LABYRINTH

The Knight woke startled and alert, lifting off the ground as if jerked erect by invisible wires. He had been dreaming, and while the dream itself was already forgotten, the impression it had made on him lingered. His breathing was quick and his heartbeat rapid, and it seemed as if he had run a long way in his sleep. He felt a damp heat on his body beneath his clothing and along his hairline. He felt poised on the edge of something about to happen.

His eyes shifted anxiously through the gloom. He was in a forest of huge, dark trees that rose like columns to hold up the sky. Except there was no sky to be seen, only the mist that roiled overhead, blotting out everything, even the highest branches. The darkness of the forest was a twilight that was as much a part of day as night, as much of morning as evening. It was not real, and yet the Knight recognized instinctively that it was the only reality of this place in which he found himself.

Where was he?

He did not know. He could not remember.

There were others. Where were they?

He came to his feet swiftly, aware of the weight of the broadsword slung across his back, of the knife at his waist, of the chain mail that warded his chest and back. He was dressed all in black, his clothing loose-fitting and leather-bound, with boots, belt, and gloves. His armor was somewhere close, though he couldn’t see it. It was close, he knew, because he could sense its presence, and his armor always came to him when he needed it.

Although he didn’t know why.

A medallion hung against his chest beneath his tunic. He lifted it free and stared at it. It was an image of himself riding out of a castle at sunrise. It was familiar to him, and yet it was as if he were seeing it for the first time. What did it mean?

He brushed his confusion aside, and cast about in the gloom. Something stirred at the clearing’s far edge, and he moved toward it swiftly. A figure who lay curled upon the ground straightened as he neared and pushed itself up with both arms extended. Long black hair with a single streak of white through its center hung down across face and shoulders, and robes trailed on the earth like liquid shadows.

It was the Lady. She was still with him. She had not run away while he slept (for she would run if the chance presented itself, he knew). Her head lifted at his approach, and one slim hand brushed back the raven hair. Her pale, beautiful features tightened as she saw him, and she hissed at him in anger and dismay.

“You,” was all she said, that single word conveying the depth of her dislike for him and for what he had done to her.

He did not try to go closer. The Knight knew how she felt about him, knew that she blamed him for what had been done to her. It could not be helped. He turned away and scanned the rest of the clearing in which they had slept. It was small and close, and there was nothing about it to suggest why they were there. They had come to this place earlier, he knew. They had come here in flight, pursued by … something. He had brought the Lady with him—and one other—fleeing the beast that would devour them all.

He shook his head, an ache developing behind his eyes as he tried to see into the past. It was as misty and gloom-filled as his present, as this forest in which he found himself.

“Take me home!” the Lady whispered suddenly. “You have no right!”

He turned to find her standing with her hands clenched into fists at her sides. Her strange red eyes burned with rage, and her lips were skinned back from her teeth like an animal’s. It was said that she could do magic, that she possessed incredible power. You did not want to make an enemy of her, it was said. But the Knight had done so. He was not sure how it had happened, but there was no getting away from it now. He had taken the Lady from her home, from the haven of her life, carrying her off to this forest. He was the King’s Champion, and he existed only to do the King’s bidding. The King must have sent him to bring the Lady, although he could not remember that either.

“Knight of black thoughts and deeds!” she scorned. “Coward behind your armor and your weapons! Take me home!”

She might have been threatening him now, preparing to use her magic against him. But he did not think so. What magic she possessed seemed lost to her. He had come this far, and she had not attacked him with it. If she had been able to do so, she would have tried long ago. Not that it would have mattered. He was a weapon built of iron. He was less man than machine. Magic had no more effect on him than dust thrown in his eyes; it had no place in his life. His was a world of simple rules and tight boundaries. He was not frightened of anything. A Knight could not allow fear. His was an occupation where death was always as close as life. Fighting was all he knew, and the battles he fought could end in only two ways—either he would kill his enemy or his enemy would kill him. A thousand battles later, he was still alive. He did not believe he would ever be killed. He believed he would live forever.

He brushed the musing aside, the thoughts that came unbidden and were unwelcome. “You are traveling to a new home,” he told her, letting her anger fall away from him like leaves thrown against stone.

She shook with her rage, balled fists lifting before her breast, the tendons of her neck as tight as cords. “I will not go with you farther,” she whispered, and shook her head back and forth. “Not one step!”

He nodded noncommittally, not wishing to spar with her verbally, feeling inadequate to the task. He turned away again, walked to the far side of the clearing, and peered out into the gloom beyond. The trees were packed together like bundles of giant sticks, shutting out the light and the view, closing everything off. Which way to go? Which way had he been headed? The King would be waiting for him, he knew. It was always thus. But which way led home again?

He turned as the Lady came at him with the knife she had somehow kept hidden, the blade black and slick with poison. She shrieked as he seized her wrist and forced the knife away, then twisted it from her grasp. She beat at him and kicked wildly, trying to break free, but he was far stronger and immune to her fury, and he subdued her easily. She collapsed to the ground, breathing hard, on the verge of tears perhaps but refusing to cry. He picked up the blade and cast it far out into the gloom.

“Be careful what you throw about, Knight,” a new voice warned, deep and guttural.

He saw the Gargoyle then, resting on its haunches close by, come from the woods as silent as a shadow at midnight. The creature’s eyes were yellow and hooded as they studied him, and there was nothing in their reptilian depths to offer even the slightest hint of what the mind behind them might be thinking.

“You’ve chosen to stay,” the Knight said quietly.

The Gargoyle laughed. “Chosen? A strange word in these circumstances, don’t you think? I am here because there is nowhere else to go.”

The Gargoyle was loathsome to look upon. Its body was gnarled and misshapen, with its arms and legs bandy and crooked, its body all sinew and corded muscle, and its head sunk down between its powerful shoulders. Its hands and feet were webbed and clawed, and the whole of it was covered in bristly dark hair. Its face was wrinkled like a piece of dried fruit, and its features were jammed together like a child’s clay model of something only vaguely human. Fangs peeked out from beneath its thick lips, and its nose was wet and dirty.

From atop its hunched shoulders, wings fluttered weakly, leathery flaps too tiny to be of any use, appendages that seemed strangely out of place. It was as if its forebearers might have flown once but had long ago forgotten how.

The Knight was repulsed, but he did not look away. Ugliness was a part of his life as well. “Where are we?” he asked the Gargoyle. “Have you looked about?”

“We are in the Labyrinth,” it replied, as if that answered everything.

The Gargoyle glanced at the Lady, who had looked up again on hearing him speak. “Don’t look at me!” she hissed at once, and turned away.

“In what part of our country is the Labyrinth?” the Knight persisted, confused.

The Gargoyle laughed anew. “In every part.” He showed his yellowed teeth and black tongue. “In all parts of every part of everything. It lies north and south and east and west and even in the center. It is where we are and where we would go and where we will always be.”

“He is mad,” the Lady whispered quickly. “Make him keep still.”

The Knight shifted the heavy broadsword on his back and glanced around. “There is a way out of every maze,” he declared. “We will find the way out of this one.”

The Gargoyle rubbed his hands as if seeking warmth. “How will you do that, Sir Knight?” His voice was disdainful.

“Not by staying here,” the Knight said. “Do you come with us or not?”

“Leave him!” the Lady hissed, rising suddenly to her feet and drawing her dark robes close. “He does not belong with us! He was never meant to be with us!”

“Us?” the Gargoyle repeated slyly. “Are you bound together now, Lady? Are you joined to this Knight as mate and companion? How unexpected.”

The Lady curled her lip at the creature and turned away. “I am joined to neither of you. I would rather be killed now and have it done.”

“I would rather you were killed as well,” the Gargoyle agreed.

The Lady whirled back upon him once again. “You are an ugly beast, Gargoyle. If I had a mirror, I would hold it up to your face so that you could see how ugly!”

The Gargoyle flinched at the words, and then hissed back at her, “And you would need a mirror inside yourself to see the ugliness that possesses you!”

“Do not fight!” the Knight thundered, and stepped between them. He looked changed suddenly, the man in dark clothing and chain mail suddenly gone even darker. It was as if the light about him had been sucked away. It was as if he had been plated in shadows.

“Do not,” he repeated, more softly now, and then the dark cast that had enveloped him disappeared, and he was himself again.

There was a long moment of silence as the three faced one another. Then the Lady said to the Knight, “I am not afraid of you.”

The Knight looked off into the gloom as if he had not heard, and in his eyes there was a lost, faraway look that reflected memories of missed chances and lost possibilities.

“We will walk this way,” the Knight said, and started out.

They traveled through the remainder of the day, and the forest that was the Labyrinth did not change. The gloom persisted, the mist clung tenaciously, the trees did not thin save at scattered clearings, and the cast and shape of the world did not alter. The Knight led them afoot (where was his mount?), trying to travel in a straight line, hoping that at some point the forest would end and the grasslands or hill country that surely lay beyond would appear and suggest to him where they must go next. He pondered with every step the inconsistencies of his memory. He tried to reason out what he was doing there, what had brought him to this abysmal place. He tried to remember how the Lady and the Gargoyle had come to be with him. He tried to think through the fog that enveloped almost the whole of his past. He was a Knight in service to the King, a champion of countless battles, and that was virtually all he knew.

He clung to that, and it kept him just ahead of the madness that too much thinking would bring.

They found streams from which to drink and did so, but they found nothing to eat. Yet they experienced no hunger. It was not as if they were full, but as if hunger’s presence had left them entirely. The Knight was puzzled by this, but did not speak of it. They walked through the day, through the twilight that changed only marginally, and when darkness finally came, they stopped again.

They were in another clearing, a clearing that looked much like the first. The forest about them had not changed. They sat down together in the deepening gloom and stared out at the darkness. The Knight did not think to build a fire. They were not cold, or hungry, or in need of light. They could see quite well in the darkness; they could hear sounds they should not have been able to. The Gargoyle sat a little way off from the other two, not wishing to endure the scorn of the Lady again so soon, not feeling a part of them in any case. The Knight could sense the other’s distancing, even when traveling together, as if the Gargoyle understood that there would always be a wall between them. The creature hunkered down in the shadows, then stretched his misshapen body and seemed to melt into the ground.

The Lady sat facing the Knight. “I do not like you,” she told him. “I wish to see you dead.”

He nodded impassively. “I know.”

She had been silent and introspective all day, journeying obediently but without interest. He had glanced at her now and again, and sometimes found her openly hostile and sometimes as lost and searching as himself. She held herself as if armored, tall and straight and unafraid, but there was a vulnerability to her that she could not disguise and did not quite seem to understand, as if it was newly come to her and unexpected.

“Why don’t you just take me back?” she pressed, a sudden urgency in her voice. “What difference can any of this make to you? There is no enemy for you to fight. There is no battle to be won. Why are you doing this? Am I your enemy?”

“You have said so.”

“Only because you steal me from my home!” she exclaimed desperately. “Only because of that!” She inched forward across the grassy earth until she was quite close. “Why have you taken me?”

He could not answer. He did not know why.

“Your King has ordered you to do so? Why?”

He could not remember.

“What does he want with me? I will never be any good for him, no matter what he thinks! I will be neither wife nor consort! I will be his worst enemy until I am dead!”

The Knight inhaled the forest air, smelling the green freshness of the leaves and grass, the musky damp of the soil, and the pungent dryness of bark and old wood. What were the answers to her questions? Why could he not remember them? He withdrew into himself, thinking to find peace. He took comfort in knowing who he was and what he did. He found reassurance in his strength and skill, in the press of his weapons against his body, in the smooth fit of his battle dress.

Yet his armor was still missing. He had felt its presence when he had been forced to step between the Lady and the Gargoyle, but it had not shown itself. Why was that? It reached out to him, yet stayed hidden, as if playing cat and mouse. His armor—it was lifeless and yet seemingly possessed of life, a paradox. Like the medallion he wore about his neck, it was a part of who and what he was. Why then could he not remember its source?

The Lady was a silent ivory carving before him, watching intently, wanting to come forth from within herself he sensed, but unable to do so. What was she hiding from him? Something frightening. Some deep, secretive admission.

She folded her slim hands within her lap, and the disdainful look crept back upon her face. “You are powerless,” she declared bitterly. “You have no self-will, no independent spirit with which to act. You are a tool to be wielded by whoever wears the crown. How sad.”

“I am a servant of that crown.”

“You are a slave to it.” She cocked her head slightly, the raven hair shifting in a glimmer of black light. Her eyes fixed him. “You can make no decision that conflicts with your master’s orders. You can make no judgment on your own. You took me without asking why. You keep me without wondering why. You do what you are bidden, and you are careless of the reasons for your actions.”

He did not like to argue with her. It gained nothing for either of them. He was not good with words; she was not possessed of his sense of honor and obedience. They came from different lives.

“Who is this King who would have me for his own?” she asked pointedly. “Speak his name.”

Again, he could not. He stared at her, trapped.

“Are you so ignorant as to not know it?” she pressed, irony sharpening the edges of her anger. “Or are you afraid to give it to me? Which is it?”

He kept silent. But he could not look away.

She shook her head slowly. She was hard-faced and cold-looking with her dark hair and white skin, with the set of her jaw and the glint in her eyes. But she was beautiful, too. She was as perfect as a fond memory lovingly worked over the passing of time, all the roughness rubbed away, all the flaws removed. She enchanted him without trying, without meaning to do so, drawing him past her anger and despair, carrying him out of what was into what should never be.

“Whatever I would tell you,” he forced himself to say, “would mean nothing.”

“Try, at least!” she whispered at him, and there was a sudden softness in her voice. “Give me something!”

But he could not. He had nothing to give. He had only himself, and she wanted no part of that. She wanted reasons and understanding, and he had neither. He was as adrift as she was, thrown into a place he did not know, into circumstances he did not understand. The Labyrinth was a mystery he could not fathom. To do so, he must first escape it. That, he understood intuitively, would not be easy.

“Have you no feelings at all for me?” she asked plaintively, but this time the falseness in her voice betrayed her immediately.

“My feelings have no place in what I am about. I do what is required of me.”

“What is required of you!” she shrieked, angry and bitter all over again, casting off any pretension of weakness. “You do what you are sent to do, you pathetic creature! You bend and scrape because it is what you know! What is required of you? I would rather be cast into the darkest pit in all the land than spend one moment of my life giving heed to what another would demand of me!”

He smiled in spite of himself. “And so you have been,” he told her. “For where else are we if not there?”

She shrank back from him, downcast, in silence. They sat like that for a long time. The Gargoyle was sleeping, his breathing nasal and rough, his crooked limbs twitching as if his palms and soles were prodded by hot iron. The Lady glanced at him once and then glanced away. She did not look back. She did not look at the Knight. She stared at a space upon the earth some six feet to her right where the grass had withered away in shadow and the soil had cracked and turned to dust. She sat that way a long time. The Knight watched her without seeming to, without really wanting to, unable to help himself. She was in genuine misery, but the source of her anguish went beyond what she had told him. It was huge and carefully warded, and it transcended his meager understanding of its source.

He felt a strange stirring inside. He should say something to ease her pain. He should do something to lift her burden. But he did not know what. He wondered then at the words she had spoken to him, at the accusations she had cast. There was truth in them. He was given over to another’s service, charged with another’s wishes, bound to another’s cause. It was the essence of his life as King’s Champion. A Knight in armor whose weapons and strength settled all causes—that was his identity. On reflection, it seemed too small a possession. He was defined by it, yet it was given out in a single phrase. Was that the sum of his parts? Was there nothing more to him?

Who was he?

“Do you know what you have done to me?” he heard the Lady ask suddenly. He looked over at once. She was not looking back. She was still staring at that same patch of earth. Lines of wetness streaked her cheeks, trailing from her cold, empty eyes.

“Do you know?” she whispered in despair.

Night’s shadows cloaked Landover as well. All eight moons were down, and clouds layered the sky and masked away the stars. The blackness was intense. The day’s heat had left the air windless and damp, and the whole of the land lay hushed and sweltering.

The Gorse felt no discomfort as it moved out of the concealment of its cavern lair and into the forest beyond. It was a fairy creature and at one with nature whatever her disposition. It came forth as a cloud of dark mist, the state to which its long captivity in the Tangle Box had reduced it. But already that substanceless form was beginning to coalesce and take shape anew, freedom returning to it the face and body it had once owned. Quite soon now both would be restored. It would be ready then to exact from those who had wronged it the revenge it so desperately craved.

It had thought about nothing else for centuries. Once it had been a fairy creature of great power, a being whose magic was formidable and feared. It had used that magic in ways that so enraged and disgusted its kin within the fairy mists, the world to which all fairy creatures belonged, that they banded together, seized it when it thought itself invulnerable, and imprisoned it. They cast it down into the mists of the Tangle Box, a device they had constructed from their own magic and from which nothing could escape. Locks were placed upon the box from without where the Gorse could not reach them.

Entombing it thus was meant to wear it down, to destroy its will, to make it forget everything it had known before its confinement and in the end to reduce it to dust. The effort had failed. It had remained trapped a very long time but it had not forgotten and its hatred of those responsible had grown.

It had grown very large indeed.

The Gorse moved easily through the night. It required little time to reach its destination and was in no hurry. It had waited until Horris Kew and the bird were sleeping, not wanting them to discover what it was about, needing them to continue to believe it was their friend. It was not, of course. The man and the bird were pawns, and the Gorse was using them accordingly. If they wanted to believe otherwise, if they chose to do so because they were greedy and foolish, that was as it should be. It was the natural order of things. They were mortal creatures and, so, much less than the Gorse. They were expendable.

It crested a rise and found itself at the edge of the Heart. It paused to send out feelers of sight and sound, taste and smell, and discovered nothing amiss, nothing threatening. It looked out across the rows of white velvet seats and rests, past the burnished dais and its standards, past the encirclement of Bonnie Blues. It savored the presence of the magic that rose out of the earth, here at the wellspring of all the land’s life. The power of that magic was enormous, but the Gorse was not yet ready to tamper with it. It would serve a different purpose this night. A greater magic could be used to mask the conjuring of a lesser. It would do so now.

The Gorse gathered itself and sent forth the summons it had prepared. Lines of fire that neither burned nor smoked lanced down into the earth and disappeared. The response was immediate, a harsh, grating rumble, the groan of a great stone wall giving way. After a moment, the rumble faded, and the silence returned.

The Gorse waited.

Then the air before it ripped apart as if formed of fabric, first tearing and then splitting wide. Thunder boomed from within the rent, deep and ominous. A hole opened in the night, and out of that hole rose the clang and scrape of armored riders and the hiss and shriek of their mounts. The sounds heightened to a frightening pitch as the riders gathered speed. A fierce wind whipped across the Heart, tearing at the flags atop their standards and screaming into the trees beyond.

The Gorse held its ground.

With a rush of wind and sound, those it had summoned materialized from out of the warp in time and space. They were formed of armored plates and spikes, bristling with weapons, riding on nightmare creatures that had no recognizable name. There were five of them, massive dark creatures that steamed despite the humid night air and whose breath hissed and rasped through the visors of their helmets. They were lean and shadowy, like dark hued ghosts, and the reek of their bodies was terrible.

The demons of Abaddon had arrived.

Foremost was the one who was designated as the Mark, their chosen leader, a huge, angular monster with serpents carved into its armor and the severed heads of its enemies hung about its neck. It beckoned to the others, and they fanned out to either side, weapons held ready. As one, they advanced on the Gorse.

The Gorse let them come. When they were close enough to spit on, it disappeared before their eyes in a flash of green light, reappeared as one of them, disappeared a second time, and reappeared finally as a pair of snake’s eyes. It stole into their armor and licked at them lovingly, showing them they were kindred spirits. It conjured images of the horrors it had once performed on its own people and let the demons savor its evil.

When they were satisfied that it was one of them, that it was as powerful as they, and that it had summoned them for a reason, the Gorse hissed softly to prick their ears for his words and said, “What if I were to prepare a way for you to come into Landover safely?”

He paused, hearing them growl expectantly. This was too easy. “What if Landover and her people were to be given over to you for good?”

Too easy indeed.