The Spiral Labyrinth

by Matthew Hughes

  "In whose dormant account was the activity first noticed?" I asked.

  "A fellow named Winn Boder, a retired servant."

  "From whose service had he retired?"

  "That of the Magguffynne family, who now lives on a farm outside Tahmny with his daughter and her husband."

  A memory tugged at my awareness. I let it emerge from the shadows. "Was not Lord Magguffynne involved in a plot to usurp the Archon's throne, at about the time Filidor succeeded his uncle Dezendah?"

  Warhanny stopped, tugged thoughtfully at his pendulous nose, and said, "There were rumors. Nothing actionable."

  "I suspect the plotters have regrouped. The Moldanow pool is connected to a cadet branch of the Magguffynne clan. The retired retainer's account was probably a screen behind which the plot's financial activities could be carried on unseen."

  I instructed my integrator to investigate the connection. A moment later, it confirmed my analysis.

  "Amazing," the scroot said, his face suffused with wonder. "You deduced all that from the skimpiest of facts."

  "Once one identifies the presence of a Magguffynne, the elements of a plot fall easily into their true arrangement," I said. "I suggest that you assign Bureau of Scrutiny personnel to examine the family's recent toings and froings. I am sure a pattern will soon emerge."

  "I will also alert the Archon," Warhanny said, "and advise him that, once again, he owes a debt of gratitude to the clarity of Henghis Hapthorn's intellect."

  I lowered my eyes in humble acceptance of his praise and said, "I merely do what any good subject of the Archon would do, who had the means to do it."

  Warhanny was at the door. "I must set events in motion," he said. "Will you be available if complications ensue?"

  "Of course."

  His heavy feet clumped down the stairs and he was gone. My integrator said, "I am receiving a communication from the integrator of the Honorable Elthene Messeram, asking if you are available."

  "Say that I am and connect us."

  The integrator's screen appeared in the air before me and was immediately filled by the heart-stopping face of Elthene Messeram, her raven tresses tumbling loosely and her violet eyes gazing into mine. "Henghis," she said, in a husky contralto, "are you private?"

  "There is none here but I," I said. "How may I help you?"

  "It is a matter of the greatest delicacy," she said, "yet also of the gravest import. I know not whom to trust."

  I assured her that she could trust me implicitly, not just because of my professional standing but because I had long wished to be of service to her.

  "I am glad to hear it," she said. "I cannot explain over the connectivity. Can you come to my house in town?"

  "At a moment's notice."

  "Then please come now. I am at my wit's end, and only you can save my reputation."

  I had my assistant summon a cabriole and flew swiftly to Elthene's small house in a steep-streeted district below the Archonate palace. She met me on the rooftop landing as I alighted from the aircar. She had dismissed her personal servants for the night and bade her integrator step itself down to minimal mode. We were quite alone as she led me to her most private rooms.

  Blushing and slightly breathless, she said, "It was surely fate that brought us together at Xanthoulian's tonight. When I saw you, I knew that you were my only recourse."

  Tears brimmed in her compelling eyes. I comforted her and urged her to tell me all. She did so freely, though honor prevents me from revealing any of it here. I listened attentively and was soon able to unpick the tangles of her problem and chart for her a clear course to a happy outcome. I assisted her in making calls to three persons: a former paramour who had proved less than faithful, a discharged servant who had broken a trust, and an old friend whose good opinion Elthene did not wish to lose. Disaster was averted, and justice done. It was the work of mere minutes, once I had the facts and could engage my faculties.

  I would have left her then, but she was insistent on displaying the full measure of her gratitude -- the details of which also cannot honorably be revealed. It must suffice to say that when I finally departed her house, to be greeted by the old sun just lifting itself over Olkney, I was meditating on the thought that 'Four Passions and an Afterthought' could describe an experience even more delightful than the finest dinner at Xanthoulian's.

  I arrived home to be alerted by my integrator that the Archon commanded my presence in his private office after his early afternoon audiences with petitioners. An official car would be sent to collect me.

  "I will take a nap," I said, "then a long soak in the sanitary suite, followed by a good meal. Awaken me in good time."

  As I lay down on the sleeping pallet and engaged its systems that would make a brief slumber compensate for a missed night's sleep, I reflected that I had never been more contented. All the unsettled -- and unsettling -- months of coping with the impending arrival of the age of sympathetic association, when I had been pushed hither and beyond by powers I could not control, were now fading into the past. I was, once again, who I was supposed to be, doing what I was born to do, and doing it superbly.

  "This is how things ought to be," I told myself, then the ease of restful, well earned sleep stole over me.

  #

  In the third hour after noon, I arrived at the broad terrace outside the Archon's private study. Brustram Warhanny was there to greet me as I descended from the aircar. He escorted me into the small, high-ceilinged room, lined on all side with shelved books, and carpeted in an intricately patterned, green and blue Agrajani rug from the classical period. Filidor, despite his youth looking every inch the Archon these days, was seated behind his wide and well-worn desk. He waved me toward an armchair upholstered in old leather.

  I offered the appropriate salute and took my seat. Warhanny hovered somewhere in the background. Filidor regarded me benignly for a moment, the tips of his fingers tented together, then said, "Well, Hapthorn, you've done it again. The Magguffynnes were indeed staging another attempt at usurpation. This time, their dastardly plan might have succeeded."

  "I am delighted to have been of service," I said.

  "In recompense," Filidor said, "I have decided to bestow upon you all of the Magguffynne holdings, the house in town, the country estate, the financial portfolio. They will not be needing them any more."

  I was astounded, and said so. "You do me great honor," I said.

  "Furthermore," the Archon continued, "I intend to confer upon you the social rank of lesser margrave."

  That meant I was being elevated to the second-tier aristocracy. I would have the right to design a crest to decorate my door and to wear garters in the Archon's presence. It was a dream I had held close to my heart all my life, never daring to speak of it to anyone, even my integrator. I rose and performed the civilities that propriety demanded. I had long ago memorized the six phrases and three postures.

  Filidor smiled warmly and praised the punctilio with which I had executed the ancient forms. "You acquit yourself admirably," he said. "Perhaps we should be looking at a permanent, formal relationship rather than the loose association we have had until now." He looked up at the scroot officer behind me and said, "Tell me, Warhanny, what would you and your fellow agents say if I named Henghis Hapthorn to the governorship of the Bureau of Scrutiny?"

  I heard the snap as Warhanny came to attention. "We'd say, 'Well done! Couldn't wish for a better!'"

  Not only social rank, but the governorship of the scroots! With that combination of title and office, I'd be one of the most powerful personages in Olkney, almost on a par with the Archon himself.

  "See to the forms," Filidor was telling Warhanny, while I sat dazed by joy. The Archon rose and I stood to be dismissed. Then something else occurred to Filidor. "By the way," he said, "I believe you know a few magic spells."

  "Not I," I said.

  "Come, come," he said. "I am reliably informed that you hold a great compendium of magic in your mind. I would be gratef
ul if you would reveal it to me."

  "Someone has misinformed you. Would you like me to inquire into it?"

  And now it was as if someone else looked out through the young Archon's eyes. I felt a coldness around me, as if the air in his study had suddenly chilled. There was a sour odor, very faint, in my nostrils.

  "You are lying to me," Filidor said, "and that is very unwise. Tell me what I want to know."

  "I would if I could," I said. To contemplate enraging an Archon, I would have had to be as mad as a Magguffynne.

  "You are concealing your knowledge from me," said the man who glared at me from across the desk, a figure in whom I was now hard put to see even a trace of Filidor. He spoke to Warhanny. "Take him somewhere where his memory can be encouraged."

  For the second time in recent days, I was seized in a powerful grip. Warhanny seemed to have grown to a phenomenal size. I felt like a child in his hands as he lifted me from my feet and carried me bodily out of the Archon's study. Impossibly, though we went out the door we had entered by, we did not emerge onto the sunny terrace overlooking the spread of grand old Olkney. Instead, we were suddenly in an underground chamber, its walls rank with black mold and cold seepage, lit by flickering torches. It reminded me of a scene from a tale I had read in childhood, a story that had given me nightmares.

  Warhanny flung me down onto a pile of straw, rank and stained by fluids I did not care to identify. I looked up at him and in the dim, shifting light, I did not see the familiar, lugubrious face of the Colonel-Investigator. Instead, the same intensity that had shone from Filidor's eyes, the glare of a powerful will, now fell upon me.

  "The spells!" he said. It was not Warhanny's voice, nor any human voice at all. No human throat and lungs could have emitted the roar that shook the walls of my prison, and shook me to the core. "I want the spells!"

  #

  Long ago, when I was in school, I had come across a story that had survived from the dawntime: some fellow had grievously offended a god and the vengeful deity decreed that the culprit be chained to a rock in perpetuity, then sent a feral creature to tear out the prisoner's organs. The ill treatment, horrific though it was, should have mercifully ended with the victim's death. But the god had also ordained that his flesh should heal so that the torture could begin again and go on indefinitely. The only hopeful note in the myth was that, after centuries of such abuse, a hero happened by and did the fierce tormentor to death, although the captive must still remain fixed to the rock.

  This tale came to my mind at some point in the timeless period that followed my being brought to the dungeon by an outsized Brustram Warhanny. It was not the Colonel-Investigator, of course, who seized me in giant hands and flung me about the walls, then proceeded to put me to a series of tortures involving techniques and apparatuses that doubtless were also remembered from the most primitive, most brutal years of humanity's infancy.

  Warhanny, for all his dislike of me, would not have crushed my bones, torn my flesh, seared my skin with flame, separated my joints through traction engines, whipped me and scourged me, while never tiring, never pausing to take a rest or a sip of restorative, never even blinking those burning eyes that commanded me to tell me the spells.

  Nor would I have survived an hour of the treatment he relentlessly dealt me, though how long I suffered those torments I have no idea. Time lost all dimension. There was no time. Only the present pain, and then the next, and the one after that. But though time ceased to exist Henghis Hapthorn did not. From every injury, however gross, I soon healed. The shattered bones knit themselves up, the ripped flesh closed, the joints re-embraced each other, the burns faded even as the smell of scorched meat and the echoes of my screams still hung in the air. And thus my torturer could constantly begin anew, and I could not die, nor even lose consciousness.

  At one point, as he reached for a set of pincers that had been heating on a bed of coals, I gasped at him, "I know who you are."

  "Tell me what I want to know."

  "I cannot."

  "You must know it. I remember seeing the shape of it in your mind then you hid it from me. I will have it from you."

  "I am hiding nothing from you."

  "You must be."

  Then back to the work he went, with the same cold zeal that animates a plant to sink its roots into the least accepting soil, or to strangle a competitor for the simple necessities of air, light and water.

  Finally, there came a moment when time began to flow again. He stepped back from where I hung from a hook, let fall the drill with which he had been coring my bones. He did not much resemble Warhanny any more; the illusion had sloughed away, to be replaced by the pale, rudimentary features and affectless eyes that had been his guise when I had seen him at Arlem's estate and in the garden of the ruined palace at Bambles.

  Something had drawn his attention from me. He stood, attentive to some stimulus I could not receive, like a man listening to a distant sound. His sketch of a face showed no emotion, but I knew that he was now fully engaged by whatever had caught his attention. And then, in less than a blink, he was not there.

  I hung against the cold, slimy wall, the memory of pain still filling my being. Was this some refinement of the torturer's technique? Had he remembered that the pause, the caesura in the symphony of agony, is almost as important a part of the effect as the crashing chords of pain and the reedy solos of anguish?

  But no. I knew I was not the captive of a creature that dealt in subtleties. He -- I should have said "it" but it had only manifested itself as a male figure -- was a practitioner of will. He bored toward his objective, only diverting from his course when an impenetrable object forced him to detour around it. I was far from impenetrable, as the timeless time just passed had demonstrated in so many different variations. So if he was not still drilling away at me, it was because some other opportunity -- or, I dared to hope, threat -- had taken his attention.

  I was suspended by my wrists, which were enclosed in a set of iron manacles, with my feet some distance from the floor. I looked down and about, as best I could. I was hoping to see a stool to which I might swing my feet, thus relieving the weight on my wrists and slipping the chain that connected the fetters over the hook. But no convenient stool appeared.

  I tried wanting a stool to be there, tried wanting it very much. But no such convenience appeared. Clearly, conditions in this place would not reflect my will, only my captor's. I ignored as best I could the pain that seared my wrists and tried to give thought to how I might improve my situation. Nothing came. I followed various lines of thought, but each led me up a blind alley and left me face to face with an uncompromising reality: I was in the grasp of an entity that wanted what it wanted, an entity that was not inclined to subtlety, was probably not even capable of it.

  In tales of derring-do, the hero in the grip of an ogre would often fool the brute into making an error of judgment or perception. I now saw that the authors of such fictions must have conjured their monsters out of their own sophisticated minds. The real thing, it turned out, was far too devastatingly simple to be fooled by cute tricks. One might as well try to reason with a house plant.

  I began to despair. It was a sign of my desperation that I tried again to want a stool to appear beneath my feet; to go up an alley one already knew to be a dead end was a waste of time and energy, yet here I was doing it.

  No stool rewarded my desire with its sudden presence. I hung, inert and pained, and racked my brain for another course of action. The metaphor "racked my brain" now took on a much more salient meaning, my body having recently had the experience, and again I felt the onset of a wave of hopelessness that I was too weak to resist. So low did I sink that it was only when I heard my name called for the third time that I roused myself to respond.

  "Hapthorn!" called a voice. It seemed to come from nowhere in the ill-lit chamber, yet it seemed close. "Henghis Hapthorn!"

  "Here!" I said. "Who calls me? Can you help me?"

  "I am helping you," s
aid the voice. It sounded familiar, yet not the same, like a known melody played on an instrument one had never heard before. "Can you feel anything when I do this?"

  "Do what?" I felt nothing but the pain in my wrists.

  "What about now?"

  I yowled as a stinging pain tore across my face, from left to right, as if a strong adhesive had been roughly yanked away. Unlike the aftermath of the torturer's attention, the hurt did not immediately fade, but continued to smart. Another ripping pang suddenly burned across my shoulders. I yelped again.

  But as the sting echoed in my nerve endings, the pain in my wrists suddenly decreased. The stone walls around me seemed less dense, as if they were losing conviction in their own existence. At the same time, the sour tang in the air grew more insistent.

  Another rip and flare of pain, this time across my chest. And now the dungeon faded, the image dissolving, to be replaced by a dimly lit cavern. I sat slumped against a wall of cold rock, my buttocks chilled by more frigid stone beneath me. I was naked from the waist up, my legs encased in a softly luminescent material. The same substance thickly coated the entire inner surface of the cavern, which I now saw was immense.

  But it was not the surroundings that held my attention, but the naked man who stooped over me, tearing at the stuff that covered my lower limbs. And as he sank two hands into and gave it a sharp tug, it came away from my flesh, taking with it some of the outer layers of my skin. But not my hair -- that was already all gone.

  My limbs were not at full strength, but I reached behind me to where a band of the luminescent, fleshy material lay across my lower back, and pried it loose. The pain felt like the release it was. A moment later, my deliverer had freed my feet. He offered me his hands and helped me to stand.

  I was naked and shivering, my teeth clicking rapidly against each other. The air was still but scarcely warmer than the freezing point of water. I wrapped my arms about my torso, then rubbed my upper arms with my palms to generate some circulation. My feet, now uninsulated by the glowing stuff, were rapidly losing sensation.