The Chain Breaker: Books 1-3

by Holmberg, D. K.

  The answers weren’t out there, and he didn’t know if they would be in the room where he had emerged. There had to be some other way out from here. Not just the trapdoor, but an alternative exit. What sorcerer would have given themselves only one way out? Or why would the El’aras, given what he had seen on the door?

  Gavin made his way back to the room. He looked at the door again, noting the El’aras symbols and writing. He pushed it open and wrinkled his nose at the smell. Why was the odor still so fresh in here? If the body were old and had been there for a while, why would he still smell it quite so profoundly?

  And what reason had the Fate for coming here?

  As far as he knew, there was only one way in and out of a sorcerer’s lair like this.

  “Wrenlow?” he called into the enchantment again, and again he didn’t know whether Wrenlow was listening to him. Maybe he couldn’t hear him. Or worse, maybe the enchantment had somehow been severed because he’d come down to the sorcerer’s lair.

  Find a way out, then find the Fate again.

  Gavin set the lantern down near the dead sorcerer as he explored. He headed to the walls, searching in a pattern as he spiraled generally inward. There had to be something else here. Another way out.

  “Wrenlow, if you’re there, I need help,” he whispered into the enchantment.

  He was so accustomed to having somebody with him these days.

  Gavin crawled across the ground, holding the dagger out, sweeping it from side to side. Maybe there would be a crack or something along the ground to guide him. He found nothing. He held the dagger closer to the sorcerer’s body, and the light started to glow even more brightly.

  Gavin frowned, looking over to the door for a moment. As he did, he realized the symbols that were present on the other side were also present on this side.

  The dagger was glowing a little less brightly than it had been before; the distance from the sorcerer’s remains seeming to dim the light. Using the lantern might help. Gavin brought it over to where he stood near the door. He twisted the handle so that the light blazed more brightly. He studied the markings on the door. They were El’aras symbols.

  For the most part, the door gleamed with reflected light. But the lower section seemed duller, as if it had been touched. Or scuffed. Gavin leaned down, studying it. From a lower vantage, as he held the lantern out, he couldn’t even see the slight change in sheen to the door.

  He shifted the lantern from side to side but didn’t see anything more. He jabbed at the section of the door with his dagger.

  The door hissed.

  Balls.

  He held the dagger to the door more cautiously than the last time. The door hissed again. He lingered for a moment, getting even lower and holding the lantern out so that he could see if the spot where he touched the dagger to the door would change anything. Gavin brought the dagger up to the door on one of the higher sections, but nothing happened. Bringing it back down lower, closer to where he saw the dull areas, he noticed the hissing sound again.

  Only in a certain small section of the door did it make that sound. He couldn’t even tell if it came from the dagger or if it came from the door. Gavin pushed the dagger against the hissing door, and he listened for a long moment, waiting for something to change. It continued to hiss, the sound building around him.

  He took a seat, studying the door. He couldn’t read the El’aras writing.

  If the dagger made it hiss, what would happen with the sword?

  Gavin unsheathed the sword, but it didn’t hiss at all. Of course, there weren’t the same markings on it, though it still had other El’aras markings. He pushed the sword forward, pressing the blade against the door. Rather than a hissing sound, there came a soft grinding.

  The blade blazed brighter again.

  He started to pull it back, but he couldn’t. It was almost as if the sword locked in place, preventing him from doing anything with it. Gavin jerked his hand back, trying to withstand the changing nature of whatever was happening, but he couldn’t.

  He pushed the sword forward. If he wasn’t going to pull the blade back, then if nothing else, he would force it farther forward. The blade glowed, and something unexpected happened.

  The symbols on it changed shape. They glowed in a way that matched with the door, which started to grind again.

  The door began to roll open—differently than how it normally opened. The part where the sword touched the door rolled slowly, pulsing with a hint of brightness and a surge of pale light.

  An opening formed to the right of the door, not within it.

  Withdrawing the sword, he stepped into the darkness.

  Chapter Nine

  Once Gavin stepped inside, another grinding sound came from behind him, and he spun around, the lantern light allowing him to see that the opening that had formed was rolling back into place.

  Gavin held out the lantern and turned back around, but he could barely see anything. He detected shadows ahead. These days, it felt as if he were noticing shadows moving all around him, though none of them were obvious. Nothing along the corridor. Instead, he turned around and focused on the door itself.

  Gavin was sealed inside. Only, as he looked at it, he wondered if he truly was. The inside of the door had similar symbols as what he had seen on the other side. It was almost as if the El’aras writing matched up with the sword.

  He looked down at the blade. It still glowed, though it was dimmer than it had been before. He had taken this from Cyran’s home—from his lair.

  Had Cyran known what he possessed?

  Gavin crept along the hallway, the sword still glowing with a soft light. The hallway ran parallel to the other hall. Could it be that the sorcerer’s lair led to more than one location? Would Cyran’s lair lead to more than one?

  The walls were smooth, almost perfectly so, and certain areas of the wall caught the light reflected off the lantern, shining it back at him. Gavin stopped and noted a symbol that reminded him of the ones he saw in other sections of the hallway. Those symbols seemed to matter.

  “Let me know if you can hear me,” he said into the enchantment.

  There was still no response from Wrenlow, and the silence around him felt even more stark with the heavy darkness around him. Gavin twisted the lantern, and the brightness shone along the corridor. It looked to stretch an impossibly long distance beneath the city.

  He reached a branch point in the tunnels that veered in either direction. The tunnels extended away from him, darkened both ways. A soft breeze blew, though Gavin couldn’t tell where it came from. It carried the stench of foul water mixed with decay.

  The sword started to glow a little bit more brightly when he pointed it in one direction, so he turned and headed that way. He moved more carefully. Every so often, he caught sight of something along the tunnel, and he didn’t know if it was a reflection off the walls or if it was something else. He swung the lantern around, but he never caught them with the light. The walk through the tunnels seemed to take an impossibly long time, though it never veered off. It headed straight, and thankfully, he had the lantern with him.

  It seemed almost as if eyes were watching him. That had to be his imagination. Thankfully, he wasn’t trapped here in the darkness. He crept forward, and the sword continued to glow more brightly with each step.

  Finally, he found an end point. A door.

  The door was different than the last one. Whereas the other one had been almost oval and had rolled in and out of place, this one was rectangular and filled the wall in front of him. The same El’aras writing that had been on the other door existed here as well.

  Gavin ran his finger along it, marveling at the complexity of the writing. The lettering had symbols that seemed to be squished together, forming words and sentences. Many of the symbols were far more complicated than any that he saw elsewhere, and certainly more complicated than the typical writing within Yoran. He traced his finger along the letters. Some of them looked to be a jumble of geome
tric shapes, triangles and squares, and circles. Others were more like swirls, and still others looked to be rune-type symbols that could be patterns and pictures more than actual letters. All of them were intricate, and he couldn’t imagine taking the time to write them out like this.

  It was far more detailed than what had been on the other door. This one reminded him of the El’aras dagger, more so than the sword he now carried. He held the sword up and pressed it against the door, but nothing happened. He tried the dagger next, but even though the writing on both the sword and the dagger looked similar, neither attempt made any sort of difference in coaxing the door to open.

  On a whim, he flipped the blades over and tried their other sides. The writing was different on each side of the El’aras dagger, as was the case with the sword. When he tried, nothing changed.

  It was strange that it had worked with the other door. Stranger still was that the El’aras dagger had caused the hissing sound. Maybe he could try something else. Gavin brought them both together. That didn’t work either.

  Perhaps this door wasn’t meant to be opened by him.

  He backtracked. When he reached the branch point, he headed in the opposite direction. It took a while before he reached that portion of the tunnel, and he was not surprised when he had to walk or what seemed another impossible distance before reaching the end of the hall. Gavin couldn’t even imagine how these tunnels had been built in the first place. Somebody had taken considerable time to dig them out. Not only time, but given how smooth the walls seemed, he couldn’t help but feel as if it had taken power—magic, probably.

  He reached another doorway.

  This one was circular, though there were lines within it. Gavin took in the El’aras writing much like he had on the other door, and he held the dagger up to it. It started hissing. He brought the sword out and held it against the door, waiting for any sign of movement.

  Slowly, the sword started to take on a faint glow. The glow began to intensify the longer he held it there. He pushed it farther against the door, waiting. For a moment, nothing happened. Then the door started opening.

  In a spiraling fashion, the lines created a circular pattern as it opened, twisting into darkness. Gavin lingered for a second before moving the lantern forward, and he could make out a room on the other side.

  Once he stepped inside, the door closed again. The combination of the sword and the lantern shone brightly, making it so that Gavin was better able to see everything around him.

  The room was enormous. The walls were all made of smooth stone, not stacked block like many of the buildings in Yoran. It looked like the room itself had been carved out of the rock beneath the city. There was a dampness to the walls, and he heard a tinkling of water. He felt a breath of air whisper across his cheeks—a breath that was stale and damp, and one that lingered in his nostrils. This room was shaped similarly to the one he had just come through, only this one seemed to be filled with artifacts.

  The shelves lining the walls were packed full of items. The table was cluttered with various relics. Sorcerers’ relics. The items resting on the table were intriguing. He would almost have called them enchantments, but Gavin had never seen any enchantments with such detail. Some of them looked to be carved out of stone or metal, with intricate inlays. He traced his finger along one cylindrical item, which looked something like a bracelet, but as he ran his fingers along the surface of it, he couldn’t tell if it truly was a bracelet or if it was simply a sculpture. It reminded him of the enchantment Olivia had made for him, but only vaguely. The enchantment was a poor replica of this.

  At one end of the table, he found three small sculptures, each of which looked like an animal. They were like the items Mekal enchanted. There was what was obviously a wolf, though the snout was slightly shortened and scrunched in. There was a strange humanoid creature that was covered in what looked like fur. The third sculpture resembled a man with his legs curled in toward his body, his arms wrapped around himself. The pose reminded Gavin of how he had often been forced to sit while Tristan worked with him, training him to escape.

  Everything on the table had a feeling of power to it. Everything here struck him as something that Zella would love to get her hands on, but he also suspected this was the kind of place that Cyran had wanted to find. Now that Gavin knew who and what Cyran really was, he had little doubt that Cyran would take the power of a place like this and manipulate it in his favor.

  This had to be what the Fate was after.

  He searched for a doorway. Once he figured out how to get out, he could return if he wanted to. The far side of the room had a door.

  Gavin paused in front of the door and tried it. Locked. Focusing inwardly, he used the sense of the core reserve power he had and jerked on the door. The lock snapped, and he pulled it open.

  He stopped in the hallway. There was nothing there. He followed it until he reached the end, where he found a ladder. He climbed and paused when he reached the trapdoor. Gavin braced himself for anything that might be on the other side.

  He pushed. Resistance greeted him. The wooden ladder creaked.

  The resistance didn’t feel the same as it had with the other one. At least in this case, he didn’t think a sorcerer was holding a magical spell against him, keeping him from opening the trapdoor.

  He continued to push, though rather than shoving forcefully, he pushed carefully. He kept his shoulder leveraged up against the trapdoor and squeezed, while imagining all the things that might be on the other side.

  For all he knew, it was an empty room, though if it were anything like what he had found in Cyran’s home, it would have been covered by a rug. Maybe that was what he pushed against.

  He had to be more forceful. Bracing himself with his feet on either side of the ladder, Gavin gave it a hard shove. The door exploded up. He made a point of holding on to the El’aras dagger and poked his head up, but he didn’t see anything out there. He scrambled down the ladder, grabbed the lantern, then headed back up.

  Gavin swung the lantern around what appeared to be a small room. All stone walls, barely ten paces in each direction. It was otherwise empty. Why had it been so difficult for him to force the door open?

  He found the answer when he approached one of the walls. A large trunk rested nearby, toppled over. Gavin tipped it upright and looked inside of it. A few items were in the trunk, most of them broken ceramics. A section of cloth likely had once been wrapped around the ceramics. There was a slender blade, which he wrapped in cloth and stuffed into his pocket. It didn’t strike him as anything altogether significant, but if it was near a sorcerer’s lair, then it might be meaningful.

  Gavin surveyed the room for a moment before flipping the trapdoor closed. He moved the trunk on top of it once again. There wasn't much evidence that the trap door was even there with the door closed and the trunk in place. Considering what he knew about it, though, and its ties to sorcery, he supposed that he shouldn’t be altogether surprised.

  Approaching the door, he listened for a moment. He doubted there was anyone here. If there had been, the noise of the trunk slamming against the wall would’ve caught their attention. That it hadn’t done so suggested that the home was empty.

  Gavin tested the handle, relieved the door was unlocked. He pushed it open slowly and glanced out. There was nothing and no one there. Whereas the other rooms had been in homes—or, in Cyran’s case, in some sort of healer’s enclave—this looked to be little more than a warehouse. It was enormous. The room in front of him sprawled much farther than Gavin would have imagined. He used the lantern to better see what was there, but he couldn’t make much out.

  Instinct warned him that something wasn’t quite right here, though so far, he had seen nothing out of the ordinary. The only unusual thing he found was that this warehouse was here at all.

  He started along the rows of shelves. It occurred to him that he still hadn’t heard anything from Wrenlow. He didn’t know whether the sorcerer’s lair made it so t
hat he couldn’t hear anything, or if it blocked the enchantment.

  Get outside into the open and head back to the Dragon.

  Those thoughts stayed with Gavin.

  He didn’t see a doorway. As he moved through the rows of shelves, he noticed a soft shuffling sound. Gavin spun, holding the lantern out, but there was nothing. Maybe that shuffling was his imagination.

  He moved quickly and came across an opening in the shelves. A doorway wasn’t far from him. As he neared it, he noticed the shuffling sound again. There was something off about that. Gavin couldn’t tell quite what it was, only that he felt as if it were trailing after him. Whatever was there came closer.

  He hurried forward. The door loomed in front of him. The lantern glow illuminated it and revealed El’aras symbols on it as well. That couldn’t be a coincidence.

  Of course, Gavin knew that none of this could be a coincidence.

  The shuffling came closer, and he raced toward the door, threw it open, and ran outside. The moment he was outside, he felt foolish. He turned back toward the building.

  He looked for the sound of shuffling that he had heard but saw nothing. As he started to turn, he noticed a hint of smoke trailing out of the building. It was faint, and in the daylight, it was difficult for him to know if the smoke came from the building or simply drifted toward it. What he needed was to head back inside to investigate further.

  He didn’t recognize the sign that was shaped like a man leaning over a table with an animal crawling across the tabletop, but as he peered along the street, he knew where he was. He could just make out the building's crumbling stone topping a small rise that he’d been told once housed the sorcery school. When closer to it, Gavin could imagine young sorcerers running through the now overgrown lawn, flittering about with magic and spells.

  It was the opposite side of the city from where he thought he would end up, quite a way from where he had been in the first place.