The Spiral Labyrinth

by Matthew Hughes

  "I told you," Bol said, "he is a simpleton."

  "Even simpletons can be surprisingly knowledgeable," Tancro said, "if you ask them in the right way". He held out a hand, palm up, while uttering a few sounds. Something fell from the air into his grip: a length of black iron, except that its chiseled tip glowed red hot. "Get hold of him," he said.

  I turned to run, knocking aside Pars Lavelan who had been reaching for me with a pained but determined look on his face. I heard Bol laugh derisively and Ovarth shout, "Stop him!"

  The conclave had been held in the deepest part of the decorative pool. The way I was heading, a series of steps led down from ground level. I mounted them two at a time, with no more thought than to get some distance between me and Tancro's glowing poker. I would formulate a plan as I went.

  From behind me I heard sounds of pursuit. Then there came a prolonged whistle, three-toned and loud. Somehow I knew it came from Chay-Chevre, and I doubted it boded well for me.

  I was halfway up the stairs when from in front of me the darkness suddenly filled with blue and yellow. The yellow was a scaly throat and belly that towered over me, the blue the long feathers of great wings that beat the air as the wizardress's dragon landed at the top of the steps. Its sinuous neck swooped down, and it opened a muzzle as long as I was tall, revealing dagger-like teeth as long as my hand. It hissed at me with a breath like a banked fire.

  The grinnet, which had clutched my hair while I ran, clambered down me and scuttled into the darkness. The dragon briefly tilted its head to watch its escape, then refocused its golden-eyed gaze on me. It hissed again.

  Strong hands seized me from behind. Two of Tancro's retainers had rushed after me. Their master's voice said, "Bring him down here."

  Chapter Nine

  Just as he had conjured up a red hot poker, Tancro had caused a sturdy framework of wood and metal to appear in the middle of the magicians' circle. His two retainers efficiently manacled me to its arms, then produced knives with which they cut away the clothing from my upper body.

  Tancro approached, blowing on the tip of his glowing iron. Far from cooling it, his breath made the point brighten, the deep red becoming paler until it shone a pure white. The glow lit up his face from below, making it a mask of cruel anticipation. I could feel its heat on my own skin as he came nearer.

  "Now," he said, "let us begin at the beginning."

  From behind and above me, I heard the dragon's loud hiss. Tancro looked up, the cruelty on his face giving way to surprise. The other four Powers did likewise and I followed their common gaze to the dark sky where the stars had been blotted out by a vast and complex spiral, red and black, that spun slowly above the ruined palace. From the labyrinth's center appeared a pale shape that quickly grew and became recognizable as a human figure descending sedately toward us. And the closer it came, the more recognizable it was to me.

  The heat I had been feeling from Tancro's poker suddenly died away. I looked and saw that the metal had cooled. Tancro noticed and blew upon the point, but the iron remained cold and black. With a look of disgust, he threw the rod to the stone floor and turned to glare at the man-shape coming down from the sky.

  Ovarth had produced a wand from within his robes and was directing it at the slowly descending figure. He uttered several guttural sounds, followed by a flourish of the wand. At once his black and purple robes swirled around him and a great, spiraling wind sprang from the tip of the instrument. It gathered itself, swelling, then rushed up into the air. But the smoothly descending newcomer, now revealed to be naked and hairless, turned his face toward the whirlwind, and the elemental was suddenly no more than a sigh, drifting away on the night breeze.

  Chay-Chevre was standing, arms extended and hands working the air before her. A surge of air from the yellow and blue dragon's winds buffeted me as the huge beast leapt into the air, a rumbling growl in its throat. But the pallid figure, now at rooftop height and still descending, locked eyes with the dragon. The beast faltered in mid-air, then dropped one wing and banked to turn. Its growl sounded more confused than angry as it stroked off into the night sky.

  Shuppat had folded his hands into his sleeves. If he had contemplated any action, he now was clearly decided against it. He glanced away from the descending figure to where Bol sat and watched. The green and copper magician's perpetual smile was the thinnest I had yet seen it, but his eyes were alive with interest as he studied, not the pale man, but the still swirling spiral from which he had descended.

  Silently, serenely, the man from the sky slid down toward us, on a glide that would bring him directly to where I stood, chained to the torture frame. His face was as expressionless now as it had been the other time I had seen it, peering at me from around the door frame at the Blik Arlem estate. Then the eyes had seemed washed out and the expression distant. Now his gaze was concentrated on me and for all that the features were as rudimentary as before -- a sketch of a human being had been my original thought -- there was behind them an immense store of will.

  He touched down before me, soundlessly. Tancro had to step back, cursing, or be brushed aside. The pale man paid him no heed. He studied my situation for a moment, then reached to touch the four points at which my ankles and wrists were fixed to the framework. Instantly, my shackles fell apart.

  "It's not a spell," I heard Bol say, as if speaking to himself. "It's the application of an enormous force of pure will."

  The new arrival regarded me impassively. I could still read no expression on the rudimentary face, though this time his presence at close range was nothing less than intimidating. The voice, when he spoke, was still the same quiet exhalation it had been at the Arlem estate, but again there was an unmistakable emanation of vast will behind it.

  "Hapthorn," the man said, quite clearly. It was not a question.

  There seemed no point in maintaining the fiction by hiding behind a missing consonant. Whatever fate the pallid man intended for me, I doubted it would be worse than answering questions for Tancro. "Hapthorn," I said. "I am Henghis Hapthorn."

  The expressionless, round face did not change, but I was aware of a fierce satisfaction radiating from my putative rescuer. "Hapthorn," said the toneless voice, then repeated my name, adding, "Now I remember."

  "Who are you?" I said, but he gave me no answer. Instead, he took hold of both my wrists. His hands felt cool, the flesh rubbery, almost vegetative, but full of strength. I could no more have freed myself from his grip than from Tancro's fetters.

  He said nothing more, but now we were rising swiftly and smoothly toward the orbiting spiral in the sky. Curses followed us from the Powers left below, though I thought to hear Smiling Bol reciting some incantation. I looked up and saw the labyrinth growing nearer. Still, my mind could not retain the shapes of its symbols, red on black and black on red. I tore my gaze from it and looked down.

  The dwindling thaumaturges were looking up. I saw Pars Lavelan stepping toward his patron as Bol beckoned him. Far off in the ruins, the yellow and blue dragon squatted beside a tumbled tower, staring up at us. Of my integrator there was no sign.

  I looked up and saw that we had arrived at the spiral. I felt a brief mental dislocation, then it was as if we were not rising, but were instead descending toward a structure on the ground. We drifted gently toward one of the panels; it was black with two red glyphs. Without slowing we went head first through it, as if it were no more than air.

  Again I was in that region where all was darkness and wind, falling interminably, my wrists still gripped by the pale man who glowed in this nonplace as if he was illuminated from within. He spoke again, "What is your desire?"

  The words came out of me without thought. "To go home."

  Abruptly, he released his hold on me and disappeared. Alone, I fell for what might have been moments, or may have been hours. Then all at once, without transition, I was standing in the afternoon light that flooded into my workroom in Olkney.

  #

  A discriminator's life has
its ups and downs, its ins and outs, even for one such as I, at the top of the profession, dealing with the moneyed and titled acme of Old Earth's social pyramid. I had, on several occasions, found myself in situations that could fairly be described as more than a tight fit. I had stopped armed bandits in mid-robbery, faced down enraged aristocrats just when they were on the point of taking sanguinary vengeance, calmed the jagged blade from the hand of a mad ripper. I would not gladly admit it, but some of my escapades had left me shaken and in need of a quiet day or two for full recovery.

  But nothing in my career had matched the experience of being a helpless stranger in the grip of vicious and powerful persons, one of them about to char my flesh to the bone with hot iron, and then to be swept away into nothingness and deposited, safe and snug, in the comfort of my own rooms.

  For a long while I simply stood on the well-worn, faded rug, blinking and looking about me. Everything was just as I had left it when we had set off for the Arlem estate. The wide window that looked out on Shiplien Way was partially de-opaqued, so that the cheerful orange light of the old sun warmed the room. I could see the roofs of Olkney stepping away before me, falling and rising with the lay of the land, with the slopes of the Devenish Range climbing in the distance, and above it all the sprawling palace of the Archon.

  "I'm back," I said. I looked down at myself and saw that I was no longer wearing the slashed remnants of the rough garb I had chosen for the adventure with Osk Rievor. Instead, I was clad in my favorite day-robe, a little ratty in places, but quite the most comfortable garment I had ever owned. I touched its front plaquet, its nap now almost rubbed away, so many times had I reflectively stroked the cloth while I paced the rug and pondered some recalcitrant set of clues.

  The air of the room was rich with the scent of fresh punge. I went to the culinary suite and found a full pot sitting on the warmer. When I poured and tasted, I found it brewed to perfection. There were seed cakes in the freshery, just the kind I liked best. I buttered a couple and took them and the punge to my best chair and sat, eating and sipping, and gazing out at the everyday scenery of home.

  I had finished the cakes and drained the cup of punge before my mind re-engaged. "The integrator!" I said aloud.

  "What do you require?" said the familiar voice from the air.

  I stood, crumbs falling to the carpet, and looked about. "Where are you?"

  "Where I am supposed to be," it said. "Where you installed me."

  I looked, and it was true. The old components that I had assembled and placed about the room, linked together appropriately, were alive again. Even the traveling armature, into which my assistant had been decanted when we passed through dimples of magic and other dimensions, causing it to emerge as a grinnet, was back in its place in a cupboard near the door.

  "Everything," I said, "has been made as it was. All is as it ought to be."

  "Indeed," said my assistant, "you have always preferred an ordered existence."

  I drew a long breath and let it slowly go. For the first time in the several weeks since I had been drawn into the adventure of Bristal Baxandall and the juvenile demon, I was back to normal. I poured myself another cup of punge and stood at the window, watching the drays and motilators rumble by below, the crowds on the walks and slideways, the aircars silently passing overhead.

  I deduced what had happened. Osk Rievor had found his destiny, the place where he, as a seed of the new age, could plant himself and flourish. But he had not treated me as an outworn husk. Instead, he had used his powers -- doubtless much augmented in whatever sympathetic place he now made his abode -- to send me home. He must even have restored my assistant to its former state.

  I drained the last of the second cup. "Integrator," I said, "see if Xanthoulian has a table free for dinner tonight."

  A moment later, its voice said, "Your preferred table is booked for you. And tonight the chef is preparing his signature menu: Four Passions and an Afterthought."

  "My favorite," I said. It was remarkable that I was able to get a seating on such short notice. Someone must have canceled just before my assistant called.

  I felt renewed. Bol's smile and Tancro's poker retreated into the past. I stretched luxuriously and said, "Are there any communications?"

  "You are invited to the usual soirees and salons."

  "What about some work? I feel in the mood for a good case, something to blow the cobwebs from my mind."

  "Colonel-Investigator Brustram Warhanny presents his compliments and asks if you would care to consult on a matter that apparently has the Bureau of Scrutiny stumped."

  I was taken aback. "Did he actually use that word? Warhanny has always hated having to call me in on a case."

  "I was reading between the lines," the integrator said.

  "I see. Does he wish me to call upon him?"

  "No, he will come to you whenever you find it convenient."

  "How extraordinary," I said. "Perhaps word has come down to him that the Archon himself has praised my abilities."

  "That could account for it."

  I stroked the front of my day-robe. The response seemed out of character for Warhanny, I told my assistant. "He has never been a climber of advancement's slippery pole. An old-fashioned crime-sniffer, some would even say a bit fusty in his approaches, and he cares not who knows it."

  "Perhaps he has finally recognized your abilities," said my assistant. "But what does it signify what his motive may be? The case is the thing."

  "Indeed. Ask him to call upon me when I return from Xanthoulian's."

  A moment later it informed me that the appointment was set. I spent a short time attending to my other correspondence, regretfully declining a number of invitations since I did not know what demands the impending new case would make on my time. Then it was time to prepare for dinner, which meant a long session in the sanitary suite, from which I emerged scrubbed and well tidied. I dressed in evening wear and set off on the short walk to Xanthoulian's in Vodel Close.

  I encountered a number of acquaintances along the way, affably greeting and being greeted. All of them were folk who had reason to wish me well; at least, none were among the whose nefarious schemes I had closed down at one time or another. As I bathed in the general air of approbation, I had cause to reflect on the tenor of my career so far. I saw that, all taken in all, I had done a lot of good for my fellow human beings, and little harm to any who did not merit such chastisement.

  I arrived at Xanthoulian's and was personally escorted to my seat by he whose name the establishment bore. I greeted several familiar faces, made a formal salute to an aristocratic scion whose interests I had once protected from ill-wishers. Across the room I noticed the perfection in form and visage that was the Honorable Elthene Messeram, daughter of one of Olkney's wealthiest magnates. I had often wished to attract her interest, but had never received more than polite attention, briefly bestowed and withdrawn. But now she favored me with the warmest smile, followed by that subtle widening of the eyes by which a sophisticated female signaled that she would not repel an overture.

  I was delighted, even astonished. For a moment I wished that my assistant were on my shoulder again, that I might have someone with whom I could discuss the implications of our brief exchange of smiles and glances. I surprised myself by missing the grinnet's weight and warmth, but before I could pursue the thought further, the head waiter appeared and asked if I was prepared to receive the appetizer. And from there on in, I had no thought but for the unparalleled richness of the Four Passions, each dish an individual triumph, but together mounting an unsurpassable conquest of the palate, followed by the poignant savory of the Afterthought.

  Afterward, replete in both body and spirit, I walked home through the crowds in their fashionable finery. The evening air was warm and soft as worn velvet, one of those nights when the ancient City of Olkney was truly the grand old dame she aspired to be, full of life and experience, charm and majesty. I thought that I was perhaps the most fortunate man of O
ld Earth; having seen what was to come with the new age, I more than any other was in a position to appreciate all that lay strewn about me in casual splendor.

  In such a mellow, pensive mood, I arrived at my lodgings to find Brustram Warhanny on the doorstep. He shuffled his oversized feet and sketched a salute to the dark-complected hat with rounded crown and narrow, curving brim that he habitually wore when out of his green-on-black scroot uniform. I greeted him, with perhaps just a hint of condescending graciousness, and showed him upstairs to my workroom.

  He declined an after-dinner drink. I could see that he was somewhat ill at ease. Still wearing his hat, he clasped his large hands behind his back, bent his head so that his long nose was aimed at the worn carpet, and began to pace up and down the room in a manner I could only see as troubled.

  "It's fair got us flummoxed," he said. "As I was telling the boys, Hapthorn's our only hope."

  It must be a truly perplexing case, I thought. Not even Tancro's poker could have easily wrung a "Hapthorn's our only hope," from Warhanny. I would have wagered that he would rather have had useful parts of his body torn from him than to have had to utter words of such ignominious surrender in my hearing. Still, they were gratifying to hear.

  I seated myself in my chair, instructed my integrator to take notes, and said, "Perhaps you should start at the beginning."

  He continued to pace. "It began," he said, "when an underclerk at the Moldanow Fiduciary Pool discovered a minor discrepancy: there had been a brief flurry of activity in a supposedly dormant account. She began to trace the 'wheres and whyfores,' as they say in her line of work. Abruptly, she was transferred to another department. She complained to a co-worker, with whom she had a close relationship, and he mentioned the matter to a superior who had taken him under his wing as a protege.

  "The next thing we know, the girl is dead -- a freak accident, or so it would seem. Her boyfriend is rendered mute and paralyzed by the sudden onset of a rare brain disorder. And the mid-ranked bureaucrat to whom he had related the underclerk's tale contacts the Bureau, babbles semi-coherently to a junior agent, then disappears completely."