David Wells - Cursed Bones

Alexander vanished from sight and found Hazel. As predicted, she was trying to flee the keep rather than face Isabel and Hector again. When she reached the cave-in and started cursing, Alexander projected just his voice, just his laughter into the room, moving it past her as if he were walking behind her.

She spun, looking around frantically. “Show yourself!”

“There’s no way out,” he whispered tauntingly, almost imperceptibly.

She turned toward the voice and found nothing. Clearly agitated, she hastily returned to the staircase and started down, moving cautiously as if she expected the walls themselves to reach out and grab her.

Satisfied with the fear in her colors, Alexander returned to Isabel, reappearing when she woke. She was groggy at first, taking a few minutes to fully recover from the sleeping powder.

“Hazel’s coming back down the spiral staircase.”

“We should set a trap in the black-and-white room,” Isabel said.

“I can distract her when she enters, so you and Hector can subdue her,” Alexander said, “but you don’t have much time to get into position.”

They moved quickly, carefully taking positions on either side of the door to the staircase in the black-and-white room. Isabel prepared a pinch of sleeping powder and they waited … and waited.

“It’s been too long,” Isabel said.

Alexander appeared, nodding. “I’ll go find her,” he said, vanishing again.

Several moments later, he returned. “She went into the level above. Maybe she knows another way out.”

“All right, let’s go find her,” Isabel said, heading up the staircase.

She stopped at the threshold. They had bypassed this level on their way down into the heart of Siavrax Karth’s laboratory, but now there was a single set of footprints moving off into the dark hallway. Isabel motioned for Hector to take the lead. Alexander provided light, revealing a long straight passage almost twenty feet wide with ten foot ceilings. Thirty feet into the hallway, they came to two doorways, one on each side, both open with the remains of their doors long since rotted away.

Isabel motioned to the one on the right and they slipped inside, Hector in the lead.

“Looks like living quarters,” he said.

“Alexander, can you tell us where Hazel went?”

The ball of light bobbled and vanished, returning several moments later.

“The corridor leads to a big room that was probably a dining hall,” Alexander’s disembodied voice said. “Past that is another corridor just like this one. She’s about halfway down that hall, heading for the stairs on the other end.”

They raced toward the dining hall, stopping briefly at the entrance to let Ayela catch up. When they reached the far side of the large room, Isabel heard voices coming from the hallway ahead. She motioned for silence and Alexander vanished, plunging them into darkness.

Each peering around a side of the doorframe, Isabel and Hector saw Hazel stopped near the end of the hallway, frozen in place, the sound of footsteps coming down the staircase on the far end. She acted just a moment too late, running for one of the rooms lining the hall but not before one of Trajan’s men reached the landing and saw her.

“Stop!”

She was trapped. Almost a dozen soldiers poured into the hallway, followed by Trajan and the two Sin’Rath witches.

“Princess Ayela fled into that room,” the soldier reported.

“Take her alive,” one of the witches said.

“Thank you, Mistress,” Trajan said, motioning for his men to approach the door. Four men entered. Sounds of a struggle filtered down the hallway and then two men dragged Hazel back into the hallway, unconscious and limp as a rag doll.

“Change of plans,” Isabel whispered, slipping away from the door and motioning for them to follow.

Once through the dining hall, Hector and Ayela stopped.

In the darkness, Isabel couldn’t see their expressions but she could almost feel the intensity of their emotions.

“I will have my vengeance,” Hector whispered intently.

“And I need my body back,” Ayela said.

“I agree on both counts, but we can’t take them. If we try, they’ll kill us.”

“So … what then?” Hector said.

“We go after the bones. Once we have them, the witches will be powerless and the soldiers will see them for what they really are. Trajan’s men will probably kill them for us.”

“Very well,” Hector said, emotion draining from his voice.

They retraced their steps through the dark, feeling their way along the wall and trying to remain silent. Dim light flickered in the distance and the sounds of soldiers’ boots reverberated softly off the walls of the corridor. Reaching the staircase, Isabel looked back to see an orb of unnatural green light streaking toward her. She didn’t hesitate, racing into the staircase, urging Ayela to move faster into the darkness. Echoes of boots running on stone chased them back down into the heart of the mountain.

Alexander returned as an orb of light, providing illumination. Reaching the black-and-white room, Isabel stopped, looking around at the ten remaining doorways leading from the room.

“Which way?”

Alexander appeared and pointed to the wall just to the left of the staircase entrance. “There’s a corridor behind that wall. I think it’s down there, but I can’t be sure. When I get close to the door at the other end of that corridor, I suddenly find myself back in my body on Tyr.”

“That complicates things,” Isabel said. “What’s down the rest of these passages?”

“Mostly old workrooms.”

“Any of them have tools?”

“That one,” Alexander said, pointing to a passage across from the staircase entrance. “It looks like it used to be a smithy.”

“Good enough,” Isabel said, heading for the passage and sprinkling a pinch of concealment dust after they’d passed the threshold. They moved cautiously by the soft, eerie glow cast by the jar of luminescent lichen Isabel had taken from Hazel’s workroom. The corridor ran for a hundred feet before reaching several flights of stairs leading deeper under the mountain. It opened into a large room, cold and dark. Alexander appeared again as a ball of light, revealing dozens of workstations lining the walls of the room. Each included a forge, anvil, and an assortment of tools, many of which were rusted to the point of uselessness.

Isabel was beginning to think they wouldn’t find anything they could use until she came to the workstation at the far end of the room. It was larger and more elaborate than the rest, flanked by two heavy stone tables, each cluttered with an assortment of old tools. Resting on the large anvil were two hammers, both rust-free and sturdy. One was a single-handed tool while the other was a heavy sledge hammer.

“Those are enchanted,” Alexander’s disembodied voice said.

“Good, maybe they’ll be enough to break through the wall,” Isabel said. “Any idea what they do?”

“No clue.”

Isabel picked up the smaller of the two. It was lighter than she expected, far lighter than it should have been. Frowning, she brought it down on the corner of one of the stone tables. As the blow fell, the weight of the hammer increased markedly, striking the table with tremendous force, breaking a chunk off the corner and sending it bouncing across the floor.

“These will do nicely,” she said, handing the larger of the two to Hector.

“Now we just have to break through the wall without the Sin’Rath hearing us,” Hector said.

“Not much chance of that,” Isabel said. “I’m hoping they followed our tracks into the menagerie, but I suspect they left a man or two behind in the black-and-white room so we’ll have to be careful.”