the Crosser’s Maze. Solomea was nothing but a shadow now, a loose cloud of matter fading into nonexistence.
Solomea, who is the Sage? Who was Lapis working with?
The Sage is a memory, a remnant of a past age. Solomea’s last words were a dying echo. The Sage is the founder of the Spire. The Sage is Parthol Runecarver.
What? The great hero of the archmagi, who had given his life to defeat Naloric Skewn, father of Naradawk?
Solomea, that’s impossible! Parthol has been dead for centuries. He cannot—
Reality tilted and spun. It swirled like water draining from a basin, and Aravia drained out with it, the strange alternate reality of the Crosser’s Maze blurring, its millions of stars fading into a darkening expanse.
Her eyes fluttered open. She lay on her back, looking up at a clean wooden ceiling, brown boards dusted with a faint, even light. From somewhere nearby came sounds of scuffling, grunting. She turned her head.
Horn’s Company was sprawled out on a wooden floor, roughly lined up, arms and legs flopped at uncomfortable angles. Aravia’s wrists were sore, as though someone had recently gripped them too tightly.
Three bodies down the line lay Ivellios. Mazzery struggled to pull off his golden bracelet.
Boss? Aravia, are you there? What happened?
Pewter? Where are you?
Underneath Morningstar’s hair, I think.
Aravia sat up, purely by instinct, to locate her cat. Mazzery spun his head to stare at her, his eyes huge, his mouth open.
“How—” Presumably he had been going to continue with “did you escape from Solomea’s mind?” or something similar, but he only managed the first word before Ivellios’s right hand shot upward and gripped Mazzery’s neck.
“Son of a bitch!” Ivellios sat up without releasing Mazzery, who was not a large man. There was plenty of strength in Ivellios’s grip. The other members of the company were all waking, and soon enough they surrounded Mazzery, who struggled to choke out breaths though Ivellios’s fingers. Pewter nipped out from beneath Morningstar’s head, leaped onto Aravia’s shoulder, and began to purr.
“I’m so glad you’re alive!” Mazzery said between his gasps. “You escaped from that horrible, horrible man.”
“We sure did,” said Dranko. “And what do we discover upon our escape? Our good friend Mazzery helping himself to our stuff.” He gestured to where Mazzery had made a pile of liberated backpacks, weapons, and jewelry.
“Solomea forced me to do it!” Mazzery squeaked. “He used the Crosser’s Maze to overpower me!”
“That ain’t what Solomea told us,” said Kibi. “He explained your scheme pretty clear, and by the looks of it, he weren’t wrong.”
Mazzery’s eyes flicked back and forth, looking for all the world like a rabbit cornered by dogs. They were in a large empty room with doors on two walls. The wooden panels of the walls and ceiling were pristine, though the floor was badly scuffed and scraped.
“Count yourself lucky that we cannot kill you here in Calabash,” said Morningstar. Aravia had never seen her like this, her face contorted in fury. “But I am of a mind to test the limits of how badly we can injure you.”
“Please!” Mazzery pleaded. “What do you want? Anything! Name it!”
“Lapis,” said Morningstar. “The woman with blue skin. You said she came to you years ago. Where is her body?”
Mazzery gulped, and in a tiny voice said, “With all the others.”
Morningstar pulled her mace from the pile of their pilfered possessions, then brandished it in Mazzery’s face. “Show us.”
Revulsion twisted in Aravia’s gut. It was an emotion she’d normally have avoided, but now she let herself steep in it. Did her heart beat quickly because of what she saw or because of the relative novelty of feeling anything so keenly?
She stood on a balcony, looking down into a small room filled with jumbled bodies, limbs flopped and draped over one another, heads lolling, eyes open and staring. A narrow staircase seemed to be the only way in or out.
“Are they…dead?” Ernie’s voice was a horrified whisper.
Mazzery shook his head emphatically. “Absolutely not. They’re in a kind of stasis. Their hair doesn’t grow, and they don’t age or atrophy. No heartbeats or breath, but I’m certain they’re alive…in a fashion. Calabash won’t let them die.”
He explained all of this in an upbeat, hopeful tone of voice, as if he could mollify Horn’s Company with enough cheerful cooperation. Dranko had tied Mazzery’s hands behind his back, and Ivellios made sure his sword was never out of the man’s view. Neither of them looked placated.
In truth Aravia wasn’t sure of the state of Mazzery’s previous victims. Were their minds still adrift in the infinite expanse of the Crosser’s Maze? Or had Solomea destroyed them, leaving their bodies empty as eggshells, kept alive only by the overriding enchantment of the City Vitreous? If the former, then their minds were in her mind now, and maybe she should try to rescue them. Tor would certainly want her to.
He stood next to her; she reached out and held his hand. He looked down at her, smiled, and gave her hand a squeeze. “There must be fifty people down there,” he said.
“Forty-seven,” said Mazzery. “And I was careful not to harm them. I only took what seemed valuable.�
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Kibi crossed his arms. “Looks like you just tossed ’em over the railing, judgin’ by the way they’re piled up. Not sure ‘careful’ is the word I’d a’ used.”
“None of that matters,” said Morningstar. She pointed down into the pile to a dark-blue body. “We need her head.”
Aravia, for perhaps the first time in her life, found it difficult to concentrate. The Crosser’s Maze waited in her mind like a bottomless pit with no railing, daring her to lean over its edge. Already she itched to know how it would let her teleport the company out of Calabash, as Solomea had promised. Would it hurt to cast her awareness inward, only a little, to explore the edges of the maze’s immensity? It beckoned her as Serpicore’s library once had, but this time she was not forbidden from her desire, but expected to explore it. Slowly, carefully, she—
“Aravia!”
Boss!
Both voices sounded together, Tor’s in her ear and Pewter’s in her mind.
“What?”
“Your face went blank.” Tor’s voice was hushed with worry. “And your eyes, they…they were black for a moment, but speckled with little lights, like stars in the sky.”
She discovered that she had let go of his hand. “I need to learn how to use the maze if we’re going to escape from Calabash.”
“Look there!” said Ernie, pointing into the pit of bodies. “Lapis is moving!”
Lapis’s body twitched and bucked, as though someone tugged it with invisible strings. Then it rose up and rolled over, as someone beneath it heaved it to the side.
Certain Step sat up, looking around himself in shock. “Kemma protect me! Where am I? What has happened?”
“Step!” Dranko waved down to where the Kemman acolyte struggled to his feet. “Do us a favor, will you? Grab Lapis and bring her up here.”
“Are we going to chop off her head?” asked Ernie. “That seems so…barbaric.”
“Look at the bright side,” said Dranko. “She’s catatonic, so she won’t resist. She won’t even notice.”
“Shreen said he preferred her head not be attached,” said Kibi. “I reckon bringing her whole body’ll do well enough. Don’t seem right to hack off her head when she’s…” He gestured to where Step hoisted Lapis onto his shoulder.
“Can we trust Step?” asked Ivellios quietly. “We still don’t know if he was working with Lapis of his own free will.”
“Let’s give him a chance to explain himself,” said Dranko.
Aravia only half-listened to the conversation; she had returned to the edge of the pit, itching to jump in, to begin to plumb the depths of the maze. Did it occupy any physical space inside her mind? Had Solomea suggested using its aether because it was the only source inside Calabash or because it had some special property? Should she begin by seeking out a former Keeper, as Solomea had suggested? How would she do that? Or could she—
Boss, snap out of it!
She shook her head. The Crosser’s Maze stole her attention as a diamond would distract a magpie. Was this how Tor felt all the time, every new thought diverting him from the previous one?
Certain Step struggled up the stairs to the balcony, Lapis slung over his shoulder like a sack of meal. His bronze face had paled. “Will someone please…explain to me…what is happening?” Step huffed as he climbed. “And where is my pendant? And my sword?”
“I can get them for you!” Mazzery said hurriedly.
“Be quick about it,” said Dranko. “Because we need to be going. Aravia, you can get us out, right?”
“Yes.” Her heart again quickened. Unfamiliar as she was with the normal array of emotions, this strange mix of fear and exhilaration struck her like a bolt of energy. She couldn’t resist the call any longer. “Yes. I can get us home.” Aravia held out her hand to Tor. “I’m not sure what’s going to happen,” she whispered, “so don’t let go.”
The Crosser’s Maze. The totality of creation mirrored in her own mind. Aravia cast her awareness inward, trembling on the precipice of everything. Infinity yawned like a chasm. Should she take that final step?
Yes.
Aravia eased herself into the maze, mindful of Solomea’s warnings. She would test its waters carefully, a toe into the opaque unknown, on guard against—
The world around her vanished, smothered by an empty black. She thought she might retain some awareness of her friends in Calabash, of Tor’s strong grip, of Pewter’s wry commentary in her mind, but all of that was gone. Aravia twisted her body around, but nothing provided a frame of reference. She swam in a sea of absence. Where was the universe?
Don’t look for something specific. Simply look.
Ah, yes. As when Solomea had instructed her, Aravia relaxed her mind and sought to sense what existed, what she knew must exist. Instead of peering into the shadows, she imagined what must be behind them. It came a little bit easier than before, a perceptual shift, and the cosmos spooled out in all directions, its scope immeasurable. She didn’t focus on any one thing, but let her mind acclimate (as much as such a thing was possible) to the idea that it contained all of time and space.
Something tingled. She couldn’t describe it better than that; her skin prickled, as though she had stepped out into a gale that pelted her with grit, but that wasn’t precisely accurate. This was new, a sensation without equivalent in the physical world.
It’s aether.
In Charagan, on Spira, wizards understood the presence of the aether and could draw upon it to shape their magic, but it wasn’t something one felt. It existed outside of the human senses of touch and sound, taste and smell. But here, in the maze, aether was everywhere. She swam in it. She breathed it in, absorbed it, exulted in it. Was it because she had existed for so long in Calabash, deprived of aether, that she now felt so suffused? Or was there something qualitatively different about the aether in the maze? Either way, she felt as though there were no limits to how she might impose her will upon reality.
What to do first? They needed to leave Calabash, to leave Kivia behind altogether, to return to Charagan and Abernathy. But she wanted to make one quick stop. Aravia focused her mind on the immediate surroundings of her physical body, unsure of what she would see. And while she saw nothing in the sense of light deflecting off of objects and striking her eyes, she could sense the life-force of her companions. Most formed a ring surrounding her. One rested upon her shoulder. And one stood particularly close, still holding her hand.
Thank you, Tor.
There should be no teleporting out of a bounded pocket dimension, but Solomea had been correct. With the maze, that limitation was gone. She swept up all of her friends—
—and there they were, in the deep, green, shaggy woods not far from where the Feline Conclave made its home. She had arrived with her awareness back in the physical world, with a stinging headache and her bewildered companions looking around in wonder. She had brought Step, but not Mazzery. Lapis, asleep or comatose, was still bent over Step’s shoulder.
“You did it!” Tor still clutched her hand. “We’re free from Calabash!”
“Where are we?” asked Ernie.
Aravia blinked her eyes rapidly, trying to dispel the dreamlike quality that the physical world had taken on. Her flesh felt heavy, cumbersome. She gave Tor’s hand a squeeze, then let it go. “Wait here, all of you. I’ll be back soon.”
Pewter, wait with the others. If you are challenged by a member of the Conclave, explain why these humans are here.
You got it, Boss.
Ivellios put a hand on her shoulder. “Where are you going?”
Aravia peered into the hazy green-gray of the forest. “To tell the Conclave that the Spark-killer is dead.”
* * *
You have succeeded. We knew the moment it happened.
Only the black cat Inkspot occupied the same place as before; he sat upright upon his block of weathered stone. The other cats of the Conclave were sprawled about the glade, regarding her with their impenetrable shining-marble stares.
White Paws rose lazily and walked to where Aravia stood. I suppose I was wrong about you, human. You had a purpose after all.
Queen yawned. Undoubtedly. But Aravia is still a human, and now that she has served her function, I don’t see that she needs to remain here.
The snowshoe, Plumpypuss, flicked his tail. You should show more respect. That purpose was to save the Conclave, as well as the other councils of Sparks. Aravia, you are a hero to cats. Quarrol knew what he was doing when he imbued you. We knew when you killed the Spark-killer because it was a Spark itself. Of course, it is troubling that the Skittering Mischief would betray the rest of Quarrol’s Chosen like that.
We don’t know if it was an intentional betrayal on the part of the rats, said Inkspot. For all that we are at odds with them, we are all children of Quarrol together. My guess is that some outside agent provoked one of the Mischief.
I disagree, said Opal, the golden tabby. I’d say the rats have been plotting this for a long time. The Skittering Mischief has always been up to no good.
And we are still eight, said White Paws. The death of the Spark-killer did not result in Sawgrass’s divinity being reborn into a new kitten. We must be wary that another rat might rise to continue the slaughter.
Plumpypuss jumped down from a stump and stood in the center of the glade. All the more reason to treat Aravia as a respected—no, a vital member of the Conclave.
Indeed, said Inkspot. Quarrol foresaw that the Black Rat would arise and that you would need to strike him down. Who is to say if such a need will not come again?
He narrowed his eyes. Aravia, these last words are for you alone to consider. By the ancient laws of Spira, the gods may not walk the earth. They are compelled to remain in their heavens, and the rules for even the tiniest interventions are prohibitive. They are limited to divinations and prophecies, and may not take a direct hand. In fact, we, the Conclave, the Herd, the Pack, the others, we are the only divine beings of any kind on the surface of the world. And that means you, Aravia, are the only directly divine human being on Spira. I do not think that came about simply to help the feline race. Perhaps there is a place you must go where only gods are permitted, or a yet more dire creature you must slay, whom only a god can kill.