The Flame in the Maze (13 page)

For a moment Phoibe's eyes were blank; then they went wide with horror. “That was a
person?
” she gasped.

Melaina laughed. “What did you think—that the monster was feasting on wild boar? Of course that was a person—an Athenian, no less—but by all means, eat.”

Phoibe sat down hard on the altar stone.

Ligeia picked the leathery strip up and folded it into her mouth. “It'll be hard for you to find anything else,” she said, chewing, as Phoibe whimpered and Melaina snorted. “Unless you go into the altar chamber. But I wouldn't do that.”

“Isn't this the altar chamber?” Theseus said. He was walking to the offering tables that stood around the stone, picking up goddess figurines and setting them gently down, but Chara saw that he was glancing at Ligeia with half-lidded eyes.

Ligeia swallowed the last of the Athenian and shook her head. “Oh, no. No.”

“Take us there,” Melaina snapped.

“
Melaina
,” Theseus said. They stared at each other, still as statues themselves. Chara thought,
Gods, if only I knew what he was saying to her.

He turned back to Ligeia. “Take us there,” he said, evenly, and smiled.

She stared at him. Opened her mouth; closed it. At last she smiled back at him, with her yellow teeth and her no teeth. She lifted one of her feet and stared at its blackened sole. She set it down again, and walked slowly back to the bridge. The rest of them straggled after her.

Phoibe whimpered again, when she was halfway across the bridge. “I can't,” she said breathlessly. “I'll die. We'll all die. There's light in this place—Master Daedalus saw to that. You don't need me. My Lord Theseus: let me lie down here. Leave me here.”

Theseus caught Phoibe as she sagged. “We must be strong,” he said, as the others came up behind them. “The Princess Ariadne has set me a task, and I will not disappoint her.”

“The Princess Ariadne isn't here,” Phoibe said—but she let him draw her up and shuffled on again, with his hand against the small of her back.

“The Princess Ariadne is not here, no,” he said. “But she has helped us immeasurably—and she will be waiting for us. Thank all the gods for her—she has—”

The darkness came down suddenly. One of Chara's feet was raised, mid-step. She swayed so that she wouldn't stumble, and groped for the bridge's handrail. The fire's glow had vanished. The light in the corridor across the chasm had vanished. The only light was the faintest sheen of silver, rippling like slow waves in the black.

“Melaina!” Theseus called. “
Melaina
! What are you doing?”

Melaina had been mere steps ahead of Chara; Chara had heard the dragging of her injured foot. There was no sound at all, now—just silence, vast and silver-dark. Silence and then a rhythmic, metallic sawing
.

Theseus bellowed into the air, into their heads; Chara doubled over, her own cries soundless beneath his.

Phoibe's godlight flooded the darkness, which thinned and squiggled away from them. Theseus was holding Melaina by the throat with one hand, and the ball of string with the other. Only her toes were touching the stone of the bridge. She was utterly still, except for one vein in her forehead, which pulsed with her heartbeat. Her eyes were on his; neither of them seemed to blink. A shard of obsidian lay glinting at her feet. Beside it lay one end of the string she'd cut.

“Explain yourself.” A whisper, hoarse and ragged.

“You promised you'd marry
me
,” Melaina croaked. “Remember? Remember how you did that, with your voice and your mind, the night before we sailed from Athens?”

What?
Chara thought—and then she laughed. She laughed so hard that she fell to her knees on the bridge. “Quiet!” Alphaios said from behind her. She could see real fire again, blurring with steam and tears. When her vision cleared, she saw Melaina standing on her own, both hands splayed at her neck. Theseus was leaning on the bridge in front of her.

“I remember,” he said. He leaned his forehead on his clasped hands. His shoulder blades, and the muscles that bound them and everything else, bunched and jutted.

“And?” Melaina's muscles and bones and skin were golden and smooth, so lovely that Chara thought again of Ariadne.

He straightened. “And you will knot the string together now, and hope that the knot holds.”

She knelt very slowly, as he walked back to her, tugging at the ball, trying to find its end. Just before her fingers closed around the end that lay on the ground, it leapt out of her reach. She stretched to grasp it but it leapt farther, and farther yet, and then, with a piercing whistle, it sped away from her, back along all the paths they'd taken.

“Godsblood,” Alphaios breathed.

Chara thought,
It always was like a living thing—like an earthworm, this time, cut in half, with both halves moving on their own. Oh, Icarus: I'm sorry—
even though it didn't matter. He was already dead, and she would be too, soon. For even if Ligeia
could
lead them back to the wall beneath the door, there'd be no way of climbing it.

Theseus walked past Melaina, who was staring at the place where the end of string had been. He went past her, past all of them; he stepped onto the ground above the reaching, sucking flames.

::
Where is Ligeia?
:: he said.

They waited for what must have been hours, Theseus pacing back and forth in the corridor by the fiery lake, while the rest of them sat against its walls. His shadow was always there, even when he wasn't.

“Why?” he hissed down at Melaina, on one of these passes. She stared back at him, her lips pressed together, and he made a snarling noise and set off again.

“She's gone,” he snapped when he returned. “She's gone, and she could have helped us—not that we would have even needed her help, if you hadn't destroyed our only hope of escape.”

“Yes, well, she probably would have left anyway,” Melaina said, standing up to face him. “She was clearly mad. And anyway,” she went on quickly, as Theseus drew a deep breath, “she obviously taught herself how to find her way around this place. Now so will we—without the
princess's
gift, which the wolf-girl claimed would be useless, eventually. If the gods truly favour Ariadne, and us, they'll show us another way out.”

Chara thought Theseus's eyes would burst from his head. He strode away again. This time Phoibe and Alphaios straggled after him.

Melaina sat down heavily beside Chara and wrapped her arms around her shins. She pressed her face against her knees.

Because the sound of Theseus's steps was unbearable, and because the other girl was too still, Chara said, “I'm sorry.” She'd said the same thing to Ariadne once, on her sixteenth birthday, when Queen Pasiphae had given Chara to her daughter as a gift. There'd been a storm, just before that; Chara and Asterion had been hunkered in the storerooms, feeling the thunder in the jars at their backs. “I'm sorry,” Chara had said to Ariadne, who'd been small and sad and angry.

For a time Melaina made no sound. Only when Chara stretched her legs out, preparing to rise, did Melaina raise her head. “He used his mind,” she said in a small voice. “He told me he'd never felt so drawn to anyone.” She laughed a high, trembling laugh. “It was sunset. Goddesses of love and fury—how could I ever have believed him? And why did he even bother letting me think he'd give me this?”

Chara leaned back against the wall. “Maybe he meant it,” she said carefully, evenly. “Maybe he means it every time he says it to someone.”

Melaina dragged the back of her hand under her nose and gave a brief, hollow laugh.

“Why
did
you cut the string?” Chara said.

Melaina was silent for so long that Chara shifted, preparing again to get up. “I didn't intend it to . . . But no matter. I cut it because he believed in it.” Melaina bit off another laugh. She stood and looked down the corridor at Theseus's shadow. She walked toward it—Chara counted eleven paces—and sat down. This time she stared straight ahead, her chin on her fists.

Alphaios hunkered down where Melaina had been. “She was poor, you know,” he said, very quietly. “Really poor. When Theseus told her he loved her . . . well.”

“Yes,” Chara said. “Well.” At last she got up. She walked past Alphaios and Melaina, all the way to where Theseus was standing, with his hands against the corridor walls.

“No more,” she said. “No more godmarked string. No more proposing marriage to poor girls and princesses. Now it's time to save a god.”

He raised his eyes to hers.
::I do not save. I slay—both men and monsters.::

“Take me to him, then,” he said, and walked away from her.

They heard no more wolf howls, though Theseus and Alphaios called for Ligeia until they were hoarse, and the mountain rang with their voices long after they'd stopped. They heard only the dripping, and the grinding of gears that kept them from finding water.

“I'm so thirsty,” Phoibe said once. They were in a cavern whose vaulted ceiling was impossibly high and covered in green points of light that looked like strange, sickly stars. The ground was a forest of stalagmites, some as tall as the grandest of the bull's horns atop the palace at Knossos, others tiny and needle-sharp against bare feet.

“So thirsty,” Phoibe said again, and slid down to sit at the base of one of the large stalactites. Chara saw some of the little ones sink into Phoibe's skin, and winced. “I can't keep going. And I'm too weak to use my godmark, if I need to.”

Theseus crouched next to her and put the back of his hand on her cheek. “We'll stay here for a bit,” he said. “You'll feel better after a rest.” Melaina sucked her breath sharply in through her teeth and took a few steps away from them.

Alphaios called then, from the far edge of the cavern. “Come and see this!”

Chara reached him first. He was drawing his finger along the smooth, lumpy black of the wall. “This mark,” he said as she leaned closer, “someone made it. Look—it's even and fairly straight, and it runs all the way to . . .” He walked slowly, and Chara walked behind him, her own fingertip following the deep groove. “. . . here.”

Their feet were touching the lowest step of a staircase. It climbed and turned, carved out of the thickest stalactite Chara had yet seen. She squinted up and up and saw that it became a bridge that spanned air and ended in a corridor whose mouth shone with crimson light.

“Maybe this line was someone else's godmarked string,” she said slowly. Melaina came up beside her; Chara saw her flinch, even though she wasn't looking at her.

“Yes,” Theseus said as he approached, with Phoibe clinging to his arm. “Another Athenian has given us a direction. But we cannot go there yet,” he went on. “Not until Phoibe is feeling stronger.”

“I thought you were all ready to charge about looking for the beast,” Melaina said, and Chara winced at the weak, helpless anger in her voice.

Theseus was gazing down at Phoibe. “We wait,” he said, and wiped gently at the sweat that shone on her closed eyelids.

Melaina gave a laugh that echoed around them, and limped into silver-flecked darkness that was partly of her own making. A moment after she'd disappeared, Alphaios said, “My Prince: shouldn't we go after her?”

Theseus looked up from Phoibe's face at the green lights that weren't stars. He said nothing. Another moment passed, and another.

In the silence, they heard singing.

It wound toward them like water—and even before she saw the song's silver flowing out of the rock above them, Chara knew whose it was.

“Polymnia.” She could barely hear herself. “Polymnia!” she cried, over and over, as the others gaped and Melaina walked slowly back to them.

No
, she thought as she shouted,
it can't be; she was so frightened, so sure of her own death—
and she saw the girl as she'd seen her four years before: lying in front of the mountain door, singing a frightened, hopeless wash of silver into the morning air.

There was no fear in this song. It teased—loud, soft, joyous, strong—and wrapped their limbs in silver thread. The threads tightened around Chara's arms and neck and the silver seeped into her blood, and she had to dig her fingernails into her palms to keep from lying down and staying there.

“Who's Polymnia?” Alphaios murmured, after Chara had shouted herself hoarse and the silver had faded back to silence. They were all blinking as if they'd just woken up.

Chara's throat had already been dry and sore; now she could hardly speak at all. “She was in the first group of Athenians. Ligeia's group. I spoke to her once, just before she was pushed inside. I was sure she'd die quickly.”

“What a beautiful godmark,” Phoibe said, almost dreamily.

“If she's survived this long,” Alphaios said, “she knows her way around. Just like Ligeia. We have to find her.”

Melaina scowled. “Such keen insight you possess, Alphaios.”

“There is no way of knowing where the song was coming from,” said Theseus. “Its strands appeared from the rock on all sides of this cavern, from low to high. All we can do is continue on and hope she sings again.”

“And what of poor, weak Phoibe?” Melaina sneered.

Phoibe lifted her head and thrust her thin shoulders back. “I'm ready,” she said, as Theseus took her hand.

Staircase to bridge to corridor; one corridor branching to two, to three; dead ends and turnings upon turnings—and still there was no song.

They found a trickle of water on a wall carved with octopus and flying fish, and lit by a blue light that streamed down through the crystal ceiling. They'd been taking turns following the same line that had led them from the stalactite cavern—and it was Chara who cried, in her low, ragged voice, “Water!”, when her fingers passed through it, then fumbled back again. They pressed their lips and tongues to the wall, one after the other. Melaina was last; she drew back and gasped, “There's none left!”—and, somehow, there wasn't.

They were thirstier than ever, after that. Chara was so hungry that she felt only an empty sort of pain in her middle. She remembered how Ariadne had stopped her from eating sweets at feasts. “You mustn't get fat,” the princess had said, holding a tray just out of Chara's reach. “I wouldn't be able to abide a fat slave.” Chara remembered the figs and honey cakes on the trays, and the way the sunlight had turned Ariadne's hair to dark, burnished wood, and her skin to bronze. She remembered crouching under a table with Asterion, when everyone had gone except the other slaves, who laughed and gossiped and took no notice of them. Chara had whispered, “Honeyed cakes are in my claws,” and Asterion had hissed back, brokenly, because he was laughing, “And now I'll put them in your jaws.” He'd crushed the honey cakes against her open mouth and she'd choked, laughing too, heedless of the way the last of the sunlight had glinted from his horns. Heedless until now, when all she could do was remember.

The heat was increasing—or maybe it just felt that way because there wasn't any more water. They no longer slept soundly; they merely fell, when they couldn't walk any further, and curled up while the others straggled back to lie down near them. Phoibe clung to Theseus, sitting, lying or standing. Silver light flared from her skin whenever she was afraid, which was often. Melaina mocked her, but Chara saw her own eyes dart nervously whenever a strange sound came from the passageways and chambers that pressed down around them.

“Polymnia!” Theseus shouted once, his head thrown back, his fists clenched. “
Polymnia!
Ligeia!
” The echoes of his voice lapped and died against the stone.

Still there was no song.

Strangely enough, it wasn't Phoibe who collapsed first. They were trudging along another corridor, this one twisting and narrow. Chara heard the dragging of Melaina's injured foot behind her and then, suddenly, she didn't. She turned and peered into the gloom, tinged green by glowing shells set into spiral patterns, and saw Melaina fall.

“Help!” Chara cried over her shoulder as she ran for the other girl. Chara lifted her off the ground and into her lap. Melaina's head lolled and her limbs were limp; she was as heavy as a block of marble.
Wonderful
, Chara thought as the others straggled up behind her,
we're all so tired that we'll go down in a big, heavy pile, and I'll be on the bottom, and Asterion will never find me, even if he passes by.

“Hold her head up,” Alphaios said, and Phoibe sobbed, and Theseus's mind-voice thrummed, ::
You are good, to have returned for her
::—and as Chara raised her head to command them all to be quiet, she saw a shadow shiver against the green-lit darkness.

“Look,” she said. Even though it was a whisper, Alphaios did, and Theseus, and Phoibe, who backed up against the wall and raised her hands and poured silver godlight into the corridor.

A woman was standing a few paces away from them. “Greetings, Athenians,” the woman said. “I am Polymnia. Do not be afraid.”

“Polymnia?” Chara said—though it couldn't be: she hadn't been a woman, and she hadn't held herself this tall and straight.
But that was years ago
, Chara thought.
So many years ago; just imagine what
he'll
look like, now.

Polymnia angled her head slowly, until her eyes were on Chara's. Her hair fell in glimmering red waves to her waist—far longer than it had been when she'd arrived on Crete, and far less tangled. Her hipbones jutted through her robe, which, somehow, was nearly white, and belted with a piece of torn cloth.

“Have we met?” Her voice was rough and rich. Chara tried to remember how it had sounded years ago, saying, “. . . Great Goddess's breakfast”—but all she truly remembered was her tears, and her godmarked singing.

“Yes!” Chara said, the word cracking. “We . . . the morning you were sent in here. And Asterion with you.” A long, silent moment passed. “Is he here too?”

Her belly and chest ached. Her ears roared with the rushing of her own blood—and yet she heard Polymnia when she said, “Yes. Oh, yes. The bull-god is here.”

Theseus took a step forward and Melaina stirred in Chara's lap, but Chara didn't look at either of them. “And you know exactly where? You understand this place? You can take me . . . take us to him?” She was panting as if she'd been running or diving; her body was slick with fresh sweat.

Polymnia smiled. “Of course.”

“Excellent,” murmured Melaina. She tried to lift her head but it fell back against Chara's thigh. “Then you'll take us to him . . . Prince Theseus will kill him, as planned . . . and we'll figure out a way to get out of here. Yes,” she went on thickly, waving a hand at Theseus, “you're right; shouldn't have cut that string.”

Polymnia's smile had vanished. She shifted her gaze to Theseus. “Kill him?” she repeated, very softly.

“Yes,” he said. As Chara drew breath to speak, his mind-voice lanced through her. ::
I told you I would think on this. I am still thinking.
::

Polymnia was still and silent for a moment.
She looks like she's listening to something
, Chara thought, and a cold prickle of dread made her feel abruptly, painfully alert.

“You will need food, then,” Polymnia said at last, smiling again. “And water. I will take you to these things.”

Melaina heaved herself out of Chara's lap and onto the ground. She twisted and thrashed, then lay on her back, gasping with laughter and tears.

“Great Theseus,” she finally said, so weakly that they all had to lean forward to hear, “you'll have to carry me.”

Polymnia went first, of course, and Alphaios after her. When the corridor widened, Chara moved up to walk beside him, and saw that his eyes were huge and dark, fixed on the sway of Polymnia's thin hips. “Alphaios,” she muttered, “remember: we know nothing of her.”

He swallowed. “I know,” he muttered back, and shrugged.

Polymnia walked swiftly around corners and along passageways that branched and branched once more. In a chamber ringed with obsidian columns and only a single doorway, she pressed or pulled something set in one of the columns, and a ramp ground down at their feet. She led them up one ladder and down another. When they tired and straggled (even Alphaios, with his huge, dark, admiring eyes), she called, “Nearly there!” in a voice so cheerful and certain that Chara felt her steps quickening. When their way was blocked by a wall, Polymnia said, “This will move soon; the mountain tells me so”—and some bleary, blurred time later, gears ground and stone shifted and the wall did move.

There was sunlight in the vast, round chamber beyond. Chara counted six shafts of it wavering far, far up the chamber's walls, as Alphaios and Theseus and Phoibe pushed past her. Sunlight. Water. Figs and olives and oatcakes spilled onto the steps of an altar carved with snakes.

Polymnia put a hand on her shoulder and Chara felt herself shake it away. “I'm sorry,” she said, her tongue sluggish in her mouth. “I don't know why I did that.”

Polymnia smiled. “Come,” she said. “You're safe now.”