Exquisite Ruin (The Labyrinth #1)

Chapter 3

AFTER I turn the corner, I find another long, living hallway stretching before me. Except this one isn’t empty. Not of all but statues, anyway.

A short way down the passage, there’s a creature lying on the ground, one the size of a cat or a small dog from what I can see, half-entwined in flower-speckled vines from the hedge. It’s not made of stone, but fur and flesh, and clearly under duress. I realize the vines are slithering and constricting around its body like serpents, and the red blossoms adorning the tendrils do nothing to lessen their sinister appearance.

The creature shrieks again, screams , a sound too loud and terrible for something so small, and I gather the burning sensation in my bound arm, summoning flame into my palm once more.

I dive for the small struggling bundle, fire raised. Ripping the vines away from its body, I send fire racing along them, careful not to singe any fur. The bloody blossoms shrivel from my touch and the leafy tendrils recoil, leaving behind the dry, fluttery wings of dead butterflies scattered on the ground and acrid black coils of smoke in the air that sting my nose.

Revealed is an animal even stranger than I could have imagined, lying on its side, struggling to kick its way to its feet, breathing in a panicked rhythm. It is like a small short-haired dog, except with bugged eyes, an entirely squashed, bunched-up snout, and a shaggy mane like a lion. Where I would expect a lion’s tail, albeit a small one, instead there’s a curled, scaly appendage more like a pig’s. It also has tiny, dull nubs for horns nestled in the deep wrinkles of its forehead, alarmingly clawed feet like a big cat’s, and stubby feathered wings that couldn’t possibly lift that jug-like chest off the ground. Its labored breathing sounds like snoring.

I gesture at it. “Get up! Get away from here!”

It only rolls one bulging eye at me from its wrinkly, flat face, its tongue lolling—clearly too long for its nonexistent muzzle. I’m not sure if that’s its normal expression or not, but it looks terrified. And distinctly unintelligent.

“I changed my mind about waiting for you,” says the daemon’s voice right behind me, making me jump. “I’ve come to fetch you.”

“I’m not something to be fetched,” I hiss, turning only to glare at him, ignoring how his presence, all horns, hooves, tail, and muscle, fills the passageway. I reach for the creature before he can try to stop me.

“Sadaré, leave it!” he snaps. It’s nigh a command.

How dare he? I think, until his next words stop me short:

“Its life isn’t worth yours .”

I glance back at him, and his red eyes are slightly wide before something in them shutters, closing me out. “Or your chance at victory,” he adds belatedly.

I didn’t realize my life was worth anything to him, beyond whatever goal or obligation holds him here, or that he cares about my victory in this challenge at all. More like he would relish my failure.

“What—?” I begin to ask, and then vines close around my ankles and drag me off my feet. With only one hand to catch myself, I hit hard, banging my hip and tied elbow, my flame extinguishing between my palm and the dark stone floor. I roll over awkwardly with one arm and try to kick off the tendrils, but they hold me fast, twining my ankles together, and begin winding up my calves.

I feel the small pinpricks as they come. Bloody was the right idea for the red blossoms. I think they might drink me slowly, drop by drop, just like they did the butterflies and like they were trying to do to the poor creature, as if I were a fly caught in the web of a thousand tiny spiders.

I desperately hope this maze doesn’t hold a thousand tiny spiders.

“Help me!” I cry.

Daesra only glares disapprovingly at me, no reminder to say please . “I told you to leave it. You deserve the consequences of failing to listen to me.”

“You mean I deserve to die ?” I bite out.

Apparently the only living being I know in this strange world—aside from the wheezing, bug-eyed creature on the ground next to me—would allow me to be slowly eaten alive by bloodthirsty plant life, just to prove a point.

What in all the gods’ names did I do to Daesra to make him hate me so?

He’s not even looking at me anymore where I’m trussed up on the ground; he’s looking over his shoulder, back toward the main passage. “We need to go, now.”

“Can’t you see I’m a little preoccupied?”

“Then focus. We’re about to lose the path forward—or worse,” Daesra says as he spins back to me, his tail whipping behind him. “What a hideous little chimera,” he adds— still disregarding the slithering vines in favor of the tottering, tongue-lolling little animal. “Some god’s plaything gone wrong.”

“Like you?” I gasp.

He eyes us both upon the ground, his sky-piercing dark horns making him look even taller as he glares down. “You never had a pet, that I recall. Well, other than… never mind. Despite your compulsion to control everything, you never needed to toy with smaller creatures to feel superior. To play the god.”

“ My compulsion? You’re the one toying with me from a lofty vantage,” I snap, wresting away a vine slithering its way up my thigh, trying to gather my concentration for more flame. But Daesra isn’t helping, in more ways than one. He’s not just standing there; he’s distracting me, despite bidding me to focus . “I didn’t rescue it out of a sense of superiority. Look at it!” I wave at the ridiculous creature—chimera, I suppose—still scrabbling to find purchase on the too-smooth stone and now snorting like a pig. Is it a pig-dog? A dog-lion? With a chicken’s wings and tiny goat horns? I can’t help but agree that its creator took a bad turn somewhere. “It needs help!”

“It seems you need help, at the moment. You realize that acting like your usual, ruthless self would better serve you in this place.” Daesra scoffs. “How is it that you’ve become so motherly?”

“Thank you for the insight now, of all times,” I say in a bitter tone, tossing my head at my trapped legs, “when it’s the last thing I need. By the way, this hedge is drinking my blood.” I can’t help but add, “ Motherly? ”

The word feels as strange to me as stuffing my foot in someone else’s ill-fitting shoe.

The daemon shrugs, folding his arms. Still not coming to my aid. “All I’m saying is it’s odd, if you’re doing this out of some nurturing instinct. You never wanted children. You couldn’t spare love for anyone but yourself.”

Children? I stare at him blankly, a gutted fish gaping, until I gather myself enough to speak. Only with mortal breath, not fire, despite the vines working their way inexorably toward my hips. They’re swallowing me slowly, like a large snake. Draining me all the while, with a thousand little pricks. I almost don’t care, I’m so consumed by Daesra’s words.

He dares speak to me of something so… intimate… when I know nothing of myself? When he won’t tell me anything else?

“I’m glad,” I finally say through gritted teeth, “that whatever it is you know of me from our past, I never spared any love for you .”

His eyes hold something remote and utterly cold. “As am I. Now, get on your knees and beg for my help.”

“ Excuse me ?” The words come out in a near screech, startling the chimera.

“You’re not excused,” the daemon says. “I told you, get on your knees.” I open my mouth to shout something at him—perhaps vile curses—but he interrupts me with an impatient wave of his hand. “It will make the pain yours , Sadaré. Just as with binding that immobilizes as well as hurts, surrender is another form of sacrifice that augments your offering. Think of it as a sort of mental bond. Now”—he nods at my bound legs—“get on your knees, beg me to help you, and you’ll have all the strength you need to free yourself.”

“Why can’t you simply free me?” I demand.

“That wouldn’t be terribly instructive.” He shrugs. “Besides, where’s the fun in that?”

I scowl. “I’m glad this is fun for you.”

He twirls a long-nailed finger as if tracing the turn of a wheel. “Nice try, but carry on and with less sarcasm.”

Snarling, I laboriously roll onto my side and begin the struggle to fold my legs underneath me. Spots of blood ooze out from under the vines digging into my skin.

“Why,” I growl, “do I have to beg you ?”

“You need to bow to someone , and the gods aren’t listening anymore. I’m the only one here, unless you want to kneel for the absurd abomination.”

I look at the little chimera, and its bugged eyes roll toward me. It would almost look like it was grinning with its tongue hanging out of its mouth, if it didn’t look so terrified.

Kneeling for that creature would never make a believable offering.

Still, I say, “I would rather anyone than you.” I groan through clenched teeth, pushing my weight into my knees and sinking onto my shins, where the vines are biting particularly deep. “I can’t help but think you get some benefit out of this as well.”

The daemon grins down at me, revealing his sharp canines and overt pleasure in seeing me brought to this. “Of course.”

“I hate you.” I gasp as I flatten my one unbound palm on the ground and lean forward, hinging at the waist as stiffly as a tree in a gale.

He says cheerfully, “What doesn’t bend will break. But you might want to hurry with the bending.”

I scowl at the dark stone floor directly beneath my face, trying and failing to swallow my pride. “The vines aren’t drinking my blood that fast.”

“And they’re not what’s about to kill you,” the daemon says above me. “The passageway behind us is. It’s closing.”

I lift my eyes to his in shock. I can hear it now, a distant roar like the wind. The corridor collapsing. And, by the sounds of it, at a far quicker pace than the mist that hurried us along at the beginning. “That’s why I’m here,” he adds. “The maze seemed to appreciate your wayward venture less than I did. Though I’m not exactly sure why.”

I squeeze my eyes closed, trying to focus in earnest now. I breathe into my bindings, both rope and vine, expanding into the pain, especially where my kneeling has increased it. Making it my offering and doubling it.

“Please,” I gasp out in the daemon’s general direction— meaning it, now that I know how precarious my situation truly is. “Help me.”

As if I were kindling struck by a spark, power erupts within me, and my legs glow like the sun. The vines writhe like worms on a salt-field. They can’t untangle themselves fast enough to retreat, and they start sizzling and steaming, smoking and then curling to black. Their demise leaves behind burns and seeping pinprick wounds all over the pale expanse of my skin, anyplace left unprotected by the leather straps of my sandals or my slitted tunic. Already the creamy material is stained with blood and char. I tip sideways on the ground, kick free of the ashes of the vines, and then spit on them, but my mind is already on the path ahead—the closing path, where I hear the leafy, rustling roar of the hedge walls collapsing like crashing waves.

Daesra hauls me upright and begins to drag me back the way I came, toward the noise, but I jerk away.

“This is still the way forward, no matter the danger,” he growls. “We can’t lose it.”

“I know!” I resist only long enough to scoop up the snorting, snuffling chimera. Definitely a pig-dog , I think.

“You’re really trying my patience, Sadaré,” the daemon says. “But it won’t fall to me to punish you. Pity,” he adds as he tugs me into a run.

I don’t have time for a biting response because I see the form my punishment might take as I reach the main corridor. I keep sprinting as fast as I can, because not far back now, as if chasing us, the hedges are shivering, leaning. Colliding. Changing because I went the wrong way? Fell for some sort of trap by rescuing the chimera, as Daesra seems to think? Or because that’s just what the passageways here do?

Maybe the statues were running from the shifting maze, if not the dead oceans.

Which means the daemon may have actually helped me, I’m loath to admit. That is, if it’s not too late to have made a difference. Behind us, branches churn and statues fall to the leafy mass as if beneath a plow. I barely gain ground before it can pull me under, the roar angry and terrible, a beast on my heels. Daesra easily outpaces me with my burden, which I know he won’t carry for me. But I refuse to leave the little creature behind.

My breath rasps in my ears as I run, the pig-dog clutched under my arm like a lumpy satchel, loose leaves billowing over the black floor from the wind of the collapsing hedges. I’m not slow, but the chimera is surprisingly heavy. I can’t hold it with both hands because of my binding, and my free arm burns from the strain of it. I could pull the release I rigged for my other arm, but I want to hold that power in reserve for as long as possible. The bottoms of my feet sting as they slap the ground, my heartbeat a rhythmic thunder in my ears.

The worst comes then. A wall of smooth black stone rises into view ahead of me, just like the floor, set perfectly across our path and taller than I am—though not nearly as tall as the hedges—almost as if designed to trap us between it and the closing passageway. I could hoist myself up with difficulty—but not with one arm bound and a chimera in the other.

Daesra has reached the wall ahead of me and leaps into a crouch atop it, his wiry legs bunched beneath his black tunic, his tufted tail lashing. Facing me. Waiting to see if I’ll make it, his red eyes bright. All he would have to do is extend a hand down to me.

I would reach for him if I had a free limb. But I don’t need my arms to scale a wall. The daemon is probably waiting for me to remember this on my own. I begin to gather my strength in my feet and thighs. My pain’s not just a weapon, it’s a tool, and I can use it to spring like Daesra has, faster and higher than any human could jump.

Instead, the toe of my sandal catches on a patch of moss and leaves, and I send the chimera flying in order to catch myself and keep from breaking my nose. When I smack into the ground, my jaw clacks violently against my teeth where it doesn’t bite viciously into my tongue. The pain is such that I can’t think straight.

This , I amend, this is the worst. My watering eyes instinctively seek out the one being who can help me.

“Daesra!” I cry. And then, “You bastard !”

Because he’s already pivoting away from me on his hooves, unfolding his legs. He leaps lightly off the other side of the wall, out of sight. Leaving me behind.

My rage burns hotter than my pain. I want to torch the daemon, but he’ll have to wait. The more pressing threat is behind me.

I should make this agony mine, harness its power. I should throw fire or whatever I can at the closing hedge. But all I can think, uselessly, is That goat-fucker left me to die after all. I only roll on my side, wheezing for breath, tears blurring my vision, blood in my mouth. The chimera is alongside me, staring at the oncoming tidal wave of leaves with bulging eyes. It appears to be paralyzed with terror, or maybe that’s just how it always looks.

I try to cry, “Run, Pig-dog!” since that’s the best I can do as a name for the small, unfortunate creature under pressure. There’s an aspect of lion to the chimera, but it’s just not impressive enough to overcome the other parts. Instead, run gets stuck in my throat with the blood, and I simply gurgle, “Pog!” in a spatter of red droplets.

It’s as good a name as any.

At least I’m ready to die alongside that name. I don’t even know my own name for certain, so I’m hardly one to judge. The daemon who told me mine is less than trustworthy, after all. I look at the chimera, and it looks at me.

It turns to the oncoming crush of branches, no change in its bug-eyed expression. For a half second I stare at it, bemused, waiting to die.

But then it opens its squashed, ineffective-looking little jaws and roars back at the closing passageway. The sound should be impossible for so small a creature, jug chest or no. It completely drowns out the tumult of the hedges. I cover an ear with one hand and press the other side of my head to the ground to protect myself. A new wind rises from the creature’s cry, perhaps from its very mouth, lashing at the churning storm raised by the shifting maze. Leaves and twigs and even bits of stone explode around me with violent speed. I curl into a ball.

When the noise fades and flying debris stops stinging my skin, I carefully open one eye. I’m still alive. So, I see, is the pig-dog. It’s sitting, panting happily. I sit up, dust and leaves raining off me, and cough, looking at the corridor where the closing hedges had been about to swallow me.

There is no more corridor, only a blockage of the way I came, nearly pinning me between it and the dark stone wall. But neither is the new hedge wall solid. There’s a great wound blasted into it, narrowing as it goes in a tunnel of broken branches and shredded leaves, until it simply ends. The destruction seems to originate from the chimera.

I stare at the creature, propping myself up on my one free wrist, aching from my fall. I vaguely hope I haven’t broken it or loosened a tooth. “Did you do that?” I croak. “Did you keep the maze from swallowing us?”

The pig-dog only sneezes and scrubs at its snout. I lurch forward to smack its paw away before it can poke out an eye with one of its too-large cat claws.

Motherly , I think with a sneer. Maybe . The thought fades as I look at the creature. It might be ridiculous, but helpless, it is not.

“Pogli,” I say. I lean forward, balancing my weight to turn its flat face gently toward me with my free hand. I hold its unblinking, protruding gaze in all seriousness, even duck closer to it. “Short for Pig-dog- lion . I will never underestimate you again.”

It licks my mouth before I can stop it, and promptly sneezes again, this time in my face.

I drag my arm down my cheeks, trying to wipe myself clean, but all I do is smear the spittle through the dust coating me. “Rather, I won’t underestimate you in another life-and-death situation, though perhaps everywhere else.”

Pogli’s long tongue lolls out of its wide mouth. Once again, it looks like it’s grinning at me.

I duck down for a closer look underneath the creature. “You’re a he,” I say, and then struggle to my feet. “Insofar as I’m a she. So, brave sir, we need to find the coward who left us.” I glance back at him. “That is, if you’ll come.”

He only watches me, tongue hanging to the side as he pants. His bulging eyes glance once at the high stone wall—the way forward—and then back at me. A question, or a statement of the obvious?

“Right. I suppose those wings are useless. Of course.” I laboriously pick him up again. He seems even heavier now, perhaps because I hurt in several different places: knee, hip, wrist, jaw. I spit blood and grit my teeth against the pain, making it hurt worse. Making it mine . “Come on, you. I’m keeping you with me. At least you’re reliable.”

This time, I’m able to jump without tripping. But I use too much force, overestimating how wide the wall is. I clear it entirely, coming down on the other side of it.

And I fall right into a deep pool of quicksilver liquid waiting at the bottom, surrounded entirely by black stone walls as if it’s the only way to go. It is taking me down , at least. That doesn’t make me feel any better in the second I have to regret my decision. Panic seizes me as the cold, metallic strangeness of the pool closes over my head, swallowing me and Pogli together.

My only consolation is that if this was a terrible choice, Daesra made it first.