The Spiral Labyrinth

by Matthew Hughes

  "Did he say where he would derive this energy?"

  "Not directly, but I think me meant you and Osk Rievor, because he told Lavelan to be ready to return us promptly at his signal."

  "Hmm," I said. I would have liked to discuss the matter with Osk Rievor, but that was difficult to do with Bol's retainer standing between us. Not for the first time, I wished I still had the intuitive faculty that had been reified into my other self; I did not know enough about Pars Lavelan to know if he would do as ordered, or if he could somehow be persuaded to defy his patron.

  Alternatively, I could simply push him from the disk and let him fall to the stony floor. That seemed a precipitate action, however, especially as I did not know how to operate the disk. I decided to wait.

  Bol was now busy at his apparatus, Chay-Chevre and Shuppat also bustling about, tugging at this rod or shifting that coil's alignment as he directed. I thought it remarkable that the green and copper thaumaturge should let his rivals gain so much familiarity with his interplanar mechanism. But then it occurred to me that we might not be the only sources Bol had in mind for supplying 'special vitality.'

  The work continued. Finally, Bol stood back and eyed his device from several angles. He minutely moved one of the smaller rods, then rotated one of the coils a few degrees, and stepped back again with an air of finality. After one more inspection of the arrangement, he moved to where several of the smallest rods fanned out from a common center. He touched and tapped in a rapid pattern, then stroked his hand along the curves of a nearby coil.

  A globe of colorless light appeared above the apparatus. At first it was not much bigger than a human head, but as the smiling magician worked the controls it expanded steadily. A moment came when the sphere grew lopsided and seemed to spin and tumble, but Bol moved his hands of the smallest rods like a maestro at his instrument, and the orb stabilized. It continued to grow, until it was the size of a small parlor.

  Now the magician moved to another part of the apparatus, thrusting past Chay-Chevre in his eagerness. He tugged and pushed at the rods then stood back to examine the globe of light. At the center of its paleness, something dark appeared, a swirl of black. Bol nodded and touched another rod. This time a burst of red flashed across the surface of the sphere, then retreated to become a pulsing, amorphous shape appearing and disappearing behind the arabesques of black.

  Bol's back was to us, but I could see excitement growing in the way he moved, balancing the black and the red. As he stroked and struck the control rods, the two colors danced about each other. But the swirls of black became less extravagant, the pulsing of the red less intense. And then the magician pushed a heavy rod so that it disappeared entirely into the apparatus. As he did so, the contrasting motions within the sphere abruptly froze then blossomed into a crystalline lattice of interpenetrating red and black lines.

  "He's got it," Osk Rievor said. "He has connected to the tenth plane, the symbiote's gateway."

  "Yes, he has," said Pars Lavelan, in a tone I found it hard to interpret. "Now the struggle begins."

  Bol's reaction to his achievement was not difficult to identify. His rotund figure performed a little jig on the planks of the decking and he clapped his hands. I could not see his smile, but I was sure it had never been more genuine. His hands made peremptory gestures to his two rivals, and there could be no question that in Bol's mind their relative statuses had now changed.

  The three magicians worked the apparatus, and now a new shape appeared in the sphere. At first, it was semitransparent and small, but as Bol adjusted the controls, it grew and solidified. The substance of the fungus's avatar was drawn steadily into the ambit of the sphere. The white, manlike shape twisted and writhed, its eyes blazing with frustrated will that I could see even at a distance. But its struggles could not keep it out of Bol's interplanar trap.

  "So now he has it," Lavelan said.

  Osk Rievor said, "But can he wield it without its seizing him?"

  "That will be the test."

  It was time for me to speak. "And will that test require 'special vitality?'"

  Pars Lavelan looked at me. "You heard that?"

  The truth-telling spell was still upon me. "Obviously," I said.

  "How?"

  The question had been put to me but he was looking at the grinnet. "Does it matter how?" I said.

  He did not take his eyes off my assistant. "I think it does," he said.

  "Look," Osk Rievor said.

  We looked back to the scene on the deck, where Bol had now begun to torment the avatar. Although it had tortured me, I found myself experiencing a wave of sympathy for the creature as the magician harried it with bolts of pain and shocks of misery. But it was not to the travails of the symbiote that Osk Rievor directed our attention. His intuitive sense had led him to look elsewhere.

  With the avatar in the trap, Chay-Chevre had summoned her gray and silver dragon back to the fort from where it had crouched over the crevice in the hill. But the great beast was struggling to rise from its perch. Its huge wings compressed the air, but it's feet did not lift from the rock. I peered across the distance, trying to make out what was happening.

  "Integrator," I said, "tell me what you see."

  The instruction won me a sharp look from Pars Lavelan, who was in the process of bringing out his ocular device. "Ahah," he said, and I realized that I had spoken aloud instead of by the private method.

  The magician's retainer said no more, but fixed his instrument on the distant dragon.

  "Integrator," I said, "you might as well give us all a view."

  Immediately, my assistant's screen appeared in the air before us and filled with a close-up image of the gray and silver. Lavelan put down his viewer and said, "You and I must talk."

  "Yes," I said, "but later. Integrator, what is wrong with the dragon's feet? And no need to speak in silent mode."

  "They are encased in stone," my assistant's voice said from the nearby air. "The symbiote appears to have sent legions of its insect partners into cracks in the slope, some with cargoes of acids to dissolve the native rock and others with chemicals to reconstitute it. The dragon's own weight caused it to sink into the hill, and with its attention fixed on guarding the crevice it did not notice."

  "That will cause Chay-Chevre some grief," said Pars Lavelan. "That dragon represented a large part of her ability to remain useful to Smiling Bol. Now it is immobilized."

  "Worse than that," said the integrator. "Behold."

  The image of the dragon's ankles sunk into rock enlarged then enlarged again. I saw motion but could not make it out clearly. "Enlarge again," I said.

  My assistant obliged and now I saw the source of the movement. A flood of tiny creatures, some no larger than the nail on my smallest finger, some almost as large as my hand, had come swarming out of the ground and were now climbing the dragon's legs, burrowing beneath its scales. The great beast shook and bent its neck to bring its head down to snap at its own legs, like a fierce predator beset by fleas. Its motions became more and more frantic as new hordes of insects poured from the hill. I could hear its roars and hisses rolling across the plain and echoing from the far hills.

  "Can their bites do it much harm?" Pars Lavelan said.

  "Perhaps not," I said, "but chemistry that can dissolve rock may well be able to dissolve a dragon."

  "Chemistry?" the man said. "Next you'll be imagining gravity."

  It seemed a pointless discussion, especially in light of what was happening to the gray and silver. Back on the ship, Chay-Chevre had climbed the prow and stepped over to the fort's front parapet and was gesturing for Shuppat to follow her. The small magician seemed to be torn between going to her aid and remaining to help Bol contain the avatar.

  "She must imagine that he can use his powers over small animals to defeat the attack on her dragon," Pars Lavelan said.

  "She is too late," I said. The entire surface of the gray and silver's body was now a seething mass of motion, visible even witho
ut the integrator's viewer. Seen close-up, the great beast crawled with glistening, segmented bodies, some wedge shaped, others serpentine, yet others resembling narrow cones of chitin with jointed legs and busy mouth parts at the wide end. The dragon's bristling chin swept across its scales, knocking thousands of its assailants to the ground, but tens of thousands took their place.

  The gray and silver's struggles reached a paroxysm, then suddenly its curling neck extended straight up to the sky. its huge jaws opened to emit an agonized roar that became a howl that became, finally, only a dying gasp of expended air. It sank onto the hillside like a downed bird, its wings drooping. A cry of rage and despair went up from Chay-Chevre.

  She swung around to point at the yellow and blue. It sprang forward with a single beat of its wings to land on the front parapet, then lowered its head so that she could climb onto its neck, straddling it just ahead of the wings. Bol called to her, angry, almost petulant, but she ignored him, goading the dragon into the air. It stroked out across the plain, but ascended no higher than the walls of the fort. In moments it had crossed the distance to the crevice, and there it hovered at her command, its great wings pounding the air as it sought to remain just above the part of the crack that was still open.

  I used the integrator's viewer to magnify the action and saw the blasts of wind sweeping away the symbiote's tiny creatures like dust before a squall-line. But the insects were not Chay-Chevre's targets; now she had the yellow and blue crane its neck toward the split in the rock; now its jaws opened; now a blast of white and red flame issued from its mouth and splashed across the hillside and the crevice. It paused to draw breath, then a second torrent of fire poured down on the fissure.

  Back on the deck of the confined ship, Bol was raging. I switched the integrator's viewer back to him and saw that the struggle between the magician and the symbiote's avatar had reached a stasis: Bol had the entity snugly snared, but it seemed that his efforts to harness and direct its stupendous will were being frustrated by the very force of that faculty.

  "An interesting conundrum," I said to Pars Lavelan and Osk Rievor. "He has an element of the entity's existence, its interplanar avatar, in his trap. But the symbiote is not just the sum of its parts; indeed, some of its parts are capable of acting to rescue the part that he has captured."

  "He needs Chay-Chevre's help," Lavelan said, "but she is blinded by rage, trying to kill the thing with blasts of flame shot down its hole. I wonder if she is having much effect."

  "I doubt it," said my other self, "I have explored that cavern, and seen how it connects to many others, all thick-coated in fungus and wriggling with its helpers."

  "Smiling Bol may lose his nickname," I said. "It must be hard to smile when trying to chew something that is too big to swallow."

  Pars Lavelan agreed, but said, "Unfortunately, he will surely opt to bring in more teeth. That is, he will want us to assist him."

  "What can we do?" I said.

  "Provide that 'special vitality' I spoke of. I suspect he will even want the yellow and blue to contribute its store of life-energy. Dragons, having been here since the beginning of the age, are well stocked with what Bol will be looking for."

  I looked Pars Lavelan straight in the eye. "Are you willing to give up your life for Bol's ambition?"

  "Not willing," he said. "But also not able to deny him his will. My skills are minor compared to his. He can plunge our life-stuff into his apparatus as if he were throwing logs onto a fire."

  I turned to my other self. "What have you got that might be useful?"

  "I've been thinking about it," Osk Rievor said. "There are a number of spells that would devastate him, assuming he cannot counter them."

  "What's this?" said Pars Lavelan. "I thought you were from an age before magic."

  "I told you," Osk Rievor said, "I studied it."

  "And you have spells that can lay waste to Smiling Bol? That would have been some course of study."

  "The problem," my other self said, "is that I was never able to try them out at full strength in my own time -- a supportive environment was lacking. And they have come to me from ancient and corrupted sources. I might get a syllable or a gesture wrong, and you know what happens when an element of a spell is out of harmony with the whole."

  "Yes," said Bol's retainer, "I have had to clean out the workroom sump after a couple of such mishaps."

  Bol was not yet summoning us to die for his goals. The situation on the plain had taken another turn. While Chay-Chevre was directing the yellow and blue to enflame the crevice, a new eruption of insects had come boiling up from several places out on the cracked floor of the flat. As we watched, more crawlers emerged from new exits, forming rivulets that converged to become a wide glittering river. It surged toward the fort.

  Bol called out to Chay-Chevre, using an augmented voice that sent pain crashing through my head and caused the grinnet to whimper. He had to bellow twice to gain her attention, but finally she looked up from her work and saw the new danger. She goaded the dragon away from the slope and brought it winging out over the plain, turning it in the air over the fort then arrowing back toward the oncoming tide of insects.

  The dragon came in low and slow. When it reached the head of the broad column, it let loose a blast that scorched and carbonized the tiny creatures. As it continued along the onrushing horde, the downrushing wind from the dragon's wingstrokes scattered their charred shells in puffs and horizontal spirals of disturbed air.

  I heard a shout of triumph from Smiling Bol and Chay-Chevre's harsh laugh came to me on the thin air. The yellow and blue rose and wheeled around to come back for a second strafing run. But still more insects poured from the ground and now the target was changing even as the great beast leveled to pass over the column again. The single river of crawlers split into two, then into four, then a dozen, then a score, then yet more and narrower streams that arced and curved sinuously over the flat. Yet all inevitably headed for the fort.

  The dragon, urged on by its mistress's shouts and blows, swung low over the plain, and wherever its fire rained down, the tiny things died in multitudes. But they were replaced by multitudes of multitudes that raced toward the place where the avatar was captive. And the spurts of flame were not so long-lasting, nor did they seem as hot as before.

  Now Bol sent Shuppat to the forward rampart. The small magician threw back the sleeves of his robes and addressed the air with his wand. His thin voice sang out in a chant that carried across the plain. The streams and rivulets slowed, the insects now hesitantly crawling forward as if they had lost some of their desire to reach the fort even as they had almost reached its forward wall. Shuppat's voice came again, accompanied by a series of precise motions of the wand. All of the oncoming streams stopped, save for here and there where a few insects wandered at random.

  "He has held them," Pars Lavelan said. "He always did have a talent for the smallest things."

  "Then what now?" I said.

  "Stasis has again been achieved. Bol's attention will return to the question of controlling the entity."

  "Then we are closer to the moment when he requires our deaths."

  "Yes."

  "I would prefer not to die for Bol," I said.

  "I feel the same way," said Lavelan.

  "As do I," said Osk Rievor.

  "And you may include me in your number," said my assistant.

  I had not expected to hear from my integrator, but when I considered its situation, I had to concede that it had as much attachment to its life as we did to ours.

  "He is calling us," Pars Lavelan said. I looked and saw Bol gesturing peremptorily -- a mere flicker of his fingers -- for his retainer to bring us back to the ship. We began to move slowly toward him.

  "Well," I said to Osk Rievor, "this is your moment. What might you try?"

  "I've been thinking about it," he said. "There is Grayven's Incisive Ice. It will cause needles of ice, conjured from deep space and so cold that they have the tensile stren
gth of fine steel, to lance through the target's vital organs, simultaneously and from several directions."

  "That sounds effective," said Lavelan.

  "And then there is Hop's Dissociation, which causes the body's joints and sinews to come undone, leaving the victim a heap of unrelated parts wriggling within a bag of skin."

  "I would like to learn that one," Lavelan said.

  "Or Tumular's Reversive Feint. It turns the victim's own will against him. The harder he resists, the more explosive the result."

  We were slowly drifting toward the crisis. I said, "Which will you employ?"

  Osk Rievor sighed. "I am torn. Each requires a stream of syllables and a number of hand gestures. Plus, for the Dissociation, I have to raise one leg."

  "That will be hard to do without rousing Bol's suspicions," I said. "He may take counteractions before you can complete the spell."

  "Yes, that worries me."

  "If I might make a suggestion," said our assistant.

  "Perhaps I could screen you from his view," I said.

  "No," said my other self, "both spells work by line-of-sight. Your suggestion would leave you either riddled by ice or flopping in your skin."

  "Excuse me," the integrator said, "but--"

  "I know Man Kuo's Swift and Terrible Flattener," Lavelan said, "but I learned it from Bol. He would not have taught it to me if he was not permanently proofed against it."

  We were almost to the ship. Out on the plain, the insects were stopped and the dragon was burning them, though it was now more spitting fire in thin spurts than blasting with torrents of flame.

  "I will distract Bol," I said to my other self, "while you try one of your heavy spells."

  "Wait," said the integrator, "I have--"

  "That is brave of you," said Pars Lavelan. "I, too, will try to draw his attention away. At the very least, we will all die trying."

  "So," Osk Rievor said, "victory, or a noble end together. It has been a pleasure to have--"

  "Shut up!" said the integrator. We were almost down to the deck. It turned to Osk Rievor and whispered, "Lateef's Instantaneous and General Manumission."