Into the Labyrinth

20

“No! Don’t leave us! Take us with you! Take us with you!”

“Oh, stop it, Roland, for Orn’s sake,” the elf snapped testily. “They’re gone.”

The human glowered at his companion and, more for the sake of defiance than because he thought he might accomplish anything constructive, he continued to wave his arms and shout at the strange ship, which was no longer even in sight.

At length, feeling a fool and growing tired of waving his arms above his head, Roland left off shouting and turned around to take his frustration out on the elf.

“It’s your fault we lost them, Quindiniar!”

“Mine?” Paithan gaped.

“Yes, yours. If you’d let me talk to them when they first landed, I could have made contact. But you thought you saw a tytan inside! Hah! One of those monsters couldn’t get its little toe into that ship,” Roland scoffed.

“I saw what I saw,” returned Paithan sullenly. “And you couldn’t have talked to them anyway. The ship was all covered with those weird pictures, like that Haplo’s ship, when he was here. You remember him?”

“Our savior? I remember. Brought us here to this blasted citadel. Him and the old man.[26] I’d like to have both of them in front of me right now.” Roland swung a clenched fist, which, quite by accident, smacked Paithan in the shoulder.

“Oh, sorry,” Roland muttered.

“You did that on purpose!” Paithan nursed his bruised arm.

“Bosh. You got in my way. You’re always getting in my way.”

“Me getting in your way! You’re the one who keeps following me around! We divided this city into two halves. If you’d stay in your half, as we agreed, I wouldn’t get in your way.”

“You’d like that!” Roland jeered. “Rega and I stay on our side and starve to death while you and your bitch of a sister grow fat—”

“Fat! Fat!” Paithan had switched to elven, as he often did when exasperated—and he seemed to be speaking a lot more elven these days. “Where do you think we’re getting food?”

“I don’t know, but you spend a lot of time in that fool Star Chamber or whatever you call it.” Roland was deliberately and irritably speaking human.

“Yes, I’m growing food there. In the darkness. Aleatha and I are living on mushrooms. And don’t call my sister names.”

“I wouldn’t put it past you. Either of you. And I’ll call her exactly what she is—a scheming little bit—”

“Scheming little what?” came a throaty, sleepy voice from the shadows. Roland choked, coughed, glowered in the voice’s general direction.

“Oh, hello, Thea,” Paithan greeted his sister without enthusiasm. “I didn’t know you were here.”

An elven woman stepped into Pryan’s eternal sunlight. One might guess, from her languorous appearance, that she had just waked from a nap. By the look in her blue eyes, her sleep had been filled with sweet dreams. Her ashen-blond hair was disheveled; her clothes appeared to have been thrown on hastily, were just the tiniest bit disarranged. The fabric and lace seemed to want some strong male hand to shift them into proper place—or to take them off and start over.

She stayed in the sunlight only a few moments, long enough to let it shine on her hair. Then she glided back into the shadows cast by the high city wall surrounding the plaza. Bright light was damaging to her fair complexion and made wrinkles. Languidly she leaned against the wall and regarded Roland with an amusement which glittered sapphire blue from beneath long and sleepy eyelashes.

“What were you about to call me?” Aleatha asked again, eventually growing bored at hearing him stammer and sputter.

“You know well enough what you are,” Roland managed to get out at last.

“No, I don’t.” Aleatha’s eyes opened wide for just a fraction of a second, long enough to absorb him inside; then—as if the effort were too exhausting—she lowered the lashes again. Cast him out. “But why don’t you meet me in the maze garden at winetime and tell me.”

Roland muttered something to the effect that he’d meet her in hell first and—his face mottled—stalked off.

“You shouldn’t tease him like that, Thea,” said Paithan when Roland was out of earshot. “Humans are like savage dogs. Baiting only makes them—”

“More savage?” suggested Aleatha with a smile.

“You may find toying with him amusing, but it makes him damn difficult to live with,” Paithan told his sister.

He began walking back through the human section of the city toward the main part of the citadel. Aleatha fell into slow step beside him.

“I wish you’d just leave him alone,” Paithan added.

“But he’s the only source of entertainment I have in this dreary place,” Aleatha protested. She glanced at her brother; a slight frown marred the delicate beauty of her face. “What’s the matter with you, Pait? You never used to scold me like this. I swear, you’re getting more like Gallic every day—a stringy old maid—”

“Stop it, Thea!” Paithan caught hold of her wrist, jerked her around to face him. “Don’t you talk about her like that. Gallic had her faults, but she held our family together. Now she’s dead and father’s dead and we’re all going to die and—”

Aleatha snatched her hand away, used it to slap her brother across his face.

“Don’t say that!”

Paithan rubbed his stinging cheek, regarded his sister grimly. “Hit me as much as you like, Thea, it won’t change things. We’re going to run out of food eventually. When that happens—” He shrugged.

“We’ll go out and find more,” Aleatha said. Two spots of fevered color burned in her cheeks. “There’s loads of food out there: plants, fruit—”

“Tytans,” Paithan said dryly.

Gathering up her full skirts, which were admittedly growing a bit frayed at the hem, Aleatha flounced off, moving at a much more rapid pace than previously.

“They’re gone,” she said over her shoulder.

Paithan had difficulty keeping up with her. “That’s what the last group said when they left. You know what happened to them.”

“No, I don’t,” Aleatha retorted, walking quickly through the empty streets. Paithan caught up. “Yes, you do. You heard the screams. We all heard them.”

“A trick!” Aleatha tossed her head. “A trick to deceive us, trick us into staying in here. The others are probably out there feasting on... on all sorts of wonderful things and laughing at us...” Despite herself, her voice quavered. “Cook said there was a ship out there. She and her children found it and they flew away from this dreadful place...”

Paithan opened his mouth to argue, shut it again. Aleatha knew the truth. She knew well enough what had really happened that terrible night. She and Roland, Paithan and Rega and Drugar, the dwarf, had stood on the steps, watching anxiously as Cook and the others left the safety of the citadel and entered the distant jungle. It was the emptiness and the loneliness that drove them to risk leaving the safety of the citadel’s walls. That and the constant quarreling, the arguing over dwindling food supplies. Dislike and distrust had strengthened into fear and abhorrence.

None of them had seen or heard signs of the tytans—the terrifying giants who roamed Pryan—for a long, long time. They all assumed—everyone except Paithan—that the creatures had left, roamed off. Paithan knew that the tytans were still there, knew because he’d been reading a book he’d found in a dusty old library in the citadel.

The book was handwritten in elven—a rather old-fashioned and outdated elven—and was illustrated with lots of pictures, one reason Paithan had chosen it. Other books in the library were written in elven, but they had more writing than pictures. He snored just looking at them.

Some type of godlike beings who called themselves “Sartan” were the ones who had—so they claimed—brought the elves and humans and dwarves to this world.

“Heretical nonsense,” his sister Gallic would have termed it. The world of Pryan—world of fire—was one of four worlds, purportedly. Paithan didn’t believe that part, having found a diagram of the supposed “universe”—four balls hanging suspended in midair, as if some juggler had tossed them up and then walked off and left them.

“What kind of fools do they take us for?” he wondered. A green and lush tropical world whose suns, located in the heart of the hollow planet, shone constantly, Pryan was—according to the book—intended to provide light and food to the other three worlds.

As for the light, Paithan readily conceded that he had more light than he knew what to do with. Food was a different matter. Admittedly the jungle was full of food, if he wanted to fight the tytans for it. And how was he supposed to send it to these other worlds anyway?

“Throw it at them, I guess,” said Paithan, considerably tickled at the thought of flinging pua fruit into the universe. Really, these Sartan must think they were all idiots to believe a tale like this!

These Sartan had built this citadel. And, according to them, they had built a whole lot more citadels. Paithan found this idea intriguing. He could almost believe it. He’d seen their lights shining in the sky. According to the book, the Sartan had brought the elves, humans, and dwarves to live with them in the citadels.

Paithan believed that, too, mainly because he could see evidence with his own eyes of the fact that others like himself had once inhabited this city. There were buildings built the way elves liked them, with lots of gewgaws and curlicues and useless columns and arched windows. And there were buildings meant to house humans—solid and dull and square. And there were even tunnels down below, made for dwarves. Paithan knew because Drugar had taken him down there once, right after they had first entered the city, when the five of them had still been speaking to each other.

The citadel was very beautiful and practical, and the person who had written this book appeared to be baffled by the fact that it hadn’t worked. Wars had started. The elves, humans, and dwarves (the writer called them “mensch”) had refused to live in peace, had begun to fight each other.

Paithan, however, understood perfectly. There were only two elves, two humans, and one dwarf living in the city now, and these five couldn’t get along. He could imagine what it must have been like back then—whenever “then” was. The mensch (Paithan came to hate that word) populations had grown at an alarming rate. Unable to control the ever expanding numbers, the Sartan (may Orn shrivel their ears and any other part that seemed suitable) had created fearsome beings they called tytans, which were apparently supposed to act as nursemaids to the mensch and also work in the citadels.

The light beaming from the citadel’s Star Chambers was so bright that any ordinary mortal who looked on it would be blinded, and so the tytans were created without eyes. To compensate for the handicap (and to control them better), the Sartan had provided the tytans with strong telepathic skills; the tytans could communicate by thought alone. The Sartan had also given the tytans very limited intelligence (such strong and powerful beings would be a threat if they were too smart) and had also endowed them with their rune-magic or something like that.

Paithan wasn’t much on reading; he had tended to skim over the boring parts. The plan had worked, apparently. The tytans roamed the streets, and the elves, humans, and dwarves were too intimidated by the monsters’ presence to fight. All well and good. But what had happened after that? Why did the mensch leave the cities and venture into the jungle? How did the tytans get loose? And where were these Sartan now and what did they intend to do about this mess?

Paithan didn’t have the answers, because at that point the book ended. The elf was miffed. He’d gotten interested in the story in spite of himself and wanted to know how it turned out. But the book didn’t tell him. It looked as if it had intended to, since there were more pages bound into it, but these pages were blank.

He’d read enough, however, to know that the tytans had been created in the citadels, and so it seemed more than likely that they should be drawn to the citadels. Especially since the tytans kept asking everyone they met (before they bashed their brains out) questions such as “Where is the citadel?” Once the tytans found the citadel, they wouldn’t be likely to leave it. That’s what he’d told the others.

“I’m staying right here, inside these walls. The tytans are still out there, hiding in the jungle, waiting for us. Mark my words,” he’d said. And he’d been right. Horribly right. He would sometimes wake up in a cold sweat, thinking he heard the screams of the dying out in the jungle, beyond the walls.

Paithan had refused to go with Cook and the others. And because he refused to go, Rega—Roland’s sister and Paithan’s lover—had refused to go. And because Rega had refused to go, Roland had decided to stay. Or perhaps it was because Aleatha—Paithan’s sister—had refused to go that Roland had decided to stay. He said it was because of Rega, but his eyes kept darting to Aleatha as he spoke. No one was certain quite why Aleatha stayed, except that she was fond of her brother and it would have taken a great deal of effort to leave. As for Drugar, the dwarf, he stayed because he was given to know that he wasn’t welcome to join the party that was leaving. Not that he was particularly welcome among those who stayed behind, but they would never say as much to him aloud, since he was the one who had saved them all from being devoured by the dragon.[27] The dwarf did what he wanted anyway and kept his own counsel about it, rarely talking to any of them. But apparently Drugar agreed with Paithan, because the dour dwarf had shown no desire to leave the citadel, and when the screaming began he had simply stroked his beard and nodded his head, as if he’d been expecting it. Paithan thought about all this and sighed and put his arm around his sister’s shoulders.

“What were you and Roland doing together in the plaza anyway?” Aleatha asked, indicating by her change of subject that she was sorry she’d hit him. “You looked a couple of idiots when I saw you from the walls—jumping around and shouting at the sky.”

“A ship came down,” Paithan answered, “out of nowhere.”

“A ship?” Her eyes opened wide; she forgot, in her astonishment, that she was wasting their beauty on a mere brother. “What kind of ship? Why didn’t it stay? Oh, Paithan, maybe it will come back and fly us out of this horrible place!”

“Maybe,” he said, not wanting to dampen her hopes and get his face slapped again. Privately he had his doubts. “As for why it didn’t stay, well, Roland doesn’t agree with me but I could swear that the people on board were fighting a tytan. I know it sounds crazy, the ship was small, but I saw what I saw. And I saw something else, too. I saw a man who looked like that Haplo.”

“Oh, well, then, I’m glad he left,” Aleatha said coldly. “I wouldn’t have gone anywhere with him! He led us into this dreadful prison, pretending to be our savior. Then he left us. He was the cause of everything rotten that’s happened to us. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was the one who brought the tytans down on us in the first place.”

Paithan let his sister rant on. She had to have someone to blame and, thank Orn, this time it wasn’t him.

But he couldn’t help thinking that Haplo had been right. If the three races had allied to fight the tytans, maybe their people would be alive right now. As it was...

“Say, Thea.” Paithan came out of his gloomy reverie as a thought struck him.

“What were you doing down in the market plaza,[28] anyway? You never walk that far.”

“I was bored. No one to talk to except that human slut. Speaking of Rega, she said to tell you that something funny was going on in that beloved Star Chamber of yours.”

“Why didn’t you say so?” Paithan glared at her. “And don’t call Rega a slut!” Breaking into a run, he dashed through the streets of the shining marble city, a city of spires and domes and wondrous beauty. A city that was likely to become their tomb.

Aleatha watched him go, wondering how he could expend all that energy on something as senseless as going into a gigantic room and fiddling with machines that never did anything and weren’t ever likely to do anything. Nothing constructive—such as grow food.

Well, they weren’t starving yet. Paithan had attempted to impose some sort of rationing system on them, but Roland had refused to accept it, stating that humans—being bigger—needed more food than elves and so it was unfair of Paithan to allot to Roland and Rega the same amount of food that he allotted to himself and Aleatha.

At which Drugar had spoken up—a rarity for him—and claimed that dwarves, because of their heavier body mass, needed twice as much food as either elves or humans.

At which Paithan had thrown up his hands and said he didn’t care. They could gorge themselves. They’d only die that much sooner and he, for one, would be glad to be rid of them.

At which Rega had flown into a rage and said that no doubt he’d be thankful if she was the first one to die and she hoped she was because she couldn’t go on living with a man who hated her brother.

At which they’d all stormed off and no one had ended up rationing anything. Aleatha looked down the empty street and shivered in the bright sunlight. The marble walls were always cold. The sun did nothing to warm them, probably because of the strange darkness that flowed over the city every night. Having been raised in a world of perpetual light, Aleatha had come to enjoy the artificial night that fell on the citadel and nowhere else on Pryan. She liked to walk in the darkness, reveling in the mystery and velvet softness of the night air.

It was especially nice to walk in the darkness with someone. She glanced around. The shadows were deepening. The strange night would fall soon. She could either go back to the Star Chamber and be bored to tears watching Paithan dither over his stupid machine or she could go and see if Roland would really meet her at the garden maze.

Aleatha glanced at her reflection in a crystal window of a vacant house. She was somewhat thinner than she had been, but that didn’t detract from her beauty. If anything, her narrow waistline only made her full breasts more voluptuous. Artfully she rearranged her dress to best advantage, brushed her fingers through her thick hair.

Roland would be waiting for her. She knew it.