When he’d talked about doing hard things to save someone you loved. He hadn’t been talking about what Marcus was going to do. He’d been talking about what he was doing.
At the very moment Marcus had labeled Graehl a traitor, he’d been giving up his own life.
Tears dripped from his eyes and down his chin, then splattered on the dirty floor.
“Hurry,” Riph Raph whispered. “Someone’s coming.”
Marcus closed his eyes. When they’d been sitting around the campfire, Darnoc had said that the realm of shadows was a portal between Earth, Farworld, and other worlds. At the time, Marcus had assumed that the land elemental was talking about other planets. But maybe, just maybe, he was saying that the realm of shadows had some kind of connection to the elemental keeps as well. If so, and if Marcus could use his magic to find Kyja the same way she had used the Aptura Discerna to find him, he might be able to contact her to see why she hadn’t pulled him over.
Focusing on what she had looked like the last time he saw her, and what Fire Keep looked like, of the magical flames she’d step into, Marcus drew on all four elements and called out, “Kyja, where are you?”
Nothing.
He tried again. “Kyja! It’s Marcus and Riph Raph. We’re trying to bring you back to Farworld, but we can’t find you. Why haven’t you pulled me over?”
For a moment, he saw nothing. Then a yellow light—so bright it made him squint, although his eyes were closed—filled his vision. A second later, she was there, looking straight at him.
“Kyja!” he cried “You’re alive.”
“Kyja, where are you?”
She was about to touch the retinentia when a voice came out of nowhere.
Turnip looked up from the ball and glanced around the room. “Hello?” She checked the door, but was almost positive that the voice hadn’t come from beyond it. She stared into the light. “Is someone there?”
The voice came again. It was a little unclear and she couldn’t make out all of the words. Something about a kyja—whatever that was—and a riff raff and something called Farworld. The voice sounded like a boy’s.
“Kyja!” the voice called again.
This time the voice was so clear, it could have been coming from right beside her. She looked into the light and saw a boy with messy, brown hair. Something was wrong with one of his arms, and his right leg was bent in an odd way. Behind him, outlined against a gray square of light, seemed to be some sort of winged creature.
She reached out to the boy. “Hello?”
Kyja didn’t sound nearly as excited to see Marcus as he was to see her, but he didn’t care. It was Kyja. She was alive and speaking to him.
“Pull us over!” he shouted. “Find the rope and pull us over so we can—”
The door of the room slammed open and Riph Raph shouted a warning. Marcus looked up to see four men in dark uniforms storming toward them.
“Hands on your head,” the one in the middle yelled. “Do not try magic, on the penalty of—”
Marcus created a fireball and blasted it toward them. The fire bounced off the men’s shields and singed the walls, but didn’t appear to hurt them at all.
One of the soldiers fired a shot, and Riph Raph gave a squawk of pain.
As Marcus reached for air magic to blast the men away, one of them flung a silver wire at him. The wire wrapped around his wrists and legs, cutting off the flow of magic like turning off a water faucet.
He looked for Riph Raph, but the skyte was gone.
“Pull us over!” he screamed to Kyja. But when he closed his eyes again, she was gone too.
After the boy turned away, Turnip heard shouting and a loud bang. His voice cut off and an instant later, he was gone. She looked around the room. Who was he, and what happened to him? He’d said something about a rope, but she didn’t see one anywhere.
“Where are you?” she shouted. “How do I pull you over?”
No response.
Clearly, he’d been frightened and needed her to do something. He looked sort of scruffy and maybe not all that trustworthy. But if he needed her, she wanted to help him—if only to find out where he’d come from and how he’d managed to talk to her.
“Hello?” she shouted. “Boy, where are you?” Wherever he’d been—whoever he’d been—he was gone.
Something popped, and she looked down in time to see her retinentia burst open. She reached for it, but the moment the liquid inside touched the glowing yellow air, it disappeared. Nothing was left but hundreds of tiny glittering shards.
Interlude: Taking Chances
Master Therapass was poring over his maps when Tankum walked into the study. “Have you heard anything?” the wizard asked starting to stand up.
The warrior waved him back to his seat. “Only what we already knew. They were spotted heading into the Windlash Mountains. Since then, nothing.”
Master Therapass rubbed his temples. “Maybe all of this was a mistake. I should go after him.”
“And alert the Dark Circle to what we’ve discovered? Besides, we both know that the Unmakers cavern is too well protected. It’s why we had to send him that way in the first place.” Tankum tried to sit in a chair, but as soon as he put any weight on it, the wooden legs cracked and splintered. “Sorry about that,” he said, tossing the mangled furniture aside.
Therapass rolled up the map. “You don’t know what’s in there—what could happen to him in the realm.”
“You’ve told me,” Tankum said. “And we both agreed that the risk was one we had to take. Trust me—if you had told the lad what he was up against, he’d have made the same decision.”
“He may never come out,” the wizard said, slamming his fist on the table. “The things they’re rumored to do in there . . .” He shook his head.
“And if he didn’t go in, there was no chance of saving the girl.” Tankum walked around the table. “If you want my personal opinion, I think he’ll make it. The boy’s got spunk and heart. He’s done more than I could’ve done at his age.”
Master Therapass nodded. “I know. If anything happens to him, though, I’ll never forgive myself.”
Tankum tapped the rolled map. “My men are two days out from the target, a day and a half if they push it. But I need to join them.”
The wizard stood up. “I don’t like your chances.”
Tankum grinned. “Have you ever? The day you like the odds of a battle I’m in is the day I retire my swords.”
“Take care of yourself,” the wizard said. “I’ll let you know when we’re on our way.”
Tankum nodded and slapped Master Therapass on the back so hard, the wizard’s teeth snapped together. “He’ll be back. You can count on it.”
Master Therapass watched Tankum walk out the door with a strong feeling that it might be the last time he’d see his friend alive.
22: Pain
He tried to keep up with the soldier who was dragging him by a silver wire, but without his pole, Marcus could barely walk.
“Didn’t know the Spell Casters had crips,” the soldier said, picking Marcus up and flinging him over one shoulder. “Thought you’d all magicked yourselves perfect bodies.”
“I didn’t know the realm of the shadows had dimwits,” Marcus said, trying not to moan from the pain of being bounced him around as he walked downstairs.
A soldier behind them laughed. “Kid’s got you there. I’ve been telling you that you’re a dimwit for years.”
As they stepped into the alley, the soldier carrying Marcus “accidentally” banged him against the doorway and chuckled. “Oops. Sorry about that.”
The one who seemed to be their leader turned with a frown. “Damage the livestock, and you’ll be on crap detail so long, even your girlfriend won’t remember your name.”
“Tuck don’t have a girlfriend,” cracked the soldier behind him. “She left him for a geo-vacuum. Said he sucks rocks more than it does.”
Two soldiers laughed, but their leader knelt and t
ouched a spot of blood in the street a few feet from the building. “Looks like we hit the flying lizard. Racker, you and Lii track it. Tuck, throw the Spell Caster in the wagon. King Phillip wants him brought in ASAP.”
“You have a king?” Marcus asked. The realm of shadows kept getting weirder and weirder.
“You’ll learn all about him soon enough.” Tuck carried Marcus out of the alley to a vehicle that looked like a mix between a car and a covered wagon. The back was clearly made from an Earth car, which Marcus guessed to be from the late fifties, with tall lights on the back almost like the fins of a fish. The roof was gone, and the vehicle appeared to have been chopped in half right about where the front seats should have been. In their place were a wooden seat and reins. The whole thing was covered with a piece of white canvas cloth held up by curved rods.
Tuck threw Marcus roughly onto the back seat, and springs sticking up through the ragged leather jabbed his side. “You think you’re special ’cause you’ve got magic,” the soldier said under his breath. “But trust me. Once the King has you harnessed, you’ll wish you were nothing but a grunt.”
When the leader climbed onto the wooden seat and picked up the reins, the vehicle began rolling down the street, although Marcus couldn’t see anything pulling it. Watching them go, Tuck gave a sarcastic wave and mouthed the word, “Crip,” before walking away.
With the driver looking straight ahead, Marcus tugged at the wires wrapped around his ankles and wrists. He couldn’t see any kind of clasp, but there had to be a way to release the bindings.
“You seem like an okay sort, for a Caster,” the driver said without turning around. “Recognized Tuck for the piece of digger dung he is right away. So I’m going to give you some advice.”
Marcus tried to slide his fingers under the wire, but the harder he pushed, the tighter it dug into his flesh. He tried rubbing the wire against the edge of a spring, but it didn’t appear to do any good.
The soldier pulled the reins to the right, and the wagon turned in that direction. “The silver stuff you’re yanking at right now is called conductor wire. It not only blocks any magic you try to use, but also the more you mess with it, the more it clamps down. Pull hard enough, and you’ll cut your own hand clean off. Even then, it don’t let go. You’ll walk around with a wire-tied stump that looks kind of like a sausage.”
Marcus stopped tugging at the wire. “How did you know I was trying to get it off?”
The soldier shrugged. “That’s what you all do. I’d do the same thing if I were on my way to be harnessed. But it won’t do you no good. Once you’re wrapped, no one gets away.”
Marcus shifted, trying to find a position that kept him from getting poked by the springs so much. “When you say all, are you talking about other . . . Spell Casters?”
“They’re the only ones conductor wire works on. Supposed to be because their magic is what makes it work in the first place.”
They turned right off of the road they’d been on, and Marcus noticed that the farther they went, the less ragged the buildings got. “Do a lot of Spell Casters come here?” If he could team up with a few other wizards, they might be able to fight their way out of wherever this King Phillip was keeping them.
“Not as many as there used to be,” the driver said. “That’s why it was such a big deal when you showed up. Power’s been getting a little low.”
Marcus didn’t hear the last of the soldier’s words because at that moment, they drove past a 7-Eleven. Not something that looked like the convenience store, but the real deal, complete with a poster of a blue Slurpee.
“This looks exactly like Earth,” Marcus gasped. There were gas pumps out front. Even a propane tank.
“Parts of it do,” the soldier said. “Other parts look like the Caster world, from what I’ve been told. Then there’re parts that . . . well, let’s just say you don’t ever want to experience them yourself. Some nasty things out there. You’re lucky you holed up where you did. If you’d crossed to the other side of the street from the diggers, you might never have come back.”
“Diggers?” Marcus asked.
The soldier nodded. “The things that look like big black bubbles.”
“But how is this all possible? How can you have cars and guns and video game controllers?”
“Ask King Phillip,” the soldier said. “When he’s in a good mood, he can talk for hours. When he’s not . . .” He shook his head. “You don’t want to be anywhere around him.”
They pulled up in front of a five-story building, which looked like a mix between a high-tech office building and a fairytale castle. Conical spires of gleaming chrome and dark glass rose high into the air. As the wagon approached, a drawbridge with flashing multi-colored neon bulbs lowered, and a couple of dozen fairies flew out, scattering handfuls of sparkling dust as they soared overhead.
A man and woman dressed in maroon robes came out of the building. They reached into their sleeves and pulled out what looked like metal wands. Marcus felt a surge of air magic freeze him in place and lift him out of the car.
“Are you wizards?” he asked, feeling a surge of hope.
“Do you see any harnesses?” the woman sneered. “We’re engineers.”
The two of them floated him toward the building. As he was carried across a moat filled with rollercoaster cars, he saw something white and furry peek up out of a sewer grate. He could have sworn it was an Ishkabiddle.
Inside, the building was as odd as it was outside. One entire wall was covered with cuckoo clocks of all shapes and sizes. None seemed to be set to the same time, and when one went off, instead of a little bird popping out, tiny fireworks exploded. They passed an ordinary-looking receptionist typing on a modern computer. Hanging above her on the wall was the head of a dragon and a pair of crossed long swords.
They turned down a hallway lined from floor to ceiling with microwave ovens. Through a window on the left, Marcus saw a colored fountain outside. Beautiful creatures with fish-like bodies and human faces frolicked amid blasts of colored water shooting into the air through white plastic sprinkler pipes.
At the end of the hallway, the robed pair stopped in front of what looked like a piece of medical equipment. “This will measure your magic capacity,” the woman said, plugging the other end of Marcus’s silver wire into the machine.
“It may hurt a bit,” the man said, right before he flipped a red switch.
Marcus had lived his whole life with chronic pain, but until that moment, he had never understood how intense pain could be. His arms and legs shot out to the sides. Every hair on his body stood on end, and each nerve-ending screamed as though it had been hit with a blowtorch. His teeth slammed together, and his body convulsed. He felt as if blunt nails had been driven through every inch of his flesh into the bones beneath. He tried to scream, but the pain locked his muscles so tightly, he could barely breathe.
His response was completely instinctive. Knowing he couldn’t take that kind of agony for more than a second or two, he slammed magic through the silver wire and into the machine. The pain stopped at once and he gasped with relief.
A digital readout on the front scrolled rapidly through a series of numbers, and the man and woman nodded their heads and smiled.
“Very good,” the man said, turning off the machine. “The king will be quite pleased.”
“The highest I’ve ever seen,” the woman said, patting him on the back.
Trembling with exhaustion, Marcus lost track of where they were after that. His entire body shook like a kite in a hurricane, and his brain kept trying to convince him that this was all a dream. Not until they stepped out of a crystal-and-stone elevator that had no cables or pulleys, did he finally come back to his senses.
He had a feeling that they were deep underground now. Light came from a combination of torches and electric bulbs, which seemed to be randomly distributed. The man and woman carried him through a brightly lit room where more robed figures hunched over computer screens, tapp
ing keyboards and waving metal wands.
“New one?” asked a man with steel rimmed glasses.
“He may be the last one we need,” said the woman floating Marcus, and everyone looked up from their computers with interest.
They passed through the room and into a downward sloping hallway. The air took on a sour smell, which for some reason reminded Marcus of a zoo. He could hear a rumbling, as if heavy equipment was running nearby. The walls and floors seemed to be vibrating, and the air pounded against his eardrums.
They entered another room, and the sour smell intensified. The vibrating was so powerful that he could feel it all the way to his bones. He turned his head, and at first thought he was seeing hundreds of acrobats—the kind that did tricks in a circus—hanging from silver trapeze bars on the ceiling.
He blinked and realized that they weren’t trapeze bars. They looked more like swings. And the people hanging from them were definitely not acrobats. The wires holding them in the air were connected to their arms, legs, chest, back, and neck, like the strings on a marionette. The people might as well have been puppets, with their lifeless expressions, and slack limbs. Tubes pumped clear liquid into their arms, and several of the people had drool leaking from the corners of their mouths.
“What are you doing to them?” Marcus asked, terror making his voice shake with the same vibration as the air.
The man and woman stopped and released the air magic holding Marcus. As his body began to drop, two muscular guards stepped forward and caught him. One of them had metal hands with robotic fingers, which clicked as he opened and closed them. The other had normal hands, but the lower half of his face was gone, replaced by what looked like the bucket of a steam shovel.
“Welcome to the harnesses,” said the one with the metal hands. “We’re going to get a charge out of you.”
The second laughed, his mechanical jaw clanking open and shut. “Good one.” He held Marcus upright, and the first guard started to take off Marcus’s robe.
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