IGMS Issue 22 (6 page)

I reconsidered the roundel with the heraldic Panther, venting fire from its ears and mouth. Did I overlook something? Would Antlion really hide the key to the stone door in an obvious symbol?

I decided to trust what I knew of Antlion. "When Antlion delights in riddles and hidden meanings. Given that he kept true to the clues in
Il Dono di Ulisse
and the Capodilista Horse, these symbols likely hold secret meaning as well. Look where he chose to put the Panther: directly over the threshold, alluding to the myth of Antenor."

"You can't be sure the bolts won't fire even if you turn the right symbol," Luca said. "These things turn. They don't work by push, so you can't prod them with a staff from a safe distance. You'd have to know where and how to stand."

I saw his point. Even if I changed back to my first shape, with the reach of seven-foot tall Little John, I could not turn a symbol from a position safe from the array of crossbows. I had to place myself in the maw of the trap.

I looked up. The walls at the landing stood five feet apart, and the ceiling six feet high. I handed the torch to Luca. "Go back to the top." Though it was a tight squeeze, I braced my hands and feet against opposite walls and climbed up, my body flat and facing down. I climbed until my back hit the ceiling.

Luca held the torch low to give me light.

I twisted the Panther roundel.

Three bolts flew out of the stairs. One hit where my head would have been, had I been standing in front of the door, breaking against the stone. The second struck the left wall. The third arrow, angled upward from the rise of the second step, buried its sharp head in my thigh. I held in a cry of pain and kept myself from falling.

Damned Antlion had anticipated that a thief might try exactly what I did. Had I been turned the other way, the bolt might have pierced my heart.

There came a shout of surprise and sounds of a struggle, and then the torch rolled down the stairs. I dropped down to the ground and looked up. Luca was struggling with a man at the top of the stairs, desperately keeping a dagger from being plunged into his chest.

Drone!

I hobbled up the stairs, every other step sending a jolt of pain through my injured leg. I forced Drone's knifehand away from Luca. Drone kicked my thigh and broke the arrow, driving the arrowhead deeper into my flesh and unbalancing me. I cried out and fell backward, but dragged him with me, tumbling together down to the lower landing. I twisted him so that he was the one who fell on the flaming torch and he screamed. But he wrestled me with all his strength and rolled us further towards the portal, smashing my head against the floor.

I couldn't keep my mind clear. All I saw was a gleam coming towards my right eye.

I grabbed his wrist just in time, and with all my strength turned his hand and broke his wrist.

He howled and dropped the dagger, but grabbed for the amber set in its pommel with his good hand.

I grabbed his throat and reached for the amber as well, but he touched it first and drained its Lightning. He began to grow. I couldn't let him gain an advantage in size. I grabbed Drone and pressed him against the steps with my full weight while I still could. "Luca! Trigger the arrows!"

Luca leapt over our heads and used my back as a step, forcing the air from my lungs, but it helped me keep Drone down even as he grew larger.

The arbalests fired, a single bolt flying past my ear. The other two bolts buried themselves in Drone's back. He coughed blood on my bare chest, shuddered, and was still.

I tried to ask Luca how he was, but my voice would not come. Then I saw a scratch across my left palm. I had been poisoned.

Luca saw it too. "Maybe he has the antidote," he said, searching through Drone's clothes.

I reached for the other amber in my pocket, but it had been crushed beyond usefulness in my fall.

"Nothing!" Luca said.

I could barely hold on to consciousness. The mithridate that could save me was on the other side of the puzzle door. With a trembling hand, I indicated the roundels.

"But which?" Luca said, despair in his voice.

Darkness took me then.

I awakened in a round, vaulted chamber lit by tall brass candlestands with beeswax candles standing at the base of eight Doric columns. Dark alcoves set into the walls held chests of gold and silver that glimmered in the fading torchlight.

Luca breathed a sigh of relief. "The antidote worked."

"How . . .?"

"I figured out how to open the door," he said. "Well, not straight away; I made a couple of mistakes before figuring it out. Luckily, Drone's corpse took some arrows that might have killed me." He knelt. "But then I thought about you and Antlion. You're both proud of who you once were, and who you are now. If the Panther of Padua is the key to Antlion's current Labyrinth, then maybe the Minotaur is the key to his past. I tried both roundels at the same time and it worked." He pressed a piece of amber into my hand. "There are lots of these here."

I willed the spark of Lightning in the amber to heal me, forcing out the arrowhead and closing the wounds in my flesh.

Whole again, I stood with Luca's help. "Thank you."

"No, Master Flea, it is I who must thank you. There are more vials of mithridate, enough to save Father."

I walked the perimeter of the chamber, marveling at the heart of Antlion's Labyrinth. A passage curving behind the entrance likely led to Antlion's ballistae trap. Eight alcoves in the walls bore their own carved emblem at the top of each arch. Mantis. Locust. Cicada. Dragonfly. Butterfly. Spider. Scorpion. Bee. Ancient shape-shifters, all, elders among the Elect.

Luca showed me Bee's alcove. An open chest there bore a latch with the same bee emblem. Atop a bed of gleaming gold dinar, silver drachm coins, jewels and gems, lay two slender vials filled with honey-gold liquid, and a slab of basalt inscribed with Greek words. The mithridate and its recipe.

Bee would never poison another of my men again.

I gave the vials to Luca. "We must return to Venice at once. Take as well what treasure you can from Bee, so long as it does not weigh us down."

Under the magic of the mithridate, Mafeo began to regain his strength.

True to his nature, his first utterance to me was his report of his meeting with the Spaniard. At the end of it, he clasped my hands. "Master Flea, once again I owe you my life."

"Ah, but if you hadn't taught your son to defy me, Mafeo, I might well be dead myself." I regarded Luca with heartfelt thanks. "And what you have learned of the Armada may save all of England."

Mother never spoke about the sea.

She'd been very young at the time of the exodus, Aunt Albane said: a mere smolt, able to swim on her own but not yet ready to mate or bear offspring. Father had dragged her from the depths as the Dark King raged, and they fled together, ahead of twisted, shadowy shapes with harpoons and tridents -- never stopping till they reached the safety of the seashore.

"But how did he swim?" I asked. I couldn't imagine Father -- small and portly with a shock of pale white skin, out of breath when he climbed the stairs -- as someone who had ever been at ease in the sea-depths.

Aunt Albane laughed, a sound like breakers on the shore. "He had an armour. Grey and green like a lobster's shell." Her eyes had that distant look that suggested she wasn't there anymore, but somewhere underwater, amidst algae and fish and the familiar currents of her childhood.

"And a sword?" I asked.

She looked startled. "Yes. I guess you could call it a sword."

I pictured Father as some kind of knight: like Sir Roland in the Pyrénées, holding back the Saracens with his blade Durandal -- a palpable halo of light around him as he swam with my mother in his arms, away from the spreading, choking darkness.

I imagined it was only later, when they'd touched the shore, after my mother and her people had been resettled, that the glow had died.

There were words for what we were, not all of them kind: fish-heads, brine-breaths, dead-skins. The boys whispered them to me at recess when I walked past, my skin too grey and opalescent to be ever mistaken for human. They laughed and swaggered and said the country was all going to waste if they let my kind settle there.

Jamila told me they were blockheads, the lot of them, and that I shouldn't pay any attention to their babbling. That it was the Republic, and that we were all equals, Muslims and Asians and mermen. That I was no merwoman, but born on French soil, and as much of a Frenchwoman as Jamila was.

The boys teased Jamila, too, about her dark skin colour; but never for very long, for Jamila had an acid tongue -- and an older brother, Toufiq, who was quick to come to her defence, showing off his muscles and his willingness to use them to preserve her purity.

Jamila was curious about us. She'd ask me all sorts of questions about a country I'd never known, about what it had been like to swim in the depths, if we'd had clothes or toys or books.

"I don't know," I said, shrugging. My toys were a battered red teddy bear, and a small piano that made crystalline sounds when you hit the coloured keys; and all the other things you could find, going into any toy shop in Paris. "We have them now."