Grazing my hand on the left wall, I took the lead and Virgil's advice, while the youthful face of Scarfell played in and out of my mind. The witch told me he had the power to come and go between realms whenever he pleased, but it never once occurred to me that it could be his face under that disguise. He had us all fooled.
From time to time, I would peer at Kat, concerned. He appeared half-alive at my side, caught in some mental paralysis between the living and dead. There was no obvious problems with his physique, but there was something wrong with his presence, a part broken.
"Must be close,” I said, pushing them hard. "How long has it been?"
"We should rest Daniel," suggested Harmony, the sweat sapping her bandanna "This exertion is intolerable."
They were ready to drop, but we couldn't stop. Not here. I now felt the weight of leadership bare down on my shoulders. It was a heavy burden, and with Kat giving no hint, order or opinion — it was definitely mine.
"There!" bawled Eddinray, pointing out a rodent, crawling at speed toward us.
Grunting, I cut a slash up the creature's chest, leaving its bloody graffiti on the wall. This incident appeared to shunt Kat out of his mind; a lively focus came back to his eyes, and they honed in on those now swarming over the labyrinth rims.
"Our home! Our home!"
"Arm yourselves!" cried a primal Kat. "Run!"
"Run!" I repeated, setting off in a frenzied charge, blocking claw, teeth and hook with my sword. CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!
"Cover my back!" Kat ordered Harmony and Eddinray. "Hear me?"
Troubled by their silence, I searched back to see Eddinray rolling on the deck with a rat snapping down on top of him. Harmony stood over their tussle, kicking the rat's ribs.
"Use your arrows!" I screamed, returning to them. "Harmony! Your arrows!"
Eddinray manoeuvred his panting face to the left and to the right — all the time avoiding the malignant mouth over him. Unaware that I had left his side, Kat fought like a powerhouse ahead, parting heads from bodies on his way forward.
Endeavouring to remove an arrow from her quiver, Harmony failed to see a scavenging rat at her blind side. Seeing it for her, I flung my short sword spinning through the air, hurtling past the angel's ear and finishing in the rat's heart, if it had one.
"Up!" I exclaimed, forcing the knight to his feet before recovering my sword from the dead body. Glancing high, the blood froze in my veins when I witnessed a vast number of rodents filling the labyrinth.
"Don't stop swinging!" I said; and full of resilience, Eddinray and I began to carve a path through rats whilst Harmony shot her arrows. We couldn't see Kat any-more, so arriving at the next fork, we continued following Virgil's advice.
"A cave ahead!" shrieked Harmony, after the left turn. "There! There!"
It was a serrated scar cut into a dead-end, like someone attempting to make an exit when there was none. With the pack fast on our heels and no other options, we three dashed desperately into that dark crack.
***
The surface was not sturdy, but a spongy, pliable soil. Rats bunched behind at a careful pace, almost ushering us in. I detested the smiles on their dribbling gobs, as if they knew they'd be eating well tonight.
"I'm scared,” mumbled Harmony, her voice bouncing off the jagged stone here.
"We all are,” I said. "Kat! You in here?"
Observing nothing but the rats, we stumbled over the strewn organ pieces, juice-less eyeballs and stinking bowels left uneaten at our feet.
"Our home!" they hissed, and Harmony screamed upon noticing the six creatures, appearing out of nowhere to block any progress through the cave. Six behind, hundreds in-front — we where emphatically surrounded.
"Back cannibal!" demanded the knight, his sword flailing. "Get! Scram!"
Harmony pulled arrows back on the bow and killed anything slithering, Eddinray and I meanwhile struggled to hold the distance between us and them.
"Our home!"
"Get out of it!" I growled, but on their turf, they closed the net. "We take out the back group!" I panted. "They're only six!"
"Five!" exclaimed Harmony, firing into that half dozen to strike one in the neck. We then cut through that lot in unison, and into deeper, darker territory.
***
In the labyrinth corridors, and with longer and shorter swords bloody, Kat was clustered by starving killers. He took a second to centre himself, then, in concentrated and precise fashion, he dismantled them a piece at a time. His whole seemed encompassed in the sharp tips of those swords — the steel his eyes and ears, the hilt his heart and soul, and he made light work of all comers.
Hairy rats receding, Kat lowered his weapons to refill his overworked lungs. Caked head to foot in blood and mucus, he stepped from the mangled and tangled he'd just annihilated, then huffed — “Who…will…die…next?"
The hissing hungry reinforced for a final, mammoth attack. Unyielding, Kat pressed a finger against his nose, blew out the snot blocking the nostril — then repeated his question: "Who will die next?"
The further we ventured into this grotto of glassy rock and dripping glob, the more cadavers we past, and fouler the stench became. Everything changed when we splashed head first into a wide puddle of ooze — constricting walls ballooned to ceilings of transparent slime, and strangely, the salivating pack behind us strayed no further than the puddle, it acting like a barrier separating us from them.
There was only one lurking rat in this exposed area, and instinctively, I cut a wound across its belly. The creature screeched like a human would, and standing over it now, I hesitated in the kill. Spread under me was the writhing face of an older female, all wrinkly skin and weary eyes. Her body however was that of the rat — overly large, hair wet with gunk and heaving grotesquely at the gut.
"What is it?" asked Harmony, terrified.
"What was it?" I returned, raising my sword to finish it off.
"Stop!" the thing gargled at me, caressing her prickly belly with a grimace and falling tear down her cheek. "Asss! Do not kill! My babies…"
As if obeying some earlier restraining order, the army of rats remained, absolutely seething before the puddle. "You nurture these things?" asked Harmony, crouching closer to the woman.
"Asss!" she nodded, with a painfully warped expression.
"Good!" I cried; "then they've something to lose!"
Seizing a chunk of her hair, I pressed my blade to her throat and dragged the ratty woman to her feet.
"Steady on, Danny!" said Eddinray, appalled by my behaviour "She is a woman after all!"
"Did you count the bodies on the way in?" I asked him, annoyed. "Don't be fooled thinking there's humanity here Eddinray, and I've been through too much shit to be eaten alive in this fucking mouse trap! Got it?"
With no way out but the way we came in, I scrutinized those incensed rats at the puddle, pulled back on the hybrid's hair, then slowly manoeuvred her forward.
"Stay close!" I advised my jumpy friends. "Be ready for anything!"
Harmony shot an arrow into the face of a rat too close for comfort, and the rest duly backed off when the angel aimed her next at the bulging belly of the woman — their mother and queen who said — "What want you…hu — man? Asss!"
"Call off your children!" I demanded. "We are leaving your home…"
***
Wearisomely Kat cut them down, but with tenacity decreasing and guard faltering, his demise looked inevitable. Suddenly however, before Kat's force field could be penetrated, the rats halted their assault and without explanation, ran down corridors like scared children. Kat stood rightly bewildered, bloody, depleted, and for the very first time…realized he was alone.
***
I reached the serrated exit with my sword in one hand and the hybrid's hair tangled through the other. Rats followed the instruction of their mother, keeping a reasonable distance without another swipe at us. Harmony and Eddinray were extremely anxious at my arms, expecting any underhand surprise.
"Daniel?" whispered Harmony, trembling. "The moment you release her, this army will — "
"I know it!"
"So what do we do?"
Exiting the cave, we were greeted by a vision of wiry whiskers and teeth — thousands. At this desperate point, I considered slitting this woman's throat and making a suicidal run through the vermin. I also thought of dragging her as cover to the very exit of this labyrinth, to the 9th Fortress if need be. However, all the mad deliberations were scrubbed as the iron grate nearest us dropped open with a frightful clang. This elementary action caused rats to shriek nonsensically then scatter like cockroaches from the light. The mother too, struggled in my arms to cut her neck on my blade. She squirmed so violently that she tore the hair from my hand and her own scalp. I was utterly lost as that half rat, half woman, returned to her diseased children in their pit, their home, without a single look back. We three couldn't possibly contemplate the meaning of this, for we were rattled by the domino effect of other grates, falling open all across the labyrinth. SMASH! SMASH! SMASH!
"You just know this is bad!" said Eddinray. "Extremely!"
We agreed and ran for it, subsequently taking left turns at a breathless sprint, leaping over opened grates and through their venting steam.
"Jump!" yelled Harmony, successfully vaulting over an open grate.
Preparing to spring over the next grave, the suffocating high walls suddenly shook, knocking us three to the bone dashed ground. This promptly became a shattering earthquake like none ever recorded, a force to sack cities and crack a planet's core — the power of god in Hell. Our screams were throttled by these brutal tremors, the very rip and tare of this realm; but oddly, despite the battering, the labyrinth endured, the high walls showed no crack or clue of collapse. We took to our feet again when all of a sudden, over the sound of shaking stone came the sustained groans of a monster, as if the sky itself were bawling.
"We have to move!" I howled, cowering. "We have to…"
"What?" cried Harmony, staggering like a drunk. "Can't! Hear! You!"
I steadied myself against one vibrating wall, and pale faced with shock, I raised a hand to the sky and screamed. "Look out!"
Gargantuan shadows steadily grew over the labyrinth now, and over the sound of thunder, two trolls appeared to amaze and terrify us. Unfathomable in size, they carried heavily loaded buckets of granite in their arms. Their bodies taller than any mountain, the trolls were a combination of fatty rolls and defined muscle, with reptilian flesh with purple spots.
Another quake hit, shaking the entire structure and spilling us backwards. This hefty rollicking was the result of one troll's bucket being set atop the labyrinth wall, hundreds of feet from us. Some of the buckets contents spilled over one side, and I noticed its yellow liquid drip like hot syrup. I recognized this lethal mixture for what it was, and how we had only one pathetic option left:
"Run!"
We set off at once from the overlooking, impossible trolls, who tipped their bucket loads into the backward corridors of the winding labyrinth. The lava — the flood — funnelled down routes too fast for any living thing to outrun.
We ran against the thunder and the quakes, arriving at a fork and taking the left turn. We leapt vents one after the other, then another before venturing left yet again. Still and still the thunder, still the ear bursting moans above and the catching chase behind. Harmony glanced back at a bearing down wave of yellow, and screamed. The incinerating tsunami had already caught us. We turned a final left, leapt the last vent for our lives and saw Kat at the foot of an upward slope, frantically motioning us onward.
"Move! Move! Move!" he bawled.
Kat started up the slope and we reached his back before the flood reached ours. We climbed and climbed, grunting and panting, the flood gaining at our footsteps, scorching licks at our heels. Eddinray's mail fizzed on its touch and the animal skin of my boots disintegrated. But up we charged; ascending this scale till our bodies were sucked of all energy, till we collapsed one by one on the stone slope; the consuming flow of lava stopping mere inches behind us. At last…we where out of the accursed labyrinth. We were alive.
This life saving incline continued skyward, the flow itself however would travel no higher than the labyrinth walls — filling its narrow corridors and patterns with a luminous, mesmerizing glow. It remained briefly at this high tide, before sinking through the many open vents — stripping all life from the surface and leaving but steaming puddles over the labyrinth floor.