“Well,” Aiden muttered. “That’s different.”
She looked at him and saw that he’d taken his wand out, and was looking through a circle made of his thumb and forefinger. He glanced at her. “I can see the magic here as well.”
“So, different than at Stonehenge and the Town Hall,” Avery said, nervous. “Great. Surprises are just what I was hoping for.”
“Hold steady,” Gideon said. “Aquincum was, in its day, a temporary haven for our people during a turbulent time. Perhaps some of their power simply remains.”
“What happened to it, then?” Bailey asked.
Gideon shook his head. “I’m not sure. Come, let’s see what else there is to find here.”
They wandered through the ruins quietly, along with the handful of other people there, maybe seven or eight in total, including a couple with two children who were leaving the ruins just as Bailey and the wizards were entering. The children looked bored to tears, and their parents seemed unconcerned about that. They had cameras and looked as though they were on vacation.
The path they took wound through the ruins in an attempt to cover as much ground as they could, and Bailey kept her senses alert for any changes. Though every inch of Aquincum seemed to radiate old magic, the leftovers of whatever had taken place here two thousand years prior, none of it had the flavor of the markers at the previous locations.
“Is it possible the stone here was moved?” Bailey asked after it seemed like they’d covered most of the ruins.
“My information is possibly out of date,” Gideon admitted. He flipped through the journal, muttering. “The site has been protected by the government for some time, however... it should be illegal to remove anything from the ruins...”
“The same way it’s illegal to explore Stonehenge after hours?” Bailey asked pointedly, her hands on her hips.
“It’s also against the law to take anything from the grounds at Stonehenge,” Gideon agreed, and then paused as he closed the journal and caught her point. “Ah. Of course, someone with the requisite abilities might have been able to circumvent that particular difficulty.”
“Who?” Avery asked, glancing around. “Like the Centurions?”
At the mention of them, Aiden frowned, and waved his wand, low, near his waist, as he muttered a spell and looked again through his fingers.
Gideon seemed alarmed by whatever spell Aiden had cast, and quickly did the same, his movements identical, the unintelligible words just as impossible to follow but with the same cadence and rhythm. He passed a hand over his eyes, though, rather than looking through his fingers, and then stiffened. “Oh, dear...”
Bailey had enough time to feel a rush of panic at Gideon’s tone before she felt the magic around the ruins shift. It almost felt like it slid under her feet, giving the uneasy sensation that the earth my be pulled out from under her feet like a rug; she even had to steady herself.
Only, it wasn’t just the movement of magic around them that made her unsteady on her feet. There was something happening to the space around them; a sense that gravity wasn’t quite right here, and couldn’t decide which direction it was supposed to be pulling them. All four of them stumbled a few times, and Bailey had to brace herself against one of the low walls with one hand as she looked around frantically for the source of the spell.
Two of the visitors besides their group stood at one end of the ruins. “There,” Bailey said, pointing.
All three wizards turned to see the two men at the edge of the ruins, each of them waving a wand with one hand, their other hands flickering through wizardly gestures, their lips moving though the spell they were casting was too quiet to be heard from this distance.
It was too late, anyway. The world twisted around them, and Bailey jerked her hand away from the low stone wall as it began to grow. Stones emerged from the ruined walls, accompanied by a grinding sound as the ruins came to life. The remnants of ancient houses grew like something alive, stones giving birth to other stones as the walls rose up not into the houses they had once been, but into twelve foot walls that then began to grow over the open spaces between them, gradually cutting off the light.
Bailey looked around, and found a spot of wall that hadn’t yet grown in. “There!” She shouted at the others, and pointed.
They rushed toward the spot of light, wands out, and Bailey even reached into the churning magic around them with the brute force of her own, but trying to hold back the progress of the spell was like trying to deter a tsunami with a fire hose.
They reached the spot of daylight just as stones ground into place, cutting it off.
The stones above them grew together as well, and the last of the light vanished.
Chapter 18
“Is everyone alright?” Aiden asked.
Half a second later, three wand tips glowed to life, illuminating the wide but entirely sealed passage around them.
“What happened?” Avery asked. “Were those men part of the test or Centurions?”
“Impossible to say,” Gideon sighed. “Though... my understanding is that the Centurions are more of the fire and lightning sort than the... whatever this is sort.”
Bailey looked ahead of her and then behind. The light didn’t go very far, but she thought that she saw the shadow of a turn at the end of the corridor they were trapped in. She pointed it out, and waved Aiden after her. “I don’t think we’re entirely trapped, at least...”
Sure enough, the passage ended in a T intersection. She extended her senses, trying to get some sense of which direction they should take, but nothing presented itself. “Which way?”
“Wait,” Avery said as he came close. He pointed his wand at the corner. “If we’re going to wander around in here, we should track our position as we move.”
“You think it’s a maze?” Aiden asked.
“If it is,” Avery said, “I don’t want to get lost.” He tapped his wand against the stone, and chanted something short. Nothing happened. He cleared his throat and tried again, to the same effect; or, lack thereof.
“Am I seriously doing Pollock’s Luminous Chalk wrong?” He asked, glancing at Aiden and then Gideon.
Both of the other wizards frowned and shared a look.
Gideon acted first, repeating Avery’s spell—and again, producing nothing for the effort—and then casting something else that also had no apparent outcome. “Well,” he said. “It would seem the walls of the maze are... impervious, or perhaps warded against specific spells.”
Bailey focused her magic, and reached toward the stone walls with it. Rather than passing through them, as she expected, and gaining some sense of what was beyond them, her senses simply stopped at the wall. Beyond them, she was blind. “Not just against wizard magic,” she said. “I can’t feel anything beyond them.”
Just to be sure, she opened her mind and felt around for thoughts beyond the walls as well. Nothing.
“So,” Avery said, “we’re... trapped in here. And unable to mark our progress. Wonderful.”
“We’ll do it the old fashioned way,” Gideon said. He drew the leather journal from his pocket and held it up, and then produced a pen from his other coat pocket. We might assume that we are in a position relative to where we were standing before, if the ruins themselves have merely been transmuted. If that’s the case we should be... just a few yards left of center and north... right. The stones seem of a somewhat uniform side so... we’ll call one square, say, ten stones for scale...” he scratched out a small square on the page, and then paced back the way they’d come, counting, before he added their first steps to the map.
He returned when he finished. “There. Keep count of the stones. If we explore enough we should be able to create a fairly accurate map. And find our way out. Assuming there is one.”
“Assuming?” Bailey asked.
Gideon nodded, frowning. “Unfortunately that’s all it is for the moment. And we should keep our senses alert for traps.”
“Traps,” Avery sighed
. “Fantastic. So... which way do we go?”
They didn’t put much thought into which direction—by unspoken consensus, they took the left turn, and started walking.
How long they wandered the maze while Gideon paused periodically to take counts from everyone, average them when they differed, and add to the map, Bailey couldn’t have said. Shortly after they started, she checked her phone, realizing they may well be able to simply call for help—only to find that all of their electronics were dead, including Gideon’s pocket watch.
So they instead focused on creating a map of where they were.
By the time Bailey began to realize she was starving, there were more pressing realizations.
“Look, here,” Gideon said. He waved at the space around them and then at the map. “There’s a problem.”
Avery peered at the paper. “Maybe you missed something?”
“Admittedly, that’s possible,” Gideon said. He showed the page to Aiden and Bailey.
“Oh, dear,” Aiden said.
Bailey wasn’t sure what she was supposed to be seeing, but Aiden pointed to a section that began to lead off the page. “So... use the next page?”
“I tried to scale the map to a single page,” Gideon explained. “So that the page itself represented the size of the ruins.”
“So you miscalculated,” Bailey said.
He tapped the journal again, “See this spot?”
She did, and said so.
“That’s where we started, and it should be where we are,” he said. “Or, at least, it should be. Look around us. What’s different?”
She looked, and realized immediately what had changed. If the map was correct, then the intersection had gone from being a T shape, to a cross.
“So... the passages are changing,” she said.
“More likely,” Aiden sighed, “it’s a spatial distortion of some sort. Our ability to judge distance is in question because we can’t be certain the distortion is uniform or consistent.”
Bailey puzzled that out quickly enough to feel a moment of pride—though, maybe it meant that she’d been spending too much time with wizards. “You’re saying some places, space may be shorter, and other places longer?”
“We wouldn’t be aware of it as we passed through,” Aiden said. “It could have us walking in mile wide circles and we wouldn’t know. Or the entire place could be confined to a few square yards.”
A chill ran through Bailey’s body. “What... what can we do?”
No one spoke; they were, Bailey hoped, working out exactly how to get out of this.
It was cold in the maze. Outside, assuming time wasn’t affected the way space seemed to be, it would be dark by now she thought. The stones were beginning to sap heat out of the space, and there hadn’t been that much to begin with. She tugged her hands inside her sweater, and found herself picking at the loose knot of thread where it had been tied off. It was a good thing it had been given to her; between the coat and the sweater, she was almost warm enough not to shiver. Almost.
She plucked idly at the knot of yarn until she looked down at her hands, and rolled the sweater sleeve inside out to look at the knot, and then look around them. “The labyrinth,” she muttered. Then, louder, she said, “What if we had a way to see where we’d gone? Would that make a difference?”
Gideon wasn’t looking at her when he answered, instead staring at his map, tracing their path with a finger. “We do,” he said.
“Right,” she sighed, “but the map is compromised, right? What we need is a ball of thread, like in the story of the labyrinth and the minotaur.”
“Don’t say minotaur,” Avery groaned. But he looked at her as she held her arms up. “But... a ball of string...”
Aiden frowned, and nodded slowly. “Theoretically the maze is finite. Distortion of space is a complex process but possible—infinite space is another matter entirely. If we could even track the distortion it would be helpful.”
Gideon smiled around at them. “There, see? Team work.”
Bailey glowered at him, and took her coat off and handed it to Aiden. She tugged at her sweater, and when it came off she was instantly much colder than before. That, though, they could deal with later. For now, she worried at the knot in the yarn with her fingernails until she managed to pull it loose. She gave the yarn a tug, and sure enough the sweater unraveled a bit.
“Thank you, Anita,” she muttered. The old witch must have seen something of this before passing the sweater to Bailey through Rita.
They secured one end of the yarn between two stones, flossing it over the corner until it seemed to be securely stuck, and then began their exploration anew.
It was also Bailey’s idea, a few minutes later, to begin tying small knots in the yarn as they went. If the others were right about space being somehow distorted, she reasoned that they should be able to tell by how far apart the knots were. They trailed out sweater yarn through several passages, tying knots ever so many steps, and then wound the yarn back up as they retraced.
This told them two things—that the passages were static, even if they were distorted; nothing changed, and they didn’t encounter a solid wall where there had been a passage before. It also told them, once they’d gone back to the yarn’s origin, that, indeed, space wasn’t quite what it seemed. Some of the knots were barely more than a foot apart, others were several yards.
“There’s a pattern,” Avery pointed out. He took Gideon’s journal, and made a series of tick marks. “Like this. Close, far, normal; and it repeats, and then reverses. See?”
Aiden and Gideon both looked over the little diagram, and both of their eyes widened.
“It’s a möbius trap,” Aiden said before Gideon could.
“Is that... a good thing or a bad thing?” Bailey asked. From Aiden’s tone, it could have been either.
“Both,” Gideon said. “On the one hand, it tells us what we’re dealing with. On the other... the maze has been... wrapped around itself. We could walk forever in a single direction, if we were able to walk a straight line, and after two passes we’d end up at the same place we started.”
“Two passes?” Bailey asked, though she almost immediately regretted it.
Gideon explained, after some time, that there were effectively two mazes in play, each pressed against the other and connected through a twist in space. A möbius trap was ingenious precise because it took very little magic to sustain once it was stable—you merely had to keep the people inside from directly interfering with the construct. And they could be extremely small, because the two mazes didn’t have to be close to one another in space. For all they knew, parts of the maze were located underground in some other country, thousands of miles from Hungary.
“May I ask, then,” Bailey ground out after she weathered the explanation, “why you seem so cheerful about it?”
“Because,” Gideon said, “it means there’s a way out. We just have to find it.”
When she said nothing, only raising one eyebrow impatiently, Aiden explained. “We’re being routed away from the passage that should take us out of the loop,” he told her. “If we can identify which passage that is, we can get out. The exit will be a predetermined spot somewhere; an anchor around which the distortion is wrapped. Think of it as the nail that keeps one end from flipping back around from tension.”
“I’ll think about it as a way out,” she said, sighing. “Right... so, we use the yarn to track our path and see where it... doesn’t go.”
“And now that we know the pattern and distance between distortions,” Avery said, holding up Gideon’s pen and journal, “I can get a sense of exactly how big this place is and hopefully keep us from back tracking too much.”
“Great,” Bailey said, even though she had no idea how he planned to do that—wizard math, more than likely. She stood from where she’d sunk down to rest against the wall, and shivered violently from the cold. “I suggest we do that, as quickly as possible.”
Chapter 19
Bailey reflected on Anita’s words as delivered by Rita before they’d left Coven Grove. “The rain is cold,” Rita had cited, “you must not be.”
Well, so much for that prophecy. Right now, Bailey was freezing. She’d stopped being able to control her shivering an hour before, and all three wizards had attempted to create heat but it never lasted more than a few minutes. Bailey tried to generate her own heat but all she managed to do was give herself a headache. The kind of power she could touch now was more than she was used to, and dangerous.
Luckily, they seemed to have plenty of yarn. The sweater had been thick, but Bailey hadn’t realized just how thick it really was. There were actually two layers to it, knit together to make the thick, wide cording that made up most of the pattern. It was a shame to see it unravelling like it was—even if that had somehow been Anita’s intention. It was a comfortable sweater, and warm.
However, it also served them exactly as Bailey had hoped.
By the time they were down to just a bare handful of yarn left, they had discovered places where the yarn crossed itself even though they hadn’t. The twist in space, Gideon explained, meant that the last time they’d passed some of those points they had actually been on the ‘other side’ of the space there. Bailey did her best not to think too hard about it; she got almost nauseous each time she tried to visualize the actual shape of the place in her head.
There were no more turns left to take. As far as they could tell, they had walked the entirety of the maze. No exit had yet presented itself.
“That doesn’t mean it isn’t here somewhere,” Gideon pointed out, “just that we’ve only just now completed the survey. All we need now is to... find out where the yarn doesn’t lead.”
Bailey rubbed her arms, and pulled her coat close around her, and then looked at the three wizards with something like jealousy. “Are the three of you just impervious to cold? Is that a wizard thing?”
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