The Spiral Labyrinth

by Matthew Hughes

  "Oh, you needn't worry about that," he said. "The pot having boiled, that wizard has moved on to other ambitions." He shivered slightly at some unspoken thought, then stood up and fished out the talisman that hung about his neck. "It is safe to go on now."

  I awoke my assistant and placed it back upon my shoulder, where it demanded another piece of fruit. Lavelan and I rose and set off toward the hills. I was occupied in untying the cloth package of food as I said to him, "You have not told me what brought you to this valley."

  He shrugged. "I meant to locate this man, Ezzers, and report back to my patron."

  "And who is your patron?"

  "His name is Bol. He likes to be known as Smiling Bol."

  "He sounds a pleasant sort."

  "I suppose he does, to those who have only his name to work with."

  "And why, if I may ask, did your patron want you to locate another practitioner's retainer?"

  "He did not actually order me to do so. He is very busy with a project of his own. But each of the major practitioners of Bambles is interested in what all of the others are doing, and they expect their servants to keep their eyes open."

  He fell silent for a moment, then continued, "Lately, there have been more comings and goings. I sense a rising tension, though no one is speaking plainly. So when I saw Ezzers bound this way on one of his master's flying platforms, and when one of Chay-Chevre's dragons winged off in Ezzers's wake, I thought to myself, something is going on down south. And I came to see what was what."

  "But you have not located Ezzers," I said.

  "True, though I did find out that he has been asking after a man named Apthorn. However, no one seems to know anything about the fellow."

  "So you have not located this Apthorn, either."

  "No, but I have located you."

  "Do you think I have something to do with all those comings and goings?"

  "I think you may. If not, you are at least a curiosity, and Bol likes curiosities. He may even decide to help you. He is not much given to peevishness and does not relish cruelty for its own sake, so you would be better off under his protection than under Chay-Chevre's or Tancro's."

  I took his meaning. Someone might want to winkle out the mysteries that surrounded me, and Smiling Bol would be the least inclined to do so in a manner that I might find unendurable. I counted the names he had mentioned: Bol, Ovarth, Chay-Chevre and Tancro. "So there are four great practitioners at Bambles?"

  "There are five. Shuppat mostly keeps to himself, but we have probably passed before some of his eyes and ears."

  His remark created an unappetizing image in my mind. "This Shuppat, he has an unusual sensory apparatus?" I said.

  The gray-eyed man chuckled. "No, no. His kind of magic gives him influence over little creatures. He might be watching us though the eyes of the occupant of some wayside burrow."

  It occurred to me that I should know more about the major players in whatever game was afoot in this land. Lavelan was happy to oblige. I listened and understood most of what I heard. When I was not sure of the meaning of a term or reference, I forbore to ask questions; I already appeared ignorant and strange enough.

  There were five Powers in Bambles. Their reach extended a long but ultimately indeterminate distance, before they encountered the spheres of operation of other practitioners. Beyond commanding what Lavelan called "the base of the recondite arts," each was a specialist in a particular discipline: Shuppat, as already described, was adept in manipulating the lives of small animals; Chay-Chevre, the only female of the five, specialized in dragon lore, and maintained three at her keep; Ovarth was expert in the summoning and control of elementals -- I thought I knew what those were, and nodded for Lavelan to continue -- while Tancro had achieved pre-eminence in the magic of men.

  "My own patron is drawn to the interrelation of the Nine Planes," he finished. "He has visited three of them, and works to improve his range."

  I asked about the tone of relationships among the five.

  "A balance of authority has been achieved. Each knows the power and prestige of each of the others to the least tittle. That is not to say that, occasionally, this or that figure might not trespass upon the prerogatives of another, just to see."

  "One never knows the extent of one's powers unless they are tested," I said.

  "Exactly," he said, "but nowadays the tests are infrequent and of minimal intensity. The times when balls of blackfire hurtled across the rooftops of Bambles and ghostly armies tramped its streets are behind us. Or so we all hope." He frowned at some inner image. "Or so I hope that, indeed, all of us so hope."

  I understood. Stability had been achieved after a time of strife and dire doings, and was all the more appreciated for the contrast. Thus, any new factor in the complex mix of power and personality would set nerves atingle and cause teeth to clench.

  "Indeed," he continued, "and thus one has to wonder about this Apthorn. Is he a mercenary, imported by one of the Powers? Or a foreign practitioner obsessed with some narrow interest that dovetails neatly into someone's wider stratagem? Perhaps he does not even exist, and Ovarth has created a cunning ruse to distract attention from wherever his real theater of operations may be."

  "Perhaps this Apthorn is some innocent fellow whose aims and ambitions are misconstrued," I said. "Sometimes there really is no fire, despite all the smoke."

  "When magicians are concerned, smoke without fire is unremarkable," Lavelan said. "Is it so different where you come from?" He brushed away the thought and continued, "No, something is definitely on the boil. Meanwhile my patron has been distracted by his project -- he has spent weeks in his workroom, building and tuning some abstruse device -- so I am obligated to ensure that his interests are protected."

  We had arrived at the end of the valley. The road went forward through a low saddle where two small hills met. Lavelan stopped and brought out his medallion. He consulted it for a long moment before saying, "We are all right from here to the wayfarers' rest at the top of the pass. After that, who can say?"

  We climbed to the low saddle. Before us rose more hills, and more steeply sloped, the path switchbacking into the distance. The effort of scaling the successive heights took most of our breath and conversation lapsed. I was glad of the opportunity to consider what I had learned.

  I had heard no mention of central authority. Magic's arrival had surely brought the end of the Archonate. Affairs seemed to have reverted to the other pole of the eternal spectrum, and power was wielded by those who had the wit or skill to amass it. Five great personages rivaled each other for precedence in the city to which we were bound, each probably taking a roughly equal portion of the overall rule. The portions must be equal, I reasoned, since the moment any practitioner fell markedly behind the others, his competitors would likely league against the weak one, destroy him, and divide the spoils. I wouldn't have been surprised to learn that at some point in the past, there had been six rivals, and seven before that. Each of the five still standing doubtless intended that eventually there would be but one, and that he would be it.

  The shape of the situation into which Osk Rievor had plunged me was beginning to appear. It was possible that one of the Bambles Five had reached into the past and lured him, and therefore me, into this time and place. The summoner's intent would be to set some strategy to uncoiling, using my other self as a decoy, or a stalking horse, or even as a resource to be drained of power -- I did not know enough of the workings of magic to make an estimate.

  For a moment I wished I could toss my sketch down the back corridors of my mind to where my intuitive insight had always resided. But that part of my psyche had first been reified into my alter ego, and now he had been pulled loose and taken out of my ken, perhaps by one of the powers of Bambles. The perpetrator might even be Smiling Bol. Perhaps the mechanism he had been building was a device to reach through time. Or perhaps Lavelan's patron had summoned Osk Rievor only to lose him somehow to a rival who, aware of the plan, stepped in at a
crucial juncture and diverted the catch into another creel. Logically, that was less likely to be the case, since it was more complex than the first theory. But in this age, logic was a flame that must be frequently starved of fuel.

  If I had had my intuitive other self, I could have planned my path with some sense of where lay the right direction forward. Without him, I saw that I must acquire more facts. I faced the bleak likelihood that my hopes of returning to my own age without my other self were unreasonable. Without him, I could not reliably navigate in this irrational time. My original goal -- to find a magician who would send me homeward for the gold and silver in my pockets -- was probably untenable. I did not want to question Pars Lavelan on the point, lest I reveal more of my strange ignorance and induce him to examine me more closely.

  Any of the Five might have the capacity to help me, but it seemed that I was already unintentionally involved in some new phase of their unending struggle for dominance, so who knew how they would seek to use me? Indeed, the moment one of them took a thorough interest in me, my pitiful camouflage of being a wanderer from "the south" might fall to tatters around my ankles. Already, Pars Lavelan thought me a magically "whipped-up" contrivance. His master would almost certainly have the means to make a more searching determination of who and what I was.

  In what I was coming to think of as my old life, I had often found myself in perilous situations. But I had usually been the most astute player in the game, rarely equaled and never overmatched. Here I did not even know the name of the large, sinuous and winged creature I now saw again gliding over the valley behind us. I drew Lavelan's attention to it, but as we looked, I saw something even larger drop from the clouds like a great bird of prey. It struck the flying thing hard, and there was a sudden flurry of motion, a blur of yellow and blue mixed with the darker hue of the first creature. Then both were winging off toward the south, the larger in pursuit of the smaller, diminishing rapidly into the distance.

  "That's settled, then," Lavelan said, and we walked on.

  #

  By noon we had traversed enough up-and-down country that the valley and its river were beyond our sight. The land here was uncultivated, the hills covered in coarse grass and bristly, knee-high bushes. In a pocket where the land leveled for a short distance between slopes, we came across a stone bench set beside the path. A spring bubbled nearby, making a pool of pristine water.

  Lavelan led us to the bench, saying, "The water will be good, though it does no harm to first throw a coin into it and ask permission to drink."

  I sat beside him and unwrapped my package of food. My assistant, which had been dozing on my shoulder as the warmth of the red sun increased, climbed down my arm and began to pick out morsels of fruit. I offered Lavelan a share of the provender but he declined.

  "My patron equipped me with a spell of sufficiency. So long as I am serving his interests, I neither hunger nor thirst."

  "A useful spell," I said. I noticed that the top of the bench bore an inlaid circle of bronze like that of the bridge now far behind us. Though smaller, it advertised the same news: that someone named Albruithine had made the bench and that he defended it, promising "peril" for any who troubled it.

  I touched the letters of the name and asked the locator, "Is he one of the Bambles Five?"

  My question earned me a snort of disbelief and "How far south is this benighted land you come from?" He put a palm to his chest and let his jaw drop in mimed wonderment. "You've truly not heard of Albruithine?"

  "I am afraid not."

  "He was Albruithine," he said. "He was the First. He arose in the long-ago times, in the chaos when all was disjointed and human beings were without will. He imposed order and system. Many of the great spells that still hold the world together were of his devising." He looked up at the dull, red sun and added, "Why, it was he who penned the sun when it would have billowed out and swallowed the Earth."

  "You say 'was.' So he is dead but his power survives him?"

  "Naturally. Why would it not?"

  "Because he is no longer here to exert his will."

  I saw that my proposition puzzled him. "His will remains the same whether he is here or not."

  "How is that possible?" I said.

  "Are you completely unschooled? His will remains the same because he willed it so, and his level of willing was sufficient to override all objections. Not that anyone is willing to make them and take the consequences."

  It was my turn to blink.

  Lavelan went on. "Besides, it cannot be said for sure that he is dead. And even if he were, there are several different kinds of 'dead' that can apply to a wizard of his supernal power. Having settled the world's disorder, he may have 'gone on' in pursuit of other interests." He looked off into the distance. "It would be. . . something to know what happened to him."

  "But how do you know that his will endures?" I said.

  "It is self-evident. Look, there is the sun, and here are we. Are we charred to cinders? We are not. What more is there to say?"

  "So no one has tested the concept?"

  He reached over and took a morsel of my lunch, held it beneath his nose to sniff it. Then he drew out his medallion and brought it close to the crumb.

  "Do you suspect my food of being adulterated?" I said.

  "Something has clearly diverted your mind. He dropped the crumb and said, "You ask if anyone has 'tested the concept.' But why would anyone test reality? Reality is not for testing, but for living with."

  "But how do you know what reality is without testing it?" I said.

  He adopted that look that often overcomes parents of children who ask too many questions. "It is what it is. Existence is existence. Must I constantly ask myself questions to determine if I am still who I was moments ago? Life would be used up in the pursuit of inanity."

  "But have you ever asked if Albruithine's spells still work now that he is not here to support them?"

  "Why would I?"

  "Intellectual curiosity," I said. "If everyone assumes that the spells still work, because nobody ever tests them, then it may be that his works endure merely because no one ever tries to change them."

  "Why would anybody try to change them? This shelter, the bridge back there, they serve their functions."

  "You do not seem to be following my line of reasoning," I said.

  A light dawned in his face. "Oh, that's what you're doing, is it?" He gave me a comical look, as if I'd tried to slip one under him, then laughed indulgently. "Reasoning, indeed!"

  "Empiricism is a powerful tool of the intellect," I said, "and I am one of its ablest users."

  Now he laughed out loud and slapped his thigh.

  "I'll show you," I said, but had to wait until he quieted down. As he wiped his teary eyes, I went on. "You wondered how I beat the wheel last night."

  "True, I did. But now I am sure it was a luckiness spell."

  "Your medallion tells you if magic is in play near you, does it not?"

  "It does."

  "Has it told you that I have been magicked?"

  "I haven't asked it. Obviously, you have been."

  "Ask it now," I said.

  He held the medallion to me, then studied it, puzzled. "Odd," he said. "It must be a very subtle spell, indeed."

  "Suppose I told you that my win was not the result of luck at all, not even magically enhanced luck? Suppose I told you it was the product of a process of reasoning?"

  He gave me the kind of look that said he did not know whether or not I was joking, but that he was leaning toward believing that I was trying to draw him into some comical prank. "Come, come," he said, "we are grown men. Put aside your silliness."

  I assured him that I was completely serious and asked him to take out a coin from his purse. He produced a large copper piece that had a number on one side and an eye on the other. "Toss it several times, letting it land on the bench."

  He did so. I took note of the sequence of times it landed eyes-up or with the number showing, a
nd applied second-level consistencies. After nine tosses, the pattern emerged. After the eleventh, I told him, "Toss it again, and the eye will be showing."

  He did and it did.

  "Again," I said, "and it will be the eye again."

  Again I had predicted correctly.

  "Once more, and this time it will be the number."

  I was right again.

  I had him toss the copper twice more, and twice more I was able to predict the outcome.

  "There," I said.

  "Where?" he said.

  "The odds of my predicting all of those tosses correctly were only one in thirty-two. Yet I succeeded."

  "What have odds to do with it?" he said. "Clearly you are able to affect the outcome, as you did with the wheel."

  "No," I said, "I applied a mathematical formula that describes the order that underlies seeming randomness. Where I come from, it is taught to schoolchildren."

  He rubbed his pate as if I had spouted nonsense and he did not know where to begin to set me straight. "The 'order that underlies seeming randomness' is will. Things happen because they are made to happen. And that is what is taught to schoolchildren hereabouts."

  "No," I said, and would have said more but he cut me off. He handed me the coin and told me to throw it as he had done. I flipped it and it rang as it struck the stone bench. "Eye," he said, without looking to see that he was correct. "Toss it again."

  I did so, and again he called it. Five more flips followed, and he called each one while the coin was in the air. Then he gave me a sly grin and said, "Edge."

  I was astonished to see the disk land on its unmilled edges, spin, then come to a halt upright. I had been applying consistencies throughout, but the coin did not obey the rules. Now he scooped it up and put it back in his purse.

  "Of course, it's easier when it's my coin," he said.

  I felt that I had been made to look foolish. I did not know how he had managed the trick, but I was sure he had applied some form of prestidigital manipulation. I restrained my anger and said, "I will show you empiricism at work," while reaching for a fist-sized rock that lay beside the path. I stood and hefted it.