The Crosser's Maze (The Heroes of Spira Book 2)

by Dorian Hart

  “Listen carefully,” he said. “Solomea is very particular about how he receives visitors. Beyond this room is a flight of stairs going up, which brings you to a short, narrow hall. There is another door at the end of that hall; knock five times, no more, no less, and with your knocks evenly spaced. Then go through. Do not wait to be invited in; Solomea will be expecting you. He waits on the far side.”

  “Do we need to leave our weapons behind?” asked Tor.

  “Solomea does not care,” said Mazzery. “Keep them if it makes you feel better, but I advise you not to use them. Solomea is more than capable of defending himself if you try to take the Crosser’s Maze from him by force.”

  Dranko patted Mazzery on the shoulder. “Thanks for all of your help. Our world will owe you a great debt.” He turned away, then quickly looked back, as though he had forgotten something. “Oh, and I just want to go on record as saying that if this is all a setup and you’re sending us into a trap, we’re going to escape from it, track you down, and make you seriously regret your life choices. I don’t know what your game is, but I can tell it’s a game. I bet we could fill a book with everything you’re not telling us.”

  Mazzery opened his mouth, but Dranko held up his hand. “Don’t bother. We’re going up there either way. If our little troop here had a motto, it would be ‘spring the trap and fight our way out.’ I’m just telling you this in case you want to start running now.”

  Morningstar didn’t see it; if this were a ruse, why would Mazzery allow them to keep their weapons? But she trusted Dranko’s instincts and drew her mace. The others followed her lead, and in a moment all weapons were out.

  Mazzery merely smiled. “I’ll be here when you return. I hope your audience with Solomea goes well.”

  Tor pushed past Grey Wolf to the door. “Let me go first. Just in case.”

  Morningstar kept to herself the feeling that Tor’s constant need to put himself in danger would bring him to a bad end someday. Last up the stairs, she kept an eye on Mazzery to the end. He wore a bland smile—the kind of expression a man puts on like a mask. Even after the whole of Horn’s Company was in the stairwell, Mazzery didn’t close the door behind them. She walked up sideways, watching in both directions, up and down. Mazzery did not follow them.

  As Mazzery had said, the stairs leveled out onto a straight hallway, dimly lit with the city’s simulacrum of a sunrise. The unaccountable light of Calabash brightened everything equally, inside and outside. The walls and floor were scarred brown wood. At the back of the line, Morningstar couldn’t see the door past her companions. She leaned to the side—

  A tremor ran through the corridor, ever so slight, more of a ripple in the air than a movement of the building.

  She tapped Kibi, directly in front of her, on the shoulder. “Did you feel that?”

  “Yeah, I think so. And I don’t feel so awful, like I’m back on more solid ground.”

  “What’s that sound?” came Ernie’s voice from somewhere ahead.

  “Everyone, quiet,” barked Grey Wolf.

  For a second there was nothing, no sound, as though the stretch of corridor was its own little, silent world. And then, from somewhere, from someone, came a slow susurrus of breath. It sounded like its source was beyond the ceiling, beyond the walls, an unseen giant slowly inhaling, exhaling, inhaling, exhaling.

  “What in the hells is that?” whispered Grey Wolf.

  “I’m guessing this is the trap,” said Dranko.

  Morningstar turned around, expecting to see Mazzery behind them, maybe holding a knife, but what she beheld baffled her. The stairs were gone. In the direction they had come, the wood-paneled hallway stretched away for a hundred feet or more, fading into a deepening shadow.

  “Be ready,” said Grey Wolf.

  Morningstar opened her mouth to warn the others about the missing stairs, but the walls faded away, melting into nothing, and the ceiling as well, and beyond them was more nothing. It was as though she had been transported high into the night sky, surrounded by blackness and distant stars.

  “Aravia?” The urgency in Grey Wolf’s voice was not quite panic.

  “I don’t know what’s going on,” said Aravia. “But I can make an educated guess. Illusion is most likely. Solomea and Mazzery could be staging a visual spectacle to intimidate us.”

  There was only the wooden floor, a catwalk hanging above an abyss. Morningstar pulled her light-rod out of her pocket and tossed it toward where the wall had been. It flew over the edge of the floor and fell out of sight into the vast starry void, its light swallowed up.

  “I don’t think it’s an illusion,” she whispered. She took a tentative step toward where the stairs should be; ahead of her the floor faded away as the walls and ceiling had done.

  “Watch out!” she cried. “The floor! Keep moving forward!”

  Kibi saw it, too, and shoved Ernie, who was next in line. They hurried along the narrow strip of wood as it disappeared behind them. Would they fall off and plummet forever into the emptiness around them?

  “If this is magical fakery, it’s really good,” said Dranko.

  The breathing sounds were quickening, as though mocking their own frantic breaths while they dashed further down the not-there hallway. Would they arrive at the door that Mazzery had promised, terrified, more prone to make a bad bargain for the Crosser’s Maze?

  The sound of her friends’ boots on the ground changed abruptly from the clump of wood to the clang of metal. Horn’s Company spilled out onto a circular iron platform, a wide gray disc hanging in space. All around them, above and below, stars twinkled, but Morningstar took no comfort in them. Nothing about this was natural, and the breathing slowed, becoming steady but slightly rasping.

  A head appeared, unimaginably huge, taking up a full quarter of the star field, its distance impossible to gauge. It was an old man’s head, with wispy gray hair and a more-salt-than-pepper beard and mustache. His smile revealed gleaming white teeth, but his eyes were empty, the stars shining through their blackness.

  “This is wonderfully impressive!” Dranko shouted up to the head. “I assume you’re Solomea Pirenne; nice to meet you! Do you have a few minutes to talk about the Crosser’s Maze?”

  Ah, Dranko. Brash to the last, and unfazed by flimflammery.

  “The Crosser’s Maze.” The head’s voice boomed through the void, sounding from every direction at once. Despite the man’s apparent old age, his voice was strong and resonant. “Dranko Blackhope. Or should I call you Melen Brightmirror? Or perhaps even—no, no, I shouldn’t say. Do you want to know of the maze?”

  “Uh, yes?” Dranko sounded less sure of himself, and for good reason. As far as Morningstar knew, she was the only person in whom Dranko had confided his birth name.

  “Look around you,” boomed the head. “You are inside of my mind, and thus inside of the maze—and here you will stay. You will lose yourselves, little creatures, lose yourself in every sense of the word. Everyone does. You will try to find me, but in the end you will be lost, dissolved in the pool that reflects the universe.”

  To Morningstar that sounded like meaningless babble. Inside of his mind? She still held out hope that this was just a magic show meant to impress, but she was no longer confident of that.

  “Find me,” said the head, its voice quieter. “Please. I am the Keeper, but I would not be the last. Take the—”

  The face quivered and cringed, as though its unseen body had been stung by a wasp. “I am the Keeper, and I will be the last!” it shouted. “Goodbye, little creatures.”

  The head blurred, darkened, became one with the black space around it. Once again they stood unaccompanied on a round iron platform suspended in emptiness.

  High above, something new filled the sky—a vast metal labyrinth, terrifying in scope, stretching through the blackness as far as she could see. It hung upside down from her point of view, as if the gods themselves held it inverted high above their heads.

  And it was descending.
Closer and closer it came, filling all space and thought; the sky was a huge iron maze, and it was falling. Ernie shouted and pointed downward; an equally large maze rose up from the depths below their floating disc. For a few brief seconds, Morningstar could see that both mazes were irregular, mostly filled with even iron-walled passages, but with various strange features dotting the expanses—rooms, walls of other materials, blotches of color. But the two labyrinths, falling from above and rising up from below, were going to crush the company like a pair of monstrous jaws. Morningstar braced for their collision…

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Grey Wolf crouched and threw up his arms, and while his emotions ran the gamut from fear to confusion, he mostly felt frustration that he would die without understanding what any of this meant.

  But he did not die, not then.

  The two mazes met with a deafening bell-ring sound of metal striking metal. Each had a round room in its very center, and it was there that Horn’s Company found itself—a round iron space at the center of a labyrinth that stretched out to eternity. At the moment, it was illuminated only by Dranko’s light-rod, but soon everyone except Morningstar had their lights in hand. The curving wall rose fifteen feet high, showing a patchwork texture of old rust, riveted gray plates, and seamless sheets. Four openings, doorless, were evenly spaced.

  Grey Wolf rounded on Aravia. “Tell me this is still all an elaborate illusion meant to intimidate us.”

  Aravia knelt and put her palm flat to the iron floor. “Mind, magic, and metal,” she whispered. “This is it. The Crosser’s Maze. We’re inside of it.”

  “How?”

  Aravia stood. “I don’t know. Not yet. But I am going to figure it out.”

  “That man said we were inside of his mind,” said Ernie softly.

  “And thus inside of the maze,” finished Aravia. “Perhaps the Crosser’s Maze is embedded in the skull of its owner.”

  “Huh,” said Dranko. “So we’re inside of a magical object, which is inside of a guy’s head, and the guy is inside a city-in-a-bottle, which is sitting on a table in an abandoned hut, which is in the middle of an uninhabited jungle, on the far side of a continent only reachable by a magical archway.”

  Grey Wolf’s head hurt to think of it.

  “I’m going to lay down a bet right now,” Dranko continued, “that this is the unlikeliest place we will ever be in our lives.”

  “But what do we do?” Grey Wolf pressed his hand against the cold iron wall, as if he could push it away and reveal something commonplace. “How can we find the Crosser’s Maze if we’re inside the damned thing?”

  Tor giggled. “Found it.” He tapped the floor with his knuckle.

  “Damn it, Tor, this isn’t a joke! Didn’t you hear what—let’s assume it’s Solomea. Didn’t you hear what he said? We’ll dissolve in here!”

  “That weren’t all he said, though.” Kibi stepped to one of the walls and ran his finger down one of the iron plates. “‘Find me,’ he said. And somethin’ ’bout ’im not wantin’ to be the last Keeper. The one who keeps the maze, maybe? Mazzery did say Solomea wanted to give the thing up.”

  “Mazzery.” Grey Wolf spit out the name. “This was a trap from the beginning, a scheme to get us stuck in here. Everything he said was a lie.”

  “Not everything,” said Dranko. “I mean, here’s the maze, right? He did lead us to it. Maybe this is where Solomea makes his sales pitch, and if we impress him, he lets us out of his brain and gives it up.”

  “I still don’t understand where we are,” said Ernie. His voice didn’t echo. A room like this ought to have echoes, but there were none.

  “I know one thing,” said Tor. “Nothing good will happen if we simply stand here talking and arguing. We should explore. Maybe the idea is that we have to find Solomea in the maze, and if we do, he’ll hand it over.”

  Grey Wolf turned in a slow circle. All four of the room’s exits looked identical. “Aravia? Any idea which way we should go?”

  Aravia wore an expression of concentration mixed with wonder, her head tilted slightly to one side as though she listened for something. “Do you hear that?”

  “The breathing sound?” More evidence that Solomea wanted to scare them. “Yeah, I hear it.”

  “No, no, not that,” said Aravia. “Something else. It’s as if the Crosser’s Maze is talking to me, but I’m not smart enough to understand it.”

  “That’s not possible,” Tor objected. “You not being smart enough, I mean.”

  “When it comes to the world of arcane possibilities,” said Aravia, “the amount of knowledge I do not yet possess dwarfs the totality of my understanding.”

  Grey Wolf turned to Dranko. “I’m not taking your bet. This is…” He didn’t know how to finish that sentence. Nothing made sense. Gods, but his mind felt tired. But Tor was right. “That way,” Grey Wolf said wearily, pointing to the opening more-or-less in front of him. “Unless someone has a specific objection.”

  “I doubt that it is relevant,” said Aravia. “Lead on.”

  Grey Wolf held his light-rod before him and walked into the dark opening in the iron wall. Behind him six other pairs of boots clanked on the iron floor. The ceiling was low enough that he could reach up and brush his fingertips along the cold, smooth metal.

  Not twenty paces in, the hallway branched.

  “Anyone care left or right?” he called behind him.

  “Right,” said Ernie at the same time Tor said, “Left.”

  “Aravia?” Grey Wolf called back.

  “We have no information on which to base a decision.”

  He turned left. In ten more steps the hallway branched again, and then again, and soon it became obvious that they were in a literal maze. Aravia recommended that they always keep one hand along the wall to their left—the left-hand rule, she called it, a standard method of finding the exit of a normally constructed labyrinth. As if anything about this place were normal.

  After what felt like a half-hour of wandering, something finally changed. Around yet another corner one long stretch of wall was not iron, but a perfectly polished mirror. Grey Wolf knocked his knuckles against it a few times in different places, in case it secretly masked an exit, but it was no more than it seemed. The reflections of the company looked normal enough.

  Another turn brought a new length of iron hallway with three discrete mirrored panels. The first two were ordinary in every way that mirrors embedded in a magical labyrinth could be. The third returned their reflections, but it also showed a huge light-gray spider scurrying along the floor near their feet. Grey Wolf shouted and looked down, pointing his light-rod to where the spider ought to be, but it existed only as a reflection. It gave the appearance of weaving between their legs, but though everyone looked down, Dranko hopped on one leg, and Tor tried to stomp on it, no spider shared the hallway with them. It scuttled past the edge of the mirror and disappeared. Soon after, a distinct skittering noise sounded above the passage’s metal ceiling. In seconds that, too, had faded, leaving behind only their own small incidental noises and the omnipresent inhale-exhale.

  “What was that all about?” Grey Wolf didn’t expect an answer, and didn’t get one. “And that breathing makes me wonder: Are we somewhere with air? Are our physical bodies in here at all, or are we just imagining all this?”

  “Impossible to say.” Aravia stared at the ceiling, as though trying to understand where the spider had gone. “But I would guess that our bodies are still in the upper hallway of Mazzery’s warehouse. In that respect, the interior of the maze may be similar to the Tapestry that Morningstar visits in her dreams.”

  But that meant—“Damn it! So Mazzery could be looting our bodies right now! Maybe that was his game from the start! Or even—” His blood froze. “Or he could kill us. But we wouldn’t be here if he had. Would we?”

  “Can he do that?” asked Tor. “My memory is that no one could die or be killed in Calabash.”

  “That is correct,” said a v
oice.

  Grey Wolf nearly leaped out of his boots. A middle-aged man with just a brush of steel at his temples stared out at them from one of the mirrors. Or was it still a mirror? It showed none of their own reflections, just a man in a gray robe against a matte-black background. His right hand was tucked inside the folds of the robe.

  “Hey, it’s Solomea!” said Dranko. He was right—or at least this looked like a younger version of the old man they had seen looming over them.

  The man bowed his head. “I am indeed. And your young friend is right; the prohibition against killing or inflicting injury in Calabash is so strong, it maintains its sway over its citizens even if they have restored their original identities.”

  “How do you know that?” Grey Wolf asked.

  “How do I know that.” Solomea phrased it as a flat statement with a patronizing lilt. “Ivellios, I know because Calabash is my creation.”

  Rage rose up within Grey Wolf. Here was the man who had trapped them not once, but twice, in two layers of incomprehensible magical constructs. Before he knew what he was doing, he had stepped into the mirror, which was not a mirror at all, and grabbed Solomea by the neck with his right hand.

  “Why? Why would you make a place that steals people’s lives? That’s sick…evil…”

  Solomea calmly put his own left hand on Grey Wolf’s wrist and squeezed. His grip was red-hot iron; Grey Wolf cried out, released his hold, and was driven to his knees as Solomea twisted his arm.

  “Manners, Ivellios. Do you think you can control your temper long enough to take a walk with me?”

  Grey Wolf could feel the bones of his wrist sliding and grinding painfully in Solomea’s grasp. He nodded.

  “Good. All of you. Follow.”

  Solomea turned his back to them and walked into the darkness. The space beyond the not-mirror was a dark blank, lacking any depth or sense of place, but the robed man grew smaller, and all of their boots rang against unseen iron as they walked after him. Presently trees loomed up out of the darkness, and the space around them resolved into a forest, bright with mid-autumn’s particolored cloak of leaves. One conspicuously large oak had a huge and oddly shaped knot bulging from the base of its wide trunk.