Chapter Seven
By the time the last flash of the elevator winked out of sight, most of the remaining offerings had pulled out their lamps and begun to go through their packs. Ikki took out her lamp. It was only a cheap short-life model. Its cells only illuminated about four steps ahead of her.
“Better than nothing, I guess,” said Ikki, holding it over her head. The chamber looked like a warehouse. She could make out the dark-on-dark shadows of metal crates packed over each other. They were much too large to be opened by a handful of people. Construction machines, then. Ikki took a few steps into the black and slowly made out the arch of a huge doorframe, one big enough for a crane. The door must have been open, because she could see nothing but the faint gleam of more Nyx lights further along. She followed the nearest wall along to the other side of the pad where the elevator sat, where she found a similar door.
“A material warehouse,” she said. Of course. The great elevator was a service elevator: meant to ferry equipment from the bottom to the top of the tower.
“And where do you think you are going?” asked Agnan.
Ikki glanced over her shoulder. She could just make out the skinny shape of the scholar in the little circle her fellow offerings had formed close to the elevator’s cradle. “I want to see where we are,” she said.
Akadden laughed. “You want to find that big beast in the cave and get us all killed.”
Ikki hoped her patient look came through. “No, I’d like to see if there are any service hallways where we can stay. If this part of the Labyrinth’s a former construction warehouse, the ancient workers had to stay somewhere. Listen, we all have lamps. Two of us can stay at either one of the doors and two more will go in either direction. It can’t be too far. When we find the housing level we can probably access Poseidon’s pipes, and figure out where the Helios lights are installed in the halls, and from there we can—”
“That’s a great idea, Ikki,” said Lila, in an understanding voice Ikki was beginning to realize meant she felt the exact opposite of what she was saying. “But I think me and my brothers would like to stay here. It’s the closest to civilization, and I don’t think any of us want to miss the elevator when it gets back.”
There was a general murmuring of agreement amongst the group. “It’s safe here.” “Here we are in the eyes of the gods.” “Hell if I want to get left behind!” Ikki waited until it had settled down.
“We can do that,” she agreed. “But if it were that easy, how come every other group that came before us didn’t do that?”
“Maybe they went looking for housing,” sneered Akadden.
“Or the Minotaur found them,” whispered the oracle.
“And no wonder!” said Ikki, she gave her lamp a sweep. “This place is so open. I bet if there’s anything in these halls it would spot us from at least fifty feet in either direction, however long those hallways go.”
“Or maybe those sent here lost faith,” said Theoldus. His solemn voice seemed made of the very darkness itself, and everyone hushed their alarmed murmurings to listen to him. “During my training, I was once asked to guard a box being kept in a shop on the market place. I was told a beautiful necklace was kept in this box, one set to be given to one of the brides of Minos himself. My job was to make sure nothing bad happened to it. Every now and again, people would pass by and ask me what was in the box. What could be considered so beautiful that it could only be given as a gift to a wife of Minos?”
In the lamp light Akadden’s face looked especially foxlike. “And what was so beautiful it could only be given to a wife of Minos?”
“I do not know,” said Theoldus. “I did not look. When my superior officer returned, he told me I had shown great faith, and so I was chosen as a member of the guard.”
“Oh,” said Akadden. “Well, that’s a drag.”
“So you believe the challenge of the Labyrinth is an issue of faith,” said the oracle. “Yes, yes, something of what you say feels true.”
“And anyway, it’s better if we all stay together,” said Lila. “And we’ve got seven days of food and water each.”
“Heh. Then mine must be short.”
All eyes turned to the large figure of the retrograde, sitting quietly at the edge of the circle. His eyes glowed faintly in the dark. Ikki wondered how well he could see.
“I know how far food goes on a ration,” he said. “We’ve got four days at best here. And not enough water.”
And then he laughed. It was not a calming sound.
“Are you … sure of that?” asked Agnan.
“You mean am I just saying that to beg for scraps?”
“You can go a long way on some good rationing,” said Lila. “It’s all about pooling together and saving. I for one think we ought to put our food, water, and wine stocks together. That way we all get the same amount for sure.”
“No!” said Ikki. She said it louder than she meant to. Her voice bounced off the walls.
“You do want to get us killed,” hissed Akadden.
“No,” Ikki said, more carefully this time. “If we put our food together, we make it more difficult to move from one spot. And we might have to move. And quick. What happens if we can’t pick up our food all at once? These packs are good for carrying. And what if this Minotaur has a good sense of smell? And we don’t even know what the Minotaur is. Has anyone thought of that?”
“It is a giant awful beast,” said the oracle. “A retrograde of remarkable proportions and more remarkable cruelty.”
“Is that official?” asked Ikki. “Are there records that say that?”
“Well, no,” said the oracle. “But the House of Minos believes …”
“It could be a cleaning mechanism,” suggested Ikki. “A large machine that sweeps the halls. In which case it probably has monitors that check for sound and body heat. Or food on the ground.”
“My dear, you are doing no one any favors talking about this so candidly,” said Agnan.
“We need to think about this,” said Ikki. “The more we know about this place, the more we’ll know how to survive. For all we know right now, the Minotaur could just be made up—”
“Don’t say that!” screeched the oracle.
“You know what,” said Akadden, “If you’re going to obsess over this, why don’t you do it over there where we can’t hear you?”
“I’m sure you mean well,” said Lila, in that measured voice of hers. “But I think maybe we all need sleep before we think about things like that.”
Ikki could see from the faces in the lantern lights, that everyone felt quite a bit like Lila did. She sighed. She could almost hear Tierce laughing at her, asking if she’d gotten sleep the night before. He always expected the answer to be “no.” He was usually right.
“Okay,” she said. “Okay. If anyone does want to check things out with me later, I’m going to be over by those crates, okay?”
No one seemed eager to respond to that.
Ikki picked up her packs and went over to the crates. Behind her she could hear a quiet murmuring: “Should we let her go off like that?” “Let her. She won’t go far. She needs someone to listen to her lecture.” “That is the child of the Architect? Well, I suppose genetics doesn’t count for everything.”
The conversation turned to other things soon enough, Lila’s brothers wanted to hear more about Theoldus’s training, and Agnan was eager to talk about the wicked rival who had gotten her sent down to the Labyrinth in the first place.
She ignored it. Her mother had never gotten any work done being anyone’s friend anyway. “If I had my toolkit on me it’d be a different story,” muttered Ikki.
The worst part was, it was true. Ikki had been able to do a lot with her toolkit. It had been the reason she had been allowed to stay in Grand Minos after her mother’s death. The citizens liked their tinkerer. She could fix their lights faster than the city maintenance team. She could get their children little mechanical toys that ran across the room. She could make windmills that would charge their extra appliances without extra cost to the tower electric fund.
Tierce had liked his tinkerer too. She had done everything he had wanted, and when she became trouble for him, it was time to throw her away. Ikki switched on her lamp and unrolled her rumpled jacket.
“And his idea of a kindness was to send me down here without it,” she said, giving her jacket a flick to air it. “Probably thought I’d be good and useless without it. Damn him anyway.”
An object clattered out of the arm of her coat.
Ikki was too tired to jump, although she flinched away from the sound. She recognized the mask-like shape. The Herm. She’d completely forgotten about it. She had shoved it into her jacket without thinking. She would’ve figured the water and the crash would have damaged it, but it crackled with feedback. Ikki lunged for it and adjusted the dial.
The static immediately rolled back. It shaped itself into a fragmented voice.
“Hello?” Ikki whispered into it. She kept her voice low. Like the other offerings needed more reason to think she was crazy. “Hello? Oh, mother. Is someone there?”
She turned the dials until the fragments became full sentences. “Ikki,” called a familiar voice. “Oh, good. You didn’t throw out the coat. I was worried you would. You do such reckless things when you’re angry sometimes. I wish you would’ve …”
Ikki nearly dropped the Herm in disgust. “Tierce?”
The voice laughed, faintly. “Yes? Who else? I thought the connection might work this far. They would never have let you take a Herm. I had to improvise. I would have contacted you sooner, but I had to be sure that my charming sister and her friends had gone.”
“Who says I wanted to hear from you?” asked Ikki, quietly.
There was a pause on the other end. “Ah,” said Tierce. “You’re still angry at me.”
Ikki’s fingers went tight over the edge of the Herm. Oh, if only it were actually his face. “Uh. Yeah? Yeah I am? You threw me off a cliff, Tierce.”
“Minos III and Minos II wanted to have you executed,” said Tierce. “And King Minos would have agreed with them.”
“If you hadn’t lied about everything they wouldn’t have had a reason to execute me.”
“You really think they need reasons to do that?” Tierce sounded very tired, all at once, the way he sometimes got when talking about the House. It used to make Ikki feel bad for him. “You’re not that special a case to them. No one really is. And anyway, what you saw … it changes everything. Absolutely everything. Did you know that Minos has always eliminated any maintenance worker he sends to work on the dome?”
“Uh, no?” said Ikki. “Is there a reason you didn’t tell me this sooner?”
“Would it have stopped you from making the flying machine?”
“No, but it would’ve been nice to—wait a minute. You thought if I knew I’d stop?”
“Possibly. Most would. I had to be absolutely—”
“Tierce, what did you take me for?” It was very hard not to yell. Ikki’s hands shook. “What was I? Some trained pet that needed positive reinforcement? And so what, you knew Minos would eliminate me for seeing what I saw up there? Were you planning to toss me away from the start, or was that just an added bonus?”
“No, of course not. I needed you to go to the Labyrinth.”
“You what?”
“It’s connected to the breach, I promise,” said Tierce. “Ikki, I wasn’t going to abandon you. You see, the core is somewhere in the Labyrinth. Do you understand, Ikki? The core. Now that I’ve got you down there with a solid connection, we can find that, and then after that, I promise—”
“Do your own dirty work,” said Ikki, and flipped the switch on the back of the Herm, cutting the connection. Tierce’s voice vanished from the room. For a moment Ikki held the Herm in her hand. She considered tossing it as far into the blackness as she could, but then she thought about how useful a working connection could be. She settled for shoving it with great ferocity into her pocket. She unrolled her sleeping pack and switched off her lamp.
In the dark, she could see the gleam of the Nyx lights that marked the elevator shaft. She could hear the murmurings among the rest the group. She could also hear the vibrations from beneath the wall. It sounded distinctly like air rushing through the vents, along with the deeper, more mechanical croaks of not-so-distant machinery.
Something has to live down here, thought Ikki. They wouldn’t bother to pump air in here otherwise.
While cool, it was warm enough that Ikki could lie on top of her sleeping roll. The climate must have been regulated for some reason, and if there was active machinery, that meant someone would have to monitor those systems. Ikki went over the possibilities of who could live down here and what materials they would require. She wondered how many levels the Labyrinth had, and what sort of ventilation systems would be necessary to keep air circulating to all levels, and how anyone could have gone about building them, and how her mother had once told her that information to the main temple was relayed from the core, very, very far below.…