Chapter 30 The Silb Maze

  On September twenty-fourth Mozez gave the two heretics a grand send off, complete with feast and speeches. He wanted his people to know that he, too, respected the young miracle man, and that accordingly he was sending him away to become Emperor of the East. The people soon caught the word ‘emperor’ and it was with this title that Clay arrived at the mainland next day.

  He and Zendor left their ship on the northeast shore of the Maigathal and found waiting for them a train of carts and carriages drawn by oxen, a troop of a hundred soldiers as escort, and a crowd of curious Perg peasants. The black plague was not yet very severe in this country town, so the people—hearing of a young emperor—had dared to assemble.

  Clay saw to it that Zendor was concealed under the awning in the back of their two wheeled carriage, and then seated himself by the driver and waited impatiently to be off. In the meantime, Pergs crowded close.

  An old man bowed low and, identifying himself to Clay as the town’s Arch, asked, “How can we save ourselves from the plague, Your Eminence?”

  Clay was distracted by a noise behind him, where Zendor was rousing himself to shove away some people at the back of the carriage. When would the wagons start moving? Where were the soldiers?

  “What?” he said to the Arch.

  “The plague, good young Emperor, how can we ward off the plague? It’s here in our village, come from the south. My brother’s granddaughter died with the black swellings at her throat, fell down and died in just a few minutes.” The old man held forward something worn on a string around his neck, a paper tied up in a knot and decorated with signs of the zodiac. “We bought these charms from a wandering doctor who said that no one who wore them had ever contracted the plague.” The old man began to cry. “The girl died wearing one.”

  Clay’s specialty was military history, but he had picked up a few other matters along the way. This sounded like the bubonic plague.

  “Give us some talisman, Your Eminence.”

  Clay shook his head stiffly. “No—no, just kill the rats.”

  The old man looked at him curiously.

  “No, really, it’s carried by the fleas on the rats, so just kill all the rats.”

  The Arch thanked him and withdrew just as the soldiers finally came from wherever they had been lingering and drove the crowds back from the wagons. In a few minutes they were rolling onto a broad, stone-paved road that angled northeast.

  “You OK back there, Zendor? I thought you were having some trouble.”

  “I stopped them from stealing your bag,” Zendor answered, “but they pulled out one of your shirts from the Old World.”

  “They stole my shirt?”

  “No just yanked off a few buttons before I got it back.”

  “Don’t worry about it, then, if that’s all they got.”

  They rode north in cooler weather, admiring the changing colors of the leaves. Little happened along the way. The road was good and the escort large and well-armed, so that although once they heard a rumor of a plotted attack by mountain bandits, Clay did not take it seriously. After reaching the main north-south artery, or Royal Road, they rolled quickly along with the Titans always on their right. (Clay, who had never seen mountains, got a stiff neck from staring at them.) After several days of this, the mountains fell away at the opening of the Sidder-phar, or Iron Valley; and here there were more towns and, now and then, a glimpse of the Long Wall that sealed the valley from the East.

  By Mozez’s plan, Clay was not going directly through one of the wall’s gates, but would first visit the city of Dowerkass on the north side of the valley. At this capitol city lived Aaron, Archon of Prowts, and to him Clay brought letters of introduction from Mozez. Aaron was to advise him and send him on his way.

  However, late that afternoon of October seventh, Clay began to get disturbing reports from his Thalschorian escort. Talking with the people of the land, Mozez’s soldiers had learned that the Gatekeepers of the Long Wall had been ordered to prevent Clay from passing east. A reward was said to be offered for him. Also, it was said that they were being followed by some of the Prowts army, troops who had fallen in behind them after Clay had crossed the border. It looked as if Archon Aaron did not trust the young Pretender.

  Clay crawled into the back of the carriage and tried to get advice from Zendor, but the Unknown King had sunk into a half trance. He sat with his hood pulled back, his hair streaked with silver and his face a darker blue than Clay would have thought possible for someone living. Though he talked freely in spurts, it was a babble about souls and thrones and princes that meant nothing to Clay. Once only, Zendor’s eyes seemed to clear as he looked directly into Clay’s face, gripped his shoulder, and said something intelligible.

  “Pray for your sister,” he said. “She has killed two men, and now she wants to go home. It isn’t time for that yet.”

  “How could you know about Simone?” Clay said evenly. He thought Zendor had lost his mind.

  “She will speak to your ancestress tonight,” he answered cryptically. “Pray for Simone. Her faith is weak.”

  “Fine, I’ll pray for her,” Clay said, “but what about us? It looks like Archon Aaron wants to trap us. What should we do?”

  “Your sister—”

  “No! What should we do?”

  Zendor pulled his hood back up over his bent head. “Your pardon, Emperor. I don’t know.”

  “So now you call me Emperor,” Clay said irritatedly. “Did you finally make your mind up to that? I’m not ‘slave boy’ anymore?”

  “Your pardon. I was very, very wrong.”

  Zendor would not say any more, so Clay crawled back onto the front seat and glanced up at clouds building to the southwest, threatening a thunderstorm. He noticed that the road ran parallel to remnants of a wall and asked his driver about it.

  “That’s some of the Old Wall, Your Eminence, that was the only one back before the Long Wall was thought of. In those days, centuries ago, the Interpreter did not allow them to build any closer to the Trans-Titanites for fear of defilement. When they built the Long Wall, they took many of the stones from this, so what with its age and all, there’s not much left. But there’s a stretch ahead of about two, three miles that’s intact. Twenty feet high and hardly a stone missing.”

  “So we’ll be walled in on the left,” Clay said, “and the Long Wall not far off on the right. It’s like entering a tunnel.”

  He fetched his binoculars and, standing on the swaying carriage seat, looked back over the awning.

  “Best to sit down, Your Eminence.”

  “I can see those local troops of Aaron’s we’ve been hearing about,” Clay said. “They were supposed to be a mile behind, but they’ve gained on us.”

  Through scores of military history books and as many mapboard war games, Clay had schooled his mind to think as a soldier. All this paper experience told him that some very real Prowtsian troops would be waiting for him a mile or two up the road. Very soon, the Old Wall on his left would be solid—already the ruins they were passing were more substantial—and then the troops behind would advance quickly on his procession’s rear. The equation was simple: two parallel walls; troops sealing both ends.

  Clay went back to Zendor again and found him sitting hunched over and reciting to himself, “The track of her paw prints went endlessly on....”

  “Zendor, we’ve got to get out of this procession, or the track of our paw prints stops here.” He grabbed his bag and hauled up Zendor by one arm. “Come on, it’s high tail it west, or we’re trapped.”

  He pulled the older man out the back, where their boots hit the ground at the same time as the first, big rain drops. Already, their view of the more distant wagons was blurred by hard rainfall.

  “Go on!” Clay shouted to his driver. He waved on the next wagon, “Go on, don’t stop!”

  He led Zendor up the roadside slope and through a gap in
the ruined wall, and as he did, noticed that this was one of very few gaps left before the wall became solid. They had bailed out just in time.

  “The Raza Staltara was high as the stars,” Zendor recited as they fled across a bean field in the growing downpour.

  “Kindly shut up, Zendor. Where are we going? That’s right, you don’t know. Oh man, this is the worst yet!”

  Soaked to the skin, he stumbled along, aiming vaguely for a large mound or building on the horizon, all the time knowing that the following soldiers would probably search there first. But at least the rain was helping to conceal them, and darkness was coming.

  In twenty minutes, they topped a rise, where Clay was able to look down across the structure he had seen from afar. Even with a reasonably clear view, he could not puzzle out what it was. Great, crumbling walls were laid out in concentric circles covering an immense area. Here and there, radial walls connected the circles, but irregularly, and the circles themselves were incomplete. At the center was a rough tumble of stones and vegetation that might at one time have been a building. The site was deserted.

  “It’s like a maze,” Clay said to Zendor. “Do you know what it is?”

  “The soldiers,” Zendor said quietly and without looking back.

  Clay looked. Yes, Aaron’s soldiers had apparently finished a quick search of the captured wagons. Some had passed the Old Wall and were pursuing them. He dragged Zendor down the slope, and their overview of the maze was lost. As they came closer to the structure, they could see only the rough exterior of the outermost wall. To their left was some sort of entrance with a short tower set well back within it. Directly ahead was a place where the wall had collapsed down to a low jumble, and on their right was a long, unbroken stretch more than fifteen feet high.

  The broken down portion of the wall provided a steep, rough slope up to the wall top. Clay decided to climb up and use the wall top as a road, for if they entered the maze at ground level, he feared they would be trapped in a dead end. He went up on the loose stones, slippery and dangerous, still tugging Zendor along. The King went on reciting his poem. The soldiers were close now. They had certainly been seen.

  Once atop the wall, Clay led Zendor more quickly over the comparatively smooth surface, but it was a bit dizzying because their way was only six feet wide and the winds were strong. The thunder roared. Night, coming with the storm, was engulfing them in darkness.

  “The maze Silbs concealed her within their curved walls, the Fijata Imalda Lusu.”

  “Shut up, Zendor! They’re climbing after us, can’t you hear them? Will you turn around, we’re going this way!”

  Clay dragged him along several more yards. This was no use. By himself he could have run far along the wall top by now. By himself.

  “This is the place,” said Zendor. “This is where they hid her, oh, so long ago.”

  “I don’t care! What? It doesn’t matter now, you’ve got to run. Run, do you hear me?”

  Zendor stood still and looked into Clay’s eyes. “She was buried like a seed. There’s a cave beneath the central building, and they buried her alive there to hide her from the Mangusisska, from Zeel. It was—”

  “Shut up!”

  The thunder rolled.

  “—for nine days. ‘For she hid in the earth and she waited her time—’”

  Clay backed away from him, sobbing, looking past him in the direction that they had come. The dark figures of the soldiers were on their level now and trotting toward them with spears at the ready. One of them shouted something.

  “But they brought her up alive,” Zendor said, still with his back to the soldiers. “Alive from the grave! They—they say it was while she was buried that her fur turned white. But she....”

  Clay continued to back away. Now the soldiers came to the King and seized him. They stopped there, in a jumble of voices, trying to decide in the dark and the rain whether they had the young man they wanted.

  Clay turned and ran.

  He passed by two wall tops radiating off to his left, for he intended to follow the outermost wall all the way around to the far side. He calculated that he could move faster than the armor wearing soldiers as long as he did not get lost on the twists and turns of the inner maze. He would outrun them to the western side and there hope to find some way down. As for Zendor...

  A small light flickered far behind him, and a moment later he heard screams and yells.

  “The blue plague! It’s the blue plague!”

  In his near desperation, Clay almost smiled. Perhaps they would let Zendor go. But then what would happen to the Lost One? And what if they killed him on the spot? Before he could consider that, Clay stopped himself just short of a sheer drop, for the wall turned left and inward toward the center of the maze. Before him, where more outer wall might have been expected, was another entry, another squat tower. He cursed himself for not having remembered seeing it from the grassy rise.

  With no other choice, he turned inward, and soon, facing him, he could dimly see the wall that formed the second concentric circle. He told himself that he would get on this wall, turn right again, find another cross wall, and so get back to the outer ring. Perhaps this was a piece of luck, really, since the soldiers might become confused and so lose him. His mysterious blessing was holding, he would escape again.

  In the midst of such thoughts, he came just short of pitching off into emptiness. He steadied himself on the edge. This cross wall simply ended here without a turn or a way down. Many yards ahead stood the second circle wall he had thought to gain. It flashed through his mind that for him this was a dead end in every sense of the phrase. That is, that this was his end, and he would soon be dead. He could turn back and be impaled by a spear. Or he could drop off the wall and break himself on the stony ground below. Or he could stay still until they reached him.

  Suddenly the night seemed to become blacker—he could scarcely see at all—and drained of strength, he sank down on his hands and knees. In dread of the steep drops so very near on three sides, he tried to clutch at the stones under him. He could hardly breathe. He shivered and writhed, knowing that in minutes and possibly seconds the Prowtsian soldiers would seize him. Would they be angry because of Zendor? Would they throw him off the wall and down into the blackness below? They would!

  Nothing mattered but to stay on the wall. To stay here in soaked, trembling agony was infinitely preferable to the abyss that he imagined below him. Life was sweet. He wanted to live and nothing else.

  Sharalda. She had taunted him, asking if he cared for anything but himself. “No!” he answered as if she were present. “Nothing but myself. Myself and to live. I didn’t want to come here. That was Raspberry’s idea. And she died.”

  With that last thought, his normal mental functions ceased. He dropped to his elbows, buried in a crushing fear more horrible than any physical pain. Little by little, terrified of the wall edges, he turned around in this posture to face the way he had come. He saw no light now, but over the rain he could just hear the soldier’s voices at a distance. As if to add to his torment, they neither came nearer nor went away. He stared dully ahead at the few yards of wall top ahead of him, having no intention or even thought of moving.

  Presently, something landed at a short distance—a blur of white. It came a little closer and then stopped. Clay’s mind had entered a place of its own, a place where some things, a few things, were clear and undeniable. Only they were things he could not possibly have known, things detached from the present. He began to speak to the white apparition.

  “Sharalda said that nobody knows if Imalda Lusu lived to see Zeel’s end. But I know she didn’t. When she knew she was about to die—when she knew—she hid herself all alone in a cave where no one knew where she was.”

  “This is not to the point,” the white thing said in a high voice. “I believe you are Clay. I’ve found you.”

 
“And that way,” Clay went on, “that way, all the Sarrs would fight on because they could always hope that she’d appear again, as she’d done so many times before when she had been rumored dead. So she chose to die alone and in the dark, so they could live and be free. Now that was a bad choice, I think.”

  “I must ask you to leave this topic,” said the white thing. “You’re in danger.” It moved closer.

  “In her last moments,” said Clay, “she must have wished she had someone else there—when she couldn’t see anything but the wings of, the wings of the—”

  “This is immaterial,” said the white thing. “Have you lost your senses? Death is very close to you.”

  “I know, I know. That’s why it’s so relevant,” Clay said. “Because I’m seeing the same thing she saw then.”

  “And what is that?”

  “Ka Flis Daltom.”

  “No,” said the white thing, suddenly speaking in Kreenspam as he had. “I’m not the Angel of Death. I am Angfetu, messenger of the Lusettas.”

  It came to within two feet of Clay’s rain-soaked face, and he saw the white wings of a bird and small head of a mammal. It peered at him. He remembered Bekah’s having told him of a Sarr named Angfetu that had been looking for him at Kulismos.

  “Can you make a light?” it asked.

  “What would I want to do that for?” Clay answered in its language.

  He pulled himself up on his knees. His near blackout was apparently over, for he could see much farther.

  “If you can’t, it would be a waste of time to explain,” Angfetu said sedately.

  “Well, I don’t dare. The soldiers will see.”

  “They’ll be here soon, regardless. If you’re the Emperor Clay, then you must fight them.”

  “I’m Clay—but I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I see you have a sword.”

  “A decoration. I don’t know how to use it.”

  “All the more glory. A mural on a wall of the White Palace will commemorate your last stand. I, of course, will fall beside you.”

  “Like funny you will. You’ve got wings.”

  The Lusetta chose to misunderstand Clay’s meaning. “No, please, Your Eminence, don’t order me to save myself. Give me a small share in this noble and hopeless battle, all the more noble because hopeless.”

  Clay did something he could not have imagined himself doing a few minutes before: he laughed.

  Angfetu added, “Don’t think that you’ll need me alive to tell others the heroic story of your death. My friend Unknown King Pindar is on the other side of this maze and will no doubt learn the whole story from the soldiers. Though they may throw our bloody bodies to the dogs, still our memorial services in the Forest Obscure will be magnificent and—”

  “Now who’s getting off the point?” asked Clay. He began rummaging through the bag slung at his side. “Be quiet for a minute while I think.”

  Angfetu complied while Clay pulled out his tape recorder and army surplus flashlight. He unscrewed the bottom of the flashlight and pulled out the color filters. Then he unscrewed the glass face in front of the bulb.

  “What’s taking the soldiers so long?” he asked Angfetu.

  “I think they’re afraid,” the Lusetta said. “Pindar says the Pergs have a superstitious fear of this place. They have many legends about it.”

  Clay inserted the blue color filter and put everything back together. He stood up, flashlight in one hand and tape recorder in the other, and walked back along the way he had come, Angfetu following. Reaching the outer circle, they turned southward. At last he could see the soldiers, more of them than before, crowded together on the wall top. Someone was shouting up to them.

  “Go on! What are you waiting for?”

  “We don’t know which way he went, Captain,” answered one of those on the wall. “There are three ways. Why don’t we just surround the whole structure and find him in daylight tomorrow?”

  “Are you afraid of the ghosts of this place?” the captain barked. “You cowards, I’ll have the lot of you in irons if you disobey me. Don’t you know the Archon has promised a fortune to those who capture this Pretender? Now divide into three groups and get on with it.”

  “But sir, he may have the blue plague. The first one did. You’ll find his body below where we threw him down.”

  “He’s not down here. It’s soft grass, he probably wasn’t hurt much. Now go on. I’m taking my men on around to make sure he doesn’t escape onto the road on the other side. Just follow your orders.”

  Clay leaned down to Angfetu. “Go find the man they threw off and send him around to the other side, to what’s his name.”

  “To Unknown King Pindar, Your Eminence. But Your Eminence, am I not to die with you?”

  “No. Then when you’ve got him going the right way, come back up here and lead me across the maze. You know the way?”

  “Yes, I perched in one of the trees at the center during the worst of the storm and so observed the pattern closely. But Your Eminence, you’re overly optimistic if you think you will ever again require my services.”

  “Just do what I say. Go.”

  Angfetu soared off into the night.

  The captain below the wall had marched his men away, and the leader on the wall was trying to get his men divided into groups as ordered. This stopped when they saw Angfetu fly off. Then Clay came closer and was noticed.

  “Menelaus, there he is!”

  Spears pointed toward Clay.

  “You there!” shouted the same voice that had argued with the captain. “Come here and give yourself up.”

  Clay put on his most ghastly grin and flicked on the flashlight, held just under his chin so that the filter turned his face blue and his hair green. At the same moment he turned on the tape recorder at full volume. The voices of Moldy Socks screamed through the night, and their bass reverberated.

  The effect was immediate. Hardly pausing to scream, the soldiers fell back on each other until the wall shed them like eggs off a globe. In seconds they had all fled away or fallen. Clay turned off the flashlight, turned the recorder’s volume down to a tolerable level, and strolled forward to the nearest cross wall. Singing along with the music, he entered the maze.

  Zendor was quite willing to listen to the Lusetta and even to nod amiably.

  “Go around along the wall?” he echoed. “Oh, I see. And the Emperor will meet me on the other side. No, I’m limping from my fall, but nothing’s broken. ‘Then her spirit flew higher, by heaven’s design, than a flis or a Guardian flew....’ Do you know any verses of that? I’ve forgotten most of it. Ouch! What have you done? You bit me, you little beast. Ow! Yes, I’m on my way, I’m going. Leave me alone, I’m going.”

  Unknown King Pindar had actually given up hope, but he remained on watch in the road on the western side of the maze. He leaned down on his mount and spoke to her while rubbing the wide, flat space between her ears.

  “Well, Kathoo, the army has him by now, and I’ll have to try to talk Aaron into not turning him over to the Farjans. That won’t be easy, since they’re offering a huge ransom. Has Aaron ever turned down a bribe? That’s an interesting question, isn’t it, Kathoo? Steady, dearie. Yes, I see it, too. Angfetu is driving something toward us, a man I think. How in Ourans can that be?”

  He turned the huge mega-sloth and rode her closer to the wall.

  “Who is that down there? Angfetu, what have you got?”

  “Not the Emperor,” the Lusetta screeched. “But he’s coming after. Excuse me, but I must go back to him. He isn’t all the way across the maze yet. I’ll return with him quickly.”

  She flew away.

  Pindar looked down at the dark figure below him.

  “And who are you?”

  “Zendor.”

  “Zendor?”

  “Yes, Pindar.”

  “Well, how are y
ou, old man?”

  “I have the blue plague.”

  “Um. I’m sorry. But you might have predicted it, the way you were going. Here, I’m letting down the rope ladder. Climb up. Kathoo has a triple saddle.”

  Zendor scaled the shaggy side and strapped himself into a saddle behind Pindar’s and facing right.

  “A good job getting the Emperor here, Zendor. I didn’t know he was in the Fold at all until Angfetu came looking for him. I’d only heard rumors. Look, we’ll get you into the plague colony at Antiochia. Unknown Queen Doris can look after you there. It won’t be so bad.” Pindar patted Zendor gingerly on the shoulder.

  “No, I won’t last that long,” Zendor said. “I’m about to enter the second stage.”

  “What? Not now, not this minute?” said Pindar nervously.

  “No, I think it may be a few more days.”

  “Oh, all right. I’ll get word back to Prizca, of course. How are her eyes, by the way? No better, then? I’m sorry. Maybe we can—wait, here he is.”

  Clay came running up, panting. “Soldiers close behind,” he said. “Yikes! What is this?”

  “Climb the ladder and get on,” said Pindar, as Angfetu landed beside him. “Explanations later, Your Eminence.”

  Before Clay had reached the last empty saddle, Pindar was turning the mega-sloth and they were on their way across the fields. Soon the rain fell hard again, obliterating Kathoo’s tracks.