End of the Century (62 page)

The trio waited what seemed an eternity beside the closed door, kneeling down, watchful for any sign of its opening, but were rewarded only with still silence. Then, unexpectedly, they heard muffled footsteps approaching from behind.

They leapt to their feet, and whirled with weapons in hand, to find a figure approaching from around the bend.

Galaad at first took it to be a youth, but as the figure drew nearer, eyes wide with fear, he could see that it was a woman. Or a maid, to be precise, perhaps a few years his junior. Her hair, so dark as to be black, was cut short, and she wore a short coat of black leather over a close-fitting white tunic, with tight blue breeches on her legs and heavy black boots encasing her feet. She was unarmed, and seemed to present little threat to the trio, evidently on the edge of terror, or shock.

She slowed her approach as the trio came into view, and warily addressed them in some strange language, which to Galaad's ears had the same sound as those the Red King had spoken.

“Who are you?” Artor demanded in Britannic. Then, at her evident confusion, he repeated in Latin, “Who are you?”

The maid seemed to understand the Latin a little better, but seemed no less confused for all of that, appearing to struggle to find the words to answer.

Galaad took a step forward, reaching out to the maid. “Do you need help?” he said, gently.

Gentle or no, when the maid saw Galaad's approach, fear flashed in her eyes.

“Enough of this,” Pryder barked, brandishing his skyblade. “I want answers!” He advanced on the maid, angrily.

Seeing Pryder approach, a dark expression on his face, the maid started, shouting out in alarm, and took to her heels, running off in the opposite direction.

“Come on, after her!” Pryder shouted back over his shoulder, sprinting.

Artor and Galaad could only exchange uneasy glances and hurry along after him.

The maid could not have been more than a short distance ahead of them, just beyond the curve of the wall, but no matter how fast they ran, they didn't overtake her, and never again were they to catch sight of the maid of the Unworld.

Alice

“Okay,
that
was seriously weird,” Alice said, breathless.

She'd run away from the three guys with the swords, only to find one of the big doors she'd passed only moments before was now open. She'd ducked inside, and the door shut behind her. Only now, hands on her knees, was she finally able to catch her breath.

What had those guys been, medieval knights? Roman soldiers? And what
language
was that? Part of it almost sounded like Latin, but not like any pronunciation Alice had learned in school.

Now that she'd caught her breath, and the sword-wielding guys hadn't come bursting through the door, Alice had a chance to look around and take in her surroundings.

A narrow passageway led from the door, the walls featureless and bare. Unable to open the door behind her even if she wanted to—which she
didn't
—Alice shrugged and walked up the hallway. A little way in it jogged to the right, then back to the left, then branched into two more hallways.

It was a maze.

Alice knew mazes.

Running her fingertips along the right-hand wall, she followed, seeing where it led.

Galaad

The trio ate a meager meal on the corridor floor, munching disconsolately on the few remaining scraps of dried meat that remained in their packs, rationing their remaining reserves of water. They rested for a time, their legs and backs aching, though whether they slept for hours or merely dozed for moments, it was impossible to say. When they woke, they continued on, now testing each door they passed, spending hours trying to pry the door open, to
wedge their weapons into the near seamless cracks between door and jamb, all without any success.

It seemed an eternity, but at last, they rounded the curve of the inner wall and found one of the doors open and inviting.

Light streamed from within. They entered, weapons in hand.

Alice

Several more times the nausea overtook her, but eventually Alice found herself at the edge of an enormous space, dominated by two giant figures, one red and one white, crouched on either side of a huge chessboard. Between them, the silvery-metal and glass pieces, each of them at least twenty feet tall, moved on their own, back and forth across the board.

At first, Alice thought the giant figures were statues, but then the white one
moved.
A large outcropping on top, that might conceivably have been meant to be a head, turned towards her. It didn't have anything like eyes, but Alice knew that the thing was
looking
at her. She felt her skin crawl.

Then, Alice heard a clattering noise behind her and turned to see a seven-legged metal spider-thing come crab-walking out of the maze, with a red-lensed camera at the end a long craning neck. It was some sort of robot thing and was coming straight for her.

Alice didn't stop to converse but turned and took off running across the chessboard, dodging around the towering pieces of silver and glass.

The spider robot was quicker, though, and before Alice was even a few squares in, it was on her, wrapping one of its long segmented legs around her waist, pinning her arms to her sides.

Alice tried to scream, but no sound came out. Then, mercifully, everything went black.

“The sample wakes.”

The voice buzzed in her brain without passing through her ears.

She was surrounded by whiteness on all sides, and falling.

“The sample's memories have been studied and recorded. The Dialectic has gained knowledge of the sample's language. These words are being implanted directly in the sample's mind.
”

“What…what's this…? Who
are
you?” Alice's voice sounded raspy and hoarse in her own ears.

“The Dialectic is the governance of the Change Engine. A sample is retrieved, examined, and altered experimentally. The results are…inconclusive. A new sample is needed, and the first sample will be kept in suspension, pending further examination.
”

“What? What do you mean, altered?” Alice looked down, and for the first time saw that her leather jacket was now bone white, as were her jeans. She held up her hands, and even her skin seemed bleached white. She reached up and tugged a lock of her hair in front of her eyes, now no longer dyed black, but blindingly white. “What…what did you
do
to me? Who
are
you?!”

“Additional study is needed. The new sample is retrieved.”

Then the voice was gone, and Alice was left alone. Falling through whiteness.

Galaad

The trio found themselves in a labyrinth of narrow, winding passages. At first, Galaad found them a pleasant change from the monotonous engulfing spaces of the corridors beyond, but when they had taken a dozen turns or more, each time finding themselves facing another turn and wall, the novelty quickly wore off.

After stalking through the winding labyrinth for what seemed an eternity, they took a final turn and found themselves at the threshold of a massive chamber. The ceiling was so high as to be invisible from the floor, while the walls receded so far in every direction that they were only just visible. Galaad,
who'd long since ceased trying to work out how so much space could be contained within the confining walls of the tower of glass, reeled at the sight of it.

But the space was not empty. The floor of the enormous chamber was dominated by what appeared to be some sort of gwyddbwyll board, the floor demarked in an immense checkered grid, on which stood pieces of silver or glass, each as tall as a house. The pieces, to Galaad's astonishment, seemed to move of their own accord, sliding back and forth across the floor.

So stunned was Galaad by the gwyddbwyll set that he momentarily failed to notice the two gargantuan figures hulked on either side. They were of such a scale, of such monstrous proportions, that it seemed as if they would not at first fit inside his mind, dominating so much of the view on either side of the board that they essentially disappeared from view. But in short order he came to realize that it wasn't that one side of the room had a red hue and the other side white, but that there crouched on either side of the massive board two monstrously large figures, one red and one white.

They were dragons. Or not dragons, precisely, but that was the only word in Galaad's vocabulary that came close to encompassing them. They were enormous, immense, unimaginably large. Somewhere high above on either side was something suggesting a head, or even a face, regarding the movement on the board between them, while the movements of Artor, Pryder, and Galaad were completely beneath their notice.

Pryder was for attacking the dragons, but Artor was quick to stay his hand. It would do no good, the High King insisted, having no more effect than a gnat attacking a mountain. Whatever these immense dragons were, it was beyond their ken, and on a scope far in excess of anything that mere men could affect. Better to continue on, and seek the Red King or the White Lady elsewhere.

It took them some considerable time to skirt around the immense beings, but finally they came to another archway opposite that through which they'd exited the labyrinth, which led into still more twisting corridors. At Artor's insistence they quitted the giant chamber, leaving the dragons to contemplate their game, and their search continued.