Wizard Heights - Book 1 - The Legend of the Sorcerer King

by Alexander Scott

  Charlie ran his eyes over the cadaverous form in the box. It was not a pleasant sight. The old man's skin was pale and goose-bumped—it sagged about his bones and welled beneath his eyes. Frost gathered around his nostrils and mouth, and his legs were as white as those of a frozen chicken.

  That's when the mansion shook again as if a freight train were passing outside its front door. Charlie saw the lights flicker. Then he peered down into the casket and saw that the old man's expression was pinched. The heartbeat indicator on the machine began to arch more rapidly, and then, all of a sudden the shaking ceased, the lights stopped flickering and the muscles of the old man’s face slowly relaxed and became placid.

  Whitstable gazed down at his grandfather wistfully. "He does that occasionally," he said. "Sometimes I think that he's trying to speak to me..."

  "Maybe he's angry because he's stuck in a freezing, glass box?" said Charlie. "Maybe he wants to get out?"

  "Precisely!" said Whitstable, seizing upon his words. He regarded Charlie seriously. "That's why I brought you here! I need your help to set him free. You see—he wasn't always like this. Oh no, he was a great man once—a noble man. But he was deceived by an evil magician!"

  "A what?" asked Charlie.

  Whitstable glanced around to make sure that he wasn’t heard. Then, in a lowered voice, and with narrowed eyes, he said, "There is a man—a very wicked man who lives here in Wizard Heights. His name is Lord Sharak and he is a warlock!"

  "How do you know he is evil?" asked Charlie.

  Whitstable lowered his voice. "Recently," he began, "the Magi Council (I speak of some know-it-all Victorian busybodies who run the city) asked Count Mongovia to go to the Valley of the Kings in Egypt in search of an ancient artifact—the fabled Idol of Thebes. Naturally, he did not wish to undertake such a perilous journey alone, so he selected five of Wizard Heights' finest magicians to accompany him. Amongst these was my grandfather, Benjamin Bourgamund, who is a doctor and an expert in exotic diseases. His knowledge would prove invaluable on their journey to such a perilous place..."

  Charlie nodded with understanding.

  "The journey began well," continued Whitstable, "the party left upon a steam ship from New York, bound for Northern Africa. From there they would journey by train to Egypt. Their crossing went well. There were few storms to impede their progress. During this time, Lord Sharak, who was also a member of the expedition, befriended my grandfather. Furthermore, an agreement was made. If the sacred idol was indeed discovered in Egypt, then the money made from its sale would be split equally between the members of the party."

  "And?" asked Charlie. "Was it?"

  "No!" said Whitstable. "When the idol was discovered, Lord Sharak and Count Mongovia refused to share it with my grandfather, and what's more..." Whitstable peered about furtively. He spoke in a stealthy whisper. "Lord Sharak laid a curse on him!"

  "A curse?" said Charlie with incredulity. "What kind of curse?"

  "The most wicked kind," replied Whitstable macabrely. His eyes traveled over the old man's body in morbid fascination. "See how he lies like a mummy? That's what they did to him—with the idol!"

  "The idol…" murmured Charlie, as if in a dream.

  "But we can bring him back!" declared Whitstable, laying his hand upon Charlie's sleeve. "He's not dead yet—just cryogenically suspended."

  "How will we do that?" asked Charlie, swept up in imagining. "With a spell?"

  Whitstable laughed mockingly.

  "No spell can help this!" he said. "It would take a Grand-Wizard or higher, and most of them are very reclusive—only five in existence, and only one in Wizard Heights—G.W. Grisholm—horrible fellow. No, what we need is the relic—the fabled Idol of Thebes! If we can get that back, then we can remove the curse, and if we can remove the curse then my grandfather can regain consciousness!" Whitstable's eyes shone triumphantly. He straightened his bow tie assertively, then he lowered his eyes in a clandestine fashion. "We'll have to take some secret paths tonight, Charlie," he said seriously. "We don't know who might be on our trail..."

  "On our trail?" said Charlie with concern.

  "I mean," said Whitstable, "there's no knowing who's out there, but don't worry, they won't catch us."

  Charlie swallowed solemnly. "What are we going to do?" he asked.

  "Steal the idol," replied Whitstable emphatically. "Whatever else?"

  Chapter 9

  Whitstable led Charlie down to the mansion’s oversized kitchen. In the pantry they found a heavy grate in the floor. Levering it up with a crowbar, Whitstable heaved it against the wall. Then he handed Charlie a glowing lantern. "Down into the hole, Charlie," he briskly instructed, pointing to an iron ladder that descended into darkness.

  Charlie peered into the hole. He made a face. "I'm not going down there," he said. "Its dark and damp and there's probably rats and—"

  Whitstable grabbed the lantern from him. "OK, OK," he said, "I'll go first."

  He descended the ladder until he was just a head emerging from the hole. "Follow me," he said seriously, "and go slowly. These ladder rungs are slippery." And with that he disappeared into the hole entirely. Charlie peered down into the darkness and saw Whitstable clanging down the ladder. His lantern, which hung from his belt, shone erratically about him. "Come on, Charlie," called Whitstable, his voice echoing as if it were at the bottom of a drain. "We don't have all night, you know!"

  Charlie was glad that they didn't have all night. In fact, he was beginning to wish that the whole escapade could be over with. Reluctantly he climbed down the ladder after Whitstable, and as they descended, he hoped that whatever they were going to do would be quick and safe, and would lead to him being safely back in bed before dawn. He planned to wake up the next morning and find his parents returned to normal, but tomorrow morning seemed very distant to Charlie. The air in the hole was damp and cold—so cold that his breath fogged before his eyes, and so damp that the rungs of the ladder were slippery with moisture. Noticing that rust flaked off onto his hands, Charlie deduced that the ladder had not seen use for some time. He wondered why. However, due to the confined space and the echoing of their footfall upon the iron rungs, there was no way to ask Whitstable, so he kept climbing down, with the little square of light above his head becoming smaller and smaller, until he could barely see at all. Then he realized that he was no longer climbing downward, but was instead standing on solid ground.

  "You can stop climbing now," said Whitstable, mockingly shining the lantern into Charlie's face. "You are alright, aren't you?"

  Charlie glanced about disorientedly. Rubbing his eyes, he saw that he was in a rough-hewn chamber that was lit by a grand Victorian gas lamp that hung from the ceiling. Glancing about he saw that in the center of the chamber there sat a large, circular pool—a vast cup of rippling water atop an ornate plinth of stone. Its centerpiece was a white, marble, renaissance cherub who held a stone fish in its pudgy arms. Four archways, inscribed with ancient runes, offered exit from the chamber.

  "What is this place?" asked Charlie, gazing about him in wonder at the ceiling, which wavered and glimmered with the water’s reflection. "Who would build a fountain down here?"

  "These caverns were built long ago," said Whitstable in a reverential tone. "They stretch for miles. In fact, there's more of Wizard Heights below ground than there is above it."

  Charlie remembered what Whistable had said about the Arabs and the pirates only being allowed above ground on the last Tuesday and Thursday of every month.

  "You mean people actually live down here?" he said. "Underground?"

  "Indeed," replied Whitstable. "There are many towns and villages below Wizard Heights that belong to all kinds of people, like tomb thieves and—"

  "Tombs?" said Charlie, his eyes wide.

  "Oh yes," said Whitstable. "Thousands of magicians tombs are buried deep beneath the city. So many tombs in fact, that I don't think anyone's ever been able to keep count. There’s lots of treasure hidden down h
ere, too—in magically protected vaults that are protected by traps, but that's much further down than we're going to go today."

  That's when Whitstable glanced around sharply. Echoing footsteps were approaching from beyond one of the chamber’s archways. "Quick!" he said. "Over here!"

  He hurried Charlie over to where the light barely reached at the edge of the chamber. In the wavering shadows they stood with their backs to the wall, barely breathing or moving an inch. Beyond one of the chamber's arches, they could hear echoing footsteps and a man's voice. "Yes, I quite agree with your proposition," he said seriously. "We must do something about it..."

  Crouching in the shadows, Charlie and Whitstable observed two men dressed in burgundy, velvet robes enter the chamber. "Tell me," said the former, a tall, regal-looking gentleman with noble, brown, shoulder-length hair and a van dyke beard. "how are the preparations coming along?"

  "Very well," replied a younger, black-haired man who had a scar down the side of his face. "The High Chancellor has said that all is in order, my Lord. Word has been sent. Our allies are amassing their forces in New York. It will be not long now before our plans are brought to fruition..."

  "Good," said the first. "And of the high command?"

  "The high command is well aware of your service, sire," said the other. "Surely it will not be long before you are rewarded for your work..." And with that he lowered his eyes and bowed slightly.

  "It's Count Mongovia!" hissed Whitstable, nudging Charlie in the ribs, "and his assistant, Silas Sludge." As he said this, the tall, regal-looking gentleman halted in the wavering light of the chamber and laid his hands on the pommel of his walking cane. His eyes narrowed as if he were considering something very troubling.

  "What’s wrong, master?" hissed his associate, but the Count's mumbled reply was lost in the echoing ambience of the chamber. Whitstable and Charlie watched with heart-pounding apprehension as the Count and his assistant passed to the fountain and filled two steel cups. After drinking from them, they continued on their way, leaving the chamber by the opposite archway from which they had entered. Only when their echoing footsteps had at last died away did Whitstable and Charlie dare to breathe fully again.

  "Have you any idea how lucky we were?" said Whitstable. "If they had found us down here, there's no knowing what would have happened."

  "Who are they?" asked Charlie.

  Whitstable glanced around as if to make sure that he wasn't heard.

  "Count Mongovia is one of Wizard Heights most eminent magician luminaries," he said. "He is said to have once traveled with the Imperial Russian Circus. Since then he has developed a repertoire as a famed illusionist and conjuror—but his skills far exceed that. He has developed immense wealth and now exerts great influence in the chancellery and the magi council—the governing bodies of Wizard Heights. In short, he's not a man to be trifled with. We'd better get going. Are you ready?"

  Charlie was, so they set cautiously off down the same dimly lit passageway that the Count and his assistant had passed.

  On the way, Charlie took the opportunity to quiz Whitstable about Wizard Heights. "The people that we saw in the streets," he said, "looked like they were from Victorian London, yet there were pirates too, but they're from a time much older than that, aren't they?"

  "Oh, indeed," said Whitstable, using his lantern before them to illuminate the way. "Their people have lived in Wizard Heights for centuries. There are people in Wizard Heights from all sorts of times. You see, the city is very old. Far older than anyone can remember in fact. As for the magicians—that is, the ruling classes, they have inhabited it for centuries, too. They don't entirely die, you see. Well, that is, as long as they don't meet some sort of terrible misfortune. Oh, it's a long story but in a nutshell, some of them die benignly and some of them die malignantly, and of course, as one might suspect, being benignly dead is far more preferable to being malignantly dead. When you're benignly dead you can enjoy tea and cakes brought to you by a nice lady with a trolley in the afternoon, but when you're malignantly dead, well, there are no tea or cakes in the afternoon. In fact, as far as anyone knows, it's rather more permanent."

  "Like... being deceased?" said Charlie, who was by this time almost entirely confused.

  "Precisely," said Whitstable.

  "My relations, the Bishophamptons are benignly dead and they love it. They're in the Wisteria Way Cemetery—you can reach it on the tram."

  "I see..." said Charlie, who really didn't see at all.

  "One must just be awfully careful that one does not do something frightfully silly," said Whitstable. "Or annoy someone terribly powerful. Ah, here we are..."

  Charlie had not realized it, but while Whitstable had talked, they had been climbing some low Victorian steps, and now they had come to a dead end. Here they found roots that grew from the ceiling.

  "This is it," said Whitstable, turning to Charlie excitedly. "Help me!"

  Charlie saw that Whitstable was feeling around the edge of the ceiling—trying to make out the edges where faint moonlight streamed in.

  "It's stuck fast!" said Whitstable, heaving at the edge of what appeared to be a flagstone, with his shoulder.

  Charlie put down the lantern and squeezed into the passageway beside him, ripping cobwebs as he did.

  "One ... two ... heave!" said Whitstable, and the two boys heaved with all their might at the stone block above them. In response, the block gave a gravelly groan and showered stone dust down on them. "Again!" cried Whitstable, his face and hair now covered in white stone powder. "Heave!"

  They heaved again and this time the stone block slid sideways, allowing a slender shard of blue moonlight to shine upon the boys grateful faces.

  "I see blades of grass!" said Charlie, peering through the hole, "and the moon!"

  "And there's more," replied Whitstable, "much more. Now, heave!"

  Once more the two boys shouldered the stone block, and now it slid further, allowing just enough room for a child to crawl through. They climbed out onto a moonlit lawn. Standing up, they brushed off the dirt that had accumulated in the tunnels.

  "I never thought we'd shift that giant stone," marveled Charlie, "but we did."

  Now that they had climbed out of the hole, he could see exactly what they had moved. It was the tombstone—the lid of a half-sunken sarcophagus that also served as a hidden entrance to the tunnels. Looking around, he saw that they stood in a graveyard—an ivy-strewn, tumbledown place, full of weathered, teetering gravestones, knee-high grass, and ornate, gothic tombs. Around them, Victorian, ivy-garbed, stone angels regarded them with doubtful expressions.

  "Come on," said Whitstable. "Al Sharak’s mansion is not far from here. I’ll show you the way."

  The two boys threaded their way between the moonlit gravestones, following a path that surrounded the imposing stone church until they finally arrived at a gate in a wrought-iron fence.

  "We're nearly there," said Whitstable, creaking it open and passing through. "Al Sharak lives right next door to the graveyard. It's very convenient for him, you see."

  "Convenient?" asked Charlie. "Why?"

  Whitstable turned to Charlie, his face deathly white in the moonlight. "Because he collects dead people…" he said, his eyes wide and foreboding.

  Charlie didn't know how to respond to that. He followed Whitstable out to a quaint street beyond, where stone servant's cottages with pointed roofs like wizard hats, nestled close to one another on either side of a cobbled road. They had narrow, wooden doors, their windows were latticed, and light shone from behind their curtains. Whitstable hurried Charlie along the street to an almighty hedge that sat atop a high bank of earth. This Whitstable scrabbled up, and finding a narrow hole at the hedge's base, he quickly disappeared through it. Charlie followed, creeping through the hole on his hands and knees until he emerged onto an expansive, moonlit lawn.

  There he found Whitstable and a sight that took his breath away. Upon the other side of the lawn sat a white mansion
that was easily three stories high and as wide as a football field. Above its mighty doors, between stone pillars, hung a lantern that cast golden light across its palatial steps.

  "At last..." said Whitstable, his eyes shining magnificently. "Magabaal..."

  Chapter 10

  Before Charlie could catch his breath, Whitstable darted across the lawn, weaving and ducking commando-style between statues of Egyptian gods. "You mean," said Charlie, running behind him, "that this house has a name and its name is Magabaal?"

  "Precisely!" said Whitstable, breathing heavily. The boys caught their breath in the shadow of a tall statue of the Egyptian god, Ra, and at last Charlie was able to properly look the mansion over. It had stone columns and endless dark windows. About its entrance were more statues of ancient Egyptian deities.

  "Although Al Sharak is not Egyptian," hissed Whitstable, "he has a keen interest in Egyptology. See those stone figures upon the buttresses?" He pointed to sculptures that adorned the roof’s corners. "They're sphinxes, and that one there," he pointed to a tall statue of an ancient Egyptian god that stood sentry to the house (a man who had a pharaoh’s beard, wrapped legs, and a tall crown that was decorated with ostrich feathers), "is Osiris, the god of the afterlife. The statue in the half-light on the other side of the door (a beautiful, female god who had birds wings and a headdress that was shaped like a throne) is his wife, Isis—she's the goddess of motherhood, magic, and fertility."