He sat eating a bag of wotsits while his cat, Merlin, watched him with envious, green eyes. ‘What?’ he said to the feline, who was licking his chops. The man extended a singular wotsit across the desk and Merlin sniffed at it, wrinkled his nose, then curled up to go back to sleep. The man sighed and slumped back in his chair. He stared at a laptop, where a blueprint of a labyrinth hovered in infinite space.
‘I’ve no ideas,’ said the man to the cat. ‘Not a single one.’
The labyrinth itself was done. Mostly the pathing was designed by an algorithm and then given a manual brush-up. The traps were all set. He was reusing some old favourites and had designed a few new ones for this year, as he always did. In the distant past, when the Gauntlet was first run, ancient orders of mathematicians, engineers, magi and alchemists would work, year-round, to design the hallowed contest. Thousands of slaves would be brought from all corners of the empire to replace the dead labour of the year prior and implement the designs laid out by a hundred men or more. But now it was all done from this office by his team of a dozen designers. They had one magi amongst them, for consultation. Other than that, the actual construction began only two months before the Gauntlet started and was left in the hands of the sub-contractors that swarmed from all over the globe.
But the most important element, the most secret element - more secret than even the layout itself - was yet to be designed, and he had little time left. The thrill of the race, the battling contestants, the lethal traps; these all brought the crowds to the stadium and the viewers to the streams, but it was the monster that kept them there. Watching its progress through the labyrinth as it hunted down its quarries, seeing the near-misses and the inevitability of its pursuit, that’s what people really loved about the Gauntlet.
The first Gauntlet, the one that inspired all that followed, had been a minotaur. Every Gauntlet since had featured a different horror at its centre, that hunted their prey down using varied techniques, senses and gimmicks, and ended the contestants’ existence with equal variation, from dismemberment to transmutation. They brought the bull-headed beast back for the thousandth anniversary, ten years ago, which had been a roaring success. The monsters that followed offered mixed results, as they always have. Last year, his spider caused a lot of controversy. A lot of complaints from arachnophobes who said they couldn’t watch the show because of his monster. He argued, privately, that since it had sixteen legs, it wasn’t technically a spider. Besides, how can they have a problem with an oversized arachnid and not with the flying saw traps he’d put in place that year? All the non-spider did was wrap people in webs and liquidate their insides. The saws made a right mess of things. He knew that wouldn’t wash then and it wouldn’t wash now either. He had to come up with something good.
He rested his cheek on his hand and looked sideways at the sleeping cat. Oh, you smug little bastard. You’ve no idea how lucky you have it, do you? You just sleep and eat all day. And snatch the occasional bird from the garden.
The man sighed and flicked away the empty bag of wotsits. What would that be like? To be a little bird and to be snatched out of the air by a spoilt, lazy cat? Rubbish, probably. To get carted around in its jaw. To get battered around in front of uncaring giants like a favoured plaything.
Then, the idea came to him. He sat up in his chair, wide-eyed, imagining what Merlin would look like if he was twenty times bigger.
Paddy Dobson
1st September 2020