4.52: Coming up behind

“Okay,” I said, jiggling a bit and breathing quickly and definitely NOT panicking. “Okay. So, maybe he left that coat here, and just went back – ”

“He’s been gone for several hours. This is all set up for a descent, including a rope. And Max doesn’t just leave his coat somewhere. The question is, what do we do now?”

“Well, we go for help, obviously. Malas is only a few minutes – ”

“No, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“You’re usually the first one who wants to go for help!”

“When it’s useful, yeah! But we have no reason to think Max is in danger and every reason to think he’s doing something super suspicious and maybe illegal that we absolutely do not want anyone, especially Malas, to know about!”

Right. Right. I was being stupid. Think, Kayden. Malas was probably the one who’d erased our memories, and also the one most likely to die if we succeeded. Alania? No, she was on the Council. How about…? No. There wasn’t really anyone we could tell who would keep the whole thing a secret. That would be a ridiculous thing for anyone to do. If a student was in danger, a search party would be arranged. What were we supposed to say? ‘Can you find our friend but keep the details to yourself, for unspecified reasons, please just trust us?’

“How can we be sure he’s not in danger?” I asked.

“We can’t. But we have no reason to think he is. He’s Max. he’s careful.”

“He’s done this exact thing one before and nearly died when – ”

“Exactly! He knows the risks now! Last time, he didn’t need to stay alive for the sake of saving the entire world. And last time, he didn’t know how dangerous it would be. And it’s the one thing he promised us he wouldn’t run off and do alone again, so if he did, he must have a really, really good reason. Or at least he thinks he has a really good reason, the idiot. And we have no information, so we have to trust that he knows what he’s doing. If he was in any certain danger, then the Destiny would have prophesied; it always prophesies for you and Max. So. We know he’s not in certain danger, and we know he must have a really good reason and must know what he’s doing. I can’t believe he ran off like this after everything, but us getting help would make it worse. Getting help would just make him fail at whatever he’s doing and reveal way too may secrets to people who shouldn’t have them.”

“Okay,” I said, “but if you do prophesy – ”

“Then we go for help right away,” Kylie agreed. “There would have to be many ways to save the world. There’s only one Max.” She bit her lip. “Although I’m gonna kill him for this anyway.”

I forced myself to slow down and actually think. “He’s Max,” I said. “He knows us. He must have expected that we might come looking before he was back, right? Presumably, he didn’t tell us what he was doing because he knew we wouldn’t agree with his reasoning and wouldn’t let him go ahead with it alone. But now that he’s downt here and we can’t stop him, he wouldn’t want us to go for help and he can’t be certain what we’d do if we found this, so… he’s probably left us a note. Right?”

Kylie nodded and checked the pockets of the coat. I started searching the general area of the well.

We found nothing.

“Right,” Kylie said. “Okay, then. So we...”

“We go after him. Right? I mean, I don’t want to mess up whatever he’s doing, but – ”

“He should’ve thought of that before running off without explanation and not even leaving a note! I can’t believe him! I can’t believe he trusts us this little, after everything!”

“Well, like I said, he was probably worried we’d stop him – ”

“If his reasons aren’t good enough to convince us, they aren’t good enough to go! Does he think we’re idiots? I’m sick of him running off like he knows best all the time! When we find him, he absolutely better be perfectly safe and achieving something really important for saving the world! I’m gonna kick his arse!”

“You mean, ‘he absolutely better be perfectly safe and achieving something really important for saving the world or else I’m gonna kick his arse’?”

“No, I’m going to kick his arse either way. So. What do we need for this journey? Food, water, medicine… what else?”

“Rock climbing gear,” I said. “I have enough for two. Do you own any pants? Or divided robes for sports?”

“Uh, probably? Why?”

“You absolutely don’t want to try to put a climbing harness over normal robes, trust me.”

Forty minutes and a few more grumpy comments from Malas later, we were back at the well, equipped for the journey. I felt vaguely like we should have left an ‘if I’m not back by tomorrow, get help’ message with someone, like when you go hiking, but… who? And even if we did, maybe whatever Max was doing was really safe and just took a long time. Maybe that would ruin everything.

“Okay,” Kylie said, “how does this work?”

I helped her put on her safety harness and mounted two new ropes on the crossbar over the well. “This is the exact opposite of a beginner’s climb,” I pointed out. “Maybe I should just go by myse – ”

“Absolutely not. You might need me to channel the Destiny to protect you from the spells down there. Anyway, Max did it.”

Oh. That introduced a new possibility I hadn’t thought of. What if Max hadn’t? What if he’d fallen to his death?

No; Fionnrath’s Destiny would have warned us. We’d have known.

Except the Destiny only prophesied danger that was both fairly certain and preventable. What if Max had been indecisive until the last moment, and by the time he’d made up his mind and got on the rope, it was already too late to save him? What if – ?”

I shook off the wild worst case imaginings and clipped myself onto a line. No point worrying about Max until we found him. For now, my job was getting Kylie down the well alive. And myself, for that matter. I was a climber, not an abseiler.

We made the slow, careful descent; me first, then Kylie a few metres above. At first I tried bracing my feet on one wall and my shoulders on the opposite wall and sort of walking myself down that way, but it quickly became apparent that this would turn my shoulders to hamburger meat long before reaching the bottom, so I just dangled instead and relied on the safety mechanisms in my equipment to keep me from plummetting to a fast and very messy death. This was absolutely not how a drop like this should be done. There should be extra safety lines, a buddy on solid ground to spot me, and a lot more horizontal distance between climbers. But this was how we were doing it. So.

Come to think of it, how were we going to get back out? We couldn’t just drag ourselves back up the lines with our own arms. Well, we were already too far down to abort mission, so… that was a later problem. I supposed.

Man, this whole journey was a mess.

The drop was long. The well was cramped. There were no sounds, but for our own breathing and occasional scuffling on the walls or our equipment. There was nothing to see, but for the wall directly in front of me, illuminated by the tablet strapped to my chest and covered in ancient runic patterns that I couldn’t understand, but that were dizzying to look at. I was making slow, steady progress when suddenly, something gave, and I dropped.

For the first couple of seconds, I expected something to catch, a safety mechanism to kick in and pull me up short. It didn’t. After the first couple of seconds, I knew that it was over. Anything stopping me now would probably injure me… now would injure me badly… now would probably kill me. Well. It had been a good run I supp – well, not a good run, but it had been a run, I supposed.

Then, something did pull me up short. But the pressure wasn’t in my harness; it had grabbed my legs, flipping me upside down. The line; I’d caught myself on the line, somehow, and I was fine, somehow, although I was upside down and my legs were tangled. I looked up, trying to angle myself so that I could shine light on the rope and see how to free myself, but when I moved, so did it. Winding tighter around my legs. Digging in. Wrapping around my torso, digging into my legs harder, crawling under the skin, burrowing its way through my flesh in strange designs, using me as a canvas to etch its magic binding runes as easily as Max etched runes into a fetish, turning me into a tool to hold magic while it dragged me deeper, deeper under the water.

Because there was supposed to be water in a well, wasn’t there? Yes. This made sense. I sucked in a mouthful of water instead of air, choked, struggled. But I knew I wouldn’t be able to struggle for long. I breathed faster, deep, gasping breaths, but there was no air to be had’ only mouthful after mouthful of empowered water that wormed its way –

“Kayden! Kayden, are you alright?”

Kylie’s voice. She’d saved me the first time but there was no way she could save me now. We were both under, both going to drown…

“Kayden! Breathe!”

I was breathing, but there was only…

Only…

Hang on. Kylie’s voice didn’t sound like it was underwater. It sounded perfectly clear. Like we were in air.

“Kayden!”

I squeezed my eyes shut, then opened them and took a deep breath of stale underground air. Kylie was in front of me, hands on my shoulders. I wasn’t upside down, wans’t tangled in anything. Wasn’t injured or wet. We were just dangling there, on our lines.

“What happened?” I asked.

“You tell me. You just started freaking out. What was it?”

“N-nothing. Let’s… oh.” I looked down. The ground was less than two metres below us.

We slid down and, very anticlimactically, unclipped from our lines.

“So,” I said, “how did you like your first abseiling experience?”

“I hated it. I never want to do that ever again.”

“Well, we’re going to have to do the opposite at least once. Unless you want to stay down here.”

“Ugh, don’t remind me.”

The bottom of the well widened out into a cavern about as large as our bedroom, the walls smoothed by the passage of water that had long since dried up.

In the Labyrinth of Dreams, mirror runes had been etched along the edges of the roof of the tunnels to channel the traped spells. I inspected the roof and found none. Not in the Labyrinth, then. That was something.

“You know what would be funny?” Kylie asked. “If this was nothing but an actual dried up well, that used to just provide water to the residents of Duniyasar. Maybe Max’s theory was wrong, and they did just build the Heart using portals, and this doesn’t lead to anything mystical at all.”

“Maybe,” I said. But I doubted it. There had been a lot of complicated runework in the well, and whatever had happened to me when I’d thought I was drowning… that wasn’t normal. That was some Labyrinth of Dreams level bullshit.

Honestly, this part not having runes marking it as part of the Labyrinth worried me more. Because there was magic here, and it probably wasn’t as well contained.

But there was one good thing here that hadn’t been present in the Labyrinth; bright white chalk arrows on the walls. Max had marked his route.

It made the whole thing so easy. We just had to follow the arrows until we found him. I kept expecting something weird or spooky, like maybe the arrows would change or vanish or we’d realise that they were leading us in circles or something, but Kylie started channelling after about half an hour of fairly boring walking peppered with the occasional break to let Kylie rest, we found him. He was at the dead end of a fairly wide passage, his back to us, inspecting the wall.

“Max!” I called in relief.

He turned. Saw us. Grinned. “Guys! What are you doing here? Never mind; come look at this!” He waved us forward and pointed at the wall.

I didn’t step forward. Neither did Kylie.

Max’s expression was relaxed. His voice was calm.

His hands were absolutely covered in blood.