Faculty of Fire (56 page)

“Dogron! Tell me, how long ago did you betray us?” Tillak asked from round the corner.

“Who is ‘us’?” Dogron asked. “The community? We went against the community council when we took on this job!”

The trolls had a community council? And only yesterday I had no idea that trolls even existed.

“You’ve betrayed your family,” Tillak replied. “Almost twenty of us have already died because of the Master. And you’re still helping him?”

Dogron shrugged guilty.

“How can I explain so that he’ll understand?” he asked in a quiet voice.

I thought it was a rhetorical question. In any case, none of us had an answer.

“This one will do,” Shins said eventually. “It should be able to handle all of us, including the troll. But then, why do we need the troll?”

“Yes, indeed,” Kelnmiir sighed as he walked up to the teleport. “These Craftsmen are really big-hearted ...”

Right on, that was no way to behave.

“Dogron helped us, and we can’t abandon him,” said Alice, voicing my thoughts.

“Just thinking out loud,” Shins said with a shrug, and he stepped into the teleport.

Chas and Alice followed him.

“You go first,” the troll said to me. “The teleport definitely has enough power for you ...”

How about that for noble generosity?

I hastily stepped into the teleport.

When I emerged on a different floor, I stepped off the platform quickly, and Dogron appeared on it. As he stepped off the teleport, the troll hammered his stone fist down on it with all his strength.

“Just to make certain,” he explained, looking slightly embarrassed.

“We’re on the fourteenth floor. Excellent,” Kelnmiir said cheerfully and nodded to Shins: “Check the teleport to the first floor.”

“Surprisingly enough, Shins didn’t argue with the vampire. Or maybe it wasn’t really surprising? After all, Kelnmiir was about thirty centuries older than Shins ...

“Okay, boys and girl,” Kelnmiir declared. “If everything’s all right, we’ll go down to the first floor now, take the Craftsmen where he needs to go ... by the way, what place is that place, exactly?”

The vampire gave Shins an enquiring look.

“We need to get out of the tower and walk right up to the isolation field,” Shins explained. “After that, I’ll do everything that has to be done.”

“There, see how simple it all is?” the vampire said delightedly.

“Couldn’t be simpler,” Chas agreed. “Some adventure this is ...”

“Everything’s in order,” Shins announced. “Actually, the teleport on the first floor has much greater reserves of energy than the other teleports.”

“Then let’s get moving,” Kelnmiir concluded. “I don’t think there should be any problems.”

We walked through the teleport in the same order as before. Dogron was the last one out.

“And now quick march to the way out,” Kelnmiir commanded.

But the quick march soon came to a sudden halt. Literally at the next corner, we ran into a living barrier.

Scene 9

To be quite honest, at first we didn’t even realise that it was a barrier. It was just five people in yellow livery standing in the middle of the corridor.

“Hey, guys!” Chas shouted happily. “What are you doing here?”

Kelnmiir stopped running forward and gestured for us to stay behind him.

“No problem,” Chas declared breezily and took a step towards the pupils. “I know these guys. Hey, guys, if you only knew what’s going...”

Chas walked up to one of the pupils and put a hand on his shoulder. The next moment my friend was ducking a punch with an expression of surprise on his face.

“What are you doing?” he exclaimed.

“Dummy,” Alice commented drily. “It all goes in one ear and out the other. We were told that this mysterious Master had hypnotised everyone he caught on all the floors of the Academy.”

“A-ah!” Chas exclaimed slowly as he backed away.

I raised my broom uncertainly.

“Maybe I should clear the way?” Dogron suggested.

“I see you have a vicious side to you,” said Kelnmiir. “No, I’ll deal with them.”

He approached the hypnotised pupils.

“Go easy on them,” I asked him.

After all, they were only pupils ...

“I’ll be the very soul of gentleness,” the vampire replied seriously.

Kelnmiir touched each of the pupils in turn with movements almost too fast for the eye to follow, giving them no chance to react. They slowly sank down onto the floor.

And we ran on along the corridor.

Soon the vast wooden gates loomed up ahead of us.

“Right, now our adventures are over,” Chas sighed when we reached the locked gates. We’ll break down the gates, and then Master Shinesimus will destroy the isolation field ... and that’s it?”

“It really would be great if that was exactly how everything ended,” Kelnmiir said thoughtfully. Don’t you hear anything?”

We started listening carefully. Silence.

“Not a thing,” I confessed. “Should we hear something?”

“No,” Kelnmiir replied. “Not yet you shouldn’t. But in a couple of minutes you’ll hear it and see it too.” He turned towards Shins: “How do the doors open?”

“They don’t, now,” Shins answered. “They didn’t have an independent power source.”

“Will we have to break them down?” Dogron suggested.

He was clearly dying to do something useful. And, in principle, I could understand his impatience.

“We can’t,” said Shins, shaking his head. “These are too tough. We don’t have the appropriate means.”

“Isn’t he an appropriate means?” Chas whispered to me, nodding at the troll. “Why not use him, since he came with is?”

“I can hear something,” Alice said suddenly.

I listened carefully, and this time I really did hear a strange scraping sound.

“What is that?” I asked in surprise.

“Who can tell?” replied Kelnmiir. “But it’s definitely something dangerous.”

Dangerous for whom? For us, or for him? But then, what difference did that make?

I listened again and caught more strange sounds. Scraping and rumbling ... quite a long way off, but getting closer at a pretty fast rate. Oh, this was definitely very ominous.

“Something’s about to happen,” Chas declared in a slightly hollow voice.

We froze in anticipation.

But what could it be?” Chas asked in alarm.

No one answered him, everyone was watching the end of the corridor. What was going to appear round that corner at any moment? Whatever it was, it clattered as if it was made of ... iron. Oh-oh, I only knew one thing made of iron that ...

Out from behind the corner crawled the upper half of the iron golem.

“What is that thing?” asked Chas, startled. He wasn’t acquainted with our iron friend yet.

“It’s the iron golem I told you about,” I explained, hastily preparing to wave my broom. “Or rather, his top half.”

Dogron took two steps forward, blocking me.

“Stop,” Kelnmiir told him. “You’re easy meat for that thing. He’ll just carve you into pieces, it makes no difference to him if you’re made of stone.”

The troll clearly felt offended, but he did as the vampire asked and stepped aside.

“Everybody move well back,” Kelnmiir told us. “I’ll deal with him. Half a golem’s not nearly as terrible, and apart from that, I’ve just been topped-up with blood ...”

I quickly leaned back against the wall, trying to press my entire body into it. The others followed my example – when the troll stood against the wall, he looked like a detail of the architectural composition.

The golem was moving along quite agilely on his hands. I wondered how this lump of iron was going to attack the vampire. With its head?

And that was exactly what the golem did! He jumped at the vampire but Kelnmiir dodged out of the way. There was a resounding clang as the golem’s head struck the gates.

Naturally enough, the iron hulk wasn’t bothered in the least. The golem instantly turned and leapt at the vampire again, holding his taloned hand out ahead of him ...

“Watch out!” Alice exclaimed, but of course, the warning wasn’t really necessary.

In a single lightning-swift movement, Kelnmiir dodged the golem’s talons and grabbed his arm.

Yes, vampires are strong enough anyway, of course, but after they’ve had a good drink of blood ...

Kelnmiir swung the golem round above his head and smashed him against the gates. And then again, and again ...

Soon the problem of opening the gates had been solved. With no magical protection, they soon developed a hole that happened to be exactly the same size as the upper half of an iron golem. Now why would that be?

“Bravo!” Chas exclaimed.

Kelnmiir bowed to his audience and stepped through the breach. Which was the right thing to do – the golem was hardly likely to have suffered any damage from a little thing like that ...

“Let’s go, quickly,” Shins said to hurry us on, only for some reason, he wasn’t the first to stick his head out through the hole.

But Dogron jerked forward rapidly. The troll was stubbornly determined to do something useful, to prove that he was with us. And maybe that was a good thing ...

“Okay,” I sighed, and followed the troll.

Although it was night outside the isolation field, in the yard it was as bright as day, thanks to the glowing stone surface. So I could see very clearly as Kelnmiir beat the hell out of the golem.

As a matter of common sense, I decided not to interfere (I wonder how I could possibly have interfered anyway, even if I’d wanted to). I held out my hand to Shins, so that he wouldn’t stumble by accident ... well, in fact I originally held my hand out to Alice, but the Craftsman managed to squeeze through in front of her. Chas squeezed through next, and when I was finally able to offer my hand to Alice, she ignored it.

“No time for that now,” she growled and darted past me.

I stood there for a while, staring stupidly into the breach and trying to gather my thoughts, and that was when I spotted some kind of movement in the corridor. I didn’t wait to find out what was moving, but went hurrying after the others.

“You know, Alice,” I began when I caught up with the vampiress, “it seems to me ...”

“Listen, let’s talk about it afterwards,” she said, looking imploringly into my eyes. “When it’s all over.”

“Of course,” I said, shrugging my shoulders as I walked along. “It’s just that I ...”

“Later,” Alice said firmly.

Okay, so it would have to be later.

We reached the isolation field, which from close up reminded me of a soap bubble. The same rainbow streaks, the same structure ... but when Shins touched the field, little flashes of lightning ran along its surface and struck his hand. It obviously didn’t hurt much, because Shins took no notice of them.

“And now what?” Chas enquired.

“Any help needed?” Dogron asked at the same time.

Shins waved them away.

“Don’t interfere.”

For a while I watched the Craftsman touching the field in different places. Maybe he was looking for a particular spot ...

Eventually the Craftsman asked Alice and Chas to help, and after a couple of minutes of incoherent explanations there were three of them probing at the field. For some reason Shins didn’t take the troll – or me, for that matter – as one of his helpers, so we were left standing there.

I don’t know why, but I really didn’t feel any urge to help them. They hadn’t asked, and that was fine by me. I watched as Kelnmiir finished off the golem, and enjoyed that far more.

Dogron and I had been left with nothing to do. The troll was really dejected, and he watched Kelnmiir with a melancholy air ... I watched too, occasionally glancing at the gates. So I was the first to notice the strange movements of the shadows in the breach ...

“I might be wrong, but I think we have visitors,” I told the troll in a quiet voice.

“Where?” Dogron asked in surprise.

“Where do you think? Over there, there’s something moving in the hole in the gates ...”

“I think we might have visitors,” I repeated loudly enough for the others to hear me.

Kelnmiir didn’t react, he was busy tearing the golem to pieces. He’d already pulled off one arm, and now he was clearly going for the head. Chas and Alice reacted, though.

“Are you sure?” asked Alice, instantly turning away from the field and walking over to me.