Aldwyn's Academy (12 page)

This was bad.

With a shaking hand he reached out and grabbed the smooth, tooled leather of the carryall.

Helene would never have dropped the little rucksack if she weren’t in the direst of trouble.

His fingers fumbled with the clasps as he opened the straps. The chance that this was an old item left by some other adventurous student seemed so unlikely as to be ridiculous. But he couldn’t help hoping it wasn’t Helene’s.

He opened the flap and turned the bag out.

A leather belt identical to the one he wore spilled loose. The chain-adorned strap was festooned with small pouches containing spell components.

Dorian had so recently been cataloging the ingredients as part of his arduous punishment from Professor Fife that he could identify several of them by feel and scent alone.

This was even worse than he thought.

Under no circumstances would Helene have simply wandered off and left all of her spell components behind with ghosts and dire wolves—and bugbears—hunting the grounds of Aldwyns.

Dorian frowned. He was only moments behind the girl in entering the tunnels. She had to still be close by.

His fingers burrowed into something soft and yielding and he pulled free the elf girl’s phoenix cloak.

The wondrous item was remarkably light and he could fairly feel the electric energy of the magic bound up in the item.

As he had the first time he saw one, Dorian dearly wished to own one.

The thought of flying filled his heart with a longing inappropriate to his situation, yet, despite his fear and exhaustion, he could still imagine the sensation of weightlessness that must come from flying.

A piece of folded parchment tumbled out and struck the ground.

Puzzled, Dorian bent and picked up the vellum document. He unfolded it, squinting to read the words scratched in a spidery scrawl across the paper.

Dorian felt as if he had been punched in the stomach.

The thought of someone harming such a noble creature as Mordenkainen seemed impossible. As a boy he had always loved his mother’s familiar, for the bond the creature shared with her had extended in love to her offspring.

He understood now why Helene (the princess, he corrected) had come alone.

If such a beautiful thing as Mordenkainen had belonged to him, he would have taken any risk to see the animal safe. He felt a flush of shame as he remembered why he’d left his room in the first place.

The idea that he had begun this night trying to get Helene into trouble embarrassed him.

“How was I supposed to know?” he demanded in a fierce whisper, the light of the Glitter Stone painting him with colors as motley as the paint of a harlequin.

Dorian began shoving Helene’s things into his own haversack. He didn’t understand anything that was happening and it frightened him.

He had not felt right or like himself since the first howl of the dire wolf on the road outside of Aldwyns Village.

An inhuman roar echoed down the cavern tunnels from out of the darkness.

Dorian’s heart lurched in his chest.

He spun first one way then the other. The roar echoed down the subterranean halls louder than the thunder outside. Whatever made that sound was big, Dorian realized.

His stomach cramped as he swung his haversack over a shoulder. Heavy footsteps pounded the earth, growing louder as they rushed toward him.

The thing roared again and Dorian squeezed his eyes shut. The smooth metal shaft of his wand filled his hand.

He opened his eyes again and cast about desperately. For the briefest of moments a silvery rune appeared on the wall of one of the rock tunnels.

It was the rune
FA-wel
.

He recognized it instantly. It meant “help.”

This has to be the way, he mused.

Without a second thought he scrambled down the fork in the tunnel even as another roar loud enough to split rock came rolling out of the darkness near at hand.

A dark shape, larger even than the bugbears, appeared out of the gloom.

Dorian had a hurried impression of horns rising from a misshapen head over a pair of glowing red eyes.

Instantly he remembered the figure from the wolf attack, the one that had controlled the dire wolves.

The thing roared like an angry bull.

There was nothing to do but run.

“Death Magic is the dark art of creating, raising, and controlling the dead. Wizards who specialize in death magic work with unholy abominations, enslaving the dead who dearly deserve their rest, and draining the lives of the living before they’ve gone to the grave.”

—A Practical Guide to Wizardry

C
rouched alone in the dark, Helene grasped the smooth shaft of her wand and mentally summoned the words to her spell.

She heard the murmur of deep, rough voices and the creaking of the floor under heavy footsteps coming from out in the hallway, beyond the door to the hidden room.

The section of tunnel that held her hiding spot was unnaturally warm, and the heat in the room was stifling.

She had lost her cloak and now wore only a dark shirt of light material. It stuck to her body like a second skin and she felt beads of sweat slide down the hollow in the small of her back.

She clenched then relaxed her grip on her wand.

She willed her pounding heart to slow. How could she have been so stupid? How did she fall so easily into this trap?

She cursed herself silently. Her mother would never let her live this down. Helene gulped. If she lived at all …

The footsteps in the hallway shuffled.

The hard, guttural voices whispering there fell silent.

She saw her homunculus fluttering weakly in the shadow of a windowsill now long bricked closed. The tiny, doughy creature hovered like a misshapen fairy.

“Be still, little one,” she whispered. “Stay very still.”

Her words soothed it momentarily.

It was the only thing she had left after losing her enchanted haversack during the chase that led her here. The lumpy creature settled into the crook of the bricked-in window frame and remained still.

Her blind descent into the caverns below Aldwyns Alchemical Gardens led her very deep, very quickly. Minutes ago she left the natural earthen tunnels and suddenly stumbled upon the brick walls and flagstone floors of an ancient structure buried so long ago it had dissipated from memory into myth.

Helene pursed her lips together and scooted back farther into the shadows of the room.

She hadn’t known the long buried keep even existed when she began her investigation that night.

She’d been herded like simple prey into its confines once she’d entered the caverns. Taking a blind door, she had found herself in a small, long abandoned room filled with empty, dust-covered beds and insect-infested mattresses.

She held out little hope now for escape.

The doorknob rattled as a heavy hand fell across it.

Helene shushed the trembling homunculus once more. She stood between a bunk bed and the door. She slowly lowered herself down and scooted under the filthy, rotting mattress and dusty wood frame as the doorknob began to turn.

The door creaked loudly as the hunter outside pushed it open and Helene slid farther back under the bed.

Torchlight from the hallway spilled into the room.

From her position, she saw two pairs of green feet with toes tipped with jagged brown nails. Drops of saliva fell to the floor, making muddy splotches in the dust.

She eased her arm up from her side, bringing the willow-shafted wand around should she need to use it.

A bugbear walked a few steps into the room and she smelled an almost overwhelming stench of unwashed body.

She bit down her reflex to gag and for a moment was reminded of the Stench Stones Dorian had pelted her with earlier. She never thought she’d be in a position to miss him. Her father’s counselor, an ancient elf named Shadizar, would have likely informed her that this was called irony.

At the moment, Helene missed even him as well.

She felt something drop onto her from the bottom of the mattress. She tensed as tiny legs scuttled up her back.

The thing’s legs were too close together to be a spider. Perhaps it was just a roach. The subterranean cockroaches were prevalent, disgusting, and huge in the underground.

The second possibility was a scorpion.

If a deathstalker scorpion were to crawl up her back and become entangled in the thick mass of her long hair, she was in very real danger. More than she already was, that is.

The poison of the deathstalker was fierce, deadly in children and the elderly, and likely to make her so sick she’d be unable to save herself if she were attacked.

In her lost haversack she possessed spell components to blunt the venom’s effects, but that was of no use to her now. And none of it would help her if she were discovered by the bugbears in the room.

The insect scurried up her body and in response she bit down hard on her trembling lower lip to stifle any sound.

A hoarse, bass voice called out from the hallway.

“You missed the weak-blood, Slake,” it complained. “Grimek hungry.”

The insect perched between Helene’s shoulder blades froze as the humanoid in the room answered, voice loud and slurred.

“I can smell elf,” Slake growled. “The elf’s not for eating. Mistress made that as plain as the ugly on your face.”

Helene closed her eyes.

A sting from a scorpion that close to her spine and central nervous system could be fatal. If the bugbears discovered her under the bed and forced her to move and act in self-defense, she was finished. There was no way that one of the aggressive, deep-earth scorpion species would not strike.

“Grimek hungry,” Grimek repeated.

“Grimek can shut his bloody great trash hole,” Slake answered.

A segmented leg explored her skin. Let it be a roach, she thought. Or a beetle. Let it be a dwarf-cursed dung beetle.

From where she lay, Helene now saw the ragged bottoms of a bugbear’s cutoff leather pants hanging down past his knees.

The creature—the one called Slake—relaxed, apparently satisfied the room was empty and lowered his weapon down in one hand so that Helene could see the tip and cross guard of a short thrusting spear.

It was stained a rusty black with what could only be old blood.

Slake sniffled loudly through his bearlike snout. “I can’t see the little elf-meat, but I can smell elf fear.”

From the doorway, the second bugbear whistled a little tune in reply. The one in the room picked up the melody after a fashion and began singing in a hoarse, off-key rasp.

“Sing a song a finger long, a pocket full of lye, four and twenty bodies baked into a pie …”

The insect began moving on her back again, scuttling up the nape of her neck to where her hair was held in place by a cloth scarf given to her by her mother in happier times.

A tiny puddle of sweat pooled in the natural hollow there. She felt the hard, sticky legs of the creature play themselves across the goose bumps of her flesh as it paused, drinking in her perspiration.

She heard footsteps and shifted her eyes to the door. The second bugbear was fully in the room now. This one wore a shirt of dirty black chain mail. He stopped whistling.

“I like pie. Elf pie, dwarf pie—”

“Too stringy,” Slake corrected.

“Not babies,” Grimek chuckled. He pulled the door to the room open all the way, spilling more light in.

The insect at the back of her neck scurried onto her left shoulder. Afraid to turn her head, Helene shifted her eyes to follow the bugbears as they walked deeper into the room, headed for the storage closet.

The heavy insect began a lazy trail down her arm toward her elbow.