“King Mamba,” said Nick.
But Will sensed this fearsome creature didn’t rule by size alone, as if that wasn’t enough. A foul, keen intelligence radiated from its oval reptilian eyes, which sought them out from across the room, using the force of its gaze as a blunt instrument. A long red tongue slithered out toward them a few times, maybe four feet, tasting the air.
Searching for fear, Will thought. Like any snake, it can taste it.
The curve of its long mouth already angled toward a grin, but Will thought it took on an added degree of sneer as it sized them up.
“It’s trying to scare us,” said Jericho.
“Working,” said Ajay, his voice quivering.
The snake king took in a deep breath and flared out its hooded neck with a snap, like a parachute opening.
“I don’t suppose you could speak nicely to it,” said Ajay, hiding behind Nick. “Like you did with the daisies.”
Will did give it a try, sending out a mental probe in the snake king’s direction. He saw the monster tilt its head to one side as the probe approached. Curious, momentarily, then annoyed, like it had just noticed a gnat.
The thing summoned up some strange source of eldritch energy. Blinking on the Grid, Will saw a thin veil take shape all around the monster’s head like a protective barrier, and then his probe vanished, just as if that gnat had been vaporized by a bug zapper.
“No luck,” said Will; then he turned to Elise.
I want you to try something. I know you’ve never done it before and you probably think you can’t pull it off. But I need to ask you to try.
Then he told her what he had in mind. Elise looked at him skeptically.
That’s not happening.
Yes, it is. If you can do this, you can do that. You take the one on the right. I’ll tell you when.
The snake king raised his trident and issued a harsh stream of orders to the two war parties. While it continued to harangue them, Will turned to his friends, who were all staring at the giant snake.
“Everybody ready?” asked Will.
“As we’re ever going to get,” said Jericho.
Will sent Elise another message:
Let ’em have it.
They both turned toward the two war parties guarding the front of the stairs. Both concentrated hard and shot the same thought commands at the leaders of the two packs: images, arranged in specific order, one after the other, like a rebus.
Will saw the thoughts land and take immediate effect. The two captains growled and whipped their heads around from their leader and the humans in front of them to their opposite number in the other war party:
That’s your enemy, there. Disguised as some of us. Bad bad. Attack attack. Kill kill.
And other vivid word pictures to that effect.
Both captains pointed at each other, raised their weapons, and charged across the plaza at each other, barking out orders and frothing at the mouth. Shocked, but pulled along by their blind adherence to the chain of command—helped enormously, Will thought, by an almost laughably low threshold of intelligence—both war parties followed, albeit with slightly less enthusiasm than their leaders, at least initially.
Their lingering reluctance vanished the moment the two captains savagely collided with a crash near the middle of the room, their swords clashing and clanging, and both parties tumbled after them into a lethal melee, chopping and hacking at each other. From that moment on, training, instinct, and bloodlust took over.
Elise watched for a moment, then turned to Will with no small amount of amazement.
It worked. I can do it, too.
I told you so.
The snake king stared at this spectacle in astonishment. He’d obviously been expecting them to attack, but in a radically different direction.
“Now,” said Will.
Ajay and Nick broke toward the stairs on the left, and Will followed closely behind, skirting the edges of the fight in front of them. Jericho and Elise ran toward the stairs on the right.
Not one of the savages in that scrum in the middle paid the slightest attention to them. As both groups reached the base of the stairs, they heard a deafening shout: the snake king laying down the law. He pounded the staff of his trident into the ground and his shout echoed through the chamber like a crack of thunder.
The shock wave had the desired effect: The two captains and their war parties snapped out of their mesmerized state and stared at each other in amazement, as if to say, How the bleep did this happen?
Will pushed Ajay ahead of him to the landing and then hesitated long enough to look back and see the snake king wave his trident forward and shout out another slightly less thunderous command that wasn’t hard to translate:
Kill them, you idiots!
The war parties, many of them wounded and limping, refocused their wrath on the two groups of humans who just now were disappearing around the first landing of the stairs and gave chase. Will stayed behind one additional beat as Ajay and Nick ran ahead, just long enough to see the rest of the king’s army rush forward from the tunnel with a bloodcurdling cry, all of them now in pursuit, while the drummers charging behind them went into overdrive.
Don’t stop for any reason, Will sent to Elise. Until we’re back in the swamp.
The war parties and the regiment behind them split into two groups to follow them, just as Will had figured they would. He picked up his pace and raced to the top of the stairs just as Ajay and Nick were getting there, Ajay slowing down to reach back and grab something out of his pack.
Elise and Jericho were already waiting under the archway above the passage leading out to the maze.
“Go, go, go!” shouted Will, urging Nick and Ajay along as he came up behind them.
They followed the others through the archway into the maze, but Ajay slowed even more between the stairs and the exit to carefully scatter a few handfuls of small objects he took from a pouch.
“What the heck are you doing?” asked Jericho as he waited by the arch.
“There’s no point in bringing these things along if I don’t get a chance to use them,” said Ajay.
“What are they?” asked Will.
“Explosives, a few shrapnel bombs, some tear gas, and a few that throw out a weaponized spray of hydrochloric acid when you step on them,” he said cheerfully. “A real mixed bag of Halloween treats.”
Ajay scattered the last of his little booby traps—they looked like clusters of nuts and bolts crossed with multicolored gumballs—then scampered out under the archway after the others.
“Coach, take the lead. Get everybody past the trapdoor!” Will shouted. “Elise, stay with me.”
Will stopped with Elise on the far side of the archway and turned back to the entrance. They tensed and waited until they could hear the clamor and slithering of the approaching warriors charging up both stairways.
“Now,” he said.
Will covered his ears. Elise took a deep breath, leaned forward with her arms bent back, and sent a howling shriek through the mouth of the entrance. Will heard and felt it bounce off the stones, echoing back and forth in the enclosed chamber, shock waves reverberating so powerfully that the stones themselves seemed to tremble, and then the sound rushed out through the only places it found to escape—down both sets of stairs. They heard screams and shouts from the stairwells as the shock wave crashed into the leading edge of both ascending columns.
“Now get going,” said Will.
“What about you?” asked Elise, bent over and panting for air.
“I’ll be right behind you.”
Elise squeezed his hand and hurried out into the maze. Will took a few steps after her into the passageway, turned, looked up, and focused his mind on the long snake carving in the center of the immense stone archway. He summoned up another powerful mental charge—shaping it this time into the form of a cannonball—and sent it hurtling at the keystone of the arch.
As the thought-form made impact, the archway reare
d and buckled at its midpoint. The whole structure trembled and then the artful masonry around it collapsed as the central stone gave way. The entire structure dropped to the ground, raising a cloud of dust and burying the entrance to the building with a thick wall of debris.
Will turned and staggered away into the maze, dizzy and light on his feet. A stream of blood gushed from his nose, and he wiped it away on his sleeve. He wasn’t sure if he was feeling the effects of just this particular exertion or if the whole encounter was starting to exact a cumulative toll, but he knew his reserve was close to running out.
From inside, on the far side of the pile of debris, he heard a series of small explosions detonating, followed by a series of screams and shouts of pain and alarm and then the slightest whiff of some acrid gas. The survivors of the sound blast had made their way up into Ajay’s Halloween minefield.
Will turned the first corner into the maze and headed for the turn around the trapdoor.
A few turns ahead of him, Elise and Ajay had caught up to Nick and Coach. Ajay was taking a certain amount of pride in pointing out that they were quickly negotiating their way back through the maze by following the fluorescent pink tags he’d left behind on their way in.
“See,” said Ajay to Nick. “I told you that you’d thank me later.”
At that moment, just as Will was trying to summon up the strength to make the jump across the trapdoor paver, an enormous explosion erupted from the front of the structure behind him.
Will turned back to see debris from the pile they’d created there soaring into the air in every direction—he had to dodge a large block of stone that landed, skipped, and caromed off the wall near his feet, ending up on the next paver beyond him that activated the trapdoor. That was followed a moment later by a deafening bellow of rage, and he realized what had happened.
The snake king had reared up to its full height and smashed through the barricade at the entrance, its head and hooded neck rising up and towering above the walls behind Will, looking around for the intruders.
Jericho and Nick heard the commotion behind them; Nick quickly hopped up on top of the nearest wall, looked back, and saw the giant serpent rise up the maze. The snake king spotted Nick on the wall almost as soon as he appeared and surged forward. But instead of following the winding path of the maze, he simply used the bulk of his enormous trunk as a battering ram and burst through the nearest wall, forging the straightest line between two points and heading right toward Nick.
“Oh, mama,” said Nick.
“What is it?” asked Jericho down below.
“King Mamba’s coming, and he is royally pissed.”
As the snake king passed by, Will tried to blend into the wall behind him, feeling the sharp edge of the network of vines digging into his back.
The rasp of their bark gave rise to an idea that began to take shape in the back of his mind. He now recognized the peculiar itch this feeling generated—intuition again—although this time he sensed his mind needed more time to roll it around before it would come fully to life.
But the snake king passed by his position without noticing him, intent on some other target farther ahead in the maze, most likely his friends. Will stepped back, took a running leap, and cleared the open trapdoor. Then he accelerated to the top speed he could manage—dizziness still affecting his balance—and whipped around and through the corners of the maze.
As he rounded the first turn, the gigantic enraged snake smashed through another wall only a few yards to Will’s right. Glancing back through the ruins it left in its wake, Will saw the remnants of the king’s elite regiment—still at least forty soldiers—picking their way over and through the rubble at the entrance, trying to follow their leader.
A few turns ahead, Jericho called up to Nick, “Draw him away! Don’t do anything stupid!”
“Fat chance,” said Ajay.
Nick launched a series of insulting gestures and sounds toward the onrushing monster, then scampered away to the right, running along the narrow top of the wall as if it were the middle of a street.
The snake king heard and saw Nick moving away to the right and slightly altered its course to give chase, smashing through another couple of walls in its path.
“Get behind me,” said Jericho to Ajay and Elise. “And close your eyes.”
“Not that again…,” said Ajay.
“Do as I say if you want to live,” said Jericho.
They did as he said. The sound and fury that erupted within a few feet of them momentarily rivaled the tumult the big snake was causing behind them. Both Ajay and Elise felt a burst of heat, and then the acrid odor and bristling presence of a wild beast filled the air right next to them. When they opened their eyes, they could hardly see past what appeared to be the world’s largest grizzly bear immediately in front of them.
A booming gravelly voice, only remotely recognizable as Jericho’s, burst from its jaws with a ferocious growl: “CLIMB ONTO MY BACK! HURRY UP!”
The bear bent down on all fours, immense bands of muscle rippling under its fur. Elise immediately jumped onto him, but Ajay froze, gaping at the bear a moment longer.
“NOW, AJAY!”
Ajay vaulted forward like he’d been poked with a cattle prod. Elise grabbed and pulled him up beside her onto the bear’s back, and they scrambled farther on top, just below his shoulders.
“HANG ON! AND KEEP YOUR HEADS DOWN!”
Both of them grabbed handfuls of fur, held on as tightly as they could, and lowered their heads. Nearby, they all heard the giant snake smash through another section of wall; when Ajay turned his head, he could see the top of the thing’s body moving off to the right but with only a few sections of the maze left standing between them.
Will raced through the turns behind them, desperately trying to catch up. As he rounded the next corner, he caught a glimpse of the bear with Elise and Ajay clinging to its back as it made the turn and headed around the other way.
Wow, thought Will, not even immune to wonder under this kind of pressure. Coach went full-on bear.
Nick didn’t turn around until he reached the far right side of the maze with only swamp ahead of him, and when he looked back, he saw the giant snake wading its way through the maze toward him, knocking down one wall after another as it advanced. Nick jumped up and down and waved his arms.
“OVER HERE, SNAKE EYES! COME AND GET ME, YOU BIG, UGLY BASTARD!”
They were in a long section of passageway that faced the swamp, so Jericho—or simply “the bear,” as Elise and Ajay both perceived it; it was a challenge to hold the thought of this giant beast as “Coach Jericho” while they were riding on his back—turned and galloped back along to the next turn, then swung around and sprinted toward the wall straight ahead.
Elise raised her head and looked up just long enough to realize what the bear was about to do and sent to Will, Oh God, Will, he’s going straight through the wall.
Will spun around the next turn just in time to see the big bear lower his head and smash through the wall in front of him. The stones seemed to more or less vaporize on impact and the bear hardly lost a step as he powered through the gap he had created and headed on the same line for the next wall ahead of them, with Elise and Ajay hanging on for dear life. Will scrambled after them.
At the sound of the bear smashing through the second wall, the snake king stopped and looked away from Nick to his left. Nick saw a cloud of dust and debris rising from that area of the maze. The snake king turned again and focused its fury back in that direction. It picked up speed, flattened another few walls along the way, and raised its trident.
“HEY, FANG-FACE, WHERE YA GOING?” he shouted, then muttered when it kept charging away, “Great, a giant snake with ADHD.”
In the wreckage behind the snake, Nick could also now see the remaining soldiers that had followed the big mamba into the maze. About a third of the original force appeared to have regrouped and were rushing through the rubble, trailing their leader by no more
than a few seconds now. Larger groups of soldiers were spreading out into other sections of the maze, and he noticed more than a few of them were activating secret passages that let them bypass whole sections of the maze uninterrupted.
“Aw crap,” said Nick.
Will continued running behind the bear, cruising over the rubble of the first wall. As he hurdled over the crumbled remains of the second, he realized that the snake king was headed back their way and was only a couple of sections away on his right. For the first time, he was close enough to smell the thing, and it wasn’t a scent he would soon forget—metallic, dominated by the tang of rancid blood and the smothering scent of ammonia.
He could also hear the shouts and roars of the trailing soldiers in the near distance behind it and, even more distressingly, all around him. The big snake had taken down so many walls by this point that his minions were quickly closing the gap.
Then the idea that had first taken shape in Will’s head back at the trapdoor presented itself, fully formed.
That’s it.
He immediately threw a thought to Elise: Get out of the maze as quickly as you can. Straight line.
Elise leaned forward and shouted as loudly as she could into the bear’s left ear: “WILL SAYS TO KEEP GOING STRAIGHT AND GET US OUT OF HERE FAST!”
“OH, DOES HE?” roared the bear, turning to look back at her. Elise saw that the bear’s head was bleeding and bruised in many places. “WHAT DOES HE THINK I’M DOING NOW?”
“I MUST SAY I THINK IT’S AN EXCELLENT IDEA,” added Ajay, flopping up and down with every stride like a bull rider coming out of his saddle.
“THEN WHY DON’T YOU GENIUSES TRY SMASHING THROUGH A FEW WALLS?”
“OKAY,” shouted Elise. “MAYBE I CAN HELP.”
Looking ahead, she saw the next wall in their path fast approaching. Elise focused, drew in a deep breath, and blasted out a cone of sound ahead of them. It cracked the stones and then completely smashed through the wall just as they reached it. The bear lowered his head for an impact that never came; the wall was already gone. As they passed through, the bear threw back his head and Elise and Ajay felt a deep vibration rumbling through the bear’s back; they realized the bear was laughing.