“Feel that breeze? Remember what I told you about the sand?”
“Tezzeret, I fart harder than this breeze.”
“Well, don’t do it in my direction, then. If you remove the earpiece, it will deactivate your anti-grit screen. The glass powder on that breeze will instantly begin to abrade your corneas, which will not only progressively blind you, but it will hurt. A lot. And there is a very long vedalken word that I’m not going to inflict on you, which is the specific term for the permanently disabling lung damage caused by breathing the powdered glass in the desert. The powdered glass is why we call it the Glass Desert.”
“Aw, hells, Tezzeret, I know. You already told me eight times. It’s only-well, you know. Where I’m from, the stuff that’ll kill you is big and scary and makes loud noises and crap. This dying-from-just-how-the-place-is gunk just seems all wrong.”
“It may be. But there’s nothing you or I can do to make it right. Are you with me?”
“If I weren’t, I’d be blind and coughing, right?” She nodded toward the progressively higher rides of the dunes ahead. “What’s the deal on your zombies out there?”
“They don’t have to breathe, and they don’t need eyes. And there’re a lot of them.”
She shrugged. “Zombies burn.”
“Indeed they do, but that’s not the real issue. What matters is-well, to talk about it is pointless. I can show you from the top of that dune.”
“All right, juice up the sleds and-”
“No more sleds. We brought them too close to the Labyrinth as it is. We may have alerted those ahead.”
“And so we rode them this far why?”
I shook my head. “In the Glass Desert, accurate navigation is impossible. There are no maps, and there is no reliable measure of distance. A two-mile hike may take you ten miles from your starting point, or one, or leave you farther from your destination than when you began.”
“That’s why your scout thingies, right?”
“Exactly. And that scout thingie,” I said, nodding toward a metallic sunflash at the top of the farther dune, “is the last of them. We won’t need more.”
She frowned. “Don’t much like the sound of that.”
“Yeah, me too,” Doc chimed in.
“You won’t like the look of it, either.”
The Crystal Labyrinth stands at the center of a vast, deep bowl of sand known as the Netherglass, some 20 miles across. Today, that is; the dimensions of the Netherglass are as variable as any other distance in the Glass Desert. I am given to understand that the Netherglass never shrinks below a fixed minimum of four miles across-but only because to do so would make it impinge upon the Labyrinth itself.
Even from almost 13 miles away, the Crystal Labyrinth is of a wholly astonishing appearance. Its walls and roofs are white as milk quartz, with no stain or sully to be seen, perhaps because constant abrasion by the scouring winds of the desert erode and erase all substances that might otherwise darken it. The Labyrinth proper is a structure of twelve immense rectangular buildings, set precisely in a great ring about three miles across.
It is said the dimensions of the Crystal Labyrinth are the only constants in all the Glass Desert.
Each of the great structures is in fact a vast hall of twelve stories, each story containing one hundred rooms, with each room having from two to twelve doors. Six of the stories of each great hall are above ground, and six are subterranean, directly below the upper. The connections between the buildings are said to exist beyond normal space. There are thresholds within the Labyrinth that might connect the lowest corner of one hall with the uppermost of one at the opposite end-and if you turn back, often you will not return to the same chamber you left.
All I could uncover that described the interior of the Crystal Labyrinth was recorded by one Faltus Mack, the sole survivor of a quite large and well-funded expeditionary party some thirteen years before. His account speaks of walls, floors, and ceilings of glass, some transparent as air, some opaque as stone; of blazons and guide paths disappearing behind him as soon as he would quit a chamber; of walls that seemed to shift when he was not looking-though he never saw one move-leaving him unable to determine whether any room was in fact one his party had visited before, or a room of similar configuration wholly elsewhere. He also speaks of encountering other seekers, unfamiliar pilgrims, some of races unknown to Esper, speaking languages that cannot be transcribed in our alphabet. He speaks of meeting members of his own party, who were alive though he knew them to be dead, and on one occasion actually encountering himself, or some phantasmic doppelganger that claimed to be he, filthy, wild of hair, clothed in rotting rags, and speaking only disordered fragments of sentences. By the time Faltus Mack finally escaped, he was entirely mad, of course, but mere madness is not sufficient to impeach his account.
When I shared this information with Baltrice before our departure from Vectis, she became a bit dubious about our propects. “This is your idea of a vacation spot?”
“Think about the riddles,” I said. “ ‘When one is made of glass, everything looks like a stone,’ and ‘Where do you seek what cannot be found?’ The Labyrinth is literally the only place on all of Esper that Sharuum and her agents can never search; no one has ever reached the center and returned to the outside world. And, not to grind too fine an edge on it, it’s made of glass.”
“Oh, this just keeps getting better. You are one literal-minded sonofabitch, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” I said, “and we must operate under the assumption that Crucius knew this when he laid the trail.”
“How do you know it’s not just a practical joke? Or, like, demented rambling? I mean, come on, we’re talking about a sphinx, right? A crazy sphinx. Did you ever hear the joke about the sphinx who was so crazy that other sphinxes noticed?”
“According to Sharuum herself,” I said, “there is a sphinx of unimaginable power at the heart of the Labyrinth. She named him Kemuel the Hidden One, and she believes he is the oldest living creature on Esper. She is uncertain if this Kemuel reached the center by navigating the Labyrinth, or if it might have been originally built around him.”
“How nutty does this crap have to get before you just give up?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not sure I have any idea what nutty is anymore.”
“Got a mirror?”
I conceded the point. “You don’t have to go.”
“Yeah, sure. Then I’d have nothing to do but hang out and watch my boss’s hideous doom and crap. Include me out on that one, huh?”
“You are unexpectedly tender of heart.”
“Yeah, well, don’t tell anybody.”
“There is also this: the Crystal Labyrinth is by far the oldest structure on all of Esper. Descriptions of its exterior are among the earliest writings of the vedalken culture, which is vastly more ancient than the human. If Faltus Mack is to be believed, however, the Labyrinth behaves like a machine.”
“A machine to do what?”
I shook my head. “I can’t say. Kill people who get lost, certainly-but there’s no way to know if that is a designed function or if it is merely ancillary, like a side effect. This, however, is certain: If one wishes to deter intruders, one does not hide at the center of a maze. One does not build a maze at all.”
“What, now you’re thinking Crucius built the Labyrinth?”
“I am reserving judgment on that; I can only say that it is not impossible. I am certain that whoever did build it is a mechanist whose boots I am not fit to wipe.” I shook my head helplessly. “I don’t even have the words for how far beyond me-beyond anyone-the Labyrinth is. Crucius is the only being I can think of who’d even come up with the concept.”
“Woo. Crap. Damn, Tezzeret,” she said, “all these years I’ve been dead-bang positive that the stars’d burn out before I ever caught you being humble.”
“It’s not an attitude I cultivate.”
“You’re scaring me.”
“Myself as well. It’s Crucius. He’s like… staring into an infinite abyss. Anything you can imagine might be in there, and what’s actually in there you probably can’t imagine.”