Labyrinth Gate (33 page)

It was quite the strangest thing that had ever happened to Maretha. As she touched the cup she felt, not metal, but a hand clasping hers: a soft, feminine hand, warm and reassuring. Her surroundings were dim and hazy and seemed unimportant.

A woman stood before her. She was young, no older than Maretha, with hair so black that it seemed painted. Her face had a slightly alien cast, high-cheeked, deep eyes rimmed by black coloring, a striking cosmetic touch. Her lips, by contrast, were so pale as to be almost bloodless, insubstantial. Jewels studded the lobes of her ears like a dual sickle of stars. Huge skirts of yellow-and-green-striped, stiff cloth belled out from her slender waist; her yellow jacket was tight and close-fitting and exposed her beasts. Each nipple was startlingly red—daubed with some deep textured color. At her throat hung a pendant. Maretha could not quite make it out.

“Set the cup back on its pedestal,” said the priestess in a low voice full of music.

“Will it be safe?”

The priestess smiled. “Only a virgin’s touch opens this door.” She turned her head and chimes tinkled in her hair as she moved. “Come with me.”

Maretha followed as if in a glamour, but the priestess’s hand was firm. Lord Death fell away before them to reveal a staircase curving down into darkness. They descended step by step, feet a light scuff on the stone: The curve of the stairwell was tight at first, on her left, but expanded gradually as if they walked down on an opening spiral. On her right lay only air, so profoundly still that the gulf beyond might have been bottomless. All was black.

Eventually they passed through an arch and the curve of the stair began to compress again, the wall on her right now, the air on her left close and confined, until at last they came to a deep end, a tiny, circular chamber with a single door. Maretha lifted her lantern and saw on that door a picture. A young woman dressed much as the priestess sat before a mirror, pots of rouge and black kohl and fine bits of jewelry on a table beside her; roses were woven through her dress. In the mirror was reflected a passageway, bright with frescos, that led into some torchlit mystery.

—Except that it was not reflected in the mirror, it was beyond the painting itself, and the priestess drew Maretha forward and they passed through the place the painting had been and walked down the passageway itself. Smaller, darker ways branched off at intervals that seemed to have some pattern.

“That was The Heiress,” said Maretha. “It is one of the Gates, the—” She faltered. The priestess turned to look at her with a high echo of chimes.

“She is the Chosen One,” said the priestess. “Have you not guessed?”

Maretha shook her head.

“You are she.”

At that moment they came out into a large circular chamber. The light of the lantern was too dim for Maretha to see more than the vague tracery of wall paintings around her and a low slab of stone in the very center of the room.

“What is this place?” she asked. She passed a hand along one side of her neck; it was hot down here. The slight stirring of air did not cool her.

The priestess disengaged her hand from Maretha’s. “Here is the very center.” She took one smooth step back. “Here you will receive the treasure of the labyrinth.”

And she was gone, vanished, as if she had never been.

Maretha lifted her lantern higher—at first to look for the priestess, but then to study more closely the frescos that decorated the walls.

A young woman dressed in an elaborate version of the priestess’s garb, head crowned by a wreath of blazing white roses, crowned in her turn a young man with a circlet of lit candles. Contiguous with it ran a line of glyphs. As Maretha stared, moving slowly along as the fresco unfolded in a long sequence, she began to see a pattern emerge in the writing.

“Lady,” she breathed, feeling understanding rise until it was about to break to the surface, “how great a treasure, indeed.”

She had to pause, it was so hot, to remove her jacket and, a little later, her kid boots, and on to an extended tableau of a great fair of artists and craftsmen rendered in loving detail, where she felt impelled to unbutton the neck of her dress; removed her stockings as she studied the rite of spring sowing. It grew ever more stifling as she reached the feast of the goddess of the flowering, bride and groom resplendent at high table, surrounded by celebrants. As she at last slipped out of her gown to stand clad only in her shift, she found herself looking at the bedding ceremony of the newlywed couple.

A sound behind her, something dropped. She turned, lantern held out in front of herself, so that it illuminated her more than the person beyond. But she knew who it would be. It seemed inevitable.

She walked across the chamber. Her hair came unbound, falling loose down around her shoulders. They met at the low slab of stone, she and her husband. She did not know how he had found her. He, too, had lost his jacket, his waistcoat, his boots, his gloves. His white shirt was unbuttoned halfway down, and she could see the fine down of light hair across his chest.

His was a beauty made finer by the dimness; the shadows lent tiny imperfections to a face otherwise too cold and pure of feature. His expression was not cold now; neither was it warm—it was anticipatory.

She stretched out a hand to touch his lips, to be sure that he was real and not a vision. There was a kind of desire in him that woke the desire in her she had tried to suppress. He was the treasure she longed for—golden and dangerous. The very stone beneath her seemed to throb with it, as if it was at one with her, this room, this labyrinth, this entire city.

His lips parted under her fingers, and she felt their moistness. She took, he took, a step forward; the lantern set down; a shifting; a sinking; and they lay together on the couch of stone, unaware of anything but each other. They made love by the indistinct light casting shadow over all but the glow on their faces, a ring of light around their necks and chests, the fading in and out of their hands as they moved.

At the moment of consummation she saw his face, the widening of his eyes, the shock, and she felt, she
knew
—as if the stone, being one with her, could communicate of him to her because his flesh also touched it—that he had been, like her, a virgin.

At first she thought it was she, trembling with astonishment. Until she felt power welling up, from the walls, from the floor, the air, from the stone itself so strongly she felt as if it were heating around her, melting into her flesh—

It was this act that the city had been waiting for. Gold, jewels, chalices, frescos, writing and rituals; all this was nothing. The city, the labyrinth, had been waiting for long centuries, patient in its sessile way, until two would come to reenact the ritual that gave it life, renewed its life. There was no treasure here that one could hold in one’s hands, unless it were the body, the warm flesh, of the beloved.

He kissed her, like a consecration, and she stared at him in sudden wonder, and sudden fear.

“You’re a virgin,” she breathed. “You’re never done this before either.”

His eyes bore a disturbing glow in the wavering gleam of lantern light. “What do you think is the source of my power?” His voice was almost inaudible. He shifted with her, and for a long moment she could not speak or even think.

But when she could, she lifted a hand to brush at the gilded line of his hair. “But if it—if it was—then where will you get your power now?”

“From the sacrifice,” he whispered.

When he put his hands on her throat, she thought at first that it was a caress.

W
HEN HE SAW THAT
Maretha had disappeared from the square chamber at the base of the stairs, he felt such a swell of hard, cold fury that he knew he could immolate the very stone if he did not contain himself. The golden cup still stood on its white pillar, but Maretha was gone. He pushed past the others and fled up into the late afternoon light.

Three workers stood at the excavation, drawn by some inexplicable instinct, but they scattered before him as he ran. He knew there had to be another open entrance. He knew it as he knew his soul, but the key to the city had eluded him all these months, tantalizing, close, but always just out of his grasp. If magic was his language, then here a dialect was spoken that he could not quite understand.

He returned to his tent, paced there a time among the bits and pieces of his art: a deck of Gates, seldom used, a small stove always lit, and burning within, the tiny creatures, half dragon, half fire salamander, that attended him. Somehow Maretha had gone below, through an entrance closed to him—

But there were other entrances. And if there were entrances east and west, then there must be one north, far away in the forest, and one south. With this thought he left his tent and set out to search.

Whether by scent, or good fortune, or some other force, it did not take long. The trenches the workers had dug partially around the little camp to protect it from that dawn fire had never been filled in. The stairwell had evidently never been noticed, but now, as he walked, it seemed abruptly to be there, gaping open at his feet.

He descended. When the light grew too dim, he called fire to his hands. Eyes of flame winked at him and curled into a ball at his bidding. He had learned when quite young that emotion can be channeled into power, separated and distilled until it coalesces into a source for the magical arts. Leaving, of course, its practitioners quite free of the impediments of joy and fear, hate and sorrow. Only one thing threatened him, as he got older—a stirring so insidious and compulsive that he recognized at once its danger and its promise.

He embraced chastity not with enthusiasm, since by the age of fifteen he had pretty much destroyed that capacity within himself, but with ruthless purpose, and felt his power grow hotter, and his heart grow colder. To protect himself from a temptation stronger than he cared to admit, he let rumors and gossip spread, fueled them himself by providing the material on which other men and women, prisoners of their basest instincts, could act out their twisted desires and then blame the damage and horror on him. It sometimes shocked even him, with what ability was left him to be shocked, what such people were capable of. But the subterfuge kept women away from him, even the most fortune-hungry. Only the discovery that at heart he was a bit of a prude had enough force to make him smile at the irony of it all. He was content, and very powerful.

Until he began at last to feel the drain, just after turning thirty, and had to face the unpleasant truth: virginity is not a circle; in and of itself it produces nothing, but only uses itself up at the last. A source of great power, used wisely, but not infinite.

That was when he came across Professor Farr’s monograph. There were other options open to him, it was true. The prospect of draining the life from thousands of children he found distasteful. The unfettered use of sexuality and arousal to power magic, which he suspected of the Regent, offended his fastidious soul. But Professor Farr’s monograph promised one act, one death, and the power would be sealed within him. Vast power, strong power, a veritable treasure—he had made his plans swiftly and mercilessly. And he had chosen Maretha as the sacrifice.

He frowned now as he halted at the base of the stairs in a small, square room that mirrored the first one. It was decorated with the feast of the bride and groom, and the light in his hand dimmed as he recalled how she had looked at Harvest Fair when he had danced with her—deep-eyed with intelligence and courage and passion, a face strong in line, but weak with a capacity to give and forgive too much—or was that its strength?

He stood almost in blackness, cursed, and erased her image from his mind. As the fire boiled back in his hands, he saw a spear embedded haft down in the middle of the stone floor. When he closed his hand around it and lifted, the wall opened to reveal another staircase, going down. For an instant he thought he saw a woman, black rimming her eyes, broad-skirted, in a yellow jacket that exposed—but it was just a lingering vision and it faded. He hefted the spear in his right hand and descended.

It grew hot as he went down. When he reached the deepest level at last, he had to unbutton his coat. He stood in a small circular chamber with a single door. On that door a picture: through late-summer woods ran a loin-clothed hunter carrying a spear. Dogs ran and nipped at his heels. Just beyond the trees one could see what he pursued, almost—As he walked forward, he walked through the picture and immediately found himself lost in a maze of tunnels.

The fire in his hands was dying, shrinking slowly. It was so hot that he had to remove his coat, then his waistcoat, his boots. He was unbuttoning his shirt when he came into a huge room and saw, by the lantern light coming from the opposite wall, Maretha.

She was taking off her dress. He stared, finding that he could scarcely breathe. The dress slipped to the floor and she stood wearing only the thin material of her shift. He was seized by a compulsion so fierce that he let go of the spear. It clattered to the stone and she turned and saw him. They crossed to each other and she touched him and he was flooded by feelings so intense that he did not even notice that the light in his hands was extinguished.

She was sweet, infinitely sweet; he found her so. His power became lost in her, lost by the very act of finding her, but he did not care: it was clear to him now that love is the infinite source of power, having neither beginning nor end, having no limit. Love begets love, and so creates itself, on and forever. With such loving as this, they could create a child, the only true immortality for humanity, a child, if he had not stripped himself barren in the years before, that they could share and love, and then—

Then she spoke to him. He returned to himself out of this hallucination and realized that his power was trembling as if on the edge of an abyss, and that in one more instant he would lose it forever. He put his hands on her throat and began to strangle her.

For a moment there was no resistance, and he settled into his task with grim determination, in order to finish it quickly.