In the testing chamber, the crystal display went dark as the inside of a coffin. Seymour sat slumped, back to the wall, feeling buried beneath recent events.

  “Holy shit,” he said for something like the tenth time. “Handsome Gentry is legit dead.”

  That was, of course, why the display had finally gone completely black – Gentry had finally gone completely dead. And now Seymour couldn’t help but feel like he’d had a hand in the bard’s killing.

  “I mean, you straight up interrupted his regularly-scheduled resurrection to turn him into your zombie slave, and then he got bit in half by a monster. If not you, then I’m not sure who else is on the hook for that.”

  He knew that Gentry had a wife. She’d actually brought their infant child to Hedwick’s Home for Wayward Aliens once to watch him perform. Was she even aware that he’d died earlier in the day during a dungeon crawl in Vol’kara? And knowing that because he’d died as a zombie, Gentry couldn’t be brought back again using the Resurrectory, did that mean Seymour was now responsible for the widow’s wellbeing?

  “Yeah, that’s a real honorable thought and all, but you gotta put it on the backburner for now.”

  He shoved the entire guilty mess from his mind, because more immediate and urgent at the moment was the fact that Rathbone Killmaim had somehow thrown off Seymour’s mind control and abandoned Thornton and Penny. Getting the two of them out of the hedge maze was now his most pressing concern.

  “They won’t make it very far without him,” Seymour concluded, a cold weight sinking deeper in his gut. Thornton could probably handle the various topiary creatures, but something like the weird ass monster that killed Handsome Gentry was still going to be far beyond his ability to deal with. His powers worked best with range and time to get properly set up. An ambush like the one that had ended Gentry’s run wasn’t something that Thornton was well equipped to deal with.

  Then there was the fact that the last scene Seymour had seen of Thornton—while looking through Handsome Gentry’s eyes—had been creepier than shit. What was he going to do with that knife he’d pulled?

  “Put Gentry out of his misery?” That seemed like the most generous guess at what Thornton had been up to in the moment before the bard had finally died and the display went dark.

  The expedition had gone worse than Seymour ever could have imagined. The idea that there were powerful monsters like the mimic lurking just upstairs had seemed like an impossibility.

  Sure, he’d known that Rathbone had died up there, but Eusebio had told him that the orc had croaked of a heart attack. Which now seemed fairly ridiculous in hindsight, even knowing as Seymour did that the orcs’ entire diet consisted of meat and meat alone.

  “Man flesh is loaded with bad cholesterol,” Eusebio had told him, smirking.

  But now Seymour realized he’d been duped by his manager. The orc hadn’t been killed by his own, clogged arteries. He’d been ambushed by one of these weird ass slug-monsters, and Eusebio had lied to cover up the fact that such a deadly creature could be lurking just upstairs.

  As a business practice, it made perfect sense. They didn’t want customers to get wise to the potential hazards of browsing around on the third floor. They didn’t want customers fearing for their lives – that could only hurt business. But Eusebio’s coverup had led Seymour to make decisions based on faulty info.

  While assembling the team he’d felt that sending Thornton along—let alone the orc—was actually overkill. But now the time had already come for their final, desperate contingency.

  Seymour hurried to the raised platform in the center of the testing chamber. Penny’s party streamers glowed orange and red. All he needed to do was untie a certain bow in the center of the array and she and Thornton would be whisked away to safety, evacuated by a portal to his current position. He reached up and seized the streamer Penny had instructed him to pull and he yanked it down. The bow unraveled and then the entire array came away from where she had attached it to the walls. The streamers immediately ceased their glowing and drifted lazily to rest on the testing chamber’s floor.

  And then nothing else happened.

  “Is that it?” Seymour wondered. “Did it work? Shit shit shit – it doesn't feel like it worked.”

  He thought back to a month earlier when he’d had his hand blown off in the treant graveyard. Afterward, Penny had helped him escape from the Malveaus through a portal she’d opened through artifice; artifice created by wrapping a pinecone in gold thread. He knew that this was a similar portaling mechanism she’d put together tonight but obviously not exactly the same, since this time she’d designed her sacred geometry using party streamers. When she’d opened that portal back in the jungle using her gold-webbed pinecone, it had all gone down so differently than this. That one had started to appear as soon as she had activated her artifice, for one.

  So where was the portal now?

  During the course of the next minute, he waited for something—anything—to happen over a period that felt just short of forever. But he couldn’t deny the dreadful reality for even a single second longer: something had gone wrong with Penny’s array. He doubted that she had installed it wrong – most likely he’d somehow screwed up its activation.

  “That means there’s no other choice – I have to go in after them.” He had a map, after all. He’d been sketching it out on a handheld GLCD. As long as Penny and Thornton didn’t move too far from where the mimic attack had happened, he should be able to track them down and lead them back out to safety.

  He sped out of the testing chamber and headed for the stairs, but as he passed the door to his own personal quarters a familiar voice spoke in his mind:

  Wait.

  Jerome’s thought-form plea caught Seymour like a net. He froze in his tracks, only a few paces past his door.

  “What is it?” he wondered aloud.

  It’s dangerous to go alone! Take me with you.

  Seymour pivoted. He hurried back into his room and scooped up Jerome in his terracotta pot. The cactus was right. He couldn’t simply become another victim of the maze—that wouldn’t help anyone—and the simple truth was that of the two of them, Jerome might be the one who was more capable in any sort of combat. The topiary creatures didn’t have any blood—Seymour remembered that much from his fight with the tiger—but maybe the nasty ass slug-thing that had killed Handsome Gentry did. If he met one while tracking down Penny and Thornton, then maybe Jerome would be able to feed on it and at least weaken the monster to some degree.

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  He raced back out of his room and hit the staircase up to the second floor running, going up three-at-a-time. He no longer cared if his commotion might wake up Eusebio or Adara. Sprinting now, he passed through the library, tapping touch-candles as was needed to light his way. The cafe-area went by in a blur, and then the apothecary, and then he was on the final staircase, climbing up toward the third floor.

  The wind blasted out of the maze as he reached the alcove at the top of the steps. He stood on the verge of taking his first steps into the labyrinth when the entryway suddenly darkened. The broad-shouldered silhouette of Rathbone Killmaim filled the doorframe.

  A sickening realization struck Seymour. Cost of Living required him to pay an ongoing upkeep charge in gold coins in order to maintain his target’s state of undeath – but it had been way too long now since he’d been prompted to do so. Rathbone should have dropped dead by now. And yet, the orc’s reanimation continued. Did that mean he’d be stuck forever as a zombie?

  And maybe worse right at that moment: would he somehow know it was Seymour who had done this to him?

  That thought led Seymour to the conclusion that he should become someone else, instead. Someone Rathbone wouldn’t be completely justified in killing. So before the zombified orc could fully enter the alcove and identify him, Seymour hurriedly activated one of his other new powers, which he knew would take effect instantly:

  “Who are you?” Rathbone growled. He stepped inside the small alcove and stomped once with each bone-mail boot to rid them of snow. “And what are you doing here? This is no place for an old woman.”

  “It’s Rathbone, isn’t it?” Seymour’s voice was no longer his own, but rather matched that of the gray-haired, hunch-backed crone whose form he had just morphed into. “Rathbone Killmaim?”

  “Yes. I am Rathbone Killmaim.” The orc raised a suspicious eyebrow. “How do you know me?”

  “You have more pressing questions, don’t you?” Seymour’s voice in this old woman’s body had a cryptic quality that fit this turn in the conversation perfectly. “You want to know what you’re doing here.”

  “That is correct.” The orc loomed before Seymour. “I want answers.”

  With a simple act of will, Seymour activated his Cost of Living power – the same one he’d already used once to cajole the orc’s corpse into leading the ill-fated expedition in the first place. It stood to reason that since Rathbone was still a zombie—a zombie of Seymour’s creation—then maybe the mind control effect could be reestablished by simply using his power again. But right away a notification appeared to disabuse him of that notion:

  “Ain’t that a kick in the nuts,” he muttered in the voice of an old crone. The creaky, discordant sound of his words almost made him laugh.

  But he needed another plan now. For a moment there he thought he’d hit the jackpot, but it wasn’t going to be possible to re-charm the orc to order him back inside the hedge maze. At least altering his own appearance using Sincerest Flattery had kept Rathbone from chopping him in half.

  The huge orc was still waiting for some explanation of his current circumstances, his glare fixed upon the old woman in his path. He didn’t know to call her Nana Gring.

  “I’m afraid I don’t have any answers for you, after all,” Seymour croaked.

  “Then remove yourself at once from Rathbone’s path,” he snarled. Seymour waddled to the side and the orc went stomping back down the stairs. Hopefully he wouldn’t run into Eusebio or Adara down there, but that wasn’t Seymour’s problem.

  An unanticipated giggle escaped from his lips – from Nana Gring’s lips. Adrenaline had him trembling and it struck Seymour all at once how terribly close he’d just come to being chopped in half right down the middle. If the idea of changing his appearance to match Thornton’s nana—the least threatening person he could think of in the moment—hadn't occurred to him right when it did, Rathbone might have straight up bisected his ass with one swipe of his great bone-axe.

  And it hit Seymour then that what he’d inadvertently done to the orc might have been more awful even than the fate which had befallen Handsome Gentry. Rathbone might be cursed now to spend the rest of his days as a goddamned zombie.

  His mind felt muddied with a mixture of guilt and relief that he didn’t have time to reconcile right then. He drew in a long, centering breath. His body had become larger now that he was impersonating Thornton’s nana, and his lungs felt larger, too. Then he steeled himself and entered the hedge maze.

  The footprints which the expedition had left on their outbound journey were long since covered by freshly fallen snow, but Seymour was grateful for the deep, wide tracks left by Rathbone’s bone-crafted boots on his more-recent return trip. If he hurried, he might be able to follow them all the way to Penny and Thornton. He hoped that perhaps they had also decided to follow in Rathbone’s wake, and that he might meet them halfway, even if it ultimately meant that by going after them he was risking his own life for nothing. He broke into a loping jog, fast as Nana’s legs could carry him, eyes locked on the boot-shaped depressions.

  “Hurry up, Little.”

  After going only a short way, he paused, cursing the fact that Rathbone’s tracks were already half-vanished under suddenly intensifying wind and snow. He shivered and untucked the GLCD from under his arm. Constantly checking and re-checking the map he’d made would slow him considerably compared to simply retracing Rathbone’s footprints, but he felt immensely grateful to have it, nonetheless. He resumed the half-jog he’d taken up earlier, with Jerome cradled close to his Nana-bosom something like a football.

  Visibility quickly became a major issue, not only because of the increasingly heavy snowfall and blustery wind but also due to the chill being so uncomfortable on his eyes, like they might freeze open. Seymour pushed back against the intrusive idea that his eyeballs might actually become icy little grapes in his skull. Then he fought back harder against the thought that one of those frozen eyeballs might shatter on the floor if he sneezed.

  Unseen to Seymour, a snow-covered root crossed his path ahead, and when he finally found it with his foot it was too late. Tripping at full-speed, he went sprawling face-first into a drift and lost his grip on Jerome, as well. The cactus rolled into the snow and disappeared. On hands and knees, Seymour scrambled around, plunging his hands into the surprisingly deep drifts, desperate to unbury his prickly companion as quickly as possible.

  The cold would certainly have been wicked enough all on its own, but in that moment he was experiencing it not only as a man but also through his empathic link with a sapient succulent who clearly would have preferred a much warmer environment. The chill permeated throughout Seymour’s entire body, as if his blood had suddenly turned cold, driving his search for Jerome to become more and more frantic.

  Then as his hand finally landed upon the terracotta pot buried beneath the snow, the hedges behind him simultaneously began to rustle as if the wind had increased to a hurricane-force gale – but that wasn’t the case. The wind was biting, but still not forceful enough to be disturbing the hedge like that.

  Something else must be coming.

  He quickly rescued Jerome and clutched him to his chest before whirling around to face whatever would emerge from the hedges. He braced for an attack.

  But he was suddenly face-to-face not with any sort of monster, but instead with simply more hedge. The corridor which he’d just come down was now sealed shut, the wall having somehow rearranged itself to block his way. Seymour could only stand there, still panting from his desperate scramble to recover Jerome, racking his brain for a development that would have been worse than this; worse than having the way out sealed off behind him.

  “Nope,” he concluded, “this is as bad as it gets.”

  And then in the next beat the hedge blocking his way out opened its mouth and grabbed him around the waist with a ropy, prehensile tongue.