Selected Scenes from the Ecologies of the Labyrinth

Mullion, in his career, has pulled fangs from giant spiders and scooped the steaming rinds of carnivorous slimes and shaken tiny treasures out of enough crap-crusted goblin clothing to outfit a battalion of the little bastards. Every year when the warm months roll in, the lunatics insist upon making circuits of all the fanes and labyrinths and ruins they can find, often delving deeper into old explorations, or reopening places that have fresh infestations of horrors. Sometimes the lunatics don’t come back from their “adventuring,” and sometimes their gleaning crews are lost along with them. It’s foolish, Mullion supposes. These dark and haunted places really ought to be burned out and exorcised for good. But wherever you have dungeons, you get parties of lunatics with their boundless enthusiasm, and the lunatics employ gleaners, and they visit the taverns and stables and smiths, and the countryside needs all the coin it can get. Mullion has two children and an aging mother to account for, and many would say he bears a light burden.

As he sets a useless skull aside, Mullion is surprised to feel a sudden chill in the stones beneath his fingers. Curiously, gingerly, he tests the clammy patch with a fingertip. Oh yes, a distinct sensation of coldness. Ill circumstance, that. Not for the likes of him to poke at. He rises on creaking knees and takes a step back-

IV

You must be exquisitely careful with a spell for traveling through time.

You think you understand that before you fuck it up, but you don’t.

Not the way you understand afterward.

Anthar-Kaladon, Lord of the Bleeding Gems, Arch-Thaumaturge, Defiler and Deliverer of Thrax, could have been more precise with his incantation. Heavenly bodies rotate on their axes and move through space as they move through time. There are equations to deal with this, but Anthar-Kaladon admits to some impatience (indeed, a certain moderate impatience is often concomitant with brilliance). Rather than a triumphant appearance under the bright gleam of the moon in the proper year for his intended ritual, he materialized in the middle of a stone wall some three hundred feet down, in one of the annexes of this minor dungeon complex he built twenty or thirty centuries ago.

Now, that would have been the final line in the biography of most wizards, but Anthar-Kaladon, nobody’s gods-damned clown, had already traded in the tired squish-squish of his mortal frame for cold, elegant mineralization. For a creature of undying stone, the act of teleporting face-first into his own architecture, while frustrating, was not quite a permanent setback.

He hasn’t been able to move, but he hasn’t been entirely inert-while complex sorcery is out of the question, Anthar-Kaladon has been able to intone a simple teleportation spell at about half of one-millionth of his usual speed, his voice a whisper so low, it is entirely lost in the sounds of the settling earth. Every few years, he completes an intonation and teleports a few feet up, invariably embedding himself in a new section of wall or floor, but after so many years and so many castings he’s almost made it, surely. Possibly this might even be the last time, and then ...

Something flits across his awareness. A sensation of life and movement overhead, separated from his outstretched fingers by just a few inches of stone. The feeling vanishes, unsurprising. His immortal form is antithetical to life. Nothing with a beating heart can long tolerate his proximity. Still, this is exciting. Inches! Inches between him and the creature above! Oh, let it be this time. This time for sure!

V

Down goes the basket and Yrmegard just knows they’re not going to be happy with something in it. They’re never satisfied, bloody lunatics.

Yrmegard grunts and thinks uncharitable thoughts as she lets more rope out via the pulley she has rigged just above the broken skylight leading into the cursed labyrinth under the hill the folk have always called the Kal’s Mound (or Kalgrave, in a few cases, though Yrmegard has never met anyone who knew this Kal or had any notion what he was about). Forty feet below, one of the lunatics is standing in the circle of light from the aperture and waving her on, as though a basket sent straight down a rope might go anywhere but directly into the fool’s arms.