Good pep talk, Maria thought.
She spun around. The voice seemed to be getting closer and closer, as if the man was everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
“If I take your trials, will you return Sherlock to me unharmed?”
“Why, yes, Maria. I will return your mutt to you, and then you will be on your way, on to the other side, free of my mountain.”
“And Ignatius and Freida?”
“They will pass through here without a clue. I may watch from the shadows, but they will remain untouched.”
“The rules?” Maria asked.
The ground shifted behind her, from where she had climbed up. She whirled around and saw the cavern floor rising up to meet her. There was no more drop off. The land had smoothed into a plateau; there was not even a crack in the ground where the two ends met. Lights flickered, orange and red, eating away the gray gloom. Torches on the walls, burning with flame, sending acrid smoke high into the mountain.
“There are no rules, Maria. But there are guidelines. The Trials are simple to understand: you will be given three tasks, each one increasing in difficulty.”
“What tasks?”
“Ah, ah, ah,” the man said, clucking his tongue. “That’s for me to know and you to find out.”
Maria didn’t answer him; she was deep in thought. The man had known her last name, had known Sherlock could talk to her. Somehow, he had access into her mind, her thoughts.
“Yes,” the man answered. “I do.”
The way he spoke made Maria shudder.
“There is no need to be frightened. No going back now. As you can see, I have raised the land. There is no exit behind you. A good metaphor of life, I think. The only way to be successful is to keep going forward. And Maria, my dear friend, that is what you will have to do.” He broke out in laughter again.
The walls began to narrow, closing around her. Maria held her ground. Down the rocky corridor, that pinprick of light reappeared in the blackness where the torchlight would not stretch, like a slit eye.
“I feel your anxiety, Maria. I know you want to begin. But you will not be thinking this once you are faced with your first task; so patience, my dear witch. Since I’ve grown to admire your work—the inside of your head is quite amusing, I must say—I will give you a few hints. Each trial will test you in a different way. Skill, will, and thrill. In what order, you ask? That, you will have to find out on your own.” More laughter. “Now, let the Trials of Antenele begin!”
The cave shifted again, more violently than before, yet Maria held her ground. Once it stopped, the silence engulfed her. She could hear her own ragged breathing, her own thudding heartbeat.
The music box weighed her down. It was a burden, it seemed, too great to carry. Some voice deep inside of her mind was telling her to put it down, to leave it there in the bowels of this great mountain, where no one would ever find it, and where it would be safe from all creatures, from Arachnids to Orcs. Never to be found again.
“No,” Maria said, sternly. If this was the first test, Maria thought it would be a breeze. She could resist a little whispering.
With the sword in her right hand—the sword that should’ve been wielded with two hands—Maria took a step forward. The goal was simple: Besides survival, Maria knew she was supposed to move forward, like the man of the mountain had said. The pinprick of light on the other side of the dimly lit rock corridor was where she needed to go. Along the way, the tests would be taken. Yet she found herself slightly afraid to take that first step. She had read somewhere that the first step of any journey was always the hardest. It had been true on her birthday, when the magic had started to surface, and it had been true when she left the portal into Oriceran for the first time. But she had done it, hadn’t she? She had taken that first step, and then the second and third and fourth.
C’mon, Maria. C’mon, she thought.
She stepped, her breathing ragged.
But when she stepped, the cave disappeared. Gone were the torch lights and the rock walls and the raised land behind her.
Now she was in a gray field. Two moons shone high in the dark sky. She could see her breath on the air. The temperature was low enough to make her flesh break out in goosebumps. She no longer saw the pinprick of light that was her goal, but a great wrought-iron gate.
She approached it, her sword still in hand. There was a word written in twisted steel at the top of the entrance, but Maria could not understand what it said. It was in a language outside of her English and two years of high school Spanish. The letters and symbols were enough to tell her that she was not looking at an Earthen language.
Still, understanding the words or not, it did not take a genius to realize where she was.
Beyond the gates were large slabs of stone sticking out of the ground—headstones.
The hinges squeaked rustily as the gates opened. As they did, the pinprick of light bobbed beyond in the blackness.
It’s back. I have no choice but to go forward.
Taking the path, she strolled at a pace faster than she would normally walk. On the headstones were the same letters and symbols she did not understand on the gate, though if she could understand them, she still wouldn’t have stuck around to read them. Graveyards were inherently creepy, but graveyards at night were the worst.
Sherlock, I’m coming, she thought. Sherlock, just hang on.
It was all she could do to keep herself from freezing in fear. Sure, she was a witch with the potential to grow into a badass witch, but the dead sleeping just below her feet would be too much for the bravest of souls.
A low rumble caused her to stop. Her head on a swivel, she scanned the surrounding area.
“That didn’t sound good,” she whispered, gripping the sword tighter. Despite the chill in the air, her palms were still sweaty.
The rumbling came again, this time worse than before; even worse than the rumbling when the land had risen to meet the cliff, inside the cave.
Then all at once, the ground exploded. Clumps of dirt shot into the air, raining down on the path and on Maria’s shoulders. She held the sword up high, in her movie-defense pose, the one she’d picked up from The Princess Bride, Star Wars, and The Lord of the Rings.
If Obi-Wan holds his lightsaber like this, then where could I go wrong?
She caught the first glimpse of white emerging from the earth before the last bit of dirt fell. It was bones. Skeleton fingers.
The first test.
The skeletons pulled themselves out of the graves, wearing tattered and dirty robes, ripped leather jerkins, long dresses. Their jaws were propped open by packed mud, and worms and beetles and other insects Maria thought were from Earth fell off of them, landing on the path with meaty thumps.
“All right, assholes,” Maria said, “let’s do this.”
The skeletons did not move like the dead. They had more life in them than most people on Earth did.
But that didn’t matter for Maria.
She swung the sword in a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree circle, connecting with rib, severing spinal cords, detaching arms. This gave her enough room to back up the path, but all around her, the ground was exploding; dirt was raining down on her, and more skeletons were digging themselves out of their graves.
The fear had left Maria after she’d taken down the first skeleton dressed in dark robes, still wearing its hood. Now she was running on pure adrenaline.
As she swung down on a skeleton’s skull, cracking it down the middle and leaving a lightning bolt fissure in the bone, she felt hot fire ripple through her back, down to the back of her thigh. She let out a scream, spinning around. Two skeletons had clawed her with their sharp finger bones, deep enough to rip her leather jacket and her shirt beneath it. She thought she felt blood trickle down to her waistband, but she didn’t have time to check.
“No one gets to touch my ass without my permission,” she said, grimacing. With a shout, she severed skulls from vertebrae. The heads rolled down the
gentle slope of the graveyard until they clattered against a gravestone, like bowling balls collecting in a Resurfacing Machine. More came up behind her, so she didn’t have time to admire what she had done; two birds with one stone, and all that.
“You have to buy me a drink first!” she grunted, taking out three more skeletons.
Maria chopped and hacked until her chest was heaving and the sweat trickled down the back of her neck, making her hair stick to her skin.
She nearly collapsed out of exhaustion, but caught herself on one knee in the path, surrounded by piles of bones. Her head was tilted downward, absently watching a worm wiggle and squirm its way back into the lush grass when she heard the rattle of bones.
“No fucking way,” she said, breathlessly.
Looking up, she saw just one more skeleton coming toward her. It was missing most of its teeth, and she could’ve sworn there was some sort of life flickering in the blackness of its hollow eye sockets.
She stood up on shaky legs and took the sword in both of her hands. She was too beat to lift the sword up with one anymore; all the magic she had called on from Oriceran was depleted.
“I think it’s bedtime,” she wheezed as she swung the sword downward like a medieval executioner. The hit wasn’t a clean one, but it did the trick. The skeleton dropped into the large pile of bones; gone to rest for eternity—or until the next weary wanderer stumbled into the Trials of Antenele.
From behind her, in the direction she was supposed to be going, the far gates squeaked open.
She had passed the first test.
Skill, she thought.
Chapter Thirteen
Maria wanted nothing more than to fall to her knees again and rest, but she couldn’t. The gates were open, and she didn’t know for how much longer. So she sheathed her sword, only because she could not bear to carry it anymore, and headed for the opening, toward that pinprick of light.
When she cleared the gates, they slammed shut behind her. Reflexively, she wheeled around. The graveyard sank, bleeding away into a dark mist.
“Okay, Maria, one down, two more to go. Sherlock, I’m coming for you. Don’t worry; when I get there, I promise you can pee on all the Gnomes you want.”
She turned back around to find the darkness was gone, replaced with a burning light of orange and red. Maria took a step and quickly stopped, her heart plummeting, and threw herself backward.
The ground was gone.
Where the walkway should’ve been, there was just a large gap, empty space for hundreds of feet until it ended in the sweltering magma below. A chunk of rock broke off from the edge and fell. It landed in the magma with a splash, quickly followed by a sizzling. Maria, now sitting, shook her head.
“Okay, how the hell am I supposed to get across that? Killing skeletons was one thing, but I’m not superhuman. No way I can make that jump.”
Not with that attitude, my dear, Gramps’s voice answered.
“Gotta be another way.”
She looked around. Behind her was a dead end. The corridor was narrow enough for her to be able to touch the walls to either side.
She got up, walked over to the left wall, and ran her hands along it. The stone was firm, and jagged enough she could get her hands into the cracks and crevasses.
I’ll have to climb. I’ll have to shimmy over like fucking Batman; except how often does Batman have to do it over a sea of lava? Probably never.
Then, aloud, “This is ‘thrill’. Gotta be. Or it could be ‘will’. Whatever it is, I don’t fucking like it.” She stepped onto the rocky ledge and grabbed ahold of a knob of rock a little to the right of her foot. Already, the pain biting into her palm was sharp.
Three sideways steps later, she was over the orange abyss, the heat reaching up to bake her from below.
This is fucking crazy.
Sweat poured off of her. Each time she shifted her hands, she felt her grip on the rock getting looser and looser.
When she was halfway to the other side, her foot slipped out from beneath her. With a fair amount of pain driving into the flesh of her palm, she screamed.
But she held on.
Then, at three-quarters of the way—so close she could see that the pinprick of light was now bigger on the other side—she slipped and fell.
Screaming the whole way down, she stopped abruptly, the wind knocked out of her, her head rebounding off of something hard. There was no splash, no magma consuming her body; none of that.
She opened her eyes and saw the orange light still dancing on the cave’s ceiling in front of her.
“What the hell?”
She rolled over slowly on her side, and her breath froze in her lungs when she realized that she was hovering above the lava, as if she were lying on a see-through floor.
“This is impossible,” she whispered.
Magic, her grandfather answered in her head.
Even more slowly than she rolled over, she sat up. With her left hand, she knocked on what seemed like thin air. Its hard surface made a clink-clink sound when she did it.
“This is just crazy.”
Now she stood up, her arms out to her sides for balance. But she didn’t need it, which she realized as she took a cautious step forward. The air was not air at all—it was as hard as the rock bridge she had come from; harder, maybe, than the ledge she had fallen from.
As she righted herself, she saw the other side of the bridge. It was slightly above her. Nothing she couldn’t reach by jumping.
The sensation that she was walking on thin air never left her, even after taking eight or so steps.
“Thrill,” she said. “This has gotta be thrill.” Though she felt nothing close to a thrill. Each step was a test in terror, but it was one she was currently acing.
That was, until she got closer to the other side of the bridge and decided to speed up her pace. Suddenly, she heard crackling below her feet, and it caused her to stop. She looked down and saw the very air she was walking on fracture. Spiderweb-cracks branched out from beneath her soles.
“Oh, shit. Not good.”
Then the sound of breaking glass filled her ears. It started behind her and, like a flash fire, began to chase her. She moved with such speed, it was as if she were not putting any weight down at all.
The pieces of whatever she had been walking on fell to the lava below, getting swallowed up by the flames, splitting and cracking as it turned into rising smoke.
Maria realized, almost too late, that she wouldn’t make the jump to the other side of the bridge. She had to think fast, just like Gramps had taught her.
And she did.
She pulled the sword out of its sheath and planted it on a piece of un-cracked air, which looked like nothing at all; using it in much the same way a pole vaulter uses their stick, she planted the point into the surface, feeling it give as she launched herself into the air.
But it was enough.
The shattering of glass below her, the lava swallowing up the pieces—Maria grabbed onto the edge of the other side of the bridge with one arm, her sternum pressed up against the rock, digging into her. She threw the sword up and over with her right hand to free it, then she clawed at the edge, using her nails to get some purchase as she kicked her legs and tried to find a foothold.
The glass floor below her was completely gone. She was suspended over nothing but the lava and her impending doom.
“Not today,” she wheezed, and with one great pull, she scrabbled up to safety. She lay there a moment, catching her breath. Laughter rippled through the warm air, and it was quickly followed by slow clapping.
“Wonderful job, Maria. You have officially gone farther in the Trials than most of those who’ve set foot in my mountain. That is something to be proud of, in and of itself. So remember that when you fail during round three.”
“We’ll see about that,” Maria muttered. No time to rest. Must keep going. Not only for Sherlock, but for the village, and Gramps, and now Frieda. Man, the crew just keeps getti
ng bigger and bigger. More eggs in the basket. It’s a good feeling, living for something other than myself.
Slowly, she got to her feet. This time she wasn’t surprised to see that the rocky bridge in front of her dissolved like the graveyard had done after it served its purpose. Now she stood in the village of Dominion. The King’s castle—my father’s castle—brooded in the background.
This was not the Dominion Maria had seen on the two occasions before. The first time being in Duke, the dead soldier’s, memory, and the other time being when she, Gramps, Tabby, Claire, and Sherlock had traveled to the ruins the first time she remembered setting foot on Oriceran.
Now, the sky was a brilliant blue. No clouds. It was warm, but not so hot that Maria would start sweating. There was a light breeze in the air that brought the sweet, rich smell of fall—leaves, grass, and spices that reminded Maria of pumpkins and pecans and Halloween.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” a voice said from behind Maria.
She spun around, her hand on the hilt of her sheathed sword. Quickly, she realized she wouldn’t need it. The woman standing in front of her was no threat. She didn’t know how she knew, but she did—the woman standing in front of her was Zimmy Ba, Ignatius Mangood’s daughter, the King’s wife.
“Mom?”
“That’s right, Maria.”
Maria couldn’t control herself. She rushed forward, and the two women embraced. She was so warm, so real, so alive.
But how? How can this be?
Maria burst into tears of joy as the women separated.
“Oh, my, you’ve grown into such a beautiful young woman,” Zimmy said. “I’m so proud of you.”
“Mom,” Maria said, “how are you here? How am I here?”
“Maria, that doesn’t matter. What matters is that we are here, the both of us, for the first time in nearly twenty Earth years. Together.”
She was right.
Zimmy swept her hand over the village. “See this, Maria? This wonderful village where we were going to live and grow and love one another?”
Midwest Magic Chronicles Box Set Page 39