transformation. Dill couldn’t see anything but the wall just an inch from his face, its scarred stone illuminated by a peculiar grey light. Whenever he moved his eyes, the light moved, too. His own gaze was the source of the illumination.
Memories crawled through the back of his mind like flies.
Trapped between walls…
And a smell?
The scent reminded him of beeswax. The more he thought about it, the surer he became. All at once the smell seemed to intensify, growing stronger until he was absolutely certain: it was the scent of polished wood.
He recalled this from before.
And a surge of panic overcame him.
Dill struggled wildly against his prison, bucking and shifting his shoulders. He failed to free his body, but he managed to lift an arm.
There, at the end of his index finger, grew a tiny white shoot.
Dill’s place within the Maze would grow from his own body. He was about to re-experience the torturous process that had haunted his dreams since his last return to the world of the living.
It would mean unbearable pain.
As soon as he thought about the pain, he felt it. The shoot atop his finger began to nip like a wasp sting. Dill cried out. He scraped the white stem against the wall, and gasped. He could feel the roughness of the wall through the shoot. It had now become a living, sensitive extension of his body.
This sensation brought with it a flood of darker memories.
He yelled in frustration, then pushed the stem against the wall, bending it back on itself.
It broke off and fell away into the darkness below, leaving a bleeding stub on his finger. Dill shivered at the pain and sucked his finger until the bleeding ceased. Even the wound tasted of beeswax.
He felt more shoots growing from his toes, pressing into the inside of his boots, but he couldn’t reach these. All he could do now was wait.
Time passed.
At some point Dill must have fallen asleep, because he was suddenly aware of opening his eyes and realizing that some sort of change had occurred. His body felt strange, awash with odd sensations. The previous pressure on his wings and chest had gone.
The walls had moved backwards a yard or so. He was standing on the solid wooden floor of a tiny stone cell.
Or rather, he was attached to the floor. A mass of slender white tendrils had grown out of his boots, bursting through the leather like the roots of a tree. These shoots had buried themselves in the wooden floorboards on which he stood, fixing him to the spot.
A flash of memories returned.
Dill moaned. The floorboards had not been punctured after all. They were extensions of the roots themselves. Each tendril had hardened and flattened as it had grown outwards, turning from white to the colour of deeply polished oak. He had grown a floor under his feet.
He could not move his trapped feet, and so he collapsed forward onto his knees with a wail of utter despair. And then a curious thing happened. It felt as though he had struck a part of his own body. He could feel the pressure of his own knees through the wooden floorboards, the weight of his body pushing down. The grain of the wood was as tactile as his own skin.
Dill knelt on the floorboards that were not floorboards, and gazed feverishly around the tiny space. Where the planks met the wall, a skirting board had partially formed. He could sense the texture of the stonework behind it.
The angel was turning into a room.
It was all too much for Dill. He sobbed and smashed his fists against the floorboards, then winced at the pain it caused him. He tried to pull his feet free, but they would not shift. Eventually he lay down and wept.
At some point he slept again.
This time he woke up to find himself lying on the floor of an elegant wood-paneled chamber. Tall shutters covered the windows. A crimson and black patterned rug lay upon the waxed floorboards. There was a bed, a heavy carved four-poster draped with dark blue velvet, a poppywood sideboard supporting a vase of white flowers, and a dresser with three oval mirrors. On the dark paneled walls hung a dozen or so portraits of people Dill did not recognize. They were young men and women dressed as Deepgate commoners: maids and potboys and labourers. They were all staring at him. Dill found their gazes unnerving, and he looked away. From his position on the floor, he spied a tall doorway leading to another room-as large and richly furnished as this one.
A strange sensation crept over him, the same queer feeling he remembered from before. He could feel the grain of the floorboards under his palms, while at the same time he felt his own hands pressing down, as though he now had four hands, each pair pushing against the other.
In desperate panic he glanced back round. The tendrils that had grown from his heels and toes had thinned and darkened, becoming as hard and black as reeds. They still connected him to the floorboards. This opulent chamber was still a part of his body. It had simply grown around him.
Tentatively, Dill tried to move his feet. At first they would not budge, but then, after some effort, two of the brittle shoots snapped. Dill winced as blood leaked from the sheared roots, spilling out of both his heel and the floor. He paused, gasping for breath, before shifting his foot again. Three more of the weird shoots cracked, spattering the floor further with spots of blood. Now he had freed his left foot entirely. He stared in horror and fascination at the woody growths that sprouted like talons from his toes and heel.
He reached out and touched the place where the broken roots protruded from the floorboards. As his fingers brushed the stems, a shiver of pain coursed through him. The wood remained as tactile as his own tender flesh. He could feel the dull throb of blood leaching out from the floor, the touch of his own fingers against the wounded roots. The sensation filled him with revulsion.
With a sharp jerk of his leg, he freed his other foot.
The pain came from everywhere: from Dill’s bones and teeth and from the drapes hanging from the four- poster bed, stretched like taut veils of hot skin. He felt the tightness of the oval mirrors in their frames and wanted to shut them like eyes. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t move any part of this environment, yet he could feel every inch of it. The room was alive around him. It
The floorboards continued to bleed under him where he had torn his feet free. Warm iron-scented blood soaked into the rug. He glanced up to see the wood panels in the walls expand outwards and then contract, as though they were breathing. The spars between them itched and grated against each other, hurting him.
And then he became aware of other chambers beyond this apartment he had grown around himself. Other rooms all around him, pressing against Dill’s own.
The Maze, he realized, was not just a place where dead souls went, for the damned created Hell around themselves. Every last brick and nail was sensate, a part of someone’s living soul.
The Maze of Blood had been aptly named.
A sudden pounding headache struck Dill, as though a hammer was striking his skull repeatedly. He gasped and squeezed his temples before he realized the pain was coming from somewhere else. He could hear the sound of knocking. Someone was thumping on the door to his apartment.
He had a guest.
17
