Labyrinth (Book 5) (25 page)

Belinda looked up and handed me the map. “Why do you want to go out there, anyway?”

“Uh, ghost hunting.”

She paled. “Ugh. Well, better you than me. Be careful out there. There’s still bits of that maze out there and you can fall into it if you’re not keeping a sharp eye out.”

That was an interesting caution—how could one fall into a maze? We thanked Belinda and Janice for their help and set out to find Rosaceae.

I drove this time, holding the noisy grid voices at bay a little more easily now that I was doing what they wanted.

Quinton was frowning and about the time I turned onto Chumstick Highway I asked him why.

“It’s bugging me: What did Belinda mean about a circle of trees?”

“The other one—Janice—was telling me the orchard around the house is planted in a circle or circular area with the trees arranged in irregular radii, not in regular rows. Apparently, it was hard to harvest unless you worked in a spiral.”

“Ahhh . . . that’s what I was wondering. I’ll bet the center of the spiral coincides with the center of the labyrinth.”

“Why?”

Quinton paused, ordering his thoughts. “This mystery turns on keys, puzzles, and a labyrinth. But really, it’s just the keys and the puzzles because a classical labyrinth is the visual expression of a key as a circle.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“OK, look—turn right.”

“What?”

“This is North Road. Turn right.”

I did and the road began to climb quite steeply. I had to concentrate on the grade. Even as we crossed the railroad tracks, the angle barely eased and the road curved sharply to the right. I made the curve and almost missed the road to the cemetery. The sign marking it was faded and small, but I saw it in time and made a hard left onto the steep path, not much wider than the Rover itself. The truck’s tires were so close to the edge that they pulled on the ruts rather than falling into them, making the ride a thumping, twitching misery until we passed the neat rows of fruit trees on the right and found a grove of old oaks shading a small slope dotted with crumbling headstones and strange monuments enclosed in rusted iron fences.

Although it was quaint from most vantage points, I found the cemetery unsettling and odd. Most of the graves were old enough to lie quiet, but a few were literally giving up the ghost in spires of colored mist and restless shapes. A disproportionate number of the restless forms were tiny: evidence of high infant mortality. There was a strange cluster of shady forms around the trees at the north end of the small graveyard. The voice of the grid urged me to ignore them and I agreed. I kept my eyes to the right where the last row of graves on the orchard side petered out as the road took a sudden dip down. The Rover lurched a bit at the change of grade but had no problem keeping to the hard-packed dirt surface.

I tried to put the conversation back on track so it would be easier to ignore the curious stares the ghosts turned on us as we passed. “So . . . how is a key a labyrinth?”

“Not just any key: a Greek key—a meander.”

Yet another chill of recognition rolled over me. “
Maiandros
” was also one of the words the Grey chorus had spoken into my dreaming ears. “Wait—what? A meander is a key? I thought it was piece of a river.”

“It is, but it’s also the Greek word for an ancient, endless shape—the Greek key or fret. Mathematically it’s a relatively simple structure of two connecting, single-turn spirals, one coming into the center and the other going back out, kind of like an outline of an ocean wave. But it’s usually shown squared off instead of rounded, so it looks a bit like the wards on an old-fashioned key. You see it all the time on Greek and Aztec art; I think the Hopi and Anasazi used it, too, but that’s off the point. You know the shape I’m talking about, right?”

I could see it in my mind, running down the hems of ancient clothing and along the edges of dishes at the Greek diner in Fremont, bordered in lines so the squared-off wave shape was contained. “Yes, I can see it.”

“All right. If you think of the outer lines of the shape as solid bars and the inner ones as elastic, then you can grab one of the bars and swing it around over the top of the other so the two bars are now resting back to back. The lines of the spiral elastics will describe the path and shape of a classical, round labyrinth with a circular center, just like the famous labyrinth at Knossos where the minotaur lived. So a key and a labyrinth are reflections of each other.”

A sudden flash of vision or memory made me step on the brake and bring the truck to a halt in a small flurry of dust. In front of me, formed in silver mist, I saw an image of my father’s strange key flexing and twisting in and out of the shape of a classical labyrinth. Then it flew apart into glittering shards that re-formed as a smaller version of the puzzle balls that shifted and rolled across an invisible surface, leaving strange trails of color on the mist of the Grey. “That’s a little freaky.”

Quinton couldn’t see it, so he continued on his own conversational course. “Not so much. It’s just math. But here’s an interesting detail most people leave out of the whole labyrinth myth: A
Lady
presided over the labyrinth at Knossos and she was viewed with such awe that she received the same tribute each year as all the other gods combined. She must have been a pretty powerful woman to be treated that way.”

I shook away the Grey’s persistent show. “Please don’t suggest that Dru Cristoffer might be an ancient goddess. . . .”

“I’m not thinking so, but . . . it’s an interesting idea and maybe that’s part of the reason for this crazy system of puzzles and keys. Maybe she used that model, scaled down.”

“So that makes my dad the minotaur?”

“That makes him the prisoner. The Labyrinth of Knossos was a prison for the Minotaur of Crete.”

“If I remember correctly,” I added, “Theseus slew the minotaur. . . .” Quinton gave me a long, sober look. “You didn’t think everyone was going to get out of this alive, did you?”

I snapped at him, feeling grief-stricken and unreasonably enraged at the thought, “Don’t say that!”

He sighed, closing his eyes a moment before he said anything more. “He’s already dead, and you can’t bring your dad back. He’s a ghost. Do you think he wants to stay? Given what you’ve told me, do you think that’s a good idea? The best thing you can do is let him—and that poor bastard you’ve got tucked into your pocket—go. Maybe that’s all it’ll take, though I doubt it. Between Cristoffer and the vampires, blood’s going to spill. If it comes down to saving a dead man or a live one, pick the one who’s breathing.”

I gaped at him. Not because he was upsetting me—that wasn’t his fault—but because the voices were talking, babbling in swift and rising harmony that shifted the silvery mist of the Grey like an immensely complex game of Tetris, dropping images and pieces of sound and magic into a glittering mosaic of information. My silent stare unnerved him and Quinton started to reach for me. I held my hand up to ward him off, quivering and drinking in the growing fractal vision. Then it jerked to a halt, frozen and dangling in the ghostlight, silent until it broke apart in a thousand chiming pieces that fell away into dust.

I gasped and tried to clutch the shards and hold them together, but they had no substance and only stung my hands like ice and melted away. Quinton lurched forward and caught me by the shoulders.

“What is it?”

“I . . . don’t know. I almost had it. . . . I almost knew something. . . .” I shook my head in frustration.

“Maybe you’ll know more when we get to the maze.”

“Maze?” For an instant I didn’t know what he was talking about.

“We’re heading for the maze in the labyrinth.”

“In the orchard,” I corrected, concentrating on calming my shaking and getting the Rover back in motion.

“No . . . I was getting to that. The classical labyrinth has a single long path that goes into the center and back out again. We use the word as if it’s a synonym for ‘maze’ but it’s really not. Mazes have multiple paths or multiple
possible
paths to the solution. But if the orchard is laid out in a spiral, then
it
may be the labyrinth and there’s something else at the center—another way out. Possibly another maze.”

“Then we’ll have to find out,” I answered, turning over the ignition. The Rover growled sullenly but started, and I drove on, looking for the lightning-struck trees that marked the path to Rosaceae and its labyrinth.

TWENTY-THREE

I
t was so narrow and weed-choked that I almost missed it, but I found the road that turned up the hill and away from the railroad track. Once we were on the path, finding the remains of the house was easy. The road went up through a slight fold in the hillside, twisting north and east of the cemetery into what was clearly no-man’s-land until the trees appeared, like the fringe of a pale-green cloak on the shoulders of a giant. The track—it wasn’t really wide or clear enough to call a road—ran along the edge of the thickening grove of trees and then turned suddenly to the left to end in a ragged dirt oval bordered on the east side with trees and on the west with scrub that fell away before rising again to hide the house from the railroad and the cemetery. No one would find this place by accident unless they came down the hill on the northeast, and that was covered in neat, cultivated rows of apple trees above the stark ocher rifts of the miniature valley’s walls that cupped the Rose house in its weathered palm. A lane of trees came right to the edge of the oval and led straight back to a pile of fieldstone rubble and half-buried wood, charred and broken among the stones. I used the oval to turn the Rover, figuring it was better to be prepared if we had to leave in a hurry, and got out.

The ground whispered under my boots like distant earthquakes. I found myself narrowing my eyes, suspicious and expecting trouble. The avenue of old pear trees—their blossoms whiter and more translucent than the apple’s—led directly to what had been the front steps. Now it was two broken marble slabs and a wasteland of ruin beyond the cracked front stoop. I stopped about halfway up the path and studied it. The approach was much too easy.

Quinton paused beside me, stuffing the two puzzle balls into his backpack. “What?”

“Something’s wrong. Cristoffer wouldn’t leave it this simple. Am I missing something? What do you see?”

“I just see . . . trees. Just a mess of trees.”

I huffed a strand of hair out of my face and crouched down, changing my viewpoint, and let my vision open to the Grey. But I didn’t slip in; if there was something there, I didn’t want to meet it just yet.

In the silvery world of the Grey, the house rose in blocks with a round central turret like a finger pointing into the sky. The trees tossed their shaggy heads in a spectral wind and cast moving patches of colored light onto the fog-shrouded ground. The thick, vibrant feeder lines of the grid—the leylines and main trunks of magic—throbbed below the earth and arrowed for the back of the house. I couldn’t see where they were leading from here, but I would have guessed they converged at the center of the labyrinth of moving trees.

Quinton had been right: It was a labyrinth. The apparently concentric rings of trees were strung with lines of light and mist, creating barriers that would confine and control whoever stepped into them, forcing them to wander a single, tortuous route until they reached the center. The ground was a sheet of silver marked with red, black, and white in scattered lines like runes or broken bones. I held Quinton back and inched forward, putting my hand against one of the barriers.

The broken lines on the ground stirred, rising into the air, and a shock wave of crows erupted from the nearest trees, plunging at us, shrieking and shattering the Grey. Quinton ducked, yanked his hat over his head, and turned up his collar, hugging his coat close against the ripping talons and clacking beaks of the flock. I turned my shoulder into the cloud of birds and tucked my head down until they lifted away again, circling into the sky and flocking to and fro as if waiting for my next move. A shadow shaped like a bear assembled itself from the clutter on the ground and roamed a restless path a few feet away, pacing just beyond the next wall of the labyrinth.

I looked at the trees and the ground, then back up and down again, studying the way the shadows fell and the returned detritus that lay along the labyrinth’s paths. “So that’s where the animals came from,” I whispered.

“Are they real?” Quinton demanded, raising his head warily.

“They are, but they’re not exactly normal. Did you get a look at any of them?”

“Hell no. Too busy hiding my eyes from their beaks.”

“They’re dead.” The cloud of crows fluttered and fell from the sky, breaking into bones and feathers, scattering back into the years of leaf rot and weeds. “Every animal that ever wandered in and died here guards this place. Guardian beasts by the score, animated by the energetic forces under the house. Probably tied to it by blood—seems like the blood mage sort of thing to do, doesn’t it?”

“Sounds like the creepy thing to do, you ask me.”

“But effective. That’s probably what attacked the kids who came here and thought they were chased by animals. These guardian beasts try to keep people out of the labyrinth or away from the house; cross the lines, walk in the wrong place, and they come after you. I’d bet that you encounter fewer of them if you stay on the right path. . . . You want to take the long way, or risk the dead things and run straight through?”

“To where?”

I pointed to the cleared place at the back of the tumbled-in foundation: a circular area of weedy grass about the size of a baseball infield. “There. The center of the labyrinth.” It was as clear as water to me, and as I named it, the misty walls of the orchard labyrinth thickened and brightened, increasing the electric sensation in my body.

Quinton gave it and me a considering look. “Much as I tend to live recklessly, I think this might be a better time for caution. And I could do without any more encounters with skeleton crows.”

I stared at the ground for a while, looking for the silver fog that marked the lines of the labyrinth’s walls, then led forward until we came to the first turn.

We must have looked insane, wandering around the orchard in looping arcs for no apparent reason. We were nearing the center and I was getting fatigued from staring at the Grey without vanishing into it. A thin silver fog covered the ground in my view and I was concentrating on the thicker shapes of the walls, so I missed the shadow bear, its tattered skin stretched over an incomplete skeleton of bones and twigs.

The eldritch creature grunted and charged us, rising on its back paws as it came on. Its breath was the scent of things rotting in the earth as it roared, swiping at me in the lead. Quinton grabbed for me, shouting, “Watch out!” as he tried to pull me backward. The massive, ruined paw of the shadow bear fanned over my shoulder, claws ripping into the leather of my jacket.

I threw myself sideways as Quinton tugged back, losing my footing and scrambling for a solid purchase. My foot descended on emptiness and I plunged straight down into a pit the Grey had concealed.

I landed on the damp-smelling earth with a thud and a burst of pain up my right leg. Quinton jumped down next to me and the shadow bear lumbered to stare down at us from empty eye sockets, too large to get through the narrow hole we’d come down. It pawed the earth a moment, thrusting its razor claws at us through the opening, snorting. Defeated, it finally shuffled off in disgust.

I let out my breath and leaned against the dirt wall of the hole. Jarred out of my observation of the Grey, I could see it was more of a ramp than a pit, a twist in the path that looped under the main way like a stream under a bridge.

Quinton pulled me to my feet, wincing in sympathy as I made a pained face. “You all right?”

“Yeah.” My ankle twinged and throbbed, but well-laced in my boot, it held up fine. “I’ll be OK, now the bear’s gone. What about you?”

“All right. Couple of cuts and scrapes but nothing dramatic. How did you miss seeing that hole?”

“I wasn’t looking for a normal trap,” I replied, a bit ashamed I hadn’t thought of it.

“The bear
was
a little distracting. You can’t watch everything, I guess. And why did the bear attack us anyway? I didn’t think we’d stepped off the path. . . .”

“Guardians are supposed to keep you out of things . . .” I started but petered out.

Standing under the path, we looked around. Even with normal eyes it would have been hard to detect the new path much earlier. The roots of the apple trees and decades of rain had camouflaged the entrance and filled it in slightly, making the hole smaller. I turned around several times, trying to get my bearings on the new elevation.

Another path took off under the bridge, heading off in strange twists and falls through the surface of the orchard labyrinth. The bridge wasn’t so innocent either: From the top it looked like just more surface dirt, but from below, it was a stonework arch that opened into a new landscape of passages below and through the orchard.

“It’s another maze,” I observed. “A hidden one under the surface labyrinth.”

“I don’t think it’s just ‘another maze.’ What if it’s the start of the
real
maze? Should have realized a labyrinth—even with ghost-bears and skeleton crows—was too easy. That bear was trying to keep us out of here. I’ll bet this leads into the center,” Quinton speculated.

Studying the visible part of it, I agreed. “I guess we’ll find out.”

“Can you make it?”

“Yeah. My ankle’s a little sore, but the boot’s as good as any brace. Let’s go.”

He shrugged and walked closer to me as we passed under the arch and into the new maze. This was different from the labyrinth above; the paths branched and twisted, rising up to the surface and falling back below it, ducking under more bridges and coming to sudden ends that turned us back again and again. But the closer we moved to the center, the stronger the sensation of electricity coursing through me became while the harmony of the grid grew—lounder and more like a single great voice.

We’d been in the maze nearly an hour when we saw a shaft of light from above. We were passing through a long, turning corridor choked with roots when we saw it cutting through the gloom ahead, plunging down from an opening above. The light was brighter and stronger than any we’d seen since entering the maze and we moved toward it with caution. It seemed too good to be true and that made us both wary.

At the base of the light, we came to another arch, this one leading to a cylinder of rising stairs. Going up them, we emerged into the edge of an empty circle at the heart of the original labyrinth, about a hundred and fifty feet from where the back door of the house must have stood. I paused at the top of the steps, looking through the Grey again before stepping out onto the weedy grass. Bright blue lines of energy crossed just to the west of the stairs at the center of the circle. Dru Cristoffer had enclosed a power nexus for herself in the secret walls of her labyrinth. A spiderweb of rich green and golden-yellow energy spun out from the crossed spokes of the nexus. One color I did not see was red.

I had a bad feeling.

I checked my shoulder where the shadow bear had hit me, but only the jacket showed any damage. If it had cut me, the wounds had already closed. I looked back at Quinton, blocking his path up the stairs. “Hey, how bad are those cuts and scrapes of yours?”

“Not bad. Kind of oozy, but nothing to worry about.”

“You have any bandages in those pockets of yours? Because I think this might be a very bad place to bleed.”

He frowned and squinted. “Why?”

“Cristoffer is a blood mage. This is, essentially, her workroom. What do you think?”

His face lit and then clouded with unhappy recognition. “Ah. Yeah. No bleeding here.”

I left him on the stairs and stepped cautiously onto the lawn, half expecting something to attack or flash or change, but nothing did. “Power must be off,” I muttered to myself and thought I heard the voices of the grid giggle. I walked to the point where the colored lines of energy crossed, figuring that was the most likely place to start with whatever came next.

“OK, Dad, I’m in the labyrinth,” I thought aloud. “So . . . what do I do?” I supposed now was the time to open one of the puzzle balls. The doors, the voice of the grid reminded me. Just one at a time. . . . But I didn’t have them. Quinton did. I called out to him. “Can you throw me the puzzle balls?”

“Sure.”

They were a little bigger than croquet balls, not as large as volleyballs, and well within my ability to catch, but while the first one was easy enough, the second spun off-center, wobbling as it came toward me, making an odd, thrumming counterpoint to the chorus of the Grey. I made a scooping motion to catch the ball, but it seemed to slide across my fingers with a slithering, impossible shimmy to fall willfully to the earth. The dark blotch of burned blood that Dru Cristoffer had made touched the ground with a clash that shook the foundations of the collapsed house behind me until they growled and grated together. Red light flashed across the lawn with a roar, sealing the center of the labyrinth in hot energy. I heard Quinton shout, but the sound seemed to come distantly, as if from behind a steel door.

“No!” I yelled, and darted for the stairs, but they were gone, hidden away behind an impenetrable shield of light. I grabbed for the crimson-glowing barrier, concentrating, reaching with all my will for the living fabric of the Grey, and felt the earth groan and bulge as the searing shock of the grid burned through my frame.

My ears rang as if I were surrounded by noise, but the silence was absolute with the rushing feeling of something pushing through me. The voice that wasn’t a voice but a million whispers told me to stop trying. To let go of the seal. Yes, I could break it, but not now. Stop. Stop and open the first door—just one—and all will be well.

I shuddered at the invasive sense of knowing. Something that wasn’t me—that wasn’t even a single thing but a collective of knowledge—spoke to me, not in my ear but directly. I raged around the room of red light until I was too tired and dizzy from its endless sameness. I didn’t slip out of it; I didn’t tear it apart. I could have. Knowledge hovered nearby, taunting me with the way but not allowing me to do it. Dragging my feet, I came back to where the two wooden balls lay on the ground, hovering on the scarlet surface like bubbles on water.

I picked up the first puzzle ball, the one Will had given me and in which I’d found the quiet one of Dru’s pair of earrings, and rolled it around in my hands until I found the odd slit in the surface into which my father’s key fit. I didn’t have to fumble around with the funny little wire puzzle this time. Once in my hand it shuffled into the right shape on the first try, adding its satisfied humming to the song of the grid. I was filled with disgust at the smug noise of it all.