Chains of Gaia

by James Fahy

  Henry looked down at the dryad. “But … how is it that you’re not dead? How have you not starved? Or died of thirst? You’ve been down here a prisoner for years.”

  Alder held up his arms. They saw that although the shackles of steel had fallen away, the twining roots which had fed down from the ceiling were still wrapped around his forearms. Only now, as Strife’s potion seemed at last to be bringing the man some strength back, were they beginning to slowly uncurl, to release him from their living grip.

  “The roots,” Strife surmised. “They have nourished him.” He looked upward at the tangled ceiling vaulting above. “We are directly below the elder trees themselves here, Scion. They are part of the dryads, and the dryads are part of them. Do not forget, this man has been in this chamber all this time alone with the Earth Shard. Clearly, it has kept him alive, feeding him through these woody bindings, an intravenous drip from the forest itself. Your friend Alder here has been save by these chains of Gaia.”

  “This certainly explains how Splinterstem was the only one who could retrieve the Shard for Peryl,” Robin realised. “He would have been the only one not afraid to enter the Labyrinth, because he alone knew there was no minotaur. Just his own eternal prisoner.”

  He thought of the steward, guiding them through the forest to Rowandeepling, how he had gently carried Robin when he was trapped in sleep. He thought of how noble and attentive he had seemed at the feast, doting on the princess, so dutiful and honourable in his concern for her wellbeing. And all the time, he had been hiding this dark secret, knowing that far below them all, this injustice had been playing out, wrought by his own hand.

  “No one is ever what they seem, are they?” Robin said quietly.

  Strife look thoroughly unsympathetic. “When you have truly learned that, perhaps you will be less of an annoying boy and more of a man,” he snarled. “I care nothing for this sad little dryad, or whatever tiresome courtly intrigues led him here. We are wasting my time.”

  To Alder, Strife now turned. “Your enemy is dead. The one who imprisoned you here. You should be happy to know that. His corpse lies still cooling not far from here. Your torment is of no interest to me, but I can understand all too well the sweet release of revenge. The bad news I’m afraid, is that your lady-love, the princess, as well as every other one of you sorry little tree-folk, man, woman and snot-nosed child, is currently in mortal danger and in the less than gentle hands of my sister.”

  He leaned closer to Alder, tilting his head to one side. “And might I add, if you think your captor was cruel, my sister makes him look like a child playing in the sand. So you … are in our way. The only hope for your people lies with this yellow headed Fae.” His cold black eyes narrowed, pointing at Robin. “Stop shaking on the floor like a fallen leaf, and stand up.”

  “Give him a minute!” Robin complained, but Strife’s less than genial bedside manner seemed to have had some effect. Unsteadily, Alder got to his feet. He stumbled a little, and he looked at Robin.

  “Thank you,” he said hoarsely. "For freeing me.”

  “Well, technically, he did,” Robin nodded at Strife. “But don’t tell him that, it will probably make him feel terrible or bring him out in a rash or something. Take it easy, okay. You need serious rest.”

  Strife strode away into the circle and began to walk from stone to stone in a seemingly random order, placing his hand at the centre as he passed each one.

  “Are you dialling Hive HQ?” Henry asked, watching the man.

  The stones Strife touched were beginning to glow softly from within as the old man stalked back and forth between them, over and over in a complicated pattern.

  “That’s certainly one crude and rather dull way of putting it.” he hissed. “I am opening the way now.”

  Robin looked to the dryad while Strife was busy and distracted. “Listen,” he said. “Do you know how to use one of these? Can you operate a Janus station?”

  Alder nodded weakly.

  “Good. Once we’re gone, open the Janus station again, immediately. Use it to get away from here. Somewhere safe, where you can rest, get your strength back. It’s the only way you’ll get out of the maze.” He lowered his voice further. “Don’t stay here with the old man,” he whispered. “I can’t guarantee he won’t kill you just for the cruel fun of it. You can’t trust him. Get clear, find aid, and then, when you can, return to Rowandeepling overland.”

  “The princess …” Alder coughed.

  “Don’t worry about her,” he assured him. “Henry and I are going to get her back. We’re going to get all of the dryads back. Wait for us there. I promise we will get them back to you. We’ll undo what Splinterstem did.”

  He hoped desperately this wasn’t an empty promise.

  Behind him was a rush of cold air. Robin turned, to see Strife and Henry standing outside of the circle. The centre of the Janus station had now filled with gold mist.

  “The way is open, Scion of the Arcania,” Strife said. “I have done my part. I have let you into the Hive. The rest is up to you. I don’t care how you do it, but Peryl must fail. She must not present my Lady Eris with another Shard. Disgrace! Ignomy! Failure! They will be her bitter fruits to taste. No longer mine.”

  Robin regarded the Grimm. Without his travelling cloak, he looked much his old, sinister self. But his usually smart tailcoat and suit were horribly worn and tattered, dirty and threadbare. His dilapidated state was only slightly less alarming than the manic, cold gleam in his black-on-black eyes.

  “I know what needs doing,” Robin said, shouldering his pack. “I’m doing it for my friends, not for you.” He nodded to Alder, ensuring that the healing dryad understood to use the station after them. To get somewhere safe, somewhere away from this dark underground prison.

  “Your motivations are irrelevant to me. It is only results that concern me, boy. Ensure you do not fail,” Mr Strife said. “You will find I am most unforgiving of failure. A trait no doubt inherited from my glorious mistress.”

  “Well,” Henry clapped Robin gamely on the shoulder. “This has been a horrible, horrible, truly icky truce. So long, Grimm.”

  As he and Robin stepped into the mists, feeling the tingling of the Janus station begin to work, Robin glanced back at Strife. The old man reached his long arm into the glimmering haze and dropped a small bottle unceremoniously into Robin’s hand.

  “Nyctophil,” he explained. “It may hide even you two bumbling dolts from sight. At least long enough to do what I need to be done.” His eyes narrowed. “Have no illusions, Robin Fellows,” he said quietly. “Our ceasefire is at an end from this moment. When next we meet, power will be mine once more, and you…you will merely be my quarry. I shall have your scalp.”

  “Lovely doing business with you too,” Robin muttered. He gripped the bottle tightly as the golden mist of the Janus station transported them away, far across the immense forest of the Elderhart, and into a different kind of darkness altogether.

  A TWISTED REFLECTION

  As always when Robin had used a station, Janus gave no real sense of motion or travelling at all. The golden mist merely settled around them, thinning and dropping away to the floor as it faded, and Robin and Henry looked around warily to see where they had arrived.

  After the gloomy cold and damp of the minotaur’s maze, Robin hadn’t been sure what to expect. All he knew of the Hive was what Ashe had told him. It was a great stepped pyramid, hidden deep in the south of the forest, where the trees were sickly and withered. He had pictures something like the old Mayan pyramids he had learned about in school, the kind you were always told people ended up getting sacrificed on top of. He hadn’t given much thought to what the prison might look like on the inside. Whatever he might have imagined, it wasn’t this.

  He and Henry were standing in the centre of another Janus station, this time a neat circle of pure white stones, squat and flat, neatly squared at the edges and none higher than his hip. The room they had arrived in was circular and domed
, like the one they had just left, but much smaller. There the similarities ended.

  It was bright here, a sickly golden light that seemed to drain the vitality out of their skin. The walls were yellowish, and curved upwards into the dome above in a smooth and seamless arc, devoid of any feature. They seemed to glow from within, as though they were slightly translucent. Deeply coloured glass perhaps. The floor beneath their feet, Robin saw, was tiled, perfect interlocking hexagons, and it appeared to be of the same material. There was no obvious source of the draining yellow light. No flaming torches, no light-wells or windows. It seemed to exude, insipid and jaundiced, from the warm, soft-looking walls themselves.

  “Well, this is horrible,” Henry whispered queasily, looking around. They were, blessedly, alone in the still and silent Janus chamber. There was only one door to the room, a slim oval, presumably leading out to the prison proper. From what they could make out, another luminous corridor stretched away from it.

  The air smelled and tasted thick, somehow stale. It was unpleasant to breathe.

  “At least we’re alone,” Robin noted quietly, as the two stepped out of the circle. “I was expecting guards. Surely you guard the only entrance and exit from a prison?”

  “Maybe there’s just no need to,” Henry said. “If it’s the only way in here, and the only people who can set a path from another Janus station to this one are the jailers. Your worry with prisons isn’t really about people breaking in, right?”

  Robin couldn’t argue with this logic. He looked down with interest at the small black bottle in his hand.

  “What is that?” Henry asked.

  “Nyctophil,” Robin answered, without a clue what that meant. “A parting gift from our least favourite Grimm. He said it might be useful for us.”

  Henry made a face. “It’s probably poison,” he reasoned flatly. “Or some horrible concoction that makes bits of you fall off. I know he healed you, Rob, but we both know why. I wouldn’t trust that creepy old cadaver to put a sugar lump in my tea, never mind down a bottle of Dis brewery’s finest ale.”

  Robin tiptoed towards the doorway stealthily. The floor felt warm under his feet, even through his boots. It was slightly sticky. An altogether unpleasant sensation. “I know what you mean,” he said. “But I don’t think even that charmless nightmare would go to all this trouble, swallowing his pride and admitting he needed us to do something he couldn’t, just for the cheap laughs of tricking now. He’s the sort who wouldn’t poison a person unless he could be there to watch you drink it. It would spoil the fun.”

  Something moved beyond the doorway, a shadow. Robin froze, heart beating fast, motioning silently for Henry to halt too.

  Cautiously he crept closer and peered carefully around the edge of the door.

  Beyond was a long corridor, with another oval opening at the far end. It too was sickly yellow and slightly transparent. A creature stood in it, leaning idly against the wall.

  Robin had never seen a member of the swarm before. He knew that they were dryads once, so his mental image of them was quite vague. He had been imagining them to look the same as those he had met at Rowandeepling, only maybe sterner looking, and more heavily armed.

  This being however was something quite monstrously different.

  Much taller and thinner than a dryad, its skin was a sickly pale and jaundiced hue, like old custard. Dryad killing, Robin observed. Its stringy body was clad in rust-red and black armour, sharp, sectioned edges folding over one another like the interlocking thorax of an insect exoskeleton, giving the thing a wasp-like appearance. Its wings, folded along its armoured back, were not wholly unlike the dragonfly wings of the dryads, though they looked duller, and a little ragged and grey. But the major difference was the head. The hive-guard’s head was utterly bald, like a boiled egg. Its face was a mystery to Robin, covered as it was entirely by a mask of metal, the same colours as its armour. The mask had large, round, tinted glass eyes like portholes in studded metal, and a long nozzle where the nose and mouth should have been, concertinaed like an elephant's trunk. This metallic tube fed down and around and connected somehow into the armour on the creature's back. There were several protruding wires and tubes. It looked to Robin exactly like an old gas mask from the world wars, only glinting gold and red.

  With its large round eyes and long snout, the swarm-creature looked even more insect-like, a steampunk mosquito from a nightmare. It was with faint disgust that Robin noticed that the many tubes and nozzles fixed here and there on its armoured body seemed to feed directly into the creature's bald skull, burrowing into it like worms. The gas-mask face piece was not merely decoration. It was fused at every edge directly and permanently to the creature's face.

  From within the helmet there came a constant, low chitinous clicking.

  “I think we’ve just met some more of Eris’ handiwork,” Robin whispered as Henry cautiously joined him and peered around his shoulder. “Now I’m wishing we’d brought weapons.” He thought for a moment. “Maybe a really big can of fly-spray.”

  “I didn’t know there would be bee-people,” Henry sounded agitated. “Did you know about this? Why didn’t you tell me about the beeple?”

  “More important than what it is, how in the world are we supposed to get past it?” Robin murmured worriedly. If he’d had magic, a well-placed Needlepoint would have done the trick. But without his mana stone he had about as much magical ability as Henry. They were just two boys armed with nothing but their wits and Henry's ninja skills.

  “Wits … and a potion,” Robin remembered, holding up the vial. He uncorked it, giving it a sniff. “Any better ideas?” he asked Henry, who looked dubious. “Half each?” He raised the bottle to his lips and was about to take a drink when Henry snatched it out of his hands and glugged from the bottle instead.

  “What did you do that for?” Robin hissed, as loudly as he dared.

  Henry stood very still, holding the bottle with an expectant look on his face, clearly waiting anxiously to see if he was about to explode or if anything of importance was going to drop off.

  “Me first,” he said. “If it is poison, well, then we’ll know. You’re more important. You’re the Scion, you have all the Shards to collect and a world to save remember? We can’t risk you. I’m just Henry. I’ve never even managed to collect a full sticker album.”

  But Henry didn’t drop dead. In fact, as he was speaking, shadows were growing in the air around him. They shimmered, encasing him in a nebulous cloud. When it faded, the changes wrought to the boy were abundantly clear …as was Henry. He was hardly there at all. Nothing but a thin, almost invisible sketch of him remained, extremely faintly in the air. To Robin, the bottle seemed to float of its own accord.

  “Henry,” Robin said. “Firstly, you’re insane, and don’t ever do something like that again. But second, and maybe more importantly, you’re invisible!”

  “I am?” Henry exclaimed. Robin assumed he looked surprised. To Robin, he didn’t look anything.

  “Cloaked in shadow,” Robin thought. “Strife is quite the alchemist. He’s practically a walking Boots the Chemist. I bet you anything he does a lot of his snooping around the Court of Dis with this stuff. Here, pass it over.”

  “What if it’s permanent?” Henry mused, as Robin took a deep swig, draining the remaining contents of the bottle. It tasted like aniseed and nettle soup.

  “Then look on the bright side,” Robin shrugged, as he watched his own hands fading away to almost nothing. “We’ll never need to bother about a haircut again. Come on. I’ve no idea how long this stuff lasts. We have to find my mana stone, the Shard and our friends, and we have to do it really really quietly.”

  Sneaking past the hideous swarm-guard was nerve-wracking. It clearly didn’t see them, and the corridor was wide enough for the two boys to creep along on the golden, glowing floor without coming too close to the insectile, metal face. But they had no way of knowing if the thing might sense them another way. It could have feelers for
all they knew, checking for disturbances in the air, or ultrasound, with that ceaseless, chirping clicking.

  Robin and Henry inched along the corridor, painfully slowly, backs brushing against the soft, unpleasantly warm walls. Both kept their eyes fixed on the circles of polished glass that made up the creature’s inhuman eyes. It was difficult to believe that it had ever been anything like a dryad. They were part of nature, practically offshoots of the forest itself. This thing was a metal hornet. It couldn’t look less natural if it tried.

  Thankfully they reached the other end of the corridor without issue, slipping through the far doorway with relief.

  The space they had entered now was an open area, and it was so vast, it took their breath away.

  Robin had seen a documentary once about a shipyard, where the largest ocean liner of its time had been built, put together piece by piece in a massive building, erected for this purpose alone. It had been the most enormous indoor space he had ever seen, a vast warehouse, many stories high, larger than the largest aircraft hangar. The ship has sat, immense in its own right, but looking dwarfed, tiny and lost amidst the city of scaffolding and gantries surrounding it.

  This place was the same. If the Hive was indeed a great pyramid, then it was totally hollow within. Scaffolding soared into the sky like a spider's web, supporting suspended rooms and buildings, soft golden walls, rounded edges. Crooked walkways criss-crossed the open air in a mad hatchwork, leading to and from everywhere. They looked as though they had been thrown in from above to settle wherever they landed, slanted and precarious.

  Everything here was made from the same strange substance as the Janus room, the glassy yellow bridges and catwalks like spun sticky sugar. Above it all, a huge, sickly amber light shone down, washing scattered and spiky shadows over everything.

  To Robin, the walkways were like Rowandeepling, the whole arrangement was built along the same lines, but whereas the treetop city of the dryads, resting peacefully under the open sky, with its elegantly carved and sweeping bridges had been a joy, lit everywhere with softly glimmering lights, a magical and enchanting space, this was anything but.