Scott Lynch
Selected Scenes from the Ecologies of the Labyrinth
I
Up above, the sky is a sun-washed silken blue that deepens into forever and the bees are going from blossom to blossom while life is warm. Yellow grains dust their bodies.
II
Akayla Sethrys’s boot hits the door just below the lock.
She’s been kicking these things in for eight or nine years now and she knows where to put her emphasis. She favors a pair of bespoke basilisk leather and steel sabatons for this purpose; today some additional luck is with her in the form of rotten wood. Jagged wet splinters fly as the broken door slams inward, peeling out of its frame. Another dungeon chamber breached.
“Onward!” cries Sethrys, crouched over her shield, blade up for quick thrusts past the rim.
Pinpoints of ominous red light flicker in the darkness. Fleshless eyes. Something stirs, rattles, rises. A dozen white frames of the dead. Human bones invested by insatiable ghosts, hungry in the dry sockets of their teeth, hungry in the hollows of their time-leathered marrows.
Sethrys doesn’t face the skeleton onslaught alone; behind her come Felix with his silver censer spilling threads of blessed smoke, Gorandal with their father’s father’s hammers, Morladi with her incantations. A wave of bone meets metal and magic. The skeletons are hungry for blood, but the adventurers are hungrier for glory. Seven major chambers into this sunken, mold-racked ruin and their enthusiasm has yet to dim. It’s not even time for lunch.
Sethrys slams, smashes, howls. Her blade flashes silver. With a triumphant cut she parts one skeleton’s head completely from its column of vertebrae. The skull whirls, the sputtering flames in its sockets painting roses of red light on the walls and ceilings as it flies spinning through the air, out the door-
III
Mullion Galdarsson has sifted bone before. Dead bone, certainly, but also not-quite-dead bone, more often than he’d like. This stuff, with the animating witchery freshly knocked out of it, hasn’t entirely settled yet. He slaps at a few clutching fingers, knocks a yellow-white hand away from his ankle like a grim, dry kitten. Legs, ribs, hands, hands, more legs, a spine, a skull-that worries him for a moment, but it gives him no trouble. No light in the eye sockets, no bite left in the teeth. No precious metal fillings, either.
Mullion sighs. The current mess might not prove a very lucrative one. Behind him, his sister Arna and his sometimes-friend Tylo the Sulk are crouched on shattered and parted bones as well, muttering and slapping defensively, moving occasional items of interest into the pouches and wicker baskets that hang on them all like ornaments on festival trees.
Somewhere ahead, the lunatics are plying their trade, thoroughly enjoying bloody combat with whatever fresh horror Mullion and his little crew of gleaners will be sorting in about twenty minutes. Lunatics, the successful ones at least, don’t have time to scour the trash of their own passage. That would cut into valuable combat time. Once the traps are disarmed and the monsters are beaten down, locals like Mullion and Arna and Tylo slink in behind them to sort and count and store all the wretched, dirty little scraps that might be sold or reused.
Jeweled necklaces? Gold bars? Oh, of course not. The lunatics always manage to spare a moment to snatch that sort of thing for themselves. Gleaners fetch up the bent and rusty coins of baser metals, the dusty weapons half-rotted in ancient racks, the glowing mushrooms and bile-yellow fungi that might be of interest to the alchemists (or just as often might not). Scraping walls, shaking junk, prodding crevices with wooden poles, sneezing in clouds of dust that mostly don’t kill anyone later (cousin Halvar had been the strongest of them, worth three Tylos, but when the remnants of his lungs had come up through his nose, they’d looked like tomato jelly)-that’s the work of gleaners. And the damnable thing is, even allowing for dust and darkness and the occasional dead cousin, the pay is considerably better than working the mills or fields back home.
Mullion, in his career, has pulled fangs from giant spiders and scooped the steaming rinds of carnivorous slimes and shaken tiny treasures out of enough crap-crusted goblin clothing to outfit a battalion of the little bastards. Every year when the warm months roll in, the lunatics insist upon making circuits of all the fanes and labyrinths and ruins they can find, often delving deeper into old explorations, or reopening places that have fresh infestations of horrors. Sometimes the lunatics don’t come back from their “adventuring,” and sometimes their gleaning crews are lost along with them. It’s foolish, Mullion supposes. These dark and haunted places really ought to be burned out and exorcised for good. But wherever you have dungeons, you get parties of lunatics with their boundless enthusiasm, and the lunatics employ gleaners, and they visit the taverns and stables and smiths, and the countryside needs all the coin it can get. Mullion has two children and an aging mother to account for, and many would say he bears a light burden.
As he sets a useless skull aside, Mullion is surprised to feel a sudden chill in the stones beneath his fingers. Curiously, gingerly, he tests the clammy patch with a fingertip. Oh yes, a distinct sensation of coldness. Ill circumstance, that. Not for the likes of him to poke at. He rises on creaking knees and takes a step back-
IV
You must be exquisitely careful with a spell for traveling through time.
You think you understand that before you fuck it up, but you don’t.
Not the way you understand afterward.
Anthar-Kaladon, Lord of the Bleeding Gems, Arch-Thaumaturge, Defiler and Deliverer of Thrax, could have been more precise with his incantation. Heavenly bodies rotate on their axes and move through space as they move through time. There are equations to deal with this, but Anthar-Kaladon admits to some impatience (indeed, a certain moderate impatience is often concomitant with brilliance). Rather than a triumphant appearance under the bright gleam of the moon in the proper year for his intended ritual, he materialized in the middle of a stone wall some three hundred feet down, in one of the annexes of this minor dungeon complex he built twenty or thirty centuries ago.
Now, that would have been the final line in the biography of most wizards, but Anthar-Kaladon, nobody’s gods-damned clown, had already traded in the tired squish-squish of his mortal frame for cold, elegant mineralization. For a creature of undying stone, the act of teleporting face-first into his own architecture, while frustrating, was not quite a permanent setback.
He hasn’t been able to move, but he hasn’t been entirely inert-while complex sorcery is out of the question, Anthar-Kaladon has been able to intone a simple teleportation spell at about half of one-millionth of his usual speed, his voice a whisper so low, it is entirely lost in the sounds of the settling earth. Every few years, he completes an intonation and teleports a few feet up, invariably embedding himself in a new section of wall or floor, but after so many years and so many castings he’s almost made it, surely. Possibly this might even be the last time, and then ...
Something flits across his awareness. A sensation of life and movement overhead, separated from his outstretched fingers by just a few inches of stone. The feeling vanishes, unsurprising. His immortal form is antithetical to life. Nothing with a beating heart can long tolerate his proximity. Still, this is exciting. Inches! Inches between him and the creature above! Oh, let it be this time. This time for sure!
V
Down goes the basket and Yrmegard just knows they’re not going to be happy with something in it. They’re never satisfied, bloody lunatics.