Into the Labyrinth (7 page)

When the Lord of the Nexus had left, when his voice could be heard rising strident and angry from the far end of the cellblock, Jonathon spoke, quietly, softly.

“You see now. You understand.”

“Yes!” The phantasm peered out of the lifeless eyes in despair, as the living man had once peered out of his prison cell. “I see now. I understand.”

“You always knew the truth, didn’t you?”

“How could I admit it? We had to seem to be gods. What would the truth have made us?”

“Mortal. As you were.”

“Too late. All is lost. All is lost.”

“No, the Wave corrects itself. Rest upon it. Relax. Float with it, let it carry you.”

The phantasm of Samah appeared irresolute. It darted into the body, fled out of it, but could not yet escape. “I cannot. I must stay. I have to hang on …”

“Hang on to what? To hatred? To fear? To revenge? Lie back. Rest upon the Wave. Feel it lift you up.”

The corpse of Samah remained seated on the hard stone. The eyes stared up at Jonathon. “Can they forgive me … ?”

“Can you forgive yourself?” the lazar asked gently.

Samah’s body—an ashen and blood-covered shell—laid slowly down on the stone bed. It shuddered, then was still. The eyes grew dark and now truly lifeless.

Jonathon reached out his hand, closed them.

Xar, suspecting some trick, stared hard into Zifnab’s cell. Nothing. No sight of the wet and bedraggled old Sartan.

“Hand me that torch!” Xar commanded, peering about in baffled outrage.

The Lord of the Nexus banished the cell bars with an impatient wave of his hand and strode into the cell, flashing the light into every part of it.

“What do you think you will find, Lord?” Sang-drax snarled. “That he is playing at peekaboo in a corner? I tell you, he is gone!”

Xar didn’t like the dragon-snake’s tone. The lord
turned, held the light so that it would flare into the dragon’s one good eye. “If he has escaped, it is your fault! You were supposed to be guarding him! Sea water of Chelestra!” Xar sneered. “Takes away their power! Obviously it didn’t!”

“It did, I tell you,” Sang-drax muttered.

“But he can’t get far,” Xar reflected. “We have guards posted at the entrance to Death’s Gate. He—”

The dragon-snake hissed suddenly—a hiss of fury that seemed to wrap its coils around Xar and squeeze the breath from his body. Sang-drax pointed a rune-covered hand at the stone bed. “There! There!” He could say no more; the breath gurgled in his throat.

Xar held the torchlight to shine on the spot. The lord’s eyes caught a glint, a sparkle that came from something on the stone. He reached down, picked it up, held it to the light.

“It’s nothing but a scale—”

“A dragon’s scale!” Sang-drax glared at it with enmity, made no move to touch it.

“Perhaps.” Xar was noncommittal. “A lot of reptiles have scales, not all of them dragons. And what of it? It has nothing to do with the old man’s disappearance. It must have been here for ages—”

“Undoubtedly you are right, Lord of the Nexus.” Sang-drax was suddenly nonchalant, though his one good eye remained fixed on the scale. “What could a dragon—one of my cousins, for instance—possibly have to do with that daft old man? I will go and alert the guard.”

“I give the orders—” Xar began, but his words were wasted.

Sang-drax had vanished.

The lord stared around at the empty cell, fuming, a disturbing and unfamiliar unease jabbing deep beneath his skin.

“What is going on?” he was forced to ask himself, and the simple fact that he had to ask that question indicated to the Lord of the Nexus that he had lost control.

Xar had known fear many times in his life. He knew fear every time he walked into the Labyrinth. But still he was able to walk in; he was able to grapple with his fear and put it to use, channel its energy into self-preservation, because he knew that he was in control. He might not
know which enemy the Labyrinth was going to hurl at him, but he knew every enemy that existed, knew their strengths and their weaknesses.

But now. What was going on? How had that feeble-minded old man escaped? Most important, what did Sang-drax fear? What did the dragon-snake know that he wasn’t telling?

“Haplo didn’t trust them,” the lord said to himself, glaring at the scale he held in his hand. “He warned me not to trust them. So did that fool who lies dead over there. Not”—Xar scowled—“that I believe any claim of either Haplo’s or Samah’s. But I am beginning to believe that these dragon-snakes have their own goals, which may or may not coincide with mine.

“Yes, Haplo warned me against them. But what if he did so only to blind me to the fact that he is in league with them? They called him ‘Master’ once.
¹
He admitted as much to me. And Kleitus talks to them. Perhaps they are all in league against me.”

Xar stared around the cell. The torchlight was failing; the shadows grew darker, began to close in around him. It was nothing to him whether or not he had light. The sigla on his body compensated, would make the darkness bright if he chose. He did choose. He tossed away the useless torch and drove away the shadows with his own magic. He didn’t like this world, this Abarrach. He felt constantly stifled, smothered. The air was foul, and though his magic nullified the poison, it could not sweeten the stench of the sulfurous fumes, remove the rank odor of death.

“I must make my move, and quickly,” he said.

He would start by determining the location of the Seventh Gate.

Xar left Zifnab’s cell, strode rapidly back down the corridor. The lazar that called itself Jonathon (where had Xar heard that name? Haplo, undoubtedly, but in what connection?) stood in the corridor. Jonathon’s body itself was unmoving; the phantasm roved restlessly about it in a manner that Xar found extremely disconcerting.

“You have served your purpose,” Xar told it. “You may go.”

The lazar made no response. It did not argue. It simply walked away.

Xar waited until it had shambled back down the corridor. Then, putting the disquieting lazar out of his mind, along with the dragon scale and Sang-drax, Xar turned his attention to what was important. To Samah.

The corpse lay on the stone bed. It looked as if it slumbered peacefully. Xar found this more irritating than ever.

“Get up!” he snapped. “I want to speak with you.”

The corpse did not move.

A feeling of panic invaded the lord’s body. He saw then that the eyes were closed. No lazar that he had ever seen went about with its eyes closed, any more than a living person. Xar bent over the corpse, lifted one of the flaccid eyelids.

Nothing looked back at him. No unholy light of life glimmered and winked. The eyes were empty. The phantasm was gone, fled.

Samah was free.

NECROPOLIS
ABARRACH

I
T DID NOT TAKE MARIT LONG TO PREPARE FOR HER JOURNEY.
She selected clothes to wear on Arianus, choosing among the wardrobes left behind by the Sartan, murdered by their own dead. She selected a garment that would conceal the runes on her body, one that would make her look human. Packing this, along with several of her favorite sigla-in-scribed weapons, Marit transported the bundle to a Patryn ship floating on Abarrach’s lava sea. Then she returned to the castle of Necropolis.

She walked through halls still stained with blood from the dreadful Night of the Risen Dead—the term the lazar used when they spoke of their triumph. The blood was Sartan blood, blood of her enemies, and so the Patryns had made no attempt to remove it, left it splattered on the walls and floors. The dried blood of the Sartan, mingled with the broken runes of their magic, became a symbol to the Patryns of the ultimate defeat of their ancient foe.

Other Patryns passed Marit on her way to her lord’s study. They exchanged no greetings, wasted no time in idle conversation. The Patryns Xar had brought with him to Abarrach were the strongest and toughest of a strong, tough breed. Almost all had been Runners. Each had made it either to the Final Gate or near enough. Most had ultimately been rescued by Xar; there were few Patryns alive today who did not owe their lives to their lord.

Marit took pride in the fact that she had fought with
her lord, side by side, in the grueling struggle to win her own freedom from the Labyrinth.…

She was near the Final Gate when she was attacked by gigantic birds with leather wings and flesh-tearing teeth, who would first disable a victim by pecking out his eyes, then gorge on the warm, still-living flesh.

Marit fought the birds by altering her own form to that of a bird—a gigantic eagle. Her talons ripped jagged holes in the leather wings; her plummeting dives knocked many from the sky.

But, as is the way of the Labyrinth, its heinous magic grew powerful in the face of defeat. The numbers of shrieking leather-winged birds increased. She was hit countless times, wounded by tooth and claw. Her strength gave out. She fell to land. Her magic could no longer support her altered state. She changed back to her own shape and fought what she knew would be a losing battle, as the horrid flapping things swirled about her face, trying to get at her eyes.

Her skin was torn and bleeding. She was knocked to her knees by striking blows from behind. She was nearly ready to give up and die when a voice thundered over her.

“Rise, Daughter! Rise and battle on. You are not alone!”

She opened her eyes, already dimming with approaching death, and saw her lord, the Lord of the Nexus.

He came like a god, wielding balls of flame. He stood protectively over her until she regained her feet. He gave her his hand, gnarled and wrinkled but beautiful to her, for it brought her not only life but hope and renewed courage. Together they fought until the Labyrinth was forced to retreat. The birds—those that survived—flapped away with shrill squawks of disappointment.

Marit fell then. The Lord of the Nexus lifted her in his strong arms and bore her through the Final Gate, carried her to freedom.

“I pledge you my life, Lord,” she whispered to him, her last words before she lost consciousness. “Always … forever …”

He had smiled. The lord had heard many such pledges, knew that they would all be redeemed. Marit had been
chosen to travel to Abarrach by her lord. She was just one of many Patryns he’d brought with him, all of whom would be willing to give their lives for the man who had given life to them.

Approaching the study now, Marit was disturbed to see a lazar wandering the halls outside. At first, she thought it was Kleitus and was about to order him off. Admittedly the castle had once been his. But the lazar had no business here. Closer examination, which Marit made with extreme repugnance, revealed this lazar to be the one she had sent to serve her lord in the dungeons. What was it doing here? If she could have supposed such a thing possible, she would have said the lazar was lingering in the halls, listening to the voices that came through the closed door.

Marit was about to order it to be gone, when another voice—the eerie echoing voice of another lazar—forestalled her words.

“Jonathon!” Kleitus came shambling along the corridor. “I heard the Patryn lord raging over his failure to raise the dead. It occurred to me that you might have had something to do with that. I was right, it seems.”

“It seems …” The echo was mournful.

They were both speaking Sartan, a language Marit found uncomfortable and disturbing to hear, but one she understood. She backed into the shadows, hoping to learn something to her lord’s advantage.

The lazar called Jonathon slowly turned. “I could give you the same peace I gave Samah, Kleitus.”

The Dynast laughed, a terrible sound, made awful by the echo. It wailed in despair. “Yes, I’m certain you would gladly reduce me to dust!” The corpse’s bluish-white hands flexed, long-nailed fingers twitched. “Consign me to oblivion!”

“
Not
oblivion,” Jonathon corrected. “Freedom.” His gentle voice and its soft echo coincided with the despairing echo of Kleitus, producing a sad, yet harmonic note.