The Flame in the Maze (19 page)

“Oh, please,” Melaina snapped, days after their return. “It's bad enough that the Goddess is trying to consume us—must we put up with your
love
, as we prepare to die?”

“We will not die,” Theseus said, before Chara could reply. He was standing with one leg on a block of stone. Polymnia was propped against the same stone, sideways, bound and silent. The only sound Chara had heard her utter was a broken, trailing cry, when she and Asterion had come back. He hadn't even glanced at Polymnia, then or since—or not that Chara had seen, anyway.

“Remember: I have called for the ship,” Theseus went on. “The mountain could yet shift enough for some of us, at least, to escape it; if the gods are good, we will reach the sea and the ship will be waiting to return us to Athens.” As he spoke, a section of the wall above him disintegrated in a streaming shower of rock; he ducked and ran a few steps, over the buckling ground. Polymnia hardly flinched as the rocks struck her.

“Escape,” Melaina scoffed, shaking her head. “Oh, my Prince: the mountain will keep shifting, yes, and we'll all be crushed.
This
is where the gods will have us end—not Athens.”

“No,” Alphaios said, “he might be right: if the ground keeps moving like this, and if we can stack more rocks on top of each other, we might be able to—”

Flame spewed from one of the corridors, and Alphaios had to leap out of its way.

“Yes,” Melaina said loudly, over a hiss of steam, “we obviously have so much
time
to build this rock ladder of yours.”

“Is it wrong to hope?” he demanded. Melaina made some retort, but Chara didn't hear it; she was looking up at a strange, flickering shadow.
One of ours
, she thought,
all twisted and stretched by the firelight—
but as soon as she thought this, she knew it wasn't.

“Quiet, all of you; look!” she cried, and pointed. All of them looked, except Polymnia.

“It's from
outside
!” Alphaios said, as the shadow grew on the crumbling stone at the top of the chamber. “It's coming in!
Down
! What . . . ?”

Chara clutched Asterion's slippery hand with her own and waited.

Icarus had never known such darkness. He'd always been able to find the sky, when he'd been too long indoors and his flesh prickled with longing and feathers. And the sky had never been this dark: there were always stars and sometimes moon, sometimes lightning, and drifts of silver cloud that taunted him because he couldn't reach them.

When he and his parents had been seized during the attack on the ship that was supposed to bear them away from Crete, they'd been thrown into the hold of a different ship. It had been dark there, but some sunlight had crept between the timbers; Icarus had been able to see his father's teeth, bared in the smile he wore whenever he was puzzled, and his mother's slender fingers, wrapped around his own downy arm.

“If they're pirates,” she murmured, “they'll soon find out that none of us have anything to take.”

“Not pirates,” Daedalus murmured back. “Not sure what, but not pirates.”

The sunlight was gone by the time the ship docked. Shadowy figures blindfolded them and bound their wrists. “Icarus?” Naucrate called as someone tugged her away from him. “Don't be afraid . . .” He wanted to call back, “Mother, I'm not a child—I'm not afraid!”—except that he
was
. His legs shook so badly, when he was finally pushed out onto solid ground, that he thought he might fall. His calfskin boots had come unlaced, and they slipped off his feet as he shuffled to stay upright.

What
do
they want with
us
? I don't even have my boots, any more—though Mother might have brought a few of her alabaster jars?

Even with the blindfold, he could see things: tiny orange blurs that must have been lamp- or torchlight; darker smudges that might have been people, shifting in and out of what passed for his vision. He stumbled where he was driven, by hands and harder things, maybe the wooden ends of spears. The first place was part slippery sand, part knobbly stones—probably a beach. The next was a staircase up a cliff; he knew this because, when he listed, someone growled, “Straighten up, man, or you'll end up in the sea,” and because he could hear this sea, pounding and hissing to his left, spattering him with spray. Just as his lungs and legs started to burn, the steps turned into a path that was flat and hard-packed. “No stopping,” the same voice growled, as whoever owned it thrust at him again, sharply, between his shoulder blades.
Pirates would have killed us as soon as they found out we had nothing to steal
, Icarus thought, his chest tightening even further.

They ripped his blindfold up over his head so quickly that he felt strands of hair go with it. His wrist bonds fell away at the same time. The world lurched around him; he flapped his arms and tipped forward, into what he saw too late was an abyss made of sky and water. “Whoa, there: that's not the way down,” said the same voice, as hands wrapped around his arms and tugged him away from the cliff's edge.

Daedalus was at Icarus's right shoulder, blinking at the white-crested waves far below. His teeth were still bared, but not in a smile. Naucrate was beside him; as Icarus tried to catch her eye, she rounded on one of the six men who stood behind them in a ragged line. “Explain yourselves!” she spat.

The one nearest Icarus laughed, and the rest of them did too, loudly, as if they were making up for not having done so immediately. Their loincloths were plain, their weapons unadorned, but Icarus thought he recognized two of the faces. Before he could try to puzzle this out, a new voice bellowed, “Silence!”

King Minos strode into the glow of the torches.

Daedalus's laugh was high and wavering in the quiet. He didn't turn to look at the king. “My old friend,” he said, when he'd finished laughing. “I wondered why you'd let us go so graciously.”

Silver-orange fire kindled beneath the skin of Minos's neck. Icarus watched it spread up beneath his jaw, pulsing under the dark hair of his beard. “I couldn't let you go at all,” he said. “Old friend.” He waved a smoky trail through the air. “Take them down,” he said, and there were hands on Icarus again, pushing him to sit, prodding him to turn and flatten so that the stone of the edge ground into his belly and his legs flailed in empty air. He lowered his legs and poked at the cliff with his bare toes and found an indentation that was barely a step—but the man above him said, “That's it: down you go,” and Icarus went, groping and shaky. He tried to ignore the wind that buffeted him, but couldn't: he sprouted feathers as he always did, when his body felt called to the sky. The ones on his arms tickled his cheeks.

Another pair of hands steadied him, as his feet settled onto something that felt like ground. The hands turned him so that he was facing the chasm once more—and he saw that he was on a narrow ledge. “Here,” the man beside him said, and pulled him along for a few paces. Icarus pressed his back to the rock as his father descended, then his mother. “Steady, now: wouldn't want you taking a tumble before you get to your fine new quarters.” The man grinned—or perhaps it was more of a leer. His face was pockmarked and sallow in the starlight.

“Theron?” the king called from above them, and the pockmarked man shouted, “Ready, my Lord!”

A strangled shout drifted down; a body followed it, and another, another, until all six of Minos's men had fallen, flailing, past the ledge and into emptiness. Icarus didn't hear their bodies meet the water; the waves were too loud. His own voice, circling wordlessly in his head, was too loud.

Minos dropped onto the ledge with a grunt that Icarus did hear.

“Monster,” Daedalus said, quite calmly.

The king shrugged. Silver-red light bloomed on the curve of his shoulder. “The fewer people know about this, the better. Do you not agree, Theron?”

Theron bent his chin to his chest. “I do, my Lord.”

“Lead on, then!” the king cried, as gaily as if he were summoning his people to a feast. Theron grasped Icarus's arm and shuffled along the ledge, and Icarus followed. He kept his eyes on his own feet; if he'd looked at his parents, his dizziness would have pitched him into the sea.

After only a few careful paces, Theron said, “On your knees.”

Icarus eased himself down, his back to the emptiness. He saw a low, rounded door in the cliffside. Rusty bolts; rusty lock, already unlatched.

Push him
, Icarus thought.
Turn around and push both of them: nothing good is waiting behind this door.
But he couldn't move—not until Minos said, “In you go,” and Theron set his hand on Icarus's head and pushed
him
.

Theron's torch flickered off a low, curving ceiling and root-encrusted walls. Icarus crawled until he reached an open space: a cavern with a soaring ceiling that glittered with crystal veins and hardened drippings of something that looked gold. There was a low, flat rock in the centre, and an opening that might have been a jagged doorway beyond the reach of the flame—he saw it for only a breath before his parents pressed in behind him.

“Theron?” Minos said. His teeth glinted in his beard. “The bonds.”

“Back on your knees,” Theron said to Icarus. Icarus glanced at his mother, who shook her head helplessly, and then at his father, who was rocking a bit, his eyes closed. Icarus knelt. Theron crouched behind him and tied his wrists behind his back. As Icarus thought,
Gods and gulls—so tight—my wrists must be bleeding
, Theron thrust him onto his side. He lashed once, twice, like a fish in a net; the third time he felt his feet hit something hard, and heard Theron grunt.

“Stop,” snapped the king. “It will go even worse for you if you struggle.”

There's nothing I can do
, Icarus thought, and went still. Theron bound his ankles. With a jerk that made Icarus's teeth knock together, Theron tied the ankle and wrist bonds with yet another length of rope. Icarus gasped as his back bowed inward. His hands and feet were already prickling; soon they'd be completely numb.

Naucrate cried out and Daedalus bellowed as if someone had hurt him, but Icarus couldn't see either of them. He blinked grit out of his eyes, and the king's legs swam into focus. The king's legs, bending; the king's face, angled sideways so that it was level with Icarus's. Minos's cheeks were glowing with pinpoints of fire—stars scattered on flesh. He put out a finger and stroked the feathers that had sprouted along Icarus's shoulder.
Don't move
, Icarus told himself, as his insides roiled and squirmed.

“Your god has made you a monster,” the king murmured, “just as Asterion's made him. May you both think on this, in your deep, dark holes.”

He rose and swivelled on his heels. Icarus craned and saw him staring down—at Naucrate and Daedalus, no doubt. He stared for a very long time. At last he arched his brows and waved an orange and silver hand languidly. “Sleep well, children,” he said, and laughed. A moment later the torchlight was in the passageway, twisting the men's shadows; a moment after that, the door clanged, and all the light was gone.

No time and all time passed, in this darkness Icarus had never even imagined. No one spoke, and all of them did, in hushed, urgent voices.

“Even your underground workshop wasn't this dark,” he whispered to his father. He could smell Daedalus beside him: sweat and urine and blood. He tried to remember that workshop, which had always frightened him, a little. It had been hot—the air, and the water that lapped over his feet, stirred by the beasts that lurked beneath it. But there had always been daylight, above and behind him; if he held his arm up, its hairs and feathers turned gold.

He couldn't lift his arms, now; couldn't even feel them, except when he ground his wrists together. He did this several times, because the knife-cut pain reminded him that he had a body.

“No,” Daedalus said, after a silence. The word was vague and soft; Icarus wondered if his father even knew that he'd said it.

After a longer silence, Naucrate said, “They're not done.” Her voice was raw. Icarus had seen her cry only once, when he was five, and his sister had been born and died, in the same day.

“The king—he's wanted to hurt us since I spurned him, all those years ago. His plan for us will be terrible, cruel beyond anything we can imagine. I'm sorry,” she breathed, and this time it was Icarus who said, “No.”

He rolled from his right side to his left, gasping at the pain. That was all he could do. There was no way he'd be able to get to his knees, let alone his feet—not trussed as he was. He rolled again. Dirt and stones stuck to his cheeks and lips; he spat and spat, but the grit was between his teeth, coating his tongue. He tasted blood.

No time and all time; nothing but the dark. He felt the weight of sky, pressing at the rock above them, and at the rusty metal door. He
heard
it, pressing on his ears—and then he heard the screech of lock and hinges.

Light wavered at the edge of the chamber.

“Turn away,” Daedalus said. “Don't look at him.” The three of them lurched and scuffed and lay still, in a tight, curved row. Icarus stared up at the stone wall nearest him. Its bands of ochre and grey glistened with moisture that made his throat constrict with thirst.

“Go closer, Daughter,” the king said. “Go and see this secret that is now ours.”

Icarus turned his head toward the king's voice and had to close his eyes against the brilliant blur of orange, gold, silver and red. When he opened them and squeezed his tears away, Minos was standing by the flat stone.

He rolled his head and saw her: towering, too bright, too beautiful.

“Ari.” He hardly recognized his own voice. He felt a bead of fresh blood well between his lips. He flexed the talons at the end of his fingers and heard them scrabble weakly at the dirt.

Ariadne turned to her father. “The pirate attack,” she said. “Was there one?”

He smiled down at her. “Oh, yes. The ship went down—after my men got these three off. Just before it burned. It sank, and everyone else with it. But these three . . .” He was smiling down at Icarus and his parents, now. “They deserved more.”

Daedalus lifted his head and spat. He'd probably meant the mucus to land on the king's feet, but instead it clung to Daedalus's chin. “And now,” he rasped, “you have come to give us this ‘more.'”

Minos's laugher echoed off the cavern's walls and up into the emptiness above them. “I have,” he said. “And my daughter, who deserves to know this secret, will be here to watch.”

A sour taste surged into Icarus's mouth as Minos spun on his heel and strode back toward the cavern's opening. “I thought about starting with Naucrate,” he said as he picked something up from the ground there, “but I have reconsidered. I believe I will start with the great and clever Daedalus.”

He walked back. His hand was wrapped around a hammer—one that Daedalus or Karpos might use to work their colossal blocks of stone. Minos's other hand closed around Daedalus's collar and hauled him up and over to the low, flat rock. Daedalus choked, and his bent-back body lashed like a worm in a beak. Icarus groaned.