“Yeah,” Holly croaks. “Please.”
I look at the four passageways. They’re identical.
They’re not. One looks a little lighter. Holly, there’s only one way through the labyrinth, right?
“Yeah.”
I take the passage that leads to the light, turn right, and ten paces in front of us is the Dusk, filling the tunnel like starry, slow-motion water. There are voices in its smothered ululation. It doesn’t hurt, they say in unlabeled languages, it doesn’t hurt …
“What are we doing?” Holly’s voice rings out.
I turn back. This is the way we came in. The Dusk’s following us. We came to the crossroads — here. I step us over Constantin’s body. Picture Jacko’s maze in your head again. The pendant.
“I’ve got it. Straight on.” I obey. “Left. There’ll be a turning to the right, but ignore it, it’s a dead end … Keep going. Through the next right.” I pass through the tunnel, thinking of the Dusk spilling over Constantin’s body. “Left. On a few paces … On a few more, we’re near the middle, but we have to go out in a circle to avoid a trap ahead. That’s this next left. Go on, through the arch … Now turn right.” I walk a few paces, still hearing the slosh of the Dusk catching up as the ever-shortening side tunnels and dead ends drain off less and less of its mass and energy. “Ignore that gap to your left … Now turn right. Over the crossroads. Hurry! Turn right, turn left, and we should be—” The archway before us is black, not black with shadow, but solid black, black like the Last Sea is black, a blackness that absorbs the chakra-light I shine from Holly’s palms and bounces nothing back.
I step into—
— A DOMED ROOM of the same dead Mars-red walls as the labyrinth, but alive with the sharp shadows of many birds. The room is lit by the evening light of a golden apple. “My …” Despite all we’ve seen today, Holly’s breath catches in her throat. “Look at it, Marinus.” The apple hangs in the middle of the chamber, at head-height, with no means of support. “Is it alive?” asks Holly.
I would say, I subspeculate, it’s a soul.
Golden apples I’ve heard of in poems and tales throughout my metalife. Golden apples I’ve seen in paintings, and not just the one Venus holds in the Bronzino original that Xi Lo knew so well, though that golden apple strengthens my suspicions about this one. I’ve even held an apple wrought from Kazakh gold in the eleventh century by a craftsman at the court of Suleiman VI, with a leaf of emerald-studded Persian jade and dewdrops of pearl from the Mauritius Islands. But the difference between those golden apples and this one is the difference between reading a love poem and being in love.
Holly’s eyes are welling. “Marinus …”
It’s our way back, Holly. Touch it.
“Touch it? I can’t touch it. It’s so …”
Xi Lo created it for you, for this moment.
She takes a step closer. We hear air in feathers.
One touch, Holly. Please. The Dusk’s coming.
Holly reaches out her well-worn, grazed hand.
As I egress from my host, I hear a dove trill.
Holly is gone.
THE SHADOW-BIRDS VANISHED with the apple, and the domed chamber feels like a rather dingy mausoleum. Now I die. I die-die. But I die knowing that Holly Sykes is safe, knowing that a debt Horology owed her has been paid. This is a good way to finish. Aoife still has a mum. I invoke a pale gleam and subask Hugo Lamb, Why die alone?
He uncloaks and melts out of the air. “Why indeed?” He touches his badly gashed cheek. “Oh, shit, look at the state of me! Bloody dinner jackets. My tailor’s this Bangladeshi chap in Savile Row, and he’s a genius, but he only makes twenty suits a year. Why did Xi Lo only leave the one magic ticket back to the world?”
I transverse to where the golden apple hung. Every subatomic particle of it is gone. Transubstantiation’s draining. The Blind Cathar kept getting fed fresh meat, remember. Xi Lo sustained all this on batteries. Why didn’t you take the one magic ticket back?
He dodges the question. “Got any cigarettes on you, Marinus?”
I’m incorporeal. I don’t even have a body on me.
A trickle of Dusk appears from the black doorway, like sand.
You’ve sourced, lied, I subsay, groomed, lured, murdered … “They were clinical murders. They died happy. Ish.”
… as Marcus Anyder, you even killed your old self.
“Do you really want to spend your final moments interviewing me? What do you want? Some big dramatic mea culpa?”
I’m just curious as to why a predator, I subspell out the obvious, who has thought about nothing but himself for so many years, and who only last week gloated about killing Oscar Gomez, should now—
“You’re not still angry about that, are you?”
— should now nobly lay down his artificially suspended life for a common bone clock. Go on. I promise I won’t tell a soul.
The muttering of the Dusk is growing. I push the voices away.
Hugo Lamb dusts his sleeves. “You scansioned Holly, I presume?”
Extensively. I had to, to locate Esther Little.
“Did you find us in La Fontaine Saint-Agnès? Holly and I?”
I hesitate too long.
“So you had a good gawp. Well. Now you have your answer.” More Dusk spills in, promising us it won’t hurt, it won’t hurt, it won’t hurt. A third of the floor is covered now. “Did you see her lay into Constantin? Irish blood, Gravesend muscle. Talk about breeding.”
You stood by and watched that?
“Never been the have-a-go-hero type, me.”
Constantin recruited you. She was the Second Anchorite.
“I’ve always had a problem with authority figures. Rivas-Godoy turned right when we entered the labyrinth, so that was him finished from the outset, but I followed Constantin. Yes, she recruited me, but she bought into the women-and-children-first doctrine bigtime. So I cloaked myself, got lost, heard Holly, followed you … And here we are. Death-buddies. Who would have thought it?” We watch the sandy Dusk fill the domed chamber, getting deeper. I’m nagged by a thought that I’ve missed something obvious. Hugo Lamb coughs. “Did she love me too, Marinus? I don’t mean after she found out about my little … dalliance with a paranormal cult that scarred her family and attempted to animacide her brother. I mean, that night. In Switzerland. When we were young. Properly young. When Holly and I were snowed in.”
Two-thirds of the floor is covered. Lamb the corporeal has sixty seconds of life before the Dusk reaches him. I can hover a little longer, until the dome is full to the roof, if I really want to.
Then it hits me, what I’ve missed. Hugo Lamb missed it too. Even Constantin missed it. Dodging falling masonry, trying to avoid the Dusk, we all forgot an alternative exit. I could sublaugh. Will it work? If the Dusk got into the Way of Stones and erased the conduit, no … But it was a long way down.
I subask Lamb, How much voltage do you have left?
“Not a lot. Why? Fancy a psychoduel?”
If I ingress you, we might have enough together.
He’s confused. “To do what?”
To summon the Aperture.
Sheep’s Head: 2043