Aldwyn's Academy (16 page)

“Lowadar will come for me!” Helene shouted, desperate.

“No he will not!” Athadora hissed. “There won’t be a thing that old fool can do about it. And while you lie there dying with my dagger in your heart you’ll see blood pouring out to feed the dragon. The dragon that will rise
and with its unleashed power under my command, feast on your great and mighty Lowadar!”

As the sorceress began shrieking with laughter, Helene could only turn her head to the side and shut her eyes tight against the terror.

D
orian ducked his head down below the edge of a boulder.

The banshee slid in over the ground, slipping through the opening and skimming over rocks. She crept into the tight spaces and through cracks between boulders, searching, hunting through the dark cavern.

Dorian’s hands hunted through the belt pouches secured to Helene’s belt.

Every student at Aldwyns carried such a belt containing leather or cloth pouches holding the ingredients to various spells and enchantments utilizing alchemical components.

Dorian had never been more grateful for a punishment than he was now for the one Professor Fife had given him. For hours he had cataloged the ingredients and components most commonly used by Aldwyns students and the spells those convolutions made.

He couldn’t be certain of what spells Helene had intended when she’d packed her supplies, but he realized there was a possibly helpful spell … if only the hunting banshee gave him time to complete it.

With shaking hands he spilled a pinch of the fine, sandlike bits of powder of the first pouch out into his sweating palm.

Pixie dust was a common ingredient, made easier to acquire at Aldwyns due to what Helene claimed was an indigenous population of that feykind.

On the other side of the low cavern, the ghostly apparition suddenly twisted, hanging in the air, tendrils of hair floating, grasping like hunting snakes. A low, wicked moan floated through the stillness.

The gloomy, haunted sound knifed tentacles of fear into Dorian.

He picked up the second pouch, whose ingredients he managed to identify by their smooth, oily feel—the leaves of a dryad’s tree.

Working quickly, he shoved several into his mouth and quickly ground them into a broken paste that he let drop into the pixie dust so that it immediately clung to the chewed-up leaves.

Over his shoulder, the moaning grew louder as the banshee drifted toward him, drawn by the rustling sounds on the far side of the cavern.

The air around the boy grew colder and more
oppressive, leaden with supernatural energy that clung to him like thick, wet wool.

His teeth began chattering and he couldn’t stop them though they sounded loud as snapping mechanical traps to his ears.

Suddenly the moan of the banshee turned to long, evil screeches as the ghostly hunter spotted her prey. The wailing ghost cut across the space through the dark, flowing like cloth in a wind, the intensity of her scream growing.

From the final pouch Dorian pulled out a little phial of cut crystal with one hand. His thumb pushed and pried at the stopper but it refused to budge.

Out of the corner of his eye he caught a flash of motion and felt the exposed skin of his face on that side tighten painfully then go numb from the hellish cold emanating from the creature.

“I warned you, boy! I warned you, boy!” the thing wailed, flowing closer.

Bringing the phial to his lips, Dorian ripped the stopper free with his teeth and dumped the acrid smelling drops of clear liquid into the mess of components in his palm.

It was pegasus sweat, as rare an ingredient as one could find in the alchemical world.

Pixie dust: uncontrolled dancing.

Leaves from a dryad’s tree: uncontrolled dancing.

Pegasus sweat: dizzy, clumsy.

He felt a flash of arcane energy as the three magical ingredients combined in the palm of his hand and blue sparks crackled for the briefest moment as he twisted, turning to face the charging banshee.

His pounding heart seemed to pump ice water into his veins with each hammering beat.

Under more normal conditions he would have finely ground and stirred the ingredients with mortar and pestle, taking his time to finitely measure each portion.

Not so now.

His last chance would either work or he’d pay for his miscalculation by losing his soul to the screaming ghost.

He couldn’t help but scream as the great, loose black hole of the specter’s mouth stretched wide as if to swallow him whole.

He thrust his hand out and flung his potion-paste into the gaping mouth of the banshee.

While she could consume no tangible edibles, the supernatural being swallowed the potent magic of the concoction whole.

The effect was instantaneous.

The ghostly entity stopped short then jerked back, making sharp gagging cries as if she really drew breath into physical lungs. Again those blue sparks of energy danced and flared, this time from within the darkness of the thing’s throat.

In the next instant the banshee shrieked her most horrid cry and began spinning.

Flying like a scrap of rag in high winds, the nebulous creature began twisting and twirling with frenzied, uncontrollable energy.

Dorian dug his heels into the cold, hard-packed dirt of the cavern floor and shoved himself away from the wailing ghost.

He let Helene’s belt fall off his lap as he snatched up his haversack and sought an escape from the grotesque apparition as she shot back and forth across the cave.

His eyes found the lighter patch of dark he knew marked the cave mouth, and he felt hope surge in him, but in that same instant he knew that time had run out for him.

From outside, in the chasm that wound through the crags, he heard the answering barks and howls of the hunting dire wolves.

They had found a path to the bottom and were only moments away.

Dorian pushed his back up against a rock outcropping and hugged his Heward’s Handy Haversack closer to him. He felt it shift in his arms and yelped in surprise. Dorian dropped the carryall and looked down.

The flap of the haversack was thrown open where it rested between his outstretched legs. Out from the seemingly bottomless depths of the backpack crawled Helene’s homunculus.

“The job of a wizard specializing in destruction magic is to seek out and destroy evil.”

—A Practical Guide to Wizardry

H
elene watched the zombies labor with the tireless energy of the walking dead.

Their faces were slack, expressionless masks as they swung picks and worked shovels to unearth more and more of the great dragon’s skeleton.

One of the zombies accidentally struck one of the dragon bones with the edge of an iron tool, and sparks sprayed.

“Rotten fool!” Athadora launched into a screaming tirade. “Treat those bones with respect!”

Jet black bolts of electricity arced from her fingers into the body of the offending creature.

Despite the horrific example, a dull-witted minion made the same mistake only a minute or two later. This time the grim sorceress simply pointed a long finger tipped with a sharp nail.

The burned and rotting minotaur moved forward at the silent command. The axe swung up then fell,
cleaving the offending and cowering zombie in half.

Helene turned her face away in disgust as parts of the reanimated corpse splashed and dribbled to the floor. She cooed quietly to Mordenkainen, calming the falcon and forcing herself to stay strong for her familiar.

The bond wizards share with their familiars is as strong as that of siblings, or even parent to child. A familiar chooses its wizard, and when Mordenkainen flew down onto Helene’s shoulder during the Festival of Choosing last year, she had felt whole for the first time in her life, complete in a way that she hadn’t even understood existed until that very moment, as if a missing part of herself had finally been found.

But her connection with Mordenkainen was still new. She still couldn’t read his mind or speak to him psychically like greater wizards could.

She called to her falcon beneath her breath in soft whispers, calming his agitation, and her eyes filled with tears to see him so cruelly bound.

When the silver blade of Athadora pierced her heart, it wouldn’t just be her life that would be taken …

“I will get us out of here,” Helene whispered. “I swear it, Mordenkainen, I swear.”

Frantically, she searched the chamber with her eyes.

It seemed obvious the room had once been part of the old castle keep buried so deep beneath the soil of Aldwyns a millennium ago.

Athadora had clearly instructed her minions to knock out one wall of the cavern that served as a final resting place for Insidian, and then appropriated the structure for her own vile uses.

Helene forced herself to see what was in the room, to exercise discipline and use her wizard’s eye for detail to search out and identify every item and implement contained therein.

This much was clear: Though the room was rife with artifacts of evil and forbidden relics of death magic, it was first and foremost a wizard workshop.

Helene, elf princess, was first and foremost a wizard.

She saw the empty eye sockets of leering skulls next to crystal balls on stands of pewter and bronze. Meat hooks and jagged daggers with handles of lapis lazuli lay next to raw gem tones of unparallel brilliances spilled on velvet cloth.

In one corner a copper brazier piled high with cherry red coals heated a cauldron the size of a warrior’s helmet that emitted a noxious green steam reeking of the grave. Bone and feather fetishes lay strewn casually next to scales and blown-glass funnels beside alchemist alembics on stained wooden tables.

Behind all of these sat rows of floor-to-ceiling cupboards filled with spell components of every conceivable variety.

Helene frowned as she contemplated her options.

She did not have her wand and thus had no focus for her energies, but that only made the task more difficult, not impossible.

Mordenkainen rasped low in his throat, giving warning.

Turning her head, Helene saw Athadora striding to her, cruel smile firmly in place. The woman possessed a cold, waxy beauty that reminded Helene of an ice sculpture or a diamond necklace, the kind of item that reflected light perfectly but that generated no heat of its own.

“Do you feel the thrill of power?” the sorceress demanded. “Do you realize how pointless resistance is?”

“You’re the one whose effort is pointless.”

As Athadora came nearer, Helene refused to look away.

She forced herself to remember who she was and how she was expected to behave. She was still a princess, a queen’s daughter, even if the only sibling that mother ever seemed concerned with was the older one; Anika.

As if reading her mind, Athadora mocked her.

“How brave. How lucky I am to be facing the most incapable of the Miridori line then, no?” She laughed at the surprise on Helene’s face. “I taught your sister, Anika. There was a girl with promise.” Athadora paused and smiled a wicked grin. “You’ve certainly proven yourself less … astute.”