Page 110 of House of Dusk
It was a bleak, barren place. A few trailing vines spidered over the stones, but she saw no hint of any bloom, only dry, leathery leaves the color of dried blood. Puddles of oily water sheened the earth, reflecting the pitiless sky above.
“I begin to see your point,” Nilos told her. “There should be a guard dog, at the very least.” His smile was brittle, but he was playing along with her so she would do the same.
“But it can’t just be a normal hound,” she said, joining him. “Not if it’s guarding the Labyrinth of Souls. Maybe it could have a scorpion tail. Or three heads. Or bat wings.”
“You were clearly wasted as both a soldier and an ashdancer,” he said. “Obviously you were born to be an aesthetic advisor to the gods.”
But humor was a fragile shield. The passage stretching away on either side was as endless as the wall without. Fates, how could they ever find Timeus in this place? She pressed her eyes closed, but it did nothing to stop the images chewing at her. It was as if some cruel artist had taken all her most terrible memories, all the ways that a mortal body could suffer, and painted the boy’s face onto them. She saw his strong young body shattered. Bones broken, viscera streaming. Eyes wide and mouth a terrible rictus of pain.
“Which way?” she asked. “Where would they be keeping Timeus?”
“Most likely the center. The source of the Lyrikon. It’s where the skotoi are most powerful. But the route to the heart of the labyrinth is different for every soul that walks it.”
“Even us? We’re not dead.” She frowned. Nilos looked troubled, lips pressed together, the corners of his eyes creased as he squinted at nothing she could see. “Are you all right?”
“I’m...fine,” he said, after a moment that felt like a year. “It’s the spirits. I can—” he winced—“I can feel them. Because of the Serpent’s marks, I imagine.”
Sephre felt nothing. Or at least, nothing she could separate from the ambient dread of traveling the underworld. “This is the Labyrinth of Souls. Aren’t there meant to be spirits here?”
She recalled a taverna that she had ill-advisedly allowed Zander to drag her to. It had been called the Necropolis, and was famous for offering free drinks to any soldier on the eve of a deployment. The entire place had been decorated like a tomb. She had laughed at it, back then. Downed a cup of the sour wine out of a skull-shaped goblet, watched Zander flirt shamelessly with a dark-eyed bard singing funeral dirges. She had even—she squirmed to remember it—joined the other patrons scrawling on the walls.
They had been painted with scenes of the labyrinth. Only a pale, mortal approximation, the maze, uneven, rough. Populated by spirits, roughly drawn by laughing soldiers eager to share their conquests. And she had been one of them, scratching seven awkward figures into one of those painted corridors. Zander had teased her, saying they looked more like bundles of sticks than people. That was before the war.
She had never gone back, after.
“Not this many,” said Nilos, wincing again. “Too many. Something’s wrong.”
“Is it the skotoi?”
“We’ll find out soon enough.”
• • •
Sephre trudged along yet another glossy black corridor, the walls slicing up to a narrow strip of iron sky high above, wondering where all the spirits could be. They had been walking for what felt like hours. The passages had begun to blur, each the same as the last, making it dangerously easy to lose focus. Twice, she’d nearly stumbled into one of the myriad small pools and streamlets that ran through the maze, no doubt chock full of deadly poison.
The place had the drifting, uncanny feeling of a dream. The sense of shifting. That the only surety was the ground directly beneath her feet. The air in her lungs. The man at her side. Sephre found herself staring at Nilos, her eyes hungry for anything other than gray grimness. For the burnished warmth of his skin, for the leaf green of his eyes. She felt him watching her, too. Keeping close. Two mortals, walking the paths of the dead.
She had no way to measure time except for her own body’s needs, which had thus far consisted of a handful of walnuts and dried apricots, half a flask of water, and two highly awkward breaks to relieve herself while praying the Furies wouldn’t punish her for defiling the underworld.
And in all that time they hadn’t seen a single spirit. She paused to take another sip of water from the flask. “Where are all the spirits? Shouldn’t they be here, wandering the labyrinth, being tormented with their regrets and sorrows and all that?”
Nilos halted, leaning against the obsidian wall, arms crossed. He’d refused her offer of food, and barely had a single sip of water since they crossed the Lyrikon. “That’s not the way it works,” he said. “Any torment a spirit faces in the labyrinth is something they bring with them. And they bring their joys and loves as well. Those are what give them strength to find their way through.”
She arched a brow, taking another sip. “How do they ever find peace?”
“I’m...” Nilos shook his head. “I’m still just a mortal man, Sephre. I have some of the Serpent’s power, but I’m no god. I don’t think it’s possible for a mortal to understand. To see anything more than...glimpses. But I don’t think finding peace is the point. If it was, why would the Phoenix keep sending us back? Maybe peace is impossible. Or maybe it will only come at the end of the world, when the First One claws his way out of the abyss and eats the sun. That’s another Bassaran legend, by the way,” he added.
“Then what is the point of all this?” She gestured to the glimmering, poison-threaded maze that surrounded them.
“Maybe strugglingisthe point. Realizing that you can’t win, you can’t balance some great cosmic scale. You can’t live a blameless life. You might never get forgiveness for your mistakes. But you keep going. You keep trying to be better anyway.”
She stared at him. She felt like a bell on the cusp of tolling. It was that same sense she’d had earlier, of seeing parts of something greater that her mind could not fathom whole.
“But who am I to say?” Nilos gave her a weary smile. “Like I said—” He frowned, turning abruptly to the left.
The passage looked the same as every other to Sephre.
“This way.” He began to jog. She followed, wishing that she hadn’t thrown their only sword at Ichos. What if they encountered a host of skotoi?
