Chapter 33
AFTER SOME STUMBLING around in the dark, I find my way to his private terrace.
From there, it isn’t much work to enter his suite and gather my belongings, including the ball of red string.
Under the watchful gaze of the three ravens, I pause to write a note requesting that he send me back to the labyrinth at dawn, then return to my room.
All the fae are still at the presentation celebrations, so I don’t see anyone in the corridors that I have to explain myself to, just the cat, who almost trips me up three times as he rubs against my legs.
I sleep fitfully until just before sunrise, when I get ready for the labyrinth, and sit by the window, holding my breath as I wait for the black sun to break the horizon.
The instant it does, I fragment.
I land in a familiar corridor of black glass full of equal parts relief and dread. My limbs don’t ache today, but how long can I trudge through here before they do?
The Collector is huddled, humming a little song to themselves. The moment they look up and see me, they fuss over me, touching my shoulders and hair as if reassuring themselves I’m real. “We thought something had happened to you. Something terrible.”
“The king,” the slithering voice whispers, and they nod as if all their voices are in accord.
“I’m fine. He didn’t hurt me. He… I don’t think he would.” I frown as I retrieve the ball of string from my pocket and realize that’s not a reassuring lie. Aside from emotional pain, at least.
The Collector’s various voices mutter. Most are afraid of Drystan, which makes me wonder why.
As we make our way through the corridors, I ask about themselves—their life before the labyrinth.
“Before?” They pause, murmuring back and forth between themselves. “We don’t remember a before.”
“Then you’ve always been here?”
They stop at an intersection and make a chuffing sound as though sniffing the air, though I’ve never seen any nostrils among their flecked hair.
I follow as they choose the left-hand turn.
Although they don’t have experience beyond the first tier, there is some aspect of the labyrinth to them.
Their senses steer us true more often than not.
I’m grateful—this is my sixth day in here, and I need to reach the fourth tier by sunset if I’m to stay on track.
“Yes,” a handful of the voices answer.
“No,” says one. The dissenter, of course.
Their shaggy head cocks as though the other voices are curious.
“Sometimes… sometimes we dream of places beyond obsidian walls. Trees. Snow. Hills. A smiling face. A hearth. A cottage garden with jasmine climbing the walls and lavender above the fire. A table set for two. A swollen belly. A blessing.”
The other voices listen in heavy silence. So do I.
I swallow like that can help the squeezing sensation in my chest. But this ache isn’t physical—not a symptom.
The Collector—or at least part of them—had a life before this. Many lives, if each voice was once a separate person, before they were collected. A partner. A child on the way.
I wonder if their memories come in a complete, comprehensible story or if they’re just snatches of moments with no connective tissue.
I wonder if they understand the life they lost and why this voice remembers when the others don’t seem to.
If they were the most recently collected, that might explain it.
We walk on in silence for a long while before one of the other voices pipes up. “Sometimes we dream of horses. The smell of leather and soap. The stink of their shit. The blast of wind in our ears when they race.” They hang their head. “But we don’t even know what a horse looks like.”
“What’s the wide blue?” another voice asks. “We dream of that sometimes. It sighs and crashes when its angry.”
“The sea?” I offer.
“The sea!” Their head jerks up and turns to me. “The sea.”
I fish out Lowen’s sketch of the coast and show them.
They gasp, eyes gleaming, wide, as they take in every inch, the fingertips of two hands tracing the lines. “The sea.”
Over the rest of the morning, I catch them rolling the words around their mouth several times, like they enjoy the flavor.
We stop to eat and rest, and I share my food with them. In an apologetic tone, they tell me they have no food for me today, but I tell them not to worry. I’m prepared.
Though, I don’t feel as tired as I do most days in here. I try not to think about how I should be grateful to Drystan for the enforced rest.
“You know,” I say as we repack my bag, “you can go back to the first tier. I appreciate you helping me, but it’s frightening for you here. You’re under no obligation to stay with me.”
They heft the bag over their shoulder and give me a sidelong look, the skin around their eyes crinkling. “We know.”
And with nothing more, we set off.
As the sun passes overhead, there are increasing signs of the bloom I’ve spotted before. The matte flicker echoes across the stone, oozing more of the viscous slime that turns my stomach. As we pass, though, this stuff moves.
The first time I notice it out the corner of my eye, I think I’m tired and imagining things. The second time, I stop in my tracks.
“What is that?” I edge closer, checking there is none of the slime on the floor—the last thing I need is to fall over. Plus, I don’t trust the stuff not to be poisonous or acidic or something equally delightful.
Tiny black filaments stretch out from the ooze. As I crane to one side to view them from another angle, they follow. Strange.
They remind me of an experiment the teacher at the village school once showed us using a magnet.
She had a tray of metal filings, which stood on end when she placed the magnet underneath, like they had a mind of their own.
But they were only cold, dead metal. One of the boys got hold of it after the lesson and shoved the magnet in the middle, so they spiked off its end.
The teacher never managed to get them all off the magnet.
She always seemed a bit nervous about the experiment and made it clear we weren’t to tell our parents. Now I look back, I suspect those filings were iron—forbidden, even back home.
These filaments look a lot like those filings, but with an organic aspect, like the bristly leaves of borage or furry black mold.
“Lady Annon?” The Collector shifts behind me, a rough edge to the deep voice. “We should keep going. We don’t like that stuff. It isn’t right. It doesn’t belong.”
“It is strange.” I rifle through my pockets and pull out my notebook. “But I don’t think it can hurt us—as long as we don’t touch it, anyway. Plus, it might help us understand this place.”
They make a low, begrudging noise.
I tear a strip of paper from the back of the notebook, roll it into a long tube and reach toward the filaments. They strain toward it as though hungry. The next instant, they shrink away, like when the teacher turned the magnet the other way around.
“Huh.” I move the tube and moments later, the filaments reach for it again. “Now, where’s the logic in that?”
“Be careful,” the Collector whispers over my shoulder. “Don’t touch it.”
“It’s all right. I won’t.” I give them a reassuring smile. “That’s what this is for.” I dip the paper tube into the ooze. It remains visible a little way in—the substance isn’t opaque black but slightly transparent, like smoked glass.
When I pull away, it clings to the paper, stringy, sticky. I wrinkle my nose when I finally manage to pull clear and see it’s left a greasy mark.
“I can see why you don’t like this stuff,” I mutter as I discard the paper in the corner, pull out the pencil and open my notebook.
I’m adding a sketch of the black filaments and a description of their movement to my notes when I spot the ooze creeping over the discarded paper tube.
It’s almost swallowed it up entirely by the time I bend down and peer at it with horrified curiosity.
“It spreads. Is that what it’s doing to the labyrinth?
” I hold my breath as the stuff closes over the last of the paper.
A shriek splinters the air.
The Collector’s head whips around in the direction of the noise. I’ve never seen their eyes so wide, their shoulders hunched so low. Their breaths come in staccato bursts.
My mouth dries. The hairs at the back of my neck strain to attention like they recognize the cry from some ancient ancestral memory.
“The Devourer,” the Collector whispers, the slithering voice alone. “Run.”