The Well-Favored Man

by Elizabeth Willey

  “We’ll go armed,” he decided.

  “I wonder—” I started, and stopped.

  “What?” Freia urged me.

  “A foolish thought,” I shrugged.

  Now they all looked at me, and Dewar shrugged, then looked down for an instant, biting his lip. “Go on anyway,” he said.

  “I wonder which side of the door we’re on.”

  Whichever side we were on, it didn’t have much to distinguish it.

  Lanterns at our feet (Dewar and I had chosen to use them rather than sorcerous lights for conservation purposes), we stood in a crowded semicircle in the black-walled hall and looked the door over again. Mother shivered and pulled her mantle around herself more tightly. Prospero suddenly squeezed her shoulder.

  “I feel as you: ’tis none of ours,” he said in an undertone.

  “And old,” she whispered.

  “Yes. Something ancient is worked into it … What lies on the other side of this wall in an analogous position?” Prospero asked, turning to me and pointing at the side of the corridor.

  I had never thought—or been able—to check that. So, using a length of string (Mother had insisted we each carry a rather odd assortment of items, and a ball of thread was one of them), Dewar and I measured the distance to the mouth of this corridor and then, he standing at the mouth, I walked along the wall the same distance away.

  “Nothing,” I called, and regretted it, for the sound echoed horribly.

  Dewar didn’t answer, and I had a prickling and unpleasant sensation on the back of my neck as I walked back to him where he waited, thread in hand, as I rolled it up into the ball again.

  “Nothing,” I repeated.

  “And more nothing,” he said. “What’s twice nothing?”

  “Nothing again.”

  “Can you be sure it’s the original nothing again, and not another nothing?” He grinned, quick and tense.

  “Indeed,” I agreed, my mood not supporting repartee.

  We rejoined Prospero and his daughter, who were touching the door gingerly.

  “I don’t like it,” she was whispering, and her whisper slid along the stones to us.

  “No more do I, Puss,” he said, and jumped and whirled on us, half-drawing before recognizing our lights. “Ha! —I advise that you not do that again,” he said, relaxing.

  Dewar said, “Gwydion found nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  I shrugged. “The wall is the wall.”

  “It goes on straight, in short?”

  “And long. Yes.”

  “Hm. No discontinuity …”

  “No.”

  “Then this must go, one way or another,” Prospero declared, turning back to the door and glaring at it in such a way that most sensible doors would open at once without any backtalk. This one remained stubbornly immobile.

  “Decree what you will against Nature; she’ll break your law if it pleases her,” Dewar said, folding his arms. “Just how do you propose we remove it?”

  Prospero thumped the door angrily. “This thing is against Nature; Nature decrees its removal. Fire touched it not, you said.”

  Dewar held up his hand, which was suddenly outlined in white fire, and laid it against the door mutely. Nothing, though the heat thrown off by the flame was oppressive in the small space.

  “I see. Not fire. Nor axes.”

  Dewar blew on his hand and the flame disappeared, though it wasn’t his puff of breath that had extinguished it. Half of the best sorcery is showmanship, he’d said once to me. “No sorcery Gwydion or I knew.”

  “Crowbars?”

  “I tried that,” I said. “I couldn’t get a purchase. It just slipped all over.”

  Freia was running her hands lightly around the perimeter of the door, as high up as she could reach, as we spoke.

  “You didn’t hurt yourself, did you?” she asked me, looking over her shoulder with widening eyes, her brows coming together.

  “No,” I said. “I was careful, Mother.”

  “You’re thinking of something,” Dewar said.

  “Not thinking …” She ran her hand down one side of the door, touching the corner where stones and wood met. They joined seamlessly; there was no crack to work at. The fold of her mantle she’d put over her head had slipped back off her hair. Prospero, holding the lantern for her above her head, watched her and waited.

  “You’re sure it’s none of yours.” Freia rose and turned to her father, standing from where she’d been studying the stone floor.

  “Certain.”

  She looked up at him and nodded and then turned back to the door. We contemplated it with her, three large men, one holding a lantern, one with his hands jammed in his pockets, one expecting his owl to land on his shoulder at any moment and scare the living daylights out of him.

  “Could I … could I borrow that silver dagger of yours, Dewar?” Freia asked presently.

  “It’s yours.” He bowed slightly as he presented it to her, hilt-first. She accepted it without turning around.

  Prospero lowered his head and a frown crept over his face.

  A ripple of power came into the hallway where we stood looking at this dead end, and a stronger current followed it. It came from the Spring; it came at Freia’s bidding, and she was building it up in herself and preparing to give the door a blow with the dagger.

  I had tried that already with the axe and a number of other implements, but it is best not to interrupt someone who is concentrating that way. Dewar caught my eye and shook his head, tolerantly superior—he had tried it too. Prospero closed his eyes for a moment and I felt him boost the current, adding his own demand to Freia’s and increasing thereby the power tenfold because of his affinity. Freia’s body swayed as he did, and then she adjusted herself to the greater power and I felt her assent to it.

  She lifted the dagger, gripping it, and poised herself. I braced myself for the discharge and sketched a quick screen around me. Dewar did likewise. It was coming to a peak, coming closer, I could feel the surge building up—

  Moving so fast I only saw the gesture when she’d completed it—or perhaps I never saw it and my mind reconstructed it from the start and finish which I did see—Freia moved her right dagger-holding hand down and her smooth left hand up and slashed the palm of the latter with the blade in the former and slammed her left hand hard and flat against the door as she slammed it simultaneously with the Spring’s built-up power.

  The noise was a thunderous one. It must have echoed through the realm and out to Argylle’s Border Ranges, booming and reverberating so loudly that the Catacombs could not contain it. I felt the Spring’s rush pass me by and pass through her bloody hand and smite the door, and I felt something give.

  Dewar shouted something, but it was lost in the noise of the blow.

  Mother did not do sorcery. She always relied on Dewar for anything of that sort. But she had an instinct for it, which is only natural, and this utterly unorthodox and unregulated stunt must have been something her instinct prompted her to try.

  Freia was leaning against the door, her body a tight arc, pushing her hand against it, eyes closed and face contorted. The blood was running down from her gashed hand where it was pressed to the dark wood, and the stained dagger was still in her right hand.

  We stood very still, breathing stopped, all trying to figure out whether anything had happened.

  I felt something giving in the door’s monolithic resistance.

  Freia sighed and pulled her hand away, and Dewar, quick as a hummingbird, was there beside her to wrap his handkerchief around her hand and press the deep cut until no more blood welled out. Prospero stared at the door, which had a widening hole in the thick cross-grained wood where Freia’s bloody hand had struck.

  “What did you do?” I asked. We had tried things just like that, but without the blood, again and again.

  “Told it I am in charge,” Freia said, catching her breath.

  Prospero and I bent and tried to look
through the hole, but there seemed to be just darkness on the other side. I lifted a lantern and held it up and back, trying to shine light in there, and we muttered back and forth about whether we saw rock or dark nothing. The door was evaporating, disappearing as if it had never been there. The bloodstain crept outward and fringed the opening as it widened.

  “Gryphon’s blood?” I whispered. It is corrosive under some circumstances.

  “ ’Tis potent stuff,” muttered Prospero, raking his lower lip with his teeth.

  “What’s over there, then?” Dewar asked. His arrogant disdain had evaporated as he bandaged his sister’s hand.

  We didn’t answer. We didn’t know. I turned to see how her hand was. There were a few bloodspots on the floor, but they were just spots of blood, not acting as the blood on the door was.

  “Stings, eh?” Dewar said to Freia, finishing his improvised bandaging job.

  “Not yet,” she said.

  “I could take stitches in that,” I said. “It will mend better so. We can go up and return—”

  “Thank you, but no, I think we should keep going right now,” Freia said. “This will serve well enough. Thanks, Gwydion.”

  “We didn’t bring a medical kit,” I said.

  “It’s all right. It’s a clean cut.” Freia smiled at me quickly, then went to peer through the hole with Prospero.

  “The other side,” he said, “looks much as this one.”

  “As one might expect.”

  The hole was big enough to crawl through, but I was reluctant to risk touching the expanding edges. I was immune to the corrosion, but my clothes were not.

  We waited, the four of us, watching the door vanish decorously. I half-expected a sound when the line of the bloodstain reached the floor and walls and ceiling, but it just stopped there, leaving a very fine red line of fresh blood. Freia’s blood.

  “Let us go on, then,” Freia said, and led us across the sanguine threshold.

  The corridor we were in continued there. Freia pulled her mantle up and folded her arms as she walked beside her father. Prospero carried a lantern in each hand. I had all my sorcerous senses at full alert, but there wasn’t anything to sense: this was strange itself, because Freia had just released a great wash of the Spring’s force through here, and there ought to have been perceptible remnants of that; yet I felt nothing of that, and nothing of the Spring. I was unsure whether this was my error or truly so, and so I said nothing of it. My tutor lagged behind us all, lifting and lowering his lantern, studying the blocks of stone that made up the wall. They were the same as the rest of the stones in the rest of the Catacombs.

  The corridor came to an end—rather it opened up into a wide junction where several others opened. Prospero and Freia, ahead of me, paused and then looked to the right, and he said something indistinct and she nodded and went to the right with him. A moment later I was there, and I did not see them.

  “Prospero? Mother?” I called, and looked down the first right-hand corridor, holding my lantern up high, and then a nasty realization clutched my head and shook me hard with both hands.

  We were in the Maze.

  “Dewar! Dewar!”

  No answer.

  “Shit!”

  No answer.

  I stepped back into the intersection, which was still there though I could not see the corridor where the door had been. I tried to calm down and to remember what I had been told about the Maze.

  It changed shape around one.

  Freia had been lost in it once, and she had never been sure how long. To the Citadel staff, it had been a day’s absence, but to her the time had seemed three or four days.

  No one else that I knew of had ever found the Maze, though everyone knew about it. I had asked Dewar if Mother hadn’t just been lost and he had said no, the Maze existed, but only Freia had penetrated it. She’d been mapping down here, making those maps we’d consulted before this trip, when it happened, but those maps had placed the Maze in another place entirely.

  Perhaps the Spring had put the door there, for our own good, and now here we were …

  “Damn,” I murmured.

  I couldn’t recall if she’d applied a rule to get out or just blundered along. The right-hand rule was the one that was supposed to work most of the time, wasn’t it? I’d use it, then.

  Thus, with a sinking feeling in my heart and a lantern in my hand, I started slowly away from the last place I’d seen them.

  I walked for hours. I turned right so often it became difficult to think of the word left. I stopped a few times and had a snack from my haversack and a few drinks of water, but I was very afraid of using my supplies before I really needed to, and so I conserved them. I tried to sense and tap the Spring, but there were no currents in the area to orient or guide me—the place was a blank, like the Border, which was frightening in its own way. So I walked.

  When I thought I must have walked nearly thirty miles and seen nothing but black stone, I had to stop. Jittery and worried about my family, I sat down and then lay down, turning my lantern down to save fuel but reluctant to turn it off and be alone in the crushing darkness. I dozed.

  Prospero woke me, shouting at me.

  “Gwydion!”

  “Wha’?” I jumped and started awake and shouted back, “Prospero!”

  We could see one another; he was running down the hall toward me.

  “Stay where you are!”

  I stayed, standing and yawning.

  He arrived, and we hugged one another breathless in a paroxysm of relief.

  “Where is Mother?” I asked him.

  “Curse me for a wooden-headed fool,” he said, grabbing my shoulders and staring at me. “She lagged but a half-step behind me as we went ’round a corner, and in my next breath I walked alone—”

  “Hell!”

  “She hasn’t a light.” He still had two, hers and his.

  “Oh, no!” I almost said “We’ve got to find her!” and realized before I did how simple this would sound. “When?”

  “ ’Twas hours ago meseems. Since then I’ve wandered, and called at every corner, but I’ve seen no living soul save you. And a welcome sight you are.” He pressed my shoulders again and released me, but kept one hand on my arm. “Your uncle?”

  “I was alone. I don’t know where Dewar is.”

  Without optimism, he said, “It may be he escaped or never was taken in. This is how it caught her in its coils, she said. She did not apprehend that she was lost until too late, too deep. Put out your lamp. We’ve no need to squander fuel, and I’ve enough here …” He twisted his mouth and looked up and down the hall, clearly blaming himself again.

  “Are you tired? Would you like to sleep?” I suggested.

  “Yes. I saw you sleeping; are you rested?”

  “Yes.” Even if I had not been, the excitement of being lost in company would have revived me.

  “Good. Then I’ll sleep, and you shall watch in case one of them comes nigh. So long as we stick to one another like burrs in uncombed wool, perhaps we shall not be separated.” Prospero sat down heavily, ate an apple and drank some water, and then stretched out and was asleep in seconds. I sat down at his head, pulled his cloak around him more closely, and pushed my bag under his head to make a pillow. He snored lightly. I dozed, sitting up, keeping my hand on his shoulder, afraid he’d sublimate away beside me and turn into a wall.

  While he slept I gazed at the black stone wall across from me, barely distinguishable in its darkness under the single yellow flame’s light from the unlit stone beside it. My eyes strained at the emptiness to either side, looking for any sign of movement or any faint glow from another light, and seeing nothing they strained all the harder.

  Gradually it seemed to me that the darkness or something in it moved and shifted, never when I gazed on it directly, but at the edge of my vision. I shook my head and looked determinedly at the stone wall, daring it to disappear or mutate while I watched.

  It did. Very slowly the
stone’s substance began to move, rearranging itself in a pattern. At first I ignored this and then paid it closer attention; it accelerated and the winking flakes of brighter stone caught in the black shifted and darkened. It seemed that I stared at a face, which acquired definition and clarity as I studied it, emerging in deep bas-relief from the stone around it and regarding me.

  The lips moved, slowly shaping meanings, but I heard nothing. The face’s expression was cold and intent upon me. The lips moved again, and this time I heard it, as faint as a draft of air:

  “Kill him,” said the face of stone.

  I was sure I had not heard aright.

  “Kill him,” it said again, a soughing icy command.

  “No,” I whispered.

  “It is your desire,” the stone face whispered. “His death will bring power. Kill him.”

  I seemed to feel the stone behind my back crawling and changing, and I sat forward and glanced back at it. There was nothing there, but the stone did seem to writhe under my eyes, and the stone voice said, “Kill him, and you shall live forever.”

  I might live forever anyway, I thought, but I did not say that. “No,” I whispered again. Something stirred beside me—not Prospero—I looked down and saw that somehow I had half-drawn my sword Talon. Prospero slept on by my thigh.

  Suppose I did kill Prospero, I thought; he would never emerge from the Maze, and none would ever know what had become of him. Dead, he would not be there always in the shadows and backgrounds of Argylle, brooding on what was and was not his; dead, he could not approve or disapprove anything. My mother, lost without a light, might be dead already, and Dewar—

  What was I thinking?

  I turned hot and cold in the same instant and slammed Talon back into the scabbard.

  “No!” I shouted, or thought I shouted.

  The face twisted into a hideous grimace, mouthing something I was unable to understand. I closed my eyes, whispering “No, no, no, no …” like a child willing something to unhappen, and when I looked again the wall was just a wall: black, flecked with bright specks, with a dimly less-black area under the lamplight.

  The face had faded, but I stared on. Then, with a fearful jerk, I grabbed Prospero’s shoulder. He was still there. Deeply asleep, he rolled onto his face and sighed. I relaxed my hand.