Pandora's Box: Book 3 of the Crystal Raven Series
Chapter 22

Dawn wore dark bruises under its eyes after another long bloody night. There had been no major assaults, and the siege had settled into a sniping contest across an increasingly hostile no-man’s-land. And still, those trapped within the fortress had found little sleep. It was time to turn their thoughts towards the mountains and the reason that had brought them here. The fortress command, the specialists and the Ghost Sisterhood had gathered in the only unused room they could replace – a partially collapsed outbuilding. If they did not start soon, those they left behind might run out of supplies before they returned, and there was always a risk of a major assault in numbers they could not hold off.

“No,” April objected. “I don’t like the girls going up the mountain alone.”

“What if we send Aiko?” Alvaro offered.

“She’s worse than the lot of them,” April accused.

“I’ll go too,” Cantara countered. “Crystal, Gwen, Alex, Ember, Aiko -.”

“Whoa! No more,” Angel complained. “That’s four of our specialists. If the Vampyres bring up any more tanks, we’re going to need everyone we can get. We’re lucky they don’t know how to use them.”

“I’ll take them,” Cantara replied firmly.

“And Blueberry and my puppies,” Ember added. She wouldn’t leave them behind.

“Dogs don’t climb mountains,” Gwen soothed gently. “And they’re too heavy for any of us to carry.”

“Well, monkeys do,” Ember retorted. “So, Blueberry can come.”

“Blueberry is a special monkey,” April explained. “Besides, who will take care of Huckleberry? You know those two are inseparable.”

“Then I’m not going,” Ember pouted.

“But we need you, sweetheart,” Crystal urged, knowing April especially wanted the young girl out of harm’s way. “You have a special sensitivity to demons we’re going to need when we reach the temple.”

“I don’t care,” the girl huffed. It was tough being fifteen when everyone around you was four thousand years old.

“Alvaro and Angel will take care of your friends,” Gwen soothed.

Ember got up with a huff and stormed out of the room. They did not understand. They were not ‘her friends,’ they were her family, the only one she still had. She needed to be with them.

“Let her go blow off some steam,” she heard April tell the others.

Outside her friends came to meet her. Sensing her distress, Huckleberry wander over, the imp mounted on his back like a Scythian horse lord leading his people to war. Strawberry padded over still chewing on something that Ember suspected was a small Eater of the Dead. Since arriving here, Strawberry was eating far too many vampyres to do her stomach any good. Every day the four of them wandered away to hunt in the surrounding hills, usually while Ember was sleeping.

‘Well,’ Ember thought morosely, ‘maybe she will get rid of her gas if the vampyres don’t attack tonight. And I’m not leaving them behind! If they can’t come to the stupid old mountain, I’m not going.’ There was an old ruined village behind the fortress, and it was toward there her feet, and her angry thoughts drew her. At least twice a day, she brought her hounds here to walk and poke around and be alone or to talk with Jean Claude. No-one ever came here, it was her special place. No-one was even interested in the ruined town or anything other than the vampyres in the draw before the fortress, so she knew she would always be alone here. Just her and her family.

In the centre square, there was a flight of stairs leading to nowhere that Jean Claude had warned her against exploring. It was the first place Strawberry and Tangerine wandered towards. If there was trouble to be found, these two would replace it. With her puppies, there was a natural gravitational pull towards the forbidden, and no matter how much she scolded, down they went. Stairs were no longer the forbidding barrier they once had been, not since that night in Upyr. What could Ember do? She had to follow, at least to keep them from getting in any trouble. And no matter what Jean-Claude said, they might get hurt or lost without her.

It was dark and dry and dusty on the stairs. Huckleberry dropped to her side, where he remained despite the imp’s prodding. She was halfway down before she remembered the flashlight in her backpack. Since they had arrived, Gabriel insisted that all cadets wore full battle kits at all times, and since she was the youngest cadet, that went double for her. It wasn’t like she went looking for trouble like he was always accusing, it was only that exciting things always happened near her. Like, it was hardly her fault that a wall happened to cave-in when she came walking by it, and she certainly had nothing to do with the vampyres hiding beneath it. She had merely been walking her dogs. And Tangerine had only taken that one little stick to play with. Everyone was always blaming her for everything.

She paused at the bottom of the stairs. It was a long way down. Whistling, she called the Hell Hounds to her side. Only one would come back up the stairs at a time as if they were urging her to follow. Before she had realized it, she had left the stairs behind and had entered the tunnels beyond. Pausing, she turned to look back and could no longer see the exit. It wasn’t that she was lost, not exactly. It was merely that she didn’t remember taking any turns along the way as she followed the passage. She had been too focused on keeping all three puppies in sight.

“Now, look at what you’ve done!” Ember scolded, stamping her foot in exasperation. “You bad puppies!”

Strawberry came back, whining until she scratched her ears. Ember sighed. They were only puppies and did not mean any harm.

“Well,” she said, “I guess one way is as good as another at this point.”

It certainly had been much easier spelunking with Jean-Claude, and she was hiding anyway so they wouldn’t make her climb that stupid mountain. If she couldn’t replace herself, it wasn’t likely they would. And it really was kind of cool down here. All the walls were carved with bas reliefs, strange bearded men and monsters and ships and things. If you looked carefully, you could see they told some sort of a story – an adventure like Lord of the Rings or something cool like that. And many of the figures were repeated in the next panel down the passage, or on a panel on the opposite wall.

One part of the carvings she thought might be a map to the maze she was in if she could only figure it out. It was only then that she realized that the walls depicted scenes from things that had happened inside the maze. And then her flashlight fell upon a figure that could only be Blueberry riding Huckleberry. She searched for Strawberry and Tangerine and herself, pausing there before the frieze for a long spell, engrossed in the scene. How cool was that? It was like being on a television screen from the Stone Ages. She looked for a second panel and began jumping back and forth between them, watching herself reappear and disappear amongst the stone figures.

And finally, her eyes caught and held a darker image. Her stone friends, the ones she had been following – having given each a name – one by one, began meeting gruesome fates in the maze.

“We better get out of here,” Ember told her friends.

The maze was no longer the friendly place it had been, but Ember was not overly worried. Not yet. She had her dogs and her monkey with her, and her crucifix, and lots of water and food. Until that ran out, it was still an adventure, and she adored adventures. And it was kind of warm down here, and even if she got cold, she had her dogs with her. And the litany went on and on as the images surrounding her grew bloodier and more lurid. They had come to an intersection where five other passages met their own. It really wasn’t fair, giving her so many ways to choose from. Each of her puppies started down a different one.

“Hey!” Ember cried. “Get back here until we decide which way to go.”

Ember stood at the bottleneck studying the wall. Jean-Claude had always said that your best tool in a crisis was your mind. You could think your way out of trouble if you used the tools at hand, only it didn’t always work for her, like when she forgot to do her homework, and April found out she was at the park with her puppies and not at the library. Logic didn’t work with that woman, she had heard Jean-Claude say a hundred times, and she was beginning to believe it. Still, thinking her way out of trouble had never worked for Ember, no matter how hard she tried.

What good was it having your own personal ghost when he was only around when you didn’t want him? She would have to figure it out for herself, like always. You couldn’t trust anyone over thirty. Age did something to you. Well, it did, and even Strawberry agreed with her.

“See these pictures,” Ember pointed to the carvings on the wall. “They tell us where we have to go. I think this way.”

She followed Strawberry into one of the passages, and the others raced to catch up. Each time she saw one of the maps, she paused to check it. It twisted and turned and came to so many dead-ends that it was easy to get lost in its spiral. Besides, it had a disconcerting habit of spinning if you look a bit too long, like one of those optical illusions. It was still that way, she hoped.

Ember continued on, trusting more to her dogs and luck than on her ability to unravel the ball of yarn someone had the gall to call a map. The floor changed. It felt marbly, as if someone had cemented a pebbly beach in mortar. Even if she could not feel the change through the soles of her boots, she could hear the change in the sound of her dogs’ toenails clicking on the floor. Blueberry chattered at her, and Ember knew he agreed with her. The change had to mean something. Maybe she had almost found her way back to the surface?

It was either getting darker, or her flashlight was dying. The images here were older, faded and in spots completely worn away. Ember shuddered. It was definitely getting colder. And maybe damper. It was hard to tell because she had been sweating for so long that her clothes were damp. She tried to remember that hot sweltering day in Miss Sweider’s class when she should have been paying attention to a lecture on the geography and climate of caverns. What had Miss Sweider said? Did colder and damper mean she was deeper into a system, or almost on the surface? All she could remember was that she wanted to be outside, or down at the mall with her girls, where the air conditioning would be blasting.

She needed to rest. Just for a moment. There was an alcove where she thought she could sit for a moment and have a drink and a bite to eat. Rooting in her backpack, Ember pulled out a chunk of beef jerky and began cutting it up and sharing it amongst her friends. She suddenly realized she was hearing way too much chomping and chewing than a few small bits of beef jerky warranted.

“Strawberry,” Ember warned. “Did you take Tangerine’s share?”

Strawberry looked up curiously, licking something off of her muzzle and chomping noisily. Through the bond, Ember could feel contentment from the three and annoyance from Huckleberry. Flicking on her flashlight, she shone it into the corner where they were rooting. The entire back wall was a withering black mass of three-inch-long cockroaches. Ember squeaked and leapt back with a start.

“Eeewie!” She scolded. “Don’t eat that, they’re grodie!”

She stomped her foot, annoyed, but only Huckleberry obeyed her. Blueberry was perched on Strawberry’s head, plucking bugs off the wall and plopping them into his mouth. His little cheeks were puffed with squirming bodies. Carapaces crunched, and guts dribbled down his chin. Strawberry was too busy wolfing down her own victims to notice she was being used as a chair.

“Eeeew, really!” Ember berated. “Good puppies don’t eat bugs. Monkeys, either.”

Blueberry chattered something at her, holding out a fistful of squirming bugs. His little blue belly was distended, and some of his dinner was still alive and crawling beneath his skin.

“Don’t you sass me, man child!” Ember snapped. “It’s time we get out of here before you pigs make yourselves sick.”

It took some doing to get the three gourmands away from their feast. She wondered what cockroach farts were going to smell like, and if she could borrow a gas mask from someone. If they found their way out of here, she had a good mind to have April dose all three of them. She would never, ever, ever eat bugs. In fact, she might not ever eat again after having watched that, and if she starved to death, well, it would serve them right.

The corridor changed again. The floor was made of smooth sandstone blocks, each cut into a hexagon and carefully set flush. Walls, ceiling and floor looked like a giant hive. The bas relief that had kept her company throughout her passage through the maze had disappeared. She felt a little lonely with only her hounds and her monkey for company. After having a crowd to walk amongst the open space seemed so much more vast and empty. Ember wondered if it meant anything and if she should go back and take time to study the last map?

Any map was worthless if you did not know where you were starting from, and since she did not know, she saw no point going back. She would still be lost even with the map. Huckleberry seemed to know what to look for, sniffing at every cross-corridor for any familiar scents – fresh air, grass or the smell of prey. Whenever he hesitated, Strawberry would plough forward, propelling the whole down some strange passage and keeping their momentum going. Ahead a large brass door blocked the passage. On either side of the corridor, a line of ten bronze warriors guarded the approach. Each wore ancient armour she did not recognize – maybe Greek or Persian, with funny helmets and round shields and broad-headed spears.

“Well,” Ember said, “a door means out, right.”

It opened easy enough, no lock, no magic words – Ember only needed to push on it. Inside was darkness her flashlight did little to penetrate. A wall of darkness in the centre of the chamber seemed to swallow all light. Suddenly something dark and smoky rose from the well of blackness in massive billows. At the top of it was a head with the same pointed eyes and face as Cantara.

“I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore, Toto….”