Labyrinth
She led him over to the stall and looked inside. Nothing but hay and dust. A giant spiderweb hung in the upper corner, carefully crafted by a master weaver who was apparently hiding. Annja shook her head. “Don’t care for spiders much.”
Kessel nudged her into the stall. Annja looked around. “What do you think? Trapdoor? Would it be that easy?” She knelt and hauled back a whole pile of hay. But all she saw was a dirt-covered wooden floor.
Annja stood back up. “Guess not.”
She backed out of the stall and examined the entry. But the simple latch over the gate didn’t seem out of place at all.
Kessel, for his part, stood still, studying every inch of the stall with his eyes. Annja looked at him. “See something?”
Kessel shrugged, stepped forward and touched a single nail jutting out of the closest wall. Annja heard the click and then saw a portion of wall slide back and in, revealing a black crawlspace.
“Well, look at that. Your first contribution to the cause.” She smiled at him. “It’s a shame you’re one of the bad guys. We might have gotten along well, you and I.” She shrugged. “Oh, well. I’ll take point. Don’t let me catch you staring at my ass.”
She thought she saw a glint of amusement in Kessel’s eyes. Good, she thought. If she could reach him somehow, it wasn’t out of the question to try to turn him against Greene.
Maybe.
The crawlspace was dark and dank. Annja sneezed again as she entered, aware of the moist earth smell. How had Fairclough constructed this thing without his neighbors knowing about it? Surely they would have had to haul away tons of dirt and stone to make this.
Given how utterly massive the estate was, he could pretty much be assured of privacy. Unless, of course, his neighbors could task satellites to fly overhead and spy on him.
Highly unlikely, in other words.
The crawlspace led down at a slight angle for twenty feet. Annja felt her knees bruising against the cold stones beneath them. She shifted her weight and kept moving. Behind her, Kessel made very little noise.
If he was that stealthy just crawling, then what was he like when he wanted to kill someone? She didn’t intend to find out.
The crawlspace turned at a sharp left and she saw ambient light coming from somewhere. She glanced back at Kessel. “Got light up ahead here.”
He nodded, and Annja turned back to the crawlspace. Her head kept bumping the top of it, dislodging dirt on her head. As long as it didn’t get in her eyes. She’d need a nice long hot soak when this was all over, she decided.
Annja followed the crawlspace until it opened up at last and she could stand. Kessel drew himself out of the crawlspace like some winter bear just awakened from hibernation. His massive girth filled the architecturally complete room they found themselves in as he stood and stretched his limbs.
“Glad we’re out of there,” said Annja. “Not crazy about having to find my way through dark small spaces.”
Kessel nodded.
The room was approximately eleven feet by eleven feet with a simple table in the center. In the middle of the table sat a book.
Kessel headed right for it.
Annja stopped him. “Hold it, slick.”
He paused and looked at her. “You really think that’s all there is to this?” she asked.
Kessel shrugged.
Annja shook her head. “You’re smarter than that, Kessel. And there’s no way Fairclough would put the book he’s trying to protect right here. There’s no challenge in this. And he did warn me of puzzles. I’m guessing this must be one of them.”
She looked around the room again. Something seemed odd about it and the third time she looked she finally understood. “There’s no exit.”
Kessel’s eyes blazed. And then he nodded understanding.
Annja studied the table. “So, somewhere, there’s got to be a clue how we’re supposed to free ourselves from this place. I mean, we could go back through the crawlspace—”
But at that moment, she heard a rumble and a cloud of dust poured into the room. The crawlspace had caved in.
Annja sighed. “All right, so much for that. Looks like the only way out of here is to figure out how to move ahead.”
She examined the table again. There seemed nothing special about it. It was made of wood with four simple straight legs jutting down toward the stone floor.
“Nothing there,” she muttered.
But what about the book?
Annja peered at it from all angles but could detect nothing special about it, either. As far as she could tell, it was a hardcover edition of the King James Bible. Fairclough didn’t strike her as religious, but then again, she’d only just met him. He could have been a zealot for all she knew.
But maybe he simply had an appreciation for the book and what it had done for the English language, rather than its content.
Annja glanced at Kessel. “What do you think?”
He shrugged.
Annja agreed. “Yeah, we don’t have much choice, do we?”
Kessel shook his head.
Annja looked at the book again. She could, of course, pick it up and see what happened. But was that the wisest move?
Overhead, a single lightbulb burned in the ceiling. It didn’t appear that some type of guillotine would drop on them if she picked up the book.
She pointed to Kessel. “Do me a favor—check those walls for any hidden firing ports, would you? The last thing I want is to find myself impaled by a spear or projectile I can’t see.”
Together, they ran their hands over every inch of the walls they could reach. But try as she might, Annja couldn’t find anything to suggest something lethal awaited them if they opened the book.
At last, she sighed. “All right, let’s try it.”
Kessel flipped open the cover before Annja could stop him.
“Hey…”
He stared at the book. There was nothing on the pages. Annja leafed through it but found nothing at all written in it. She glanced at the spine just to make sure she hadn’t missed something.
“Well, that’s weird.”
Kessel frowned.
Annja tried to pick the book up off the table, but it didn’t budge. “Is it stuck?”
Kessel tried, too, but it wouldn’t give. Annja nudged him out of the way and started leafing through the pages again. “There’s got to be something in here we’re missing.”
On the fourth time through, she finally found it at the back of the book. The last page covered a small button in the upper corner. Annja glanced at Kessel. “What do you think?”
Kessel shook his head.
But Annja poised her finger over it. “What have we got to lose? If we don’t press it, I don’t see anything else in here we could try. We either stay here and starve or press this and take our chances.”
Kessel nodded.
Annja pressed the button.
Several things happened in the next instant. First, the lights went out, plunging the entire room into total darkness. Annja heard sudden movement and a grunt.
“Kessel?”
And then there was nothing but silence.
“Kessel?”
No response.
Wonderful, she thought. Now she truly was alone. Villain though he might have been, Annja had felt at least some small measure of comfort knowing he was with her in the maze.
Now she was alone.
Then the floor gave way underneath her. Annja felt herself falling past the table, past the King James Bible trap that she’d triggered. She plunged down, unaware of how far she was falling until at last she fell into water. Annja dunked under and came up sputtering, gasping for air. The sudden cold shock had stunned her almost senseless.
She guessed that she’d fallen at least twenty feet but couldn’t be sure. It was still completely dark in the…pool she found herself in, adding to her insecurity about her position. After all, Fairclough had warned her that it would become obvious there were challenges within the maze itself. And Annja had the distinct impression that meant Fairclough might have stocked the maze with a few living surprises.
There might even be piranha in the water with her right now.
She wiped her eyes and tried to focus.
In any event, she was out of the room with no exit. Now she just had to figure out where she was.
And what had become of Kessel.
Chapter 8
The first thing she did was determine the size of the pool she’d dropped into. Annja swam in one direction until she bumped into stone. A wall. There, she thought, that tells me there’s at least some end to this.
She swam back the way she’d come but grew tired partway across. It wasn’t a small pool.
Annja took a deep breath and dove down, but again, she couldn’t find the bottom before her lungs threatened to burst. She surfaced and gasped for air.
Not good, she decided. Better to stay close to the stone wall she’d felt. So she paddled back over and felt the cool, slimy stones, covered in mossy algae. And Annja hadn’t detected any chlorine, so this was a natural body of water.
And that meant there might be other things living in it besides the algae.
Almost as soon as she came to that realization, Annja felt something brush against her legs. She jerked them up and away. She wasn’t in salt water, so that ruled out sharks. And while she didn’t relish the thought of facing anything in the dark, she could control her panic.
Now might be the time to see what it is I’m up against here, she thought. Annja visualized the sword waiting for her in the otherwhere. Instantly, the sword was in her hands, forcing her to tread water with her legs only. But the dull gray light the sword cast provided much-needed illumination.
Annja held the blade high overhead and attempted to see where she was. She glanced up at the ceiling and saw she’d misjudged the distance she’d fallen by perhaps a dozen feet. She could see the hole in the ceiling where she’d come plummeting through.
Any higher and I would have broken my back when I landed, she thought. Fairclough must have worked it out that way on purpose.
The stone wall at the one end gleamed in the light. Annja could see that the stones reached all the way to the ceiling, but looked impossible to climb. Then she slowly traced the wall. It went all the way around the water. She estimated that the pool was the length of a football field. Completely enclosed by the stone wall.
Again, she was in a room with no apparent exit.
She’d already tried to dive and hadn’t reached the bottom. So how deep was it? And did the exit lie somewhere beneath the surface?
One way to find out.
Annja took a deep breath and dove, holding the sword out in front of her while she kicked through the water. Just having the sword gave her a lot more strength and her system felt flush with energy. Her lungs didn’t protest so much as she swam deeper.
She could make out all sorts of plants and a sandy bottom roughly thirty feet below her.
She marveled at Fairclough’s construction of this maze. It wasn’t the type of maze she’d expected. This wasn’t a series of corridors and dead ends; it was a complex series of rooms, each with its own unique set of conditions. In order to get through this, Annja was going to need all of her wits about her.
A school of small fish swam away from the light of the sword, and Annja saw their large white eyes, more accustomed to the darkness than the light. What else lived down here?
She got her answer a second later as she spotted what looked like a bull shark. It cruised lazily some distance away from her. Annja felt her heartbeat kick up a notch as she remembered that bull sharks could live in fresh water. They’d been found up rivers hundreds of miles away from the ocean.
The shark suddenly seemed to notice her and altered its course. It wasn’t huge. But at roughly six feet long, it was still large enough to give Annja some problems.
If she’d been unarmed in the dark, it would have made short work of her.
But with the light and the sword, Annja felt ready for anything.
She hoped she wouldn’t have to kill it. It was simply doing what it was supposed to do. As an apex predator, its job was to hunt and eat. But when it swam suddenly closer with its pectoral fins jutting downward, Annja could see that its attitude had changed from mild curiosity to anger. It seemed to view Annja as an intruder.
I don’t blame it, she thought. If I ruled this place and someone threatening showed up, I’d be pretty pissed, too.
She flicked the sword blade up and aimed it at the shark’s snout. It brushed against the steel and Annja felt the blade cut into the nostrils. The shark bucked and jumped away.
Annja watched it retreat into deeper water trailing a thin line of blood in its wake. She hoped that would be the last of interest it expressed in her.
She turned her attention back to surveying the area beneath her. Unfortunately, she ran out of air, so she had to surface and take several deep breaths.
There was no doubt the sword helped her stay underwater longer. But there were limits to what it could do. And if Annja was going to figure out how to get out of here, she’d have to be sure she could reach the exit in one breath; otherwise, she’d drown.
Annja waited until her heartbeat had calmed down and then took another deep breath and dove.
She barely missed the set of teeth that flashed past her head.
The bull shark was back.
Annja kicked hard to put distance between them and then floated in the water with the sword in front of her.
The bull shark came at her hard. Annja knew this was no time for indecision. She cut fast, slashing across the water in front of her, severing part of the bull shark’s snout with a single swipe.
Blood flooded the water and the shark reeled away. Annja cut it again, a killing thrust to the underbelly.
I hope there’s only one of them, she thought. Otherwise, the mess in the water would draw others in no time.
She surfaced, took another breath and then swam deeper, beneath the blood cloud that hung suspended in the water.
The sword lit her way and Annja swam for the reeds growing down near the bottom of the pool. An underground pool stocked with a bull shark? Annja shook her head and kicked on.
The sword’s light illuminated more of the bottom. Annja spotted more fish and a few turtles. There must have been a way to keep the shark fed, aside from the fish population contained in the pool.
Would have been nice if Fairclough had given me a warning, Annja thought. I could have been killed back there. And he didn’t even know about the sword she carried. His only reason for getting her here was to warn her about the existence of that precious history book.
Annja made it to the other end of the pool and surfaced once more. With one hand on the stone wall, she held out the sword. She hadn’t seen any other sharks and she doubted there’d be more than one. It would be too difficult to keep two of them fed properly.
Still, she didn’t doubt that Fairclough could spring other surprises on her. She had to find her way out of the pool. While the sword would keep her healthy for some time, she could tell that the temperature of the water would eventually drop her core temperature and bring on hypothermia.
And that would kill her just as easily as a bull shark.
Annja waited again and then took a series of shallow breaths followed by one deep breath. Then she plunged beneath the surface again, kicking stronger than she had previously.
I’ve got to find a way out of here quickly, she thought.
She traced her way down the wall toward the bottom. A mass of boulders sat near the wall itself. Was the exit there?
Annja floated in the water and tried to reason out what Fairclough would have planned for this room. Obviously, the real challenge would have been the shark. Once that was dispatched, though, was there a secondary puzzle?
Annja swam toward the boulders. Small crabs scurried away from her as she approached. Annja thought the topmost boulder looked unusual and she pushed against it.
It moved suddenly, almost causing Annja to lose her balance. As it rolled away, it revealed a long black tunnel.
Annja frowned.
That was the last thing she wanted to see. She jabbed the sword into the opening, but the blade’s light faded about ten feet from the entrance.
Wonderful, she thought. There’s no way of telling how far it goes. She could run out of breath and find herself drowning inside.
Not exactly the way she’d envisioned herself dying.
Annja surfaced and looked around, trying to see if she’d missed anything. But as far as she could tell, there was no choice. The stone walls of the pool ran right up to the ceiling high overhead. There was no way to climb the walls. And Annja doubted the exit would have been up there. Fairclough might have been devious, but he would have also planned for someone to find a way out, provided they got past his pet shark.
No, the more Annja thought about it, the more she suspected the exit really was the tunnel beneath the surface. She’d just have to take a chance that she could swim it in one breath.
Here goes nothing, she thought. Annja took another breath and plunged straight down toward the tunnel, pulling herself through it as she kicked harder than she thought possible.
The darkness seemed to stretch before her, yawning like some great black maw. Annja drove the sword out ahead of her, willing it to carry her forward, to lend her its strength.
Her legs ached from kicking. And she kept bumping her head against the tunnel itself, which was only about six feet in diameter.
I’ve got to keep going, she thought. Come on, Annja, keep swimming!
Annja didn’t dare stop and look back. She had a gut feeling that she’d already passed the point of no return.
Her lungs started to crave oxygen more than they ever had before.
Keep going.
Annja closed her eyes and imagined the sword in her mind’s eye. A new wave of strength surged through her body and it felt as if her muscles had more oxygen now. Annja’s lungs still hurt from holding her breath, but she kept her eyes shut and kept plowing forward.
Just a little bit more.
The tunnel couldn’t go on forever. At some point, Fairclough would have to end it and bring the person into another room so the fun could continue.
Right?
She prayed she was right.
Her legs ached now and Annja knew that this was the final energy she could pull from the sword. Eventually, it would need to be put back into the otherwhere. Annja didn’t think it had an inexhaustible supply of energy to give her.
Nothing did.
I’m almost there, Annja told herself. A few seconds more.
And then she had the sensation of light ahead. Annja opened her eyes and saw that the tunnel had already started to open up. She could see the lighter water in front of her. The tunnel must have opened into a different room.
She kicked with every last ounce of strength she possessed and was rewarded by finally clearing the tunnel.
Air.
Annja shot for the surface.
Broke it.
And sucked deep lungfuls of air.
Finally.
Water dripped off her and her entire body felt cold. She needed to get out of the water and find a way to warm herself. Otherwise, she was done for.
She turned in the water and saw a sandy beach ahead.
Annja swam for the shore.
Grateful to be through the tunnel.
And still alive.
Chapter 9
Annja waded out of the water and fell face-first into the sugar-soft sand. Her teeth chattered and her entire body felt chilled to the core. Annja briefly managed to put the sword back and then exhaustion washed over her. She closed her eyes and just wanted to fall asleep.
But she knew she couldn’t. The watch on her wrist already showed her that one hour had passed since Greene had delivered his ultimatum to find the book or Fairclough would die.
Annja groaned and hauled herself into a sitting position. The sand was mercifully warm and her clothes already seemed to be drying, as if they’d been exposed to a fire. Annja lay back down on the sand and let the warmth, which seemed to be radiating up from under it, bleed into her and restore her core temperature.
Fairclough had planned for this, she guessed. After that swim, people would need to be able to warm themselves. Somewhere beneath her, there was no doubt an industrial heater.
Annja frowned. The heater probably wasn’t left on twenty-four hours a day… Had it been activated when she reached the sand? In that case, there would have to be sensors embedded somewhere in the walls that would track her progress. Either that or cameras, with people watching her. If she could figure out a way to get to some sort of control room, there might be a way to bypass the maze itself and head right to the book.
Of course, in order to do that, Annja would need a more intimate knowledge of the maze. And that was something she didn’t have.
She sighed and sat back up.
Kessel was still nowhere to be seen. Annja wondered if he’d fallen into some other pool somewhere else in the maze and if he’d had his own run-in with a shark.
Maybe he hadn’t made it.
Annja smiled. She doubted it. Kessel was very strong…and smarter than she’d first thought. Maybe she could find an unexpected ally in the man—if she could find him again. He’d already shown a willingness to communicate with her. And Greene had sent him into the maze with Annja without consulting with the guy first. That had to have shown Kessel he was expendable.
“I’d be furious if Greene did that to me.” Annja glanced around, suddenly sheepish that she’d spoken to herself.
A couple close calls and she was already cracking up.
She hauled herself to her feet and stomped around, feeling her muscles come back to life. A few deep breaths, knee bends and waving her arms around helped flush blood through her body.
Now, where do I go from here?
She took a look around this new room and saw that the sandy beach ended almost as soon as she got away from the water. Obviously, the beach was only there to serve the purpose of reinvigorating the person in the maze.
But beyond that, it was back to business.
The maze.
Annja padded out of the sand and paused only to shake some of it from her shoes. Then she put her shoes back on and turned around.
A wide corridor stretched out in front of her. Lights ran along the length of it, illuminating different-shaped stones that paved the floor.
She pulled the sword out again and knelt close to the edge where the stones started. Some of them were shaped like squares, some like rectangles and some triangles.
Annja tapped the point of her sword on one of the square tiles.
And threw herself down as a whisper of air breezed past her head. She heard a splash behind her and knew that whatever trip wire she’d triggered had fired its dart or spear into the water.
Good range, she thought.
She sat back up and tapped the edge of the sword on the triangular tiles. She heard the same punctured sound of air breaking overhead and watched this time as a small dart zipped past her and also landed in the water.
Last time, she thought, and touched the tip of the sword to the rectangle.
Nothing happened.
Annja nodded, stood and set off down the corridor, making sure to keep to the rectangular tiles.
The corridor went on for another fifty feet before ending abruptly. Annja stood on the brink of a pit that stretched fifteen feet before the corridor continued on the other side of it for another fifty feet or so.
The distance was too far to jump, and trying to get a running start would prove difficult relying only on the rectangular stones.