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BONES

An introduction to "Bones"

This story grew out of a line in God Stalk about Penari's Maze being so complex that even its own architect got lost in it. From there, it just grew.

P. C.

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It was nearly dawn in the city of Tai-tastigon. Birds had been chirping sleepily for some time as light seeped into the eastern sky, but the streets still lay drowned in shadows except where faint spheres of light shimmered against the walls. Down one such avenue in the Gold Ringing District came a hooded figure. It paused beneath each streetlight in turn, murmured "Blessed—Ardwyn—day—has—come" in a bored voice, and passed on, leaving darkness in its wake.

When the man was out of sight, Patches emerged from the shadows and resumed her vigil outside the gate of the mansion owned by Polyfertes, the Sirdan of the Lapidaries' Guild. While the plaster figures clustered around the house's lower windows were still indistinct, the young thief noted anxiously that up near the roofline the sinuous shapes of men, women, and beasts—all doing complicated, highly ingenious things to each other—stood out with far more clarity than they had only moments before. Even the black granite ravens on the gateposts seemed about to shake their wings and join the growing dawn chorus.

Gods, but it was getting late. Any minute now, a yawning servant would open the front door, and the guard, who was leaning against it, would tumble into the hall. As soon as they realized that his sleep had been deepened with poppy dust . . .

Jame—better known in the Thieves' Guild as the Talisman—was still inside that house. What the hell could she be thinking of, not to have made her escape before now?

At that moment, Jame's main thought was that she did not want to lose her fingers. Around her in the dim light of Polyfertes' treasure room glowed hundreds of gems, their erotic engravings intriguingly distorted by the horn glass of the cases that protected them. Securing each case was a box lock. Poised over each lock, out of sight within the intricacies of the box, was a weighted razor. An hour ago, Jame had edged her hand in under one such blade. She was still delicately probing into the lock mechanism beyond it, grimly suppressing tremors of fatigue. In the case before her, besides two gems, were twenty-five severed fingers, some half-decayed, all lovingly arranged on the cream velvet. Polyfertes collected more than gems.

There was a loud click. Jame caught her breath, bracing for pain. None came. The "thief-proof" lock had at last been sprung.

With a sigh of relief, she opened the case and removed the two jewels from their grisly nest. One was a magnificent sapphire, engraved with three women and a dog engaged in a rather peculiar activity. With this stone, Polyfertes had proved himself worthy of master's rank in the Lapidaries' Guild. The second jewel was a mere zircon. On it was the rough sketch for the masterwork. Jame turned the sapphire modestly upside down and pocketed the zircon, smiling faintly. Polyfertes wouldn't have to guess who had raided his treasure trove: the Talisman's eccentricities were by this time nearly as celebrated as her skill. Still smiling, she left the room.

Down below, Patches was chewing through the fingertips of her gloves, having forgotten that she had them on. Suddenly she stiffened. A line tumbled to the ground. Then a slim, dark form swung itself over the third-story window ledge and started down the rope, stepping lightly from plaster head to head.

"Talisman!" said Patches and, in the fullness of her relief stepped through the gate.

"Thief?" cried two raucous voices above her. Startled, she looked up and saw the gatepost ravens, stone wings spread, beaks agape. "Thief! Thief! Thief!" the warning cry came again from their motionless throats.

Jame was still twenty feet off the ground when she heard the guard wake with a snort. A pound of poppy dust blown straight up his hairy nostrils wouldn't have deafened him to an uproar like this. She pushed herself clear of the sculpted figures and let go of the line. The fall jarred her badly. Before she could recover, the guard was between her and the gate.

He lunged at her with his spear.

Jame sprang backward, twisting, and felt the cold breath of steel as the barbed head ripped at her jacket.

Patches yelped in protest.

"Stay where you are!" Jame shouted at her, and snapped at the guard, " 'Ware truce, man: I'm unarmed!"

He lunged again.

God's claws, she thought, sidestepping. Didn't the idiot realize that if he spitted a thief without so much as a rock in her hand, the fragile nonviolence pact between thieves and guards would be shattered? Someone inside the mansion had begun to shout. Wonderful. The entire household would descend on her from behind if she let this moron delay her a moment longer.

Here he came again.

Right, thought Jame. Unarmed isn't unable.

She caught the spear shaft as it slid past and jerked the guard into a chin-strike that snapped his head back. Now, one more to teach him manners. She was poised to deliver the kick that would leave the man squeaking for a month when the ground suddenly lurched under her feet. All three, thieves and guard, found themselves on the pavement, bewildered. What the hell . . .

"Earthquake!" screeched the ravens. "Thief! Earthquake! Thief!" A second tremor wracked the courtyard. Looking up, Patches saw two intertwined plaster figures separate from the roofline. They were directly above the guard. Jame sprang at him as he sat gaping stupidly upward. Both disappeared in a cloud of dust and flying splinters as the figures crashed to earth.

Patches, choking on plaster dust, heard more shouts from the house, then her friend's voice at her elbow: "You were thinking, perhaps, of moving in? Come on!"

They ran. Behind them, the ravens were clamoring, "Thiefquake! Earthworm!" while Polyfertes' cook ran in circles beating a gong and bellowing "Fire!"

"I think we woke 'em up," said Patches when they had slowed down again several blocks later. "But why in Thai's name did you save that guard? The bastard tried to gut you."

"I hadn't his taste for truce-breaking. Besides, this isn't worth any man's life."

She dropped the zircon into Patches' hand.

"So you really did it," said the younger thief, awed, regarding the stone. Then she gave Jame a wary, sideways look. "Still mad at me, aren't you?"

"Mad? Why? All you did was let the other 'prentice thieves goad you into swearing that I could crack Polyfertes' treasure room. Well, I have. Your honor is safe, and so is my reputation—for once without bloodshed."

"Oh well," said Patches vaguely. "No omelets without broken eggs."

Jame turned on her. "Remind me, if you please, what happened to Scramp, your brother, only three months ago."

"He challenged you to rob the Tower of Demons," said Patches, squirming. "The demon nearly made fish bait of your soul, but you got away with the Peacock Gloves."

"And then?"

"Scramp's master disowned him."

"And then?"

"Scramp hanged himself. And then," said the pug-faced thief, rallying, "you gave me the Gloves so that I could buy my way into the Thieves' Guild."

"And that, I suppose, puts the egg back together again. You don't understand, do you? I might as well have put that rope around your brother's neck myself. As for tonight, couldn't you see that the other 'prentices were setting you up—and me, too—exactly the same way they did Scramp? If you ever put me in a situation like that again, we're through; I'll be damned if I'm going to cause another death in your family."

With that, Jame turned on her heel and walked away.

She had gone quite some distance into the bustling labyrinth that was Tai-tastigon before the haze of rage lifted, leaving her ashamed. Why had she torn into her young friend like that? Patches had meant no harm, either by accepting the challenge in the Talisman's name or by speaking lightly of spilt blood. She was simply a child of the streets, with neither time nor tears to waste on the dead. Jame had thought that she too had gotten over Scramp's suicide, but apparently not. Well, forget it. It was unprofessional to brood, and dangerous as well. Now she must report the evening's success to Penari, her master, whose instructions had made it possible.

The Maze, Penari's home, was one of Tai-tastigon's marvels. The old master thief had had the huge, circular edifice built some fifty years ago, just before the final, impossible theft that had made his reputation forever. Then he had retreated into it with his prize, the jewel called the Eye of Abarraden, thumbing his nose at the entire city. Since then many thieves had tried to track the old master to his lair to obtain his secrets, but the Maze had defeated them all. Besides Penari, only Jame knew the key to its twisting ways, and even she entered them this morning with trepidation, remembering how the building's own architect had once lost his way here and never been seen again.

Fortunately, the earthquake had done little damage . . . or so she thought until she finally emerged in the old thief's living quarters. These occupied the core of the building, a wide, seven-story-high shaft lit day and night by innumerable guttering candles and filled with the spoils of a lifetime. At the moment, virtually everything appeared to be on the floor. Icons, rare manuscripts, all the trinkets on the mantelpiece except for a solitary stone gargoyle, clothes, a shattered box with ivory inlay (formerly the resident of a high shelf), fragments of a roast goose. . Jame sighed. What a mess. But where was Penari?

Molten wax splashed on the center table, followed by a shower of candles. Looking up, Jame saw that the huge chandelier had almost disappeared, lapped about in the folds of something white that undulated gently in the dim light.

"Monster?" she said incredulously, staring. "You idiot, that chain is ancient! Come down before the roof caves in."

The tablecloth moved. Jame threw it back and, crouching, found herself nose to nose with her master.

"About time you showed up!" hissed the old man. "Are we alone?"

"Why, yes—except for a forty-foot python suspended over your head."

"Never mind that." Penari scrambled out from under the table. Erect, the top of his head came to her chin and his cloudy, nearly blind eyes stared first through her collarbone, then wildly about the room. "Not here yet, is he?" he demanded, a touch of his usual self—confidence returning. "Good! I've time to thwart him yet. Now, have you seen his gargoyle?"

"I've seen a gargoyle," said Jame, bewildered. "Over there, on the . . . Why, that's odd. It's gone."

"Gone," he repeated querulously. "Of course. It would be. Quick now, have you ever come across any bones in the outer passageways?"

"Many time," said Jame, staring. "Rats, Monster's dinners, vhors . . . "

"No, no—h u m a n bones. A skeleton, say, with a finger missing."

"Bodies, yes, occasionally—when some fool wanders in and breaks his neck before we can escort him out—but bones . . . Wait a minute. I didn't exactly count phalanges, but did this particular skeleton have a medallion around its neck, a semicircle on a stem?"

"Yes, yes!"

"Well then, that would be Hervy."

"Who?"

"That's just what I call him," said Jame, with mounting embarrassment. "I came across him when you first sent me out to memorize part of the Maze and . . . well, he was such a clean-picked old gentleman that I used his bones to mark various passages. He's scattered all over the first level now."

"Excellent!" cried the old thief, to her amazement. "But do you remember where you left his head? Yes? Then go fetch the nasty thing, boy, and we'll smash it into toothpicks. Hurry!"

Jame went. Penari often left her speechless, but never more so than now. What did bones decades old have to do with a little stone statue that apparently moved about at will? Why was Monster, that venerable reptile, clinging to the chandelier, or his master, for that matter, cowering under a table . . . and would she ever get the old man to stop calling her "boy?"

The light of her torch danced on the bare walls. Dark, dusty, narrow—it was always rather like being buried alive here in the outer passages of the Maze. She went quickly, pausing now and then to listen for the sound of claws on stone. Not long ago, the labyrinthine building had suffered from an infestation of vhors—large, vicious rodents with a tendency toward demonic possession—and she was not sure that she and the priest lent to her by the Brotherhood of Sumph (Pest Control Chapter) had dealt with all of them.

Jame's destination was the intersection in the northwest quadrant of the Maze where she had originally found the entire skeleton. The bones were so old that she had never really thought of them as human remains and so had felt free to scatter them as she pleased, leaving only the skull undisturbed. She should have found it there now, but it was gone. Puzzled, Jame crouched beside the poor scraps of clothing that had survived time, rats, and her own meddling. Something glinted in the torchlight. She reached gingerly into the decaying rags and drew out Hervy's medallion. A semicircle on a stem . . . surely she had seen this emblem somewhere else, out in the city.

Suddenly Jame stiffened. Someone—no, something—was watching her. Firelight leapt on the walls. Dust drifted down from an overhead beam. The silence pressed in on her, broken only by the distant sound of dripping water and . . . what? The whisper of claws on stone? Vhors hunted in packs. When the madness seized them, they swarmed up from the sewers, engulfing anything alive that got in their way, passing their insanity on to it even as they died. Medallion in hand, Jame rose hastily and returned to the central chamber, making several quick but wary side trips.

"The skull is gone," she reported to Penari, "and so are many of the other bones. I didn't have time to check them all. Now, will you please tell me what's going on?"

But the old man didn't answer. He heard her news in silence, then began to pace back and forth, occasionally stumbling over out-of-place objects. Jame watched him, perplexed. This wasn't the first time he had kept a secret from her, but usually he did so with a kind of glee, daring her to solve the mystery for herself. That had been part of her training. But now he had apparently forgotten her presence altogether, and, for the first time since she had known him, he seemed to be badly scared. She was his apprentice, bound to him by law and respect. It was her duty to protect him, but from what?

The medallion grew warm in her hand. She didn't want to leave the old man, and yet . . .

"Sir," she said, "if you haven't any need for me here, I've an errand in the city."

Penari didn't seem to hear her. She was well out into the Maze when his voice, shrill with defiance, reached her. "You can't have them, do you hear me?" he was shouting, not at her, not, apparently, at anyone. "They're mine, I tell you, mine, mine, mine!"

 

TAI-TASTIGON, that great city, was wide awake now, shaken out of its predawn drowsiness by the tremors that had wracked it. The citizens of the night—thief, courtesan, and reveler—rubbed shoulders in the streets with merchants and craftsmen thrown prematurely from their beds. Pilgrims gawked at the damage. A fair number of these country-bred folk who know no better than to wander from their lodgings would not be seen again for weeks, if ever. Tai-tastigon the Labyrinth had swallowed even its own citizens before now, and possessed a floating, bewildered population of the lost whose patriarchs, some claimed, had been wandering the streets since the founding of the city.

Penari's Maze was more sparsely occupied, but in others ways it resembled the Labyrinth all too closely: one, in fact, was the miniature of the other. This was the greatest of Penari's secrets that Jame had yet learned, and it still awed her that a single mind could have stored up enough information about the city, street by street, level by level, to have drawn up from memory its map to use as the floor plan. She herself had only mastered a fraction of the Maze so far, but she did know how to match points in the building with their external counterparts. This bustling street, for example, equaled that dusty corridor; here she should turn just as she would in the Maze; there, go straight . . . and so on and on until some thirty minutes later Jame arrived at the spot in the northwest quarter of Tai-tastigon that corresponded to Hervy's original position in the Maze.

She was now in the heart of the temple district. All around her, chants and clouds of incense drifted out of open doors, fogging the air with sound and scent, while little troops of worshippers trotted past, some of them going backward in penance. Over the door of the temple facing her was the same emblem as on the medallion still in her hand. She saw, on this larger version, that the mushroom-shaped symbol was an instrument of some sort, marked with calibrations. She opened the door a crack and peered into the utter darkness of the sanctuary.

"Hello! May I enter?"

No one answered.

For a moment she stood there, undecided. It could be very dangerous to enter the temple of a god not one's own without safe conduct. Then, on impulse, she swung open the door and stepped over the threshold. Immediately, all outside light vanished. When Jame groped behind her for the door, nothing was there.

So much for thoughts of retreat.

Cautiously, she began to edge forward, hoping that this wasn't a sect that favored snake-pits. Then suddenly, as though an intervening corner had been passed, she saw what appeared to be a small, extremely detailed model of Tai-tastigon's Council Hall. Intrigued, she approached it. With each step she took, it grew remarkably, until, when she came up to its walls, they seemed every bit as high and solid as those of the original out in the city proper. Logically, the temple in which she stood could not have contained anything a tenth the size of this hall, and yet here it was. What was more, beyond it she saw another miniature structure—this time the Tower of Bats—and again approached to find it full-sized. This happened over and over until within a few minutes she had visited a dozen of Tai-tastigon's most notable buildings.

There was even a full-scale replica of Polyfertes' mansion. Jame circled it curiously, noting that here too parts of the ornate facade had fallen. The worst damage, however, was at the rear of the house where the servants' hall had partially collapsed. Then Jame saw something move in the ruins. It was a hand.

"Are you all right in there?" The hand had whisked itself back into a hole under a downed beam. Jame, peering in after it, saw nothing. "Hello?"

"Hello!" said a muffled, petulant voice. "Kindly get off my calculations."

Jame stepped back hastily. She had been standing on a set of mathematical figures drawn in the dust. The hand reappeared at a different hole, took several measurements with the now-familiar mushroom-shaped instrument, then added these numbers to those already on the ground.

"If," said the voice, "you were to take that board there, balance it on this stone here with the edge under this beam, and push down, you might do some good."

Jame complied, and a moment later a plump little man crawled out from under the rubble. "Well done. Thank ye," he said, brushing himself off.

"That's odd," said Jame, surveying the ruins. "Earlier this morning I . . . uh . . . had some business at this house—the real one, that is—and the earthquake had damaged it, too."

"Nothing odd about it," said the little man briskly. "Correspondences m'dear, correspondences. Naturally, the fall of one affects the other, and the same with cracks, crumblings, and other misfortunes. We even have a minor problem with pigeons. But see here: I'll show you what I mean."

He set off at a trot, obliging a perplexed Jame to follow. They passed many more buildings than she had as yet seen, a fair number of them recently damaged. Then, rounding another of those invisible corners, Jame found a tall, familiar pair of windows looming up before her, gorgeously tinted and ablaze with light. The architect priest threw them open. With a deepening sense of unreality, she followed him out onto the windy balcony of Edor Thulig, the Tower of Demons.

Tai-tastigon lay spread out far below them. Its streets hummed with life as the city's irrepressible citizens embarked on a new day of profit and pleasure. What was a mere earthquake to them? More untoward things happened in Tai-tastigon all the time . . . like stepping from the interior of one building onto the balcony of another blocks away. There to the northwest lay the Temple District. Jame was trying to pick out the architects' sanctuary—in which, a moment ago, she had been standing—when she noticed a dark scar cutting halfway across the entire district, a shadowy rift of downed buildings with shock lines reaching far out into the city.

"It was that damned Arthan," said the priest, holding down wind-torn hair with both hands. "A wild hill-god if ever I've seen one. His fool priests never told him they'd moved his house into town, so when he happened to come untempled this morning, of course he panicked. The biggest city he'd ever seen before probably had one communal privy. Why, the imbecile almost got as far as this temple! If you think the damage he did out in the city was bad, imagine what it would have been like if he'd gotten his big feet in among these models."

"You mean . . ."

"Yes, of course. D'you think the correspondences only work one way? Oh, we had a merry time getting that holy half-wit indoors again, and what should happen the moment I get home? Polyfertes' blasted house falls on me! I keep telling the architect who built it that he puts too much sand in his mortar."

Jame was leaning over the rail, staring down at the rose garden far below.

"A long way to the ground, isn't it?" said the priest behind her. "One hundred and fifty feet at least, and the Talisman jumped from here with the Peacock Gloves during the last Feast of Fools. Now there was a theft!"

"It wasn't from here," said Jame, still staring, surprised at how dry her mouth had gone. "It was from the south face down into the River Tone, which was quite bad enough, even at night, even without thinking. But there was no choice: the demon of the tower was a step behind me."

"You? Penari's Talisman?" She turned to find the little priest beaming up at her. "Well, this is an honor. We old men like to keep up on the doings of you young Guild bloods. I do believe the Talisman has stolen more supposedly inaccessible trinkets than anyone since the days of her master. Why trinkets, by the way? I've always wondered about that."

"For one thing," said Jame, "whatever I steal becomes my master's property, and Penari has all the riches he wants. For another, the only time I did lift something valuable—the Peacock Gloves, in fact—the affair ended badly. A boy died. No, you wouldn't have heard about that," she said with a sudden, bitter laugh. "He was only a shabby little nobody named Scramp, whose envy nearly cost me my soul."

"Good gracious!" said the priest, startled. "However did he do that?"

"By daring me to raid the Tower of Demons. The other thieves put him up to it, of course. They've never forgiven me for walking out of nowhere straight into the city's best 'prenticeship."

"And this boy?"

"He was an outsider too, trying to buy their acceptance at my expense. I could see what he was doing, and why, but I couldn't make him stop. Then, when I had carried off the Gloves, he lost his head altogether and accused me of cheating. We fought."

"You won, of course."

"There was no 'of course' about it," said Jame sharply. "He did very well. I hoped the others would honor him for it, but instead his master disowned him and . . . he hanged himself. Damn. I hadn't meant to think about that whole, rotten business again, much less to burden a stranger with it."

"Oh, I don't know," said the priest vaguely. "If you try to sit on something like that, it invariably bites you. I think I understand now why the Talisman has been taking such . . . well, suicidal risks these past three months. But I don't see why you feel so guilty about that boy's death. It wasn't your fault. If it had been, I expect your friend Scramp would have had something to say about it before now. In this city, the dead aren't always particularly docile, especially if they have a strong grievance against the living. I wouldn't worry about it so much if I were you. After all, anyone who can survive the Maze isn't going to fall easy prey to anything else. That building is a killer. I firmly believe that it was the death of Rugen, my old master, and he was the one who built it."

This apparently turned the little priest's thoughts in a new direction, for he abruptly swung around and trotted back into the darkness of the temple. Jame followed. She saw that they were approaching one last model, that of the Maze itself.

"Fifty years and more it's been since Master Rugen disappeared into that monstrosity," said the priest sadly, looking up at its blank wall. "A fierce old man he was—dangerous to cross but fair too, once the bloom was off his anger. I've never known him to hold a grudge against the innocent, or to forgive the guilty. This was the finest thing he ever built. He even cut off his little finger to lay under the center stone, saying 'Blood and bone bind.' I know he meant to be buried there."

"In the Maze?" said Jame, startled.

"Of course. We all make arrangements in the finest building we design—our end-work, we call it—but who crawls into a grave before his time? I still say he meant to come out when last he went in to see Penari."

"What if he simply got lost? Even if your master built the Maze, he could hardly remember every turn in it."

"He didn't have to. The floor plans were in his pocket. But then again, his gargoyle never came home. You know, one of those little stone beasties. Every master architect has one, and very useful they are, but impish too. Look the other way and you'll either find them gone or sitting on your head. They also guard their master's crypt. That's why some thought, when Quezal didn't come back, that Master Rugen had decided to lay his bones to rest with his lost finger in the Maze."

"Bones," said Jame uncomfortably, remembering what use she had made of them. "Well, he's there all right, but neither underground nor particularly quiet." And she told the priest about the events of the morning.

"Oh, ye galloping gods," he said when she had finished. "There'll be hell to pay over this. Master Rugen was never the sort to swallow insults, and fifty years of being dead won't have sweetened that foul temper of his. See here, you've got to do something about this!"

He grabbed Jame by the hand and began to half drag her around the curve of the model Maze to its western entrance.

"Wait a minute!" she protested, resisting. "I need some answers first. If Rugen really is Hervy, why has he waited so long to come back?"

"Who knows?" said the priest impatiently, trotting all the faster. "The point is, you've got to make peace between those two old men before they destroy each other and the Maze with them. Especially the Maze. If that goes, so may the city. Ah, here we are. Good luck, Talisman!" And he shoved her over the threshold.

"Dammit, wait!" Jame cried, but she was talking to herself. Behind her was not the darkness of the temple but the houses facing the real Maze. The priest had vanished.

"Marvelous," she said to the walls of the entryway. "Now what am I supposed to do?"

"Correspondences, m'dear, correspondences," replied the echo. "Find Rugen's skull."

Jame stood quite still for a moment. Then she plunged into the Maze. Equipped with one of the torches that were kept hidden near the entrance, she raced through the dark passages, checking off in her mind the places she had visited earlier in search of the bones. Someone, probably Quezal the Gargoyle, was gathering them together . . . but where? The obvious place would be Rugen's death-site, the original location of the entire skeleton, but not even the skull was there now. If Quezal was in a hurry, though, he might well be collecting the bones at some point roughly equidistant from the farthest reaches to which they had been scattered. That gave her several possible locations.

At the first three, Jame drew a blank. The fourth she approached more warily, not only because of her present search but because she remembered all too clearly the last time she had been in this part of the Maze. It was here that the vhors had trapped her, Monster, and the priest sent to exterminate them. In desperation, the priest had taken their madness into himself. Deprived of what had become their essence, they had promptly dropped dead while the poor man had plunged down the nearest sewer hole, headfirst. Jame hoped that his colleagues below had successfully exorcised him. Meanwhile, she had been left with several hundred vhor carcasses and forty feet of hysterical python. Nothing would calm Monster but the removal of the offending bodies, so Jame (not very wisely, perhaps) had thrown them into a nearby pit-trap and set them on fire. The resulting smoke and stench had made this section of the Maze unapproachable for weeks. It still stank.

Jame examined the corner where, months earlier, she had left a femur to mark her way. The bone was gone, but not without a trace: covering the floor where it had lain was a network of scratches just visible in the flickering light. In fact, the whole passageway was similarly scored. Surely it hadn't been like this the last time she had been here, Jame thought uneasily. With growing apprehension, she followed the marks back to the pit and peered down into it, noting the deep, fresh gouges that scarred its sides and lip. Not a bone remained in it.

Then, in the distance, Jame heard the sound that all this time she had half expected and wholly feared: the rasp of many, many claws on stone.

She tracked the noise by the marks on the floor. The sound grew, then abruptly faded away as she turned into the hallway where the last of Rugen's bones had been left. It wasn't there now. Standing in the eerie silence, Jame wondered how her reasoning had gone wrong, and what to do next. Then she heard a sound behind her, the faintest of scratches and turned to find the hallway full of vhors.

Not one of them had been alive for some time. Most were little more than charred bones held together by scraps of singed flesh. Torchlight gleamed off empty eye sockets, off naked claws and fangs. In all that decaying, fire-scorched mass, not one whisker moved.

Jame went back a step, then another. She couldn't take her eyes off that corridor full of death, couldn't even think. Then her foot hit something. She fell backward, the torch flying out of her hand and over the edge of one of the Maze's many water traps. In the total darkness that followed, the hall filled with the clatter of bones.

It took Jame a moment to realize that she hadn't simply tripped. Something was holding on to her ankle. The grip tightened. With a jerk she was dragged backward one inch, then another and another. The image formed confusedly in her mind of a shadowy side corridor which she had passed a moment before her fall. Something had been waiting for her there, was waiting still.

With an incoherent cry, she lashed out with her free foot. It didn't connect, but the grip on her ankle relaxed. Then it came hand over hand up her leg. The thing was on top of her now with its bony hands around her throat. Gasping, she struck out blindly again, and made contact. The bones fell apart. Each one still twitched with a fitful life of its own. Jame threw herself sideways away from them, colliding a moment later with the far wall. Something—a skull, from the feel of it—rolled under her hand. Snatching it up, she crouched there, ready to pitch her prize down the well if anything touched her, frightened enough to throw herself after it.

The darkness came alive with the sound of many objects dragging themselves over the stones, rasping, scratching, fumbling in the dark. Were they approaching, or drawing away? Ah, away. They were bound for the heart of the Maze, Jame realized. They were after Penari.

She would have to reach the old man first, without a light to show the way, over a course as complex as that from the Temple District to the Maze. An exercise, Talisman. She could almost see Penari grinning wickedly at her. A simple little test, like so many in the past. Well not quite, but close enough. She thought hard for a moment, selecting a route parallel to that of the disturbance, then rose and cautiously set out with the skull tucked under her arm.

An eternity later, Jame collided with a wall. This was hardly the first time in her blind journey, but now she groped along the upper edge and, to her relief, found the hoped-for depression. Something clicked, and a panel swung open. She stepped over the threshold into the heart of the Maze.

Jame had turned to secure the secret door when someone let off a shrill war cry almost in her ear. "Oh, no," she said out loud, and ducked as Penari's iron-shod staff whizzed over her head.

The old man shrieked again, advancing on her with flailing weapon. Obviously, in her absence, he had gone from terror to outrage—always a short step for him—and she now had something akin to a senile berserker on her hands. Jame retreated hastily to the middle of the room, and placed the skull on the table. Raising her eyes, she found herself face-to-face with Monster, who was hanging down from the chandelier. Apologetically, the snake flicked the tip of her nose with his tongue.

"You're no help at all," she told him, and then ducked again as Penari's staff hissed over her head, nearly braining the terrified python. Jame slipped under the old thief's return blow and, coming up behind him, put her hands over his on the staff.

"Sir, I'm back," she said in his ear.

For a second, Penari stood quite still, breathing hard. Then he twisted about and glared up at her. She wondered what he saw: a blur, probably, if even that.

"It's about time," the old man snapped. "Where in the seven hells have you been?"

Jame told him. From the faces he made, she gathered that he didn't like the direction her inquiries had taken, but the time for secrets was past. "And now, sir," she said, concluding, "will you kindly tell me just what the hell happened the last time Hervy—Master Rugen, that is—came to see you here in the Maze?"

"If you must know," he said petulantly, "we quarreled. That conceited jackass had the nerve to call this building his masterpiece. I ask you, where would he have been without my memory? I designed the Maze, dammit: he just put it together. And then he had the gall to claim that the final plans were his property. Of course, I didn't let him have them. He fumed about that for a bit and then he stormed out. And that's all there was to it."

"It couldn't have been," said Jame, staring at the door by which she had entered. "If so, why has he just come back?"

She had not had time to lock the panel. It gaped open now, and an indistinct figure stood on the threshold. Penari drew his breath in sharply. Nearly blind as he was, he couldn't see the form in the doorway or the horde of motionless shapes crouching at its feet, but he was no fool.

"Come back, have you?" he said through his few remaining teeth. "Much good that will do you now that I have your skull. Talisman, quick: Pick up the blasted thing and get behind me." With that, he scuttled to the far side of the table, clutching his staff.

Jame didn't move. Although she hadn't taken her eyes off that strange intruder or seen it so much as stir, it was now unmistakably several feet farther into the room. Its skeletal arm was half-raised. Where the ulna should have been were many tiny vhor bones laid joint to joint, and the fingertips ended in rodential claws. Instead of its missing skull, Quezal the Gargoyle crouched on its clavicle. The rest of the figure was wrapped in a winding sheet of some translucent material which Jame recognized as one of Monster's more recently shed skins. A burst of near hysterical laughter welled up in her, but she choked on it, one hand flying up to her bruised throat. Twenty minutes before, those taloned fingers had nearly throttled her. Not only that, but here were the vhors again, massed at the dead architect's feet, looking no more congenial than before. And they were much closer than they had been a moment ago. But she still hadn't seen them move.

Another fit of coughing seized Jame. When her eyes cleared again, the vhors and their master were within five feet of her. So that was it: Like Quezal, they could only move when unobserved. If she so much as blinked now, she was finished.

"Didn't you hear me, boy?" cried Penari behind her, clearly thinking that she was behind him. "I said smash it. Smash the skull!"

Without turning, her eyes still fixed on the architect Jame groped behind her on the table for the skull. Her hand touched it. A sudden wave of dizziness swept over her. In its wake, she saw standing before her not the grotesque, skeletal figure, but Master Rugen as he had been in life, richly clad, with Quezal perching on his shoulder. The architect was looking straight through her. His face was thunderous. Penari spoke behind her, his voice so oddly distorted that she couldn't understand a word.

"Sir?" she said, then caught her breath as the thief stepped into her line of vision. At least fifty years had fallen away from him.

He and the architect argued violently. Rugen brandished a packet in the thief's face, then thrust it back inside his robe, turned on his heel and stalked to the door. Penari stopped him on the threshold. The two exchanged more heated words, then Rugen, with a short laugh, disappeared into the Maze proper.

Jame followed him. He paced confidently through the labyrinthine halls, not pausing once despite the complexity of his path. And so it was that, without a break in his stride, he took his first wrong turn. Many more followed. At last the man stopped, looking aggravated, and reached into his pocket. His expression changed. The packet wasn't there. He tried to retrace his steps, stubbornly silent at first and then shouting angrily for Penari until his voice failed. When his torch also finally gave out he muttered a hoarse curse and sent Quezal for help. None ever came.

"Now I understand," said Jame to him. "You put the plans into your pocket, and Penari lifted them out again, there, on the threshold. Then, when you sent your gargoyle back to him, he imprisoned it. Because of that, you died of hunger and thirst in the dark. How . . . vile."

Abruptly, she found herself back in the heart of the Maze with her hand still on the skull and Quezal's grotesque face only inches from her own. Then something stuck her shoulder so hard that she was lifted off her feet and thrown sideways to the floor.

Damn, she thought hazily. I must have blinked.

Her eyes focused again and she was suddenly very still. The vhors were directly in front of her, close enough for her to see the grain of their yellow fangs and bits of rotting debris caught between them. Rugen might have spared her life, but his creatures assuredly would not. Not that the architect had been all that gentle. His claws had apparently slashed through her jacket, because her shoulder had begun to sting and blood was running down her arm inside the sleeve. She couldn't even take her eyes off the vhors to check the extent of the damage. And her back was turned toward the architect. What was he doing now? All she could hear was Penari, alternately shouting insults at Rugen, encouragement to her, and counting to himself as he went through the steps of a quarterstaff drill in gleeful preparation for mayhem. For some reason, Rugen hadn't attacked the old thief yet. She had to get him under observation again before he did. Carefully, Jame rose and backed away from the vhors, her eyes still fixed unblinkingly on them.

The table brought her up short. Rugen bent over it, his hands almost on the skull. Facing him and inadvertently immobilizing him was Monster, who had again lowered his head and about ten feet of body from the chandelier. How fortunate, thought Jame, that snakes don't blink. Any second, however, the python would probably spot the vhors and panic again. Right, she thought, taking a deep breath. Now I earn my wages.

She launched herself onto the tabletop, rolling over her right arm, hissing with pain as her weight came briefly to bear on her injured shoulder. Rugen seemed to pinwheel past. She snatched the skull from between his skeletal hands and half-fell off the far side of the table, landing on Penari. For a moment, no one's eyes were on the architect. As she disentangled herself from her master, Jame heard the table crash over. Then she was sitting on the old man with the skull in her hands and Rugen bending over her.

"If you really want me to destroy this thing," she said unsteadily, glaring up at the architect, "move."

"Smash it, smash it!" cried Penari's muffled voice through the rucked-up folds of his robe. "What are you waiting for?"

Jame raised the skull, then hesitated. If she did manage to shatter it on the stone floor, that presumably would be the end of Master Rugen . . . unjustly slain a second time. Then too, what had that little priest meant when he had spoken of these two old men destroying each other, the Maze, and perhaps even the city? That would only make sense if . . .

"Uh, sir . . . I think we have a problem. Remember those models I told you about in the temple that fell down because their counterparts in the city did? Well, the priest told me that the reverse could also happen."

Penari paused a moment in his furious thrashing. "Umph?" he said irritably, from the depths of his own clothing.

"Since the Maze is a three-dimensional map of Tai-tastigon," said Jame slowly, "it might well be considered a model of the city. In that case, to damage the building would be to endanger the entire town. The priest thought that your quarrel with Rugen might put the Maze in jeopardy, and he sent me to find Rugen's skull, just as you did. But I don't think he wanted me to destroy it. I mean, here's the man who built the Maze, who bound himself to it with blood and bone. Couldn't you say that his mind was the Maze? Then this skull would be its physical emblem, its model, if you will. So if I destroy it, what happens to the building . . . and to the city?"

"What?" snapped Penari, his head finally popping into sight. "Oh! Those damned correspondences again. If we're playing that game, I should think that my head would be worth any number of his. But then, that was the original argument, wasn't it? Who is the Mastermind of the Maze? You claimed you were, didn't you, you old fraud?" he suddenly shouted up at the architect. "You were so cocksure that you didn't need any help to get out of here.

"Why do you want the plans, then? I say to you."

"Oh, I have a special use for them, but it isn't to find my way. Never think that. This building is my end-work. I know every turn in it."

"And, the gods help us both," said Penari, his voice suddenly sinking, "I took you at your word."

Jame had been staring up unblinkingly at Quezal's devilish face, haloed by the chandelier that hung above them both. The mass of wax and metal moved slightly, groaning. Monster must be shifting. Then the import of what Penari had just said sank in.

"Do you mean that you didn't intend . . . But what about Quezal? Didn't you realize that something was wrong when he came back?"

"I thought that Rugen had left the Maze, discovered that the plans were missing, and sent his pet demon back in to steal them. The robber robbed. That would have appealed to the old bastard. So, just to teach him a lesson, I grabbed his gargoyle and popped it into my ivory inlay chest. Then, well, I was a busy man in those days."

"In other words, you forgot about it."

The old man nodded miserably. "Months later, I came across Rugen in the Maze. Nastiest shock I've ever had in my life. So I'm sorry, but that doesn't change anything," he said, abruptly rallying. "The plans are still mine—I say!—and you can't have them. Put that in your back teeth and chew on it!"

You see how it is, said Jame silently to the skull. He didn't mean to kill you, but you still died—-just as Scramp did because I failed him. Penari's pride in the Maze and mine in my reputation made us both . . . careless. But how long do we have to go on paying for that? Only you can tell us, and you'll have to do it now because I can't keep you at bay any longer. Your old apprentice said you were a fair man, so to hell with mercy. Give us justice.

Then she closed her stinging eyes and waited.

A long, nerve-wracking silence followed, broken by a deep groan from above.

Something slammed into Jame. She was sent flying backward head over heels with the skull still in her arms and, a second later, Penari's sharp elbows in her ribs.

A tremendous crash shook the floor. Dust filled the air, half choking both master and apprentice as they tried to sort themselves out by the far wall. Jame felt a sudden weight on her good shoulder. Startled, she looked up to find Quezal the Gargoyle perched there. What the hell?

"Here," she said, shoving the skull into Penari's arms.

With the gargoyle still clinging to her and vhor bones crunching underfoot, she waded into the cloud of dust, batting at it ineffectively. She almost hit Monster. The albino python loomed up in front of her, his head a good two feet above her own. But this time his other four-fifths were on the floor. Quezal's claws tightened painfully as the giant snake made a tentative effort to wrap itself around Jame's neck.

"If you're that upset," she said crossly, pushing him away, "go cuddle your master. What have you done to the chandelier?"

It lay before her, a great mass of twisted metal and smashed candles with its broken chain draped over it. Underneath was a rectangular hole in the floor. Penari, blundering up from behind, nearly fell into it before Jame could stop him.

"Where's Rugen?" the old man demanded. "And what's become of my center stone?"

"Center stone!" Jame repeated, startled. She peered down into the hole, and at its bottom saw the splintered remains of Rugen's skeleton.

"When the chandelier fell," she said, thinking out loud, "it must have triggered some counterweight hidden in the floor. The stone tilted, and the bones slid into the grave prepared for them."

"The grave? Whose grave?"

"Why, Rugen's, of course. Remember, this was his end-work."

"He wanted to be buried here, in my Maze?" The old man, began to bristle again. "Why, the nerve of the man! But that's just like him: he always did treat everything as if it belonged to him. No one else was to take any credit at all—oh, no! Arrogant old bastard. Serves him right that even his own gargoyle deserted him in the end."

Jame had been regarding her master oddly as he stomped back and forth. "Sir, you don't understand. Quezal may have pushed me out of the way, but it was Rugen who saved you."

"What? Oh, hell." Penari stopped short and seemed visibly to deflate. "Oh, bloody hell. He would turn noble on me at the last minute. Well, two can play at that. He can stay here if he likes and . . . and what's more, he can have the damn plans." He fished about impatiently in one of his voluminous pockets, at last jerking out a familiar packet tied with a dirty string. "It's not as if he were going anywhere with them, is it?" he demanded, glaring up defiantly at Jame. "Just the same, you do the honors: he'll never be able to say that I handed them over."

Jame unwrapped the packet. It contained not the sheaf of papers she had expected but a fine linen cloth with the plans drawn on it. So that was why Rugen had been so determined to keep possession of this thing: it was his shroud. She jumped down into the grave with it. In one corner of the hole lay a small object wrapped in silk: Rugen's missing finger, almost certainly. Jame placed it with the other bones on the burial cloth, finally adding the skull, handed down by Penari, to the top of the heap.

"I'm sorry that I mistreated your bones before, and called you Hervy," Jame said to the skull. "Sleep quietly at last, master architect." And she folded the cloth with its intricate drawings over the fleshless face.

"Well, that's that," said Penari with relief when they had put the center stone back in place. "A sticky business, on the whole, but I think I handled it rather well. Let that be an example of what courage can accomplish. Stay with me, boy: I'll make a man of you yet."

And with that, the old thief gave Jame a hearty slap on her injured shoulder.

She stepped hastily out of his reach. Rugen's claws had caused more mess than damage, luckily, but the scratches still stung. In another sense, though, Jame would hardly have cared at that moment if they had cut to the bone. For the first time in three months, the weight of Scramp's death was gone, and she felt almost light-headed with relief.

But there was still one loose end.

Penari broke off his panegyric of self-praise as she headed for the door. "Here now!" he called after her in sudden anxiety. "Aren't you going to help me clean up this mess?"

"Later, sir. Just now, I owe a friend an apology. Maybe Quezal will lend a hand until I get back."

Between one blink and the next, the gargoyle shifted from her shoulder to Penari's head. He flailed at it, squawking, then went off in a sort of war dance about the room, making loud, semi-articulate declarations that he would not be sat on in his own hall, thank you, and would Quezal please sit somewhere else.

Jame regarded her whirling dervish of a master, the vhor bones piled high on the floor, and Monster nosing cautiously among them, obviously ready for a precipitous retreat if any of them should move.

Ah, home, she thought. How nice to have everything back to normal

Then she went out into the Maze and beyond that into the sun-washed streets of Tai-tastigon in search of Patches.

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Framed