Michael Mathias - The Wizard and the Warlord

“What keeps it from dripping out?” Jicks asked.

“Wow,” Phen exclaimed when he saw the phenomena. “Look, Hyden!”

Hyden saw it, too. As curious as he was about it, though, he was even more intrigued by the strange symbol grooved into the room’s floor. It was eerily familiar, and since the only symbols carved into a floor he’d ever seen were gateways into the hells, it alarmed him.

“Please,” Cade urged softly. “Everyone get your bodies, and the animals, completely inside the outer ring of the mark on the floor. We wouldn’t want to leave any part of you behind.” The giant chuckled at this.

No one else laughed. It was clear that he hadn’t meant that he would leave an individual behind, only part of one.

“Sir Hyden, Lieutenant Welch,” Cade instructed. “You and the elves keep the horses calm. This process will alarm them.” He looked around in the air oddly. “Is the hawkling in?”

“He is,” Phen called, setting the bird from his wrist to his shoulder.

“Here we go, then.”

There was a sudden smell of ozone and the air filled with static. Half a heartbeat later a whomp shook them deep in their guts. Only a flash of darkness followed, and then the horses were nickering and braying in distress. Looking around, it seemed to all of them that nothing happened. Everyone looked confused. Phen appeared disappointed.

Hyden realized that something actually had occurred. Now standing in the archway of the corridor they had come down were four giant boys, looking like man-sized ten-year-olds. They were wearing identical uniforms of emerald green balloon-sleeved shirts, trimmed in the same sky-blue as Cade’s robe. They wore leather pants, probably elk hide, or some short-haired goat skin. Their boots were shin-high and they carried no weapons, or anything else for that matter. A movement came in the passageway behind them and a few of the questers suddenly realized that they weren’t where they were before. A deep breath told Hyden that the quality of the air had even changed, from thin and frigid to thick and steamy.

“That was interesting,” Lieutenant Welch said. “How far did we travel?”

Cade indicated that he heard the question and would explain shortly. First he gave them some instruction. “These pages will take the animals to a place where they can rest and graze. They will bring your things over to the guest quarters. Take anything you may need in the next few hours with you. We will be crossing the Cauldron. It’s slow going and visibility is poor.”

Cade then turned to Lieutenant Welch and spoke directly. “We have teleported from the Southern Ridgeway marker down to the Outer Moat marker. To answer your question, we have moved five miles as the crow flies, thus avoiding an estimated eighteen miles of hiking up and down the freezing rocks.”

“You have my most sincere appreciation,” Oarly said, before he started filling several flasks and bladder skins from another small keg he had cleverly hidden in one of the horse packs.

“It’s all right, Spike,” Phen was saying. The whoomp of teleporting had caused the lyna cat to puff up into a prickly ball in Phen’s shagmar coat pocket. If Phen’s skin hadn’t been petrified, he’d have probably been picking sharp quills out of his hand.

“Oh, come to me, Spike,” Telgra said, as if talking to a baby. “It’s going to be all right, little one.”

“Be careful,” both Corva and Phen said at the same time, causing them to share an awkward look. The princess paid neither of them any attention. At her gentle touch, Spike relaxed, and already she was toting him carefully away in her arms.

Dostin seemed terrified. He was clutching the thick oak staff he’d been carrying tightly in his hands. He looked ready to fight. Corva had to urge him along as Cade led them through a passageway almost like the first one they’d traversed. The only difference Hyden noticed was that the ornate sconces mounted between the ribs on the walls were made to resemble the cupped hand of some long-clawed creature. Flames leapt and danced up out of the palm. These were the tamer flames of some sort of oil lamp, instead of the harsh, smoky torches in the other corridor.

The passage opened onto another circular chamber, but this one was a crossroads of sorts. It had no upside-down pool of quicksilver, and no strange symbol etched into the floor.

The corridor they took continued on and eventually another crossed it. They went left, and after slowly sloping downward for what might have been a full hour, the humidity became intense. The air was steamy, almost cloudy. They ended up in a vast, naturally formed cavern that opened up onto a body of slow boiling water. Steam rose in clouds, making it impossible to sense the size of what was beyond. A large, well built barge, complete with a uniformed crew of capable-looking giants, was waiting to receive them.

“Welcome to the Cauldron,”said a man whose uniform wasn’t green, but black trimmed in emerald. Hyden figured him to be the captain of the barge. “You’re about to cross the moat of all moats.”

“If the castle rises up out of the steam cloud miles above us,” Hyden looked at Phen and Oarly, all three with eyes wild and full of wonder, “then the structure that lies between, hidden in the steam, must be grand indeed.”

“By Doon, a thousand, thousand dwarves could live in such a place.”

“I still can’t believe we were teleported,” Phen said to Hyden. “That’s a spell I have to learn.”

“How could you think about spells?” Hyden asked as they moved up the giant-sized gangplank to the barge’s deck. “We’re about to see… about to be inside a castle city that reaches up into the very heavens.”

“I am thinking about the castle, Hyden,” Phen said. “They had to use magic-probably teleportation spells-to get the upper reaches of such a place built. Just think of it.” It was clear Phen was calculating and estimating in his ever quizzical mind. Figuring out how such a construction had been erected would probably keep him thinking and imagining for days.

Talon leapt from Phen’s shoulder and glided to the deck rail at the front of the barge. Once he was settled he began preening himself. Telgra concentrated on scratching Spike behind the ears while Corva helped Dostin onto the boat. The lieutenant and his young men were gawking as much as the rest of them. They huddled close and spoke to themselves as the barge eased away from the cavern’s dock.

As they slid across the water out into the denser cloud of steam, it became a near white-out.

“How hot is the water?” Hyden asked Cade.

“Hot enough to boil the flesh off of your bones in just a moment,” he answered. “And that’s just at the surface. The frigid mountain air keeps the top of the cauldron relatively cool. Just a few dozen feet down and it would boil your bones to mush.”

“No serpents to worry about here, then,” said Oarly, stretching up on tiptoes to look over the rail, instead of ducking to look down under it.

“That’s not true, Master Dwarf,” Cade said. “There are a few creatures who love these waters. Dragon kin, most assuredly. After all, what is a serpent, but a wingless water dragon.”

“The serpent I cut in half was more like an eel than a dragon,” Oarly said. “It smelled fishy and had suction cups on its underside, like an octanomus.”

“It’s an octerapus,” Phen corrected with a grin at Oarly’s claim of halving the serpent. “He didn’t cut it in half, Cade; he just cut off the tip of its tail.”

Cade, after realizing that neither the dwarf nor the marble-skinned boy were jesting, shuddered.

It was hard to imagine that these people, at least the two he was speaking to, and Hyden Hawk, had commanded dragons and killed demons.