The Flame in the Maze (20 page)

“Now, then,” said the king, and drew a dagger from his boot. He cut the rope that attached Daedalus's wrist and ankle bonds. “Let us get you settled properly. You are an artisan, after all; arrangement and order matter to you.” He pulled Daedalus's bound hands onto the rock and pinned them there, pressing down on the rope around his wrists. His fingers jerked inward as if he wanted to make fists, but Minos adjusted his hold and flattened them out.

“Little Queen,” he said. “Come and help me.”

Ariadne walked to her father, who took her hand. Her head and shoulders were very straight.

“Kneel behind him. Yes. Now press here on the rope, as I did. Good. He will try to move, in a moment. Use all your strength to keep him still.”

She licked her lips. “Yes, Father,” she said.

Daedalus turned his head so that one bright eye was on her. “Ariadne,” he said, in a low, rough voice. “Minnow.”

“No. Don't call me that. Do not.” Her knuckles whitened as she tightened her grip on his wrists.

Minos raised the hammer and brought it down on Daedalus's right palm.

His hands flapped and a tremor went through the rest of him—it bent his spine, from buttocks to skull. He hardly moved, otherwise. He screamed, but only once. As the hammer came down on his other palm and all his fingers, one by one, he dug his chin into his chest and shuddered. Bones cracked in skin. Icarus was shouting; he didn't know when he'd started, but it filled his ears now, along with the cracking bones and Naucrate's wailing.

When Minos was done, he laid the hammer down and crouched in front of Daedalus. “You will never make anything again, old friend,” he said, shaking his head regretfully. Red light glowed behind his teeth. Cinders drifted between them and into his beard. “Surely this will be a relief: first exile, then endless seeking for things you could never quite touch; your art has only ever caused you pain.”

Ariadne let go of Daedalus's wrists.

“Little Queen,” Minos said, rising, “would you agree that it is not just the great Daedalus's hands that have caused unhappiness in our palaces?”

“I would agree,” she said firmly. “He has also
spoken
wrongly—yes; I remember the feast at which he said my noble brother Androgeus's name over and over, in defiance of your command.”

Minos nodded. A blotch of flame appeared beneath his flesh, at the hinge of his jaw. Icarus watched it wriggle up past his ear to the pouch beneath his left eye, where it stopped and pulsed, perhaps in time with his heart. “Precisely, dearest. His words have wounded us. What else, then, might we do to him?”

The knife was in his hand. His fingertips stained the haft with coursing, molten orange.

Icarus's talons were still scritching at dirt and pebbles; he couldn't seem to stop them from moving. Naucrate was whispering Daedalus's name over and over.

“We might cut . . .” Ariadne's voice shook, just a little. “We might cut out his tongue,” she went on.

The king smiled at her. He thrust Daedalus onto the ground, fell to his knees beside him, pried open his jaws—which stayed open, gaping, fish-like—and with that same hand he pulled Daedalus's tongue out between his teeth. With his other hand he raised the knife and set it to the tongue and sliced.

Icarus stopped moving. Naucrate stopped murmuring. The only sounds were a far-off, steady dripping and the low moan that bubbled from Daedalus's weeping mouth.

“Minnow.”

Naucrate spoke softly, but the cavern's rock caught the word and made it louder.

Minos dropped the wet, dark tongue onto the dirt. Ariadne turned to look behind her.

“
You
will not call me that, either.” She sounded both calm and threatening.

Naucrate was holding her head up as best she could, but it was trembling, bent at an angle. Tears had made clean streaks on her skin. “Princess,” she said, “I loved you. Even as I watched you grow and change and scheme, I loved you, because when I looked at you I always saw the little girl who used to bury her face in my lap and cry. The little girl who ached for her life to be different.”

“I do not know why you expect me to feel mercy. I do not know why you even try. After all, I am my father's daughter.”

Naucrate's head sagged back onto the ground. Her eyes were wide and fixed on nothing. A long, tangled strand of hair slid across her forehead and nose. It rose and fell gently, with her breath.

Minos pointed at her. Sparks hissed and fell from his forearm. “Look here: the beautiful, brave Naucrate does know how to fear!” He went to stand above her. More sparks fell; they lit and lingered on Naucrate's hair. Icarus smelled burning, through the clot of tears in his nostrils. “You have never feared
me
enough,” he said, suddenly quiet. “Even when I took you as my lover, you never trembled. I would have killed you then, except that I grew too bored with you to bother. And I am glad. For this, now, will be far more pleasing.”

Naucrate's head came up again. Her lips parted and the singed strand of hair sank between them, but she didn't seem to notice. “I have always hated you,” she said in the cold, flat voice Icarus had heard only a few times before, “but I have never feared you. So do this pleasing thing. Do it quickly or do it slowly. It will not matter. And remember: I hate, but I do not fear.”

Minos made a growling noise deep in his throat. The fire that had lit him from beneath throbbed brighter and higher until it leapt from his skin and out into the air. It fell on Naucrate like a sheet of rain. Her hair, her neck, the grimy cloth stretched tight over her back: all of it kindled and glowed. She thrashed until she was on her stomach. Minos chuckled as he bent down and cut all of her bonds. The stench of filth and burning was still terrible.

Naucrate rose, somehow. She wrenched herself around and up, streaming, screaming, and reached her blazing hands out to Icarus. He felt his body curl away from her and her terrible heat. She reached for Daedalus, who was crouching with his hands swollen and limp behind him, his mouth still dribbling blood. He tipped toward her but she was already past him, stumbling for the hole that led out to the sky. Minos held his hands up and sent flames after her. It didn't matter: she was gone, leaving smoke and skirling sparks in her wake.

Ariadne stumbled after her.

For a moment there was quiet in the cave. Then Icarus heard a long, high, warbling bird cry, swelling and dying over the sea.

When Ariadne ducked back into the cavern, Icarus found his voice. “What now? How will you break
me,
great king?”

Minos didn't turn to him, but Ariadne did. Icarus didn't look at her.

“Poor bird-boy,” the king said, still smiling at Ariadne. “He cannot fashion anything—certainly not wings that fly, despite the mark his god has given him. I shall let him stay here to keep his father company.” At last he looked down at Icarus. “Perhaps you will chirp while he gabbles?”

“Ari. Ari, please. Your father listens to you. Don't let him do this.”

She crouched beside him and reached for him slowly with her pale, steady hands. They found the ball of string where it always had been: wrapped up under his belt. He flinched when she put her fingers on the cloth, and again when she drew the hook out of the end of the ball and pulled it free. She sat back on her heels and tossed it up and down as if it were a child's plaything.

“Ari—no—leave me
something
.” He felt himself shrink with every weak and pleading word.

She laughed. “Oh, Icarus: why would we leave you with this, when it might help you escape this cave? No—you have no more need of it. Not ever.”

As she rose, Minos said, “You will find that the walls, deeper in, run with fresh water. Do not imagine you will be able to follow it out; it comes from rock and returns to rock. One of my men will come, once a month, with food and wine. Take care not to eat and drink too much.”

Icarus looked away from Ariadne at last. “My King,” he said, “why not kill us and be done with it?”

Minos walked toward the exit. His feet left black impressions in the dirt. “I may yet have need of you,” he said over his shoulder. “And also, gods enjoy the suffering of mortals. That is simply the way of things. Daughter: cut him free.”

Minos tossed a knife to the ground next to her. She picked it up and set it to the rope around Icarus's ankles. They took a while to part, but the ones around his wrists were quicker. He shifted and writhed, watching her stand and tuck the knife into the hem of her open bodice. She threaded the ball's hook next to it. Minos walked back toward the passageway, and she followed him.

Daedalus made a sharp, agonized sound, and Icarus yelled. He scrabbled for the tunnel on hands and feet that were nerveless—but then the blood rushed back into them, and the pain of this made him falter. He brushed the sole of her foot; she kicked out and crawled faster, whimpering. Minos was leaning in from the outside; he pulled her free and she cried out, and he slammed the rusted metal door home with a
clang
that echoed over the sound of Icarus's scream.

Daedalus's keening sounded like wind trapped in stone.
Because that's what it
is, Icarus thought as he stroked his father's head and gritted his teeth. It had been days, surely. Days and days
sunk within this stone place, listening to broken bones and heart and voice.

His father's hair had grown, at least a little. Maybe it had been weeks, then. Everything stank enough for it to have been weeks. Icarus had tried to wash both of them, after he'd groped to the passageway and found the water Minos had spoken of (though it was not truly a passageway: more of a cleft, so narrow that he had to squeeze his way in). Thankfully, he'd found the water almost immediately, trickling down the wall. He'd licked some off the rock; it was cool and fresh. He'd taken off his loincloth and soaked it; he'd groped his way back to his father and pressed it against one of his cheeks.

“Drink,” Icarus said. “Drink, and then I'll get more and wash you, then myself.”

Daedalus sucked at the wet, filthy cloth for a moment, then gagged and moaned and turned his face away.

“Father.” Icarus's voice was quiet and hard and helpless. “I know it must hurt—your . . . where your tongue was. But you have to drink. You have to.”

Daedalus shifted away from him and lay down in the darkness. When Icarus untied his father's loincloth, Daedalus didn't move. Icarus soaked it in the tiny, silent fall of water and fumbled his way back to his father with it. Daedalus didn't move when Icarus pressed the cloth gently against his forehead and nose and chin, and on his curled-in shoulders.

Icarus leaned down close to his father's damp, stinking skin. “Don't leave me here alone,” he whispered. One of Daedalus's shoulders lifted and fell—and that was all, for a time that might have been days.

Thirst was constant; hunger was slow. At first, when it finally twisted in Icarus's belly, he didn't recognize it. The moment he did, he imagined fresh bread and fresh fish, plump dates and olives drizzled in their own oil, and he writhed on the ground, clutching at the pain and longing at his centre. Icarus felt his father's hand on his back and thrust it away.

Thirst and hunger and darkness. The rise and fall of Daedalus's keening, or silence—until Icarus woke from another dark, muddled sleep to the door screeching open.

“Father!” he said, reaching for him, wondering whether he were dreaming. “A month—it must have been a month.”

Theron's lamplight arrived before he did. This time it wasn't just lamplight, though, not just the orange-gold: there was blue, too, pulsing to a deeper gold and back. At first Icarus had to close his eyes and cover them—but even then the light seeped in like a glorious mist.

“Thank the gods,” Icarus rasped, when Theron was standing above him. He was holding onto the long rope handle of one of the crab shell lamps from Daedalus's Amnisos workroom. Daedalus's keening had stopped. He gazed at his own creation, which threw lurid, moving shadows on his filthy face.

Theron stared at them, his eyes cold and almost unblinking in his scarred face. “Do not think the king was mercifully minded, when he ordered me to bring this to you from Master Karpos's workroom,” he said. “No—it is just that he wishes you to be able to see the sad wreckage of your lives from this moment on, all the time. And he wishes you to eat, now, so that you will continue to live these sad, wrecked lives.”

Theron set the crab shell lamp on the flat rock where Minos had shattered Daedalus's hands. The guard smiled and held up a bag.
Linen
, Icarus thought.
So clean.
The cloth bulged, and as it swayed he smelled things—so many impossibly wonderful things: bread, dates, fish, both fresh and salted.

Icarus stood up slowly. The space around him felt vast and strange; he was wobbly, erupting with tiny, soft, seeking feathers. “We might not eat,” he said. His own voice sounded very far away. “We might deprive the king of the pleasure of our continued torture.”

Theron's laughter bounced from walls and invisible ceiling for far too long. When he was finally finished, he let the bag fall. It thumped against the dirt.

“Oh—and there's one more thing,” he said. He drew a spade from his belt and tossed it down next to the bag. “You'll want to dig a hole. For your shit. You see? The king is a thoughtful man.”

Icarus took a step toward him and raised his hands.
I'll strangle him; I'll thrust my knee against his throat and press him into the dirt, never mind that I'm as weak as a newborn.
Theron drew a knife from his belt. He spun it lazily; its silver reflection swam across his skin and the stone behind him. He laughed again, quietly, and Icarus crumpled. He sat on the dirt and swayed, because his bones so badly wanted him to run and fly.

“Until next month,” Theron said, and left the chamber.

After the door had clanged shut, Icarus didn't move—not his legs or arms, and not his eyes. They were on the bag. Its rope tie had come undone; an end of bread was protruding from its neck. The bread shone—with honey, he knew. His mother had made this, of course; she'd made everything, from the meltingly sweet to the richly spiced. She'd sung in her bird voice as she did. He'd hunkered between the columns of the kitchen, listening, watching, barely able to keep from springing up to dig his hands into the flour. And yet he'd stayed still, watching sunlight slant, catching the red in her dark hair and the jewelled gold within the honey.

He crawled to the bag because he found he couldn't walk. He pawed at it until it fell fully open, and he pulled out the bread. His hands shook; he dug his fingers into it and smelled a surge of sweetness.

“Father,” he said, and crawled to where Daedalus was crouching. Icarus tore a piece free and swallowed a sudden rush of saliva. He tugged the soft flesh of the bread away from the crust and rolled it between his fingertips.

“Here, Father,” he said. “Eat. If you can't manage this, I'll soak it in water.”

Daedalus swallowed once and turned away from the bread. His face was gaunt and stark in the soft light. He gazed at the lamp, almost without blinking, until Icarus almost wished that Theron hadn't brought it at all.

Icarus stopped himself from overindulging: he had some bread, two dates, two olives, and a sip of the wine he found in a little stoppered jug at the bottom of the bag. And yet he was giddy and nauseous and, when he finished, shakier than when he'd been starving. Because he couldn't bear to be still, he grasped his father's lamp in one hand and crawled some more, this time along the passageway to the door.

It locked inside as well as out. Icarus stared intently at the mechanism, which was set just beneath a ring handle. He touched the lock; rust flaked beneath his fingers, but the bolts were firmly embedded in the metal of the door. There was a tiny space between the lock and the rest of the door, but, though he tried for a long time, he couldn't wiggle his talon-nails very far down into it. He slid their pointed tips into the keyhole, but the talons were too short to reach the mechanism within.
Father could have fashioned something
,
he thought, sitting back on his heels.
If he still had his hands. If they still turned silver when he touched things.

When he returned to the chamber, he set a rolled-up bit of bread between his father's lips. Daedalus's throat worked, and the bread fell deep into it, and he choked and gasped. “Good,” Icarus said. “Have more. And listen: there's a lock on the door—on the inside. It's strange that it's there at all, obviously.” Daedalus was digging at the earth with his toes. Icarus wondered whether he could urge his father to try using his toes instead of his hands; surely his godmark wouldn't know the difference? Daedalus's toes scrabbled clumsily at pebbles and dirt, and no silver came—but he kept scrabbling anyway, then and later, as if he might dig his way to the sea.

“I think this must have been a pirate cave. They'd have kept their spoils in here, and would've needed a door that locked from the inside. For when they were in here
with
the spoils, wanting to keep people away.” He stopped tearing at the bread. “So they'd have made sure there was another way to the outside.”

He set the loaf down and rose. He paced the length of the cave twice—stronger, steadier—then knelt again before his father. “I followed the other tunnel before, but only a little, because it was so narrow and there was no light at all. It's time for me to go there again. There
must
be a way out.”

Daedalus's toes stilled. His gaze wandered over Icarus's face. His lips parted but he made no sound.

“I'll feed you some more, now. I'll make sure you're comfortable.” Icarus lifted the glowing crab shell from the ground and looped its rope around his neck. The light flared blue, then eased back to gold. “I hope I won't be gone long, but it might take a while to find out what's down there. You'll be without light again while I'm gone.” Icarus touched his father's brow. Daedalus closed his eyes and nodded.

When Icarus had been in the passageway before, in the absolute dark, he hadn't been afraid—just nervous about getting stuck. Now, when he squeezed inside and past the trickle of water, his little light flickered, and his breath came faster and shallower.
Be calm. Think only of the way out. Of coming up into open sky. Of leaping off boulders, even if you still can't fly. Open sky. That's all. Open sky; the king's chest, also open. A sword? Glaucus's walking stick? Won't matter. Ariadne's face crumpling as her bones do, beneath my fists.

He stopped walking and pressed his forehead against the wall that was right there, at his shoulder. His breathing had turned into a sobbing that ground at his throat and ears.
Stop. Be calm. Think of Chara—
already he was quieter
—and the time you both got lost in that cave, looking for Asterion. Remember the way the dawn light looked, when you finally found the entrance. Remember how you laughed.

The ceiling was so low that he had to crouch, and the walls were so tight around him that they held him up. He eased his way forward, the light no longer swinging at all. No time and all time passed. His mind was empty of words—until, at last, a thread of fresh air touched his cheek, and he thought
Yes yes yes, oh, all you gods and goddesses, yes.

There was a fissure, where the top of the wall met the ceiling. Even if he hadn't felt the air, he would have noticed it. He forced his body straight and ran his hands along its lip. It was barely wide enough for him, but he squirmed and thrust his way up and inside it. He had to remember to keep breathing as rock pressed and plucked at him. The shaft angled gently upward. He scuttled like a lizard, pausing sometimes to taste the air. It made him want to cry again, because it was sweet and close and not enough.

His groping hands hit stone. For a moment he was dizzy—
Which way am I pointing—up or down?
He wriggled until the light from his lamp fell on the stone. It was a different colour than the rest: black instead of red-brown. It had been placed in the shaft, its edges measured and set with care, so that only the thinnest thread of air could twine between it and the wall. And it was scored with marks. Icarus lifted a trembling finger to trace them.

Icarus laughed until his voice and tears were gone.

When Icarus returned to the cave, Daedalus wasn't there.

“Father?” The word cracked. “
Father
?”

They came for him while I was away. The king decided to have him killed after all, and next time they'll come back for me—or maybe they won't—maybe they'll just stop coming and wait for me to die.

As he crumpled to his sore, scraped knees, Daedalus crawled out of the tunnel that led to the door. He didn't look at Icarus. He rose, shuffled over to a wall, and laid one of his broken hands against it. Icarus went to stand beside him. The light breathed scarlet over them both.