The Hero's Peril (The Sorcerer's Saga Book 5)

by Rain Oxford

  “Who would have a magic broom?” I asked Yuri. “I mean, who would look at a broom and say, ‘that looks comfortable to ride,’ and then enchant it?”

  “I know. That’s so weird.”

  Movement behind us caught my attention and I turned to see the shop door close and the top sign flip over slowly.

  Go away,

  We’re Closed

  “Boys, I don’t suppose you have some answers for me?” the sheriff said, approaching us leisurely. He even walked like a sorcerer; he was confident and expected people to respect him without question. He was a middle-aged man, average in size and build with dark brown hair and narrowed gray eyes.

  “Why would you suppose that? Everyone has an answer to something. They may not be the answers to your questions, or what you want to hear, but I have lots of answers.”

  One of the other men laughed and Taylor looked slightly less suspicious. That was good. Slightly.

  “What can you tell me about our friend?”

  “Your friend? I’m sorry, I’m new here, I don’t know about any missing people.”

  Yuri punched me in the arm, not hard enough to hurt. It was actually a lot like what Thaddeus had started doing. “He means Zuras.”

  “But he said it was his friend.”

  “He wasn’t being serious.”

  “Oh.” I turned back to the men. “His name is Zuras. He’s evil and he stole something and we need to get it back.”

  His eyes narrowed again. “You boys… have parents, right?”

  “Is there a shortage of parents on this world?” I whispered to Yuri. He shrugged. “I thought everyone had parents,” I answered.

  “I mean, do I need to be speaking to your parents? Are you of legal age to be questioned?”

  “Is it illegal to talk here?”

  Now two of the men behind Taylor started laughing. The sheriff was not amused. “This is serious. It’s not illegal to question minors without their parent’s permission unless I’m arresting you, but I’m not going to question you if you’re runaways. Do your parents know where you are?”

  “No, I doubt they do, but we didn’t run away.”

  “How old are you?”

  Yuri shrugged as I answered, “Older than I look and younger than you’d think.”

  “What?” Yuri asked me. “That makes no sense.” Then he addressed the man. “I’m five months older than I was a month ago, so I’m not sure how old I am anymore.”

  The man rubbed his forehead the same way Merlin did when I was giving him a migraine.

  “I am getting too old for this. Please tell me there is someone else with you who I can talk to.” He said it slowly, as if I couldn’t understand what he was saying.

  “Sure. You can talk to Merlin,” I said, pointing to Merlin, who was peering into the windows of the store.

  “Thank goodness. Merlin, are these two old enough to be questioned?”

  Without looking, Merlin answered, “Old enough, yes. Mature enough, I highly doubt it.”

  The man looked relieved to have an answer rather than shocked that a wolf spoke. He pulled out a small book and started writing on it with a strange pen.

  “Do you have a lot of talking wolves here?” I asked.

  He laughed. “In their wolf form? No. I’ve never met a shifter who could speak in his animal form.”

  “Shifter? You have shapeshifters here?”

  He stopped writing and stared at me. “Yes. Like your friend here.”

  “No, Merlin’s not a shapeshifter, he’s a… well… I can’t say.”

  “I am a wizard,” Merlin said instead.

  The man nodded and started writing again. “I see. And what’s your name?”

  “Merlin.”

  He stopped writing and looked at him. “Funny. I’m serious.”

  “As am I.”

  “Named after the Merlin, I presume.”

  “I am the only Merlin I know.”

  That seemed to shake the man up a little, but he continued writing. “And your names? If you say what I think you’re going to say, I will flip out.”

  “Flip out of what?” I asked.

  “I’m Yuri Romanus, he’s Ayden Rynorm. Can we go now? We’re running out of time.”

  “Time to do what?” he asked. Yuri didn’t answer. “You’re after the dragon egg, right?”

  I gaped at him. “How did you know about that?”

  He sighed. “You really don’t know where you are, do you?”

  “We’re in White Hills. People keep welcoming us. It’s creepy.”

  “Magic, shifters, vampires, and everything else supernatural is kept a secret on our world. White Hills has become a sort of sanctuary, where we can be ourselves without being hunted down with pitch forks.”

  “You have magic?”

  “Not much. I’m more similar to a shifter. I take it you’re a wizard?” he asked. I nodded hesitantly. “People wander into our town occasionally, so you need to be discreet with magic, but no one here is going to discriminate against you for it.”

  “Are you saying that we happened upon the one town on an entire planet that accepts magic?” Merlin asked.

  “We were following Zuras. He must have come here on purpose.”

  “To steal something from this shop,” Merlin said in my mind.

  “Now that you know you can speak freely,” the man continued, “I have to ask you some questions. The easier you answer them, the faster you three can get on your way. What does Zuras intend to do with the dragon egg?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why is he here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where can we find him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re not being very helpful!”

  “Neither are you! I don’t know! We got here a little while ago and came straight to this shop from the mall. We’re trying to save the egg. That’s all I know about the matter.”

  He closed his book and put it away. “We’ll find him. Stick around until we can put him behind bars.”

  “And you’ll give me back the egg?” Yuri asked.

  “Not a chance. The egg will stay with us, where it’s safe.”

  “It’s safe with me!” The prince was angry, and I wondered who he was channeling, because the man in front of us didn’t look angry. Because of that, I wasn’t expecting Yuri to try to grab my staff.

  “Whoa, slow down. Wait.” I pushed him away from my staff. “We’ll get it back before they do.”

  “You can take it from Zuras and we’ll just confiscate it from you. It doesn’t matter to us how we get it.” Yuri tried to respond, but I shook my head. He fell silent. The men got in their trucks and drove away. “They don’t realize we can go back to our world as soon as we have the egg. Let them think we’re on their side until one of us gets our hands on the egg. Right now, Zuras is our enemy, not them.”

  “You really are a sorcerer.”

  “When I want to be. What is it you took from Zuras? I never got the chance to ask.”

  He pulled the sack off his belt. “I forgot to check.” He took the object out. Our eyes met, both of us confused. “Was it a trick?”

  “It had to be. Who would go through all that trouble for a bottle of ink?”

  * * *

  We went inside the shop. There were five bookcases, piled high with everything I would expect to see in a magic room. There wasn’t any strange technology, only bottles of potions, potion ingredients, books, crystals, precious stones, and small boxes.

  The shop was so small and cramped that I could barely squeeze between the bookcases, which were sticking out from the left wall. Along the right wall was a glass cabinet, full of rings, coins, and wooden plaques with sigils etched into or painted on them. There was only a small isle between the bookcases and the counter. Against the far wall was an old reading chair. Next to the chair was a small table with a lit candle upon it.

  The reading chair was occupied by a middle-a
ged, slender man with shaggy brown hair and silver eyes. He paid us no attention until Merlin approached him and sat. After a moment, the man lowered his book and smiled brightly. “It’s good to see you again, Merlin. You were a little taller the last time.”

  “And you were older,” Merlin said aloud.

  The man shrugged. “It happens. Time, age, sanity… it’s all so fickle.”

  “I see that you left magic behind, like you said you would,” Merlin said sarcastically.

  “I did get out. I clawed my way out three times. But every time I thought I was free, someone from my past would latch onto my ankle with his cold, wet hands and pull me right back in.”

  “Power is addictive,” Merlin said.

  “It was never about power.”

  “It was about knowledge, and knowledge is power. You have not changed, Ascelin.”

  “What are you here for?”

  “We’re following a dark wizard named Zuras who stole a dragon egg. He stole things on other worlds and then he came here. Upon detecting your magic, I assumed he was after something of yours. Do you know what that might be?”

  “I might have a few ideas. Who are your friends?”

  “Ayden, my apprentice, and Yuri. This is Ascelin Ares, an extremely powerful and dubious acquaintance I have had the great displeasure of being friends with.”

  “You flatter me, Merlin.” Ascelin smiled at me and explained. “When you go back and forth in time, it can be difficult to keep track of what people know and don’t know. I have made the mistake of saving Merlin before he needed saving and then missing the actual opportunity to help him.”

  “Yet he insists on being friendly when we do meet and that makes it very difficult to break his nose.”

  “You’d be surprised how well that defense works.”

  “Now is not the time.” In my mind, Merlin said, “Do not give Ascelin any information about yourself, not even your last name or the world you come from.”

  “I recognize that name,” Yuri said. We all looked at him.

  Ascelin smiled. “Oh, did we meet before?”

  “No, I just heard someone say your name.” His eyes conveyed the strain it took for him to remember. “It was one of the voices. One of them said the name, but I didn’t think anything of it.”

  “Have the voices said anything else that you can understand?”

  “No, not really.”

  “What do you mean, ‘not really’?”

  He shrugged. “I’ve heard other words I thought were nothing. One in particular was said a few times, but it didn’t make any sense. It hadn’t really occurred to me that it could be a name until I heard Ascelin’s.”

  “What was the word,” I asked.

  “Rheim.” He shrugged. “It’s probably nothing, though.”

  From Merlin’s mind, I could feel that it was very important. Because we spent many months were I was the only one he could talk to and we were often speaking to each other privately, we also sensed what each other was thinking and feeling. Aside from complete shock and confusion, Merlin was hopeful.

  “Is he another person you know?” I asked. “Can he help us?”

  “Oh yes, I know him.”

  “Why do we keep running into people you know?”

  “It is intentional, and now I know why. I know why I recognize Zuras, and why we keep encountering people from my past. It is for revenge.”

  “Revenge? Who’s trying to get revenge?”

  “Rheim was my apprentice around fifty years ago. He was left on my doorstep when he was six with nothing more than a letter from his mother and the clothes on his back. He had been the sole survivor of a plague. I thought he was mute, because he didn’t speak for a year. His mother was a student of mine and begged me to teach him. I did.”

  “What went wrong?”

  “Before he started talking, I taught him to read. He loved books. I would tell him about other worlds and that was when he spoke. He couldn’t get enough stories. He was a good child, always willing to do more than his fair share of work, but when he was sixteen, he fell in love with a girl who was friends with the wrong crowd. He was always the first person to take a risk or jump off a cliff, so to speak, to impress her. She reveled in his affection and that of every other boy in the village. She never cared about any of them, though, and when he was the first to admit his love to her, she laughed in his face and said that he was too poor for her.”

  “Ouch.”

  “So he burned down her house.”

  “Oh.”

  “I tried to be reasonable. I tried to see things his way. We moved and I was willing to forgive his actions, but he was never the same after that. He refused to see the good in anyone, thought they were all laughing at him. I was not his father and had no way of helping him to understand that he had to be better than the girl who had broken his heart.”

  “Did he hurt others?”

  “Not that I could prove. He no longer took pride in his work. Over the years, he distanced himself from me emotionally. He believed he could not trust anyone, not even me. He wanted to learn more, faster, and what he wanted to do became darker and darker. He stopped caring if he hurt anyone and became arrogant and impatient. When he was twenty, two girls went missing in our village. I asked him if he knew them and he lied to me, so I told him he needed to make his own way in life. He wanted to stay and continue training. He promised that he would do his work and never lie to me. I wanted to believe him, but it was too late.”

  “That was tough for both of you, but you did what you thought was right. How could he seek revenge on you?”

  “It is impossible for someone to see reason while holding a grudge. Holding a grudge against someone is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die. I believe he never forgave the girl who broke his heart and since I was the one who abandoned him, he turned that hatred on me.”

  “So he sent Zuras to get a dragon egg on Caldaca? How could he have known you would be there or that we would come looking for the egg?”

  “To answer your second question first, that is the part I have not figured out. The first part is easy; no, Rheim did not send Zuras after us. Rheim is Zuras.”

  Chapter 13

  “What could Zuras be after?” I asked.

  Ascelin shrugged. I sell everything magical except one-of-a-kind artifacts. Anything I don’t have, I can tell you where to get it.”

  “Your selection does not look all that impressive,” Merlin said.

  Ascelin laughed. “I wouldn’t keep the good stuff on display. I display the standard craft, ritual, and new age supplies, some good starter grimoires, and a few classics. It would be irresponsible to put out the dangerous stuff.”

  “It is irresponsible to sell it at all.”

  “So I’ve been told. You could spend a month looking for what he wants or you can ask Zuras yourself.”

  “That’s hard to do when he’s trying to kill us,” I argued.

  “That may not be a problem now that we know who he is,” Merlin said. “There have not been many apprentices of mine who I distrusted, but I was cautious. If I felt like one of my apprentices were a danger to me or others, I embedded a sort of failsafe in them. Rheim was one such apprentice. We simply have to draw him somewhere and trap him there.”

  “This place will work,” I said.

  “I don’t remember agreeing to that,” Ascelin argued.

  “Well, thank you for letting us do it anyway. What do we need?”

  * * *

  Merlin showed me how to create the trap while Yuri gathered the ingredients. Ascelin said he had things to do and disappeared into the tiny room behind the bar. From the glimpse I got of it when he opened the door, I saw that there wasn’t even enough room for him to sit.

  We didn’t have the necessary floor space to make the trap inside the shop, so we made the entire shop the trap. Of course, he would be in a room full of magical supplies, but I trusted Merlin to know what he was doing.

&
nbsp; As I was painting sigils on the window, a man approached us. “Hey, a weird guy came up to me on the street and asked me to tell you to find him.”

  “Find him where?”

  “I don’t know, man, he just said to find him. I wouldn’t do it if I were you; the guy was creepy.” He left.

  “It’s a trick,” I said.

  “Of course it is. He wants us away from the shop so that he can get whatever it is he came for,” Merlin said.

  “What do we do?”

  “Look for him.”

  “Why are we going to do that?”

  “Because he is not actually going to expect us to.”

  “I’m confused.”

  “You usually are. Zuras is not an idiot. He will expect us to stay here, but by saying that he is waiting for us, we are supposed to expect him to stay away. Knowing him, he will leave the egg with some minor trap so that Yuri will not detect his approach. Thus, if we leave, we will be able to get the egg.”

  “While he gets whatever it is he came for.”

  “Yes, he will get it, but if the trap is set, he will be unable to escape with it.”

  “What bugs me is that you said you haven’t seen him in fifty years, and he clearly isn’t fifty years old. Are you sure he’s not the son of your apprentice?”

  “There is a very high chance of that. But no, he is not. He is definitely Rheim.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Get back to work.”

  * * *

  After finishing the trap and explaining the new plan, Yuri led us across town without any hesitation. That freed me up to be distracted by every amazing thing we passed, from the displays in the shop windows to the odd behavior of the people around us. A lot of people were out walking wolves of all different shapes, colors, and sizes. When I asked why the wolves were on leashes, he explained that they were not actually wolves but domesticated descendants of wolves, called dogs. They were bred by people for work, hunting, competition, or simply to be companions. He said that wolves preferred the company of other wolves, whereas dogs preferred to be with people than their own kind.