by Dorian Hart
THE CROSSER’S MAZE
DORIAN HART
Copyright © 2017 Dorian Hart
Cover art by Gareth Hinds
www.garethhinds.com
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or conveyed via the Internet or a Web site, without prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. Under no circumstances may any part of this book be photocopied for resale.
This is a work of fiction. Any similarity between the characters and situations within its pages and places or persons, living or dead, is unintentional and coincidental.
Comments and inquiries should be sent via e-mail to [email protected]
ISBN-13: 978-0692950326 (Jester Hat Books - paperback)
ISBN-10: 069295032X
For Jerry Sigmund
In memoriam
Table of Contents
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PROLOGUE
The Sharshun Lapis licked her lips and smiled thinly at the man standing before her. She observed the telltales of his profession: his slouched yet defiant bearing, the wary flick of his eyes, the muscles that bulged beneath a tattered and stained shirt. This man’s business was violence, doubtlessly done often and with efficiency.
Yes, he was a thug, but he was about to become a plaything. Men like him existed in this world to serve a purpose, no different from a hammer or a haversack.
“You are Tavros?”
The man nodded. His thick arms were crossed, his face set in something halfway between a frown and a sneer. Did he wonder what sort of creature she was, with her dark-blue skin? That he seemed incurious spoke to his professionalism.
“My understanding is that you are one of the best in this city at…what you do. Would you concur?”
Tavros’s expression twisted into a grin. “‘What I do?’ You mean hurt people and sometimes kill them? It’s fine to say it out loud. The watch doesn’t come to this part of town. They don’t want ‘what I do’ to happen to them.”
Lapis would have been surprised to hear otherwise. Here, in a damp basement beneath a darkened warehouse in Trev-Lyndyn’s most dubious neighborhood, she knew she’d be far from the watch’s patrols. She had to admit, the room and its odors lent this business a certain authenticity. It smelled of human waste, alcohol, and sweat, and the stone walls oozed with a brown slime. A filthy metal grill squatted in the center of the floor, darkened by a conspicuous bloodstain.
She was unfamiliar with the niceties of Tavros’s trade; was he accustomed to bringing his victims back here to finish his work? Or perhaps he simply liked to meet with prospective clients in a place that would firmly establish his back-alley brand of brutality.
“That is what I mean, yes. I am looking to hire a killer. Are you interested?”
“Not yet.” Tavros’s eyes never stopped moving. The room was mostly empty, so he wasn’t looking at anything, but she supposed a hired assassin could never be too careful. “Now’s the part when you pique my interest. For the record, things I find interesting are who you want me to kill, when you want me to kill them, and how much you’re going to pay me to do it. Not much else.”
“Very good,” she said, “and easily answered. I want you to kill a band of travelers who will be passing through your fair city sometime in the coming weeks. They will be easy to identify. One is a half-goblin covered with scars, and another is an albino woman in black robes. A third is a slight young woman with magical abilities, and a fourth is a tall, muscular youth who is very dangerous with a sword. The others are less distinctive, but they will all be traveling together. There will be seven of them.”
Tavros blinked. It was the first time his eyes had closed since she arrived in this charming little room.
“You want me to kill a group of seven people, including a trained swordsman and a sorcerer?”
“Most of the others have also been trained to fight. The only two who haven’t are a healer and the strongest man you are ever likely to meet.”
She enjoyed his flabbergasted expression.
“Lady, I think you mistake the nature of my professional services. I have a team, sure, but you ought to be hiring out a band of mercenaries. Good luck finding one, though; they’ve all taken Bederen coin to fight the Delfirians up north.”
“I make no mistake, Tavros. I’m sure you and your chosen men will do exactly what I need you to do.”
“Right.” He drew out the word. “A job like that, you’re going to have to pony up a lot of cash. Seven targets, six of them dangerous? I’ll need fifteen hundred miracs up front and another thousand when the job is done.”
Now we come to the fun part. “Oh. We’ve had a misunderstanding.” She widened her smile. “I was simply explaining the nature of the assignment. I wasn’t intending to pay you. And I only asked after your interest to be polite.”
“You…what?”
“This is not a business transaction. I am merely explaining to you what I wish done.”
It was a funny thing, mildly ironic even, that when one could read other people’s thoughts through the power of the Circle, one became increasingly adept at doing it through simple observation. It was written plainly on Tavros’s twitching face that he wavered between two possibilities: that she was about to threaten him, or that she was merely deranged.
“I’m sorry to break this to you,” he said, “but I don’t work for free. You’ve wasted my valuable time, so let’s talk about how you’ll repay me just for that. How about we start with that silver ring in your nose?” He gave a shrill whistle, then stood back and showed a grin gapped with missing teeth.
A few seconds passed. The thug’s grin faded. His eyes flicked repeatedly to the door on his left. He whistled again, more loudly.
“I’m sorry,” she told him. “Your associates are sleeping. If you wish to divest me of my ring, you’ll have to do it yourself.”
He snarled and drew a knife. “Fine.”
“No.”
The preliminaries were at an end. Lapis reached out with her mind and clamped down upon his, taking control of his body. He struggled, of course, but he could do little against the power of the Black Circle, not when she had had time to prepare. Gently she opened the fingers of his right hand, until the knife clattered to the floor.
“Let go of me, you witch!”
“Let us review, one more time, what you will do. You will arrange for lookouts and spies at the en
try points to the city. If and when the seven people I spoke of pass its walls, you and your fellow assassins will do your best to kill them, in whatever manner you see fit. Do you understand that much?”
She nodded his head up and down, which only enraged him further. “I’ll cut that blue skin off your bones! I’ll—”
“One more thing,” she added with a sigh. “Once you have killed your targets, you will turn on your fellows and attempt to kill as many of them as possible, while calling them the filthiest, foulest, most insulting names you can imagine. I doubt you will survive the encounter, but I don’t see that the world will be worse off for it.”
“You’re insane!”
“Hold still.”
Now for the trickier part. Lapis forced herself deeper into his mind, breaking through the layers of his psyche that tried to resist her. He was a strong-willed fellow—she supposed one would have to be in his line of work—and it took some doing. Beads of sweat broke out on both of their foreheads. Before she finished, her breath was heavy, her shoulders rising and falling. But not even a hardened killer could match her, not truly, and she drilled into his mind to the center of his conscious thought.
You are mine.
He straightened up and looked at her sheepishly. “Sorry about that.” He bent to pick up his knife. “I think we’re all straight then, ma’am. You’ll have no cause for worry; you’ve hired the best. Me and my boys will take care of your seven friends, and then I’ll follow up as you suggested.”
“Excellent,” she said. “I wish you the best of luck.”
She didn’t expect Tavros to succeed fully, but he’d kill one or two, more likely than not, and the point was more to slow them down. If all seven died, all the better, but one needed to be realistic.
She had spent enough time in this filthy basement—and, indeed, in this city. The Sage had been quite clear about the need for haste. Lapis turned her back on Tavros and considered her next move.
Somewhere in this wide foreign land, the Crosser’s Maze awaited her.
CHAPTER ONE
The distant city shimmered in the summer heat. It seemed to hover, a dark blur perched on the border where countryside gave way to a wide, blue bay.
Grey Wolf dashed the sweat from his brow before striding down a gentle, grassy hill. He knew the city’s name; he lived there. And there was a house, a big green house. Every day his memories of the city and the house had grown sharper, crystallizing out of the swirling fog that filled his mind. He knew that he had two names, Ivellios and Grey Wolf, the name he was given and the name he gave himself. He knew he had been somewhere terrible, a place in which he should have died, but he had escaped uninjured. And he knew with a hard certainty that if he could just reach the city and the house, all would be well.
That first night, when he had returned from—
Seven standing stones had looked down upon him in the moonlight, but he hadn’t remembered what they were or why they were important. He remembered nothing except that he needed to reach the big city. As he had wandered the countryside, the farmers he met had given him water and pointed him westward. They knew the name of the city, told him what it was, but on that first day his mind was a slick sheet of oil. Nothing stuck. So he walked, and ate the food he found in his pack, and slept under the stars. Sleep came easily, a refuge into which he could retreat and not have to think.
He had walked for over a week since that first day of blurry confusion. Every so often he would reach for the memories of where he had been, the danger, the horror of it, but he couldn’t quite touch them. His mind recoiled. He was like a child who had burned his hand in scalding water and dared not check to see if it had cooled. Even now, with the city only a day’s walk further, he wouldn’t send his mind back to that place, where there was a—
No. The water was still hot.
Grey Wolf. Ivellios. Whichever he was, he had returned to himself in other ways. Each sunrise had brought back new memories. There had been a battle near a desert, where bad men had been doing bad things. There had been an old woman who had died, a kind woman who had been his friend. She had a name, too, and it would come back to him. Soon it would all come back.
There would be answers in the big green house, in the city by the sea.
Tal Hae. The city is called Tal Hae.
* * *
The following evening he found himself standing in front of the house. A sign hanging out front proclaimed it The Greenhouse. Yes, that was it. He lived in the Greenhouse, a place that used to be a bakery, a house that the wizard Abernathy had given to him and several others. Over the past day his memories had been returning in a rush—names, events, faces—but he still couldn’t bring himself to think about the place he had gone. Still too hot.
He had been on a ship with the others, when he had been transported to—
It surprised him that his companions were already back. Through the curtains he could see them moving, their silhouettes backlit by Abernathy’s magical lights. What did they think had happened to him? Had they continued their errand to Seablade Point? They were going to investigate…an arch? Yes. The Kivian Arch. He had been their leader. Had they managed well without him?
He had a key. They each had a key to the Greenhouse. It was in his pocket. He put the key in the lock, forgetting momentarily which way it turned. It was odd how his memories returned piecemeal, floating back from wherever they had gone.
He opened the door.
“It’s Grey Wolf!”
“Grey Wolf, you’re back!”
“Gods, what happened? Are you all right?”
“We thought you were gone for good!”
“Where did you go?”
They crowded around him, babbling. He knew their names. Morningstar was the pale one. Dranko was the ugly one. Tor was the tall one. Kibi was the bald one. Ernie was the one who looked most worried. Aravia was the only one who hadn’t gotten up; she was reading a book.
That’s right. She was a wizard. Always reading.
They all stopped talking, looked at him, waited for him to speak.
“Nice to be back,” he said slowly, feeling out his own voice. He hadn’t spoken much this past week. “I’m surprised you’re home so soon. When did you get back from Seablade Point?”
Their eyes grew wider.
Aravia looked up from her book. “Fascinating.”
“Seablade Point?” said Tor. “That was over a month ago!”
That couldn’t be right. “Nonsense. I’ve only been away for a week.” He was nearly certain of that. He didn’t remember the details of what had happened when he went to—
He had only been there a few minutes.
There.
Been there.
Been in the presence of—
He is a boy named Ivellios, and he is looking down at the body of his mother.
Where did that come from? He shook the memory out of his head.
“A week!” Kibi exclaimed. “Grey Wolf, Tor’s right. We’d given you up for dead and gone. Abernathy came back ’bout two weeks ago and cast some kind a’ spell to figure out what happened, but it couldn’t find no trace a’ you.”
An old gentleman—Eddings, the butler—pressed a mug of tea into his hands. “It is a pleasure to see you again, Master Grey Wolf. Are you hungry?”
For some reason the butler had a translucent blindfold wrapped around his eyes.
“Yes, I could use some dinner, if there’s any left.”
Tor gave him a guilty look.
“I’m afraid all the dinner is gone,” said Eddings, “but I will bring you bread and cheese and apples.”
The others hovered around him. He ought to say something.
“A week ago, I was on the ship. For me, I mean. It feels like a week. I…went somewhere. I don’t remember exactly.” That much was true. “But I was only there for a few minutes, and then I was back…back in the middle of those tall standing stones. The Seven Mirrors. I walked home. Here I am.”
His friends didn’t look satisfied. “Whatever happened, it scrambled up my memory a bit. Most of it has come back, and I think I’ll be back to normal in a few days.”
“Did you shave while you were gone?” asked Dranko.
“No, I didn’t shave.” He rubbed his short beard. It was a week. If he had gone a month without shaving, he’d look like a wild animal. “And that’s—”
“That’s how you know you’ve only been missing for a week,” Aravia finished. “And that means you went somewhere where time moved at a different speed than here.”
“Or he shaved and then forgot,” said Tor.
Aravia frowned. “Or that, yes, I suppose.”
“Well, we’re glad to have you back,” said Ernie. “You missed a lot!”
They all started talking at once about a fire priest and Sharshun and that fellow Sagiro with the mustache. Eventually they sorted themselves out and gave him the whole story in order, ending with a giant turtle rising out of the Mouth of Nahalm and crushing most of Sand’s Edge, all as part of a ritual to open up the Kivian Arch down on Seablade Point.
“And now there’s an army coming through that arch,” said Morningstar. “All of the enemy’s designs, right through to their summoning of the Ventifact Colossus, were meant to open the way for an invasion by the Kivians.”
“Which is a problem,” said Dranko, “since in a few weeks the archmagi are going to send us through the arch in the other direction. They’re sending us after the Crosser’s Maze.”
Grey Wolf felt as if he should remember what that was. Something important, clearly. A device to repel the invasion?
“Why a few weeks?” he asked. “Why not tomorrow?”
“The archmagi are devising a plan that will allow us to bypass the Kivian army and traverse the arch,” said Aravia. “They are also collecting information about the Crosser’s Maze itself. But they still need to devote most of their time and energy to keeping the portal closed. Abernathy has spoken to us for maybe five minutes in total since we saw you last.”
“It’s incredibly frustrating,” added Ernie. “Charagan is being invaded by a foreign army, and there’s nothing we can do to help. Abernathy told us we had to wait here, be ready, not put ourselves in any danger. And the few times he’s spoken to us, he’s dropped hints that it’s just a matter of time before Naradawk breaks out and kills everyone.”
