The Forgotten King (Korin's Journal) (32 page)

I repeated this process for Laboratory Room 2 through Laboratory Room 5 with no luck.  I was running out of patience and time.  With my sleeve-covered hand resting on the door handle of Laboratory Room 6, I briefly considered just turning back and reconvening with Til’ and Briscott to come up with a new plan.  There were several rooms left, and I figured I’d be lucky to have even a quarter of my hour remaining to find Max and get out. 

Just one more room
, I thought to myself. 
Just one more, and then I’ll sneak out before the potion wears off.

Easing the door open, I slunk into the Laboratory Room 6.  The room was redolent of animal waste.  My ears were met with the sounds of chirping, growling, and squeaking.  Only one black-robed wizard was present.  He was leaning over a table with his back turned to me, his gray hair tumbling over his shoulders. 

Cubic steel cages of various sizes covered the walls, some small enough to hold mice, some large enough to hold hornbears.  One of the bigger cages literally did hold a hornbear—a massive, scruffy, four-legged beast with two curved horns protruding from its temples and one straight horn jutting from the middle of its forehead.  Hope surged through me.  It seemed I’d finally found the room I’d been looking for.

As I stepped fully into the room, some of the animals began thrashing in their cages, their growls and roars increasing in volume.  The invisibility potion didn’t seem to fool them as it had the wizards.

With the increased noise masking my footsteps, I quickly started down the wall to my right, searching for any sign of Max in the smaller cages.  There were literally hundreds of cages, some stacked so high that the rolling ladders placed around the room would be needed to see into them.  It would take too long to check every cage.  I needed a quicker way of finding Max.  As if sneaking into the Wizard Academy hadn’t been dumb enough, I decided to do something
really
stupid.

“Max,” I screamed as loudly as I could over the cacophony of animal noises.  “Where are you?”

The wizard jerked erect from the table, turning with a startled expression on his wrinkled face.  “Who’s there?” he called out, his eyes scanning the room for the source of the voice.  He stuck his hand into a small cage on the table, grabbing some sort of brown furry animal within.  His other hand rose slowly, as if ready to cast a spell.

I ignored the wizard and called out again.  “Max!”  There was no response. 

I didn’t have time to search the entire collection of cages.  The smartest course of action would’ve been to simply leave, but there was no telling how long it would take to find another way into the Wizard Academy if I did.  Also, having revealed to the wizard that someone else was in the room with him, I’d likely be unable to escape without notice.  Once he saw the door to the room open by itself, he’d easily stop me with his magic. 

So, since I’d already thrown caution to the wind, I decided to do something
really, really
stupid.  You know, the “trying to get yourself killed” kind of stupid. 

Remember when I mentioned the various fighting styles my uncle, Chasus, taught me?  Well, in this case, I fell into Tau’Shal, a form focused mainly on disarming and disabling.  Sliding behind the aged wizard, I yanked his arm from the cage and bent it behind his back, incapacitating it with a twist of his wrist.  I threw my other arm around his neck, squeezing hard enough to show him I was serious while still allowing him to breathe. 

“Don’t try anything,” I hissed.  “I even
think
you’re about to try something, I’ll snap your neck.  Understand?”  I felt bad for threatening the wizard in such a way, but I had to make sure he was properly intimidated in order to prompt him to tell me the truth.

The elder wizard nodded his head, his body trembling. 

“There was a squirrel brought into the Wizard Academy a month ago.  Where is it?” I snarled.  If only demanding answers about the location of a squirrel didn’t sound so damn ridiculous.

“I-I do not
kn-know,” he stammered. 

My arm tightened around his throat.  “
Where is it
?”

I felt the wizard swallow against my arm. 
“Laboratory four.  I-it is in laboratory f-four.”

“Don’t lie to me.  I was just in there.”  Max definitely hadn’t been there.  That room had contained nothing but tables stacked with black wooden boxes of various sizes. 

“Then I d-do not know.  I swear.”  The wizard stammered in fear.  I felt like a complete and utter ass for what I was doing to him. 

“What about the dragon child, encased in a blue . . . a blue something?”  Yes, really intelligent, I know.

“It is in the s-same room.”

I let out a deep breath.  “Okay, I’m going to let you go, but if you try anything, I
will
kill you,” I threatened, once again feeling horrible about doing so. 

He shakily nodded his understanding. 

After snatching the small cage off the table, I forced the wizard to face away from me.  “Put your hands above your head so I can see them and don’t
move a muscle.” 

As the wizard raised his arms, I released him and stepped backwards towards the door.  I couldn’t believe I’d just threatened an Idrolin-blooded wizard who technically could’ve killed me in a heartbeat.  I set down the cage and backed through the doors into the hallway.

I was pondering whether I’d have time to give Laboratory Room 4 another search or not when a strident, drawn-out chime reverberated through the hall, its volume undulating.  Behind me, I heard a loud click sound from Laboratory Room 6’s doors.  Though not a Litiera-blooded genius—Litiera’s the goddess of knowledge—I was fairly certain that I was officially locked out of every room in the basement.  The chime had probably been some sort of alarm, one that I was the cause for.  Stupid brash actions.

Not knowing what to expect, I did what any other self-respecting trespasser would do: I ran.  I ran fast.  My injured ankle was forgotten as I sprinted towards the stairs as if my life depended on it.  Thinking back, I guess it kind of did.

The stairs came into view, as well as a squad of five Wizard Guard members with their black hoods raised coming down them.  Oh, and two of them had thick-muscled black dogs like those I’d seen at the front entrance of the Wizard Academy.  I slid to a halt, my only means of exit blocked by the five wizards and their dogs.

One of the Wizard Guard wizards, a middle-aged man with a black moustache and more muscle than any wizard had a right to have, turned to the others with his arms raised.  He held up two beefy fingers on each hand, shaking them towards both curving directions of the hallway.  The four men divided into pairs, each with one of the crystal-leashed dogs.  That meant two of them turned my way.  Their black dog pulled its leash taut, its front legs lifting off the ground as it struggled to break free towards me. 

The wizards closed in, their dog snarling with spittle flying from its long muzzle full of sharp teeth.  Two rows of sharp teeth, actually.  No dog I’d ever seen had two rows of teeth.  I realized that my invisibility did nothing about my scent, and this dog—er, creature—could apparently track intruders by scent.

The two men picked up their pace, letting the black creature lead them to me.  The wizard holding the leash held up his free hand, which was now glowing with a white aura.  Behind me, I heard the second creature’s snarling barks echo towards me, revealing the hallway to be a giant circle.  The beefy wizard stood at the bottom of the steps, blocking my access to them.  I was completely trapped.

Times like these can make a man question if a simple life of working on his adoptive parents’ farm would be preferable to tracking down his birth parents and attempting to stop an evil wizard, an evil wizard’s sadistic protégé, and possibly his own father from using the undead, magically enslaved living, and eldrhims to wage a war.  Whew, that was a mouthful.  Well, pageful.

Of course, such a life was no longer an option.  I had to save my best friend and find the girl I loved.  I had to retrieve Xalis so
Til’ could return him to the Snowy Waste, making certain that Bhaliel’s sacrifice hadn’t been in vain.  I had to stop Raijom.  I had to stop . . . whoever was behind the green rocks in Gualain.  For any of that to happen, I had to first escape the Wizard Guard. 

Taking a deep, preparatory breath, I started running forward towards the closest two wizards and their vicious dogish creature.  The creature went wild, jerking the wizard holding his leash face first to the ground.  The creature tore its leash from the wizard’s hand and rushed me.  In a moment of forward thinking, I dropped to the ground, anticipating the creature’s leap.  And leap it did, soaring with bared fangs towards where I’d just been standing.  As it soared over me, I jumped up and sprinted towards the wizards. 

The still-standing wizard held up a hand in my direction.  His other hand had something wrapped around it that I hadn’t noticed before.  Something living.  It took me a moment to realize it was a snake.  While a small part of me tried to understand how he could be okay with a snake wrapped around his hand, the larger part was more concerned about the reddish glow around his other hand. 

From just in front of the wizard, a wave of blue fire rolled towards me, hovering just above the floor.  I sprung into a massive leap with all my strength, just barely cresting the flame as I passed through the scorching heat rising from it.  I landed on the other side with a painful roll of my injured ankle, but was still able to throw out my arm and slam it into the wizard’s chest as I ran by, knocking him to the ground to join his partner.  I felt a sudden chill, the wizard’s fire winking out with his break in concentration.

All of this happened in a small handful of heartbeats.  I would only have another handful before the black, too-many-toothed creature caught back up to me and more spells were thrown my way.  Then, I’d have maybe a thimbleful after that before the second pair of Wizard Guard wizards and their own ferocious creature reached me.  In other words, I had to get past the muscle-bound wizard blocking the only way I knew of out of the basement, and I had to do it fast.  Looking down at his wide stance, I figured a good slide between his legs would do the trick.

Preparing to drop into said slide, I heard a snarling bark sound from behind me.  I spun just in time to see the black creature, its crystalline leash trailing behind it, speeding towards me.  I threw myself against the wall, striking it with a grunt.  The creature rushed past and slammed into seemingly nothing with a loud yelp before crumpling to the floor. 

The beefy wizard cursed, giving away the source of the spell that had taken down the black creature.  Trapped, I grabbed the Vesteir-sigiled fortune block through my shirt, ready to resort to giving a desperate prayer, but then I got an idea.  An idea that had about a thousand—no, make that a million—to one chance of working, but it was the only one I could think of on such short notice. 

I tugged the fortune block out from my shirt and pulled it off over my head.  Behind me, I heard the other two wizards getting to their feet and calling for the other pair to hurry with their creature—they called it a gruheln.  I had mere moments and just one shot at getting out of my predicament. 

I gave the fortune block a kiss and launched it towards the beefy wizard with as much force as I could manage, snapping my wrist as if skipping a flat stone across a pond.  If the barrier was a concentrated wall of air as Grayson had used on me the night before, then I figured that maybe the fortune block would be thin enough to cut through it if thrown just right. 

The fortune block became visible as it went spinning from my hand and, to my relief, tore through the invisible barrier.  The thick wizard who’d created the barrier didn’t realize what was happening until the fortune block slammed into his forehead with a nice “thump.”  His hands shot up to where the block had struck, blood trickling through his fingers.  Score one for ridiculously undeniable luck. 

I ran forward, hoping the spell had dissolved with his break in concentration.  I passed through unimpeded, shouldered the bloody-headed wizard aside, scooped up my fortune block, and started up the stairs.

Escaping through the Wizard Academy’s main entrance would’ve be akin to willingly handing myself over, so I continued past the ground floor.  The whole place was probably on lockdown anyway, the undulating alarm still blaring through the halls.  My plan didn’t involve leaving through any door, though. 

If I could get back into the walkway, I could open the door on the opposite side, thereby creating the illusion of attempting escape through the ancillary building I’d originally entered from.  I could then double back to slip out of one of the horizontally slit windows lining the walkway’s walls.  It was a fairly foolproof plan . . . if the walkway doors weren’t also locked down . . . and if I didn’t break a leg or neck from the fall.

The second floor was still empty of wizards, and I made it within sight of the walkway door and its single guard with no problems.  As I neared, I spotted the softly glowing circle on the wall that would be my ticket out of this mess.  Even though I’d failed to rescue Max and Xalis, I’d at least live to try again.

Something seemed different as I ran towards the door, though.  It took me a moment to realize what it was, but it finally hit me.  Ahead of me was a square band of black material run through with rust-colored veins jutting a fingerbreadth from the walls, floor, and ceiling.  The boxes in Laboratory Room 4 had been made of the same type of material.  It definitely hadn’t been in the hallway when I’d passed through before.