A/N: Sorry it took so long folks.
Episode 8: As Big As We Need it To Be, Chapter 3
"What word from our treacherous wolf?"
"N-none, my Queen," came the stuttering reply. It was a hesitant, whispered reply to a quietly impatient query, but in these hallowed halls the softest murmur filled the carved rock room, carrying the Queen's demands to the trembling ears of her servants.
"What, then, from my faithful hunter," she continued, "encompassing this world in his quest to reshape it?"
"His quest goes well, my Queen," reported the kneeling figure, more confident now that the news was positive. "He sends word that the calabash is in his possession. He wishes to know your will: should he return with the calabash now or continue to collect the other items first?"
"Tell him to return first," ordered the Queen, a smile playing about her lips. "There has been a breakthrough in identifying another of the artefacts required for our great endeavour, but he will need some tools from our collection to help him locate it. Also, I would speak with him. Alone."
The messenger nodded once, without looking up, then scrambled to his feet and hastened from the room. The Queen watched him go, the same odd, half-smile wavering on her face. Finally, after so much work and so much waiting, she had the respect she deserved. How odd that she should be on one side of the divide and the person she had cared so deeply for should be fighting against her on the other. Fighting without even knowing her to be the head of the very organisation they opposed.
XXXX
"I thought this was a shortcut, Jones!"
"It is! Trust me!" Ezekiel Jones replied with a grin. The route he was taking was one he knew only Jenkins, Flynn and Charlene were likely to be fully familiar with. It passed through a lot of obscure rooms!
"They're staring at me!" Stone complained, waving a hand at the offending articles.
"They're just skulls, Stone! They're not doing anything!" Eve reasoned.
"Why do we have a room full of skulls?"
This time it was Jenkins who answered. "What else would you expect to find in a skullery?"
"Oh, I don't know," threw back the agitated art historian. "A sink, maybe?"
Ezekiel Jones looked back with honest confusion on his young face. "Why a sink?"
XXXX
"You're punching the wrong person, da Vinci," hissed Flynn as the painter wiped Cassandra's blood from his cheek. "I can't solve this puzzle even if I want to, which I don't, by the way. Only Cassandra can, or someone that knows the key and I'm guessing Ezekiel Jones, World Class Thief, kept that one to himself."
"I do believe I have reached that conclusion already," purred da Vinci, signalling to his cronies with a flick of a wrist.
The arms holding Flynn captive tightened. A fist collided with his face. "You know, I've been punched a lot of times over the years," he sighed, shaking his head to clear it. "On a scale of one to ten, I have to say: I'd barely give that four. Really, it was more like a three and a half!" Another fist connected with his gut, knocking the air out of him for a moment. "Now that's more like it. That's definitely a five."
"Flynn stop it!" Cassandra cried out, stuggling against the arms that pinioned her on the opposite side of the doorway.
"Oh, don't worry about me," breezed The Librarian, pulling an overly unconcerned face. "This guy doesn't look as though he'll get above a seven." Another punch knocked the clownish parody of a grin off his features. "Maybe an eight."
"I assure you, Librarian," said da Vinci, a grim set to his once smiling face. "My colleagues and I have more than just fists available when it comes to making you and your acolyte more... helpful."
"Yeah: I have feet too," growled one of the minions in Flynn's ear.
Da Vinci's eyes rolled and his apathetic visage suddenly looked incredibly weary. "Quite!"
With a flash of silver and a flourish of arm, da Vinci produced an elaborate crystal vial and shining metal blade. He stepped up to Flynn, a lackey grabbing the prisoner's hair and holding his head still. Da Vinci drew the blade along the line of Flynn's cheek. It was sharp. So sharp he wasn't even sure it had cut him until he felt the blood run down his cheek. With his other hand, da Vinci unstoppered the vial and held it up.
"It's amazing the things one can do with blood, you know," mused the artist. "Especially the blood of one linked so closely with magic. A Librarian, no less, and one who has survived longer than most, especially considering how much time you spent between Guardians. Did you ever wonder why? No matter. This vial will keep your blood fresh for whatever use we decide to put it to. There really are quite a considerable number of possibilities. Of course I would only need a single drop to perform a spell that would make you think that blood was boiling in your veins. I wouldn't even need to open the vial again: the knife itself holds enough. Shall I show you?"
"No!" Cassandra broke in. "I'll do it. I'll get you through the next puzzle."
"Ah, ma bella," da Vinci sighed, turning away from Flynn and facing the scientist. The synaesthete. The witch. My, what a puzzle she made for him, and what a model she might have been. "I had hoped you would see things my way. Blood magic is so... So tiresome."
"Cassandra, you don't have to," called Flynn, craning his neck to look past the traitor in their midst. "His spell won't kill me, it won't even hurt me. Not really. It's all in the mind!"
"All in the mind, you say?" Da Vinci sneered over his shoulder. "Minds can be broken just as easily as bodies, Librarian." He turned back to Cassandra. "Open your mind to this labyrinth, witch. What do you see?"
Cassandra found herself roughly turned to face the doorway, her feet dragging on the floor. She closed her eyes and breathed, feeling the magic within her beg to bubble up and forcing it down. Not now. Not yet. She let her synaesthesia take over and opened her eyes to a maze only the greatest thief could steal through. Or construct. Unless they had her gifts.
The room beyond glittered with shifting dimensions.
"Speak, witch," ordered da Vinci. "What do you see?"
"There is a way through," she replied, studying the scene. "It's difficult though. The steps keep shifting through dimensions. They only spend a few seconds in our own, and even then they keep moving, all the time. It's like he's taken the minotaur's labyrinth and combined it with some kind of computer game! Oh, Ezekiel! How did you do this?"
"I have no interest in how your thieving little friend made the obstacle," snapped da Vinci, "only how to get past it!"
XXXX
"Jones!" Stone growled, following the thief and the Guardian through another room. "They're watching me again, Jones!"
"It's just your imagination, Stone," returned the leader of the little group. "I'm sure they have no interest in you whatsoever."
"It's creepy, Jones. You did this on purpose, didn't you?"
"Only to creep out the bad guys," shrugged Ezekiel. "Besides what were you expecting?"
"Not this!"
"Buck up, Chuckles," began Charlene, but froze when thousands of plastic and porceline eyes turned to stare at her.
"Careful," whispered Jenkins behind her. "They don't like to hear anything that sounds even slightly similar to that name!"
"Why exactly do we even have a dollhouse?" Eve wondered aloud.
"Bai... Eve! They're staring at me!"
XXXX
"Okay, okay: I'll go first, but then you... You have to step exactly where I step, exactly when I say so!" Cassandra's voice was far steadier that she thought it ought to have been in the circumstances. Even without Leo and his lumbering lackeys, the prospect of the puzzle ahead was daunting to say the least. Ezekiel had outdone himself, and they were barely at the beginning if what he had told her was true. No, not true, she corrected herself, the whole truth. He hadn't lied, he had simply omitted certain facts that she had, after all, been able to work out for herself.
"I think not, fair lady," sneered da Vinci, fastening around her arm a hand that had far more strength left in it than his years might suggest. "No sane man would send his only map ahead of him into the mine field. Your friend here can go first. You can direct him. As accurately as I know you can. My friend here," he indicated the particular lackey who had been so keen on his job when it came to hurting people, "will follow your friend, step for step; you will of course inform us of the time interval beforehand. You will then lead me across in the same manner. I warn you now, dear lady, that any attempt to remove either myself or my friend in any way will result in my other friend here," at this he waved a graceful hand at the other lout, currently pinioning Flynn, "who is highly adept with a gun, shooting whichever of you he chooses."
Cassandra's eyes widened, her mouth opening in a sudden intake of breath and pausing on the cusp of a word. She glanced at Flynn. He nodded.
"It's okay, Cassandra," coughed the veteran of many such perils. "I've never known math to fail you yet. Use it. Although, since we're on the topic, let's stick to metric units. Preferably centimeters. I'm better with those."
XXXX
"Okay, even I find this one a little eerie," muttered Eve, trailing in Ezekiel's wake along the narrow, ambiguously lit corridor.
"Do I even want to know what they're muttering?" Stone mused, apparently fine with corridors filled with disembodied voices, as long as they weren't staring at him of course.
"Probably not," warned Jenkins. "There is, after all, a reason these secrets have a room all to themselves."
"Speaking of," cut in Charlene, "are we sure putting the shortcut through here was a good idea, Houdini?"
"Well..." Jones began, but got no further.
"Hold up, wait," said Eve, raising a hand in query. "This is a 'Room'? Like, a 'Room' room? It's a corridor, isn't it?"
Jenkins shrugged. "There are Rooms at the Library of all shapes and sizes. Remember the cupboard you and Cassandra interred that besom in just before the Shakespeare incident?"
"That was a Room?" Eve frowned in confusion. "And we're calling it an incident now?"
"It was a Room designed to contain brooms. Real ones," Jenkins shrugged again. "Where else would you put a broom but a Broom Cupboard. And this, while being a Room also, is not a corridor, Colonel: it is a passage."
"Don't tell me," groaned Stone, shoulders slumping as he locked eyes with Eve and continued in chorus with her. "A Secret Passage."
"I guess it's not just Flynn who likes puns then," sighed the Colonel.
Jenkins hummed an equivocal answer. "You know, I have never yet worked out if that truly is the case, or if the Library simply employs a considerably more literal understanding than we do."
"Just tell me there's no secrets or stares in the next room, Ezekiel," sighed Eve, her eyes focussing on the door ahead of them.
The thief suppressed a grin. "Next up is the Spirit Room."
"I swear, Jones," began Stone, descending to growl pitch again. "That better be spirit as in whiskeys!"
