Selected Scenes from the Ecologies of the Labyrinth

July marks our third (We can’t believe it’s been two and a half years!) summer — and we’re celebrating with four great free reads. Yes, you read that right, a whole month of free goodness from The Sunday Morning Transport — by Scott Lynch, Margaret Dunlap, Rachel Hartman, and Paolo Bacigalupi. We hope you love these and all our stories as much as we love bringing them to you on Sundays.

Bringing out great short fiction each Sunday is a lot of work and we have a fantastic team to thank for it, including EIC Julian Yap, Managing Editor Fran Wilde, Copy Editor Kaitlin Severini, Proofreader Christine Ma, and our amazing supporters — that’s YOU. We are so glad to have you here.

If you’re just joining us, or if you are a free reader, we hope you’ll love the free month of fiction we have in store, and that you will consider supporting us as a paid subscriber. We very much need your support to keep rolling!

This month, we’ve got an annual membership drive of epic proportions for you — so if you haven’t already, please consider signing up, and if you are signed up, please share this link with your friends.

In this, July’s first, free, story, Scott Lynch takes us on an epic adventure of labyrinthine proportions! ~ Julian and Fran, July 7, 2024

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Selected Scenes from the Ecologies of the Labyrinth

by Scott Lynch

I

Up above, the sky is a sun-washed silken blue that deepens into forever and the bees are going from blossom to blossom while life is warm. Yellow grains dust their bodies.

II

Akayla Sethrys’s boot hits the door just below the lock.

She’s been kicking these things in for eight or nine years now and she knows where to put her emphasis. She favors a pair of bespoke basilisk leather and steel sabatons for this purpose; today some additional luck is with her in the form of rotten wood. Jagged wet splinters fly as the broken door slams inward, peeling out of its frame. Another dungeon chamber breached.

“Onward!” cries Sethrys, crouched over her shield, blade up for quick thrusts past the rim.

Pinpoints of ominous red light flicker in the darkness. Fleshless eyes. Something stirs, rattles, rises. A dozen white frames of the dead. Human bones invested by insatiable ghosts, hungry in the dry sockets of their teeth, hungry in the hollows of their time-leathered marrows.

Sethrys doesn’t face the skeleton onslaught alone; behind her come Felix with his silver censer spilling threads of blessed smoke, Gorandal with their father’s father’s hammers, Morladi with her incantations. A wave of bone meets metal and magic. The skeletons are hungry for blood, but the adventurers are hungrier for glory. Seven major chambers into this sunken, mold-racked ruin and their enthusiasm has yet to dim. It’s not even time for lunch.

Sethrys slams, smashes, howls. Her blade flashes silver. With a triumphant cut she parts one skeleton’s head completely from its column of vertebrae. The skull whirls, the sputtering flames in its sockets painting roses of red light on the walls and ceilings as it flies spinning through the air, out the door—

III

Mullion Galdarsson has sifted bone before. Dead bone, certainly, but also not-quite-dead bone, more often than he’d like. This stuff, with the animating witchery freshly knocked out of it, hasn’t entirely settled yet. He slaps at a few clutching fingers, knocks a yellow-white hand away from his ankle like a grim, dry kitten. Legs, ribs, hands, hands, more legs, a spine, a skull—that worries him for a moment, but it gives him no trouble. No light in the eye sockets, no bite left in the teeth. No precious metal fillings, either.

Mullion sighs. The current mess might not prove a very lucrative one. Behind him, his sister Arna and his sometimes-friend Tylo the Sulk are crouched on shattered and parted bones as well, muttering and slapping defensively, moving occasional items of interest into the pouches and wicker baskets that hang on them all like ornaments on festival trees.

Somewhere ahead, the lunatics are plying their trade, thoroughly enjoying bloody combat with whatever fresh horror Mullion and his little crew of gleaners will be sorting in about twenty minutes. Lunatics, the successful ones at least, don’t have time to scour the trash of their own passage. That would cut into valuable combat time. Once the traps are disarmed and the monsters are beaten down, locals like Mullion and Arna and Tylo slink in behind them to sort and count and store all the wretched, dirty little scraps that might be sold or reused.

Jeweled necklaces? Gold bars? Oh, of course not. The lunatics always manage to spare a moment to snatch that sort of thing for themselves. Gleaners fetch up the bent and rusty coins of baser metals, the dusty weapons half-rotted in ancient racks, the glowing mushrooms and bile-yellow fungi that might be of interest to the alchemists (or just as often might not). Scraping walls, shaking junk, prodding crevices with wooden poles, sneezing in clouds of dust that mostly don’t kill anyone later (cousin Halvar had been the strongest of them, worth three Tylos, but when the remnants of his lungs had come up through his nose, they’d looked like tomato jelly)—that’s the work of gleaners. And the damnable thing is, even allowing for dust and darkness and the occasional dead cousin, the pay is considerably better than working the mills or fields back home.

Mullion, in his career, has pulled fangs from giant spiders and scooped the steaming rinds of carnivorous slimes and shaken tiny treasures out of enough crap-crusted goblin clothing to outfit a battalion of the little bastards. Every year when the warm months roll in, the lunatics insist upon making circuits of all the fanes and labyrinths and ruins they can find, often delving deeper into old explorations, or reopening places that have fresh infestations of horrors. Sometimes the lunatics don’t come back from their “adventuring,” and sometimes their gleaning crews are lost along with them. It’s foolish, Mullion supposes. These dark and haunted places really ought to be burned out and exorcised for good. But wherever you have dungeons, you get parties of lunatics with their boundless enthusiasm, and the lunatics employ gleaners, and they visit the taverns and stables and smiths, and the countryside needs all the coin it can get. Mullion has two children and an aging mother to account for, and many would say he bears a light burden.

As he sets a useless skull aside, Mullion is surprised to feel a sudden chill in the stones beneath his fingers. Curiously, gingerly, he tests the clammy patch with a fingertip. Oh yes, a distinct sensation of coldness. Ill circumstance, that. Not for the likes of him to poke at. He rises on creaking knees and takes a step back—

IV

You must be exquisitely careful with a spell for traveling through time.

You think you understand that before you fuck it up, but you don’t.

Not the way you understand afterward.

Anthar-Kaladon, Lord of the Bleeding Gems, Arch-Thaumaturge, Defiler and Deliverer of Thrax, could have been more precise with his incantation. Heavenly bodies rotate on their axes and move through space as they move through time. There are equations to deal with this, but Anthar-Kaladon admits to some impatience (indeed, a certain moderate impatience is often concomitant with brilliance). Rather than a triumphant appearance under the bright gleam of the moon in the proper year for his intended ritual, he materialized in the middle of a stone wall some three hundred feet down, in one of the annexes of this minor dungeon complex he built twenty or thirty centuries ago.

Now, that would have been the final line in the biography of most wizards, but Anthar-Kaladon, nobody’s gods-damned clown, had already traded in the tired squish-squish of his mortal frame for cold, elegant mineralization. For a creature of undying stone, the act of teleporting face-first into his own architecture, while frustrating, was not quite a permanent setback.

He hasn’t been able to move, but he hasn’t been entirely inert—while complex sorcery is out of the question, Anthar-Kaladon has been able to intone a simple teleportation spell at about half of one-millionth of his usual speed, his voice a whisper so low, it is entirely lost in the sounds of the settling earth. Every few years, he completes an intonation and teleports a few feet up, invariably embedding himself in a new section of wall or floor, but after so many years and so many castings he’s almost made it, surely. Possibly this might even be the last time, and then . . .

Something flits across his awareness. A sensation of life and movement overhead, separated from his outstretched fingers by just a few inches of stone. The feeling vanishes, unsurprising. His immortal form is antithetical to life. Nothing with a beating heart can long tolerate his proximity. Still, this is exciting. Inches! Inches between him and the creature above! Oh, let it be this time. This time for sure!

V

Down goes the basket and Yrmegard just knows they’re not going to be happy with something in it. They’re never satisfied, bloody lunatics.

Yrmegard grunts and thinks uncharitable thoughts as she lets more rope out via the pulley she has rigged just above the broken skylight leading into the cursed labyrinth under the hill the folk have always called the Kal’s Mound (or Kalgrave, in a few cases, though Yrmegard has never met anyone who knew this Kal or had any notion what he was about). Forty feet below, one of the lunatics is standing in the circle of light from the aperture and waving her on, as though a basket sent straight down a rope might go anywhere but directly into the fool’s arms.

Soft summer flatbread, liver-and-oat sausages, baked yams stuffed with crackling black pepper pods, cinnamon pie, and straw-colored sweet wine: this is Yrmegard’s contribution to the endeavor, and this is as close as she gets for the midday delivery. Mullion and Tylo and her aunt’s cousin’s friend Arna might poke about in the dark as if they were lunatics themselves, but when Yrmegard brings the catered luncheon, it goes down by rope and she remains in daylight. The thought that one of these days she might hear the last fading screams of those below is both frightful and just the slightest bit secretly attractive—a scold loves nothing more than to have their habits validated (and anyway, Yrmegard’s aunt’s cousin has a lot of friends).

“Hey! Hey up there!” The waiting lunatic has received the basket and started pawing through it.

Yrmegard peers down. She thinks the figure below might be the sorceress, though she doesn’t recall the woman wearing red robes. With a start, she realizes the clothes are drenched in fresh blood. The adventurer seems completely unbothered. “What is it?” Yrmegard shouts.

“There’s supposed to be wine with this!”

“There is!” Yrmegard massages her temples. Last thing she needs is lunatics clawing back coins from their accounts, claiming nondelivery when she knows full well she set a cool clay jar of the stuff in the basket not a handful of minutes ago. Yrmegard might fantasize about some memorable horror erupting below, but the hard truth is she needs the money, same as everyone. “Had it fallen from the basket, surely you’d have caught it right in the face, so it must be there! Look again!”

VI

Success is sweet! The shadows are kind! Success sets the heart to beat-beat-beat!

The treasure is heavy. Oh, the treasure is heavy. But that’s the price of great success!

Or so Glathfrap tells himself. He doesn’t have much experience with great success. None of the Jewel-Eyed Folk do, trapped as they are between the big creatures that come down from the daylight to smash and slay and loot, and the even-worse things that lurk below.

The Jewel-Eyed Folk are small, they are few, and they hide to stay alive.

But they are quick.

Today, Glathfrap reached from the shadows as the big creatures lowered the food basket from the too-bright world above. Today, Glathfrap was quick!

Now he rolls his prize along a scuttleway of the Jewel-Eyed Folk: a jar of wine almost as big as himself. He can hear it sloshing, would love to taste it, to share it, but there is an even more pressing need.

He will take the wine to a cold place, a place of power, where the Jewel-Eyed Folk fear to linger. Glathfrap will spill the wine there as an offering.

The Jewel-Eyed Folk are small. They are few. They do not now have a god.

But if they give offerings, they will gain favors.

Offering by offering, they will raise a god of their own. And then the shadows will be kind to them.

Oh yes. So very kind indeed.

VII

You don’t need to be as exquisitely careful with a little spell for near-vicinity teleportation as you do with a spell for traveling through time.

You don’t. You just don’t. Why would you? The logic just makes sense. You don’t! In any case, Anthar-Kaladon, Lord of the Bleeding Gems, Arch-Thaumaturge, Defiler and Deliverer of Thrax, doesn’t have the full use of his limbs or his usual vocalizations to work any corrections, so . . . it has to be fine! It’s all fine. The plan is working. That’s what his plans do, even if they sometimes meander. Lots of good things meander. It is generally agreed that rivers are good things. Everyone loves them and they do very little except meander. So.

Anthar-Kaladon has recently moved again, into a new wall, in one of the annexes of this minor dungeon complex he built forty or forty-five centuries ago, and he tells himself that he is not worrying, he is merely dissecting the theoretical boundaries of any potential difficulties for his own amusement while his plan meanders to its inevitable triumph. He can set aside the disheartening suspicion that he might have accidentally inverted himself once or twice during his teleportations, which would mean that his current direction of progress might not be progress at all. However, that would be bad, which of course means it can’t be happening. Likewise, that minute burning thread of apprehension that he might now coexist simultaneously with several versions of himself, separated by just a few yards of dirt and stone, moving in separate directions both physically and temporally, well, that is also best described as mere conjecture. What a disaster that would indicate! Unthinkable.

Something scuttles nearby. Goblins. Not conjecture. Sadly thinkable. Goblins for sure. Stack them up with the petty undead, the gleam-snakes, the Glass Devil spiders, and the freebooters from the surface. This labyrinth will need a good cleaning when he sets himself loose, a good cleaning for—

Anthar-Kaladon’s head is wet.

At first, he thinks he is mistaken. Then he merely hopes he is mistaken. But no, his head is definitely wet.

Someone has poured wine into the cracks and crevices of the floor above. The wine is trickling down upon his immobile form.

Why . . . why would the goblins do that? Of all things, why would they pour wine on him? This indignity is getting out of hand.

Anthar-Kaladon continues intoning his next teleportation spell. Oh, let it take him somewhere useful this time!

VIII

Lunch long past, the fighting moves on. Blood stains the floors and spatters the walls, too much blood. Many ordinary people-volumes of blood. But deep-delving adventurers are far from ordinary. They have spells to sustain themselves, and restorative lineaments, and every manner of healing concoction and decoction and salve. Every time a cruel spider-fang pierces mail, they drink potions, and every time a rot-rimed skeletal hand tears flesh, they drink potions, and every time an ancient trap drives spikes or flames or scything blades into them, they drink potions, and they laugh, and their zest for danger burns as hot as ever and they smash the empty vials of their life-preserving substances on the stone floor behind them. Leaving a trail of blood and bodies and broken glass, they move the battle as drunks might move a party once a particular tavern has been drained of good kegs.

Behind them come the gleaners, of course. But before the gleaners appear, there is the softest whisper of tiny bodies sliding slickly across the stones.

Pharmagast snails are little larger than a human fingernail, shell and all, and they are not slow. In a place like this, relaxation ends family lines. Pharmagasts don’t think that abstractly, of course, nor can they reflect on what time and necessity have done to their glistening lavender forms, which is equip them to survive on the dregs of the alchemical substances that dungeon adventurers litter their surroundings with. Eyestalks nervously swiveling, mouths eagerly pulsing, the pharmagasts climb inside busted phials and suck residues from glass, just as they drain the last thin whiffs of magic from wax stoppers, corks, clay shards, and discarded leather pouches. By the time the footsteps of the approaching gleaners shake the floors, the pharmagasts have vanished back to their crevices, leaving only a faint and fading phosphorescence in their slime trails to mark their revitalization.

In addition to the short-lived visual phenomena that follow a successful feeding, the slime has one other unique property, rarely noted by larger entities. As it dries and flakes away, it becomes just one more invisible powder in a veritable library of dusts, but this powder is particularly nourishing to certain rare kinds of fungi.

IX

“Deliver them to HELL!” yells Akayla Sethrys, brandishing her sword at some manner of crouching thing, some denizen of darkness, some nameless and unidentifiable monstrosity. To be fair, it’s probably quite identifiable, but this is their twenty-sixth room for the day and they’re having far too much fun to pay scholarly attention. Felix prays fervently for the power to sustain them, Gorandal laughs as they pour a healing potion directly into a fresh hole in their neck, and Morladi blazes magical wrath as the blood of other creatures slowly dries brown on her former best set of robes.

Sethrys stands in the ruin of another shattered door, unaware of the faint gray stain threading the warped and rotted grain of the ancient wood, unable to even be aware of the faint puffs of spores drifting up from the soles of her own boots, the underside of her adventuring pack, and the soiled hem of her long leather coat. The organism responsible, which is actually a tight-knit colony of highly specialized organisms, has been with her for some time (most relevantly in her throat and lungs and spine, and in the throats and lungs and spines of her closest friends). Each day in the warm months of the year, Sethrys and her little company have woken up with a fervent eagerness to head back to the low, dark places of the earth, where fortune and glory await, as well as the comfort of low ceilings and moist earth and limited sunlight. These once meant very little to them, emotionally speaking, but have of late begun to seem like markers of home. None of them feel quite so good as they do when they’re on their way, armed and armored, to investigate some new pit full of danger. Never do they seem to have as much furious energy as they do when they’re deep in the dark.

As the present fight within the present subterranean enclosure goes on, a seemingly incidental transfer takes place, with fresh spores drifting into microscopic networks of filaments within the indigenous colonies of gray symbionts—the mycological equivalent of news and visitors from distant lands. Invigorated, the native goop generates exciting new spores for the imported goop to take with it if it should be lucky enough to leave again. Bit by bit the vigor and diversity of the gray stuff in each of its sunless colonies is improving, although it has nothing like a human consciousness, merely a set of tools that has served it well.

“YEAH!” Sethrys screams. Her blade cuts into something not like skin, splashing something not like blood. The weird, crouching things are summoning reinforcements. The odds against the adventurers are growing. Still, Sethrys’s self-confidence feels like an inner sunlight that refuses to dim. Her friends are equally optimistic, bright-eyed in the exhilaration of combat. It’s wild, she thinks as they form a wall against the coming onslaught. She ought to be exhausted, but as usual she feels like she could do this all day. Couldn’t they all just do this all day?

X

Up above, the sky is a sun-washed silken blue that deepens into forever and the bees are going from blossom to blossom while life is warm. Yellow grains dust their bodies.

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Thank you for joining our journey this week.

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Scott Lynch was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1978, the first of three brothers. Early in life, he worked as a dishwasher, a waiter, a graphic designer, an office manager, a cook, and a game supplement self-publisher before accidentally selling his first novel, The Lies of Locke Lamora, in 2004. From 2005 to 2016, Scott also served as a paid-on-call firefighter in Wisconsin. Scott currently lives in Massachusetts with his wife, award-winning SF/F novelist Elizabeth Bear, plus four cats (Duncan, Gurney, Molly, and Fafhrd) and a pair of Icelandic horses (a gelding named Ormr and a mare named Spola).

“Selected Scenes from the Ecologies of the Labyrinth,” © Scott Lynch, 2024.

The Sunday Morning Transport: Selected Stories 2022 is now available at Weightless Books!