"You won, of course."
"There was no 'of course' about it," said Jame sharply. "He did very well. I hoped the others would honor him for it, but instead his master disowned him and . . . he hanged himself. Damn. I hadn't meant to think about that whole, rotten business again, much less to burden a stranger with it."
"Oh, I don't know," said the priest vaguely. "If you try to sit on something like that, it invariably bites you. I think I understand now why the Talisman has been taking such . . . well, suicidal risks these past three months. But I don't see why you feel so guilty about that boy's death. It wasn't your fault. If it had been, I expect your friend Scramp would have had something to say about it before now. In this city, the dead aren't always particularly docile, especially if they have a strong grievance against the living. I wouldn't worry about it so much if I were you. After all, anyone who can survive the Maze isn't going to fall easy prey to anything else. That building is a killer. I firmly believe that it was the death of Rugen, my old master, and he was the one who built it."
This apparently turned the little priest's thoughts in a new direction, for he abruptly swung around and trotted back into the darkness of the temple. Jame followed. She saw that they were approaching one last model, that of the Maze itself.
"Fifty years and more it's been since Master Rugen disappeared into that monstrosity," said the priest sadly, looking up at its blank wall. "A fierce old man he was—dangerous to cross but fair too, once the bloom was off his anger. I've never known him to hold a grudge against the innocent, or to forgive the guilty. This was the finest thing he ever built. He even cut off his little finger to lay under the center stone, saying 'Blood and bone bind.' I know he meant to be buried there."
"In the Maze?" said Jame, startled.
"Of course. We all make arrangements in the finest building we design—our end-work, we call it—but who crawls into a grave before his time? I still say he meant to come out when last he went in to see Penari."
"What if he simply got lost? Even if your master built the Maze, he could hardly remember every turn in it."
"He didn't have to. The floor plans were in his pocket. But then again, his gargoyle never came home. You know, one of those little stone beasties. Every master architect has one, and very useful they are, but impish too. Look the other way and you'll either find them gone or sitting on your head. They also guard their master's crypt. That's why some thought, when Quezal didn't come back, that Master Rugen had decided to lay his bones to rest with his lost finger in the Maze."
"Bones," said Jame uncomfortably, remembering what use she had made of them. "Well, he's there all right, but neither underground nor particularly quiet." And she told the priest about the events of the morning.
"Oh, ye galloping gods," he said when she had finished. "There'll be hell to pay over this. Master Rugen was never the sort to swallow insults, and fifty years of being dead won't have sweetened that foul temper of his. See here, you've got to do something about this!"
He grabbed Jame by the hand and began to half drag her around the curve of the model Maze to its western entrance.
"Wait a minute!" she protested, resisting. "I need some answers first. If Rugen really is Hervy, why has he waited so long to come back?"
"Who knows?" said the priest impatiently, trotting all the faster. "The point is, you've got to make peace between those two old men before they destroy each other and the Maze with them. Especially the Maze. If that goes, so may the city. Ah, here we are. Good luck, Talisman!" And he shoved her over the threshold.
"Dammit, wait!" Jame cried, but she was talking to herself. Behind her was not the darkness of the temple but the houses facing the real Maze. The priest had vanished.
"Marvelous," she said to the walls of the entryway. "Now what am I supposed to do?"
"Correspondences, m'dear, correspondences," replied the echo. "Find Rugen's skull."
Jame stood quite still for a moment. Then she plunged into the Maze. Equipped with one of the torches that were kept hidden near the entrance, she raced through the dark passages, checking off in her mind the places she had visited earlier in search of the bones. Someone, probably Quezal the Gargoyle, was gathering them together . . . but where? The obvious place would be Rugen's death-site, the original location of the entire skeleton, but not even the skull was there now. If Quezal was in a hurry, though, he might well be collecting the bones at some point roughly equidistant from the farthest reaches to which they had been scattered. That gave her several possible locations.
At the first three, Jame drew a blank. The fourth she approached more warily, not only because of her present search but because she remembered all too clearly the last time she had been in this part of the Maze. It was here that the vhors had trapped her, Monster, and the priest sent to exterminate them. In desperation, the priest had taken their madness into himself. Deprived of what had become their essence, they had promptly dropped dead while the poor man had plunged down the nearest sewer hole, headfirst. Jame hoped that his colleagues below had successfully exorcised him. Meanwhile, she had been left with several hundred vhor carcasses and forty feet of hysterical python. Nothing would calm Monster but the removal of the offending bodies, so Jame (not very wisely, perhaps) had thrown them into a nearby pit-trap and set them on fire. The resulting smoke and stench had made this section of the Maze unapproachable for weeks. It still stank.
Jame examined the corner where, months earlier, she had left a femur to mark her way. The bone was gone, but not without a trace: covering the floor where it had lain was a network of scratches just visible in the flickering light. In fact, the whole passageway was similarly scored. Surely it hadn't been like this the last time she had been here, Jame thought uneasily. With growing apprehension, she followed the marks back to the pit and peered down into it, noting the deep, fresh gouges that scarred its sides and lip. Not a bone remained in it.
Then, in the distance, Jame heard the sound that all this time she had half expected and wholly feared: the rasp of many, many claws on stone.
She tracked the noise by the marks on the floor. The sound grew, then abruptly faded away as she turned into the hallway where the last of Rugen's bones had been left. It wasn't there now. Standing in the eerie silence, Jame wondered how her reasoning had gone wrong, and what to do next. Then she heard a sound behind her, the faintest of scratches and turned to find the hallway full of vhors.
Not one of them had been alive for some time. Most were little more than charred bones held together by scraps of singed flesh. Torchlight gleamed off empty eye sockets, off naked claws and fangs. In all that decaying, fire-scorched mass, not one whisker moved.
Jame went back a step, then another. She couldn't take her eyes off that corridor full of death, couldn't even think. Then her foot hit something. She fell backward, the torch flying out of her hand and over the edge of one of the Maze's many water traps. In the total darkness that followed, the hall filled with the clatter of bones.
It took Jame a moment to realize that she hadn't simply tripped. Something was holding on to her ankle. The grip tightened. With a jerk she was dragged backward one inch, then another and another. The image formed confusedly in her mind of a shadowy side corridor which she had passed a moment before her fall. Something had been waiting for her there, was waiting still.
With an incoherent cry, she lashed out with her free foot. It didn't connect, but the grip on her ankle relaxed. Then it came hand over hand up her leg. The thing was on top of her now with its bony hands around her throat. Gasping, she struck out blindly again, and made contact. The bones fell apart. Each one still twitched with a fitful life of its own. Jame threw herself sideways away from them, colliding a moment later with the far wall. Something—a skull, from the feel of it—rolled under her hand. Snatching it up, she crouched there, ready to pitch her prize down the well if anything touched her, frightened enough to throw herself after it.
The darkness came alive with the sound of ma
ny objects dragging themselves over the stones, rasping, scratching, fumbling in the dark. Were they approaching, or drawing away? Ah, away. They were bound for the heart of the Maze, Jame realized. They were after Penari.
She would have to reach the old man first, without a light to show the way, over a course as complex as that from the Temple District to the Maze. An exercise, Talisman. She could almost see Penari grinning wickedly at her. A simple little test, like so many in the past. Well not quite, but close enough. She thought hard for a moment, selecting a route parallel to that of the disturbance, then rose and cautiously set out with the skull tucked under her arm.
An eternity later, Jame collided with a wall. This was hardly the first time in her blind journey, but now she groped along the upper edge and, to her relief, found the hoped-for depression. Something clicked, and a panel swung open. She stepped over the threshold into the heart of the Maze.
Jame had turned to secure the secret door when someone let off a shrill war cry almost in her ear. "Oh, no," she said out loud, and ducked as Penari's iron-shod staff whizzed over her head.
The old man shrieked again, advancing on her with flailing weapon. Obviously, in her absence, he had gone from terror to outrage—always a short step for him—and she now had something akin to a senile berserker on her hands. Jame retreated hastily to the middle of the room, and placed the skull on the table. Raising her eyes, she found herself face-to-face with Monster, who was hanging down from the chandelier. Apologetically, the snake flicked the tip of her nose with his tongue.
"You're no help at all," she told him, and then ducked again as Penari's staff hissed over her head, nearly braining the terrified python. Jame slipped under the old thief's return blow and, coming up behind him, put her hands over his on the staff.
"Sir, I'm back," she said in his ear.
For a second, Penari stood quite still, breathing hard. Then he twisted about and glared up at her. She wondered what he saw: a blur, probably, if even that.
"It's about time," the old man snapped. "Where in the seven hells have you been?"
Jame told him. From the faces he made, she gathered that he didn't like the direction her inquiries had taken, but the time for secrets was past. "And now, sir," she said, concluding, "will you kindly tell me just what the hell happened the last time Hervy—Master Rugen, that is—came to see you here in the Maze?"
"If you must know," he said petulantly, "we quarreled. That conceited jackass had the nerve to call this building his masterpiece. I ask you, where would he have been without my memory? I designed the Maze, dammit: he just put it together. And then he had the gall to claim that the final plans were his property. Of course, I didn't let him have them. He fumed about that for a bit and then he stormed out. And that's all there was to it."
"It couldn't have been," said Jame, staring at the door by which she had entered. "If so, why has he just come back?"
She had not had time to lock the panel. It gaped open now, and an indistinct figure stood on the threshold. Penari drew his breath in sharply. Nearly blind as he was, he couldn't see the form in the doorway or the horde of motionless shapes crouching at its feet, but he was no fool.
"Come back, have you?" he said through his few remaining teeth. "Much good that will do you now that I have your skull. Talisman, quick: Pick up the blasted thing and get behind me." With that, he scuttled to the far side of the table, clutching his staff.
Jame didn't move. Although she hadn't taken her eyes off that strange intruder or seen it so much as stir, it was now unmistakably several feet farther into the room. Its skeletal arm was half-raised. Where the ulna should have been were many tiny vhor bones laid joint to joint, and the fingertips ended in rodential claws. Instead of its missing skull, Quezal the Gargoyle crouched on its clavicle. The rest of the figure was wrapped in a winding sheet of some translucent material which Jame recognized as one of Monster's more recently shed skins. A burst of near hysterical laughter welled up in her, but she choked on it, one hand flying up to her bruised throat. Twenty minutes before, those taloned fingers had nearly throttled her. Not only that, but here were the vhors again, massed at the dead architect's feet, looking no more congenial than before. And they were much closer than they had been a moment ago. But she still hadn't seen them move.
Another fit of coughing seized Jame. When her eyes cleared again, the vhors and their master were within five feet of her. So that was it: Like Quezal, they could only move when unobserved. If she so much as blinked now, she was finished.
"Didn't you hear me, boy?" cried Penari behind her, clearly thinking that she was behind him. "I said smash it. Smash the skull!"
Without turning, her eyes still fixed on the architect Jame groped behind her on the table for the skull. Her hand touched it. A sudden wave of dizziness swept over her. In its wake, she saw standing before her not the grotesque, skeletal figure, but Master Rugen as he had been in life, richly clad, with Quezal perching on his shoulder. The architect was looking straight through her. His face was thunderous. Penari spoke behind her, his voice so oddly distorted that she couldn't understand a word.
"Sir?" she said, then caught her breath as the thief stepped into her line of vision. At least fifty years had fallen away from him.
He and the architect argued violently. Rugen brandished a packet in the thief's face, then thrust it back inside his robe, turned on his heel and stalked to the door. Penari stopped him on the threshold. The two exchanged more heated words, then Rugen, with a short laugh, disappeared into the Maze proper.
Jame followed him. He paced confidently through the labyrinthine halls, not pausing once despite the complexity of his path. And so it was that, without a break in his stride, he took his first wrong turn. Many more followed. At last the man stopped, looking aggravated, and reached into his pocket. His expression changed. The packet wasn't there. He tried to retrace his steps, stubbornly silent at first and then shouting angrily for Penari until his voice failed. When his torch also finally gave out he muttered a hoarse curse and sent Quezal for help. None ever came.
"Now I understand," said Jame to him. "You put the plans into your pocket, and Penari lifted them out again, there, on the threshold. Then, when you sent your gargoyle back to him, he imprisoned it. Because of that, you died of hunger and thirst in the dark. How . . . vile."
Abruptly, she found herself back in the heart of the Maze with her hand still on the skull and Quezal's grotesque face only inches from her own. Then something stuck her shoulder so hard that she was lifted off her feet and thrown sideways to the floor.
Damn, she thought hazily. I must have blinked.
Her eyes focused again and she was suddenly very still. The vhors were directly in front of her, close enough for her to see the grain of their yellow fangs and bits of rotting debris caught between them. Rugen might have spared her life, but his creatures assuredly would not. Not that the architect had been all that gentle. His claws had apparently slashed through her jacket, because her shoulder had begun to sting and blood was running down her arm inside the sleeve. She couldn't even take her eyes off the vhors to check the extent of the damage. And her back was turned toward the architect. What was he doing now? All she could hear was Penari, alternately shouting insults at Rugen, encouragement to her, and counting to himself as he went through the steps of a quarterstaff drill in gleeful preparation for mayhem. For some reason, Rugen hadn't attacked the old thief yet. She had to get him under observation again before he did. Carefully, Jame rose and backed away from the vhors, her eyes still fixed unblinkingly on them.
The table brought her up short. Rugen bent over it, his hands almost on the skull. Facing him and inadvertently immobilizing him was Monster, who had again lowered his head and about ten feet of body from the chandelier. How fortunate, thought Jame, that snakes don't blink. Any second, however, the python would probably spot the vhors and panic again. Right, she thought, taking a deep breath. Now I earn my wages.
She launched herself ont
o the tabletop, rolling over her right arm, hissing with pain as her weight came briefly to bear on her injured shoulder. Rugen seemed to pinwheel past. She snatched the skull from between his skeletal hands and half-fell off the far side of the table, landing on Penari. For a moment, no one's eyes were on the architect. As she disentangled herself from her master, Jame heard the table crash over. Then she was sitting on the old man with the skull in her hands and Rugen bending over her.
"If you really want me to destroy this thing," she said unsteadily, glaring up at the architect, "move."
"Smash it, smash it!" cried Penari's muffled voice through the rucked-up folds of his robe. "What are you waiting for?"
Jame raised the skull, then hesitated. If she did manage to shatter it on the stone floor, that presumably would be the end of Master Rugen . . . unjustly slain a second time. Then too, what had that little priest meant when he had spoken of these two old men destroying each other, the Maze, and perhaps even the city? That would only make sense if . . .
"Uh, sir . . . I think we have a problem. Remember those models I told you about in the temple that fell down because their counterparts in the city did? Well, the priest told me that the reverse could also happen."
Blood and Ivory-A Tapestry Page 14
