Cave of Nightmares (26 page)

“No, it’s okay,
” Hayden gasped in relief. “They just banned me from taking Powders ever again, which was actually the best thing that could have possibly happened.” He was almost giddy with happiness at the thought of never returning to Master Sark’s classroom again.

“Really?!”
Conner looked impressed. “You must be the first person ever to get dropped from a class before the first year was over. Usually they force you to stick it out so you have at least a basic knowledge in the subject before they’ll let you give up.”

Hayden shrugged. “Apparently I’m a menace.”

Speaking of menaces…
he looked around the room. “Where’s Bonk?”

The dragon must have recognized his name, because he popped his head up from under the covers on Hayden’s bed, his pointy little ears perked up w
ith interest. Hayden immediately relaxed.

“Oh
good, I was terrified that he would get poisoned while the rest of us were evacuating.” He pressed his hands to his temples, wishing he could will his headache away because it was making him nauseous.

“Does your head hurt?” Tess asked gently, and Hayden was barely able to suppress a sarcastic response.

“Yes,” he answered tersely, sitting down on the edge of Zane’s bed because it was closest.

“Have you taken anything for it yet?”

“No, I’ve been a bit preoccupied,” he grumbled, though Tess didn’t look upset by his rudeness.

“Well, I’ve got some calming e
lixir if you want a few drops…it should help relax all your muscles.” She offered him a small phial from her belt, which Hayden recognized from his first few weeks in Master Kilgore’s class.

“Thanks,” he accepted it gratefully, holding the dropper over his mouth and letting three drops touch his tongue before stoppering it. He felt the effects almost immediately, all of his muscles relaxing and his heart rate slowing down
to normal. It made him comfortably drowsy, but he didn’t mind because his headache was improving rapidly.

“Thanks again,” he told her with much more sincerity, handing the phial back to her. “By the way, what are you doing in our room tonight?”

Tess blushed in embarrassment, and it was Zane who answered him.

“She found something interesting and wanted to show us, but you weren’t back yet
, so me and Conner were just talking about it with her.”

Hayden raised an eyebrow curiously.

“Oh? What did you find?”

“Well…” Tess began, her cheeks still rosy, “I was just thinking that it was strange that Master Sark has hated you so much from the day you started here, and I wanted to see if I could figure out why.”

Hayden snorted.

“Probably because I’m related to Aleric Frost, the same reason everyone else in the world hates me when they meet me.” He
yawned sleepily despite the early hour. “Besides, he wasn’t really mean to me until I started failing his class the first day.”

“Well, yes, that’s what I thought too…” Tess explained softly, staring at Hayden like she wondered if he was about to bring up the first tragic meeting with her father on the front lawns during family day. “So I gave up trying to figure it out, but then I
noticed something when I was doing homework the other day and it made me think there might be more to the story…”

“Oh?” Hayden perked
up, sincerely interested in figuring out why Master Sark hated him so much.

“Here, take a look.” She picked up the book she’d dropped when he entered the roo
m, and Hayden saw that it was the level-three textbook for Powders.

“Uh, I’m actually not so good at reading books on powders…” he was tempted to ask if she had missed the evacuation of the school earlier that day.

“No, you don’t have to read all of it…just look here.” She sat down on his other side and began flipping through to the center of the book, apparently looking for a specific recipe. “We’re beginning to study complex bases and ultra-fine grinds, and we started with a fairly recent discovery called the Law of Transversion…”

Hayden had absolutely no idea why she was explaining this to him, though she finally seemed to have found the page she was looking for.

“Here, look at this. It’s one of the fundamental laws of complex bases now, but like I said, it was only developed fourteen years ago.”

She passed Hayden the book and he looked down at the page in front of him. As promised, the writing at the top said it was about the Law of
Transversion, followed by several lengthy pages of writing that didn’t make an ounce of sense to him.

“I still don’t
get why you’re showing me this,” he admitted, glancing at Zane and Conner, who for some reason looked unusually serious.

“Hayden,
read
it
,” the former sounded exasperated. “Read it from the top.”

Beginning to think his friends had all lost their minds, Hayden did as he was told and looked over the chapter heading yet again. Then he saw what was
so important about this section, and his insides went glacial as the shock went through him. Right there, underneath the chapter heading, were the mages who were credited with the discovery, just like in every other chapter of every other textbook he owned. He had never paid the sources a bit of attention before, because they were faceless, ancient mages who he would never know or meet, and all had nicknames like Ingrid the Intelligent and Alastor the Awesome.

But there, right in front of his eyes, was something he absolutely could not get his mind around even as he stared at the proof:

Chapter 9 – Formation of Complex Bases

Section 1: Law of
Transversion

K. Sark, A. Frost

Hayden looked around at the others, feeling the blood drain from his face. Three expressions of equal shock were reflected back at him.

12

A Maze of Memory

Master Sark must have done research with my father.

A full week had elapsed since Tess showed him her Powders textbook, but the strange thought still came to Hayden at random moments throughout the day, despite the fact that the four of them had discussed the subject at length since then.

He supposed he shouldn’t be surprised that any of the Masters knew his father before he became evil, especially since Sark wasn’t the Powders Master at the time of publication, which suggested that he was likely still in school as a research student himself. Truthfully, Hayden was more surprised that a blood relative of his was good at Powders than he was that Sark used to be friends with him.

Tonight he had to push it to the back of his mind, because they had another challenge arena to look forward to after dinner
, and he needed to mentally run through all the different spells he had in his repertoire so he wouldn’t forget them all in a moment of panic.

He sat with his team that night for dinner
instead of the usual crew, trading last bits of advice and speculating as to where they would end up this time.

“Maybe they’ll send us to a replica of the Fields of
Hynar,” Tucker suggested. “Frank said they got sent there last time, and apart from all the poisonous snakes it wasn’t so bad.”

Hayden suppressed a shudder at the thought of being sent to a field of snakes larger and more poisonous than
Tamon’s boa constrictor.

“But the Master
s don’t like to send us to places that other people in our year have been to, or else we can compare notes and go in with an unfair advantage,” Tess pointed out.

“Yeah, that’s true,
” Tucker sighed. “Still, we might get lucky.”

Hayden privately agreed with Tess and was sure that the Masters would be very careful not to give anyone an unfair advantage in the arenas, if only because he was pretty sure the Masters loved watching their students struggle and panic.

“It’s lucky that Bonk shed a few scales the other day, or I wouldn’t have been able to fill up my stocks of Endurance,” Tess opined happily, patting the little phials on her belt.

“Yeah, he picked a good day for it.” Hayden agreed, glad that at least one of them was advanced enough in Elixirs to know how to use them.
She had just enough scales for two phials of Endurance, and had given one of them to him as a favor for providing the materials, though it was Bonk who shed the scales.

“Knowing the Masters, now that we’ve got combat elixirs on hand they’ll send us som
ewhere where we don’t need them,” Zane grimaced. “With our luck they’ll make us purify a poisoned well or something.”

“I thought the challenge arenas were
always
supposed to involve combat,” Hayden frowned.

“
Not necessarily,” Tucker explained. “I mean, they’re supposed to be training us for the real world, and in real life we’re going to be called on to do things like purify contaminated water supplies and things instead of fighting monsters…though there’s a fair bit of that going on these days too.” He looked displeased by the thought. Everyone knew that there were an unusual number of monsters roaming the Nine Lands in recent years, more than could be controlled with the existing number of mages.

“I think they usually just focus on combat in the arenas because that’s when we’re most likely to panic
, and they want us to be used to it before we face the real thing,” Zane added.

“Yeah, the population of dangerous creatures has been booming these last few years, and the last thing we need are more mages getting sla
ughtered left and right by them,” Tucker concluded, scraping up the last bits of macaroni with his fork.

“
Well, look on the bright side…we’ll all be rich when we graduate school and become professional monster-slayers,” Zane grinned, stacking his empty plates in the center of the table. “Come on, we’d better get down there or we’ll be late. Mira said the last time her group showed up late for a challenge the Masters loosed rabid marmosets into the arena as a punishment.”

The four of them left the dining hall together, and a few people wished them luck as they walked past the other table
s, though Oliver and Jasper suggested they do the world a favor and die horribly. The Masters had left the room several minutes earlier, presumably to get comfortable so they could watch the challenge from wherever they preferred.

Darkness hadn’t fallen
yet, and they could see the circle of dotted lights on the ridge overlooking the Gawain Sea long before their approach. Six mastery-level students were waiting for them, already standing in their positions with their right hands pressed against the stone pillars beside them. The students in charge of translocating them weren’t always the same, and Hayden had learned that they had a rotating schedule that counted towards their required work hours for whichever Master they reported to.

He sometimes wondered if he would be here in five or six years, apprenticed to Master Asher, helping him research new and exciting things to do with prisms
when he wasn’t translocating younger students to challenge arenas. When he mentioned it once to Zane, his roommate told him that the Prism Master hadn’t taken on a research assistant since he’d begun teaching five years ago.

But maybe I’m the first natural prism he’s taught since then…

He shook the thought from his mind as they grouped up in the middle of the translocation circle and prepared to depart.

At first
, the effect of being moved from the real world into a fictitious plane constructed by the Masters felt strange to him, but he was getting used to the way the worlds seemed to blur together like melting candle wax. That was apparently how you could tell if you were being sent to a real location or a fake one, because being transported to a real place didn’t make the world blur.

He blinked hard several times and the arena-world righted itself.

The first thing he noticed was that he was standing in the middle of a field just outside of a maze. The grass was ten feet tall all around him except for a narrow corridor straight ahead, and when he tried pushing the grass out of the way to look around he found it dense and unyielding.

Someone has got to come out here with a lawn cutter…

The second thing he noticed was that he was completely alone.

Hayden experienced
a moment of panic, wondering if he had been sent to the wrong place and whether the other three were standing around somewhere trying to figure out where their prism-wielder was. This was the first time he had ever been in a challenge arena without his teammates by his side. Then he saw the envelope lying at his feet and exhaled in relief.

If the instructions are here
then I’m not in the wrong place.

The Masters must be trying to keep them on their toes by giving them a new hurdle to overcome every time, though the loss of his teammates hardly seemed fair. What if he needed a skill he didn’t possess to move onwards?

With that unpleasant thought he opened the envelope carefully and read the letter inside. It was very short:

Get to the center of the maze.

Thinking that they might as well have skipped the instructions altogether if that was all they were going to give him, he tossed the paper to the ground and hurried inside.

He removed the clear
prism from his belt and twisted it into his eyepiece as he went, drawing his cherry wand and holding it at combat height in case he ran into anything unexpected. By the time he came to a fork in the maze, the entrance had closed behind him and he could see nothing but tall grass in every direction except the available paths.

Feeling slightly claustrophobic, he turned left and continued on
, his footsteps crunching on the dry dirt. He considered trying to cast a spell to determine which direction he was moving in, but since he had no idea how the maze was oriented or which way the center was, he didn’t think it would do him any good and would just waste his limited materials.

After ten more minutes
he was beginning to get an idea of just how enormous the maze truly was. He was nearly running now, having taken twelve different turns and still not come to the end of it, though he slowed down after narrowly missing a bear-trap hidden directly in his path.

Obstacles came more
frequently after that, which he hoped was a sign that he was nearing the center. Typically their challenges didn’t take longer than half an hour to complete, and he had been in here for at least fifteen minutes already. It was eerie being inside the maze, because for some reason not even sound seemed to penetrate the dense grass all around him, and the silence made him very edgy.

He dodged another bear-trap and
used his wand to blast through a barb-covered climbing wall in front of him. He waited for the dust to settle and continued on carefully, ducking down as he approached a solid outcropping of rock that seemed to appear out of nowhere. There was room for him to go under it, but only if he crawled, holding his wand between his teeth like a dog with a bone in case he needed to grab it in a hurry.

He had no idea how long he crawled under the rock, but began to panic when it narrowed even further and he was forced to lie down on his
stomach and pull himself along with his arms. If the way got any narrower he would have to go back the way he came and try a different path.

Fortunately
the ground began to soften beneath him as he continued onward, eventually turning from mud to water and dropping out from beneath him entirely.

Of course, there’s always a water trap for me to get eaten in.

He was beginning to get used to the prospect of being ripped apart by hydras so it barely bothered him anymore, which he supposed was the entire point of the challenge arenas in the first place.

The rocky ceiling dead-ended in front of him, and he knew he was going to have to go
completely underwater to continue forward. He fumbled around his belt beneath the surface, extracting three phials as he tread water and examining them until he found the one he wanted.

Ha, I’ve got the chance to use Endurance after all.

He was doubly glad that Tess had thought to make this with Bonk’s shed scales and give him some. He downed the contents in one gulp and slipped the phial back into its place along his belt, blinking several times as an amazing feeling settled over him. He felt like he could run up a mountain wearing lead weights around his ankles and not even break a sweat, like he was the most physically-fit person on the entire planet.

Hayden took a deep breath and submerged his head in the water, opening his eyes and looking around. The good news was that he didn’t see any hydras lurking nearby, waiting to drown him. The bad news was that there were about twenty sharks circling him
instead.

Even though there were a lot of them, they were still far away. The underwater portion of the maze looked nearly as large as the above-ground part had been.
Holding his wand in one hand, he swam towards the wall of circling sharks in the distance, wondering how long his Endurance Elixir would hold out. Right now he felt like he could swim for an hour before he needed to draw breath, but that would only hold until the effects wore off and then he would be in danger of drowning.

It took him about ten minutes to close the distance between himself and the sharks ahead of him, which meant that they were a lot larger than he’d originally thought
(and that he was still a slow swimmer). They began to take notice of him as he approached, two of the massive beasts breaking away from the group and turning towards him, their mouths gaping open so that he could see the rows of sharp teeth inside.

Those things must be twenty feet long…

Hayden waved his wand and thought,
Repel!
but nothing happened except that more sharks turned towards him.

It must not work on living creatures…

He was still trying to get the hang of which spells worked on inanimate objects and which could be used on living things, and mentally cursed as he shoved his wand back into his belt and instead pulled out another elixir.

The sharks were about six feet in front of him and there was no time to second-guess
himself. Hayden opened the phial and emptied the contents into the water in front of him, looking at them through the almost non-existent light of his clear prism.

Light
, he commanded mentally, and the prism was instantly illuminated, showing him its typical arrays. He immediately followed that with a wave of his cherry wand and thought,
Obscure
, and the contents of the phial enshrouded him like a dense cloud that seemed to confuse the sharks. They swam around him to avoid passing through the strange pink cloud of water, and Hayden continued swimming forward with it hanging around him, slowing down only long enough to remove the clear prism from his eye and put the amber one in its place.