18
The cover bounced and rang off of stone somewhere out in the light. Shielding her eyes and blinking painfully, Cara pulled herself forward to the edge of the pipe. She tumbled out of the pipe to the paving stones a foot and a half below her, stood, and stretched her limbs, stiff from cramped and repetitive usage. Waiting for the others to work their way out, she looked around and saw that they had emerged in the hedge maze just as Sarah had done.
"I wonder if we'll meet the man in the bird hat?" she asked as she turned to see if Alia and Jareth had extracted themselves yet. "Whoa! Will you look at that!" she exclaimed as she walked back toward the wall they were crawling from. "This is too weird, guys. Look at this."
"What?" Alia asked, still preoccupied with working the kinks out of her muscles. Jareth had just exited the drain with his usual grace and started to brush himself off.
"See for yourself," Cara said.
Instead of the large solid wall she had expected, a parapet overlooked the valley containing the Labyrinth. Cara leaned on the low wall and looked over the edge. Below her a steep, stony hillside covered in scrub fell away, the leaves of the bushes quivering and shimmering in a computer-generated breeze. There was nothing in sight they could have tunneled through.
"Cool," Alia enthused, once she realized what must have happened. "Did you see this, Jareth?"
Jareth glanced over the wall and continued straightening his clothes. "Yes, very nice."
"That's all you're going to say? 'Very nice?'" Cara demanded. "We just crawled out of nowhere and it's only very nice?"
Jareth stopped and looked at Cara. "You forget that that sort of thing happens all the time in the Labyrinth. It's nothing unusual. If it will make you happy, I'll try to remember to be properly amazed next time," he said, humoring her. "Shall we continue now?"
"Yeah, let's go. You sure do take all the fun out of things." She and Alia followed across to the opening in the hedges. They entered another courtyard with three more openings, one in each of the other walls. The design resembled what they had seen in the movie with tall, stone sentinel statues placed here and there near the openings in the stone walls and foliage. They could see the castle ahead in the distance and walked straight across the courtyard to the opposite break in the hedges.
"Caereh must be skimping on the animation. This one looks a lot like the last one," Alia said.
"Maybe not. In the book Sarah kept ending up in the same courtyard no matter which exit she took," Cara said as they continued directly across this courtyard as well.
"How did she get out?"
"The Wise Man told her," Jareth said.
"Yeah, like in the movie: 'Sometimes the way forward is the way back.' If I remember right she and Hoggle walked through one of the openings backward."
"Well, it looks like maybe we should do the same thing," Alia said after they entered yet another identical courtyard. "This is the third or fourth time we've been here."
"Might as well give it a try," Cara admitted.
The three of them backed through the next opening into yet another identical space.
"Well, that worked really well," Cara commented dryly as they looked around at the four walls and statues of soldiers and housemaids with rolling pins. "Now what? Do we try it again? Keep walking normally? Try another door?"
As they considered their course of action the Wise Man ambled through the courtyard, no doubt on his way to the stone chair of stacked books for his afternoon nap in the sun. At least they assumed this was the Wise Man, for Caereh had been tampering with the design of this character as well.
"What did she do to him?" Alia asked.
"I don't know, but we've got to stop him. Maybe he has a clue," Cara said as she ran after the Wise Man in his spotless, brightly colored, brand new robes trimmed in fur. "Excuse me!" she called after him.
"Hmm?" he asked, pausing in his shuffle and half turning around the wrong way.
"No, we're over here," Cara said as Alia and Jareth joined her.
"Ah, a young girl." Apparently Caereh had not changed the dialogue for this character along with his costume.
"No, actually it's two," Cara corrected him, "and a Goblin King."
"Woo, woo, woo," said the bird on the old man's hat, drawing their attention for the first time.
A new and improved version, he had feathers, lots of them – an all over covering of smooth, brilliant blue feathers with a handful of deep red plumes standing up on top of his head. Where his body blended with the hat – or nest, depending on the way you looked at it – a froth of fluffy, dark blue feathers similar to an ostrich's grew. His eyes and bill were still recognizable – tiny, beady, yellow eyes and a horny, sharp beak.
Meanwhile, Jareth had begun explaining their situation to the old man.
"...So you see we are getting nowhere," he finished.
"You want to get to the castle?"
"How's that for brain power?"
"Be quiet."
"Yes," Jareth answered, ignoring the bird as it grumbled from its paper nest.
"So, young woman –" began the Wise Man.
"Man," interrupted the bird.
"Eh?"
"Man. You're speaking to a man. The others haven't said anything."
"Will you please be quiet?" demanded the old man, losing his temper.
The bird grumbled again and Alia caught a word here and there, "nuts," "help," "crap." She suppressed a smile and tried to pay attention to the old man again.
"The way forward is sometimes the way back. But sometimes the way forward is just the way forward and the way back is only the way back. Quite often it seems like we're not getting anywhere, when, in fact –"
"We are," crowed the bird, unable to restrain himself any longer.
"– we are," finished the old man glaring at his garrulous headgear.
"Yes, but we've tried that," Cara said impatiently. "Walking backward doesn't work."
"Who said anything about walking backward?" the bird asked.
"But that's the way it goes in the book."
"You are relying on the original too much again," Jareth told Cara. "Stop reading meanings into everything. Things are not what they seem in this place and they are not what they were in my Labyrinth."
"Ahem," the old man coughed, holding out his collection box and glaring up at the bird which was eavesdropping on their conversation intently. "Ahem," he coughed louder and bobbed his head.
"What?" asked the bird, annoyed. "Oh. Please leave a contribution in the little box," he prompted.
"What have we got to leave?" Alia asked. "I'm not wearing anything but the pendant Tieran gave me and he's not getting that."
"The pins?" Jareth suggested.
"No, I've got it." Cara said, pulling a ring off her finger.
"What?"
"The ring what's-his-name gave me." She held it up for Alia to see, the apple green stone and gold band flashing in the sun. "Never liked it to begin with and I'm certainly not keeping it now. Good riddance to bad rubbish for a good cause," she said as she dropped it in the box.
"Well, that was entertaining, but didn't get us anywhere," Alia sighed as they watched the old Wise Man and his bird shuffle off arguing with each other.
"Just like all this walking," Cara added.
"'Quite often it seems we are not getting anywhere when, in fact, we are,'" Jareth repeated. "I think we've been making progress all along, but like Alia said, Caereh has been skimping on the animation. It only looks as if it is the same courtyard."
"Yeah, that's a possibility," Cara agreed. "Saves time and money and magic animating and it's an easy way to fool the players."
Eventually, after walking through many more intersections, they entered a region composed entirely of corridors winding back and forth, dividing, changing directions, and occasionally crossing back on themselves. The relief at the change soon waned and this portion of the maze became as frustrating as any other.
"What's it take to get out of this section?" Cara asked with some annoyance.
"A big hairy thing being tortured," Alia answered.
"Yeah. What was Ludo anyway, Jareth?"
"Hey, look at this," Alia interrupted. "This is different. The movie didn't have any roses in it." She could see the roses in a side corridor they were walking by. Brilliant scarlet roses covered the hedges in the adjacent passage. They drew her for a closer look.
Alia could not resist caressing one of the blooms and laughed when her fingers came back red and wet, leaving a peach colored smear on the rose. "Leave it to Caereh to mix up her stories," she started when a small flash of silver moving through the foliage distracted her.
Bending over for a closer look she saw a large silver insect. "No, not an insect," she corrected herself. "Unless they have dragon-shaped insects here. That looks an awful lot like – but how could Caereh know about that?" Then she noticed that the tiny dragon did not look like her surroundings. It was not animated. It was real.
Alia held out her hand and the dragon crawled docilely onto it, delicately stepping around the red paint smeared on her fingertips. She held it up to examine it. Sure enough, it had Arten'barad's black streaked face and glowing silver eyes.
"What do you mean she's mixed up her stories?" Cara asked as she walked up behind Alia.
Alia quickly hid the dragon close to her body. "Um, the roses. She's painted them. Who knows why. They were an appropriate peach color before," she said pointing to the one she had smeared.
Arten'barad scurried up the front of Alia's shirt and hid in the collar near her ear while Cara was examining at the flower.
"What a waste of a perfectly good flower. What am I saying? It's not like they're real anyway." With that she dismissed the whole subject and joined Jareth where he waited to continue.
Alia followed her still making no mention of finding the dragon. It would take too much explanation, particularly for Cara who had never met the dragon, and she had no way of knowing whether Caereh and Hadrian were watching. Instinctively, she did not want them to know about the dragon if she could help it.
Which brought up another thought. Just how did Arten'barad get there and find them? Maybe Caereh and Hadrian already knew about her. After all, Hadrian had a stranglehold on all the magic in this simulation. But if they knew about her, why had they not appeared yet? She doubted Caereh would miss an opportunity to gloat and dash their hopes. Were Caereh and Hadrian waiting until the three of them had come up with a plan that they could crush? Alia shook her head. There was just no way of knowing.
Arten'barad, as if reading her mind, whispered directly into her ear, "I came looking for you. I worried when you and Tieran missed the appointment he made. The magic barriers made it difficult to find you, but did not stop me. Where is Tieran?"
Alia thought for a moment, trying to come up with a way to answer her question without giving it all away. Finally she asked, "Jareth how much farther do you think it is to the castle?"
"That depends on what changes Caereh has made to this Labyrinth. It looks to be quite a distance yet."
"And we're running out of time to get there before she keeps Tieran and the rest of us," Alia answered him gloomily. "I wonder how much longer we have."
"Six or seven hours, perhaps. Unless Caereh gets capricious again. We've been wandering for some time."
"I see," Arten'barad whispered and then crawled back down inside her collar.
"Did you hear something?" Cara asked.
"What?" demanded Alia, slightly panicked. Surely the dragon had not been speaking that loudly?
"I thought I heard something. Footsteps maybe."
"It's probably the guards that tortured Ludo in the movie. Or the patrolling knight," Jareth suggested, pausing to listen.
"Then let's hope it misses us like in the movie," Alia said.
"Maybe," Cara said doubtfully as she pointed to the end of the corridor where they just caught some movement flashing past.
They quickly moved in the opposite direction, but it did not seem to help. Every time they paused to listen, they could still hear footsteps pattering nearby. They tried to move as quickly as they could, but had difficulty moving away from the knight and still toward the castle. Unless they could lose it, it would be only a matter of time before the knight stumbled on them.
And of course he did. He seemed just as inept as his movie counterpart, but this time luck was on his side, not the hero's. He caught sight of them as they rounded a corner and sounded an alarm on the horn he carried. Alia, Cara, and Jareth did not wait to see what it summoned. They ran.
They found out soon enough what the horn called. Soon a chorus of "Nippy, nippy, nip, nip!" hounded them.
Cara glanced back and saw a pack of four or five of them. "Stones wouldn't do me any good; I can't throw and run at the same time. Like Caereh would leave them laying around in her clean little Labyrinth anyway. How else can I confuse them?" A possibility came to her and she darted down a side passage. Either they would follow her or they would follow her two companions, which was what she really wanted them to do.
They split the difference. Two split off and trailed her while the larger group continued after Alia and Jareth. She decided that this might serve her purpose just as well. Just as she had hoped, this passage curved back on itself and joined the other before she had left it. "Perfect," she thought with a satisfied, wicked smile.
She ran faster to catch the main group. "I hope this works."
Catching them, she began to grab their helmets and twist them on their heads as Sarah had done with rocks. She had to work fast and dodge the Nippers at the same time, before her personal pair caught up. Hopefully she would have this group in such confusion by the time hers arrived that they would be too busy defending themselves to chase her.
She had turned all the helmets in reach and slipped through the troop unbitten when the remaining pair ran up and the melee sucked them in. She stood back for a few seconds to admire her handiwork, then moved out of range of the Nipper sticks.
She ran on in the direction she thought Alia and Jareth had taken, but in the confusion of ducking Nippers she had lost sight of them and did not catch up with them. "Looks like I've lost them. I wonder how many of us have to make it to the castle for us to win? Knowing Caereh, she won't honor it unless we're all there. I just hope there's more than one way to get there." She looked around for the castle to get her bearings and started off to find her own way there.