The Labyrinth

by Kenneth McDonald

Keric hesitated only briefly in the foyer where they had first arrived. All of the arched exits were dark, but he knew where the shout had come from. Wary now, he passed through the dark opening, into a tunnel that curved slightly ahead to the left. Again he paused, and with a start remembered the scrolls he held in his wallet. He reached under his vest; yes, it was still there, in his pocket. He considered going back to the foyer to see if they were intact, but he remembered the pain in that shout he’d heard, and he hurried forward, one hand against the wall to guide him.

  As the darkness deepened he again considered going back, if only to summon light before proceeding, but again a glow became visible ahead before it became too black to see. The arch and the glow were almost identical to those he had encountered earlier, and he crept forward slowly, alert for another trap.

  The room was similar, but the nature of the trial had clearly been different in this case. The blackened wreckage of some sort of apparatus of metal and stone dominated the center of the room, with pieces of it strewn about the floor. There were six doors in the wall, heavy constructions of wooden planks reinforced with banded iron. It was obvious which one the other mage had taken; Keric crossed the room—giving the destroyed construct a wide berth—and looked through the opening where the blasted door had stood. A few fragments of wood still clung to the twisted pieces of metal that hung from the warped hinges, but the rest of the door was just scattered splinters and fragments of iron. He was unsure whether the door had been destroyed by a trap or sundered by the wizard’s magic; the lingering aura there was so strong that he could almost taste it in the air, but there was no time to stop for a Delving, and little to be gained by it in any case.

  A short, straight passage was on the far side of the broken door, progressing for maybe twenty strides before opening onto another room. The walls and floor were plain, unadorned stone. A limp form lay on the floor. Keric hurried over to it, and pulled the body over to see Trave’s dead eyes staring up at him.

  It was easy to see what had killed him. The gash across his throat was deep, so deep that it had scored the bones of his spine. It took an effort for Keric to examine the terrible wound, but once he did, he quickly realized what was wrong. There was almost no blood. The gem mage’s skin was pale, almost white, and while the interior of the wound was red, the separated skin bright like a twisted parody of open lips, the cuts should have unleashed a terrible spray as the primary vessels delivering and retrieving blood to and from the brain were opened. It was almost like looking at a cadaver that had been meticulously prepared for study, and the young mage shuddered at it.

  “What… what happened?”

  The voice caused him to almost jump out of his skin, and he looked up to see Ashandra standing there, staring at him in horror. He saw that she mastered herself quickly, gathering in the fear and thrusting it behind an iron mask of control. She needn’t have bothered; he knew exactly what she was feeling, and didn’t even bother to try to hide the cold terror that clenched in his guts.

  “He was murdered,” he heard himself saying. Almost reflexively he scanned the rest of the body. He wasn’t entirely surprised to find the gem mage’s pouches gone, along with the enchanted stones they had carried.

  “Marthek?”

  He stared at her for a moment before he realized what she was suggesting. “That’s crazy.”

  “His throat, it was slashed open.”

  “Yes, but it was no ordinary weapon that did that. The Labyrinth, there’s… there’s something here, something wrong here.” That much was obvious; people didn’t die in the Labyrinth. When a trial was failed, competitors were ejected, sometimes somewhat the worse for wear, but alive. Its creators had built it as a testing tool, not some mad engine of torture. There were some scholars who argued that you couldn’t die in the Labyrinth, and the archives were full of accounts of past competitions where mages had been ejected after daring and incredibly dangerous actions, daredevil stunts, uncontrolled eruptions of wild magic, and the like. As far as he knew from all of the records he had studied, Trave’s death was the first such loss of life in the entire history of the Labyrinth.

  He looked up at her, expecting a protest, but after a moment she nodded. He noticed something else as well, and stood. “You’re hurt? What happened?”

  Ashandra shook her head. “Imps. Conjured in my first trial. They were… they were more violent than I had expected, caught me off guard. I’m fine.” She walked around him, to the other side of Trave, but couldn’t hide her limp, or the flecks of blood visible along the gashes in the skirt of her dress. “I have a lesser Healing spell,” he said, and started to reach for his wallet.

  “Save it,” she said. “We may need it later.”

  He nodded. “We have to find Marthek.” Ashandra didn’t look up, staring down at the body. “Ashandra?”

  She started and met his eyes. “Right. Yes, of course. I… I’m sorry, Keric. For doubting you, before. You were right.”

  “It doesn’t matter now,” he said. “We have to find Marthek, and get out of here. Before whatever did that to him finds us.”

  The two of them were quiet as they returned to the entry foyer and headed through the arch marked with the crossed-swords sigil of the steel mages. There was another staircase on the far side, this one heading up. Keric offered a hand to Ashandra, but she shook him off. Her face was twisted into a grimace and her limp was getting worse, but it was clear that she was not going to accept his help.

  “What happened to your robe?” she asked him, as they made their way up the stairs. Like the one Keric had taken down earlier, this one curved slightly as they ascended.

  “Burned. Fire trap. It got most of my scrolls as well, I’m afraid.”

  “What? You didn’t have a shield up?”

  “If I hadn’t had a warding, I wouldn’t be here now,” he shot back, defensive of his magic despite all that had happened. They could see the glow up ahead now, and hastened their pace.

  “Sorry,” she said. “This is… this isn’t…”

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “We have bigger problems.”

  The landing at the top of the stairs had the now-familiar arch, and the same small room beyond. The signs of Marthek’s passage were immediately obvious. The shattered remnants of several suits of armor were scattered around the floor. From what Keric could tell from the wreckage, the suits had been occupied by mannequins of wood and straw. And magic, most likely, automatons that had sought to block the steel mage’s progress. With his enhanced vision he scanned the floor, looking for drops of blood or any other sign that Marthek had been injured. He didn’t see anything, but he remembered Trave’s body, and remembered that he couldn’t make any assumptions here.

  Ashandra crossed the room to the single exit, a recessed doorway warded only by a curtain of plain woolen cloth. “What are you doing?” Keric asked.

  “It seems likely that he went this way,” she responded.

  “Be careful,” he said, hurrying over to her. But by then she had already reached out and pulled the drape aside, revealing only another passage on the far side.

  “I am not exactly defenseless,” she said. But she was nervous, Keric could see that, despite her disciplined outward mask.

  They made their way down the corridor. After about twenty strides, they came to a short flight of steps that descended into a long hall. The hall was narrow, only slightly wider than the passage, but it extended for a good thirty strides ahead, with a vaulted ceiling buttressed by massive arches of rough-hewn stone. Lamps hung from niches along the walls, their flickering light more than strong enough to reveal the trial set here for them.

  “Uh oh,” Ashandra said.

  The floor was covered with a matrix of marble tiles, each about a pace across. The tiles were covered with sigils, etched in streaks of color embedded in the stone. Each sigil was unique, or at least it looked that way from their vantage; even w
ith his enhanced sight Keric couldn’t quite distinguish those on the far side of the hall. On the far side of the tiled floor, a matching stair led up to another passage that exited the place.

  “Those sigils aren’t based on any magical nomenclature with which I am familiar,” Ashandra said.

  “No,” Keric said. Careful not to touch the nearest tiles, or even extend any part of his body over them, he knelt on the lowest step and studied them. There was something familiar about them, something he couldn’t quite place. He tried to make sense of the pattern of tiles, at least the nearer ones, looking for relationships between the sigils,

  “Well, we’re going to have to try something,” Ashandra said, after Keric’s silence had extended for almost a minute. “We can’t just stand here.”

  Keric lifted a hand to forestall her, but didn’t look up. “Marthek made it through here; he must have solved the pattern.”

  “He’s a soldier,” Ashandra said. “Maybe he just bulled through…”

  “Wait,” Keric said. “You’re right, he’s a soldier.” He nodded as something clicked in his memory. “These sigils… they have nothing to do with magic at all, they are military symbols, the sigils used by units in the army. Historical, I think, back from the days of the great empires.”

  “Military history is not exactly my strong point,” she said. “I don’t suppose you know what they mean?”

  “No, but Marthek did.” Keric was already taking out his wallet, and he extracted one of his few remaining scrolls. He spread it out on the flat top of the stone balustrade that edged the stairs, holding it down while he studied it. He’d written the scroll himself, and knew the runes almost as well as he knew his own name, but what he would do here would require a bit of subtlety.

  She glanced over his shoulder. “What are you casting?”

  “A lesser Delving,” he said.

  She frowned, not understanding at first what he was doing, but knowing enough not to interrupt him further as he read the scroll and worked its magic. Once again he felt the stabbing disorientation of the layering effect, but it was not as severe as before; the Delving did affect his perceptions, but the bulk of the magic was extended outward into his surroundings.

  As he finished the spell, he closed his eyes and reached out with his mind. After a few moments of concentration, he opened his eyes and stared out across the room.

  At first, all he could see was red. The subtle currents he’d detected on the edges of his perceptions before were bright and obvious now, tendrils of corruption that were visible everywhere: on the floor and walls, floating in the air, even seeping down from the ceiling like hanging vines. He had to control a brief sensation of revulsion as some of them touched him; he couldn’t feel anything, of course, and they had to have been there since they’d entered the Labyrinth, but the sight still filled him with dread.

  Ashandra noted his reaction. “What is it? What do you see?”

  It wouldn’t do any good to share what the Delving had revealed to him, so he didn’t answer at once, focusing instead on the floor of the hall ahead. It took intense concentration to filter through the red haze, but when he finally found the trail left by Marthek’s aura, the faint golden flickers made a clear path across the room. If anything, the omnipresent red corruption made the path easier to follow, as the steel mage’s traces were bright and pure by comparison.

  “I found it,” he said. “The aural traces are still strong. He must not be far ahead of us.”

  He took a deep breath, and stepped onto the first tile indicated by the golden trail. Nothing happened, and he let out the breath with relief. “Follow me, step exactly where I step,” he told Ashandra.

  “Right behind you.”

  They made it across without incident. The pattern made by the military runes remained a mystery to Keric, but he realized that to Marthek they must have created some sort of map, a trail of history that led across the hall to safety. He wondered what danger lurked under the other tiles, but decided that he could live with that mystery remaining unsolved.

  Keric sagged against the balustrade on the far stairs. His head swam from the effort of maintaining his concentration on the Delving for that long. Ashandra touched his arm. “Are you all right?”

  He nodded. “This isn’t… exactly… a casual walk… through the Quadrangle,” he said.

  She managed a smile. “No, not exactly.”

  It took a supreme effort, but he straightened, pushing off from the balustrade. Faint smears of red had been left on the stone where his hands had touched, but as the Delving faded, they slowly dissolved from his view. He knew that the corruption that suffused the Labyrinth was still there, however.

  “Come on,” he said. “Let’s find Marthek.”

  * * * * *

  Chapter 6