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Still, the rancid odor tickled my nose until I circled back to the area closest to the throne. Had Merden managed to bring a gobbelin here for sport? I wouldn’t be surprised if she had one in her menagerie of captured creatures.
Watching my elbows so nobody would bump into me, I inched across the space, searching for the source of the scent.
There.
A spot of black blood, left behind on the burgundy carpet. It was almost invisible in the candlelight, but there was a certain shimmer to gobbelin blood.
Had there been a fight?
Was it wounded? Or dead?
Scanning the room, I chose one of the nobles who had already passed out, his cheek smashed against the table as he snored loudly. Memorizing his looks, I made my way out of sight, then assumed his form with my glamor.
Using all this magic was draining, but I needed information, and it would be dangerous for Saint Laurent to appear too interested in anything. Mystery was useful in gaining others’ interest, but too much attention from them was always a bad thing in this court.
I sauntered up to a pair of women, trying to mellow my voice and slur my words a bit. “I say, quite a crazy thing, that gobbelin, right?”
They both gasped and cowered behind their ornate fans, looking nothing like the fierce vampires that used to live in this palace.
“It was dreadful. I’ve had nightmares ever since,” one of them whined.
“And that ice wolf - how dare he barge in like that? The Queen should have killed him on the spot,” the other said, outrage on her pinched face. Not all vampires were beautiful, evidently.
“I say,” I repeated like a drunken idiot, hoping they’d continue their gossip.
“I never did find out what happened to the body,” the first lady said, lowering her voice and hiding her painted lips behind her fan.
“Probably in the King’s lab,” the other said, then clamped her hand over her mouth, eyes wide with the thrill of spilling new information. They exchanged looks that told me they were about to bolt, but I had enough intel already.
“What a horrible night it was,” I said, and they nodded, dipping into curtseys that showed enough cleavage for four women.
I strode away, exiting the banquet hall and letting my glamor fade as soon as I was out of the guards’ view.
So, there had been a gobbelin, but just one. And an ice wolf had brought it - that was very interesting. If the ice wolves had deigned to leave their mountain fortress, perhaps the vampires’ fate wasn’t quite sealed.
That was the beauty and the frustration of prophecies - they showed the beginning and sometimes the end, but the middle was up to the individual, and changing it could jumble everything.
I spent the next several hours running into dead end after dead end as I tried to learn more. All the guards who had been watching the competitors seemed to be relocated to the dungeons and slave quarters, and they stood shoulder to shoulder on the stairs. Even with glamor, there would be no way to slip past them, and I wasn’t sure I had time to cause a distraction.
The King’s laboratory was something I’d heard plenty of rumors about, but I’d yet to meet anyone who actually admitted to knowing where it was. I’d searched his rooms more than once for secret doors, with no success.
And the stench of the gobbelin blood had faded as soon as I’d left the banquet hall.
Overall, I was in a foul mood as the sun began to rise, and Merden’s party finally began to break up.
Seeing her heading into the palace gardens with a trail of followers, I joined them, hoping they were headed to this labyrinth. I was not disappointed, but as we stood at the top of a hill and looked down at the enormous maze she’d somehow built into the valley below, I said a quick prayer to the Goddess for Kana’s safety.
The labyrinth was enormous, stretching endlessly into the fog of early morning.
We approached the square maze on the diagonal, and I saw no exit on either of the sides in my view. Even from above, it was impossible to see a clear path through the maze, and I shuddered to think of all the deadly things that could be lurking in its shadows.
It would take the competitors ages to learn the layout through trial and error.
As the fog cleared, I began to see that there seemed to be four separate sections, differing in material. One area had shimmering green vines growing on all the walls, and another was the dull gray of smooth rock. The two at the back were both dark stone, but one was carved in spikes like the palace.
In all the sections, the corridors were narrow, and their design convoluted like the tangled roots of a pot-bound plant. Clearings dotted the tangled mess of hedge and rock walls, and I hoped there were places to find refuge from the dangers Merden had alluded to.
The screech of a fairy echoed in the early morning air, and I shivered despite myself.
