The Hero of Varay (27 page)

The next shoulder was more than a mile away, and we had to take the slope very carefully because of the snow, losing another few hundred feet of altitude in the process and all but a dusting of snow. Then we maneuvered around the shoulder—a rock outcropping half the size of Basil Rock—along a path that was nowhere wider than two feet, and some places only half that. The drop at our right increased as we went along, and the earlier slope got precipitous. Before we made it around the hump, the drop at our side looked like several thousand feet straight down.

There was a long, broad valley beyond the rock shoulder, though, a high valley climbing slowly to the east-southeast beyond the end of the chasm at our side. There was a similar drop from the valley side, down to those unfathomable depths, and then a vista almost as inviting as the meadow where we left our horses.

“No snow there,” Lesh observed.

There was even lush, healthy grass visible in the nearer half of the valley. Beyond that, everything was rockslabs of rock like dominoes lying on their edges, or maybe like underfed children’s blocks, a dense field of regular stone formations.

“That is the maze,” the elf said. “And look beyond if you can.”

“Doesn’t look like much of a maze to me,” Lesh said.

I didn’t pay much attention to him. I was up on tiptoe trying to see what lay at the heart of the maze. The elf said that we might be able to see the shrine. There was something large and brilliantly white off in the distance, but not enough of it rose above the gray stones for me to tell anything about its appearance.

“That white?” I asked, glancing at the elf. We moved on a few steps to the end of the narrow ledge around the shoulder, where we had a little more elbow room.

“That white,” he agreed. “It is the entablature of the shrine. If you climb a few feet higher on this rock behind us, you should be able to see most of the facade.”

I looked at the rock to see if I could get up it without much loss of time or energy.

“We’ll see it soon enough,” I said. Then I had second thoughts. “But maybe I can get a better idea of the lay of the maze.”

The elf laughed. “Little good that will do you. You could map out every twist and turn and it wouldn’t help you in the least when you finally got down into the maze.”

With that kind of challenge, I had to try. I spent twenty minutes getting ten feet up the wall and finding an anchorage that let me turn my head to look. The maze was complex, much too intricate for me to hope to memorize even a small portion of it from my present perch. But I did have a a slightly better angle on the shrine.

“How far off is that temple?” I called down.

“Straight line, less than three miles,” the elf replied. He didn’t shout, but I had no trouble hearing him.

I whistled mentally. I had thought it might be a third of that, half of it at most. At one mile, the shrine looked like a Greek temple. At closer to three miles, it had to be colossal.

“How did anybody manage to build something that big up here?” I asked when I rejoined the others.

“The Great Earth Mother gave birth to it,” the elf said.

Any further comment I might have made would only have left my companions as depressed as I felt, so I kept my mouth shut.

14
The Defenders

“You know where we need to enter the maze?” I asked the elf as we started across the green end of the valley. We were lower than we had been while we skirted the rock shoulder, so now we were climbing an easy slope toward the nearest wall of the maze. The temple itself was out of sight.

“Choose as you will, Hero. It makes no difference. Every opening leads to the shrine and none gets there.”

“Is there a point to this riddle?” I asked.

“The maze lives, breathes, thinks, moves. It is the first defender of the shrine. It can admit anyone it chooses to admit. And if it doesn’t choose to admit you, the only way by is to kill it, and it can’t be killed.”

“The way you elves can’t be killed?” I asked.

“The maze has been there since before the beginning. It is promised that it will remain after the end.”

“And if we don’t get in there, and back out, the end is upon us, right?” I asked, to remind him of our position. His good cheer was really beginning to annoy me.

“And worlds lost or won!” he boomed. That such volume could come from a mouth with no lungs below it still astounded me. “Think what a tale they’ll tell of us in the Netherworld!”

“He’s fey,” Lesh said.

“He can’t be fey, he’s already dead,” I said. “Despite his feeble boasts, what more can he lose?” I didn’t try to keep him from hearing me. “Let’s get there,” I said, without giving the elf a chance to add another wisecrack. “If I listen to much more of this crap, I’ll teach him what soccer is all about.” That was for my own benefit. I didn’t expect the elf to understand the reference, and apparently he didn’t, but Timon got a laugh out of it.

There were tiny white flowers scattered throughout the grassy part of the valley. In some places, the flowers were so thick that there was hardly room for the grass. I knelt down in one patch and pulled a flower on a four-inch stem. I couldn’t smell any scent from the flower, but I slipped it into a buttonhole on my jacket. I was going to have
something
to show for this trek.

My danger sense had been relatively quiet until we rounded that rock shoulder and I got a good look at the shrine. It started doing a tarantella as we started moving toward the maze. Then the feeling built. I tried to deal with the concept of a field of rocks being a living creature and failed absolutely. Our elf was not being allegorical. The way he spoke, I was certain that he believed what he said, that the maze was a living defender of the shrine. The
first
defender.

“Where’s its brain? Where’s its heart?” Lesh asked, almost shouting at the head just in front of him.

“Wherever it chooses to be,” the elf replied.

“If you want to hold any hope of getting home to your father, you’d better come up with something better than useless riddles and inane patter,” I said. “If that’s all you can provide, we might as well dig a hole and bury you here, save ourselves the bother of toting you around and listening to the sound pollution you spout.”

He hesitated a moment before he answered. That was promising, even if his words weren’t.

“I can’t give you hope that doesn’t exist,” he said. “If you find your way through the maze, it will only be because another defender feels confident of destroying you later. I can only sense faint hints of their minds, but they have their politics, like all sentient gatherings.”

I reciprocated by taking my own time considering what he said before I spoke again.

“Can you guide us through the maze?”

“For what good it may do,” he said. “I can sense the proper course to take at any specific moment. An elf can’t be lost. But the maze
can
shift, and any correct choices can be made incorrect at its whim.”

I thought of one possible loophole, but I didn’t say anything, just in case the maze had good hearing. If it could read minds, we were out of luck anyway.

A mile isn’t far to walk on a sunny day, even if you’re loaded down with a heavy pack and a heavier heart. But not all miles are equal. We got to the top of the slope, and it looked as if we had a mile to go to the beginning of the maze. But that last mile was extraordinary. After ten minutes of level and then slightly downhill walking, we were still just as far away and the rock we had started from appeared to be a mile behind us.

I stopped walking. My danger sense had been getting progressively more agitated about what I would expect as I covered the distance separating me from a threat. But my eyes were telling me that the enemy, the wall, was no closer. The easy guess was that my eyes were wrong.

“What is it?” Lesh asked.

I told him. He looked at the wall of the maze, then back to where we had started. Timon and Harkane went through the same motions. Harkane’s movements gave the elf his chance to judge the distances too.

“You realize, of course, that we are almost on top of the maze,” the elf said.

“I figured that out,” I said. “That’s why I stopped. But my eyes don’t agree, so I have to try something else.”

There weren’t a lot of options popping into my head. All I could think of was
If my eyes are lying, I’ve got to try it without them
. I drew Dragon’s Death and closed my eyes while I started pacing forward carefully, sliding one foot in front of the other.

“Stay close to me,” I warned the others. I took only five steps before my blade encountered stone. I opened my eyes and the outer wall of the maze was right there.

“How did you do that?” Lesh asked.

“What did it look like to you?” I asked.

“It looked like the maze came tearing straight at us and ran itself right into your sword.”

“I’m impressed,” Xayber’s son said. “I would have thought that you would need much longer to think of that.”

“Maybe if you hadn’t been so quick to assume that our minds are puny, you wouldn’t be in the position you are,” I said quietly—trying to avoid making it sound like an insult. The insult was there, of course, I simply wasn’t trying to emphasize it at the moment.

There were two openings into the maze about equally distant from where were. I mentally flipped a coin and headed for the entrance to our right. I kept my left hand on the outer wall of the maze to make sure that it didn’t zoom off on us again. The wall
was
stone, cold, hard, and smooth. I didn’t feel any throbbing pulse, any rise and fall of breathing lungs. I still couldn’t conceive that it might actually be alive.

“Stay close together,” I said before we entered the maze. “Keep a hand on the back of the man in front of you. Grab a strap or something. If this maze
can
shift, I don’t want to let it separate us.”

We were near the center of the north wall. Our straight-line distance to the shrine couldn’t be more than a mile and a half, not that straight-line distances would mean much in a maze. My danger sense clanged like a fire alarm at the entrance, then settled down to something bearable, leaving itself room to signal a panic if the occasion arose. I hesitated for a long time at the start of the maze, trying to feel something of this
creature
we were about to enter, to violate. I even tried communicating with it, tried to project a thought ahead of us.

Why don’t we make this simple? Make it easy. I’m already suitably impressed
.

I didn’t hear any replies.

One foot in front of the other. Shuffle off to Buffalo. Or someplace. Put your left foot in. Put your left foot out. Walk the line. There was no static, no resistance, no fireworks as we entered. I walked straight ahead along the first passage, staying close to the wall on my left, touching it, dragging my hand lightly along the rock about half of the time. Whenever we came to a choice of paths, I let the elf decide which way we should go. He might have been leading us in circles, or into any number of traps, but I
thought
that he was doing his best to keep his end of the bargain. True, he had damn little to gain by helping us if our mission was as hopeless as he claimed, but he had absolutely nothing to gain by betrayal. As long as he was intelligent and rational enough to figure that out, I didn’t think that we had to worry about betrayal. But how rational can you stay when all you have left is your head in a birdcage?

The walls of the maze and the ground beneath our feet were a uniform slate gray. The walls were fourteen feet high and the passage seven feet wide. Negotiating a static maze like that, against a stopwatch perhaps, would have been a stimulating challenge as a game or intellectual exercise. The chance that the maze was alive, able to shift its configuration at will, and possibly able to throw more deadly obstacles in our path, made it much, much more. The tension I felt was maddening, waiting for something—
anything—
to happen. But the maze remained passive, quiescent. I wasn’t sure what to expect—sudden trapdoors to deep pits, armed and hideous-looking creatures, extremes of one sort or another—
active
defenses certainly, not just boredom and the drain of nervous anticipation. For two hours there were no sounds but our boots scraping stone and the elf’s terse directions—left, right, or straight ahead; second left, third right, when several passages appeared close together. Then we turned one corner, and a second, immediately, and the elf said to stop.

“The pattern has changed,” he announced. “We have to backtrack.”

I almost asked how far back we would have to go, but didn’t.

“Which way is it to the shrine from here?” I asked instead. “Direct course.”

The elf thought about it for a second, then said, “To your right.” I pointed and he said, “Just a little more this way.” I adjusted my aim and he said, “Precisely.”

“Plan B,” I announced, though I had never said anything about alternative plans. This was the possibility that had popped into my head before we reached the maze.

“Don’t say anything, not one word,” I warned my companions, though I had no real cause to believe that silence would provide any measure of surprise.

I took a rope from the side of Lesh’s pack and a grapple from Harkane’s. I attached the grapple, paid out forty feet of rope, then had the others each take hold of the line farther back, all without saying a word. It was going to be tricky doing this in a seven-foot-wide passage, but I coiled the rope at my feet and started to swing the grapple around my head, building up momentum. Finally, I launched the grapple over the wall in the direction of the shrine. The hooks clanged softly on the other side, and held when I drew back on the rope.

“Quickly!” I said, and pulled myself up the rope first. When I reached the top, I crossed to the middle of the seven-foot-thick structure and stood on the rope to make sure that the hooks didn’t pull out while the others climbed—Timon first, Harkane with the elf, then Lesh. I had one hand on my elf sword, but no opponents appeared to challenge us.