David Baldacci - The Keeper

He croaked, “The chain of Destin ’tis indeed.”

And then he stamped the floor with his cudgel once more and I fell hard to the rock. I lay there breathless. I glanced over at Delph. His mouth was still open, but his eyes were looking not at me but at a spot on the floor. I looked there.

You idiot. Your wand!

I snagged it, pointed it directly at the creature and cried out, “ Impacto! ”

He instantly swept his cudgel across the air and my spell hit an invisible barrier. The collision caused dust and rock to fall from the ceiling of the tunnel.

Although he’d blocked my incantation, the creature was now regarding me in a new light, it seemed to me.

“You are a sorceress,” he hissed.

I rose to my feet. “I know I am. What the Hel are you?”

He said nothing, but continued to watch me.

“Release my friends. Now!” I raised my wand threateningly.

“I will see you again, certe ,” he said.

“What does that mean, certe ?” I asked.

In answer he pointed to the walls where the eyes blinked and the mouths opened. He opened his own mouth in a gruesome smile and I saw his teeth. They were black like his eyes. He hissed, “All come to me in the end. Certe .”

He stamped the cudgel against the rock floor a third time, and I braced myself for another attack. But he simply pointed again to the wall where the eyes and mouths were. And now I could hear them! They seemed to be pleading with me to save them. Their cries rose and rose until I had to put my hands over my ears.

He shouted out some word I had never heard and there was instant silence.

When he turned back to me, he opened his mouth wide and out came his tongue. Only it was not really a tongue, not like mine, in any case. It was long and black and had three arrow points at the end of it.

“I am Orco,” he said. “These are my offspring. And I will see you again, the timing of which remains with you, for now. But not always so. Something will intervene.” He smiled maliciously. “It always does.”

With his free hand he reached inside his coal-black coat and pulled out an enormous timekeeper on a rusted chain. He held it up so I could see. Across the glass of the timekeeper, faces were swirling like shooting stars traversing the heavens. They came and went with astonishing speed, too fast to count, almost too fast to see at all.

Orco intoned, “Life. And then death. Certe. ”

Everything went black again. I felt propelled upward. At last, I hit something hard and lay still. When I opened my eyes, there was Harry Two.

I sat up and hugged him. Then I slowly rose and staggered over to where Delph lay on top of the grave of his ancestor Barnabas Delphia.

“Delph! Delph!”

I gripped his shoulder and pulled him up. He came around and looked at me.

“D-did... did that just really h-happen?” he asked in a disbelieving voice.

I nodded, my breaths coming in bunches.

“It... it was horrible, Vega Jane. Them faces. Pleading-like.”

“They were dead, Delph,” I said quietly.

“But what did that thing want with us?”

“Astrea said that escape from this place means imprisonment forever. I wonder if she meant down there, on that wall?”

“So we’ll end up there? No matter what we do?”

I couldn’t believe that Astrea would have trained me up just so I would end up stuck on a wall by that evil creature.

I straightened and looked out ahead of us. “The First Circle,” I said.

It was our only chance.

It did not take us long to reach it.

The battlement of bones, I instantly termed it, harkening back to the description Astrea had used.

It was so tall that I could not honestly see to the top of the walls. It just appeared out of the gloom like a malignant giant blocking our path. Every last inch of it was built from bones of all sorts, taken from things once living.

“I think... I think some of ’em are like us, Vega Jane. The bones, I mean.”

I nodded but said nothing. It was too horrible to even think about.

Delph saw it before I did. I don’t know if I expected some grand entrance, but the doorway was barely bigger than the one I had at my old home in Wormwood. It was battered planks with blackened hinges and a rusted, twisted iron handle for a latch.

We approached it stealthily because that just seemed the natural thing to do here. When we reached it, we stopped and looked at each other.

Delph reached out and opened the latch.

The door swung inward, revealing, if it was possible, even greater darkness within. Taking the same tack I had underneath the graves, I stepped quickly through. Delph and Harry Two immediately followed. As soon as we were inside, the door slammed shut. And I doubted that any spell I cast would reopen it. From this point we could only go forward, not back.

We were inside the First Circle. We were inside the perfect maze.

I looked ahead of us and suddenly the place was awash in light. The walls in here were exactly like the ones out there: bones. From every nook and cranny, skulls with empty eye sockets stared back at us.

The corridor turned sharply to the right about ten feet down. We walked ahead a bit, turned that way and were immediately confronted by eight different passages bleeding off the one we were on.

I held up my wand and was about to say the Confuso, recuso spell to straighten out the maze.

I never got the chance.

The battlement of bones changed suddenly. The skulls became long vines that shot out and ensnared me, ripping my wand from my hand. I tried to call out, but a vine wrapped around my mouth. I looked over in terror to see Delph being lifted into the air like a small child, the vines pinning his arms and legs together.

Then I saw something flash past me.

It was Harry Two! My canine was dodging and leaping over the vines that clutched at him. When a vine grabbed his hind leg, he turned and bit it in half with one chomp of his strong jaws and razor-sharp teeth. Try as they might, the vines could not capture my canine. I wondered for a moment where he was going, until I saw him returning with the thing clamped between his teeth.

My wand!

He raced toward me and leapt between two vines, which shot out to intercept him.

My hands were bound by vines, but my fingers were still free. Harry Two reached my outstretched right hand and my fingers closed around my wand.

But my mouth was still covered by a vine and another had encircled my neck and was squeezing the life literally out of me. My mind felt dark and dizzy as my chest started to heave with the effort of staying inflated.

I could not cast a spell without saying it. I didn’t know what to do. I closed my eyes and felt the wand begin to slip between my fingers.

I opened my eyes when I heard him.

Delph was looking up at me even as a large vine encircled his body and started to tighten.

“Your wand,” he cried out. “The Elemental!”

The Elemental.

I willed the Elemental to full size and though my arm was still bound tightly so I could not throw it hard, it didn’t matter. I had known for some time that I controlled the Elemental with my mind, not the strength of my arm.

Do it, save us.

The Elemental blasted off from my hand and hurtled down the passage. As it did so, the power of its mighty wake tore apart the vines holding us, throwing huge chunks of them against other vines, which in turn were smashed by the weight of these projectiles.

Freed from the grip of the ravaged vines, Delph and I plummeted toward the ground. I was ready, though, because I doubted we would get a second chance. The Elemental had turned and was racing back to me, and I caught it before I hit the ground. I willed it to its normal size, made a slashing motion with my wand at the towers of vines and shouted, “ Withero .”