“In the highest room, in the tallest tower,” muttered Raze.
“What’s that from, Rapunzel or something?” asked Ben.
Raze flashed him a grin. “Shrek.” She took off her shoes and socks, stuffed them into her backpack, and removed the spare rope ladder, since they’d had to leave the other one behind while stealing the stone. She repeated what she’d done at the apothecary, tying the end of her climbing rope to her waist. She gave the coil of rope and her backpack to Ben. “You know the drill,” she told him. Then she turned to Lix. “Can I take the stone?” The witch hesitated a moment, and then passed her the chain with the stone dangling from it. Raze put it on and walked over to the tower. She ran a hand over the stonework. It wasn’t smooth; the stones were roughhewn, with bits sticking out everywhere to give the tower texture and an old-fashioned beauty. She could do this easily. She patted the tower once, and began to climb.
She felt her way up, trusting her hands and feet more than her eyes. Every now and then, when she found a good resting place, she’d peer through the alexandrite to see how far up she’d come. The walkway grew steadily nearer, and finally she was rolling over the side to stand upon uneven floorboards. She took a moment to rub life back into her cold fingers and toes, and then hauled up the ladder and attached it to the railing that circled the walkway. Before long, the whole team was assembled at the top of the tower. Raze put her shoes back on, and then she pulled up the rope ladder, leaving it folded and ready for their descent.
Lix examined the door. “May, get us in,” she said. “I don’t expect a lot of trouble. The key defenses will be inside. Raze, some extra senses would be good.”
Raze immediately shifted. To her wolf self, the narrow space they stood on stank of magic. There was a sharp and citrusy scent that wafted off May as she worked, and the now-familiar smell of sawdust and leather from the offensive spell that Ben held ready. But under all that was something else, something subtle that smelled of home and hearth and food. Of belonging. Raze found herself drawn forward until she was nearly pressing against the door May was working on.
Lix placed a warning hand on her head and she snapped out of it, springing back. She turned her wolf’s eyes to Lix, questioning.
“It’s a honey trap,” Lix said. “It’s designed to draw you in so you touch the door and set off the wards. We’re all pretty immune to that sort of thing by now, but you’d be more susceptible, with your heightened senses.”
Raze sat on her haunches, careful to stay back. That had been close. Now she knew what she was looking for, she could detect other scents beneath the mouth-watering smell of belonging: something damp and rotten, the true form of the spell. It was like seeing the most beautiful thing in the world, only to have it distort and prove to be nothing more than smoke and mirrors, and decay under all of that.
The sweet scent soon dissipated completely, leaving behind only the smell of rot. “Honey trap’s down,” said May. “And you were right, Lix. The warding is pretty basic. Hang on, I think… yes. Got it.” May stretched, looking satisfied. “We’re good to go. I thought you said this job would be a challenge?”
“Trust me,” said Lix grimly, “we’re nowhere near getting our hands on the sword.” She moved forward and set her hand on the doorknob. The door opened with a click and, as easily as that, they were staring into a small, circular room. The door was the only way in, although narrow windows lined the top of the walls along the ceiling like a circlet of glass. Raze huffed, hot wolf’s breath fogging in the cold air, and shifted back.
“So where’s the vault?” Raze asked.
Lix waved her hand, switching on her flashlight and sweeping it around. “This is it. The room is the vault.”
The cramped space was sparsely furnished, containing nothing but tan carpeting and a couple of cabinets jammed full of objects. In between the cabinets, a display bracket on the wall held a sword.
“The Night Blade,” Ben whispered reverently. “So, do we just grab it and go?”
“It’ll be trickier than that,” said Lix. “And we can’t get separated. So on three we go in together.”
They all clung to each other as Lix counted. When she reached three, they stepped forward like some weird eight-legged creature. Immediately Raze felt everything spinning and twisting around her. The small room stretched impossibly, the few square feet of carpeting becoming an endless plain of beige. The display cabinets and the sword disappeared from sight in the horizon, and Raze couldn’t see the walls around them. The room was no longer dark; instead, it was lit by a uniform white-gray glow, like the sky on a cloudy day.
“Space warp,” Ben said softly. “Wow. I’ve never seen one before.” He made to take a step forward.
“Don’t move,” Lix snapped. “Not until we get our bearings. Or we could wander in here forever and not find the sword.” She held out her hand for the alexandrite. As Raze handed it over, she saw that all the magic in the air was affecting the multi-hued gem, and it pulsed faintly, colors changing and fading, and changing again.
Lix held it up and looked through it, giving a relieved sigh. “It works. I wasn’t entirely sure that space and time warps would count as illusion spells. Here, try it out.” She passed it around. When her turn came, Raze held it to her eyes. Through the gem, the room shrank to normal proportions and the sword was visible once again, within reach. Raze dropped her hand and the room stretched back out, with no visible horizon, like staring out at the ocean. Just an unnerving expanse of forever.
“We’re still stuck in the warps,” Lix said. “But when we look through the stone, we can see true time and space. It’ll help us keep our bearings. Look.” She held out her hand, pointing at her watch. “By my watch, we’ve only been in here a minute or so, right? Wrong. Look through the gem.”
They all looked. Ben drew back, eyes wide. “We’ve been in here thirty minutes already?”
“That’s the time warp at work,” answered Lix. “If we don’t look sharp, we’ll still be in here on Sunday when the vampires wake up and the Moot ends. Come on, let’s move.”
They set off to hike the infinite carpet. Lix hung the alexandrite around her neck, and every now and then she would consult it and adjust their direction a little. But other than that, it was just a never-ending trudge across the floor, one step after another, with nothing to break the monotonous beige.
At last, something changed in the scenery. Ahead of them, the carpet bubbled and dipped, trailing downwards into a large canyon that went on for miles in each direction.
“Carpet canyon,” said May as they reached the edge. “That’s new. And a pain in the ass. Do we have to climb down? Can’t we get around or across or something?”
The far side of the canyon was dauntingly distant. “Not unless you can fly,” answered Lix. “And it looks closer across than to the sides. I can’t even see where it ends at each side, or if it does. Damn Winslow, this is some serious spellwork! He must have spent over a decade setting all of this up.”
They scouted the edge of the cliff for a while, and then Raze found the best way down. Ben stared at the spot she was pointing out. “Are you sure? This looks even steeper than the other bit we were standing at.”
“I’m sure,” Raze answered. “Hey, you brought me along to climb, right? So let me do what I do best. This is the bit we want.”
She took the lead, confidently scaling down the bumps and rocks that formed the side of the canyon. At least, they looked exactly like rocks. But it all felt like carpet to the touch, which was weirdly disturbing. That was the whole point of all this, she guessed: to throw everyone’s senses off and confuse their brains.
Raze climbed slowly, feeling for the best way down as she went. Her eyes weren’t much use, as the uniform color of the carpeting played tricks on her perception. Fingers and toes were best for this sort of work, and she moved down the cliff like a giant four-limbed spider. She tuned out the others, focused on what she was doing. Distracted by the climb, she registered
Ben’s warning shout a split second too late. The blow landed hard, wrenching her away from the boulder she was sliding across and slamming her four feet down into a small ridge of carpeting.
She looked up, dazed, and met the blank face of a towering clay golem. All she could think as his heavy arm began its downwards swing was, Well, shit.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Ben
Ben reacted without a thought, his magic catching the golem in the chest and flinging it away from Raze just as it punched down toward her face. It landed with a satisfying crunch against the beige cliff wall, carpeting doing little to muffle the sound of shattering clay.
He scrambled down the few feet separating him and Raze and hauled her to her feet. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, just a bit winded. Look out!”
She shouted the last bit just as the newly re-formed golem aimed a blow at his back. He twisted away and blasted it apart again. He gave her a shaky smile. “Déjà vu much? Feels like we’re right back at that damn apothecary.”
The golem was rebuilding itself, frighteningly fast. May and Lix joined them on the ledge. “Let’s get the hell off this cliff,” shouted Lix. “We can fight it in the valley.”
They were about two-thirds of the way down. They took the last third at a terrifying pace, leaping across rocks and crevasses, and finally full-on skidding down a last bank of loose carpet pebbles. By the time they reached the bottom, the golem hot on their trail, Ben’s hands were a mess of carpet burn.
The golem landed heavily. Ben turned and blasted it once more, pushing it back a good way until it tripped and fell over onto its back.
“That thing’s not very efficient,” he said, breathing hard. “More annoying, really. Except I can’t keep blasting it forever. I’ll get exhausted soon, and then it’s going to catch up and pound us into the ground. The carpet, I mean.”
The golem got up and attacked them once more. Ben threw it back again, making a crushing motion with his hands as the golem toppled. They ran while it rebuilt itself. Raze shifted to wolf form, loping along easily as they headed for the far side of the valley.
“Persistent… little… bastard,” Lix gasped out as she jogged beside him.
“’Least there’s only one,” panted May.
Ben halted to throw another blast of magic at the incoming golem. He turned, thinking he’d have to hurry to catch up, and ran smack into May’s back. “Wha—” he began to say, and then stopped. Their way was barred by three other clay golems, towering above them in the carpet valley. Their blank faces had no expression, but the menace in their stance was unmistakable.
“You just had to say it, didn’t you?” Ben told May, straightening his crooked glasses.
The four golems moved, getting into position, trapping them in a loose circle. Raze snarled, her wolf hackles forming a ruff around her neck.
“Lix,” said May. “Can’t you use that fire potion?”
“While we’re trapped on an endless synthetic carpet? Are you crazy? Ever heard of prairie fires? We’d never get away in time.”
The four golems, moving in tandem, closed in like a hunting pack. Ben spun on the spot, sending energy blasts at each of them. They shattered, one by one, but Ben felt his magic faltering as he tired.
“I’m not going to be able to keep this up much longer,” he warned the others as they raced past the broken clay figures, which were quickly re-forming themselves. He touched the strength ward on his arm, feeding it a trickle of magic.
Lix was digging in her backpack. She uncorked a bottle with her teeth and splashed the contents over her shoulder right in the path of the incoming golems. “Confusion charm,” she gasped, running faster. “Should hold them a while. Come on!”
The three witches kept running, Raze keeping up easilyin wolf form. Behind them, the golems crossed the potion barrier and stopped, as though they’d temporarily forgotten what they were supposed to be doing. Ben nodded at Lix. “Nice.”
May fell behind first, and Ben slowed. “May…” he said in warning. They were about halfway through the valley now, but the golems had apparently shaken off Lix’s spell and had taken up the chase again.
She waved him away. She was walking now, one hand pressed to her side. “Go ahead, I’ll catch up in a moment.”
“No way. We’re a team. Hey, Lix!” he shouted. Lix stopped, waiting for them, and so did Raze, her wolf form whining anxiously as it checked out the approaching clay creatures.
Lix was desperately searching her backpack. Ben blasted the golems yet again, but this time, even with the energy boost from his ward, his magic barely pushed them back a couple of paces. “Lix!” he screamed again. The ground was shaking as the creatures thundered up, and he broke into a sprint, dragging May along by the hand.
Just as they reached her, Lix pulled out what looked like a wooden comb and tossed it right in the golems’ path as she chanted something under her breath. Suddenly a thick forest of thorns sprang up between them and the golems, cutting them off from the creatures. Lix waved them on.
“Keep moving. I don’t know how long that will hold them.”
Ben couldn’t help giving her an admiring glance. “That was pretty damn cool,” he admitted.
“Stole the idea from a book of fairy tales,” Lix said. “Been waiting to try that one out. Not usually much call for thorn barriers.”
Raze, loping along ahead of them, skidded to a halt with a yelp. With a shimmer of magic, she shifted back to human form. When Ben reached her, he saw the problem. There was a river ahead, neatly slicing the valley in two.
“Is that wool?” Raze asked.
Ben gaped at the river. What he’d taken at first for water proved at second glance to be swirls of synthetic wool, the exact same stuff the carpet was made of. And it was flowing fast. “Do we swim?” he asked.
Behind them, the golems were throwing themselves at the thorn barrier. They made no verbal sounds, but he could hear the rustling of branches and see flakes of clay falling through the thick wall. Once they got enough of themselves through, the creatures could re-form on the other side. They were running out of time.
Lix cautiously climbed down the riverbank. She dipped a hand in the fierce current. Immediately her wrist snagged in a loose curl of wool and she was dragged to her knees and along the river a few feet. She managed to snatch her hand away just as Ben reached her. He pulled her back up the riverbank to safety.
“Okay,” he said. “No swimming.”
“But what about the golems?” asked Raze, a glint in her eyes. “Can they swim?”
“Probably not,” Lix started. “But wha— Oh. Oh. Good plan.”
May was glaring at them both. “Can we stop talking in riddles, please!”
“The golems are heavy,” Lix said in a hurry, “and not the brightest threads in the carpet, if you see what I mean. So we trick them, and push them in.”
“And let the current drag them away,” added Raze triumphantly.
“That’s actually a pretty great plan,” said Ben. “I’m not sure how much more I can manage without resting and giving myself time to recharge. But I can probably take one of them.”
“If I’m in wolf form I might be able to take another,” said Raze.
“So that leaves one each for myself and May,” said Lix.
May’s voice shook a little. “I don’t want to take on one of those! That’s not in my job description, you know that.”
“Just keep it busy,” said Lix. “Pretend you’re playing dodge ball. As soon as one of us is free, we’ll help.”
“I hate dodge ball,” May replied.
Raze interrupted, her face tense. “They’re coming.”
They fanned out along the riverbank to force the golems to split up. Ben’s magic was sluggish from overuse. Trying to channel it was like wading in molasses. He’d have enough for one hit, and that was it. He’d have to make it count. He shook his arms out, loosening up his limbs. Dodge ball it was, then.
The
four golems approached, and the nearest one cocked its blank face toward him. “All right, ugly,” Ben muttered. “Let’s play.”
He’d hoped for a mad rush from the clay creature, but either the golems were learning from their mistakes, or they weren’t quite as dumb as they appeared to be. They knew their prey was cornered. The golems marched forward in a neat line, one slow and thundering step after another. The one near Ben slammed a huge fist down, missing him by a fraction as Ben danced backward and out of the way.
“Come on, a little closer,” he said. He ducked another fist and weaved away from a stamped foot, putting his boxing skills to work, and fetched up against the edge of the small incline to the wool river. This was the spot. He stepped over the edge, waiting, taunting the golem with his presence.
The golem followed him over the edge, and just for one moment its attention wavered as the ground dipped beneath its feet. Ben dove under its outstretched arm, kicking out as he landed, foot connecting with a solid clay leg that cracked slightly at the hit. The golem tried to spin on the spot and catch him, but it lost balance, teetering precariously. Ben aimed his last blast of energy at the golem’s damaged leg, and it shattered completely. The golem pitched backward, landing soundlessly in the river. It was immediately engulfed by woolen strands, sinking from view as it was swept away.
He turned to see that Lix had her collapsible baton out. She danced out of the way of a heavy fist and smacked it hard on the wrist. Splintered fractures ran up the golem’s clay arm. But Lix was taking too long between landing one hit and another, and the fractures mended seamlessly as Ben moved toward her. Lix spotted him, and yelled, “Take this, keep him busy!”
She met Ben halfway, pressing the baton into his hands. He whacked one of the golem’s hands as it came down, but its other fist punched hard into his side, knocking him down. Lix was digging through her backpack again. Just as he rolled out of the way of the golem’s foot, she ran up to it and slammed her hand into the small of its back.
Night Blade: Blade Hunt Chronicles Book Two Page 17