Renegades Of Wolfenvald, Book Two of The Adventures of Sarah Coppernick

by SJB Gilmour

  Contents

  Copyright

  Title

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Extras

  About The Author

  Renegades Of Wolfenvald ©

  Book Two of The Adventures of Sarah Coppernick ©

  By S J B Gilmour.

  Copyright © 2012 by S J B Gilmour

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a data retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher and copyright holders.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Cover art by Tom Hermann: http://tommiart.blogspot.com

  General digital release ISBN: 978-0-9871084-6-3

  Any and all correspondence regarding this publication to:

  S J B Gilmour.

  1187 Glen Huntly Road, Glen Huntly, 3163, Victoria, Australia.

  First published in 2012 by S J B Gilmour.

  Renegades of Wolfenvald

  For Sarah Monika Louise

  As if things weren’t bad enough. Golden Mane werewolf Sarah Coppernick has found one half of the mystical Star of Planes. Now she has to find the next piece so she can use it to defeat the evil Mautallius and the entire Sorcerers’ Guild, and destroy Conundrum Gate. But how is a young girl to do that with only a tiny rag-tag bunch of renegade sorcerers and werewolves for allies…?

  Chapter One

  Most trolls simply catch fire. Some melt and others turn to stone. Some explode. This one blew up in a great spray of greenish, smelly goo. Naturally, the awful muck went all over the two girls responsible for its sudden demise.

  ‘Ugh,’ Sarah muttered. ‘I hate it when those things do that.’ She looked down at her clothes. Her cargo pants and t-shirt were covered in troll gore. Horrid bits of steaming troll entrails clung to her shirt for a few moments and then fell to the ground with awful squelching noises. The smell was really quite disgusting.

  Even in her human form, Sarah had the keen sense of smell and an even keener sense of personal hygiene typical of werewolves. Nobody in their right mind likes being covered in exploded troll, and wolves like it even less than most.

  ‘Stuff that,’ Mel replied. Her black clothing was now just as filthy, only she was less concerned about the smell than Sarah. She peered at the steamy remains of the troll. Two stumps that were its feet and ankles stood there, twitching.

  ‘What the hell was that thing doing here?’ Mel poked at one troll foot with her boot.

  “Here” was several hundred metres below ground in the old Wieliczka salt mine, not far from Krakow in Poland. The two girls had finished the school term and immediately decided that they wanted to go and see some of their home countries. This term break, they went to Sarah’s homeland. The next break, they planned to go to Greece and Turkey to see Mel’s. Unfortunately, as is so often the case with Sarah Coppernick and Melanie Hazelwood, things don’t always go exactly as planned.

  The salt mine had been used for hundreds of years, and not just by humans. Dwarves and gnomes had both used various caverns and tunnels, as had many other enchanted creatures. Many werewolves had taken shelter there whenever local humans in Europe decided to go on another witch-hunt. Sarah’s great (and a great many “greats” after that) grandfather Nicolas Copernicus, hadn’t been so lucky.

  Unable to escape the angry mob without revealing his true nature and thus endangering many more werewolves, he was captured and burned at the stake in Fifteen Forty-three. Those werewolves who had escaped thanks to Nicolas’ ultimate sacrifice had fled into the salt mine. There they had erected a statue of the great man out of the very salt being mined. It was that statue that Sarah and Melanie had strayed from the guided tour of the mine to come and see.

  Instead of finding just a statue, they found something else as well. Lurking in the shadows of the mine was a troll. Sarah had recognised the smell of the awful creature as soon as she got close to the statue. The smell of rotten old gym socks was thick in the air in that confined space.

  ‘We could ask it, if it wasn’t blown to bits,’ Sarah told her friend pointedly.

  ‘It was only a small blast! The last one I shot just fell over with a hole in its chest. Maybe if you hadn’t stuck it to the floor with that footstick spell, it’d still be in one piece!’

  ‘Oh, go paint your face,’ Sarah retorted. Of all the races of intelligent (well, mostly intelligent) life in the universe, only mortal humans willingly apply make-up to their faces. This practice is viewed by the enchanted community as both peculiar and pitiful. For one sorcerer to call another a face-painter is to imply the person is somehow defective.

  ‘Now we’ll have to wait until it regenerates before we find out what it was doing.’ Sarah looked around. ‘Where’s its head? If its brain is still intact, I might be able to read its mind.’

  Melanie looked around the dark cave. ‘Good luck. I think it’s jam. Are there any more of them?’ Then she lamented to herself, ‘Jimbo would’ve loved it down here.’ Sarah’s best friend still missed the baby dragon she had recently entrusted the care of to the mighty diamondback dragon Siouxanne.

  Sarah changed form into her Golden Mane werewolf shape and sniffed the air several times.

  ‘I can’t tell,’ she whined. The smell of troll was everywhere now. She padded several metres away to where the ground was clear of the spray from the explosion of troll. She sniffed again. Only one scent was present. She wagged her tail. ‘There was just the one, but there could be more in other parts of these caves.’

  ‘That’s why we’re going to leave,’ a new voice said sternly. Sarah gave a startled yelp and spun around to see Miss Angela Harding. Angela, the girls’ teacher in the enchanted world of sorcery, was frowning at the scattered pieces of gore and gooey smears that had once been a troll. She looked at her niece Melanie and crossed her arms in front of her chest with one eyebrow raised.

  Sarah was particularly embarrassed. Her teacher had been able to come up behind her without her smelling or even hearing a thing. One thing wolves like less than being dirty, is being taken by surprise. Sarah took quite a bit of pride in the fact that almost no-one, not even another werewolf, was ever able to sneak up on her.

  It had been Sarah who had first detected the troll long before the girls had actually seen it. She had not expected Mel to act at the same time as she had however, and so was already feeling a bit silly. Now she was positively ashamed that her keen werewolf senses had yet again failed to warn her of her approaching teacher.

  ‘How do you keep doing that?’ Sarah asked her teacher.

  ‘Amazon training,’ Angela replied with a smile. ‘Once I’ve got you doing more than push-ups and kung-fu, I’ll teach you too.’

  This was something Sarah was looking forward to. As a wolf, she could move very quietly if she needed to. She could even pad along on hard floors without making her nails click. As a human, she wasn’t so graceful. She felt clumsy and awkward and w
as at times quite jealous of Mel, who seemed to have all the attributes of a natural-born gymnast.

  ‘You were going to clean up this mess before it regenerates, weren’t you?’ Angela nodded at the remains of the troll. ‘Or would you rather some poor family of mortal tourists chance upon a bunch of freshly re-grown trolls? You know how hungry they are when they’re fresh. They’ll eat anything.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ Sarah muttered. She glanced down at the entrails and muck on the ground. The semi-digested contents of its last meal lay in the muck — some chewed-up plastic, what looked like the remains of a rodent and a soft drink can.

  Mel flared. ‘But that thing—’

  ‘Was probably hiding here, safe and secure, and unlikely to be bothering anyone. Look at its stomach contents. No human remains at all. I doubt it had any idea two young witches were going to come along and blast it to smithereens.’ Angela waved at the surrounding cave walls. ‘This place is the ideal hideout for a troll. Nice and dry, plenty of dark spots to hide… When they show up in wet-weather suburbs like Melbourne, we need to worry. I doubt it was looking for you, young lady.’

  By now the entire enchanted community had heard all about the incident at Troll Mountain. The trolls in particular, well those who had survived the battle that is, were very wary of Sarah Coppernick and Melanie Hazelwood.

  Six months ago, Sarah and her friends had gone on an amazing adventure. They had gone to Gnumphlatia and Neroland. Then they had returned to Earth to hunt trolls in the wilds of the Eastern Russia. Then they had travelled to Columbia and then to the Afar Depression in Ethiopia where they had battled not only an army of trolls, but the evil sorcerer Mautallius.

  After the battle, the group had returned to northern Britain to the mystical stone circle of Castlerigg where the spirits of the stone circle had surrendered one half of The Star of Planes. The only member of the group able to touch it had been Melanie, and then she had only held it in her left hand for a few moments before it sank itself into her palm. Then the goddess Demeter had arrived, retrieved the amulet from Mel’s hand, and instructed Sarah to wear it about her neck.

  Sarah produced two buckets of water out of thin air. She handed one to Mel.

  ‘C’mon. The sooner we get this cleaned up, the sooner we can go home and clean up ourselves.’

  Sarah and her best friend then spent several more very mucky minutes gathering up all the pieces of troll they could find – or those pieces big enough to regenerate at any rate – and dissolving them in the buckets of water. While they cleaned up their mess, Angela watched them silently.

  ‘Purgarito!’ Angela waved her hand at the remaining splatter. The Magaeic command for ‘clean this mess up!’ did its job and all the blood and muck disappeared. Unfortunately, that did not apply to Sarah and Melanie who were both still quite filthy.

  Angela smiled at them. ‘Now ladies,’ she told them brightly, ‘it’s time to go back to Gembrook before you bring the whole place down around our ears. What possessed you to blow something up inside a cave?’

  Ignoring the girls’ protests, Angela drew a quick nonagram on the ground and then handed them each a portal stone. Sarah put the foul-tasting stone in her mouth and joined hands with Mel and Angela. The three then stepped through a shimmering portal.

  They arrived on the other side, just in time to see a demon disappear in a burst of green fire. The demon was vaguely human-shaped, only its head resembled an octopus, it had large, bat-like wings and it was covered in dark brown slime.

  ‘Down!’ Angela yelled as the fire exploded out towards them.

  Sarah changed form and leaped away from the portal then crouched and covered her nose with her tail. Mel and Angela both hit the floor, covering their heads with their hands. A burst of greenish flame exploded out over them, filling the hall. It only lasted a few seconds, but it was enough to singe Angela’s hair and char much of the troll goop covering Melanie.

  Sarah may have been immune to demon fire, but she still didn’t like it. When the flames dissipated, she leapt to her feet and bounded to where the demon had disappeared.

  The three had arrived on the other side of the world in the bush suburb of Gembrook in Victoria, Australia where Sarah’s uncle Benjamin had his manor house. The main hall of the house, which always reminded Sarah of a king’s court, was one massive rectangular room that was almost completely bare except for a very long table at one end, and the fireplace. The room could have been used as a great dining hall, or for ceremonies or parties, but since Benjamin McConnell was a spellweaver and until very recently had lived almost all alone, he’d always used it as a testing area for new spells. It was into this great room that the three emerged. In the centre of the stone floor was inlaid a gold nonagram. Standing off to one side, stark naked, was Melanie’s mother and Angela’s sister, Susan.

  ‘A demon?’ growled Sarah. ‘You summoned a demon here?’

  Angela and Mel expressed similar (though slightly more profane) concerns.

  ‘Don’t get mad at her,’ James Isaacs told her. ‘My idea.’ The eccentric Master of enchanted flora was lounging at the table, along with Ronny the gnome and Melanie’s father, David Hazelwood. Like Susan, they were also nude.

  For Sarah in her Golden Mane werewolf form, the sight of naked people, whether they were human or gnome, meant very little. Angela wasn’t fussed by her sister’s or the others’ lack of clothes either, since she herself was a necromancer and quite used to disrobing when conducting necromantic rites.

  Mel wasn’t so worldly. ‘Ugh!’ She covered her eyes with the back of her hand. ‘Put some clothes on! Or at least take your feet off the table!’

  Angela looked around critically while the group at the table dressed themselves.

  ‘First these two blow up a troll inside a cave and now you lot summon a demon?’ She clicked her tongue and shook her head with disapproval. ‘Did you at least have the sense to post Benjamin, Robert and Roberta as security?’

  Susan nodded, also putting her clothes back on.

  ‘They’re patrolling outside.’ She shrugged. ‘Well, they were.’

  Two Brown Coat werewolves — Sarah’s Aunt Roberta and Uncle Robert — loped into the room, grinning broadly. They scampered about, sniffing Sarah, Mel and Angela. Moments later, they were joined by the enormous silver and black werewolf Benjamin.

  James waved at the nonagram on the floor where a fetid green mist still lingered.

  ‘I just wanted to see if any planes other than ours had prophecies about your Star of Planes.’

  Sarah changed back to human form and pulled the amulet out from under her shirt. Being very careful to hold it only by the chain, she looked at it with her head tilted sideways.

  ‘Well?’ Angela demanded. ‘Miskatopian demons are notorious gasbags. What did it know?’

  James made a face. ‘Not much. All she could tell me was that the demons your friend Mautallius was mixed up with, Hnug and Hnag, are servants of someone or something big and nasty that wants to take over our world.’

  ‘Did she tell you who? I sent Miranda back to Hnag’s hell but I couldn’t see any sign of who or what was in charge.’

  Before Angela could continue, there was a hissing sound from the nonagram on the floor and it began to glow with a pale yellow light.

  ‘Uh oh,’ James murmured, backing away from the nine-pointed diagram.

  Angela swore. ‘See?’ She clicked her fingers and was immediately naked. She stepped back to face the nonagram, already drawing in her power to face whatever might be coming through. ‘Suz, you’re a great seer, but you really should leave the necromancy to me.’

  ‘I closed the portal!’ Susan argued with the indignation only a rival sibling could feel.

  There was a burst of light from the centre of the nonagram and all further arguments stopped as a small nymph fluttered out into the room. The nymph, a very young-looking female with sheer iridescent wings and wide innocent eyes, looked about until she saw Sarah.

&n
bsp; ‘Hello, Golden Mane,’ she piped in a voice that was both whispers and tinkling bells. ‘I’ve been sent to deliver a message to you!’

  Angela relaxed visibly and re-dressed herself.

  Sarah tucked the amulet back under her shirt. ‘Okay, what message?’

  ‘The holy spirits of Castlerigg wish to talk to you,’ she squeaked. ‘They sent me to ask you to come and to bring with you the Mother of The Last.’

  ‘Who?’ Sarah demanded. What was this nymph talking about?

  James snorted something obscene. ‘You sound like seer,’ he scoffed. ‘Don’t just flutter in here talking in riddles, girlie. Who are you talking about?’

  Ignoring the nymph for a moment, Susan raised one eyebrow at James in exactly the same manner her twin Angela did when he did something she disapproved of, which was usually quite often.

  ‘Not all seers carry on with that kind of behaviour, you know.’

  ‘Okay… She sounds like a drama queen same as Cassandra. Will that do you?’

  Susan sighed, defeated.

  ‘If I may,’ the nymph ventured. ‘I heard the spirits of Castlerigg talk of the name Troy.’

  Now Mel made a face. ‘Didn’t Demeter call me the Last Daughter of Troy?’

  Susan looked at Mel and then at the nymph. ‘You mean me? Am I who they’re talking about? I’m the Mother of The Last?’

  The nymph shrugged. ‘I don’t know, madame. The spirits didn’t choose to tell me any more.’ She looked around. ‘Now, I’ve delivered my message. Would you like me to carry back a reply?’

  Sarah looked at Angela and then to Uncle Benjamin. They nodded.

  ‘Okay,’ she replied to the nymph. ‘We’ll be there soon.’ She turned to the others. ‘Well, c’mon. Let’s go!’

  ‘Not until you get cleaned up, young lady,’ Aunt Roberta told her firmly. Her aunt changed form into her human self and pointed at Sarah’s filthy clothes. Then she nodded at the waiting nymph. ‘Go on, little messenger. We’ll be there soon enough. Thank you.’ There was no mistaking her tone meant to dismiss the little creature.