Alan tripped over something hidden in the thick layer of dust on the floor, stumbling forward to crash into one of the fallen timbers that dangled from the collapsed roof, the impact loosing a stream of small pebbles and dirt from above. He cursed softly.
He motioned toward the rear wall. A wide passage opened directly ahead. Carol followed close behind her brother as he moved into the next room, the purpose of which had long since been lost. After several paces, the wall angled sharply to the right, to a spot where a doorway opened, revealing a stone stairway.
Alan ducked into this opening with Carol staying close on his heels, their muffled steps and rasping breath the only sounds. Steep and narrow, the gray steps descended in a progression of winding turns. Saying nothing to Alan, Carol starkly remembered the spiraling steps that had led to the primordial in her Ritual of Terrors.
Her brother took no chances, probing ahead with the shaft of the spear he had purloined from a dead warrior in the hall above. The tapping sound reminded Carol of a blind man she had seen as a little girl. She had asked her father why the man was probing the ground in front of him with the long stick.
“He is a warrior, lost in the black,” Rafel said. “The tapping is his guide through a dark and dangerous place, a land where only the bravest among us have the will to survive.”
She followed Alan down the ancient steps. The rusted claws of empty sconces adorned the walls, draped with cobwebs so covered with dust that they had lost all stickiness. With trepidation cloying her soul, Carol tried to see around her brother, wanting to know what lay ahead. Alan’s stocky form allowed little opportunity for such glances. His grip tightened on the haft of his ax until the veins that bulged on the back of his wrist looked like they would split skin.
Footsteps clattered in the distance from behind, the sound of heavy boots and clank of armor echoing along the halls. Alan turned right, then immediately back to the left, picking his route by feel, trying to ensure that those following them did not have a direct line to their targets. Carol put her hand on his arm and pulled him into a side alcove, sending the two lights gliding on down the hall, bouncing slightly as if two people carried torches.
The group of vorgs raced past sister and brother in the alcove, going after the lights. Carol sped the ethereal torches forward at a runner’s pace, allowing them to wink out as they rounded a distant corner. The sounds made by the pursuing vorgs diminished and died away.
“We have to find a secluded place where I can contact Hawthorne,” she whispered.
“Come on,” Alan said.
He grabbed her hand and headed down a side passage. Carol felt her way along the wall until she was sure that no one could see them. Then, once again, she called forth the fairy lights, releasing Alan’s hand as they pushed back the darkness.
Despite a feeling of wrongness, Carol pressed onward, searching for somewhere they could hide for just a few minutes without worry of being discovered.
A room opened up off the hallway to their left, and Carol paused, signaling Alan to do likewise. The two phantom lights darted inside, moving around the walls as she peered around the corner, trying to get a feel for the layout of the room. The space had apparently been some sort of armory, long ago looted of everything of value, lined with racks that had once held weapons and armor, a few damaged sets of the latter still clinging to pegs or having rusted and fallen to the floor.
A lone alcove pocked one of the walls. Carol led the way toward it. Upon reaching the spot and finding nothing more than an empty closet, she moved inside and sat down to prepare for the meditation. She found that, despite its relative simplicity, the torch spell had tired her. She needed more practice.
Carol let her mind drift, searching for that center of meditation where all was calm. After a few minutes, she reached out, sending her consciousness floating out through the castle and into the night. Snow had started to fall heavily outside, and over this landscape she passed as she reactivated her mental link to Hawthorne, using her detailed knowledge of his wards to bypass them.
The camp rushed up to meet her. She saw the light of the fires and the soldiers who formed a defensive ring around the wagons. Apparently, the missing outriders had caused the caravan to take extra precautions.
Carol whisked into Hawthorne’s tent and found him seated upon his patterned rug, lost in meditation. As her thoughts touched his, the wielder straightened in surprise.
“How . . . how have you done this?” Hawthorne’s mental voice stuttered.
“The same way we linked minds in your wagon.”
“But the distance. This should be impossible.”
“Listen, please,” said Carol, her desperation rising. “I need your help.”
After several more seconds of contact, she broke the meditation, confident that Hawthorne would relay what had happened near Far Castle to her father.
“And?” Alan asked when she opened her eyes.
“It’s done.”
A renewed clamor erupted in the hallway from which they had just come.
“The vorgs are back,” Alan said.
He and Carol raced into the passage and began running away from the sound. The vorgs were close. Loud yells echoed through the ruins. Alan rounded a corner to his right and stopped, motioning for her to go on. Instead, she stopped beside him. She refused to abandon her brother to fight these things alone.
As the first vorg rounded the corner, Alan’s ax sent its dying body spinning into the wall. The next two vorgs tried to stop, but their trailing companions pushed them forward. Alan’s whirling blade put them out of their panic.
Carol gestured with her hands, casting a light into a vorg’s face, blinding him and startling the others. Into that confusion, Alan stepped, swinging his ax in a high arc. The vorg’s lighted head tumbled from its body to roll on the floor, a horrible, grinning lantern. Carol shifted her concentration, calling forth a strong breeze that rolled the glowing vorg head toward one vorg after another. In panic, the warriors retreated back the way they had come.
Carol extinguished the light and sagged back against the wall. She had just done something she had not known that she could do, controlling two elementals simultaneously. Hawthorne had not told her that wielders could cast two different spells at once.
Alan lifted Carol in a bear hug that threatened her breathing. “My sister the wielder. You are amazing.”
She felt herself blush at the unexpected compliment, thankful that it was too dark for him to see her cheeks.
Shrieks of terror from the direction the vorgs had disappeared drew their attention. Another sound could be heard as well, a primordial sound, deep and guttural. Carol felt the hair rise along her arms, neck, and scalp. Something was killing the vorgs.
“Come on!” said Alan.
Horrible noises echoing through dark ruins have a unique ability to lend speed to the feet of the weary, and this was no exception. Casting her fairy lights in front of Alan, Carol had no difficulty keeping up with the pace he set. He plunged deeper into the dungeon, away from whatever feasted on the vorgs.
She lost track of the turns as they raced onward. A heavy scraping sound echoed down the halls behind them as Alan plunged into a passage on the right, running down the stairs three at a time. They reached the next level, but Alan continued down, Carol close behind him. The stairs terminated in a room that spread out before the two well beyond the illumination provided by the magical orbs. Carol sent one of the lights scanning out to the left across the damp floor.
She and Alan followed about ten feet behind, past an array of disparate torture devices.
A mixture of scraping and slavering noises issued from the stairway they had just descended, sending them scurrying forward again. Carol raced along behind Alan, searching for an exit along the room’s back wall. Instead, they came face-to-face with a closed iron gate. Alan grabbed a rusty key ring from a peg beside the gate and started fumbling with the lock. The noises across the room grew louder, much louder. Ala
n found the key that fit and turned hard. The rusty key broke off in the lock.
“Damn!” he yelled, giving the gate a savage kick that swung it open with a squeal of rusted metal.
The gate had not been locked.
Alan grabbed Carol’s hand, and the two plunged through. This passage was different. Gone were the worked rock walls and square corners. The tunnel was a natural part of an ancient cave system that the builders had widened. Oddly-shaped cells had been carved into walls, some of their iron doors having rotted off their hinges and fallen to the floor.
The siblings rounded a bend to encounter another set of stairs that spilled them down into a large room. A foul stench drove the air from Carol’s lungs, indicating the nearness of the thing that followed.
Alan slid to a stop at the edge of a deep pit. The floor in front of them abruptly ended. Carol glanced back, the side of the room from which they had just come seeming to move in the darkness.
“Move!” Alan yelled.
Turning left, they ran along the edge of the pit that grew ever wider, forcing them back toward the entrance. Carol sent one of the lights toward the thing chasing them. It was monstrous, with a bulk extending beyond the radius of the dim glow. The shambling pile of flesh had a lumpy appendage that she took to be a head but with no discernible face. Beneath the slimy skin, its features shifted, a large, cabbagelike bulge moving first toward her and then toward Alan.
Then Carol was lifted into the air, grabbed by Alan as he jumped off the ledge. She barely had time to suck in her breath before the plunge came to a sudden stop as he grabbed an outcropping of rock with his free hand. In the gasp that issued from his mouth, Carol could feel the pain that surged through his arm. That pain was overridden by her own as their bodies slammed against the pit’s rock wall. She scrambled to attain her own grip on the stone.
Pulling herself to a secure handhold, she yelled at Alan, “I’ve got it. Go!”
A slurping sound from above was followed by a cloying stench as the thing slipped over the ledge, slithering down.
Carol gagged, a rush of bile filling her mouth before she forced it back down.
Alan started climbing down the rough rock wall. She did likewise. The sounds from above caused her to risk handholds she would never have attempted under normal circumstances. Alan modulated his descent, moving just fast enough to stay even with her. Carol suspected that he knew she was tiring, the exertion of the chase plus the efforts of her spell-casting having worn her down.
She was determined that she would jump into the unknown depths below rather than allow that thing to catch her. Just then, its head burst into her little circle of light. The cabbagelike appendage expanded, stretching the skin beneath and reaching out toward her. As she released her grip on the wall and pushed outward, the strange appendage grabbed her arm, pulling her back toward the fleshy mound.
With a yell, Alan leapt from his perch on the wall, swinging his ax with one hand as the other encircled her waist. Carol felt a gush of putrid liquid drench her clothes as she and her brother fell away. The rough rock of the cavern floor broke their fall almost as soon as it began. Unprepared, Carol felt the sudden stop knock the wind from her body, breaking her concentration. The elemental that she had been controlling swept into her eyes, its light blinding her.
She grabbed Golich again, forcing it outward where Alan could see, but it had obliterated her night vision. Alan grabbed her and carried her along. A loud plop behind them amped up her panic.
“The light is drifting away,” Alan said. “I can’t see a damned thing.”
Still blinded, Carol could not see to direct Golich’s activity, so she concentrated on locking the light to her own right hand. When his pace increased, she concluded that her attempt had worked.
The wind rushed past Carol’s face as he ran, slavering sounds of pursuit licking her ears. She blinked her eyes. Even though her vision was slowly returning, she could not fully make out the details of her surroundings. They seemed to be in a large, natural cavern, through which Alan ducked left and right, dodging obstacles that she assumed to be stalagmites.
He was breathing heavily now, her weight another burden sapping his strength.
“Let me down,” she said. “Just hang on to my hand.”
As Alan complied, she stumbled, righting herself as they raced forward through a room in which she could see neither ceiling nor walls. Her light failed to illuminate the monstrosity shambling along behind them, but from the slightly diminished volume of its sounds, they appeared to have gained ground.
For the next few minutes, the two ran through the maze of stalagmites that grew from the cavern floor. Finally they reached a place where the walls angled to form a narrow passage. As they rounded a bend, Carol felt, more than saw, a cleft in the left wall. Tugging hard on his hand, she pulled Alan inside.
“Quick! Take off your socks!” she whispered.
She already had her boots off and her thick socks in her hand. Alan followed suit. She grabbed the socks from his hand and tossed them, along with hers, into the center of the passage. A breeze whisked the sweat-soaked things across the floor and down the passage, the odor giving ample evidence of their presence. Along with the fast-moving socks, she sent the fairy lights bobbing down the hall.
A nearby scraping sound sent the two crowding back into the crevice, so that the rough stone of the wall left its imprint on Carol’s back. The monster passed directly in front of them. The claustrophobic space and horrible slurping sounds robbed her of breath, a feeling that grew in intensity until Carol felt she would scream. Stench bathed her, the creature so close that she could have reached out and touched it.
Then the monster was gone, continuing along the tunnel in pursuit of those socks.
Carol and Alan slipped on their boots and ducked out of the crevice, back into the main cavern. Creating just enough light for them to see where they were stepping, Carol hoped that the turns they had taken would block the glow from the slime creature’s view. They loped along, heading back the way they came.
Reaching a rough wall, they paused. Was this the wall they had climbed down to enter this cavern? She had no idea. Perhaps she could enter a state of meditation and project her consciousness around the cavern until she found an exit. But that would not work. There was no light, and she could not cast a spell from within a meditative state.
Alan grabbed her arm and led her to the right, scrambling up and over a pile of boulders to a place where an old cave-in had almost blocked the passage out of the main cavern. Carol squeezed through the crack, crawling after him as swiftly as she could manage.
The rocky path added bloody scrapes to Carol’s legs and shredded the knees of her pants. Luckily, the crawlway through the rubble soon gave way to a hall that enabled the siblings to stand side by side. Together, they limped onward, pushing themselves through exhaustion.
One foot in front of the other, she thought. Just one foot in front of the other.
Unable to maintain the effort, Carol let the lights go out. Alan stopped beside her as she sank to the ground.
“Do you feel that?” he asked.
“A breeze!”
With renewed energy, she rose and led Alan down the hall, one hand held out before her as the other traced the wall. As she rounded a bend, the pale light of the full moon framed a door-shaped opening thirty feet in front of them. Heart pounding, Carol moved toward it.
Without warning, the floor collapsed beneath her. She screamed and plunged. But as she fell, Carol caught the lip of the pit with her left hand . . . and then her right. Although her body slapped the wall hard enough to leave her gasping, she held on until Alan reached down to grab her wrist and pull her up.
“It was trapped,” he said. “Probably constructed when this dungeon was built.”
Carol peered over the edge, sending a light down to a bed of sharp spikes.
She patted him on the arm. “Thank you.”
“Of course, sister.”
&n
bsp; Skirting the pit along a foot-wide lip, they continued down the passage at a more deliberate pace on the chance that the ancient trap builders had constructed more than one of their nasty surprises. They soon reached another iron gate, this one blocking the hall and preventing them from reaching the moonlit doorway. And this time, the gate was locked.
Alan fumbled with the key ring he’d found earlier, twisting each key in turn, careful to avoid snapping one off in the lock.
Finally one of the keys worked. The gate squealed loudly on its hinges as Alan opened and then closed it behind them. He took the time to lock the gate. “Just in case our large friend finds our trail,” he explained.
He reached the opening first, coming to an abrupt halt. “Damn it!”
Stepping up beside her brother, Carol’s heart sank. The doorway opened into empty space dozens of feet above the ground, halfway up the sheer rock wall that dropped away from Far Castle.
PART II
Endarians possess the innate ability to channel life energy and even time itself. But the volume that can be exchanged is determined by the wielder’s talent and skill.
—From the Scroll of Landrel
9
Central Borderland Range
YOR 412, Winter’s End
Wind. Arn cursed under his breath. He hated the wind. He did not care much for winter’s end because of the wind that accompanied it. Out here, just below the craggy cliffs lining the top of the hill, above the canyon that dropped away in steep, shale-covered slopes, a weird sea of currents swirled. Streams of cold air sliding down from the snowcapped peaks far above wrestled with puffs of warm air rising from the low plains to the east. The chill bumps along Arn’s neck left little doubt as to the outcome of that tussle. Spring would be a long while yet in making its way into the high country.
That small but insistent voice inside his head was bothering him again. Something was not as it should be. Dense woods of juniper and scrub covered the south side of the canyon. Across the ravine, he could see the almost treeless, rocky expanse of the northern slope. Nothing moved except the trees and brush rustling in the wind. Even the normally abundant wildlife refused to graze in this biting breeze. A decaying hut nestled in the trees at the bottom of the slope was the only indication that anyone had ever been here.
Mark of Fire (The Endarian Prophecy Book 1) Page 6