Masters of the Maze Read online

  Pace must have set up his weapon in a flash, for all Nate saw was the swift movement, then he saw the piece jerk up, jump back as it fired. Automatically, he dived for the shelter of the cliff where it overhung the cave. Flint fired twice. And something came spinning through the air and fell with an infinitely ugly sound on the loose shale beneath their feet. It slid down and forward, crackling, dusty, then came to a stop.

  Nate heard Pace say, “There’s more of them — ” Nate looked at the face staring blindly upward. He did not know which of them it was, but he knew it was one of Et-dir-Mor’s grandsons.

  He dashed out from his shelter. “Cover me, Major — Jack!” he yelled. “I know the way up behind them!”

  He did not look to see if they were doing as he asked, but the fact of his not getting a bullet in his back seemed to say that they were. Or maybe he’d just caught them off guard. He zig-zagged, running low, between rock and tree and rock. He was out of sight now. He still kept low, but there was no more shale underfoot to crackle and disclose his progress, so he curved around and away. And away …

  Maybe he would be able to find Et-dir-Mor yet. Maybe not. Or another of his people. Maybe not that, either. At any rate, he had lied when he said that he knew “the way up behind them.” He didn’t know it at all, didn’t even know if there was such a way at all.

  He had, after all, never been there. But he had kept his eyes open, wide open, well open, and he was pretty confident that he knew the way to where he had been. He headed there.

  Once, twice, three times, after a while, he looked back. Once, and twice, he saw nothing, saw no one. The third time he saw three figures. The two ahead and together would be Flint and Pace. The third, by the odd gait of it, would be the thing which was masquerading as a man named Jackson.

  He, Nate, still had a fine, good lead on them. With any kind of luck, he should reach the waterfall well before they did.

  • • •

  Darius Chauncey sounded off with a long string of prime, choice Union Army oaths, gliding off at the end into Minoan, Mycenaean, Philistine and Phoenician. “Hell Fire!” he said at last, comparatively tamely — and glared at Nate with a measure of resentment. “I knowed there’d be trouble if I let you in here, into my nice, peaceful pretty-place.”

  Nice, peaceful, pretty, it certainly was there; the courtyard divided between sunlight and shade, a huge old fig tree in the center of it, vines like pythons crawling up around the sides of the great pillars. The woman who had spread the table with bread and fish and honey and oil and olives and fresh-roasted meat and fruits had seated herself on a stone bench and played softly on a three-stringed instrument. A naked child leaned against her and listened. It occurred to the guest that Darius Chauncey, instead of being the large-scale, freestyle lecher he had given himself out to be, might instead have become quite domesticated. He thought he’d work on those lines to start.

  “Well, for one thing … cum-raid … I didn’t make the trouble. You take my word for the rest of it, take my word for that. And for another thing … cum-raid … how much longer do you think it’s going to go right on being a ‘nice, peaceful pretty-place,’ if those lunatics get away with what they’re after? The fact that they intend to take over my world in a way which would make Vicksburg seem like a temperance picnic, this may not be any hair off your balls: granted. It wouldn’t even affect — maybe — your own old world if you ever decided to go back to it.

  “But, oh, Brother Chauncey, use your head! It isn’t true that access to any gate in the Maze means access to the whole Maze, no. Because some of the ways are blocked up one way or another. But can’t you just imagine what would happen if the Chulpex succeed in bypassing the way they’ve got to go until now? If they get access to an arm of the Maze which has no Watchers? It would be like a game of checkers, and who’d make the moves and jump the men and sweep the board clean? Right! I don’t have to tell you about them, that they are not human in anything but intelligence, that there are more of them than we could count if we spent our lives at it, that — You know this! Isn’t that why you’re a Watcher? Let them get enough of their numbers through, anywhere, and then they can spread out in all directions.

  “And eventually, Cum-raid Chauncey, they would come here.”

  His host shifted uneasily on his bench, muttered, glanced around him quickly. His eyes rested for a moment on woman and child. She seemed to sense this, looked up and smiled, then went on with her playing. The music was quite strange to Nate Gordon, but after a while it began to catch his ear and take hold of him and linger.

  “Shucks,” Chauncey said, in a lower tone; “if they’d ever come into Crete we’d of read about it in the books — wouldn’t we?”

  Nate shook his head, violently. “Don’t cling to that hope,” he said, insistently. “That’s a straw. Ordinary common-sense applications of the laws of time and space don’t apply to the Maze. Maybe this Crete isn’t the Crete of our own history at all. No, no —

  “Furthermore, it’s not the Chulpex alone. There’s this fanatic who calls himself Major Flint, him and his band of brothers, whoever they may be. They think they’re going to use the Chulpex to do most of their dirty work; then — they think — they’ll, somehow, get rid of them. And of course the Chulpex have got exactly the same notion, only in reverse. Suppose that Flint and his men do win? He made it, I can tell you, clear enough to me that once they’d conquered the old home world in my time-period and his, that then they’d turn their attention to the rest of time and space.”

  Chauncey said, “Son of a bitch.” He got up and stamped the stones of the courtyard, whirled around to face Nate. “Now what in the name of God can I do?” he demanded. “I’ve got this de-vice, you’ve seen it, long-long thing with a short crosspiece, I don’t know exactly how it works — fact is, I don’t know how it works at all — but it sure scares the piss out of them Chulpex and sends them packin’, fast. Want I should stand there, like Horatius at the Bridge, standin’ off the Chulpex Grand Army? I can try. Might work, might not. But you say, suppose they git them some ways out of their own world, they bypass all the watched ways — what do I do then? Come out after ‘em, wherever they be, all ‘levendy-six skillion of ‘m, wavin’ my magic sword? You think it’d do a precious lot of good?

  “I git along well enough here and now. I come here with a good trick or two up my sleeve, never mind what; and I made me enough to buy some land and a boat. I ain’t disliked much. But even was I to mobilize this whole blessed island, why, what good would that do? These people kin kill a bird on the wing with a slingshot at a hunderd steps, I seen ‘em do it. Think that’d help ag’inst your schools and schools of Chulpex? How much good would swords or bows and arrows do in the face of whatever big guns they got in your day? Why, brave though these people be, brave enough, a hunderd Minie-balls ‘d scatter ‘m. You ought to know that much.”

  After a moment he said, “I got to think about this.”

  He walked off, walked up and down, hand on chin. Nate got up and stretched. He had some thinking to do, himself. So far, coming here had accomplished nothing, but he had not known where else to go. Evidently Flint’s men had hold now of the Darkglen entrance, and even if they hadn’t and despite his glib assurances to Nate, Nate felt no certainty of not being picked up on a murder charge. If indeed a tentative will in his own favor had been drawn up by old Mr. Bellamy, its existence might well serve only to accuse him of having had a motive for killing the old man. “You might have thought it had been signed,” they could say.

  He was by no means sure of finding the way to Et-dir-Mor via the Maze, and by no means sure of not finding Flint’s men in possession at that old man’s place, either. He thought he could reach Chauncey, though — as he had done — and they two at least shared a common language and, up to a point, a common history and pattern of thought.

  Nate stretched again, and yawned. He had expended enough energy, Lord knew, to justify fatigue; and, too, this last meal had helped make him dro
wsy. A hand touched his arm. It was the woman, Chauncey’s wife or whatever she was. Strange, strange, she was no longer playing her kithara or whatever it was, because the tune was still going through his head. She smiled, imitated his yawn, gestured toward the room off the courtyard, bent over and patted an invisible bed.

  “Might’s well catch forty winks if you can and want to,” Chauncey said, stopping in his perplexed walk back and forth. “I’ll wake you if I think of anything. Thunderation.”

  The bed was made with straw and sheepskins with the fleeces still on them. Nate dropped off his shoes and his heavy, heavy coat, and crawled in with a groan. Straw and skins alike smelled vividly and he was commiserating with himself for not being able to fall asleep when, with a start of surprise too strong not to waken him, he fleetingly realized that he already had.

  It was dark when he awoke, a darkness relieved by a huge fire and a multitude of twinkling little oil lamps. Darius Chauncey loomed against the firelight. He rose when he saw Nate, picked up two of the tiny earthen vessels with their burning, smoldering wicks. “Help yourself to a couple,” he said, “and come along …

  “They ain’t a Hell of a much good,” he conceded. “From time to time I have thought of trying my hand at producing some summer-strained whale oil, glass chimbleys, a good woven and adjustable broad wick: modern, up-to-date inventions, as it were. But it’s for one thing ag’inst the unwritten rules, and then, too, I says to myself, ‘D’ri — just don’t you rock the boat.’ So I haven’t. Not so much as a tallow candle. Them few tricks I had up my sleeve, never mind what, they don’t count.

  “Step down here. Step down …”

  He set his lamps on a table in a chamber walled all in stone, and put the two that Nate carried on the other side, one in each corner. He pointed to something in the center, something like a small and truncated pyramid of translucent stone. “Know what that is?” he asked, gesturing. The lines of light, finer than spiderwebs, gleamed and did their strange gleaming things in the dim lamplight.

  Nate nodded. “It’s a ward or a ward-stone. Et-dir-Mor told me a bit about it. He had one, too, of course. And — oh-oh! — now that I come to think of it … so do I … in … my … pocket …”

  He stared at Chauncey, who stared back. Just as Nate’s voice had, word by word, fallen lower, so now the other’s grew word by word louder as he repeated, “You’ve got one — in … your … pocket? How — ”

  Nate told him how he had found it under Joseph Bellamy’s body, how he had taken it with him when first he ventured into the strange world-between-worlds which was the Maze. “Eventually, I suppose, I just stuck it into my pocket and forgot about it.”

  “Just … forgot about it. Well, if that don’t beat the Dutch. Never mind,” he said, abruptly. “Pay attention now to what I’m about to show you, and try to learn awful damn quickly. Pick it up. Hold it so. No — so. Like that. There, now, you let it drop a trifle. Up … over … See how the lines swell when you do it thataway? All right. Now — ”

  Nate said, “What’s this for, that you’re trying to teach me?”

  Chauncey sighed and sighed. “You maybe won’t thank me, and I may be doing wrong. But I’m going to show you how to reach the Center. And when you git there, well, you just tell the Masters all that you’ve been telling me. Maybe they’ll help you. I know they kin. What I don’t know, I don’t know if they will.”

  His speech, in voice and accents, had sounded old-fashioned and comforting. It was like hearing, somehow, the archetypal American Old Man, somehow grown young. But when his voice stopped and Nate looked at him, bare-waisted and bronzed and kilted in the light of the flickering tiny lamps, he saw nothing but what belonged, seemingly, to the strange and alien world of Minoan Crete. And as for what he had been saying —

  “ ‘Center?’ ‘Masters?’ The Center and the Masters of what?” he asked, bewildered. Again the strange tune of the strange stringed instrument ran through his mind, but it brought him no comfort.

  “Why,” said Darius Chauncey, slowly, “of the Maze, of course … of the whole, entire, wonderful, damnable Maze …”

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Quechuas had trotted past him in a steady stream and at a steady pace. Some carried baskets or boxes by themselves, or were two-men teams carrying bales upon poles. Three men went by, one after the other, bent at increasing angles beneath the weight of elaborately engraved sun-disks of increasing size. Once a file of six men loped by, holding up the links of an enormous and glittering chain. Now and then one of the Quechuas, no more, would turn his eyes to look at him from the corners — a quick, quick, fearful glance — then they were gone. And once a noble in gorgeous regalia had gone by, swiftly, in a palanquin, face composed and frozen in almost unbelief, his eyes glassy with the shock of a man whose god is captive.

  “Don’t bother, do not bother, hide your treasures and flee to the cloud-covered cliffs or the clamorous jungles,” Nate had wanted to tell them. “It will do no good; those you think to placate worship a god who was killed and in whose name they will, nevertheless, kill your god.”

  But he had not said it. They could not have understood him, they would not have believed him. With deliberate speed, bowed down with grief and gold, they hastened to fill the insatiable chamber which held the Inca Atahualpa.

  Fortunately no Spaniards passed his way. He followed the arrow-straight, stone-paved road which went up and went up; then he turned aside along a winding and probably pre-Incan trail which vanished into mists so cold he was glad of still having his overcoat. He had at one point grown hungry, but this was no problem: he stopped at the first roadside meal he saw in progress, and pointed. Bowing low, the men handed him the grilled ribs and baked potatoes; he walked on as he ate; behind him they murmured, “Viracocha … Viracocha …”

  He walked slowly, slowly up the outer steps of the vast and crumbling and deserted temple he found at last, and down and down, down, down the inner steps. It grew gradually so dark that it was not until he chanced to blink and the skin of his face flashed into paroptic sight that he realized he had re-entered the Maze. He closed his eyes and walked straight across and through the dancing minotaurs and opened his eyes and came to an outside again where it was dark but not perfectly dark. Dimly, he saw that he was in a narrow place confined on either side by walls. It stank terribly of stale urine and there was the ugly noise of many, many angry or frightened people some distance away. He paused to consult his ward.

  Far off on one of the edges was a thin line of light which was nonetheless thicker than the other lines. He had come far, and come far in a way and manner not susceptible to any means of measurement he knew of; he was terribly tired, he was frightened and oppressed; but now at last the Center was beginning to come into sight, and he could not stop.

  He went on.

  The great open place he next came to was paved with slabs of stone both slippery and uneven. There was not a soul in sight. He looked up and was just able to make out a great, pagodalike tower when the night exploded at his left into light and sound. A torrent swept across the square, guided by torch-flare, a torrent of shouting men whose dark faces gleaming with sweat and angry ecstasy were framed in long black hair barely confined by red headbands. Nate Gordon did not know the name of the city, nor the date within a decade; but in that glimpse he knew that the Taipings had entered the city; that was enough. He ran, he fled.

  And the adherents of the Great Peace ran after him, shouting their joy and fervor and holy zeal and hatred, desirous only of taking his head and laying it at the feet of the Heavenly Wang, the potent Younger Brother of Jesus the Son of God.

  Nate ran, flying and moaning, across the square and then down past the first, second, and the third hutungs; but then he had to go slow and to grope. He was gone by the time the torches reached there, but it made no difference: One may begin at any point in taking the measure of a circle, and the city was justifiably doomed in any event. Such of the women who were young and not ugly and had
not perfidiously hanged themselves with their sashes, the victors saved, however, that the Heavenly Wang might take his choice of them and grace them by ascension to his terrestrial couch.

  • • •

  The mead was all a-flower with golden asphodel as Nate plodded across it with head hanging and feet dragging, barely noticing the perfume of them.

  “Yonder comes Nathaniel,” said the first fair woman. “It is in vain that you pursue the horizon, Nathaniel. If you concern yourself with violence, you will become violent. There is no way through the mire which will not cause you to become miry. All is illusion, is it not, sisters? — all except my house, my palace, the name of which is Wisdom. There are seven times seven gates, and I will lead you through all of them in the proper order, and thus you will in time grow wise and know the proper course of things, not wasting time and substance in vain pursuit — Is it not so, sisters?”

  He lifted the small, truncated pyramid of the dawn-colored ward-stone and peered at the mesh of luminous golden lines, but his eyes blurred and the lines blurred with them. He blinked and squinted, but it did no good.

  “It is not so,” the second fair woman said, her voice ringing like a quickened bronze. “You will teach him to be at peace; he has no right to be at peace while any are at war. Go back, Nathaniel! Go back! Darius has only placed his burden upon you and sent you off with it into the wilderness; it is nothing to him if the weight of it causes you to be dashed in pieces. Do not continue this retreat, do not engage in speculation equally vain, return and fight, Nathaniel! Return and fight! Return — and I will go with you and fight by your side — Shall I not, sisters?”