Live and Let Drood

of here.”
    “Okay,” I said. “Take me to it.”
    The armour turned abruptly and strode away. I hurried after it. The armour swayed and lurched from side to side, plunging forward in a kind of continuing fall. I maintained a respectful distance. Getting to the centre of the Maze wasn’t a problem. The hedgerows shifted their positions only if you tried to leave. So we walked up and down the Maze, cutting left and right in a path the rogue armour had clearly taken many times before, until we came to the heart of the Maze. And there it was, waiting for us. The armour slammed to a halt a safe distance away and I was careful to do the same.
    I looked the mechanism over. Damned if I could make head or tail of what it was. A made thing, certainly, from metal, but I hadn’t a clue what it was or what it was supposed to do. I’d never seen anything like it before in my life, and I’d seen a lot of strange things in the Armoury in my time. I walked slowly round the thing, looking at it from different angles, trying to get my head round it. Its shape made no sense, with many of its details changing subtly even as I looked at them. Parts of the machine seemed to blur in and out, as though aspects of it were only sometimes in this world. Given that its purpose was to induce eternally changing patterns inside the Maze, I had the horrible suspicion that quantum was involved. I’ve never understood quantum. The few times the Armourer insisted on explaining it to me, I had headaches that weren’t even limited to my head.
    When I finally reached out to touch the mechanism, the thing actually evaded my hand. It seemed to recede suddenly, in all directions at once, without actually moving. As such.
    “It does that,” said the rogue armour. “You can’t touch it, you can’t harm it and you can’t break it. And believe me, I’ve tried down all the long years. But if the two of us were to work together…”
    “Worth a try,” I said, trying hard to sound confident. “So, how do you want to do this? Do I just put you on, or…”
    “A test first,” said the armour. “To see if we’re…compatible.”
    It reached out inhumanly quickly and laid a golden gauntlet on my hand before I could snatch it away. The metal was horribly cold to the touch, and it took all I had not to cry out. It was like being touched by a dead thing or something that had never been alive. The golden metal lost all shape and rigidity and flowed like liquid across my hand, covering and containing it, becoming a glove. I worked my fingers slowly and the golden fingers moved. And so, bound together, hand in hand, the armour and I moved forward. And I raised a golden fist and brought it savagely down on the mechanism. It smashed into a thousand pieces, as though it had been terribly fragile all along, protected only by its built-in evasiveness. It shattered like glass and fell apart, leaving tiny glistening pieces on the grass at my feet.
    The rogue armour took its golden hand back and stared fascinated at all that remained of the thing that had held it prisoner for so long. I flexed my freed fingers surreptitiously as warmth and sensation slowly returned. Moxton’s Mistake raised its golden head like a hound that had just caught the scent and looked around. I did, too. Something had changed in the Maze. An overlaying tension was gone from the air.
    “The Maze is still a Maze,” said the rogue armour. “But the hedgerows no longer move. We can leave now. Theoretically. If we can find our way out.” It turned its blank face to look at me. “I can see the mark of magic laid upon you, Drood. Is that our way out?”
    “Could be,” I said. “It’s certainly my way out. So…”
    “So,” said the armour. “It’s time to find out just how much we trust each other.”
    It leaned sharply forward, and a mouth appeared in the golden face mask, stretching wider and wider…until a dead body came slipping out of it. The rogue armour vomited up the body it had held inside it for so long. The desiccated head and shoulders came first and then the body, falling faster under its own weight, until finally the legs and feet slipped out and the dead body sprawled inelegantly on the grass before me. The mouth closed, disappearing into the golden mask.
    Moxton’s body was a withered, shrivelled thing, its bleached face stretched around an endless scream of horror. I wondered how long it had taken the old Armourer to die, trapped inside his greatest