After checking the door for sign of ambush, they enter single file, a floating ball
of light before them: Zane, Jessie, Remesh. Immediately they face a blank wall
and are forced to turn right. A few steps on is another wall, paths to either side.
The floor is packed dirt, trodden by the passage of countless pilgrims. The breeze touches them on all sides, is cool, with sickly-sweet fragrance. ‘Which way now, Jessie?’ Zane asks. She joins him and takes a deep breath. Her shoulders drop slightly as she exhales, then draws another breath
into her lower lung, holding it there, sensing its poised vitality vibrating
through and quickening muscle, organ, skin, sensing its echo too in the breeze lifting the fine hairs on her right arm as it rises of its own accord and points to the left.
‘Once we take that path,’ Zane notes, ‘we should stick to the left wall, thus ignoring those paths
that look useful but would lead us astray.’ They walk steadily, left hands touching rock. As they leave yet another cul-de-sac,
Zane cranes his head skyward. The high walls block the bank of light from the horizon, leaving
the faint stars above for illumination, yet their vision within the maze is clear.
He looks behind him, sees the others glowing more than normal, magenta iridescence stretching like lifelines between each of them. As Zane turns back to the front, the air chills and a dark mass hurtles down from the sky
to form a monstrous, snarling, bat-winged creature, body-bulk of vapour and spider webs,
shell-plate head with long, razor-thin, hooked beak, clicking claws, a hoya unlike his friend
Rynobar of the star-blaze limbs and body. A cry from Remesh says another hoya
has appeared behind them. Zane hurls light-balls at both of them and pushes his companions into a small room. He conjures a curtain of indigo flame at the doorway, but before he can cast a flame barrier to protect them from above, the two hoya
leap the walls and advance towards the group. Zane and Jessie conjure their weapons, step towards the star-demons, who hesitate at this audacity, then laugh in voices
like glass breaking and loom-charge towards them. Then another blur of winged darkness plunges into the room, not to join but to batter
one hoya aside and attack the other. Zane recognizes Rynobar and rushes to help. He throws a bolt of incandescence
at the first hoya, follows up with blows
from his staff that keep the creature off balance, throws a net of fury-light over it,
and keeps pummelling till Jessie pulls him away. The other attacker is limp
in Rynobar’s arms. Zane sees his friend sobbing, asks what is wrong. ‘This should never have happened. Now the stars are moving during the day
and these hoya are in league with a darkness even beyond us. I can’t leave them here.’ Rynobar picks up the other star-demon,
unfurls vast wings, soars skywards without sound. After checking for wounds and speaking briefly about the strange events, the travellers
decide their only path is to move on. They only make a few more turnings before coming across an open space in the centre of which is a still pool. A thin causeway runs around it, with many openings to other dark passages,
too many for the left wall strategy.
Remesh slumps against the wall. ‘What now, Jessie?’ She rubs her eyes, the battle with the hoya
rupturing what link she had with the maze. Zane tries a murga, but the grains refuse to settle into shape. He sends a probe around the space, but it is just as listless.
‘If your hoya friend was here,’ Remesh says, ‘it could fly above the maze, guide us out.’ Zane ignores him, because he notices that Jessie has been distracted. He touches her arm. She doesn’t notice. She is looking intently at the black water that glitters occasionally with the overhead stars. Her eyes are shifting rapidly as if
she were striving to snare a fleeting scene, sear it into mind. All at once she throws herself into the pool and sinks from sight without a sound or splash, without a ripple. Zane dives after her, but finds himself skidding across the causeway on the other side.
He dives again, but ends up where he started. He joins Remesh to scan the pool for bubbles, or other signs of life, then chants a spell to part the black stillness, reveal her fate,
but nothing happens. ‘What now?’ Remesh asks. A voice sounds from the passage behind them. ‘She should return, but it may be some time.’ Wings barely fluttering, Rynobar glides out of the dark and stops in front of Zane, who greets the hoya with a puzzled smile. ‘Thank you for your help before, but what is this place and where is Jessie?’ Rynobar says he knows little, but the pool is used
by hoya when they have captured weak souls. Having gone in by herself, she will be
drawn back soon enough to her path in Thexlan. Although reluctant to talk to the hoya
for reasons he can’t fathom, Remesh asks if Rynobar can carry them out, or
at least guide them while flying overhead. ‘It is not possible. When seen from high the maze is a shifting blur of shape patterns.’ ‘But you found us after taking those hoya,’ Remesh says with a harshness that surprises. Rynobar peers at him with lava eyes. ‘That’s because I was able to drop back to the exact place in the maze I left,
and then I followed your trail from that room.’ With the hope that music will sooth their tensions and draw Jessie back, Zane pulls out his lyre and begins to play, in a halting rhythm. The discords, someway between muffled sobs and shrill keening, fill the space so that nothing is untouched by their dark concern and grief. Eyes closed, Zane restrains his rage at this loss and lets his fingers tap into pure sorrow, the sound like cold wind caressing bare trees, or a new shoot breaking through frozen earth. Using sustained notes, Zane tries to transmute the seething din of his mind into calm.
He barely registers a tiny echo
coming from deep within the music, yet also apart, like a distant wind chime. Then Remesh nudges his arm and he opens his eyes to see the pool stippled with starlight, waves rippling to the rhythm of his music, the pattern drawing their gaze across water to where Jessie stumbles out of a passage one third of the way around the pool’s edge. When they reach her she has collapsed, face gaunt,
clothes ripped, sweat-smeared, hands and face scratched and bleeding. Rynobar brushes the others aside,
leans over Jessie, drapes its giant wings around her till no one can see within. As the hoya chants softly, subdued light filters through its wing tips, the colour spinning rapidly through the rainbow as though searching for an apt tincture for healing. It settles
on roseate light, and while the soft thrumming echoes throughout the chamber, the glow brightens and dims as though the tune were a breeze ruffling the drapes protecting an eternal flame.
After some seconds Rynobar steps back. Eyes blinking, Jessie declares, ‘I’m not dead.’ ‘How do you know?’ Zane asks as he helps her stand up, notes weariness and certainty
into the pool. Intuition. And then
I found myself in a bed, could smell Daphne, my favourite flower, could hear machines humming, but couldn’t open my eyes, couldn’t speak,
though I sensed people nearby.’ Her eyes glisten, for she is sure that one of those hold-squeezing her hands was her mother, not seen for years. She massages her forehead as she tries to make out the other person…the skin
much smoother than her mother’s, yet mist-cool. ‘Then a weariness crept over my mind,
quicker than I could battle, other people rushed into the room, I felt immense pain, like skin being ripped from muscle and bone, then woke up outside the maze, though I couldn’t be sure if it was the entrance we used,
or the exit. I followed the left wall in a stupor as time circled itself.’
After Jessie rests a while, the group enters
her tunnel, right hands on rock, though each person feels a keen itch at the back of the neck
as they slowly retrace her journey, more
twists and dead-ends than the way in, more glances upwards each time starlight reveals their path.