I gaped at him. Not because he was upsetting me—that wasn’t his fault—but because the voices were talking, babbling in swift and rising harmony that shifted the silvery mist of the Grey like an immensely complex game of Tetris, dropping images and pieces of sound and magic into a glittering mosaic of information. My silent stare unnerved him and Quinton started to reach for me. I held my hand up to ward him off, quivering and drinking in the growing fractal vision. Then it jerked to a halt, frozen and dangling in the ghostlight, silent until it broke apart in a thousand chiming pieces that fell away into dust.
I gasped and tried to clutch the shards and hold them together, but they had no substance and only stung my hands like ice and melted away. Quinton lurched forward and caught me by the shoulders.
“What is it?”
“I . . . don’t know. I almost had it. . . . I almost knew something. . . .” I shook my head in frustration.
“Maybe you’ll know more when we get to the maze.”
“Maze?” For an instant I didn’t know what he was talking about.
“We’re heading for the maze in the labyrinth.”
“In the orchard,” I corrected, concentrating on calming my shaking and getting the Rover back in motion.
“No . . . I was getting to that. The classical labyrinth has a single long path that goes into the center and back out again. We use the word as if it’s a synonym for ‘maze’ but it’s really not. Mazes have multiple paths or multiple possible paths to the solution. But if the orchard is laid out in a spiral, then it may be the labyrinth and there’s something else at the center—another way out. Possibly another maze.”
“Then we’ll have to find out,” I answered, turning over the ignition. The Rover growled sullenly but started, and I drove on, looking for the lightning-struck trees that marked the path to Rosaceae and its labyrinth.
TWENTY-THREE
It was so narrow and weed-choked that I almost missed it, but I found the road that turned up the hill and away from the railroad track. Once we were on the path, finding the remains of the house was easy. The road went up through a slight fold in the hillside, twisting north and east of the cemetery into what was clearly no-man’s-land until the trees appeared, like the fringe of a pale-green cloak on the shoulders of a giant. The track—it wasn’t really wide or clear enough to call a road—ran along the edge of the thickening grove of trees and then turned suddenly to the left to end in a ragged dirt oval bordered on the east side with trees and on the west with scrub that fell away before rising again to hide the house from the railroad and the cemetery. No one would find this place by accident unless they came down the hill on the northeast, and that was covered in neat, cultivated rows of apple trees above the stark ocher rifts of the miniature valley’s walls that cupped the Rose house in its weathered palm. A lane of trees came right to the edge of the oval and led straight back to a pile of fieldstone rubble and half-buried wood, charred and broken among the stones. I used the oval to turn the Rover, figuring it was better to be prepared if we had to leave in a hurry, and got out.
The ground whispered under my boots like distant earthquakes. I found myself narrowing my eyes, suspicious and expecting trouble. The avenue of old pear trees—their blossoms whiter and more translucent than the apple’s—led directly to what had been the front steps. Now it was two broken marble slabs and a wasteland of ruin beyond the cracked front stoop. I stopped about halfway up the path and studied it. The approach was much too easy.
Quinton paused beside me, stuffing the two puzzle balls into his backpack. “What?”
“Something’s wrong. Cristoffer wouldn’t leave it this simple. Am I missing something? What do you see?”
“I just see . . . trees. Just a mess of trees.”
I huffed a strand of hair out of my face and crouched down, changing my viewpoint, and let my vision open to the Grey. But I didn’t slip in; if there was something there, I didn’t want to meet it just yet.
In the silvery world of the Grey, the house rose in blocks with a round central turret like a finger pointing into the sky. The trees tossed their shaggy heads in a spectral wind and cast moving patches of colored light onto the fog-shrouded ground. The thick, vibrant feeder lines of the grid—the leylines and main trunks of magic—throbbed below the earth and arrowed for the back of the house. I couldn’t see where they were leading from here, but I would have guessed they converged at the center of the labyrinth of moving trees.
Quinton had been right: It was a labyrinth. The apparently concentric rings of trees were strung with lines of light and mist, creating barriers that would confine and control whoever stepped into them, forcing them to wander a single, tortuous route until they reached the center. The ground was a sheet of silver marked with red, black, and white in scattered lines like runes or broken bones. I held Quinton back and inched forward, putting my hand against one of the barriers.
The broken lines on the ground stirred, rising into the air, and a shock wave of crows erupted from the nearest trees, plunging at us, shrieking and shattering the Grey. Quinton ducked, yanked his hat over his head, and turned up his collar, hugging his coat close against the ripping talons and clacking beaks of the flock. I turned my shoulder into the cloud of birds and tucked my head down until they lifted away again, circling into the sky and flocking to and fro as if waiting for my next move. A shadow shaped like a bear assembled itself from the clutter on the ground and roamed a restless path a few feet away, pacing just beyond the next wall of the labyrinth.
I looked at the trees and the ground, then back up and down again, studying the way the shadows fell and the returned detritus that lay along the labyrinth’s paths. “So that’s where the animals came from,” I whispered.
“Are they real?” Quinton demanded, raising his head warily.
“They are, but they’re not exactly normal. Did you get a look at any of them?”
“Hell no. Too busy hiding my eyes from their beaks.”
“They’re dead.” The cloud of crows fluttered and fell from the sky, breaking into bones and feathers, scattering back into the years of leaf rot and weeds. “Every animal that ever wandered in and died here guards this place. Guardian beasts by the score, animated by the energetic forces under the house. Probably tied to it by blood—seems like the blood mage sort of thing to do, doesn’t it?”
“Sounds like the creepy thing to do, you ask me.”
“But effective. That’s probably what attacked the kids who came here and thought they were chased by animals. These guardian beasts try to keep people out of the labyrinth or away from the house; cross the lines, walk in the wrong place, and they come after you. I’d bet that you encounter fewer of them if you stay on the right path. . . . You want to take the long way, or risk the dead things and run straight through?”
“To where?”
I pointed to the cleared place at the back of the tumbled-in foundation: a circular area of weedy grass about the size of a baseball infield. “There. The center of the labyrinth.” It was as clear as water to me, and as I named it, the misty walls of the orchard labyrinth thickened and brightened, increasing the electric sensation in my body.
Quinton gave it and me a considering look. “Much as I tend to live recklessly, I think this might be a better time for caution. And I could do without any more encounters with skeleton crows.”
I stared at the ground for a while, looking for the silver fog that marked the lines of the labyrinth’s walls, then led forward until we came to the first turn.
We must have looked insane, wandering around the orchard in looping arcs for no apparent reason. We were nearing the center and I was getting fatigued from staring at the Grey without vanishing into it. A thin silver fog covered the ground in my view and I was concentrating on the thicker shapes of the walls, so I missed the shadow bear, its tattered skin stretched over an incomplete skeleton of bones and twigs.