Acton

 

It was not the shed-star seer that led him to the maze. Nothing so grand, so strange, as that.

Acton was always listening to the world around him, an ear out for an easy mark - but especially tonight, with a Ghost on the hunt. The two Solterran citizens he overheard weren’t talking about Raum; they were talking about the maze, and who they had seen enter, and who they thought might win.

How odd it was, to hear a stranger say his daughter’s name. His heart gave a little jolt, a false start in a race, a hungry jump of spark toward fuel. He had forgotten entirely about the maze, but now he pictured it as it was built - towering hedgerows, crooked pathways, shadows on shadows and a hundred dead ends. There was magic in it, too; Acton didn’t know what, but he could take a guess. Isra had been shaping the world like a potter in recent days. But it was not magic that he was worried about.

He could not remember it ever taking so long to get to the prairie. Ages for the bonfires to fade to sparks and distant smoke behind him, hours for the chaotic music of voices and instruments and laughter to fade, years for the night to fade to darkness and silence and late-summer heat. There was only one living thing he saw - a boy, small and dark, who moved hurriedly and did not look up when Acton called out to him. Kids these days, he thought, and grinned.

At last he stood before the entrance to the maze, alone. The hedges were only hedges, the Benevolent had moved on, taking the crowds with them. Only scents lingered like ghosts - the sharp copper tang of magic, the sweet waft of popcorn and hotcakes, and beneath it all the deep heady green-and-growing smell of the maze itself. Of course O was not here; nobody was here. Not even crickets. Only stars above and shadows below.

But Acton did not return to the city. His heart was no calmer than it had been in the market square; it was beating out a fast tattoo against his ribs. For a moment he stood, head cocked like a fox, so still that no one who knew him would believe it of him. He wondered what the boy had been doing at a place so clearly abandoned; he dropped his nose to the trampled earth, a jumble of hoof prints and scents too numerous to make sense of. As though it were waiting there in the soil the memory of ambushing Lysander came to him - and it seemed like a dream, now, all the thick and silent snow and the scent of pine and his family beside him, hangman grins and gleaming knives. He surprised himself by shivering, shocked himself by feeling sorry for the poor bastard.

Maybe Raum was right, he thought, and stepped into the maze.

If Raum had not been his brother (once, before everything crumbled away) he would never have found them. Oh, but Acton knew that scent - knew it in blood and smoke, knew it in the twisted darkness of Denocte’s alleyways and the dust and sun of Solterra’s canyons. Knew it at the god’s mountain and knew it most recently, most intimately, in a dank cave with the summer fireflies outside and another sort of knife to his throat. If his heart was a drumbeat before now his body was a symphony - each nerve alight, each scent awake. For likely the first time in his life he was glad he’d had nothing to drink, and that old adrenaline-spell came down over him like god’s oldest blessing.

He felt like fire and brimstone as he walked through the narrow hallways, except for the fear - that was a new thing, this worry for others, a load he’d never carried before. But still his eyes were matchlight-bright, still his blood felt hot as stars. Yet there was still nothing - no sound but the whisper of leaves like an echo of his own breathing.

Then he turned a corner, and there they were.

It was hard, at first, to see them - Isra a crumpled heap in the corner, a dim dull brown with her spiraling horn like the pointed finger of a dying tree. Raum, who he would recognize in any skin, any shape. Raum, whose intent was clear - and for a moment Acton only stood there, one foot still poised, his mind wheeling.

“It worked, then.” His voice was loud and level, calm as a closed fist; he drew forward with that old familiar swagger. “You were always the best of us, Raum - well done, again.” His grin did not look like a skeleton’s grin; it looked like a showman’s, it looked like a king’s. Acton forced himself to look at Isra, even as he continued toward Raum. He schooled his expression into arrogant distaste and turned away from the murder-and-death in her gaze.

“Let me help you end this,” he said, low, and prayed to any god that might be listening that he could put on a perfect performance one last time.