Mike and I came over to lean against the table. “What happens if we go up?” I asked.
“The Minotaur feels all of us cross the threshold, and it appears.”
“And if we go down?”
“Same damned thing.”
“And if we stay here,” I said, looking around the room. “It appears.”
“Eventually,” Speedy said. “It’s a ghost, so time’s practically meaningless to it.”
“Except whoever’s inside that monster is really messed up,” I said. “It thinks it’s got a job to do. Can we even leave the mountain without fighting it?”
“Maybe if we hadn’t gone inside the treasure room. After this, I doubt it.”
“Well, then,” Mike said, as he moved to unbuckle his new sword from his waist. “We don’t fight him—we help him.”
Which might have been a stunning idea, except the Minotaur chose that moment to appear behind him.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
I hadn’t even gotten my mouth open to shout Mike’s name when the labrys slashed through the air.
It was cool, though; Mike had read my body language and was already halfway across the room, snatching Speedy off the table as he ran.
“First right, second left, first right!” Speedy yelled as the two of them sped from the room.
“Gotcha!” The Minotaur lunged at me; I swung my sword, and felt it cut through muscle and bone. The monster bellowed in pain as one of its legs came apart at the knee. Another whipping motion, and I took off the hand holding the labrys.
Then I was out of the treasure room and racing down the tunnel.
And learning—quickly—that I didn’t have a flashlight.
“God damn it!” I muttered, and skidded to a halt before I accidentally launched myself into the chasm.
I took a deep breath, turned, and walked back into the treasure room.
Mike’s pack lay beside the table that Speedy had used as his sketch pad. The Minotaur was a dozen feet away, flat on the ground and moaning in pain. The golden glow of the room had changed; now that the Minotaur was the only source of light, the treasure reflected an eerie blue-green hue.
Very, very unpleasant.
I kept a wary eye on the monster as I circled the room. Mike had kept a few spare flashlights clipped to the outside of his pack. I grabbed two of these and strapped one to my thigh and the other to my belt as quickly as I could.
The Minotaur watched every move I made, venom in its eyes.
“Well,” I said, as I picked up my sword again. The Minotaur flinched, and I lowered the blade so I didn’t look like a threat. “I’m betting this is the first time you’ve experienced pain in…I dunno. Ages.
“I’m supposed to set you free,” I added. “Any advice?”
The Minotaur bared its teeth at me, and then it and all of its associated parts dematerialized into a blue mist.
“Didn’t think so,” I said. I hoisted the sword and sprinted out of the room.
I followed Speedy’s directions through the Labyrinth. At the third turn, I heard Mike call my name in a low whisper.
I followed the sound: they had found a hidey-hole on an upper ledge overlooking two intersections. I climbed up the wall and told them what had happened in the treasure room.
“Great,” Speedy said with an eye roll. “You reminded the monster that it’s really nothing but a ghost. Thanks.”
“Would have happened anyway,” Mike said.
“And now it knows we can hurt it,” I said.
“Which just motivates it to bring its A-game,” Speedy said. “Theseus was a warrior. Somewhere in those motes of blue light are his memories. Do you really want to test yourself against a legendary Greek hero?”
“Actually, yeah, that sounds pretty amaz—”
“Oh God, just shut up,” Speedy said.
“I think that’s a fantastic idea,” Mike said.
“See?” I told Speedy.
“No, I mean, we should remind it that it’s a human being. We can’t reason with a monster.”
“Um.” I raised a finger. “I should mention that from what I saw of Theseus in my dreams, the Minotaur might be an improvement. I don’t know if we can reason with it, even if it does remember it’s really a man.”
“Well,” Mike said, “it’s worth considering. We can’t fight him. Not over the long term.”
“What are we missing?” I asked, as I peered over the ledge. I saw nothing except darkness. The Minotaur either didn’t know where we were, or was still licking its imaginary wounds. “Helen wouldn’t have sent us here if it were a lost cause. We’ve got to be able to do something that she can’t.”
“We know she’s here,” Mike said. “She’s been steering you.”
“Call your husband.”
“No,” I told the koala. I didn’t—couldn’t—want to see Sparky until this was all over. I was having a hard enough time keeping it together without bringing him into this mess. “We’re missing…something.”
“What’s at its center?” Mike asked.
“Hmm?” Speedy flicked an ear at Mike.
“It’s a Labyrinth, right? That sketch you drew. What’s at its—”
“Yes! Of course!” Speedy nearly shouted. Then, in a whisper: “Come on.”
He scurried down the wall and danced on all fours until Mike and I reached the ground. I scooped him up, and we started another slow descent.
Talk about nerve-wracking. Those two-plus hours in the second level of the Labyrinth were among the worst of my life. At every moment, we expected the Minotaur to lunge out and skewer us on its horns. Also? It was a ghost, which meant the floors and walls couldn’t be trusted.
(I was kind of hoping the Minotaur would try to manifest through a wall, which would mean it would have to solidify as it did, which would mean there was a high possibility that it half of its body would get trapped in the wall until it could sort out its molecules, and God only knows how long that would take but at least we’d know where it was until that happened. The anticipation was murder.)
Mike led the way. Speedy rode on my shoulders, keeping watch behind us. We traveled slow and steady, our swords at the ready. Mike kept his sword low to the floor, ready to come up and gut the Minotaur at a moment’s notice; the saber I had grabbed on a whim was much lighter, so I rested it on the shoulder unoccupied by a koala, ready for an overhand swing.
My saber was Damascus steel; that had made me smile.
“How do you imprison a ghost?” I asked, sometime late into the second hour. I hadn’t felt Helen nearby; I assumed that meant Speedy was leading us in the right direction.
“It lets you,” Mike said.
“Or you get an equally strong ghost to keep it in check,” Speedy said.
“That’s still just a trick of the mind,” Mike said. “On a subconscious level, a ghost has to consent to being trapped.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But we know that different ghosts are stronger and weaker than each other. That’s a fact, not a trick of the mind. There’re natural laws at work here; we just don’t know what those are.”
It took Mike a while to reply.
“I’m not saying you’re wrong, but I don’t like that idea,” he finally said. “One human imposing their will upon another… That shouldn’t be allowed to happen in life, let alone after death.”
“Law of the jungle, baby,” Speedy said. “The strong will always dominate the weak.”
“Well, the jungle can go suck eggs,” Mike said.
We were all quiet for a few more moments. Then: “Suck eggs?” I asked.
Mike sighed with the deep resignation of a man who is still many lifetimes away from enlightenment.
“How old are you? Ninety zillion?”
“Here’s another question,” Mike said. “Who built this Labyrinth?”
“Atlas didn’t know,” I said.
“That might be worth learning,” he said, as he ran his fingertips along the nearest wall.
W
e tripped over Atlas’ body sometime during that second hour. Pretty much literally: Speedy was riding on my shoulders and keeping watch low, while I was leading the group and keeping watch high, when Mike grabbed the back of my jacket.
“What?” I whispered, my sword ready, and then saw the…uh…squishiness in front of me, wearing a familiar shirt and pair of jeans.
“Oops,” Speedy said with a toothy grin.
I took a deep breath and reminded myself there were many good reasons why I shouldn’t murder a koala in cold blood. They were an endangered species. They were cute. They were… There were probably other reasons, but screw me sideways if I could think of any at that moment.
“Just as I thought,” Speedy said, pointing up. The walls were rough, cave-like, and they kept going up. We could still see the light of our lantern, hundreds of feet overhead. “The chasm was in the natural part of the cave.”
He leapt off of my shoulders and ran up the wall a few yards, his claws tracing more of those scratches in the rock face that suggested heavy items had been lowered down to the bottom.
“What are you thinking, Speedy?” Mike asked.
“Ask me again when we get to the center,” the koala said, as he returned to my shoulders. “We’re nearly there.”
And then, five minutes later, we reached the center of the Labyrinth.
It had been lying in wait for us. Speedy’s predictions of the layout had been completely accurate, except he thought there should have been one last hard left turn before we reached the center. Whoever built the place had decided, no, we don’t need that last turn because we’re just going to mess with anyone who makes it this far instead.
Mike and I were tired and our reactions were getting slower, but we still stopped short well before the threshold. The central chamber was dark, with a faint ghostly blue light coming from somewhere within. I tried to peer inside to see if the Minotaur was the source of the light, but felt the invisible hands push me away.
“Uh, guys?” I said, as my hiking boots began to slide across the Labyrinth’s floor. “Helen doesn’t want us going inside.”
I slid backwards until Helen decided I had reached a safe distance, and released me. Then, something grabbed my chin and tilted my head towards the ceiling.
“Hope?” Mike asked, concerned.
“She’s getting handsy again,” I said. I brought up a flashlight and scanned the area in front of my eyes. “Do you see anything up there?”
“Maybe,” Speedy said. He jumped from Mike’s shoulders like a giant housecat, and began to scale the walls again. “Yeah. Toss me a light.”
I lobbed one of my flashlights at him. He caught it in his teeth, then shone the beam up and down the walls around him. The light vanished in one spot; Speedy had found a well-camouflaged hole.
“It’s a hidden passageway,” the koala said. He ran a few steps across the wall, then disappeared into same spot that had eaten the light. Mike and I exchanged an uneasy glance when he vanished, but Speedy’s head popped out from a second hole on the other side of the doorway. “It looks natural, not manmade. It’s an alternate route into the central chamber. We can avoid the threshold altogether. Can you get up here?”
Mike gave me a boost so I could join Speedy in his hidden niche, and then I helped Mike to scale the wall. On the far side of the passageway, we paused to examine the room below us.
It was big, about the size of a decent-sized home goods store. Unlike most of the Labyrinth, this room looked like a natural cave instead of a manmade structure, with rough walls and a floor peppered with miniature hills and valleys. It held two objects: the first was a large white marble stature of a warrior woman, her Spartan xiphos extended and pointing downwards. Her breasts were bare; her body nothing but hard muscles; her face the most deadly kind of beautiful.
“Helen,” I whispered.
The stone sword of the long-dead queen was aimed at the second object in the room. A fire pit waited below her blade, where ghostly blue flame flickered around a black dagger with a straight edge and a heavy handle.
“There,” I said, nudging Mike with the side of my fist. “That’s the dagger Theseus used to kill himself.”
“And that’s what Archimedes has been working on for the last two thousand years,” Speedy said.
Mike and I looked at the koala, and then followed his gaze up to the cavernous ceiling high above.
“Oh wow,” I whispered.
Archimedes had had a long time to perfect the art of his orreries. A solar system turned above us, slow and glittering in glass and precious metals. There were comets and planets and moons, all rotating in a celestial dance around three large objects. I tried to find recognizable features—the continents of Earth, or the rings of Saturn—but nothing seemed familiar.
Behind this spectacle, written in gold letters across the roof, were formulae. Countless (sorry) numbers in gilded paint had been painstakingly applied in luminous equations. The blue light from the fire below made it glow like a star-filled sky.
Speedy’s eyes lit up as he read it, and he chuckled.
“Nine, ten, eleven… Doesn’t our solar system have eight planets?” Mike asked.
“Yup,” Speedy said. “But this isn’t our solar system.”
Mike and I let that sink in.
“Oh,” I said in a tiny voice.
“Oh, indeed,” the koala said. He seemed unable to look away from the grand orrery above us. “We’re taking photographs of this before we leave,” he said. “This is more lifetimes of labor than I can calculate.”
“The planets?”
“No,” he said, shaking his head as he broke away. “That’s window dressing. The money is in the math.”
“All right,” I said. “Photographs later. Mystery now. What’s going on here?”
“Looks like we were right; Helen is here to balance Theseus,” Mike said.
“I’ll bet she’s entombed in that sarcophagus,” Speedy said.
I blinked and reassessed the room below us. What I had taken for a marble statue on its pedestal was actually a statue balanced on top of a large box.
We had found Helen’s tomb.
“If I had to make an educated guess,” Speedy said, “When Sparta began to go into decline, Helen had Theseus’ dagger thrown into a deep cave. When that didn’t fix things, she ordered her people to use the same cave as her own tomb after she died. They stuck her down here, along with her share of the spoils from the Trojan War as her grave goods.”
“This isn’t a cave,” I said.
“It was once,” Speedy said. “No ancient civilization could build a Labyrinth like this. Two levels under a mountain? Miles and miles of smooth walls? And how did they move this statue down here, when it’s larger than some of the tunnels? I call bullshit on that feat of engineering. You saw what she did with rock and stone at the shrine—I think Theseus has been building this place for two thousand years.”
“Theseus? Not Helen?”
“She’s been busy making the normals ignore this mountain. But he’s deluded himself into thinking he’s a Minotaur, right? What else is he gonna do during that time than shape his own cage? Maybe just at the rate of a couple of feet a day, but time plus energy equals Labyrinth.”
“This is hell,” Mike whispered. His voice was rough. “This is hell for both of them. We’ve got to end this.”
“How?” I asked. “If it’s something simple, like snuffing out that fire, why hasn’t Helen done it herself?”
“Because this is Theseus’s kingdom,” Speedy said. He poked one paw out over the edge of the ledge, as if testing the air inside the central cavern. When nothing happened, he began to climb down the wall, one cautious step at a time. “The only thing she’s been able to affect down here is you, Hope. You’re hers—she’s been pushing you around, but that’s it. She didn’t intervene with Atlas or Darling, and she hasn’t sheltered us from the Minotaur. She can’t. All she can do is keep Theseus imprisoned in this mountain.”
Mike and I replied by drawing our swords.
“Thanks,” Speedy said, and planted his forepaws on the floor of the central chamber. He counted to ten before he turned and ran back up the wall to join us.
“Maybe it only works with humans,” I said, before I remembered that Speedy had been the one to trip the threshold to the treasure room. “Never mind,” I muttered, and jumped down from our hidden niche.
I walked a slow circuit of the central chamber, my Damascus saber at the ready, with Mike and Speedy keeping watch over me. When I completed the circuit with nary a sign of Minotaur, they joined me on the floor.
I knelt beside the fire pit. The black dagger was suspended in midair, the blue flames coating its blade.
“What does your gut say?” Speedy asked.
“It’s been fifteen hours since we last ate anything substantial, and I’m a moron for not grabbing a bottle of water when I went back for the flashlights.”
“Don’t make me bite you.”
“Right.” I sighed. “I think it’s a seriously bad idea to touch that knife.”
“Okay then,” Speedy said, and the two of us backed away from the fire.
“Hey, guys?” Mike called to us. “Come and take a look at this.”
We crossed the room to where he stood by the base of Helen’s tomb. The far side had been set up as a shrine, with personal objects strewn about the surface of the marble sarcophagus.
Most of these looked as if they had belonged to a woman. I saw a hairbrush, some jewelry, trinkets and small statutes…
“Theseus moved all of the gold to the treasure room,” I guessed, “but he didn’t touch anything that was Helen’s.”
My eyes snapped back to the jewelry. Lying on top of a polished bronze mirror in an olivewood frame was a long string of glass beads.
“No way,” I muttered, as I removed the lanyard from my neck. I cupped Helen’s three beads in my hand before I placed them next to those resting on the mirror.
The ones I had been wearing were beaten all to shit, and the ones on the mirror appeared new and still shone with their gold casings. Other than that, they were identical.
Greek Key Page 26
