Liljana, who was having a hard time breathing in the fetid air, turned to Ymiru and said, 'You didn't tell us we'd find a labyrinth here.'
'I didn't know,' Ymiru said. 'Morjin must have had it built to confound assassins or anyone pursuing him out of the city.'
'Well, it's certainly confounding us,' she said. 'How are we to find our way through it?'
But he didn't have an answer for her, nor did I or anyone else. Finally, Kane, who had tired of standing still, shook his torch at the corridor off to the left and said,
'Let's walk then, eh? What else is there to do?'
And so we walked,, as he had said. For a long time we wandered through the labyrinth's curves, which ate through the bare rock like dark, twisting worms. After a while we grew very tired. Liljana's torch, its oil all burned, was the first to sputter out. We used the sooty end of it to mark the wall where we stood, in the hope of orienting ourselves should we come upon this part of the labyrinth again. But the black char seemed lost against the blackness of the rock here. Soon, I thought, all of our torches would die, and then we wouldn't be able to see any marks upon the walls
– or even the walls themselves.
'It's cold down here,' Maram grumbled. 'My feet are wet and sore. And I'm tired.
And I'm hungry, too.'
We were all hungry, and so we paused to sit down on a dry patch of the cold stone floor and eat a quick meal. We shared some hard cheese and battle biscuits with each other, trying to ignore the pervasive stench in the air as we swallowed these rough foods. We tried to swallow back our belly-churning fear, too, which was growing with the darkness all our torches flickered out one by one.
After a while, after we stood yet again and resumed our wanderings, only two torches remained afire. I took one of these to lead the way while Kane, in the rear, took the other. Ymiru, Maram, Master Juwain, Liljana and Atara walked in the darkness between these two sickly yellow lights.
At last we came to a large, circular chamber at what I guessed to be the labyrinth's very center. There our last torch died, and much of our hope with it as we huddled together in the utter blackness. 'Ah, this is the end,' Maram muttered, 'surely the end.'
Master Juwain, whose tenacity seemed to grow with the severity of our plight, said to him, 'Surely this is not the end. Surely we've come to the center of this maze, and that must be counted as progress.'
'I think not, sir,' Maram said. 'Didn't you notice that there was only one way into this chamber? And so only one way out. Now we'll just have to go back and get lost all over again.'
His logic drove Master Juwain to silence. For a moment, we all stood there in the dark listening to the sound of our breathing and the scurrying of the rats around us.
One of these tried to bite Maram again, and he shook it off with a desperate curse and shuddering frenzy.
'The rats seem to like you,' Atara said to him. 'Maybe they smell all that disgusting kalvaas you've spilled on yourself.'
'Ah, these accursed rats,' Maram said, shuddering more violently. 'I think they're worse than anything we found in the Vardaloon.'
He paused to do a breathing exercise that Master Juwain had taught him. Then he gave up and said, 'And this accursed place is worse than the Black Bog.'
Now it was my turn to shudder; I stood there in the black bowels of the earth wondering how we would ever escape from its endless twistings, especially if we could not see our way out of them. I was afraid that if we didn't escape from this city of dreadful night soon, I would begin to hate myself for leading us into it and more, hate the whole world for calling such dark creatures as Morjin into life.
And then, at last, I drew my sword. It glowed with a soft, silver light. It was not enough to fill the chamber and illumine its dark walls, but it brightened our spirits all the same.
When I pointed my sword upward, its sheen deepened, slightly. It was strange to think that the Lightstone might be so close, somewhere above us through half a mile of rock in Morjin's throne room. Morjin, I thought was near there, too. I could almost feel our hearts beating with the same poisoned blood and sense his mind seeking mine. This connection that he had made between us with a bit of kirax suddenly darkened my soul. For a single moment, I allowed my dread of him to take hold of me. As if I had drunk the foul waters running through the cold rock here, my belly filled with doubt. It quickly worked at me and split me open. And through this dark crack in my being, beasts and demons came for me. At first I was so shocked by this sudden attack that I didn't realize that it was an illusion. Black, birdlike things with razor talons and the faces of those I had slain fell at me out of the air.
I cut at them with my sword, and its touch caused them to burst into flame and scream so pitifully that I thought I was screaming myself. And then a huge shape lunged through the chamber's doorway. It had great, golden eyes, scales as red as rust and hooked claws that sought to tear me open. Through its slashing white teeth, it breathed fire at me, as the dragons of old were said to do. I swung my sword against tts writhing neck, and watched in horror as its bright blade shattered into a hundred glittering shards. And then the fire caught me up in its incredible heat and began burning through my mail, melting the steel into a glowing lava that ate into my heart, burning and burning and…
'Val!' someone called to me.
A sudden shimmering radiance poured out into the chamber. It was Flick, I saw, spinning about in swirls of silver and iridescent blue. Once again, he had returned to us. And beneath his reassuring form, Master luwain stood in front of me with his varistei pointing at my chest It flared a deep and bright green. I felt its healing touch, like cool waters, quench the evil fire inside me. And then my mind cleared as I slowly shook my head.
Kane, his sword drawn, stood next to him looking at me intently. I remembered that in my madness, I had swung my sword at him – and at my other friends. Only Kane's great skill in parrying my wild slashes, it seemed, had saved them from being hacked in half.
'Val, what happened?' Master luwain asked me.
'That… is hard to say, sir,' I told him. I looked at Alkaladur's bright blade. 'When my sword first flared, there was a moment of hope. And I saw it leading us to the Lightstone. But there the Red Dragon waited, too – always watching and waiting.
And my hope turned into despair.'
Master Juwain nodded his head gravely and said, 'There is a great danger for you here – and for all of us. Danger beyond death or even capture and torment. This turning that you have told of: it seems that the Lord of Lies has a great talent for poisoning even the strongest of trees and twisting good into evil.'
He went on to ask me if I had been practicing the exercises he had taught me, particularly the light meditations.
'Yes, sir, all the time,' I told him. 'And my sword has helped me. The silustria has. It has shielded me all through the Nagarshath, And so I began to think that the battle against the Dragon's lies had been won.'
'That battle can never be won,' Master Juwain told me. 'And it is lost most surely the moment we think that it is won.'
Kane tapped his sword against mine, and its steel rang throughout the semi-lit chamber. 'So, even the best of shields is useless if it's lowered, eh?'
I nodded my head that this was so. 'Thank you for reminding me.'
'As you've reminded us,' he said, smiling fiercely. 'From the first, you've had more fire in you for finding the Lightstone than any of us, and we wouldn't have come this far without it.'
His deep eyes searched in mine for faith, and Master Juwain, Atara and the others looked at me in this way, too. They looked to me to find a way out of this seemingly endless labyrinth and see our way toward the Lightstone.
And suddenly I knew that there was a way out. In my connection to the dark corridors of Morjin's mind, I became aware of a twisted logic that ordered its turnings. It was the logic of his life and all the works of his hand, this labyrinth among them. For hours upon hours, I had wandered through part of it. Its curved passages and nodes were recorded inside me as if my blood were a liquid, living day. And now, as I gazed at the bright, silver crystal of my sword and my mind opened, in a flash of light, I saw the whole of the labyrinth from this chamber at its very center.
