The Crosser's Maze

by Dorian Hart

  Morningstar forced herself to take a deep breath. “But to answer your question, if Aktallian is not alone, then we’ll have to improvise.”

  Now she faced the biggest challenge of these training sessions. How to simulate Aktallian himself? She had asked the avatar, but the Ellish angel had refused. Showing herself to Morningstar had strained the Injunction enough; she would not reveal herself to the others. But there was an alternative.

  “I will play the part of Aktallian. Your weapons cannot do me permanent harm, but all the same I’d appreciate it if you’d blunt them and not aim to crush my skull. Scola’s team will attempt to land hits upon me. The others will attempt to adjust the conditions of the fight to your favor. Understand that I am a poor stand-in; I cannot make your weapons vanish, and Aktallian will have other abilities I cannot mimic. But I have been training many months longer than you and should be able to give you a challenge.”

  She created a suit of red armor around herself.

  “One thing more. As some of you have noticed, I have been increasing the ambient light each time we have met since that is what Aktallian will consider our greatest weakness. For this fight, I am going to brighten the battlefield to full daylight. It will not be comfortable.”

  At her thought, the moonlight intensified tenfold. All of her sisters flinched; a few covered their eyes with their hands.

  “Now, begin. Let’s see if any of you can strike me.”

  Belle advanced sideways so the moon wasn’t in her field of vision. Starbrook and Obsidia covered their eyes with their hands. Morningstar felt sympathy, but also dismay. They weren’t going to have the months that she did to acclimate.

  Scola rushed straight at her, eyes nearly shut. Morningstar created a pit at her feet, too wide for Scola to leap over, though she tried. Gyre and Sable had already moved left and right to flank, so Morningstar manifested wide wooden walls to block them. Belle reached down to help Scola out of the hole in the dirt.

  “Let the others take care of that!” Morningstar shouted. “You five fighters have to take me down.”

  Scola popped up out of the pit as though there were springs on her feet, and gaps appeared in the walls; her “disruptors” worked quickly. And one of them—she guessed Jet, who was looking up—dimmed the moon. Clever; Morningstar hadn’t made that off-limits. As Scola, Gyre, and Sable moved to surround her, with Obsidia and Belle not far behind, Morningstar reimagined the glade. All around her the ground became a thick, tarry swamp. Her attackers sank up to their waists. Then Morningstar willed the terrain to change back to earth, leaving the five buried, arms and weapons useless. She quickly moved forward to finish off Sable, who was closest, but a metal wall sprung up in front of her, studded with sharp spikes.

  Morningstar stopped before she was impaled. The wall shifted and blurred, carelessly made, not fully solid. She easily imagined a hole in the wall, stepped through, and tapped Sable on the head with her mace.

  “Dead,” she said. The disruptor team worked to free the others, carving out a wide pit with ramps. Morningstar took advantage of the disruptors’ distraction; she looked up and re-brightened the moon, making it shine more strongly than before. Belle gasped, and Obsidia flinched away.

  Morningstar’s shoes grew heavy, and she fell over, her ankle twisting painfully beneath her. Scola bore down on her; Morningstar repeated her earlier trick of weighting Scola’s weapon, but someone undid that within seconds. The moon darkened again. There were too many angles to attend to; her shoes, Scola, the light. Scola swung her blunted hammer into Morningstar’s shoulder, perhaps a bit harder than necessary. Morningstar quickly lightened Scola’s weapon to something akin to balsa wood and did the same to her own shoes. She lashed out with her mace as she rolled away, but Scola leapt back with amazing deftness for someone her size.

  Now Morningstar was surrounded and badly outnumbered. She could outthink any individual member of her team, but not all five of them together. It gave her a surge of optimism, even as she tried desperately to prolong the exercise. She manifested a stone dome around her and scooped out a hole beneath her feet. It required some intense focus, but she dropped down and excavated a sloping tunnel upward just in front of her as she ran, the earth vanishing before her eyes. A slip of concentration and she’d slam into a wall of dirt.

  The walls began to cave in as she reached the surface, but the attackers, now twenty feet away, still surrounded her dome, waiting for the disruptors to fully remove it.

  “Over there!” shouted Jet.

  Vines exploded up from the ground around her, twined around her arms and legs, and pinned her mace to her side. She imagined them withered, but more vines took their place, thick as ropes and tough as leather. Belle and Gyre ran up.

  “Dead,” said Belle, grinning as she moved to touch the flat of her sword to Morningstar’s head.

  A surge of focus shivered through Morningstar, and time in the Tapestry slowed to a crawl. She stared at Belle’s sword, willed it to cease, decided that it was not part of reality. The sword vanished. She did the same to Gyre’s cudgel and Obsidia’s spear, removing them neatly from the dream. She felt a moment of exultation; removing an object that someone else had manifested and was still holding was a trick that had eluded her for months.

  Time snapped back, and a sharp exhaustion settled onto her chest. New weapons flickered in the hands of the attack team as the disruptors attempted to restore them, but the constricting vines fell away from Morningstar. With a great effort she lifted her mace, poked Gyre in the side, turned, ducked, and tapped Belle’s knee. But Obsidia tripped her up with her reclaimed spear, and Morningstar twisted and fell sideways. As her head spun, she caught a glimpse of Scola’s face, the tall sister’s eyes widening with horror even as she swung her hammer forward.

  The hammer caught Morningstar dead in the face. A flash of pain shot through her, the sound of her snapping neck—

  Her hands flew to her head even as she sat up in bed. On the floor around her lay her companions, their peaceful snores mixing into an odd, breathy music. She felt no pain, but her head felt muzzy. She gathered her thoughts. Scola, she was certain, had not meant to deliver a killing blow. The tall sister had been aiming for her breastplate, hadn’t expected Morningstar to fall and spin at the last moment.

  Or maybe Scola had been just as happy to take a crack at Morningstar’s head. It didn’t matter. Either way, it was a good lesson; she should return to the Tapestry and explain what had happened.

  Sleep did not come. Over the past weeks it had become so easy, so instinctual, she hardly gave accessing the Tapestry any thought, but now her mind balked. Morningstar took a minute to calm herself, listening to the soft noises of her sleeping companions and trying not to think about the filthy sensation of Shreen’s oath. With a final exhalation she tried again, but once more she failed to enter the Tapestry.

  Why wasn’t it working? It couldn’t be Shreen’s promise; she had gotten into the Tapestry in the first place, after all. A chilling thought came to her; perhaps she was somehow still dead in the dream world and would no longer be able to return there. But surely the avatar would have warned her if that were how it worked.

  Morningstar tried one more time with no success and gave it up for the night. Perhaps a night of real, dreamless sleep would reset her mind, and she could try again tomorrow. She hoped her recruits wouldn’t be traumatized; she had explained to them that none of them could inflict real damage upon the physical body of a dreamer.

  Even falling back into ordinary sleep was difficult. Her heart still raced from the battle against her sisters, and memories of Shreen kept bubbling up to torment her. It took nearly an hour for her to drift into an uneasy slumber, and it was anything but dreamless. Aktallian and Shreen featured prominently, mocking her, screaming at her, whispering obscenities and brandishing weapons. She pushed these nightmares away, seeking some dark refuge of comfort and isolation that she could never quite reach. But at last her mind quieted and—

&nbs
p; Morningstar stands in the middle of a city street made of glass. On either side of her, men and women rush past on their errands, wearing long silk gowns, shoes with absurdly thick soles, and cunningly wound turbans. The air is filled with the scents of exotic spices and yet at the same time is stale, dead. The city is dead, she is sure of it, despite the bustle of its citizens, the bright colors of their clothes.

  She looks down and finds that she is dressed the same as the others; her azure gown hangs straight and unmoving in the perfectly still air. She reaches up to feel a turban on her own head, her long white hair tucked neatly inside of it.

  Slowly she turns a circle. On one side is a large public house. Adjacent to the building, a tiny apple orchard holds no more than fifty trees, the grass beneath them crisscrossed by glass walkways. On the other side of the street is a row of shops: a carpenter’s studio, a clockmaker, and, directly before her, a chandlery. A large painted sign above the door proclaims, “Ruby Avenue Chandler,” and what catches her attention is the v in the word Avenue. It is an upside-down triangle, black like the other letters.

  It is the symbol of Ell.

  She woke to find Kibi standing over her.

  “Hope I didn’t wake you. I brought up a bit a’ breakfast. You’ll like the juice, and the cook knows his way around an omelet.”

  Morningstar nodded her thanks, though her mind was on the dream. She had started to think Ell had stopped sending Seer-dreams to her. The glassy street—vitreous, as Aravia had explained. Surely she had glimpsed the City Vitreous, where Shreen claimed the Crosser’s Maze waited!

  Kibi set down a tray on the tiny bedside table and gave her a look of frank concern. “You gonna be all right? Last night was as awful as it gets, but we all understand you got the worst of it.”

  Morningstar was not anything close to “all right.” She felt as though she were infested with parasites. She reached up and touched her bruised face. Your friend’s promise binds you, and Ell cannot free you from it. Shreen’s voice wouldn’t stop echoing in her ears.

  “I don’t know, Kibi.” Her eyes fluttered shut. Exhaustion lay on her like a heavy blanket.

  “I’ll just leave this then. But you should eat; it’s late mornin’, and some food’ll do you good.”

  She drifted in and out of a restless sleep, never quite mustering up the energy to eat her breakfast. Dreams, her refuge for so many years, felt like invaders, denying her any true rest. In one she wept on her knees before her avatar, begging forgiveness. In another Shreen the Fair held her chin in his twisted hand, whispering that Ell had abandoned her.

  “You are Dralla’s creature now,” he said softly. “You will come to love her as I do…or else we will grind you up and feed you to those who do.”

  “No!” She shouted out loud, waking herself up.

  “No?” Dranko sat on the floor next to her bed. “You don’t even know what I was going to ask you.”

  She stared at him, wondering if she might still be dreaming.

  “My turn to play nursemaid,” he said. “I brought up some water and something that smells like roasted chicken, but you haven’t eaten your breakfast yet. If I were in bed and you were me, you’d be telling me it was unhealthy not to eat.”

  She shook the sleep out of her head. The table wasn’t big enough for both trays, so Dranko consolidated everything onto one.

  “I’m not injured,” she said.

  “In my capacity as a physician, I disagree,” said Dranko. “You have a bruised cheekbone, though that will heal just fine in a few days. You’ll be as lovely as ever. Cigar?”

  He pulled a cigar from his pocket and held it out. “It occurred to me I’ve never offered you a blacktallow in all the months since we’ve met. I find it just the thing to take my mind off malformed night-devils.”

  Goddess, what an awful idea. “Dranko, unless we’re leaving this afternoon, we’ll all be sleeping again in this tiny little room. I’m sure the others won’t appreciate you filling it with stink.”

  Dranko smiled and put the cigar away. “For one thing, one man’s stink is another man’s perfume. For another, a second room is opening up tonight, so the rest of us can draw straws for a second bed. And for a third, are you saying you’re not up for hitting the road today? Rumor has it that you’re not injured.”

  Could she force herself to march in her condition? She could hardly stand the thought of getting out of bed. Shreen’s oath was like a heavy carcass of rotting meat draped across her shoulders.

  “Can you feel it?” she asked. “Do you feel the weight of Ernie’s promise to Shreen?”

  Dranko grimaced. “Yeah, we all feel it. It’s like a pair of soiled underclothes you’re not allowed to change out of.”

  Morningstar surprised herself by laughing. It wasn’t a terrible description, though she wouldn’t have phrased it quite like that.

  “But we all understand it was hardest for you,” Dranko continued, his face growing serious. “And not just because you were the one whose head Shreen was flattening.”

  “I feel like I’ve betrayed Ell,” she said. “I shouldn’t have let Ernie say yes. I feel in my bones that even if Ell were to command me not to turn over the maze, or to spare Lapis’s life, I’d have no choice but to keep to my oath to Shreen.”

  Dranko gave her a grim smile. “You keep doing that. Ell sets you up to handle a world of crap, then gives you crap to handle, and you assume it’s either a punishment or a personal failing instead of part of the plan.” He reached out, took a piece of fruit from her tray, and popped it into his mouth. “After you were chosen by Ell to be a Dreamwalker, I told myself I wasn’t going to gloat and say I told you so, and I haven’t, but this seems like a good day to change my mind.”

  It was true. That first full day in the Greenhouse, she had slapped Dranko across the face for telling her what turned out to be the truth. In all the months following, he had never rubbed her nose in it.

  “Let’s face it,” said Dranko. “If we want to be cynical about things, we could say that Delioch and Ell must be having a contest to see who can pile the most responsibility on us before one of us snaps from the weight. I’ve asked myself over and over again why Delioch would choose me, out of all of his priests and novices, to be the one wandering around the world trying to save it.”

  “Delioch didn’t choose you,” Morningstar pointed out. “Abernathy did.”

  “Fine. Yes. But I have to believe that Delioch is sticking his hand in there somewhere. At very least he’s blowing my little boat harder than the others.”

  “He’s what?”

  “Did they not teach you the toy boat theory of the gods in your temple?”

  Morningstar shook her head.

  “The idea is that when the Traveling Gods came to Spira and set down all us mortals on Charagan, they decided to treat us all like toy sailboats on a pond, the kind little kids steer with sticks, except that the Injunction prevents them from doing any real steering; we’re mostly left to ourselves. Every so often, when they can get away with it, they poke one of us with a stick or blow a puff of godly breath into our ragged little sails. That’s why we have channelers and dreamseers and Corilayna’s luckbenders and Brechen’s water-walkers and so on.

  “But sometimes, so the theory goes, the gods grow especially attached to one of their toy boats and blow that one’s sails a little harder. I always figured that was just a way for particularly egotistic priests to claim a holy mandate and puff themselves up. But the longer we’ve been on this journey, the more I think I buy into the toy boat thing. We’re the ones with our hands on the tiller, but Ell and Delioch are knocking us around with their sticks. Problem is, they’re far away and their aim isn’t great.”

  Morningstar tried to imagine Ell reaching down from the heavens with a stick. “I’m not sure if that’s comforting or not.”

  “Me neither. But my point is that Ell might very well have steered you into Dralla’s shrine. She’s already made you responsible for saving the world
; she can hardly complain about you making hard decisions.”

  “I don’t see how you or I get to decide what the gods can or cannot complain about. And just because they give us the option to make mistakes doesn’t mean they’re not mistakes.”

  Dranko became serious again. He leaned toward her. His eyes were deep brown. She had never looked closely at them before; as a rule she tried not to focus on his face.

  “Ell decided you’re some kind of once-in-a-generation dream warrior. You have a church mandate to work for Abernathy. Abernathy wants us to get the Crosser’s Maze. We did what was necessary to do what your goddess wants. It wasn’t a mistake. It was bravery. It was taking another punch and getting up again. It was showing fate your middle finger.”

  He straightened up and smiled his tusky smile. “But enough about you. I have some other news. We’ve been chatting with our new friend Certain Step while you’ve been lazing about up here. Aravia had the bright idea that since you can buy just about everything else in Djaw, maybe someone could sell us some information. Turns out there’s a whole street full of sages who have browsing privileges at a private archives in the North Wedge, called the Vault. They’re expensive, but Step says that if you give them a week, they can dig up information on just about anything. He, Aravia, and Tor are on their way there now to ask what the sages can learn about Het Branoi, Calabash, or the City Vitreous, and the Crosser’s Maze. And yeah, I know, if it turns out they know about the maze, we’ll all be kicking ourselves.”

  Morningstar shook her head. “A week? We can’t afford to delay that long.”

  “We took a vote, and we agree with you. If you’re feeling better, we’re going to leave first thing tomorrow morning.”