by Dorian Hart
“If we have our way, Naradawk will die, yes.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
Lapis laughed, a sound without an ounce of warmth or humor. “Do you take me for a storybook villain who spills her secrets before her plan comes fully to fruition?”
“You did just admit that you’re not working alone.”
“Which you already knew.”
“The Sage,” said Aravia. Dranko had told them about Lapis’s confederate after his trip to the “floating island” in the Mouth of Nahalm. “You’re working with the Sage.”
“A name that means nothing.” Lapis shrugged but looked nettled. “The point is that we both intend to use the maze to the same end: the neutralization of Emperor Naradawk. Perhaps we should be working together toward that shared purpose.”
Aravia smirked. “Dranko had a similar talk with your friend Mokad before we left Charagan. If you want to recruit us so badly, maybe you shouldn’t keep trying to kill us first.”
“I have no desire to recruit you,” said Lapis. “And the only thing I regret about my attempts to kill you is that they didn’t work. But here we are, arrived nearly at the finish line together and unable to act directly against each other. A temporary alliance seems the logical choice, don’t you think? You, after all, being a creature of logic.”
“Logically, then, I should ask you why you wish to eliminate Naradawk.”
“True,” said Lapis. “But you’ll just have to keep wondering. It should be sufficient that we strive for this common goal.”
The wheels and gears turned in Aravia’s mind. And now there was something new—an outside force sharpening her thoughts, accelerating those connections, as if her mind were a small machine that had been socketed into a much larger one, one whose speed and precision were far greater. It was the maze, making herself a part of it.
“Solomea told Grey Wolf something else,” she said slowly. The pieces aligned like gear teeth meshing together. “He said your goal is that arcanists end up ruling Charagan.” Click. Whir. “And yet you are obviously working against the Spire and the archmagi. You…you intend to let Naradawk escape, so that the archmagi will throw their power against him. Naradawk will be victorious but weakened, and then you will use the Crosser’s Maze against him. The Sage must be a powerful renegade wizard who seeks to rule, who needs both the archmagi and Naradawk defeated in order to seize power.”
Lapis betrayed not a hint of emotion, just gazed back steadily, but Aravia knew that she was close to the mark, if not absolutely correct.
“Think what you’d like,” said Lapis flatly. “Though if something like that does come about, you personally could end up in a position of great power.”
The feeling of engagement with the Crosser’s Maze vanished as quickly as it came, replaced by the strangest thought: How disappointed Tor would be in her, if she allied herself with Lapis and her master. He held such an idealized image of her, and she wanted to be worthy of it. That feeling had a strange effect upon her, quickening her heart and raising the hair on her arms.
“I’m sure I would be,” she said coolly.
“Solomea is going to give the Crosser’s Maze to me,” said Lapis. “That is not in question. Certainly, were he in full possession of his faculties, he would be far more formidable, but that is not where we find ourselves. The man is desperate to give the thing away, and I have convinced him that I’m the one who should have it. The Black Circle derives its power from a source greater even than the maze.”
“So you came here to gloat?”
“No. I came here because after I have the maze, I would benefit from your help in learning how to use it. Surely you understand that if we fail to master it, Naradawk will be unstoppable. Would you rather a world run by you and your fellow wizards, or one enslaved by a monster, if not simply reduced to rubble?”
“I dispute that those are the only choices. You present a false dilemma. Until Solomea makes up his mind, I prefer the outcome where I take the maze back to Charagan and the archmagi use it to prevent Naradawk’s incursion.”
“I have made up his mind for him. He was unable to resist the Circle.”
“Then why don’t you have the maze already?”
Lapis’s smile grew a tiny bit wider. “Because I wanted to secure your cooperation before I push him over the precipice.”
“You won’t have it,” said Aravia.
Lapis sighed. “Not yet, it seems. But once I have the maze, I’m sure I can use it to augment the power of the Circle and force you to help me. I will control your mind as easily I did your friend Certain Step. But your insights will be keener, your knowledge put to better use, if your mind is unfettered.”
“Five minutes and thirty-three seconds,” said Aravia.
“What?”
“You managed to talk for five minutes and thirty-three seconds before delivering an overt threat. I imagine that for you, that is quite an accomplishment. Congratulations.”
Lapis scowled. “I overestimated you if you think this a laughing matter.”
“Think what you’d like,” Aravia said sweetly. “Also, consider this. Solomea gave us the Greenhouse to be a refuge, a place to regain our strength. I’m certain that you couldn’t hurt us here, even if you tried. But the inverse? Shall we test it?”
“Now who’s making threats?”
Pewter?
House looks fine, Boss.
“I am. Lapis, if the Black Circle truly lets you see the future, you should have known that I would never agree to work with you. The very fact that you thought to ask betrays such a profound ignorance of human nature, I’m shocked that you have been allowed to remain part of their organization. But on the chance that you can see fifteen seconds from now, I invite you to predict what I’m likely to try if you’re still in the Greenhouse by then.”
Aravia twitched her fingers.
Lapis fled.
Pewter padded into the room.
Boss, that was fantastic! For someone unused to showing emotions, that was some wonderfully righteous anger.
Aravia’s heart once again raced. Standing up to Lapis and throwing threats back in her face had been absolutely exhilarating.
I’m a quick learner.
I’m sure Tor will be happy to hear that.
Pewter!
Sorry.
The door to the bedroom slowly creaked closed of its own accord.
Boss?
Aravia swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood up.
Move back, Pewter.
She crept to the door, heard nothing, slowly pushed it open. Outside was not the upstairs hall of the Greenhouse, but a large octagonal room, its floor and walls fashioned of connected iron plates. A door was set in each of seven walls—a Greenhouse bedroom door, painted white. On the eighth wall was a door made of a black stone, perhaps obsidian. All of the Greenhouse doors were in the process of opening, and from each a member of Horn’s Company emerged.
Tor walked over to her, seemingly incurious that the two sides of his door didn’t match. “Did you get a good night’s rest?”
She wanted to take his hand but felt a twinge of self-consciousness—which was ridiculous. When people had romantic feelings for each other, they held hands. Why did it matter what the others might think? And the whole thing was merely a distraction; they had to stay focused.
“No.” She looked around at the others. Ernie tilted his neck left and right. Morningstar rolled her shoulders and touched her toes. Tor looked at her expectantly. All of them seemed energized, refreshed, as though they had each recently woken from the best night’s sleep of their lives.
“Lapis was in my room,” Aravia said. “Did she visit any of you?”
She had not. “What did she say?” asked Ivellios. “What did she want?”
Aravia summarized the conversation quickly and concisely, including her speculation about the Sage.
Boss, tell them what you said at the end!
Hush.
Dranko put his hands toge
ther and cracked his knuckles. “Do you think she was telling the truth?”
“I think that she believed what she said,” Aravia answered, “which isn’t quite the same. But it was plausible. We know that Lapis can control minds; we saw that much at Lakeside. And Solomea himself told us that he found her persuasive.”
“If Solomea gives the Crosser’s Maze to Lapis,” said Morningstar, “then can we take it from her?”
“I don’t know,” Aravia admitted. “But I would guess not. I believe that the maze has to be passed willingly from one Keeper to the next.”
“Then we’ll just have to convince her,” said Dranko grimly.
“But it might not come to that,” said Ernie. “Lapis could be wrong, or lying, and Solomea might give the maze to us instead.”
“Yes, I might.”
The black stone door had opened, and Solomea stood upon its threshold.
“Solomea Pirenne.” Aravia tried not to sound accusatory. “Lapis seems to think that she has already persuaded you to give the maze to her, using the powers granted to her by the Black Circle.”
Solomea rubbed his forehead with his left hand. For a second he looked puzzled. “Lapis…well, Lapis is extremely persuasive. I can’t speak to her use of dark arts; I doubt they could affect me here. But as I said, she presents a convincing case. Should her plans come to fruition, your kingdom would be ruled by wizards, something that might have prevented your current predicament, had it been implemented in the first place.”
Aravia kept to herself the notion that being literally inside Solomea’s mind might be the perfect place for a Black Circle practitioner to exert her influence. But she could not keep wholly silent, and perhaps Solomea could be persuaded with appeals to beneficence. “But Lapis intends that Naradawk Skewn will escape! She intends that he will kill anyone who might be able to stop her, before she uses the maze to banish him. Even the most enlightened sort of government shouldn’t be put in place on the backs of thousands of corpses.”
Solomea waved his hand dismissively. “Perhaps I take a longer view than you.”
“Longer view?” cried Ernie. “That’s horrible! You can’t—”
A look of fury came over Solomea’s face. “Do not presume to tell me what I cannot do!”
Just as quickly, his expression returned to something like boredom. “Follow me. I have something to show you.” Solomea turned and walked through the black stone door, vanishing into the formless darkness beyond.
Aravia was closest, her door being adjacent to his. Pewter scrambled up her back and rode on her shoulder as she hastened after Solomea. What at first appeared to be only void slowly resolved into a wide, gently curving corridor, its floor, walls, and ceiling all a uniform rust-red iron. Solomea strode quickly, but Aravia jogged until she walked beside him.
“What are you going to show us?” she puffed.
Solomea clucked his tongue. “That’s what you’re choosing to ask? A question whose answer you will soon learn anyway? Are you sure there isn’t something more relevant you’d like to know?”
Given enough time, Aravia could produce a list of a thousand questions that she’d like to put to Solomea, but who knew how much time she had?
“If you decide to give the Crosser’s Maze to Lapis, will we have any hope of wresting it from her?”
Solomea laughed; it was not a pleasant sound. “If Lapis acquires the maze with you still here—which you will be—you’ll be fortunate if she stops at killing you. No, you will have no hope, not of taking the maze from her or of anything else.”
Boss, we can’t let it come to that!
I know.
“If you decide to give us the maze, how will we use it to stop Naradawk? How does it work?”
Solomea stopped and grinned at her. “Ah! Now that is an excellent question, one worthy of a wizard and a Spark. Here, this will help you understand.”
Around the next sweep of the curving hall, a door awaited them—Aravia’s Greenhouse bedroom door, identical to the one from which she had recently emerged.
“After you,” said Solomea.
Aravia glanced back and could hear the footsteps of her companions, but they hadn’t yet caught up. Solomea had some way of adjusting the maze’s structure and isolating individuals, as he had done with Kibi and with Ivellios before him. Now it looked as though it was her turn.
She walked through the door, Pewter still on her shoulder, and entered her bedroom. Its bed, desk, and magical washtub were all in place. Lapis was absent, thank the gods.
“This room,” said Solomea, “along with the rest of the Greenhouse, is a metaphor for where I have brought you. All Keepers of the Maze build places like this, homes in the vastness, refuges to which they can retreat when the totality of the reflected universe becomes overwhelming. All the places you have been—the corridors, rooms, courtyards, and conjured-up play-stages—everything you have seen since I drew you in has been inside my little bubble.”
He pointed to the window of her room, the one that usually looked out onto the Street of Bakers in Tal Hae. “Out there, that is the Crosser’s Maze. Look.”
Aravia walked to the window; outside was only blackness.
“There is nothing,” she said.
“Don’t look for something specific. Simply look.”
She allowed her eyes to un-focus. A nagging notion picked at her mind, one that said she ought to understand better what she saw, that the darkness was a sheet thrown over a piece of art. What did Solomea want her to see? What waited out in that impossible depth of nothingness?
Boss, what exactly are we looking at?
Aravia stared, and stared, and then between one heartbeat and the next, the expanse of the maze struck her like an ocean wave.
Everything. We are looking at everything.
The world beyond the window resolved in an eye-blink, a clever illusion that presented a foreground image as dominant, but it was the background that she was meant to see. And what she beheld was everything. Literally. The whole of creation spread itself out beyond the window of her room like a painting with no frame, no border, only an endlessly unrolling canvas. Worlds and cities, gods and mortals, past and future, stars and space and light and darkness, everything that ever was or would ever be, was contained inside the Crosser’s Maze.
Of course, Aravia couldn’t actually see all of that. But by some heretofore undiscovered sense, she could feel the endless expanse of time and space stretching into a roiling infinity.
Once more she had a feeling that her mind was meant for this place, that she was a tiny part that would fit perfectly into a staggeringly complex machine. She could slot herself into it so easily, and it would give her insight and knowledge that no mortal could possibly possess, answer all of her questions.
Boss, no! It’s too big!
“Your cat is wise,” came Solomea’s voice. “All Keepers feel that pull, that temptation, but we know to resist. It would break apart your consciousness.”
Aravia took a slow step back from the window. “How is this possible?” Her voice was little more than a breath.
“Who knows? Someone, a god most likely, created the Crosser’s Maze.”
“But why? What is it for?”
“Its original intended function, as far as the Keepers have been able to surmise, is to close rifts in the fabric of space. That is why your fellow wizards back home think it will solve your problem. The portal in Verdshane, the one surrounded by the stasis field, is the one little spot where the border between Spira and Volpos is weak. Naradawk is tearing it open while Abernathy and his colleagues try vainly to hold it closed. The Crosser’s Maze, in effect, is a sovereign sewing needle.”
Aravia looked toward the window onto the universe. “But why all of that? If the maze is just a magical object meant to heal spatial rifts, why does it need everything?”
“It’s a matter of matter,” said Solomea with a laugh. “And of energy. The maze allows one to create new space, to add to the sum to
tal of reality. The quantity of arcane energy required to overcome the universe’s inherent entropic tendencies is so great, it takes a focusing of all the universe’s power to make it happen.”
He smiled at her. “You can focus the light of the sun with a specially crafted lens and use the resulting beam to start a fire. But to re-weave the universe back together where it crumbles apart, that requires much more than the light from a single star.”
“And the Crosser’s Maze is the lens?”
Solomea made a tsk-tsk noise with his tongue. “No. In the analogy, the maze is the sun. Its quasi-real reflection of the universe supplies the power.”
“Then what serves as the lens? What focuses that power?”
“Ah. That’s the tricky part. Living beings serve as the lens. When one is stitching up holes in the fabric of reality, the power derived from the Crosser’s Maze must be channeled through people—or, more specifically, through the arcane potential of willing participants.”
“Arcane potential?” That was a problem. “There are very few arcanists on Spira.”
“Ah, but everyone has at least a small amount of arcane potential,” said Solomea. “The people you call arcanists merely have more than most, enough to manifest practical effects. But if the maze is used properly, anyone willing to serve as a conduit would be able to assist you.”
“And what happens to those people?”
Solomea held out his hand; a chunk of white crystal rested on his palm. “That depends on how deft is the wielder of the maze, how well they have mastered its subtleties.” He turned his head to look at the far wall of the bedroom. A hole punctured the painted wood, rotten around the edges. Through it Aravia could see the Greenhouse’s upstairs hallway beyond.
A thin beam of red light came in through the window, penetrated the crystal, and continued onward at an adjusted angle to strike the rotting gap in the wall.
Solomea looked down at the crystal, which retained its snowy color. “If the person using the maze has mastered its use, the people serving as conduits remain unharmed. But if she lacks a proper understanding and fails to wield it with finesse…”
The crystal darkened from the center outward, a veined red-gray shadow spreading from its heart. The beam continued to pass through it, and the hole in the wall mended itself, the rot flaking away into puffs of vapor, the beams becoming solid, and the gap itself shrinking.
