Cave of Nightmares (20 page)

The others whirled around to look at him.

“I thought you said you couldn’t do anything with conjury!” Tucker exclaimed.

“I said I couldn’t translocate her…I never thought about trying to bring a rope into the arena…”
Zane looked embarrassed, and Tucker threw his hands into the air in frustration.

“It’s fine, there’s no time for
blame right now. Just get to it,” Hayden insisted, and Zane began looking around for a flat surface to draw on.

Tucker found a large stone nearby and waved
one of his wands at it, shearing it cleanly in half so that Zane could draw on it. The wand Tucker used was shortened by half from that one spell.

Hayden could tell that
Zane would have liked to draw his circle much larger, but was constrained by the space allowed by the rock. He was trying to be very precise with his line-placement and stopped to sharpen the edge of his chalk at one point as he began cross-hatching.

Three more minutes…

Zane placed his hand in the circle and pulled a rope upwards, seemingly from inside the rock itself. Thankfully he conjured a long piece, at least twenty-feet in length, and they hastened to tie it around a tree trunk while Tess climbed up the other end, bracing her feet against the wall of dirt to manage it.

She looke
d extremely relieved to be free and said, “Thanks for not leaving me.”

“We’re a team. Come on, let’s go.”
Hayden continued north along their original trajectory, trying to hurry and at the same time trying to watch for more hidden traps, but either the way was clear or they got lucky after that.

He was so excited to reach the edge of the forest that he didn’t immediately notice that the timer hit fifteen minutes until he heard an eerie howl from
somewhere behind them. An owl was perched in a nearby tree, and Hayden thought it was giving him an amused glance, like it wanted to see what would happen next.

“Oh crud…”
Zane muttered, and the four of them broke into a sprint, hurrying across a wide expanse of grass towards a sparkling lake that had no visible crossing. His heart leapt as he saw the trigger on a pedestal, just up a hill on the other side of the water. The red crystal (commonly called a trigger) would signal the end of their challenge and cue the mastery-level students to summon them back out of the arena.

Whatever was chasing them w
as running much faster than they were, and they came to a stop at the edge of the lake as they faced their next set of challenges.

“We could swim across…” Tess suggested.

“There are bound to be monsters in the lake. No way are they just testing our swimming skills,” Tucker panted, out of breath.

“I don’t suppose anyone can build a bridge…?” Hayden asked hopelessly, already knowing the answer.

A large, mangy wolf darted out of the forest just then, eyes fixed on them as it charged forward.

“Oh please don’t let that be a real wolf…please just
be a construct…” Zane was chanting under his breath, looking around frantically for inspiration on how to fight off a wild animal.

Tucker drew his wand—the one that had been shortened considerably when he sliced the rock for
Zane—and cursed.

“Damn, it’s n
ot long enough for me to cast a Freezing spell with.”

The wolf was
almost upon them, and Hayden spun the prism in his eyepiece, hoping for anything that would save them, but Tess beat him to it by withdrawing a pouch of powder and throwing the entire thing into the wolf’s face just as it lunged at her.

The animal seemed to go rigid in mid-air, though it continued along its original trajectory and crashed into Tess with a thud, knocking her to the ground. She rolled out from under it
and got back to her feet, staggering backwards so that her heels were touching the edge of the lake.

“What did you do?”
Zane asked, impressed.

“I used a s
topping tincture, but it won’t hold for more than a few minutes and that was all I had of it,” she said nervously.

Hayden turned back to the lake.

“We’re going to have to swim. We don’t have magic for anything better, and if there are monsters inside, well, we’ve got monsters out here too. Nothing to do but go forward and hope the Masters won’t let us die in here.”

The others nodded, looking scared but determined, and the four of them descended into the lake.

The water was pleasantly warm, which was a surprise, since Hayden had been expecting something like the freezing bog.
At least it doesn’t smell like armpits.

He had hardly moved three feet into the water before the groun
d dropped away beneath his feet and he was forced to swim, trying not to think about how deep this lake might be or what was waiting at the bottom of it.

Just as l
ong as there are no hydras in here…

Zane
was a faster swimmer than him and passed him almost immediately, soon followed by Tess and then Tucker. Hayden had never been a particularly strong swimmer, and suddenly wished that he hadn’t fought his mother so much when she insisted on teaching him as a child.

His arms
and legs were aching by the time he was halfway across the lake, the others far ahead of him. Just as he was beginning to think they would make it across without being attacked, Tucker cried out from ahead of him and then ducked under the surface of the water. Hayden swam as hard as he could to catch up, ignoring his aching extremities, and Zane—who was closest to the opposite shore—was turning around to go back out into the lake.

Before either of them could reach th
e place where Tucker went under, they saw a flash of bright light beneath the surface and Tucker re-emerged, shaking the water from his eyes.

“That serpent was bi
g enough to eat Tamon’s boa constrictor,” he shuddered, continuing to swim. “Keep going!” he called out to Zane, who immediately turned back around. “We don’t need the rest of us getting caught out here too!”

Hayden was uncomfortably aware of the timer in front of them, which had passed the sixteenth and seventeenth minute
by now. On the shore that Zane was swimming to, between them and the crystal, a jackal was pacing back and forth as though waiting for them.

There should be another monster though…two extra minutes have passed…

Just as he had that thought, he felt something clamp down around his left leg. Knowing what to expect, he took a deep breath just before it yanked him beneath the surface, not even giving him time to cry out and alert his teammates.

He opened his eyes as he sped downwards, nearly screaming when he saw the double-headed hydra that had its jaws (one set of them) clamped around his leg. He wished he hadn’t looked, because the sight of the four-meter monster
with legs thicker than his body was nearly enough to make him pass out from fear.

He drew his birch wand in the desperate hope of shrinking the hydra to a manageable size, but its tail whipped past him and knocked the wand from his hand, where it drifted uselessly away
in the water. His ears were popping like crazy, the water pressure making his head and throat feel like they were being squeezed inwards. He was relieved when the hydra stopped pulling him downwards before his head imploded.

Hayden
was deep enough underwater that even though he could see through his prism, the lights were too muted and scattered to do any good. He still spun it around in his eyepiece while looking up towards the surface, praying for some divine inspiration before the ache in his lungs overwhelmed him and he drowned. There was only one array that seemed intact in the dimness of the water, and without knowing what he hoped to accomplish with it, he thought,
LIGHT!
as hard as he could.

It was like the sun had suddenly risen underwater. Light burst from the prism in all directions, startling even the hydra, which stopped
and turned both of its heads away from the source, shrieking in alarm. This forced it to release Hayden from its clutches as well, but he was much too far from the surface of the water to make it out. His lungs were heaving behind his closed mouth, desperate for air.

I’ll never be able to swim that hard without breathing
…

He wondered what would happen if he died in an arena…would he stay
dead? Surely the Masters wouldn’t allow students to die here…but then again, no one would really miss the hated son of Aleric Frost. They could say it was an accident and no one would question it. Everyone who used to love him was dead.

He unscrewed th
e clear prism from his eyepiece and it continued to emit light as it was slowly consumed by the magic. Since there was no harm in looking at his amber prism before he died (because he had never tried to use it before), he removed it from his belt and held it in front of his right eye. He moved the clear prism behind it so that he had sufficient light to see through the amber one, and exhaled his remaining air in shock from what was there.

It was the most magnificent thing he’d ever seen. Looking through both prisms at once made such a startling, complex series of lights and patterns that his mind couldn’t even begin to process them all. He felt like he was looking at the true power of the world, like the mask of nature had been stripped away and he was staring right into its soul. It was almost worth dying for this.

As the last of the air left his lungs and he prepared to reflexively inhale, an array of blue-green-violet-green caught his eye, and without giving it any consideration he thought,
AIR!

The water around him exploded like a bomb. Both prisms vanished in an instant as water blasted away from him in every direction, like he was
suddenly repellent to it. He fell about two feet to the bottom of the lake and landed on the silty floor, gasping in fresh air as he looked around in awe. He could see the sky above him as the water rose up all around the edges of the lake like a giant transparent wall, or a bubble. Fish were flopping about on the ground near him, and Hayden took off running for the shore, because the water was already beginning to trickle in behind him as the prisms’ full powers were consumed.

He saw Tucker way ahead of him, just at the edge of the lake, staring around in awe.

“GO! It won’t hold!” Hayden shouted as he raced towards him, and Tucker shook off his stupor and flung himself through the layer of water and to the other side. Hayden could hear the rush of water behind him as he dove towards the wall and rolled onto dry, solid ground. The entire lake seemed to collapse right behind him as the water settled back into place without a ripple, as though nothing extraordinary had happened.

“What was that all about?!”
Zane shook him, helping him to his feet. Hayden noticed that his roommate had a scratch on his cheek that was dripping blood, but otherwise seemed fine.

He must have fought the jackal…

Hayden was too exhausted to answer, and the sight of two more jackals racing towards them from the east was enough to chivvy them into action.

“Get to the crystal!” Tucker raced up the
steep grassy hill in front of them without looking back. They could see the red crystal hovering in mid-air, tauntingly near.

Hayden clutched a stitch in his side and followed, though
Zane was half-carrying him by the time they crested the top of the hill, because Hayden was wheezing from all the strain to his lungs. Tess and Tucker already had their hands pressed against the red crystal and Hayden stumbled towards them, trying his hardest not to collapse as the jackals charged up the hill behind them. He had barely grazed the trigger when Zane shouted, “OUT!” and the world began to blur.

He had never been so happy to leave a place, including the orphanage, and fell to his knees the moment they were back in the circle of lights overlooking the Gawain Sea. For a full minute he just lay there in the grass, waiting for his head to stop spinning and registering that he was no longer soaking wet. When he opened his eyes he saw that Zane no longer had the bleeding scrape across his cheek either.

The six mastery-level students w
ho translocated them were standing right where they left them, looking bored.

“The Masters have aske
d to see you in classroom three,” one of them informed their group. “Hurry up; they don’t like to be kept waiting.”

Hayden stood up,
mostly-recovered from the effects of the arena, though his lungs still hurt and he was bone-tired. The four of them began to walk down the winding path that led back to the school in the darkness.

“Wonder why the Masters want to see us,”
Zane was the first to speak after several minutes of silence.

“It’s not
uncommon. Sometimes if they aren’t sure how to score us yet, or if they want to comment on our technique and how we could improve, they’ll call us in to talk about it,” Tucker explained.

“Maybe they just like to talk to everyone after the first arena challenge,” Tess offered optimistically.

“They’re probably going to grill us for taking twenty minutes to get through it all,” Zane frowned. “Though really, I think we did pretty well since it was our first go at an arena and we were being chased by jackals.”