by Jaxon Reed
As suddenly as it started, it ended. The tutelary stood straight again, releasing her grip.
“Enter, child, and begin the test. If you fail, earn eternal rest.”
“That doesn’t sound good,” Erik said.
“He won’t fail,” Percel responded, sounding more confident than he looked. “I passed it. The lad will be fine.”
Tony took a step, then another into the mist behind the spirit. He disappeared from their sight.
For a moment everything shimmered around Toby, then it all became clear again. Before him lay a dozen tables, each piled high with food. A whole pig lay stretched out and cooked on the nearest one, an apple in its mouth. Steaming steaks were stacked on a plate, along with bowls of apples and peaches, strawberries and plums. Fresh bread, warm from the oven, sat piled on another.
One table offered nothing but desserts, including succulent cakes and cream-filled pastries, warm pies and cobblers with steam lazily swirling as if they just came from the kitchen.
Toby grinned in delight. He took a step forward and grabbed a pie off the dessert table, popping it into his mouth whole.
His eyes went up inside his head as he chewed. He reached down and grabbed two more, shoving them in and gulping them down.
He stepped over to the meat table and grabbed a thick juicy steak between his thumb and forefinger. He leaned his head back and dropped it into his mouth, chewing noisily.
He reached over for another steak as a swirl of gold color appeared in the air, level with his head.
He turned to look at it. The swirls resolved into Tawny’s face.
“Remember, Toby. Go find the lever. Get to the lever and pull it. You can come back to this later. Right now we need you to find the lever.”
His eyes grew wide and he made an O with his mouth. He looked down at the meat table and grabbed the rest of the steaks, popping them into his mouth as he walked away.
A few more steps and the richly laden tables disappeared behind him. The steaks in his hand did too, much to his chagrin.
Ahead, the mist cleared and turned into a street on Dryadopolis. Elves walked to and fro, going about their business. A shop owner opened his door and waved at him.
“Hallo, Toby! Come visit my store! Always happy to see you, m’boy!”
An elderly elf crossed the street, smiling, carrying her bag lightly in one hand.
“Toby! By the tree, child, I haven’t seen you in millennia. How’s that sister of yours? Come by and visit for tea sometime!”
Warmth spread through his chest. Toby smiled widely at everyone, and everyone smiled back. Each elf he met expressed joy and appreciation upon seeing him.
“Toby! There you are! I’ve been looking all over for you!”
He turned at the sound of a familiar voice. There, coming down the street, Toby watched his mother approaching. She looked beautiful, perhaps the most beautiful person he had ever known to exist.
She rushed up to him smelling of lavender and roses, and gave him a warm hug. Toni reached up and gently placed her hand on his cheek.
“I prepared a special meal just for you, son. Come on home and you can tell me all about your day.”
Toby grinned and nodded eagerly. She took him by the hand and started walking.
A swirl of gold light flashed nearby, and Tawny’s face appeared again.
“Toby! You’ve got to find the lever! If you don’t find the lever, we’re all going to die. You will, too.”
Toby stopped, and his mother turned, her hand pulling his.
She said, “What is it, Toby? Come on home, dinner’s waiting. I’ve got a lot to talk to you about. And then maybe I can spend some time reading to you before tucking you in to bed. Like I did when you were little. Come on, home is just over there.”
He looked at her and his eyebrows came down. A stubborn glimmer flashed in his eyes.
He took his hand away and shook his head.
“Toby? Come on, let’s go home. Please? I’ve missed you so much, son.”
Guilt crossed his face, but it was quickly replaced with determination. He turned to walk in the other direction, putting her further out of sight with every step.
She called after him.
“Toby?”
He gave her one last look over his shoulder, then resolutely walked away, his head bent down.
She disappeared behind him, along with the rest of Dryadopolis.
The mists cleared a third time, and before him stood . . . Megalos Magos.
Toby stopped, uncertain.
The image spoke.
“In this hand, I hold a gift created only for you. It is knowledge, power, and understanding. Choose it and become who you were meant to be.”
Toby frowned at the vision. For a moment it flickered out, replaced by an image of himself. He sat in a library reading, and understanding the words. It flickered, and he stood in the Dungeon Corps Phanos Headquarters, listening to Clencher explain the finer points of swordplay.
It flickered again and he saw himself sitting at a table in a pub with the members of his team. They were eating and drinking, and he was . . . talking . . . with Nessa. She understood him and he listened to her, too, engaging in conversation.
The images faded and Magos returned.
He said, “What will it be? Death, or everything you ever wanted?”
The golden swirl of light appeared near his face again, but Toby did not wait for his sister’s voice. He snorted at the representation of the wizard, shook his head and walked past it.
He took a few more steps, and a large stone fountain appeared out of the mists. By the looks of the cobblestones encircling it, this had been part of a circle in the street when Melody existed above the surface. Traffic had flowed around the fountain.
Statues stood in the middle, three horsemen charging into battle with a phalanx of foot soldiers behind them. The whole tableaux stood frozen in stone, as if a moment in time were captured.
When water flowed in it, back in Melody’s glory days, the statues had produced music. One soldier’s flute no doubt played a merry tune. Now, in permanent dry darkness, the stained and crumbling stones stood mute.
In the middle of the fountain, a stone pedestal stood apart from the nearest horse. In its center, sticking out like a thin metal tongue, a lever beckoned.
Toby stepped over the lip of the dead fountain. He walked up to the pedestal, reached for the lever and pulled it down with a clank.
The mist parted, and all within it faded as well.
The tutelary, watching those who stayed behind, dimmed then disappeared altogether.
Toby looked back at the group, a mere 30 feet away or so, now clear to see.
He smiled and waved at them.
Everyone breathed a sigh of relief.
“He got through it a lot faster than I did,” Percel said.
“I think my reminder spell helped,” Tawny said. “Well, it was more like a nagging spell.”
Erik said, “I knew he could do it.”
-+-
They were prepared to meet worse monsters, but instead made surprisingly rapid progress after passing the tutelary. They traveled down two more city blocks without incident before surprising a large party of grotto trolls.
Rarely traveling to the surface, grotto trolls were all black, including their eyes and hair, allowing them to seem virtually invisible in dark areas. The sudden appearance of Tawny’s light globe coming out of the mist along with the party of corps members scattered two dozen of them away in fright.
The trolls quickly regrouped when they realized they had the advantage in numbers. They moved in quick, attacking with short swords and maces, swinging viciously but ineffectively thanks to the Rings of Protection.
Erik rushed into the thick of the group with the Nikos sword alive in his hand, expertly stabbing and slicing. Choster flitted in and out, too, with deliberate strikes to eyes, bellies, and necks.
Tawny gave up trying to cast an offensive spell with bot
h of them in the way. She drew her enchanted daggers and ran after them, hands blurring as she stabbed troll after troll.
Percel smiled and jumped into the fray right behind her.
Toby stayed back with Nessa standing slightly behind him. She shot down a few with her bow, but the number of targets rapidly diminished. A couple times a stray troll approached them and Toby struck them down with his sword, protecting her.
Then it was over and everyone paused to catch their breaths.
Percel said, “Let’s see if they have any loot.”
He rifled through the pockets of the nearest corpse, pulling out several coins.
Much to everyone’s surprise, the grotto trolls were loaded.
“Where’d they get all this money?” Nessa said, adding several more gold pieces to their collection.
“They likely found it here in the city,” Choster said. “All the coins have old queens on them, see?”
He held one up to the light.
Percel nodded in agreement. “Aye, Melody has never been looted. Probably quite a bit of money hereabouts.”
He selected a handful of better weapons the trolls had carried and stowed them away in a magical bag, too.
At last they finished picking through the corpses and resumed their quest.
A short while later, Tawny slowed down. The others turned to look at her.
She said, “We’re getting close to Ludge. I can feel it.”
They stopped in the street. Everyone pulled out a weapon, tension rapidly building. They tried to look in all directions at once.
“What’s our plan?” Erik said. “We never talked much about what to do when we actually found him.”
“The plan is to stay alive,” Percel said. “That means, don’t let him get near you. We provide a distraction while Tawny here does whatever it takes to kill him.”
“Kill who?”
They jumped in surprise.
Choster poofed away in a black cloud.
Behind them, a little boy looked curiously at the group. They turned, weapons raised, facing him.
He said, “Have you seen the prince?”
Chapter 14
Justen paced back and forth at the entrance down into Melody.
A new day had dawned, the sun climbing well into the sky, its rays warming the valley.
Despite the calm and peaceful setting, Justen fretted. He never stopped moving, but continued pacing back and forth, back and forth.
This, Justen thought, is worse than fighting down below. There is literally nothing to do up on top except worry.
“All we can do is wait,” one of the queen’s men said to him, watching him pace.
Two dozen guards nodded in agreement. They stood alert, in a circle around the shaft slanting down into Melody, swords at the ready. But nothing came out of the tunnel up into the giant circle of disturbed ground on the surface. And certainly nothing tried to go in.
How they could stay on alert, hours on end, was a mystery to Justen. He was no soldier.
Right now, he would much prefer to be studying an old spell book or something. He would rather be doing almost anything but this, worrying about his friends.
Justen gripped something in his hand, a black stone the size of his fist. He held it up and looked at it. He had repeatedly made the same motion since the team entered the dungeon yesterday. Justen looked at the object again and again and again. Each time he glanced at it, he felt reassured. Then he looked one more time.
Five lights glowed on the stone he had ensorcelled. So long as the lights glowed, the five Dungeon Corps members remained alive. Each yellow spot was attuned to one member of the team. If someone died, their light would go out. So far, all five kept glowing.
He did not have a light for Choster, since the spell did not work on the vampire. Vampires were not “alive” in the same sense as regular people. Justen was not worried about Choster’s safety, anyway.
For one thing, Choster did not carry one of the queen’s Rings of Protection. Justen had been tasked with retrieving the rings in the event the party did not come out of the dungeon alive.
Since Choster did not have a ring, his life was . . . less important? That didn’t sound right. No, his life was not one to monitor. Yes, Justen thought. That’s a better way to put it.
Also, Choster had repeatedly shown a remarkable ability to survive. He had remained living long after the others in his earlier team perished. Justen had little doubt Choster could pull off a similar feat in the event of this team’s failure.
In fact, and this was an unsettling thought, if the five lights on the stone flickered out and Justen led his retrieval party down to grab the rings, Choster would probably bite him to replenish his strength.
He shuddered at the thought.
“Don’t worry, sirrah,” another guard said, mistaking the shaking for a case of the nerves. “They’ll be alright.”
“One can hope,” Justen said with a smile, his skullish face grinning. “One can hope.”
For now, his willingness to retrieve the queen’s rings had helped feather Lady Lexa’s cap, so to speak. The good impression he had made with the royal mage Roberton, who had already returned to Menos, also helped.
Justen knew that Lexa stood in the queen’s good graces thanks in part to his service on this quest. Furthermore, Justen had helped Lexa demonstrate to Lord Reginald that she was capable of assisting the queen in important matters. That meant more to the young lady than most anything else, at the moment.
He grinned thinking about it, and hoped again he would not have to go down into the dungeon to try and retrieve those rings. If he failed, how would that make Lexa look to the queen and Lord Reginald?
No, hopefully everyone would come out of this alive, and he would not have to go down there at all. Yes, that would truly be the best outcome, he thought.
He glanced at the stone and once more counted all five lights glowing on its surface.
-+-
Mnester focused in his private alcove high in the Great Tree.
Scrying was relatively easy, but scrying without a person of magical ability nearby being able to detect it proved a considerably more difficult task.
Fortunately, Mnester had learned of just such a spell many decades past. It was virtually undetectable in most circumstances. He recalled which book in his personal library contained the details around casting it.
He fetched the book, found the spell and set about creating the scrying window in a perfectly crafted, highly enchanted hand mirror.
The secret to scrying without being easily observed doing so involved using a mirror to only look at a reflection of events rather than gaze upon them directly. The spell’s author explained all of this in detail in the book.
In this regard, Mnester felt uncertain as to why the reflective trick worked so well in practice. The author did not go into details as to why. Did it have something to do with the fact he was not directly observing events? Surely that must be the case, he thought. But the specifics continued to elude him.
“Maybe if I practiced the spell more often than once every few decades, that would help, too,” he muttered to himself.
Setting aside such distracting matters, he focused on the mirror and thoughts of Tawny. He refused to try and home in on the abomination. Such a creature made him sick, just thinking about it.
The king was certainly right in wanting to scrub his brother’s indiscretions from the face of this world. It was easier to think about Tawny, who was a proper elf, and a fine specimen. It was too bad she had never received proper training. Her mother had been quite formidable, and the elf population remained small, especially among the higher classes. They could have used another Andreian battle mage of Toni’s caliber.
At the thought of Toni, he considered how many good elves had lost their lives so far due to the indiscretions between her and Fulcris, the king’s brother.
Megalos Magos was gone. Dracaena. And of course, Toni herself. And Tawny, come
to think of it.
If Fulcris had not been of royal blood, if he had been almost anyone else, he would be the one suffering consequences.
Of course, few else would deign to flout the rules as Fulcris had over the centuries.
Mnester grimaced remembering other indiscretions, which had led to other abominations and their subsequent purging. How had Fulcris found so many fertile females outside his class?
Toni had been the exception. She alone had been strong enough to escape the initial round of assassins sent after her.
It had taken Megalos Magos himself to hunt her down. Even then, the children had escaped and he had not been heard from since.
Mnester was not too worried about the great mage. Half a century was nothing in the life of someone so old. Magos was probably pursuing some magical obscurity or something, although it was odd for an elf to stay away from the Great Tree for so long.
Mnester sighed and refocused on the task at hand.
The mirror shimmered, and Tawny came into view.
“Ah, here we go,” Mnester murmured to himself.
“Where . . . where are they?”
-+-
Deep in the heart of the dungeon, the team stared at a little boy dressed in the colors of a long dead prince.
The boy stared back at them with a curious expression on his face.
“I’ve heard the prince call this place Melody Hall,” the boy said.
He looked at them intently, holding the eyes of each person in turn.
In Percel’s mind, Rikkers looked the same as he remembered him, so many years ago.
But the boy’s eyes were different. They held a dark persona staring out at them.
Percel felt whatever was inside the boy was definitely not Rikkers.
Right now, the boy seemed earnest in trying to engage them in conversation.
“He said it used to be known as Melody, but when the city went underground people started calling it Melody Hall. Because it’s all indoors now, you see.”
Nessa and Tawny shared a nervous glance with one another. Then they resumed watching the little boy. No one could take their eyes off him for long.