Aldwyn's Academy (14 page)

A part of him anticipated the door behind him slamming shut.

Instead of being relieved when this failed to happen, it actually worried all the harder on his tightly strung nerves, for until it did happen, a part of him would go right on waiting for it to happen.

Dorian put one foot in front of the other, taking deliberate steps, and in his fear, the acute sensation that the walls were first breathing, and then slowly collapsing inward on him, was almost overwhelming.

In the eerie silence his foot came down on some bit of rubbish concealed in the gloom, yielding slightly under the pressure of his slipper.

It squished.

Jerking his foot back, Dorian’s eyes darted down.

He made a face when he saw the mess and almost shouted when he realized what the grotesque thing under his foot was, but just as quickly he crammed that shriek back down his throat.

The rat had been dead for awhile.

The carcass, fully bloated, released its gases and collapsed inward so that it seemed more like a crumpled dirty sock made of matted fur.

It was encrusted with squirming maggots.

Dorian felt his stomach curdle at the smell until he was almost overcome by a powerful urge to vomit.

He tried not to inhale too deeply through his nose, but the rancid stench made him gag anyway and he was forced to breath in quick, shallow pants.

Above him the ceiling creaked with the shifting of some weight.

Startled, Dorian looked up.

Directly above him hung a ceiling lamp with a
sputtering tallow candle that flickered a sickly yellow light, casting no real illumination.

In one quick motion a great black spider scuttled out from behind the housing and across the surface.

Dorian imagined a hundred such things scurrying above him, waiting to drop from their strands of web down into the nest of his tousled brown hair. His flesh crawled, he shuddered.

Then the ceiling creaked again and he heard footsteps. Suddenly Dorian was no longer concerned with spiders or the old corpses of rats.

For one long moment he simply froze. Behind him he heard a heavy footstep reach the stairs.

Shaking, he pressed his back up against a wall, unmindful now of spiderwebs or snakes slithering behind wallboards. His head locked to the side and his eyes went to the antechamber back toward the entrance where the bottom of the staircase emerged.

The footsteps from above seemed unhurried. Each one so deliberate that whoever was walking obviously made no effort at a stealthy approach.

It wanted him to know it was coming.

He paused, head turned toward the sound.

He forced his breathing to slow so that he could listen better, and his fist drew into a white-knuckled ball at his side.

Each slow, heavy footfall reverberated as it
descended down the staircase toward the open door to the tunnel outside.

The boy moaned as he realized in an intuitive flash that somehow in all his running twists and turns he had arrived at the very place the monster chasing him wanted him to be.

He was found and cornered by the very thing he fled.

Dorian twisted to look down toward the opposite end of the hall. The single door standing there was almost completely obscured by the lack of light in the hallway.

He heard the
tromp tromp tromping
of descending footsteps and knew he was never going to make it down that dark throat of a hall and through the door before the stalker above him rounded the corner.

He did not relish his chances of escaping back out through the open entrance and leaving his back naked to whatever had now reached the bottom of those stairs.

It felt hopeless.

His pursuer knew these tunnels and caverns so well it herded the boy expertly, trapping him and making its own entrance into the structure from some other portal.

Dorian understood now that he was being toyed with.

He turned back to the sliding doors set in the wall opposite. No time for deliberation. He had to act now or simply freeze in the face of the coming danger.

He stepped quickly over and pried the two doors apart enough for him to slip inside.

Not stopping to survey the dark chamber as he entered, he spun and closed the doors shut behind him.

He fumbled for a heartbeat before his shaking fingers found the sliding latch and secured it.

He stood shaking, head bowed, and turned his ear to the doors, straining to hear even the slightest bit of sound through the wood.

Footsteps echoed heavily as they cleared the last of the stairs. He heard the hinges on the front door squeak as it was pushed closed, then the vibration of door hitting jam.

This was followed by the greasy, barely audible,
click
as a deadbolt slid home.

D
orian waited, so scared his body thrummed with the energy dancing through his nerves. Moving carefully he turned and looked over his shoulder.

There was no escape.

A hooded lantern with a rusty covering sat glowing weakly on a dusty old barrel. The room, braced with rotting timbers, was filled with ripped canvas coverings and smashed furniture in random piles.

A single window filled with unbroken mullioned glass in a four-pane frame showed black, raw earth beyond its sill.

Dorian realized it must have been centuries, if not a millennium, since that window had looked out on anything other than close-packed dirt.

There were no other doors, no other openings in the tight square of the chamber.

He was trapped.

The blade of an axe punched through the wood of the doors with a single, easy chop. Long, splinterlike
sticks flew away from the impact and struck Dorian like shrapnel.

The boy cried out and spun.

From the passage behind him he got his first look at the undead minotaur. The monster was hulking and horrific, with taut, greasy skin stretched over a partially exposed skeleton. Its eyes glowed red as massive fists choked the haft of a wicked battle-axe.

The thing roared and rushed forward, shouldering through the broken door.

Dorian stumbled backward, his backside striking the old barrel.

The minotaur opened its muzzle and bellowed in rage.

Behind the boy, the barrel spun under the impact and the lantern slammed to the floor with a crash, spilling oil across the dusty floor.

Nimble yellow flame followed the spreading liquid, consuming it greedily.

The minotaur lifted the heavy, stained blade of his axe.

Dorian reacted without thinking, relying on muscle memory and terror-induced reflexes to save him, rolling out and away over one shoulder.

The axe tore into the floorboards only inches away from his tumbling body.

Coming nimbly to his feet, Dorian immediately somersaulted off to the undead creature’s side and closer to the shattered door.

The minotaur shambled forward, turning in a loose half-circle, and swung its axe again.

Dorian came out of his roll and flung himself backward out of range of the monster’s blow.

Like dance partners in some devilish waltz, the two combatants, boy and monster, whirled and twisted frantically until Dorian had the thing with its back to the room.

Now what? Dorian thought frantically.

He could think of only one move left open to him.

Hours earlier out in the snow against the dire wolves the spell had almost killed him. Now he had no other choice.

He snapped his wand through a tight flourish of motions and spoke the word of power.

The green missile leaped from his wand as the spilled and burning lamp oil reached the tattered curtains hanging beside the earthed-in window.

Greasy yellow flames exploded up the rotted cloth.

The spell struck the reanimated minotaur fully in the chest with a flash of eldritch light and a sound like bacon sizzling in a skillet. The creature roared again and staggered.

The flaming curtains collapsed down onto the rotted body of the monster, enveloping it in searing, hungry fire.

The creature roared again and this time the bellow sounded more like a scream. The gigantic beast flipped back and forth in agony as the flames ate at its hide.

The stink of burning fur filled the room as Dorian lunged for the door.

He burst out into the hallway then raced for the entrance.

Behind him he heard more bellowing and crashing as the minotaur suffered.

He reached the front door, unlocked the deadbolt, and threw open the door before stumbling outside. He careened down the old steps until his feet were on the cobblestone that formed the subterranean entrance hall.

Now sure of the location of the thing that followed him, Dorian dared to do something he had been dying to try since he had read about it many months ago. The instructions from
A Practical Guide to Wizardry
came back to him instantly, crystallized by his fear into a perfect recall.

He pointed his wand at the ground and uttered the phrase,
“Aldwyns enmur fawel upwo
Lowadar’s office.”

Instantly a glowing blue light appeared in a perfect line on the floor. The light ran across the ancient path and plunged into the darkness of the natural cavern beyond.

Following the light that promised to lead him on the most direct path back to Lowadar’s office, Dorian ran fast and hard.

He had no hope of finding Helene in this underground labyrinth and his only hope, now that he knew he wouldn’t be ambushed, was to reach Lowadar.

Or Blackburn, he thought. I’d love to see that tiefling tear into the minotaur!

He followed the blue light of the homing spell up out of the buried ruin and into the twisting passageways of the natural caverns.

The illumination glowed brightly in the darkness of the caverns, but the magical line shed little actual light. It ran directly up the center of the passages, however, and as long as he kept his head low, Dorian found he had little trouble navigating the tunnels.

Under his feet the ground angled up sharply and the muscles of his already tired legs ached in protest. Despite that, his fear drove forward.

He remained terrified that the brilliantly glowing line would serve as a beacon for other creatures, but after his encounter with the undead minotaur he was finally desperate enough to endure the risk.

He backtracked his route more quickly than he would have imagined possible and after only a short time the light led him back to the mouth of the cavern that housed the quivering mushrooms.

He paused for a moment, fighting to get his ragged breathing under control.

He peered out through the opening, which formed a sort of natural balcony over the field of mushrooms.

Below him the homing line ran straight down the center of the cavern and out the mouth of the cave. He peered into the darkness feeling horribly exposed.

He saw no sign of the bugbears.

Across the cavern the wind whistled into the mouth of the cave, agitating the massive fungi.

Lightning flashed, but from somewhere behind the crags now so that its stark illumination was blunted. When the clap of thunder followed it no longer seemed as if the sky was splitting directly overhead.

He moved to the lip of the rock shelf and put his hand against the cavern wall.

Beneath him the mushrooms rustled like a herd of grazing animals caught out in the storm.

He slid off the shelf and crept along the vertical curve of the cavern wall. A part of him could still hardly believe the Slippers of Spider Climbing he wore actually worked.

He moved slowly and cautiously. Every time his searching feet loosened grit and pebbles, the mushrooms vibrated eagerly.

Unfamiliar with magical flora, Dorian wasn’t sure how far, precisely, the sleep-inducing spores of the mushrooms would shoot up—but he was quite certain that if he fell asleep while perched on the wall that he risked never waking up again.

Caution was the judicious approach.

Easing himself carefully along, he circumvented the cavern until the muted light of the stormy night began to reveal his surroundings in greater detail. He saw the silver mist of his breath in the cold again. His drying sweat began to freeze on his skin and stiffen his clothes.

Edging even closer to the cave’s mouth, he began to shiver. With a small sigh of relief he passed the outer ring of mushrooms and began descending the cavern wall.

He paused once to ensure nothing was asleep or lying in wait among the shadows of the broken boulders at his feet, and then hopped down, landing lightly.

Breathing a sigh of relief, he stepped toward the mouth of the cavern.

His shoe came down on a patch of ice and his feet suddenly swept out from underneath him.

He squawked like a bird and landed hard.

His mouth snapped shut, driving his teeth into the tip of his tongue and hammering his breath from his body as his head struck the ground with a dizzying
smack
.

Lights exploded across his vision as pain lanced through his head.

Behind him the mewling mushrooms released their spores in a grit-filled cloud.

Desperately Dorian threw himself forward, trying to reach the lip of the cave mouth before the spore cloud enveloped him.