The Labyrinth
Chapter 3
Setsuna made his way deeper into the labyrinth, choosing his paths completely at random but, from what he could make out according to his sense of direction, always heading further and further toward the center. At least the walls were somewhat smaller now and he could actually see that improbable vision of a castle, which seemed to have been designed by a committee made up of Walt Disney, Edgar Allan Poe and H. R. Giger after all three had taken substantial hits of mescaline. All in all not exactly a sight to inspire anyone, unless one was aiming to inspire a cheerful man to poke his eyes out on a bright spring morning, but to Setsuna that hideous architectural mish-mash of a castle was the goal he was aiming for.
He started running again, in an attempt to make up for the time he had lost talking with Arakune. It was a good thing that he was running into such a riot of familiar faces, all of whom were prepared to help, provided you asked the right question of course. What wasn't so good was that they were all so loquacious. And it was a shame he hadn't been able to persuade Kira to come with him. It would have been nice to have a companion, even if that companion was sarcastic, rather prone to violence and made him look quite a bit less attractive simply by being so tall, dark and devilishly handsome.
Still, now was not the time to consider Kira's rugged dominant-male sexiness. Not when he was supposed to be worrying about Sara. The thought made him feel somewhat guilty. God, poor Sara! What she must be going through at the hands of that maniac!
"Ooh…"
Sara sat up, placing one delicate hand to her delicate brow. She had a bit of a headache and felt slightly woozy; had she been drugged? She briefly remembered someone turning out all the lights, then some brute of a man clamping a handkerchief soaked in something over her nose, and then everything had gone all pink and fluffy and she had drifted happily off. So yes, she had been drugged. Oh no! That meant she had been kidnapped, didn't it! How terrible!
"Aniki-chan?" she called pitifully, looking round herself. "Aniki-chan? Where are you?" She couldn't see him anywhere! Oh, how terrible that she should have been kidnapped and taken to this horrible place!
Though the castle, from the inside, wasn't really all that horrible. The room she was in was large and clean and neat, one might almost have said pretty, dominated by the couch on which she had been placed. What few pieces of furniture could be found in the room were quite exquisitely tasteful; a vase of roses and a candle, as yet unlit, rested on a small decorative table; the floor was tiled. A stone verandah, flanked by floor-length curtains billowing in the breeze, looked out onto an ornamental garden. All in all, it was almost worth being kidnapped if this was what her cell was like.
Still, Sara's sense of melodramatics wouldn't let her admit that it was actually a very nice room. Instead she sprang to her feet and ran to the large wooden door - locked - which she proceeded to beat the hell out of, all the while crying "Let me out! Let me out!" until someone was attracted by the noise and came to open it. She had to wait a little while. In fact she actually had time to get bored with battering on the door and poke around the room a bit looking for clues as to whose it was, before going back to wailing and beating the door again.
Katan hadn't been sure exactly why they had to kidnap Sara anyway and he was even less sure when he finally got that door open and was confronted by a small, irate girl wearing ribbons in her hair who flung herself at him and started trying to attack him. Katan let her do this for a little while before prizing the panting girl off when she started to tire.
"Please calm down." he said, reasonably enough he felt.
Horrible hole? Katan was shocked. If this was Sara's idea of a horrible hole, how would she have reacted if they had put her in the dungeons? Rociel had wanted to. It was only the fact that she was Jibrielle that had stopped him. They couldn't keep Jibrielle in the dungeons even if she was a prisoner; house arrest it had to be. 'Unfortunately', Rociel had added under his breath, then he had sloped off to work out his frustrations at not being able to put Sara somewhere he wouldn't have to see her by kicking Dubbiel whilst Katan, lucky soul that he was, had got the job of guarding Sara's door. Still, he wasn't sure what he should say about this. 'Horrible hole' indeed! Who did Sara think she was, Martha Stewart?
Fortunately for him Rociel chose that moment to come back from whatever he had been doing, having changed his clothes in the interim. He was now wearing something a little more martial in an attempt to try and look more intimidating (this was always an uphill struggle when you were about five foot six, slender and wildly effeminate) and thus scare Sara into keeping her mouth shut. Alas, he looked more like a forces' sweetheart. With him came Kirie who rather ruined the military chic look that the two men were embracing by showing up in her school uniform. She smirked at Katan because she was currently standing closer to Rociel than he was; Katan decided to ignore her.
"You!" Sara cried dramatically, pointing a trembling finger at Rociel.
She flounced over to sit on the couch again and sat there demurely, knees and feet together. She then spread her dress so it hung from her knees in the most affectingly sweet way possible and placed her hands in her lap. If she was going to be rescued by aniki-chan she might as well keep her strength up and look good when he arrived; no more getting tied to chairs in an undignified manner for her! She sat and watched for a few minutes as her captors talked among themselves, frowning somewhat when she watched Rociel sit down at a carefully-chosen desk and start contemplating some artfully-arranged paperwork. Good lord, what a fuss the man had made to ensure he was sitting nicely. Just then an idea took her and she turned to look at the others.
"Aren't you going to say it?" she asked curiously, breaking the silence.
Sara wasn't taking this from a man with long off-white hair and yellow eyes who looked like an albino version of Alexiel as a boy and she told him so. Rociel responded by throwing a wine glass at her; fortunately for Sara's long flowing dress it was empty. Kirie pouted, Rociel-sama obviously liked Sara better than her! He had never thrown anything at her and he was always throwing things at Katan!!
"Come on. It's easy." Sara said persistently.
Rociel had been about to retort (again; he never knew when to give up) when Katan laid a restraining hand on his master's shoulder, noticing with alarm how tense he was. This probably meant he was preparing to leap from the chair, run across the room and rip Sara to shreds; it was just the kind of thing Rociel did after all. He had to pacify him now; it was the only thing that would prevent total carnage. Either that or distract him, whatever was easier. At the very least he should discourage him from carrying on the whole stupid conversation.
"Lord Rociel, this is getting us nowhere fast."
Somewhere several miles away, Setsuna stiffened. Sara's voice! Though it was impossible, he knew, Setsuna could swear that he could hear Sara's voice and she was calling to him for help! Oh good God, he had to hurry, what if they were torturing her or something? There had to be some kind of short cut or something, or… he didn't know. All he knew was that he couldn't just keep wandering aimlessly around. It had seemed to work at first but now he was no nearer to the center of the labyrinth and he got the feeling that he'd seen that particular moss formation before. He was going round in circles! Well, that was no way to rescue his poor sister!
That did it. He was going to mark his path. Simple enough, only what did he have to mark it with? He wasn't in the habit of carrying permanent marker round with him, either. So what to do? Ah! Of course! He'd use Alexiel's sword. There had to be something he could do with it after all. Hmm, how to get it out the necklace though; he wasn't all that mad at the moment. How he wished he had Kira and his ever-present katana with him… because he wanted the company of course, he loved Sara after all and Kira was, well, a man.
Oh, to hell with it. If he was Alexiel, and everyone kept insisting that he was in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, Setsuna guessed he had every right to use her sword whenever he wanted to not just when Alexiel wanted to. Besides which, if he just concentrated really, really hard on being annoyed with Rociel then maybe Alexiel would want to get the sword out too.
He closed his eyes and concentrated very hard on thinking like Alexiel would think. After about thirty seconds he gave up because it clearly wasn't going to work. Instead Setsuna yanked the stone from his neck, put it on the ground and glowered at it whilst thinking of all the things he wanted to do to Rociel.
That worked.
Ha! Now he had the sword he could mark the stones. And maybe Kira would show up again now! Just because he wanted the company, mind. Trying hard to brandish the sword in some kind of way that showed he knew what he was doing (he didn't and it was really pretty obvious; looked like Alexiel had to be putting in an appearance if he wanted to be any good with the thing), Setsuna carefully scored a deep cross on one of the corridor walls, then set off again, stopping at the next turning and scratching another cross into the wall. Okay, Alexiel probably wasn't terribly happy at the use to which Setsuna was putting her sword, but it was worth it, right? Besides it was getting at Rociel in a way, and who knew, maybe he'd even get to use the sword for real by the end of this stupid labyrinth and then he could give Kira more angel blood and make him even harder to kill. Yeah, that sounded good.
What Setsuna didn't notice was that, as he disappeared round the corner, one of the paving slabs in the floor was pushed up and out like the lid of a manhole revealing a small tunnel, from which climbed a small, bespectacled young man dressed in overalls, brandishing a toolbox and carrying a stepladder slung over his back, who inspected the damage Setsuna had done to the wall in some dismay.
"I don't know," he muttered to himself. "Some people…"
And he opened up his toolbox and set to work repairing the gash in the stonework, whistling a cheerful little tune as he went. Once the job was done, he trotted off in the direction Setsuna had so recently departed in, pausing again in front of the second scratch and repeating his involved little performance, then repeating it over and over again as he discovered more and more of the marks.
Setsuna continued blithely along his way, secure in the knowledge that he could easily find his way out again, until he darted down a corridor that turned out to be a dead end. Turning back so that he could retrace his steps, he spotted the little repairman as he finished fixing the last of his marks, still humming that perky little tune of his.
"Aah!" Setsuna couldn't help the involuntary cry of frustration. "What do you think you're doing?" Bad enough that this person was erasing all his carefully-positioned way markers, but worse, this was yet another familiar face - Riuet, the little 'mad scientist', performing a far more mundane task than was his wont but looking just as infuriatingly happy as ever. Was he going to run into a single person he didn't already know? Maybe this was just a bad dream? But if that was the case, he wouldn't have been able to almost break his toe on the bricks back there, would he?
Setsuna shook his head in a mixture of disbelief and dismay. "I hate this place," he muttered. All he had wanted to do was rescue Sara… why was it turning into an endurance contest? The walls wouldn't stay put for more than a few seconds and the place was populated by perhaps the biggest bunch of freaks and weirdoes it had ever been his misfortune to encounter, most of whom were his friends… without really expecting it to work he tried the trick Arakune had showed him on the wall in front of him, but nothing came of it. All there was to do was try and go forward and see what…
Oh no.
"Yes, I hate this place too, but what can you do about it?"
No, no, no! Not another couple of his favorite weirdoes! Where did they all come from? What were they all doing just hanging round Rociel's labyrinth anyway? Didn't any of them have anything better to do? As if to prove the theory that this wasn't all just a really, really weird dream Setsuna banged his head, but gently, mind, against the wall behind him. Ow. No, definitely not a dream, he thought, rubbing his head. Great, he was still stuck in the labyrinth and now his head hurt.
At the end of the passage, a few yards away, were two heavy stone doors, covered with verdigris and overhung sinisterly with ivy. That wasn't what was worrying Setsuna though, nor was the fact that this was obviously some kind of one-chance-only guessing game. The worrying thing about them was the two men - well, a man and a boy really - stood in front of them, and the worrying thing about them was the fact that one of them was brandishing a cupful of what could have been coffee but was, considering who its owner was, almost definitely tea. Next to him a gaily-patterned teapot rested on a rocky outcrop. Obviously he was on the right track, but that still wasn't terribly comforting when you were faced with a man who had a teapot and was not afraid to use it.
"Do you want some tea, Setsuna?" Zaphkiel, who was stood in front of the right-hand door, asked, holding out a small china cup; Raziel, from the other side of the corridor, gave him a somewhat despairing glance and Setsuna an apologetic 'what can I tell you?' shrug.
Setsuna growled. Maybe he should have had that cup of tea after all, at least it might have settled his nerves somewhat. No, what he should have done was not gone and checked on the front door being locked for Sara, maybe then he would have been back at home with his sister rather than wandering aimlessly round this labyrinth because someone else had been bored. That was what he should have done! Why hadn't he done it? He was not in the mood for mind games, not whilst he was still feeling so frazzled by the labyrinth in general.
"So it's a logic puzzle. Was this Rociel's idea?" he asked suspiciously. If it was, there was a higher than average chance that both doors led to certain death.
A long pause ensued whilst Setsuna tried to think this one through. He paced up and down, occasionally turning to glance at the doors suspiciously. The other two just looked at him. Raziel began to get bored after a few minutes and started tapping one foot somewhat impatiently; Zaphkiel at least had his cup to keep him occupied so he didn't look quite so fed up by Setsuna's precision display of walking and thinking at the same time. He hoped this wasn't going to take too long; the tea in his little teapot would be going cold.
"Hmm." Setsuna said finally, turning back to the pair. "I think I've got something here…"
There was another embarrassing silence as Setsuna ran over his plan mentally again. Just as Raziel was beginning to lose patience again and was wondering how wrong it would be to take a quick peek into his mind and find out that way what Setsuna was thinking, the boy seemed to finally come to some kind of conclusion. After all, as he had to keep reminding himself, he really couldn't be doing with getting stopped every fifteen minutes! He wondered how long he had left… probably not that long, he suspected, what with all these hold-ups!
"Okay… I think I've got it. Would you," here he pointed at Zaphkiel, "Tell me that if I went through his door…"
That said, he took a couple of paces toward Raziel, who instinctively backed away so that his back was against the wall. By this point Setsuna wasn't even that surprised, never mind even mildly creeped out, when the door opened by itself to let him past. He didn't notice the look that Zaphkiel and Raziel exchanged behind his back; they may not have understood much more about their puzzle than how to make sure it worked properly, but all the same they were worried, partly because Setsuna had been so keen to push on into the center of the labyrinth and get closer to Rociel than was strictly necessary. Zaphkiel was also worried because Setsuna hadn't had any tea and would probably be getting thirsty. Maybe he should have offered him a thermos flask full of it for later. Still…
"Bye bye." Zaphkiel said cheerfully, and gave Setsuna a wave as the boy walked toward the now open door. "Hope you manage to do whatever it is that you're trying to do in there."
So saying he strode confidently over the threshold and fell straight down the hole.
Zaphkiel shrugged and traded a glance with Raziel as Setsuna's yelp of surprise was cut off when the door slammed shut again. Noting the concerned look on the boy's face, he gave him a reassuring smile. "I know he just fell down the hole, but I'm sure he'll be all right. Seems Rociel wants him alive for whatever reason or he wouldn't even have got this far. Now, are you sure you don't want any tea?"
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