They continued to run through the tunnel toward the surface, following their earlier footprints in the dust of the tunnel floor whenever they were not sure which way to go. Alex realized that must have been how the Mad Mages had tracked them. They dashed around the pit covered by the mirage-like floor, slowing to a walk along the narrow ledge by the wall, but moving as fast as they could. They did not see the dragon again and, as they ran, the bone-jarring sounds of his pursuit drifted farther and farther behind them until it was clear that the dragon had gone back. But they did not stop running. Not until the afternoon sunlight struck their faces and the smell of pine trees filled their noses.
Like a single exhausted body, they all fell to the ground some thirty paces away from where the tunnel drilled down into the mountain. Breathing heavily, they all moved closer together as the giant stone slab began to slide back down the mountain face and cover the entrance to the dragon’s lair. They watched, panting, as the rock-door slid into place with a thundering crunch.
Alex looked around as he clambered to his feet, still breathing like a fire bellows. In the distance, about fifty yards down slope, he could see five figures rushing headlong through the trees. He felt the rock of hot anger in his stomach burst back to life and shatter.
“There they are,” Alex said, gritting his teeth and raising his finger to point. “Let’s go after them.”
“Let them go,” Daphne said, still panting. “I’ve had enough gorping adventure for one day.”
“But they almost got us killed,” Alex said, feeling the heat of the anger in his cheeks. “I want to have a talk with that Dillon.”
“You can’t save their lives and then go try and knock Dillon’s lights out,” Rafael said, falling back into the dry grass of the clearing.
“You can,” Ben countered. “But do it when we get back to town. I’m exhausted.”
“Hmff,” Clark said. “I did all the running.”
“I know,” Ben said as he punched Clark in the arm. “I’m exhausted from the ride. Thanks.”
“Yeah, any time,” Clark said.
“Isn’t anybody going to go with me?” Alex asked, searching their eyes for support. They all met his gaze, but without the looks he was hoping for.
“Let it go for now, Lex,” Nina said, looking up at him. “We’ll get them back some other way. We always do.”
“I can’t wait for later,” Alex said. “I’ll go by myself.”
“Don’t be silly, Alex,” he heard Daphne say as he ran into the forest. It was exactly the wrong thing to say to him at that moment. He ignored his friends’ calls and dodged around a tree. Alex knew he had several faults. He sometimes overestimated how easy an adventure would be and sometimes didn’t plan far enough ahead, but his biggest fault was stubborn pride. He hated being told he was wrong when he felt he was right and hated being told not to do something when he thought he should.
Normally, he would never have thought that going after Dillon and the Mad Mages all by himself was a good idea, but he actively refused to think about it. He was just going to do it. He would show Dillon what happened when you nearly killed the people he loved. That was the real reason for his anger. Nina and his friends were in that dragon’s lair because of him and they had nearly died. Dillon should be held responsible for what he had done. For what had almost happened. Alex was foggy on just what that would entail, but the vague notion of socking Dillon in the nose kept floating into his head.
Although he could no longer see Dillon and the Mad Mages, any more than he could hear his friends in the Guild shouting at him from up the mountain, it was easy to track the older kids. Alex could have tracked them with his eyes closed. As most occupations in the town of Runewood tended to be hereditary, it was assumed that Alex would one day grow up to be the town’s warlock. His father had taught him woodcrafts like tracking since he was a small boy. As the town enforcer of law, it was a very important skill for a warlock to have when someone tried to evade justice.
The Mad Mages had slowed their descent down the mountain to a safe walk and it wasn’t long before Alex had closed the gap between them. As he silently stalked his quarry, he thought he heard something. Like a whisper. From upslope. He stopped and looked in the direction he thought he had heard something, but no new sound followed. That was when he had an idea: To loop around the Mad Mages and catch them in an ambush. Dillon and the others were following the same deer path that Alex and the Guild had traversed earlier that afternoon. It would take them sideways along the mountain for another half mile before veering back down slope. If he cut upward, quickly and quietly, in the direction he thought he had heard the whisper, he could get to the point where the deer path made a sharp turn before Dillon reached it. Then he could lay a trap.
It wasn’t a great plan, because he had no idea yet what the trap would be, but ambushing the Mad Mages, even all alone by himself, gave him a thrilling feeling in his chest. It took him a moment to realize that feeling was the thrill of revenge. If he hadn’t been so angry, with himself as much as Dillon, he would have stopped and cautioned himself on the dangers of revenge. As it was, he cut up the mountain slope, moving silently through the trees and underbrush and passing through a small clearing.
Alex was so engrossed in his ambush plan, and trying to deny the wisdom about the dangers of revenge that his mother and father had given him, that he was taken completely by surprise when the low pile of rocks and branches he was walking over collapsed inward, sending him tumbling down into darkness. He was so surprised, he didn’t think to scream as he fell through stones and branches down into a deep black hole. Something very much like a rock struck the back of his skull and the blackness of the cave around him faded into the blackness within his head, and that blackness stretched on and on and…
Chapter 5: Whispers in the Shadows
On his back, his right arm bent behind him, his head throbbing, Alex opened his eyes to stars. Not stars swimming before his eyes from the knock to his head, but stars in the night sky as seen through the opening in the ceiling of the cave he had fallen into.
How long? Alex thought. How long have I been out? He took a moment to mentally scan his body. Nothing seemed broken, just bruised, but his head still pulsed in time with his heartbeat. He sat up slowly, his body aching in a dozen different places. He ran his hands gently over his head and found a large knot at the base of his skull. It was too tender to touch even lightly. Looking up again at the stars, he guessed he had been unconscious for at least three hours. It had been late afternoon when he set out to follow Dillon and the Mad Mages. Sunset would have been two hours away. And the sky looked very dark. Maybe four hours.
Why hadn’t anyone found him? Maybe his friends were still looking for him. If it wasn’t too dark, they might have kept searching. It wasn’t uncommon for the Guild to stay out well into the night on a weekend. Their parents wouldn’t begin to worry for another hour or so. If they found him.
“Help,” Alex croaked. His throat felt like it was coated with dry leaves. Maybe it was. “Help,” he said again. Louder this time. Almost a shout. “Help! I’m down here! In a cave!”
Light, he thought. What he needed was light. He stood up slowly. He was a bit wobbly, but not unstable. The crystal glow-wand was still in his back pocket where he had slipped it while running from the dragon’s lair. Part of the glow-wand, at least. It had shattered. He took a shard of crystal out of his pocket, spoke the rune-word for light, and tried to focus his mind to draw the magical energy of the land up into himself and guide it into what remained of the wand. His head spun with the effort, but he was rewarded with a dim blue glow from the broken magical crystal. It wasn’t much, but a little light was better than nothing.
“Help!” Alex shouted again, his voice stronger now.
I COME.
What was that? Had he heard that? The voice had seemed too close to be above ground outside the cave.
“Who’s that?” Alex asked the darkness.
I COME!
Louder, if that was possible, but still not from above ground. Alex spun in place and held the shard of the crystal wand high above his head. The cave was small, only twenty feet wide, and completely empty. A thin layer of moss covered one of the stone walls and the debris from the collapsed ceiling eight feet above covered the uneven and rocky floor, but there didn’t seem to be anyone or anything else in the chamber.
Maybe that bump to the head was worse than I thought, Alex said to himself.
“Is someone there?” Alex said aloud, raising his voice to cover his mounting fear. If there was a voice down here with him, why did he keep hearing it in his head and not with his ears? Who comes?
I COME FOR…
That was definitely a voice in his head. Come for who? Come from where? Alex cocked his head and looked around the cave again. The voice had seemed stronger when he was standing near the moss-covered wall. He stepped cautiously forward.
“Who’s there?” Alex said. “Who are you?”
I COME FOR …
“Is there someone behind the wall?” Alex asked aloud, stepping closer to where the voice seemed strongest. Strongest in his mind.
I COME FOR MY…
Alex reached his left hand out and placed it gently on the wall. He could feel the moss tickling his palm. “Who are you?” Alex said, leaning in toward the wall. “Are you trapped? Do you need help?”
I COME FOR MY REVENGE!
Alex screamed as light seared through his brain, filling his vision with a burning whiteness even as he closed his eyes. The pain of the light in his mind brought him to his knees and the scream another octave higher.
I COME FOR MY REVENGE!
The stubby remains of the light crystal clattered to the floor of the cave as Alex clasped his hands to his head, pressing them in with all his strength, trying to push the light out, to physically squeeze the pain from his head like pushing a sliver from beneath skin. Alex thought for certain that the scream that still howled out of his throat would drown out the voice in his head, but he was wrong.
I COME FOR MY REVENGE UPON THE WORLD!
“No!” Alex yelled back at the voice. He didn’t know what it was or where it came from or what it might want revenge for, but he knew instinctively that it was evil. Not evil in a simple sense, but vile beyond words. The antithesis of all that that was good and pure, the antithesis of love and compassion and beauty. If those things could be said to be in the nature of light, the voice in his head was the nature of darkness. In the midst of the pain of the blazing white light in his head, a memory surfaced, new and powerful. “The Dark Beast marks you again.” Before that memory could settle into a thought, another voice filled the cave, soft but powerful, melodic and strangely accented.
“Don’t be afraid,” the voice said. “I can help you.”
Alex looked up as the blinding white light in his mind faded and the mysterious voice of the cave whispered away to nothing. Framed in the opening of the cave above his head was a beautiful girl, her long, golden locks falling forward, a pretty button nose in the middle of her narrow face, her bright blue eyes, piercing even in the dim glow of the broken glow-wand. She wore a simple blue shirt with a long black vest and she reached her arm down toward Alex.
“Climb up on that rock there and I’ll lift you out,” the girl said. Alex recognized the accent now. English. There were no English girls in the Rune Valley. He was sure he would remember if there were. Especially if they looked like her.
“Are you real?” Alex asked even as he followed her instructions to step up on the highest rock in the cave, picking up the remains of the glow-wand as he went.
“Give me your hand and find out,” the girl said with a charming smile.
“I’m too heavy for you to pull me out,” Alex said as he raised his hand toward hers.
“I’m much stronger than I look,” the girl said as she clasped his hand in hers. That was an understatement, Alex thought, considering the ease and speed with which he felt himself pulled upward through the mouth of the cave, out into the air of the night, and lowered down to the ground. He looked up at the girl. She stood a good foot-and-a-half taller than he did. She seemed to be about his age. As his eyes adjusted to the light of the stars and the glow-wand, Alex noticed the pointed ears rising up through the curls of her blond hair and he thought for a moment that she was riding a pony. And then he realized why.
The beautiful girl who had saved him, maybe even saved his life, was a centaur.
“Hi,” she said, still smiling in the pale moon light. It was a smile that made her seem smaller than she was. “My name is Victoria.”
“Alex,” Alex said, extending his right hand. “Alex Ravenstar.”
“That’s right,” Victoria said, shaking his hand a little more firmly than he had expected, eliciting a slight wince that he strove to cover. She must be stronger than Clark, Alex thought idly as she continued. “Humans have two names. I only have one name. Just Victoria. There aren’t enough centaurs in the world to bother with more than one name. I’ve heard that pixies have three names. Probably because there are ever so many of them. But my father says we need to fit in, so we’ve started calling our family Radcliff. Which I always forget. So I’m Victoria Radcliff.” She let go of his hand.
Alex let his hand drift to his head and rub the bulging knot on the back of his scalp. He grimaced as he touched it. It felt like it was the size of a watermelon.
“I can heal that for you,” Victoria said, pointing to his head.
“It’s not that bad,” Alex said, pulling his hand away from his skull. His mother spent a good deal of her time healing his cuts, scrapes, bruises, and broken bones. He was already figuring out what to tell his mother about how he’d nearly cracked his head open.
“It’s not a problem,” Victoria said, reaching her hands out to gently place them on either side of Alex’s head. “Centaurs are good with healing magic.”
There were many kinds of magic, each person being more attuned to one or two, but all magics fell into four broad categories, the mastery of each more rare than the next. There was Ka’Al, or magic that dealt with the control of matter and energy, which, for reasons that Alex was never quite clear, were apparently the same thing on some level. Ka’Al magic covered fire and earth and wind magics.
Ka’Ett was the magic of living things, such as the control of plants and animals and healing. Ka’Lem magic worked on the mind, which allowed a mage to communicate with telepathy or read minds or create hallucinations and illusions.
Finally there was Ka’Neff, or Spirit Magic, which was the rarest and least common of all magics, allowing mages to affect other souls, speak with ghosts, summon beings from other realms, and even, it was said, walk between the planes of existence. Nearly everyone learned to master one or more form of Ka’Al magic to control matter and energy, almost a quarter of all people had some facility with life magic, but only one in a thousand might have any real command of Mind Magic and Spirit Magic was so rare as to be nearly mythical. All of this flicked through Alex’s mind in a fraction of a second as he wondered how much talent centaurs really had with healing magic.
Victoria’s hands were cool to the touch and Alex stared up into her eyes as she whispered rune-words of life magic beneath her breath, noticing how soft and slender her fingers felt in his hair. He was about to protest that she needn’t bother when the back of his head suddenly felt ice cold. His eyes flashed wide open and he gasped, his breath caught in his throat. His mother’s healings never felt like that. A bit of a chill, yes, but not the intense cold he felt now spreading down his spine. Then the back of his head was burning as if a hot poker had been jammed into it. In spite of himself, he yelped.
“Oops,” Victoria said, yanking her hands from Alex’s head to place them at her mouth. “Sorry. So sorry. I used a little more magic than I probably needed to. I got a little carried away. I wanted to make sure I healed everything. So much for making a good first impression. Are you alright?”
“I’m fine,” Alex said, stroking the back of his head roughly to make his point. “It feels like new. And you’ve made a great first impression. You saved me, remember.”
“Right,” Victoria said, dusting off her hands. “Not a bad night’s work.”
“Are you a relative of the Creaking Creek centaurs?” Alex asked.
There were only two families of centaurs in the Rune Valley. One was a large family of farmers in the fields near the Creaking Creek, to the east of Wolf’s Head Lake and north of the Silent Swamp. The other centaur family lived a more rustic life in a large cabin in the Crimson Forest in the south of the valley. Both stayed mostly to themselves, rarely being seen around town, but Alex was familiar with them from trips around the valley with his father.
None of the centaur children attended school in town, all of them being home schooled. Alex was too young to remember it directly, but his parents had told him about a human child being hurt during a fight with a centaur child long before he was born. The town had been in an uproar for weeks. Some of the townspeople, the ones who still harbored an unspoken fear of anyone who wasn’t a full-blooded human, had asked the centaurs to leave. Centaurs tended to be private creatures to begin with and it did not take a great deal of prejudice to convince them that living in town was not worth their time.
“I’m new to town,” Victoria said, her constant smile wavering for the first time. “We just moved into the old Lancaster house yesterday.”
That made sense, Alex thought. The Lancasters had been the town smiths for years and were second-generation giants who never had children. They had passed away two years ago, within days of each other. The house had sat empty ever since and, because of the size of its former owners, it would be perfect for centaurs who wanted to live within the town limits. “I start school on Monday,” Victoria continued. “I was just out for a run. I thought I’d get to know the valley a bit. See what the town looked like from the mountainside. I’m so dreadfully tired of unpacking boxes. Daddy has ever so many of them.”
The Dark Shadow of Spring Page 5
