Cave of Nightmares (19 page)

“Just let me know.” Tucker got up and walked back to his group of friends, and Hayden ladled himself another bowl of stew.

9

Compounding

Asking Tucker for help with wands proved to be a good
idea, and by the middle of the week Hayden had successfully completed a few attempts at the Growing and Shrinking spells, though he wasn’t sure how either would help him during the team challenge this weekend.

Unfortunately
his Conjury remained only partially-reliable, and Powders was still an unmitigated disaster. Hayden assured Zane and Conner that he would not be signing up for Powders again next year under any circumstances.

Since Master Kilgore had expressly forbidden him from sitting beside Lorn Trout during Elixirs
lessons from now on, his work there had improved slightly, though he wasn’t able to achieve higher than an average grade on any of his creations so far.

The only instrument
that Hayden hadn’t actually been trained to use yet was, ironically, the prism. His classmates assured him that this was normal, and that since prisms were so difficult to understand and could go so badly wrong, Master Asher focused heavily on theory and diagrams for the first few months before they would begin practicing with real prisms.

This would have been fine, except that it was Hayden’s major of focus, and despite
Zane’s insistence that he would be able to use a prism during the challenge arenas whether he’d practiced with it or not, it still made him nervous.

They we
re due to have their first arena challenge immediately after dinner on Serin, the first day of the weekend. Hayden was too nervous to eat more than a few bites of food at dinner that night, following Zane upstairs to return their familiars to the dormitory because they weren’t allowed to bring them along.

“Bonk, I’m going off to the arena now…wish me luck.” He was
getting used to talking to Bonk as though he were human and could understand.

Bonk climbed up onto Hayden’s desk, glanced at him, and then promptly ate his essay for Conjury from off of his desk.

Hayden shouted himself hoarse and threatened to feed his familiar to Slasher until Zane, laughing, pulled him from the dormitory and shut the door behind them.

“Don’t
worry, your essay was terrible anyway; Bonk was doing you a favor. It’s probably for the best that you rewrite it.”

Hayden scowled, still feeling sour about having to redo his work.

“I’ll bet no one else has to worry about their familiar eating their essays before class.”

“Oh, you’re not the only one…though you could be the only person in Mizzenwald who can confidently say
that a dragon ate your homework. They’re usually pretty picky about what they’ll put in their mouths.”

Zane
led him out the rear exit of the castle and past the black stone floor they had Conjury lessons on. Darkness was falling rapidly, and they followed a winding trail that seemed to come from nowhere, distinguishable only because the grass was well-trodden along the path.

It took the
m almost ten minutes to find the right place, and as they walked towards a circle of lights near the cliffs that overlooked that Gawain Sea, Hayden patted the slots of his belt to make sure that all his instruments were accounted for, whether he knew how to use them or not.

As they drew closer
he saw that the pinpricks of bright light were done by magic, evenly-spaced around the circle and radiating up from the grass. He also noted that they weren’t alone; six mastery-level students (identifiable by the silver ‘M’ that was pinned to their clothing) were waiting for them, one standing just behind each of the lights. Tess was already standing in the center of the circle, looking anxious.

Her expression cleared when she caught sight of them, and Hayden and
Zane went to join her in the middle of the circle.

“I hope Tucker
comes soon…we’re supposed to start in five minutes.” Tess squinted at the chrono on her wrist, shifting her weight from one foot to the other.

“Where are the Masters? I thought they were supposed to be watching us a
nd scoring us,” Hayden lowered his voice so that only Zane and Tess would hear, in case it was a dumb question.

“
They don’t have to be here to watch us,” the former explained quietly. “They tell their students where to send us so they can use their Mastery Charms to see us from wherever they’re at.”

Hayden imagined the Prism Master lying around in his pajamas, watching them battle monsters from the comfort of his room
while he sipped hot cocoa. Kilgore would probably spend the entire time reading a book and would only look up if they were being murdered.

Sark is probably
hoping
I’m murdered in there...

His last Powder’s lesson had nearly brought the man to tears.

Tucker strode towards them in the darkness, slowing down from a jog as he approached the circle.

“Good, you’re all here,” h
e greeted them, and Hayden could hear the nervous pitch to his voice. “Just remember everything we talked about and planned for, and we should be fine.”

The others nodded, trying to look confident, but Hayden noticed that
Zane was gripping his chalk almost tightly enough to snap it, and Tess was checking the phials of elixirs and powders on her belt one last time. Hayden touched the metal circlet on top of his head to reassure himself that he still had it.

The mastery-level students looked bored as they took their positions next to each point of light around the circle and pressed their hand
s against the top of the short pedestal of rock that jutted out of the ground beside each of them.

“Ready to go?” o
ne of them, a dark-haired boy, asked them collectively.

“Yeah, we’re ready,
” Hayden answered, wondering if that was true.

W
e’ll soon find out…

Bright light streamed towards the sky from the top of the pedestals, illuminating the older students’ hands and making them look ghostly. Hayden had the strange sensation of being flipped upside down
without actually moving, his surroundings blurring together slowly before his eyes. It was as if everything had forgotten its boundary and was bleeding over into everything else, the trees melding together and the cliffs and ocean slowly becoming one as Hayden’s eyes went out of focus.

He blinked hard and shook off the strange sensation, and was surprised to find himself in a completely different location with no idea of when the change occurred.

The four of them were standing in a small copse in the middle of a densely-wooded area. Looking up, Hayden couldn’t see the sun, but somehow the sky was still bright. The clearing they were in had freshly-trimmed grass and a stone park bench, but everything around them grew wild. In the empty space with them, laying on the ground, was an unmarked envelope.

“There’re
our instructions.” Tucker hurried to pick up the envelope and open it, recovering the quickest from the translocation. The rest of them were still staring around and blinking in confusion. Tess looked like she was searching for the castle to get her bearings.

“It says we’
ve got fifteen minutes to make it to the trigger crystal, due north. For every minute that we’re late a creature will be turned loose against us, and we’ll have to fight our way past it to get to the trigger.”

Hayden felt his face blanch.

“They’re going to send
monsters
after us if we’re too slow in our first arena ever?”

“I dou
bt it,” Zane answered immediately, though his voice quavered. “They don’t want us to get too frazzled on our first go, so they’ll probably just sent conjures after us. The real monsters they save for when we’re older.”

“Come on, let’s get moving,
” Tucker pointed to the air in front of them, where floating red numbers were counting upwards from zero every second.

The timer has started…

Without being asked, Tucker pulled a maple wand from his belt, set it in the palm of his hand and said, “North.” It spun around like a compass and came to an abrupt stop, pointing to their left.

“Let’s go,
” Hayden jogged alongside Tucker, removing the clear prism from his belt and twisting it into his eyepiece as he went, pulling the headpiece forward so he could see through the prism with his right eye.

The world looked strange and beautiful like that, his left eye seeing things as they
really were, while his right saw the magic arrays of light behind it all.

The trees
were densely-packed in this part of the woods, and it slowed them down considerably as their clothing snagged on branches and thorns while they were climbing over-and-around fallen logs. After five minutes of this, Tucker stopped and cast his directional spell again to make sure they were still headed north. Unfortunately they were right on course, which crushed Hayden’s hopes that the way would get easier as they went.

Tess gave a cry of surprise from behind them and Hayden whirled around just in time to see her fall through a hole in the ground that hadn’t been there a moment before. It looked like the hole had been covered with brush to conceal it and she was the one unluc
ky enough to step through it.

“Tess!” Hayden hurried back, moving cautio
usly around the perimeter and looking down at her. It was deep, perhaps ten feet down, with unnaturally-smooth walls of dirt on all sides that suggested it was made by magic. Tess was trying to jump up and grab at the walls, struggling for purchase, but there was nothing to catch onto, and she wasn’t tall enough for them to reach in and pull her out.

“Just go on without me!” s
he called up, her voice shaking. She was massaging her ankle, and Hayden guessed that she twisted it upon landing.

“No way, we’re not leaving you here!” Hayden
immediately brushed aside the stupid notion, turning to the others. Less certainly, he asked, “How do we get her out?”

“I don’t have any spells advance
d enough to translocate someone,” Tucker admitted with a frown, checking his inventory of wands for some inspiration that he apparently didn’t find, because when he finished he just shook his head.

“Me neither,”
Zane looked regretful. “That’s fifth-year stuff in Conjury, at least.”

Hayden certainly didn’t have any idea of how to move her with a prism, and doubted that his level-one prisms were even capable of such a feat. He looked around wildly for
inspiration, on the off-chance the Masters had conveniently left them a ladder or something.

Tucker glanced at the floating red timer that w
as always in front of them, counting steadily upwards.

“We could leave her…” he suggested softly. “We’ll lose points at the end for it, but if we hurry we might be able to get to the trigger before the animals are set against us.”

Hayden didn’t like to think of Tess being left alone in the woods with a pack of monsters hunting them, whether they were real or not.

“No, there has to b
e a way to get her out of there,” he insisted, glaring at the others. “Think harder. They wouldn’t set us a task we can’t accomplish, or this entire arena thing would be pointless and unfair.”

“And what are we going to do if we waste all our time here and it takes us an hour to
get to the trigger?” Tucker demanded hotly.

“Then we’re going to get a
really
bad score, but at least we’ll be able to say we didn’t run away and leave one of our teammates behind,” Hayden snapped, turning to Zane to see who he would side with.

His roommate met his eyes and nodded sharply.

“Alright then, let’s get Tess out of that stupid hole,” Zane began searching the nearby trees for makeshift tools—a long branch, perhaps. Tucker, who Hayden had been expecting to challenge his leadership, was surprisingly acquiescent once the decision was made and went to help.

Hayden glanced back down into the hole.

“We’re not leaving you,” he assured Tess, lying down on his stomach at the edge of the drop and lowering his arms down as far as he could. “Do you think you can reach me?”

Her fingertips barely touched his, but only after
he was leaning precariously into the hole. He wouldn’t be able to support her weight at this angle, even if she did manage to grab onto him. He heard Zane and Tucker somewhere just behind him, and asked one of them to grab his legs and help pull him up.

Five more minutes until we’re attacked…

He had no idea how to fight against anything with magic, and didn’t think that the Growing and Shrinking spells would be of much use right now.

That’s all I need, to make my enemy bigger.

“I would kiss Lorn in exchange for a stupid rope right now,” he fumed, pacing back and forth. Zane gave him a strange look, and at first Hayden thought it was because of the joke about Lorn, but then he said, “Uh…I should be able to conjure a rope…”