Break Up, Break Free, Break Through, Break Down

‘Let the trial commence!’ commands a mighty voice, filling the hall with clamouring echoes. As one, the robed spectators rise from their seats as a shaft of light pours down upon the pinnacle, illuminating the outline of a man, white-haired and gaunt, seated on a massive throne of solid, gleaming gold. Suspended in the air above his head are two crystals: one as clear as a polished diamond; the other as black as the grave. A crackling arc of energy travels between the two and its flickering blue light sheds a ghostly shadow on the face of the seated lord.

‘Intruder,’ he says, his voice soft yet chilling, ‘you have come to Kazan-Oud with murder in your heart. Have not the cowards of Elzian promised to reward you for my destruction?’

A drone of dissent surges from the crowded tiers, drowning any answer that you offer in your defence. The lord rises slowly from the throne and turns to his baying minions, his hands outstretched as if to receive the adulation. As their ghastly drone grows louder, your eye is drawn to the clear crystal that hovers above the throne. A golden light now glows at its core. In a flash of understanding you recognize the object of your quest: here is the Lorestone of Herdos.

‘Your verdict, my children?’ cries the wild-eyed man, his voice now harsh and angry.

‘Guilty, Lord Zahda,’ the crowd howls in reply.

‘The sentence?’ retorts their master.

‘The maze!’ they scream. ‘The maze!’

So it comes to be in the seventh Lone Wolf book, Castle Death, that Lone Wolf is thrown into the Maze of Zahda. The maze cannot be escaped by playing it 'fairly', and attempting to do so will only result in Lone Wolf's death... something the player should probably guess from the kangaroo court that gets them thrown in there in the first place.

At a certain point in the maze, Lone Wolf will encounter an Oudagorg ("a huge worm-like creature with great black eyes and horny mandibles ... a purple froth bubbling from its mouth"). There are four possible ways to deal with the Oudagorg, and three of them end with the creature's death. In its death-throes, the Oudagorg makes contact with the maze's overhead forcefield, shorting it out; Lone Wolf can then climb up the carcass and reach the maze's maintenance gantries, from which he can escape into another part of the castle:

As you pull yourself on to the cold iron platform, you see the maze spread out below you like the surface of a massive brain, each chamber a cell populated with perils created by the devilish imagination of Lord Zahda. A criss-cross of interconnecting walkways is suspended above the maze by gigantic chains that vanish into blackness. You hurry along the iron path towards a staircase that descends to an arch beyond the boundary wall of the maze.

I find it interesting on a metatextual level that Lord Zahda is undone because he didn't play-test his dungeon crawler well enough. I am also amused by how similar the maze's gantries are to the ones you might find in Television Centre or New Broadcasting House in Manchester when the book was originally published in 1986; Lone Wolf even accesses them via an observation platform intended to be used by the castle's inhabitants as they watch the latest hapless player make their way through the maze.

But anyway. Three of the four ways you can deal with the Oudagorg allow you to escape the maze. The exception is if you have the Magnakai Discipline of Invisibility (and succeed a check on the Random Number Table), whereupon the worm passes you by and you can make your way to the next chamber... which you can also reach if you choose not to climb up to the gantries and carry on through the maze.

The next room you come to has two archways, both of which will lead to your life and your quest ending; one burns you to death the instant you step through it, whilst the other seals itself and traps you in the heart of the maze. ("It may interest you to learn that you survived at the core of the maze for three weeks, a feat that earned you the respect of Lord Zahda, but one that did not persuade him to spare you your life.")

If you possess the Magnakai Disciplines of Invisibility, Pathsmanship or Divination, then you can find another door out of this chamber: an old tunnel which was bricked up many years ago, presumably when the maze was first built, and which deposits you at the same point you'd have reached if you'd climbed up the gantries earlier. From a Doylist perspective, this almost certainly exists to give those players who had the Invisibility discipline, and so could bypass the Oudagorg without killing it, another way out of the maze. If you are playing the books sequentially, you can only have four out of the ten Magnakai Disciplines by this stage, so on maths alone it's more likely you won't have any of the required disciplines if you were daft enough to ignore the opportunity to escape via the gantries.

You have to admire Joe Dever's internal consistency, rather than just not giving the player the opportunity to use the Invisibility discipline for that one encounter in the first place.