‘How do you know that?’ Kalten asked him.
‘Sir Bevier broke the spears of the ones who were with Adus. That means there are other soldiers here in the labyrinth – probably in small groups the same as this one. I’d guess that they’re here to lead us into traps in the side corridors.’
‘That’s very obliging of them,’ Ulath said.
‘I don’t follow your reasoning, Sir Ulath.’
‘There are traps in the maze, but we have soldiers around to spring them for us. All we have to do is catch them.’
‘One of those silver linings people talk about?’ Tynian asked.
‘You could say that, yes. The Zemochs we catch might not look at it that way, though.’
‘Are those soldiers behind us coming up very fast?’ Kurik asked him.
‘Not very.’
Kurik went back to the side corridor, holding his torch aloft. He was smiling grimly when he came back. ‘There are torch rings in the side passages the same as there are in this one,’ he told them. ‘Why don’t we move a few torches as we go along? We’ve been following the torches, and those soldiers have been following us. If the torches start leading them off into the side passages where the traps are, wouldn’t they sort of slow down a bit?’
‘I don’t know about them,’ Ulath said, ‘but I know I would.’
Chapter 28
Zemoch soldiers periodically charged out of side corridors, their faces bearing the hopeless expressions of men who considered themselves already dead. The ultimatum, ‘surrender or die’, however, opened an option to them the existence of which they had not even been aware. Most of them leaped at the chance to seize it. Their effusive gratitude waned, however, when they found that they were expected to take the lead.
The traps designed to surprise the unwary were ingenious. In those passages where the floor did not drop open, the ceiling collapsed. The bottoms of most of the pits in the floor were studded with sharpened stakes, although several pits housed assorted reptiles – all venomous and all bad tempered. Once, when the designer of the labyrinth had evidently grown bored with pits and falling ceilings, the walls smashed forcefully together.
‘There’s something wrong here,’ Kurik said, even as yet another despairing shriek echoed through the maze from behind them where the soldiers who had burst into the throne room were exploring side corridors.
‘Things seem to be going rather well to me,’ Kalten said.
‘These soldiers live here, Kalten,’ the squire said, ‘and they don’t seem to be any more familiar with this labyrinth than we are. We’ve just run out of prisoners again. I think it’s time to consider a few things. Let’s not make any blunders.’
They gathered in the centre of the corridor. ‘This doesn’t make any sense, you know,’ Kurik told them.
‘Coming to Zemoch?’ Kalten said. ‘I could have told you that back in Chyrellos.’
Kurik ignored that. ‘We’ve been following a trail of blood spots on the floor, and that trail is still stretching on out in front of us – right down the middle of a torch-lit corridor.’ He scraped one foot at a large blood-spot on the floor. ‘If someone were really bleeding this hard, he would have been dead a long time ago.’
Talen bent, touched one finger to a glistening red spot on the floor and then touched the finger to his tongue. He spat. ‘It isn’t blood,’ he said.
‘What is it?’ Kalten asked.
‘I don’t know, but it isn’t blood.’
‘We’ve been bamboozled then,’ Ulath said sourly. ‘I was beginning to wonder about that. What’s worse, we’re trapped in here. We can’t even turn around and follow the torches back because we’ve been busily moving torches for the past half-hour or more.’
‘This is what’s known in logic as “defining the problem”,’ Bevier said with a weak smile. ‘I think the next step is called “finding a solution”.’
‘I’m no expert at it,’ Kalten admitted, ‘but I don’t think we’re going to be able to logic our way out of this.’
‘Why not use the rings?’ Berit suggested. ‘Couldn’t Sparhawk just blow a hole straight through the maze?’
‘The passages are mostly barrel-vaults, Berit,’ Kurik said. ‘If we start blowing holes in the walls, we’ll have the ceiling down on our heads.’
‘What a shame,’ Kalten sighed. ‘So many good ideas have to be discarded simply because they won’t work.’
‘Are we absolutely bent on solving the riddle of the maze?’ Talen asked them. ‘I mean, does finding the solution have some sort of religious significance?’
‘None that I know of,’ Tynian replied.
‘Why stay inside the maze then?’ the boy asked innocently.
‘Because we’re trapped here,’ Sparhawk told him, trying to control his irritation.
‘That’s not exactly true, Sparhawk. We’ve never been really trapped. Kurik might be right about the danger involved in knocking down the walls, but he didn’t say a thing about the ceiling.’
They stared at him. Then they all began to laugh a bit foolishly.
‘We don’t know what’s up there, of course,’ Ulath noted.
‘We don’t know what’s around the next corner either, Sir Knight. And we’ll never know what’s above the ceiling until we have a look, will we?’
‘It could just be open sky,’ Kurik said.
‘Is that any worse than what we have down here, father? Once we get outside, Sparhawk might be able to use the rings to break through the outer wall of the temple. Otha may find mazes entertaining, but I think I’ve more or less had enough amusement out of this one. One of the first rules Platime ever taught me was that if you don’t like the game, don’t play.’
Sparhawk looked questioningly at Sephrenia.
She was also smiling ruefully. ‘I didn’t even think of it myself,’ she admitted.
‘Can we do it?’
‘I don’t see any reason why not – as long as we stand back a way so that we don’t get crushed by falling rubble. Let’s have a look at this ceiling.’
They raised their torches to look up at the barrel-vaulted ceiling. ‘Is that construction going to cause any kind of problem?’ Sparhawk asked Kurik.
‘Not really. The stones are laid in interlocking courses, so they’ll hold – eventually. There’s going to be a lot of rubble, though.’
‘That’s all right, Kurik,’ Talen said gaily. ‘The rubble will give us something to climb up on.’
‘It’s going to take a great deal of force to knock loose any of those stone blocks, though,’ Kurik said. ‘The weight of the whole corridor is holding the vault together.’
‘What would happen if a few of those blocks just weren’t there any more?’ Sephrenia asked him.
Kurik went to one of the upward-curving walls and probed at a crack between two stone blocks with his knife. ‘They used mortar,’ he said. ‘It’s fairly rotten, though. If you can dissolve a half-dozen of those blocks up there, a fairly sizeable piece of the ceiling will fall in.’
‘But the whole corridor won’t collapse?’
He shook his head. ‘No. After a few yards of it tumble in, the structure will be sound again.’
‘Can you really dissolve rocks?’ Tynian asked Sephrenia curiously.
She smiled. ‘No, dear one. But I can change them into sand – which amounts to the same thing, doesn’t it?’ She intently studied the ceiling for several moments. ‘Ulath,’ she said then, ‘you’re the tallest. Lift me up. I have to touch the stones.’
Ulath blushed a bright red, and they all knew why. Sephrenia was not the sort of person one put one’s hands on.
‘Oh, don’t be such a goose, Ulath,’ she told him. ‘Lift me up.’
Ulath looked around menacingly. ‘We aren’t going to talk about this, are we?’ he said to his friends. Then he bent and lifted her easily.
She clambered upward, looking not unlike someone climbing a tree. When she was high enough, she reached up and put the palms of her
hands on several of the stones, pausing briefly with each one. Her touch seemed almost caressing. ‘That should do it,’ she said. ‘You can put me down again, Sir Knight.’
Ulath lowered her to the floor, and they retreated back down the corridor. ‘Be ready to run,’ she cautioned them. ‘This is a little inexact.’ She began to move her hands in front of her, speaking rapidly in Styric as she did so. Then she held out both hands, palms up, to release the spell.
Fine sand began to sift down from the ceiling, slithering out of the cracks between the roughly squared-off building blocks. At first it was only a trickle, but it steadily increased.
‘Looks almost like water leaking out, doesn’t it?’ Kalten observed as the sand-flow increased.
The walls began to creak, and there were popping noises as the mortar between the stones started to crack.
‘We can go back a bit further,’ Sephrenia said, looking apprehensively at all the rock around them. ‘The spell’s working. We don’t have to stand here to supervise it.’ Sephrenia was a very complex little woman. She was sometimes timid about very ordinary things and at other times indifferent to horrendous ones. They walked further on back up the corridor as the building blocks near the place where the sand was now pouring down out of the ceiling creaked and groaned and grated together, settling in a fraction of an inch at a time to replace the sand.
When it came, it came all at once. A large section of the overhead vault collapsed with the grinding clatter of falling rock and a large cloud of eons-old dust that billowed down the corridor towards them, setting them all to coughing. As the dust gradually settled, they saw a large, jagged hole in the ceiling.
‘Let’s go and have a look,’ Talen said. ‘I’m curious to find out what’s up there.’
‘Could we wait just a bit longer?’ Sephrenia asked fearfully. ‘I’d really like to be sure that it’s safe.’
They struggled up the pile of rubble from the fallen ceiling and boosted each other up through the hole. The area above the ceiling was a vast, domed emptiness, dusty and stale-smelling. The light from the torches they had brought with them from the corridor below seemed sickly and did not reach out as far as the walls – if walls to this dim place indeed existed. The floor resembled to a remarkable degree a field laced with the upward-bulging burrows of a colony of extraordinarily industrious moles, and they saw a number of structural peculiarities they had not perceived when down in the maze.
‘Sliding walls,’ Kurik said, pointing. ‘They can change the maze any time they want to by closing off some passage and opening others. That’s why those Zemoch soldiers didn’t know where they were going.’
‘There’s a light,’ Ulath told them, ‘way over there to the left. It seems to be coming up from down below.’
‘The temple maybe?’ Kalten suggested.
‘Or the throne-room again. Let’s go and have a look.’
They threaded their way along the tops of the vaults for some distance and then came to a straight path that stretched in one direction towards the light Ulath had seen and off into the darkness in the other.
‘No dust,’ Ulath said, pointing at the stones of the path. ‘This is used fairly often.’
The going was much faster on the straight pathway, and they soon reached the source of the flickering light. It was a flight of stone stairs leading down into a torchlit room – a room with four walls and no doors.
‘That’s ridiculous,’ Kalten snorted.
‘Not really,’ Kurik disagreed, raising his torch to peer over the side of the path. ‘That front wall slides on those tracks.’ He pointed at a pair of metal tracks below that emerged from the room on the outside. He leaned forward to look more closely. ‘There’s no machinery out here, so there has to be a latch of some kind in that room. Sparhawk, let’s go down and see if we can find it.’
The two of them went down the stairs into the room. ‘What are we looking for?’ Sparhawk asked his friend.
‘How should I know? Something that looks ordinary but isn’t.’
‘That’s not very specific, Kurik.’
‘Just start pushing on rocks, Sparhawk. If you find one that can be depressed, it’s probably the latch.’
They went along the walls pushing on rocks. After a few minutes, Kurik stopped, a slightly foolish look on his face. ‘You can stop, Sparhawk,’ he said. ‘I found the latches.’
‘Where?’
‘There are torches on the side walls and on the back, right?’
‘Yes. So what?’
‘But there aren’t any torches on the front wall – the one right in front of the foot of the stairs.’
‘So?’
‘There are a couple of torch rings, though.’ Kurik went to the front wall and pulled on one of the rusty iron rings. There was a solid-sounding clank. ‘Pull the other one, Sparhawk,’ he suggested. ‘Let’s open this door and see what’s behind it.’
‘Sometimes you’re so clever you make me sick, Kurik,’ Sparhawk said sourly. Then he grinned. ‘Let’s get the others down here first,’ he said. ‘I’d rather not open that door and find half the Zemoch army behind it with only the two of us here to hold them off.’ He went to the stairs and beckoned to his waiting friends, touching one finger to his lips as he did so to signal the need for silence.
They came down quietly to avoid clinking.
‘Kurik found the latches,’ Sparhawk whispered. ‘We don’t know what’s on the other side of the door, so we’d better be ready.’
Kurik motioned to them. ‘The wall isn’t too heavy,’ he said quietly, ‘and the track it slides on seems to be well greased. Berit and I should be able to move it. The rest of you should be ready for anything on the other side.’
Talen moved quickly to the corner on the left side and put his face close to the two intersecting walls. ‘I’ll be able to look through here just as soon as you get it open an inch or so,’ he told his father. ‘If I shout, slam it shut again.’
Kurik nodded. ‘Are we ready?’ he asked.
They all nodded, their weapons in their hands and their muscles tense.
Kurik and Berit pulled out on the torch rings and inched the wall aside slightly. ‘Anything yet?’ Kurik hissed to his son.
‘Nobody’s there,’ Talen replied. ‘It’s a short corridor with just one torch. It seems to go back about twenty paces and then it turns to the left. There’s quite a bit of light coming from beyond that turn.’
‘All right, Berit,’ Kurik said, ‘let’s open it all the way.’
The two of them slid the wall the rest of the way open.
‘Now that is very, very clever,’ Bevier said admiringly. ‘The labyrinth down here doesn’t go anywhere at all. The real route to the temple is up above it.’
‘Let’s find out where we are – in the temple or back at the throne-room,’ Sparhawk said. ‘And let’s be as quiet as we can.’
Talen looked as if he were about to say something.
‘Forget it,’ Kurik told him. ‘It’s too dangerous. You just stay behind the rest of us with Sephrenia.’
They moved out into the short corridor where the single torch near the far end provided a dim, flickering light.
‘I don’t hear anything,’ Kalten whispered to Sparhawk.
‘People waiting in ambush don’t usually make noise, Kalten.’
They paused just before the corridor turned sharply to the left. Ulath edged to the corner, pulled off his helmet and took a quick look, his head darting out and back once. ‘Empty,’ he said shortly. ‘It seems to turn right about ten or fifteen paces further on.’
They moved on around the corner and crept along the short passage. Again they stopped at the corner, and Ulath popped his head out again. ‘It’s a kind of an alcove,’ he whispered. ‘There’s an archway that opens out into a wider corridor. There’s a lot of light out there.’
‘Did you see anybody?’ Kurik asked him.
‘Not a soul.’
‘That should be the main corridor out
there,’ Bevier murmured. ‘The stairs that lead up out of the maze to the real route to the temple should be fairly close to the end of the labyrinth – either at the throne-room or at the temple.’
They rounded the corner into the alcove, and Ulath again took a quick look. ‘It’s the main corridor, all right,’ he reported, ‘and there’s a turn a hundred paces off to the left.’
‘Let’s go up to that corner,’ Sparhawk decided. ‘If Bevier’s right, the hallway beyond the corner should lead out of the maze. Sephrenia, you stay in here with Talen, Bevier and Berit. Kurik, you guard the door. The rest of us will go and have a look.’ He leaned close to his squire and whispered. ‘If things start to go wrong, get Sephrenia and the others back to the room at the foot of the stairs. Slide the wall shut and lock it.’
Kurik nodded. ‘Be careful out there, Sparhawk,’ he said quietly.
‘You too, my friend.’
The four knights stepped out into the broad, vaulted corridor and crept along towards the torchlit corner ahead. Kalten followed the rest of them, turning often to keep watch to the rear. At the corner, Ulath briefly poked out his head. Then he stepped back. ‘We might have known,’ he whispered disgustedly. ‘It’s the throne-room. We’re right back where we started from.’
‘Is there anybody in there?’ Tynian asked.
‘Probably, but why bother them? Let’s just go on back to that staircase, slide the wall shut again and leave the people in the throne-room to take care of their own entertainment.’
It was as they were turning around that it happened. Adus, followed by a score of Zemoch soldiers, burst from a side passage not too far from the entrance to the alcove, and he was bellowing at the top of his lungs. Cries of alarm echoed into the corridor from the throne-room itself.
‘Tynian! Ulath!’ Sparhawk snapped, ‘hold off the ones in the throne-room! Let’s go, Kalten!’ Then he and his blond friend dashed back towards the opening where Kurik stood guard.
Adus was far too limited to be anything but predictable. He savagely drove his soldiers on ahead of him and slouched forward, a brutal war-axe in his hand and an insane look in his pig-like eyes.
The Sapphire Rose Page 50