by Paul Collins
‘Was this what happened to your last apprentice?’ he shouted at the yellow walls. ‘Did you put him in here, too?’
There was no answer but a distant rumbling, as though of mocking laughter.
If talking to Master Pukje was like being tied up in knots, his silences were like being tied up and rolled off a cliff.
Ros walked carefully back to the crossroads and took the left path, ducking his head to avoid banging it on rocky outcrops. The risk of taking a wrong turn was undiminished, but he would rather fail by trying than by sitting in the dark, empty of hope.
Inaction was for the wise, his teacher sometimes said. And for the old, Ros always replied.
At the next dead end, he was forced to crouch back the way he had come.
This time he went straight across the intersection to the one tunnel he hadn’t followed, another curv ing, sweeping route that led to a T-junction. He went right, feeling the awkwardness of his hunched posture in the muscles of his back and thighs.
The dead end he found there reduced him to a crawl. And crawling meant no light, because both his hands were busy.
But he didn’t complain. He said nothing at all. The only thing he could do was retreat and press on, feeling for the notches he had left and hoping the maze would make sense sooner rather than later. Because at this rate, there might not be a later before long.
Another intersection and then another. His knees were bruised and raw by the time he found himself nose to stone at another dead end. He wrapped his arms around his head as the tunnel shook and shrank. He hacked and coughed in the rising dust. Afterwards, there was barely sufficient space to turn around.
Ros fought a rising panic. He wasn’t ordinarily afraid of small spaces, but this was different. This was a nightmare. Who knew how much further he had to go before reaching the centre of the maze, crawling on hands and knees until they were bloody to the bone? Who knew how many more dead ends he could endure? He didn’t dare imagine what it would be like to be trapped down here forever, lost like a rat in a snake warren with no end.
He kept fear at bay, barely, by telling himself that Master Pukje never did anything without a purpose, even if it was at first inscrutable. He wouldn’t throw away the life of his apprentice on a whim, even if Ros was just the latest of many.
But what about afailed apprentice .. . ?
Shut up, he told that treacherous part of his brain. I’ve beaten everything else he’s thrown at me, and I’ll beat this, too.
After the next dead end, he couldn’t turn. He had to back up awkwardly to the last intersection and twist until his spine almost snapped to fit into the next tunnel.
And then, when that tunnel also turned into a dead end, he found that he could no longer crawl at all. He could only creep along by flexing his toes and his fingers like some ungainly human earthworm, unable to see anything, unable to hear anything but the desperate rasping of his breath. Please, it sounded like - and the rhythm of his flexing limbs went what happened, what happened . . . ?
They couldn’t all be dead ends, could they?
He almost wept when the tunnel he had been painfully inching along concluded in, not the centre of the maze, but one more blank yellow wall.
The maze pressed close around him, gripping him as tightly as a stone coffin. And so it might as well have been.
‘Master ... why?’ he asked, unable to move even a fingertip. ‘What did I do wrong? How did I fail you?’ His voice sounded very loud to his dust-plugged ears, but no one answered.
There was nowhere else to go. He was trapped. The air was already growing stale.
Ros sagged in defeat, wishing he had never won dered about the apprentices that had come before him, boys he had never known and should have cared less than nothing about. Maybe their skeletons littered corners of the maze he hadn’t reached yet, and now his would join them. He could go no further, no matter how much he might want to. His journey was over. He would die ignorant, denied the future he had dreamed of
I’m sorry, he whispered to the girl he had prom ised himself to long ago, even though there was no possible way she could hear him.
He had reached the end.
In the lightless coffin, Ros’s eyes suddenly shot open. The darkness looked the same to him, but everything was suddenly different.
He had reached the end.
Could it be so simple? He didn’t dare hope, but hope blazed in him anyway. There was nowhere left for him to go, so couldn’t it be said that he had, in a weird way, reached the centre of the maze? It was exactly the kind of riddle his teacher might call education.
‘Master Pukje, I get it,’ he croaked. ‘I am the centre. Now let me out of here before I choke!’
Through layers of stone, like a distant earthquake, came the same mocking chuckle as before, and for a terrible moment Ros feared that he was wrong, that the end of his subterranean struggles really did mean the end for him, too.
But then the stone flexed around him, bucking and buckling his body into a series of unnatural and painful shapes. His skull was squeezed so tightly he saw tiny lights in his eyes.
Then all the lights coalesced into one, growing brighter and brighter and he was moving, surging forward as though on the back of an avalanche, tumbling, turning and falling heavily to the ground at the feet of an open-mouthed dragon. A dragon who had coughed him up like a fur-ball from depths he couldn’t fathom.
‘Welcome back,’ said Master Pukje. ‘Have a nice trip?’
Ros laughed, coughed, then laughed some more. The stars were impossibly clear. The air smelled sweeter than he had ever known it before. He was alive.
‘Did I imagine all of it?’ he managed to say. ‘I can’t really have been inside you, can I?’
‘What difference does it make? The important thing is that you learned your lesson. Tell me what that was.’
‘I am the centre of the maze,’ he repeated.
‘I think you can do better than that.’
Ros composed himself, forcing his aching limbs into a sitting position and raising a small cloud of yellow dust as he did so.
‘I am the architect of my own confusion?’
‘Could be.’
‘Being with you is making me more lost than ever?’
‘Now you’re trying too hard.’ Master Pukje grinned. ‘Maybe I just want you to think twice before accepting a potion from someone, no matter how trustworthy they might seem.’
‘So I shouldn’t trust you?’
‘I don’t care if you do or do not, Ros. Just trust yourself more.’
Ros thought all this through, wondering if he was dreaming this conversation, too. The scabs and scrapes seemed real. He was thirsty and tired and, judging by the stars, some hours had passed. The experience was real enough. The lesson, too, whatever that was supposed to be.
He felt a rising dizziness: the after-effects of the potion, he assumed.
‘You said I’d find out what happened to your last apprentice.’
‘And you did, Ros. She went into the maze, just like you.’
‘But did she pass the test?’
‘No. I ate her.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ he said.
‘All right, then. She was smarter than you and got out within half an hour. Does that make you feel any better?’
Ros lay down on the ground and closed his eyes, which did nothing at all to quell his vertigo. Real or hallucinatory, the world was fading again.
‘I don’t think either of those stories are true,
Master Pukje.’
‘I don’t think that really matters.’
Ros’s teacher curled around him in dragon form, like a giant leathery dog, and gently covered him with one expansive wing.
‘You’re here. Let that be enough, for no
w.’
Of all the girls in the port city of D’loom, nobody knew better thanjelindel how far or fast Lady Fortune could cast a person down. She had been in the garden of her prosperous father’s mansion one night, gazing up at the night sky and escaping the noise and bickering of her family. That very night the dark, deadly figures had struck, slaughtering everyone in the house, then burning the place to the ground.
Jelindel alone had escaped, but because she could read and write, she soon found work as a scribe in the market. She dressed as a boy and called herself Jaelin, because if someone had wanted her entire family dead, they would now be looking for the one girl who had escaped. If the murderers had done a body count before starting the fires, then she was definitely being hunted.
The day had all started like any other, and by the afternoon she found herself making a little more money than usual. The D’loom market was always crowded with buyers and sellers, the latter hawking their wares at the top of their vmces, the nmse indescribable.
Jelindel had been sitting cross-legged beside the scribe’s stall she shared with Bebia, though just then the old man was off fetching his afternoon cup of teblith - a drink brewed from dried beans, and that seemed strong enough to make the dead sit up.
‘I’m alive and things can’t get any worse,’ was what she whispered to herself every day, every hour, and sometimes every minute. She was whispering it when a sudden quiet made her look up.
Coming towards her, swathed in their distinctive maroon-coloured robes, was a clutch of Maelorian monks. She looked to her left. In the distance, rising grandly above D’loom’s smog, were the towering walls of their temple fortress, Maelor, named after the god they served.
Only moments before, the marketplace had been a seething cauldron of noise and activity. Now it was silent, and a large space had opened up around the monks to let them through unhindered.
Jelindel wondered what was happening, because the monks of Maelor seldom left their temple fortress. Although powerful and dangerous, they rarely interfered with those in D’loom. It almost seemed as if the citizens of the port city were not important enough to murder.
‘Get an eyeful,’ muttered Barbar, the one-eyed salt seller in the next stall. ‘Pity them as have business with that lot!’
‘Keep your gaze and voice down!’ Jelindel hissed back.
‘Trouble’s brewing.’
‘What now?’
‘You have customers.’
The monks weren’t passing by, they were coming straight for Jelindel’s stall. She swallowed, and noticed that Barbar was sidling away from her.
The monks came to a stop in front of the stall, as perfectly synchronised as a squad of soldiers. They parted, and a senior monk stepped forward. He was short, well-muscled, and utterly expressionless.
Jelindel stood, trying not to let her legs shake. She gave the monk a small bow, unsure of the proper etiquette for greeting killer monks.
‘Welcome, exalted one,’ saidjelindel. ‘My master,
Bebia Ral’Vey, greets thee through this junior one, and sends his apologies for being absent at so auspi cious a time. May this unworthy one bear a message to his master?’
The short monk gave her a curt nod. ‘I am Stands Waiting. I serve at the feet of my master, who is called Benign Fist. I am here to engage your services, Jel -Jaelin.’
Jelindel gasped inwardly. Stands Waiting had all but told her he knew her real name. How could that be? Jelindel dek Mediesar was supposed to be dead, butchered and burned with the rest of her family! So, the murderers had indeed counted the bodies, and had noticed that they were a body short.
Had the monks killed her family?
She kept any hint of her inner turmoil out of her voice as she answered. ‘This unworthy one is honoured beyond words for such unexpected benevolence.’
Stands Waiting regarded her for a moment, then stepped closer.Jelindel tried not to flinch. Maelorian monks could move so fast that their movements were a blur. Even Zimak, considered one of the finest Silurian kick-fist fighters in D’loom, would have turned and run if Stands Waiting had stepped into the ring with him.
‘Let us speak plainly . . . Jaelin,’ said Stands Waiting, lowering his voice to almost a whisper. ‘Let us also speak very, very quietly.’
He raised a hand, palm up. From behind him a monk placed a bamboo tube into his grasp. Stands Waiting removed a scroll and spread it on the stall in front of Jelindel.
‘This is the Star Testament. As you see, it contains writing in the ancient language of Astradis. I know that you have been taught it, no need for silly games of deception.’
‘But many scholars know Astradis.’
‘True, but the person who wrote the testament was killed by her captors as soon as it was finished.
Only then did they discover that it had been a subtle code, woven within the astrological text and pictures. We want you to decrypt it. Many have tried. All have failed.’
‘But master, why me?’
‘Because you are one of the speakers of Astradis who has not been given a chance to decode it. Take care and be diligent, because we kill every fifth scholar who fails, just to give the others some incentive.’
Jelindel gulped. There had been the slightest em phasis on the word ‘fails’. It told her that there was a fairly good chance that the previous four scholars who had disappointed Stands Waiting were still alive.
‘We will return in forty-eight hours,’ said Stands
Waiting, who then turned and strode away without another word.
‘Wait!’ calledjelindel.
Stands Waiting stopped and turned, regarding her with a cold, blank expression.
Jelindel gestured at the scroll. ‘Forty-eight hours isn’t enough!’
‘Is forty-eight years enough?’ asked Stands Waiting.
‘You have forty-eight hours, use them wisely.’
‘But I’m not certain I can do it!’
‘Then the scholar who follows you will have your fate to inspire him.’
There was that threat again, though less veiled than before.
‘What if I can’t do it?’ askedjelindel, desperate to find some trapdoor to escape this mad commission.
‘Then here is a little more incentive,’ said Stands Waiting. ‘We know who killed your family. If you fail, we will tell them where you live. If you succeed . .. we know where they live.’
‘But -’
‘And if you succeed, do not think about using the secret of the Star Testament on us. The followers of Maelor are shielded by an anchor spell. It protects us from even the intention of attack.’
And with that, the monks of Maelor were gone. Jelindel stared after them, shifting rapidly from one mood to another: anger, relief, fear, and then back to anger. She sat down hard and stared at the scroll.
From nearby came Barbar’s voice. ‘My deepest condolences, Jaelin,’ he began, but she waved him silent.
Moments later, Bebia returned, looking pale. ‘Is it true? Were they here?’
Jelindel nodded. Bebia sat down, pressing a hand to his chest. ‘May the gods protect you.’
‘Should I start running or decoding?’ Jelindel wondered aloud.
‘Nobody can run faster than the monks,’ said
Bebia.
If running and decoding were not options, that left hiding. The youth Zimak was good at hiding, especially when he had just thrown a kick-fist fight, and angry betters were looking for him and waving cudgels.
‘I need to see Zimak, do you know where he is today?’ askedjelindel.
Bebia nodded. ‘He’s in the stocks for a week, for throwing a fight.’
Jelindel closed her eyes tightly for a moment. Zimak was not so much her best friend as her only friend. She was in hiding, pursued by criminals, so sh
e needed criminal skills. Zimak had been the perfect teacher for anything criminal, but now he was no help to anyone.
‘I fear, boy, that you are too good at what you do,’ said Bebia. ‘Word has spread.’
‘Cursed by competence,’ mutteredjelindel, pick ing up the scroll.
Jelindel didn’t sleep that night. Even as the noise in the marketplace died away with the coming of dark ness, she sat poring over the testament by the light of a lamp burning discarded cooking oil. It did not take long to translate the testament, but the words told her nothing. She studied the pictures from every angle, even upside down. But it was all to no avail.
Jelindel threw her hands up in despair and slumped across her work bench.
Dawn came, and the D’loom market lurched into life again, unsteadily, like a soldier forced to wake up and start marching after a night in the taverns.
Today something was different, however. It was as if everyone - buyers and sellers alike - was avoiding the scribe’s stall. Even Bebia managed to make himself absent for long periods.
In a way, this helped. Jelindel had slipped into the world of code breaking, searching for subtle patterns, recurring motifs, analysing the spacing between words and letters, the orientation of pictures and script, always seeking symbolic meanings . . .
By late afternoon Jelindel had used up her first twenty-four hours. When the sun set she had less than twenty hours until the deadline.
Jelindel began to panic. There was nothing in the testament! It simply told the myth about a witch who had made a journey to the stars and returned with a terrible spell, one so powerful it could not be shared. The witch had been forced to write the testa ment, but she had probably known what was going to happen to her. She had also been gagged, so that she could not use the spell on her captors. Had she used a code too clever for her stupid captors, or had she written gibberish? Were the monks wrong? Was there no secret message?
Jelindel had examined the other side of the scroll, which was blank. She had cast some simple spells, toy magic used by teenage scholars to pass invis ible messages to each other. They revealed nothing. The parchment itself was very old, and had been inscribed with a pen using an expensive metal nib.