Druids Sword (33 page)

A
riadne realised she had made two gigantic errors of judgement the instant the front door closed behind them.

The first error of judgement was her assumption that, even though Stella may not have been the most powerful person to teach Grace the intricacies of the labyrinth, she had at least done a competent job.

The second error was her assumption that the very worst mistake she’d ever made was when she’d pledged Asterion her soul, and that of her daughter-heirs, if ever she tried to restart the Game.

In fact, Ariadne realised very suddenly, and horrifically, by far the worst mistake of her life was propelling Grace directly into the Great Founding Labyrinth when, in fact, she wasn’t able to cope with it.

Damn Stella to all hells for not training the girl properly!

As the door closed behind them, Grace crumpled over, dropping her suitcase, a low moan of agony escaping her mouth.

For one sickening, heart-stopping moment, Ariadne thought the Great Founding Labyrinth was going to kill Grace.

But Grace should have endured this when she went through her Great Ordeal! She should be able to cope.

Ariadne cried out, one hand reaching for Grace, the other fumbling for the door as if she thought she could drag Grace out into the hallway.

But the Great Founding Labyrinth would not allow Grace to leave now, not when it had her in its maw.

Oh why, why hadn’t she thought it possible that Grace might not be able to cope?

Because she’d assumed—big, big mistake, the worst of her life—that Stella had trained Grace
well,
if not brilliantly.

But then Grace twisted about, and Ariadne saw that her wrists were crossed before her, and that wires of glowing red encircled them.

Catling had attacked the instant she felt Grace walk into the Great Founding Labyrinth.

Ariadne abandoned her attempt to open the door, and instead grabbed at Grace’s shoulder. “Use the pain, Grace.
Use
it to concentrate your mind and power!”

It was a struggle, but Ariadne felt both intense relief and admiration for Grace sweep over her as the girl’s eyes hardened with determination and power.

“The pain is a harmony as any other,” said Ariadne. “
Dominate
it, don’t allow it to dominate you, and then use it.”

Grace drew in a deep breath, straightening her body, her eyes locked into those of Ariadne, drawing strength from her foremother.

“
Use
the pain,” Ariadne said one more time.

Another deep breath, then Grace’s body relaxed a little, and she gave a single nod. The red lines still glowed about her wrists, and Ariadne understood that they still caused Grace agony, but now the girl
was using the agony—using the harmonies spun out by the agony—as an accelerant to her own power.

Ariadne took a deep breath of her own.
Dear gods, what a fright!
“You have control now?” she said.

Grace nodded, although Ariadne could see that such control was taking considerable effort.

“Did Catling never attack you when Stella trained you? When Stella took you into the Great Founding Labyrinth? When you underwent your Great Ordeal?”

“No.” Grace’s voice was quiet, but it was underpinned with strength, and Ariadne decided she could let go the remnants of her anxiety.

“Interesting,” said Ariadne. “She wasn’t concerned when you underwent your initial training, but now she thinks to attack you.”

“I don’t think Catling likes you very much, Ariadne.”

Ariadne laughed. “Then I’ll take it as a compliment that she’s upset now. But enough of Catling. You can cope with the pain? Good. Now, young lady, let me see what you’re capable of.”

They spent the entire afternoon and evening deep within the Great Founding Labyrinth which Ariadne had raised in her drawing room. Ariadne, having recovered from her initial fright, took things more slowly than she’d originally intended.

No need to tempt the fates any more than she already had.

As suspected, Stella had done a competent job of teaching Grace, but she hadn’t even begun to plumb the depths of Grace’s abilities. Ariadne remembered when she’d trained Noah. Noah had been so extraordinary, so capable, so instinctive, that Ariadne had radically revised her original training
schedule. Noah had not needed training so much as a gentle prompting now and again in the right direction.

Grace, as Ariadne quickly discovered, was similar. Her power was also instinctive, and she should have also been trained with gentle prompts. But Stella obviously had not recognised this, and had instead adhered to a more traditional programme of training—a far more restrictive programme—that simply had not allowed Grace to open herself up to her true abilities.

Stella may also simply have not cared very much, Ariadne thought. As the Caroller, her mind was on far different things, a far different world, and Ariadne doubted that Stella had used her abilities as Mistress of the Labyrinth very much at all in the past few hundred years.

“Tsk, tsk,” Ariadne found herself muttering over and over as she discovered yet another door that had been slammed in Grace’s face. “I should have taken you in hand many years ago.”

For this initial session, Ariadne contented herself with exploring Grace’s powers and working out just what was needed to open Grace up to her own potential. At midnight, when she sensed that both of them were close to exhaustion, she put her hand on Grace’s arm, and muttered, “Enough!”

Instantly the Great Founding Labyrinth vanished, to be replaced by Ariadne’s drawing room.

And the moment that the Great Founding Labyrinth vanished, so also did the fiery lines about Grace’s wrists.

Grace almost collapsed, surprised by the sudden cessation of pain (which she had been using, almost as a prop, during the past few hours), and overwhelmed by exhaustion.

“Let’s get you to bed,” said Ariadne.

For the next two days Ariadne took Grace into the Great Founding Labyrinth every morning. There they spent several hours, Ariadne doing what she had done with Noah, prompting Grace, nudging her (sometimes literally, with an elbow in Grace’s ribs) in the right direction, praising her when she made a huge leap forward.

These leaps became more and more frequent—by mid-Sunday morning all Ariadne had to do was to stand back and watch.

Dear gods, how had Stella missed this?

Grace was powerful. As powerful as Noah, although in a different way. She had a darker and even more instinctive grasp of the power of the labyrinth. She didn’t bring at her back the powers of Eaving as Noah did, but she more than made up for that with her command of the Darkcraft.

The Darkcraft, twice-bred in Grace as Weyland was both her forefather and her father.

But it was more than that, Ariadne finally, stunningly realised. It wasn’t that Grace commanded the Darkcraft in twice the measure that someone like Noah did; she commanded it an infinity of times more. It was as if Grace could somehow touch all the wielders of Darkcraft in her heritage (Noah, Weyland, Ariadne, and all the daughter-heirs of Ariadne’s up to and including Genvissa-Stella), and draw on
all
their power. Grace didn’t actually realise she was doing this—frankly, Ariadne believed that Grace had no idea at all of her potential or her power—but do it she could.

And all of this tied to Catling by that cursed hex.

Catling had not struck again after Friday afternoon, but Grace told Ariadne she could feel her watching, which made Ariadne worry.

If they spent the mornings inside the Great Founding Labyrinth, then they spent the afternoons talking.

Neither Noah nor Stella had told Grace anything of the heritage of the Mistresses of the Labyrinth (and Ariadne was not going to berate them for it, for she, too, should have attended to this), and so Ariadne took Grace for a long meander through history during these long afternoons.

She did this not so much as part of Grace’s training (which, indeed, it was), but because Jack had asked Ariadne to prepare Grace for that moment when he would ask her for the kingship bands.

Ariadne was not the only one who taught Grace her history. Silvius attended to this as well.

Silvius and Ariadne had enjoyed (although that was, perhaps, too strongly emotive an expression for it) a sexual relationship, off and on, for some years. They’d gradually drifted together, drawn not merely by a strong sexual attraction, but by the fact that, as a Mistress of the Labyrinth and as a Kingman (if minus the kingship bands), Ariadne and Silvius were naturally drawn together.

Besides, they had lived at roughly contemporary times in the Aegean world, and had shared memories and friends.

Ariadne had not asked Silvius to attend simply because they could get chummy over old times. She asked him, in part, because he could help as much as she in teaching Grace the history and antiquities of the labyrinth, but mostly because he was a Kingman, and Grace needed contact and interaction with a Kingman. She’d had interaction with Kingmen before, of course. She’d known Silvius all her life, and Weyland was close enough to being a Kingman also, and she’d had, over the past year, contact with Jack.

But, apart from those few minutes with Jack atop Ambersbury Banks, she’d never interacted with a Kingman as a Mistress of the Labyrinth, and she needed that experience.

Admittedly, Ariadne thought that Jack would be giving Grace a reasonable amount of “experience” in that matter in the not-too-distant future, but Ariadne could also see that many other emotions would be caught up in that experience, and she thought it would benefit Grace to have contact with a Kingman with whom she wasn’t increasingly emotionally bound.

What Jack had told Ariadne about his encounter with Grace atop Ambersbury Banks convinced Ariadne that Grace needed some fairly intense tuition in the art and craft of Kingmen. Jack had realised immediately that Grace’s power and her abilities were a flawless match to his own, but Grace had not realised it.

She’d probably not even realised Jack’s arousal,
Ariadne thought in some disbelief. Merciful heavens, what had she been missing all these years?

So Silvius played a dual role in these afternoon sessions. He could give a first-hand account of the history of the labyrinth, the rise to power of the Mistresses of the Labyrinth and the Kingmen within the ancient Aegean world, and the uses to which the labyrinth had been put—forming protective wards, or Games, about cities and city-states.

Silvius could also gently touch Grace with his own power during these talks, slowly acclimatising her (almost without her consciously realising it) to the touch of a Kingman.

Grace certainly benefited from this, but in the end it was Ariadne who ended up being astounded by Silvius’ power. She and Silvius may have been lovers, but even their sexual encounters hadn’t opened
Ariadne’s eyes to just how good Silvius was, and she was aghast at how magical he must have been when he also wielded the power of the golden bands of Troy.
Damn it!
Why had she been so blinded by Theseus?

On Monday afternoon, after another session in the Great Founding Labyrinth in the morning (during which Ariadne had stood back and watched with admiration as Grace expertly manipulated the harmonies of the labyrinth), Ariadne and Silvius took Grace back in time. They did this using their own power, but also significantly boosted by what Grace was able to lend them.

Without her, they could not have managed it.

Silvius led the way, directing their consciousnesses back through space and the centuries to a small Aegean city that sat atop a hill whose lower slopes were swathed in the grey-green of olive trees.

Where it is does not matter,
Silvius said into Ariadne’s and Grace’s minds.
Its name is neither here nor there. Who and what it is does not affect us. What does matter is what happens within the temple attached to the palace. See.

They were still seated in the chairs in Ariadne’s drawing room, but none of them saw the luxurious appointments with which Ariadne had surrounded herself. Instead, as Silvius extended his hand, they saw the interior of a columned temple, painted in rich hues of blue and green and red and gilded with gold. Before the altar, on which stood a gruesome statue of a horned beast, stood a young man dressed only in a white hipwrap. Before him stood a woman who all three watchers instantly identified as a Mistress of the Labyrinth, both by the power which exuded from her and by the manner of her dress, a long white linen skirt draped from her hips, and her proudly bare breasts.

Not one of my relatives,
Ariadne said with a dismissive air,
but competent enough.

Note the young man,
said Silvius, ignoring Ariadne.
He is a Kingman, but his father died before he could hand over his kingship bands.

Ariadne and Silvius paused, sensing what Grace was understanding.

A father usually hands on kingship bands?
said Grace.

Yes,
said Silvius,
although in my case Brutus simply snatched them from my dying limbs.
He chuckled.
No wonder he was to lose them so easily.

Who, other than a father, can hand over the bands?
said Grace.

It can be done by anyone who wields the power of the labyrinth,
said Silvius.
Look here, and see.

The Mistress of the Labyrinth, a woman of some thirty or thirty-five years of age with a face made striking because of her power and experience rather than through physical beauty, moved forward to lay a hand on the young man’s naked chest.

He trembled, and for an instant looked as if he might move away.

The Mistress’ mouth curled, and her eyes narrowed as she waited.

The man relaxed, and as he did so her hand caressed his skin.

“You are very beautiful,” she said, and he smiled.