from the incredibly abrasive winds of the Glass Dunes, not to mention that the sleds themselves had only two moving parts.
I had hoped to ride them right up to the entrance of the Labyrinth, but clearly that was not to be. It would be a shame to disassemble them, but there was no help for it. Given this new development, I knew I’d need the etherium.
We might have to fight.
“What’s wrong?” Baltrice’s voice came to my mind just slightly muffled by the anti-grit screen I had tweaked into her earpiece-a smaller and lower-powered version of the screens that protected the gravity sleds. Channeling the extra magics had forced me to almost quadruple the size of the earpiece and to build in a support band that Baltrice wore around her head. Not fashionable, perhaps, but it would keep her alive.
I would have preferred to reserve that etherium for other uses, but she was unwilling to use direct mind-to- mind communication, and considering for whom she worked, I couldn’t blame her. “There a problem?”
Zombies ahead, I sent, to keep Doc out of it, but he’d already seen what I had in the mirror. “Zombies?” Doc said. “Are you kiddin’ me? You’re worried about zombies?”
“Can you count?”
“Sure-two, four, eighteen, carry the twelve-urk. Hot festering crap! There’s like a million-uh, a million six, give or take a couple thousand.”
“My estimate was a million two, but you have better eyes-eye-for this sort of thing, even though you’re using mine. We both could be off by as much as a million, or even several,” I said, “because there’s no way to tell how many are already inside.”
Baltrice dismounted her sled and walked over. She reached up to pull the earpiece. I said, “Leave it.”
“What in the hells for?” she said with a skeptical squint. “I hear you fine.”
“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
