Labyrinth, p.8
Labyrinth, page 8
She watched Dan come to some conclusion as he studied her. Unlike Stewey, he did see her as a beautiful woman. That much was obvious in his eyes, where Ogden’s held challenge most of the time.
“All right, I don’t know why that bastard wrapped a meditation maze around his stepping disk,” Dan said. “Other than it would take someone half an hour to exit the labyrinth if they emerged at the center, so perhaps it gave him time to prepare defenses, since you say he was only occasionally an ally?”
“That’s right,” Khulan said. “Faucher was ancient and powerful, perhaps three hundred years old, but starting immortality today is much more difficult when there is so little power flowing free in the world. Even in America, which has not been so disrupted as Europe or Asia. He aided me when he chose and Koschei when the mood struck. But he was a private man at the best of times, so nobody knows much about him. Knew.”
“And we’re sure he’s dead?” Dan asked. “The records only show that the resident was no longer among the living, and the corporation who owned the estate had put the building up for sale. Could this all be an enormous swindle?”
“Swindle?” Khulan asked, confused.
“If you change bodies every once in a while, could Faucher have gone down that same path?” Dan asked. “Fake his death, walk away, and inhabit a new body?”
Khulan felt her stomach grow cold. Anything was possible, especially if a man like Faucher finally confronted the death of his preserved flesh.
“Would it matter?” she asked.
“All interior furnishings were removed as part of the estate,” Stewey spoke up now. “Many items were sent to museums, where us warlocks had an assumption that we might find some items of power hidden if we went looking. But if he’s walking, he might have sold things off to someone else before he died and left many of the things here. Maybe he’s walking around Seattle or Hong Kong right now just like you are, Khulan Zima.”
That would be an ugly development, she decided. And she could see someone like Faucher doing that.
“And the power bound up here?” she asked, letting these men speculate.
They had been closer to the center of things longer. Perhaps they had better ideas about modern American culture.
“Someone breaks it when they buy the place,” Dan said. “Proof positive to the rest of us that he’s dead. Nobody would ever ask if he wasn’t. Another warlock might come along and collect magical rabbits or pull some of it out of the air, like you did, Khulan. But his enemies would assume him gone. At least long enough for whatever revenge he had planned.”
“How do we prove it, one way or the other?” she asked, turning from one man to the other, aware of how wound up both of them were.
Neither was focused on her right now, though, so she was not expecting an attack.
Dan Holt turned to an interior wall and walked close enough to lay his hands on it. Khulan felt the spell the man cast into the wall itself, the underlying ribs of the building pulsing back with power underneath the paint and plaster that had been added over the brick later.
“Stewey, there’s something here,” Dan said, drawing her and Ogden closer. “I felt it when we walked in, but the taint in the air mostly obscures it. He bound something to the wall here.”
Khulan cast her own spell, but even with her greater overall power, she could not sense what Dan did. But she was a Sorcerer, not a Diviner like he was.
Stewey walked past her and touched the wall as well.
“Tastes like that damned maze the bastard left in the backyard,” Stewey said. “What’s behind here?”
“Bricks,” Dan said. “This feels like it was part of an exterior wall at one point, with archways on the ground floor that have been covered over with wall. I can see how this was once the outside of the building when I look at it. Faucher, or someone, extended it and added this room where this used to be a patio.”
Khulan wasn’t an expert on architecture, so she had to take the man at his word. She stepped back and studied the entire wall though. Felt the falseness of it, like a mask worn at a ball she had once attended, over a space about three meters wide, next to the doorway itself.
“Stewey, there is section of wall that is fake,” she saw it now.
Both hands up, she pushed some of the magic she had captured earlier into the wall and watched it light up with glyphs and runes.
“Son of a bitch,” Stewey muttered. “Can you hold that?”
“Why?” she asked, focusing on her breathing.
The enchantments were heavy. It was like carrying one of these men on her back and trying to walk.
Stewey walked next to Dan and touched the wall in three places with his right hand, palm flat and pushing his own magic into the wall.
It suddenly felt light, as if she had just set down a backpack full of schoolbooks to study.
“Dan, back up,” Stewey said abruptly.
Both men did, moving next to her.
“Khulan, the outer wall is floating free right now,” Stewey said. “Can you tilt it down and lay it flat on the floor?”
Could she what?
But the weight was lessened.
She tugged and felt the entire thing come towards her perhaps a decimeter.
Khulan concentrated and brought the top down slowly, focusing on keeping the entire thing whole as she did.
It rested with a hard puff of dust and magic that blew her hair back a little, revealing a stone wall that had been covered over before.
Khulan recognized the sigils where Stewey had touched it before.
There was a portal hidden here, where even the most aggressive remodel probably wouldn’t reveal.
It was like the stepping disk she remembered from the backyard, but didn’t lead to another disk.
Or rather, the one it led to wasn’t on earth.
Faucher had hidden a portal to a demiplane, and nobody would have found it, probably until it was too late.
Chapter
Fourteen
Dan’s job was usually to run interference for Stewey. That had always been the thing that made them more powerful, more dangerous than just two warlocks working together. Dan was the face, Stewey the bones. Diviner and Enchanter.
All the Beijing folks back in Seattle expected a Chinese boy like him to be the expert on their history, when Dan preferred late Roman Empire and Dark Ages stuff. Stewey could read all the old stuff better than just about anybody Dan knew.
Today, they had a third with them. A Sorcerer more powerful than the two of them put together. Throw in a Conjurer, like he suspected Koschei was, and an Illusionist, and you just about had your bases covered. Assuming all the stories about Necromancers were more fable than truth.
What had Faucher been? The meditation maze in the back yard was pure enchantment, with some conjuring thrown in, opening portals to other places by walking through a shadow plane. The camouflage on the wall was a nice illusion but had leaked a little wrong.
Dan wondered if him breaking the meditation maze had overloaded the illusions in here and caused them to shift a little. Worth asking Stewey later.
And this wall was pure conjuration. Say the magic word, as it were, and open a portal, except he didn’t know where it went.
Lots of power bound up right here, though.
“Stewey,” Dan said as he walked around the fake wall on the floor and got a better look at the runes. “Can you read the path enchanted here?”
He felt both approach, different echoes in the way the magic around them flowed.
Stewey was as grounded as the earth. Maybe that was why his enchantments worked so well, if all magic that was lost went back underground?
Khulan reminded him of a bird, gliding on thermals, even inside this room.
Dan glanced back and returned her smile.
“Is Koschei Russian, like you?” he asked her.
“What?”
“You had to physically come here from somewhere else, when I broke the stepping disk,” Dan explained. “That took time. Stewey just woke four people up downstairs, and I’m assuming you and Koschei are two of them. How long until someone could respond and find this wall?”
“The others might think it was a trap,” she replied after a moment of thought. “They would divine, but it would take time for them to decide to approach. Days, not years. Probably not hours, unless one of them killed Faucher themselves and already knows what the barrier breaching implied. A spirit such as the one that attacked you earlier might come first, but those are from the darkness, and the sun is arisen.”
“Then we have eight to ten hours before we could expect an ambush?” he asked her.
Her face got cuter when she got confused. More innocent and human, and less like an angry god forced to walk among peons like him and Stewey.
“Most likely, yes,” she answered finally.
Dan smiled.
“Stewey, how hard will it be to open this thing and peek inside?” he asked.
“You are completely, fucking insane, Dr. Holt,” Stewey said.
He always got serious when the situation did.
“Agreed, Dr. Ogden,” Dan replied evenly. “But we have a day before someone shows up to steal anything. And a month before we have to repair this wall or the Grimsbys will own the place. They’ll never see the portal like we do, but I could see them gutting this room and turning it into an arboretum or back into a patio. They’ve got the money.”
“Step through an unknown portal, onto fuck only knows what kind of demiplane, engage whoever has been conjured to protect it, and escape safely afterwards?” Stewey asked in a blunt, disbelieving voice.
“You think that shadow servant will politely take no for an answer and not bother us again?” Dan asked.
Stewey surprised him by turning to Khulan.
“How powerful are you really, lady?” he asked her bluntly.
Stewey usually got tongue-tied around pretty women, so Dan was impressed. His anger must have overcome his embarrassment.
Khulan studied Dan’s partner for a long second before she spoke.
“Near the top, Stewey,” she said simply. “Those four names are probably interchangeable, but everyone else, everyone you would know, is down at least one entire step from that. The tradeoff is that I’m not prepared to do something like this today. Otherwise, I’d be wearing an enchanted scale armor and carrying a sword comparable to the old legends of Excalibur.”
Dan started to say something tart and sarcastic, then realized that she might have been around at the time. Might have actually known Merlin and Morgan, or whatever they had been when those legends weren’t legends.
And how much magic had been bound up in such a sword?
“We’ve got one chance,” Dan said. “After that, I expect competition. We can’t even run back to Seattle for anything good, lest someone figure it all out.”
“Oh, I’m not completely at sea, Dr. Holt.” Stewey suddenly grinned. “We did bring Bessie, after all. Be right back.”
And he was out the door at a jog, footsteps receding.
Dan found himself alone with a being who claimed to be a goddess. Certainly the baddest warlock he’d ever met. The flower she had shown him in his mind was evidence of that. At the same time, he didn’t think she had compromised him when she touched him.
Or if she did, she really was a god of some sort, and he and Stewey were just doomed.
“What will he return with?” she asked, maybe a little nervous now.
Stewey could do that to a person when he was on a role.
“Probably a heavy pistol loaded with silver bullets and a shotgun designed to deal with eldritch creatures and conjurations,” Dan said, reaching for the knife he had stowed and holding it out to her. “You a better knife fighter than I am?”
“Keep it,” she said. “It’s bound to you already, so I’d be fighting it as much as anything I tried to stab.”
“Bound to me?” Dan asked.
He watched her hold out a hand and cast a small divination, letting it float towards him like a spider web. Dan saw it land and the knife glowed, about like he expected.
Except that his hand and arm did as well.
All the way up to his shoulder, which was about where he’d gone numb when he stabbed that shadow servant.
“How’d that happen?” he asked blankly.
“Kill anything powerful recently with the blade?” she asked in a scientific tone utterly at odds with a conversation on magic and eldritch creatures.
“Your stepping disk,” Dan said automatically. “And I stabbed that damned creature last night. This morning. Whenever.”
“Well, you stole some of his energy when you did,” she nodded. “And perhaps some of the disk’s, as well.”
“Huh,” Dan grunted. “And you’re walking in there with us?”
“As you said, this might be the only chance to do this before someone else gets in and discovers whatever secrets Faucher left behind.”
“Is this the dumbest idea you’ve ever heard?” Dan had to ask.
“Not even in the top ten, Dan,” she smiled back at him. “There’s probably a guardian of some sort, but there are three of us. My greater fear is that Koschei was already coming here, the same as I was, and is waiting for us when we emerge.”
“Anything we can do to mess with his plans?” Dan turned back and studied the wall.
Up close, the bricks were just exactly like they had been when the building was raised. He could taste the age of the bricks themselves, and they had been reclaimed from an older building, a factory of some sort down closer to Seattle.
Dan placed his free hand on the wall, unwilling to put the knife down, and cast a Knowing into the wall.
Taylor, Washington. He had the coordinates in his head of a town that had been erased, and all the buildings torn down. The bricks of one of the factories there had ended up here somehow. Nothing magical about them except the immense age of good, red brick that would outlast them all.
He turned and glanced at Khulan.
Most of them.
The portal existed as a layer of frosting over the wall, if you could call it that. Again, the Grimsbys would see nothing, even if the wall wasn’t repaired later. You had to have opened yourself to the power to sense it, and it was luck and the combination of a Diviner, an Enchanter, and a Sorcerer to open this up correctly.
Someone, Dan presumed Faucher had marked the wall in the shape of a classical Roman archway, about nine feet tall at the capstone and just over three feet wide. The underlying bricks anchored the magic itself, but Dan closed his eyes and pushed with his mind.
The wall didn’t open, but he could see into the shadows beyond. A corridor, receding out of sight, but he could sense the first twist. It wasn’t a square corner, like the role-playing maps he’d had as a kid, drawn on graph paper. Felt more like a French curve, sliding around an arc and then suddenly doubling back.
Dan blinked and stepped back.
“What is it?” Khulan asked, suddenly right at his elbow so close he had to turn his head without moving so he didn’t run right into one of her breasts.
“Looked inside the portal.” Dan breathed heavily. “Got a taste of the interior, even though I couldn’t see anything.”
“And?” she asked, still way too close to a relative stranger.
“Labyrinth.”
Chapter
Fifteen
Khulan shuddered at the implications of the word. The British had absorbed and transmitted a wide variety of literary histories from their distant past, from the Romans to the ancient Egyptians. Along the way, they had rediscovered the Greeks, who had called themselves Hellenes.
Khulan and her forebears had been forest tribes far to the northeast, thousands and thousands of kilometers away from the fabled lands of Homer, but she had studied enough of the culture, itself transmitted along to the Sarmatians and through them to the Scythians and others.
A beast half-man and half-bull, imprisoned by order of the king of Crete in a maze so complicated that the creature known as the Minotaur could not escape. Young men and women sacrificed to the creature on a regular basis until one of the great heroes of Greek myth, Theseus, was able to destroy it.
She considered the wall the held the portal. Faucher had been a powerful Conjurer, even though she didn’t know if that was his specialization. Certainly, the ability to ground a portal to a demiplane such as this was an expression of might. Especially as it had outlived him.
Had he protected the interior with a maze and a monster as well?
“What do we know?” Stewey’s return interrupted her thoughts.
“Got a maze inside the portal, Stewey,” Dan spoke up as she turned and stepped enough back that Dan wouldn’t brush against her if he turned. “Labyrinth.”
“Good thing I came prepared for minotaurs, then,” he smiled as he approached.
Dan had been correct in his assumptions. Stewey had a large pistol holstered on his right thigh and a pump shotgun in both hands. A backpack presumably held all manner of gear, as Ogden had impressed her as the one who had a kit handy for emergencies at all times.
A bug-out bag, as some people called them.
He placed the shotgun carefully against the wall nearby and shrugged his way out of the pack. Unzipped, he began to rifle around inside until he pulled out a large spool of heavy,black thread, almost a spindle, and a nail, which he drove with a hammer into the remaining part of the wooden wall, next to the exposed brick.
Stewey tied one end of the thread to the nail and handed her the spool.
“Dan will be on point watching,” he explained. “I’ll be ready to shoot anything that moves. You unwind this as we go, taking care not to break it. There’s five hundred yards, and I’ve got two more in case, plus some rope.”
Khulan wasn’t sure she wanted to know why, but supposed that he had a sewing kit in there. Still, it made sense.
Theseus had supposedly been able to find his way back out of the labyrinth because he had a similar device.
