“Something you’d like to add?”
“She’s there,” Mon said slowly. “I haven’t seen her. Finding anyone here is a monumental chore and takes... time. Resources. Come, we’ll speak more in the canoe.”
“But I can find her? It shouldn’t be too hard, right? It’s only been hours.” Jesstin nearly ran into the small craft Mon unwound from the pier. The water was no longer serene or welcoming. The sky was dark with the threat of a coming storm. “We’re taking a canoe across this?”
“I assure you, it is perfectly safe.”
“Safe?” He’d never been at such a disadvantage. Many others had crossed that same agitated river, but the difference was they had nothing more to lose, while he was risking everything. “And those things worse than death here?”
Mon’s dead eyes and gleeful grin were at odds. “I’ll tell you about them once we’re on our way, but nothing will prepare you for seeing them yourself.”
Jesstin felt whooshed through the gates. He turned to see the backs of them, but they’d vanished. The beach was gone too. There was nothing in their place except a gray haze with vague indications of shapes, like the first brush strokes on a blank canvas.
He’d save his questions for things that mattered.
The river was as still as a lake now, though just as dark as before.
Dozens were still launching their small vessels, but most were already distant specks. The ocher sky had become a muted, hazy tawny faster than it should have.
“Anyone could skipper one of these on their own. Takes no special skill,” Jesstin said as Mon pushed off and leaped in, taking the double-ended paddle from Jesstin. “Why the need for custodians?”
Mon dipped the oar in one side, then the other. It glided through the dark water. As the shore faded, the sun weakened further, no longer even strong enough to light the sand. “You might make it across without one. But what would you do next?”
“Pardon?”
“Where would you go when you landed?” He cut another smooth pass with the paddle. “Or did you think what’s here would be a mirror of what’s there?”
Jesstin had actually assumed that. “I’d sort it, same as you all did.”
“We didn’t sort it. We had help, as I’m now offering you.”
“So all custodians are made equal?”
“What?”
“They’re all so helpful and full of knowledge?”
Mon scoffed, catching onto Jesstin’s sarcasm a beat too late. “Your arrogance isn’t an advantage here. What would you know about existing in a place like this? Surviving? Avoiding?”
“At least two of those things are antithetical to being dead, no?”
“Hundreds of years have come and gone since someone has been allowed to move onto the Halls of Ilyn, the word ‘afterlife’ takes on new meaning.”
Hundreds of years was quite an era, regardless of how time moved above and below. “You want me to help you leave, but you haven’t said how.”
Mon glanced at the weakening sun, worry pulling his brows closer. He wiped his face on his sleeve without missing a stroke. “You’ll find the door just as you did in the labyrinth.”
“Why not the door I just came through?”
“There are many doors, but only one for us.”
“How? How do I find this door? How will I know it’s the right one if there’s so many?”
“You found the end of the labyrinth.”
“No, you showed me the end, after a not insignificant amount of torture.”
“It’s commonly misunderstood that a man requires the dead’s hospitality to win the challenge,” Mon said. “But anyone can beat the labyrinth, Jesstin. What makes the ‘winners’ different from the ‘losers’ is a privation of hubris.”
