Labyrinth, page 1
Labyrinth
BLAZE WARD
KNOTTED ROAD PRESS
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Epilogue
Read More
About the Author
Also by Blaze Ward
About Knotted Road Press
Chapter
One
Dan perked up as the truck began to slow down. The hill they had been climbing had been steep and a little windy, but he’d still been half asleep, after the long drive out from Seattle.
The road ahead dead-ended at a wroughtiron gate that looked like it might hold out zombie hordes. The thing opened immediately when Stewey buzzed the house from the driver’s seat, and they headed further up and around a curve to the house that was hidden beyond.
At the top, they went ahead and parked in a circular driveway, behind to two cars each worth more than Dan had made in the last three years. Stewey, too, technically, but Dan’s partner had been born to money, to his everlasting shame, heir to a mining and timber fortune and the given name of Prescott Stuart Ogden IV, aka Four, when he really just wanted to be a redneck.
The house in front them him was the sort of thing that Three, Stewey’s dad, might have owned. Perhaps as a summer palace, since it looked to be only about twelve thousand square feet of space, red-bricked, and three stories tall, done in an early-Gothic, middle-Roman mix that just barely worked.
Dan climbed out of the pickup and checked his look in the side mirror one last time before he turned to the house. Clean-shaven, half-Chinese kid from Idaho doing his damnedest hipster look in the big city. Straight, black hair just the perfect length to annoy the wrong people. Knit cap with rainbow stripes to celebrate Pride June as an ally.
The front door was already open when he and Stewey approached. Their old friend Kate, was standing next to the prospective buyers she represented, a white couple in their early forties. Former software geeks who had won the IPO lottery, cashed out, and ran away from Seattle, with one kid apparently at Yu-Dub these days and the other at Wazzou.
The locals in this valley probably hated everything there was to know about folks like this, up from Seattle with money, from coffee weirdness to evolving grocery shelves, except for what the property taxes on a place like this would do to improve their funding for roads and schools.
Stewey might have grown up in marble and gilt, but Dan still remembered an aluminum double-wide that never stayed warm enough in those cold, Idaho winters. Hadn’t been that all long ago, either, just ten years since he’d gone off to become a Vandal.
Dan unzipped his blue rain shell as he approached, set his shoulders, and approached with a smile. Seattle was cooler than the mountains, but they were close enough to East of the Mountains for everything to turn from green in the west to brown here.
“Dan Holt.” He held out his hand to the man.
“Mike Grimsby,” the man replied with a smile and gestured to the woman. “My wife, Alecia.”
Dan shook her hand as well.
“So glad you were available,” Kate said, pecking him on the cheek before doing the same to a badly-blushing Stewey. She gestured everyone inside. “Shall we?”
Dan wiped his feet and followed the other three into a foyer larger than his apartment, all marble and old, dark wood, with a crystal chandelier overhead and a mezzanine balcony. The sort of thing you could get if you hired really expensive architects and interior designers and told them they had a million dollars to impress visitors with the first room.
Yeah.
Apparently, the Grimsbys had made out really well, if they were buying this place. Although, there was a hint of staleness in the air. A dead smell. The kind that suggested the house had been empty for some time, and just cleaned in a perfunctory manner by a hired service. The kind that only came in monthly because nobody actually lived here.
Dan followed as they exited the big space by going under the stairs, through a heavy door that led into a hallway separating the dining room from the kitchen. He felt better, looking into the kitchen. He had feared one of those industrial places, straight out of a restaurant, like people were doing these days to keep up with the Jones.
This was the sort of place his mother might have cooked in, had they lived in a house. Old stove. Older microwave. An oversize wine chiller, off and empty. Lots of counter space and a small bar stuck out from the wall like a peninsula.
Homey.
“We can’t wait to rip all that out and update it,” Mr. Grimsby said, pointing into the kitchen. “Move the back wall out eight feet or so. Put in two bigger stoves and a walk-in fridge, so we can host parties.”
Dan kept from snarling an obscenity at the man.
Barely.
He smiled instead. Their money spent just as well as anyone else. And would.
Kate nodded minutely at him and got everyone moving again, out the back door into a…what?
Dan had played soccer as a kid on a pitch smaller than this manicured back yard. You didn’t mow a place like this, you bought a herd of goats and let them roam free, checking in with the shepherd every week or so when he made it back to the house for supplies.
Fruit trees. Hedges. A concrete patio in three distinct levels with marble slab benches and roses.
And over there.
“Is that…?” Stewey started to ask in a very compact voice.
Kate stopped walking and turned to face them abruptly.
Dan could see the whites of her eyes, but she was all smiles for the yuppies behind her. Still, even Stewey knew well enough to shut up at that point.
Over on the left, back under some enormously ancient trees. A cleared, round area with white gravel and black lines. It left a cold, dark spot in Dan’s day, just looking at it.
“I thought you two could take a look,” Kate said in a tight voice, chopped into individual syllables with a heavy cleaver. “The Grimsbys are all set to make an offer, and the bank will be thrilled to be rid of this place. The former owner died without heirs, so he left everything interesting to various museums and such. The county got the property itself and hired the bank to sell it off.”
Dan pasted a brittle smile on his face and directed it at the two yuppies who were suddenly in well over their heads.
“We’d be happy to,” he said in a voice of false bonhomie. “Why don’t you folks head back inside and relax. We’ll be a bit, and then come find you.”
The Grimsbys nodded warily and went back inside under Kate’s serene eyes, sheep being expertly woofed into place should they think to stray.
Dan zipped his rain shell back up. It felt like seventy degrees had suddenly become forty, just walking through the house. But that was all in his mind, right?
“Gosh,” Stewey said, dripping with sarcasm. “I’m sure glad you convinced me to leave the guns at home.”
“Not funny, Stew,” Dan replied.
“Not laughing, Dan,” Stewey fired back. “That’s a meditation labyrinth. A freaking powerful one. I’m surprised those folks couldn’t feel the power that thing contains. Kate sure could.”
“She knows what to listen for,” Dan murmured. “Real estate agents run into all sorts of old, weird magic. Your average corporate drone has no idea.”
He took a few steps in that direction, and then shifted to his left and walked some more. Just listening.
There was power over there. A fuck-ton lot of it packed down into a very compact space. Maybe thirty yards across the outer ring, demarcated by a low wall that looked like cinder blocks faced on the inside with marble tile.
Stark, white gravel. Jet black lines in a set of circles, guiding the walker slowly around the entire surface of the flat maze. A space at the exact center maybe ten feet across marked with a design that the eye refused to bring into focus. Occasional pillars or obelisks around the outside, on that two-foot-tall wall.
The entrance to the maze itself was marked with two obelisk-shaped pillars about four feet tall, flat, with objects on top.
Dan drifted closer, but studiously concentrated on not falling into the siren song that wound itself up as he got nearer. Whoever had built this had bound the magic in such a way that it would be easy to fall into a meditative trance, even before you reached the entrance itself. Walking one this big might take nearly half an hour to complete, and you might never notice the passage of time.
And then?
Dan could feel Stewey close behind him, a presence like a breakwater.
“You’re not going in there, are you, Dr. Holt?” Stewey inquired with a harsh tone.
“No, Dr. Ogden,” Dan replied, just as brusque, turning to his partner, and friend. “I’m trying to get a feel for the center. It’s not a demon-raising circle, but it is a portal of some sort.”
They moved slowly closer, both listening with ears as well as souls.
“Stepping disk,” Stewey said in an authoritative tone. He gestured to the pillars by the entrance. “On the left, a closed iron container I’m betting probably still contains ro
Dan nodded.
Who built a stepping disk with this much power behind it? It would transport you to a matching disk, but with that much power the other one could be anywhere on the planet.
Who went through?
Or worse, what would come through from the other side, assuming that thing didn’t open in one of the more dangerous planes instead?
Dan ground his teeth and pushed himself to the right as he got close to the entrance to the maze.
Stewey seemed to be having an easier time of it, but he wasn’t as sensitive to certain things. Oh, sure, give him an arcane device to build, or a summoning circle to lay down, and few people could do as precise a job. But Stewey’s arcane nature was grounded in the physicality of the world.
Dan was the one really sensitive to the esoteric. He was the guy who could walk into a library of ten thousand tomes and immediately pick out the three with magical resonance immediately. Stewey would have to touch a hundred first, just because the power had bled into them over the years.
Dan reached into his left back pocket and pulled out the simple knife he always carried. Straight blade. Eight inches overall. Single-edged with a thick spine. Iron-steel handle. Small runes carved along the spine of the blade itself and filled with silver. It was more a tool than a weapon, although silver and iron made it dangerous to most fey or eldritch creatures.
Today, he just wanted it in his hand as a security blanket. Like Stewey would have been holding his old Colt Python loaded with silver bullets in one hand right now. Dan assumed Stewey had a pocket pistol anyway. Probably in his pocket right now, engulfed in one mitt, just in case.
Stewey was like that.
Sunlight peeking through the clouds glinted off something at the center. Near the center. Part of the innermost ring that contained the disk itself.
It was hard to study, even from the short distance of the outer wall. All of maybe forty feet.
Bronze.
Bronze?
Yes, bronze.
“Whatcha got?” Stewey asked.
Dan held up the hand with the knife. It seemed to slice through the foggy murk his brain kept insisting was there, in spite of his eyes.
“Bronze,” Dan replied.
“On a stepping disk?”
Stewey’s voice ended on a half-crack, up a bit.
“My thoughts, exactly,” Dan replied. “Looks like the grounding elements of the circle.”
“You’d need at least six for a circle that big,” Stewey said in a serious voice.
And he would know.
“Times like this, a trained chipmunk would come in handy,” Stewey opined vaguely.
It was an old joke. You never saw chipmunks in the wild. Only squirrels.
Chipmunks were much better ninjas.
“Yeah, but they won’t license us,” Dan retorted.
He studied the circle more closely, trying to concentrate over the music suddenly pounding at his temple. Music that was only there in his mind.
“I’m going to have to walk it,” Dan said.
“You are completely, fucking, insane, Dr. Holt,” Stewey replied in a calm, rational voice. “That thing will eat you.”
“I have an idea,” Dan said, holding up his blade. “The knife protects me, a little. You tie a bit of line to my wrist and tug at it occasionally. That ought to ground me enough. I can’t walk straight across that much power, but I can force myself through the maze faster. Maybe I’ll stay here. And you can pull me over if I lose it.”
“Yup,” Stewey observed blandly. “Crazier than a shithouse rat.”
But he also pulled a small spool of parachute cord from an inner pocket of his denim jacket.
Dan knew people thought Stewey was pudgy, but that was all the stuff he had hidden in various pockets for emergencies. Line. Fishing gear. Spare ammunition. A can of spam.
A veritable smorgasbord of prizes, like a magician’s top hat. Dan didn’t ask about spare rabbits.
Instead, he held out his right hand and meditated while Stewey tied a loop around his wrist.
“We’re set,” his partner said in a grim tone, stuffing his other hand back into a pocket. Presumably, palming that spare pistol.
The music got louder as Dan approached the entrance. It was like being at one of Stewey’s heavy metal concerts, a nearly solid experience that resonated as much off the inside of his skull as his sternum.
Dan resisted banging his head a few times. Stewey wouldn’t get the joke, although he probably only heard the music at a level that allowed conversation.
On the left, Dan found rock salt, like Stewey had expected. The circle wanted him to cast a pinch into the air, but he forced himself to close the lid instead.
On the right, a silver birdbath, maybe a foot across and four inches deep. Polished clean, in spite of being out in the open. Not even leaf debris. Just cool water.
The circle wanted Dan to dip his hand in and flick water forward onto his path. Wanted that REALLY badly.
Dan forced his feet forward, marching to the beat of his hammering heart, rather than the slow, meditative pace he achieved when he did tai chi.
Speed was necessary today.
Something jerked hard on his hand, snapping his head around.
Dan blinked.
“What?”
“You’re halfway and slowing down again,” Stewey called across the vast gulf that separated them.
Halfway?
Dan looked down. The sun had moved far enough to be noticeable. He was clear on the far side of the circle and two rings in already.
Crap, this thing was powerful. Anyone without help would just get sucked right down into it. A dangerous tool, even for whatever mage had scribed it. Hopefully, that guy really was dead.
Dan made a note to go look up the previous owner. He was unaware of anyone this powerful, anywhere near Seattle. How had the man managed to hide himself from the other players in the industry?
He looked up and locked eyes with Stewey, nodding to the man.
Thank you.
Another fast step forward. Force the music out. Listen to your heart and your footsteps, crunching on the gravel with little puffs of white dust.
Stewey took to tugging randomly on the cord, once nearly jerking Dan off of his feet. But it also got him grounded again, when his mind wandered off onto strange paths invisible to everyone outside the walls that had sprung up.
More time passed, a battle between the power of the circle and the sudden tripping jerks from Stewey, playing him like a shark on a hook. Back and forth, but never quite reeling him in.
Just forcing him to fight it. And the music.
A hard tug. Sharp. Insistent.
Something thumped his shoulder as well.
Dan snapped around, knife up, ready to fight.
“You back?” Stewey called, holding up another rock.
Dan found the gray stone as his feet, marring the perfection of the white gravel.
The music insisted he pick it up and cast it clear. Dan stood back up instead.
“You cannot imagine power here,” he called quietly.
“Yeah, I can,” Stewey laughed harshly. “That was the third rock I’ve hit you with.”
Third?
Dan saw the other two. Smaller. Darker. Blemishes that angered the circle.
Stewey tugged sharply on the line, dragging him to one side. The lines rose up like walls in his head.
Dan shook his head like a wet dog. Shook his whole body, like that would rid himself of the power floating around.
Something withdrew under the assault. Dan found himself able to center.
He took two sharp breaths and looked around. On impulse, he swung the silvered blade before him.
Something worked, as the fog thinned.
Two steps would take him to the entrance to the stepping disk, but Dan had no interest in opening a portal to an unknown place.
Instead, he knelt where he was and studied the bronze thing set into the ground nearby.
