by John Goode
I decided to shut up until Hawk got back.
HAWK WAS tossing supplies into his magical pack when he heard a noise.
He paused and waited, motionless.
And he heard it again—a faint rustling and cracking. And panting.
Putting the pack down, he crept toward the door, willing himself to be as light as a feather so he didn’t make a sound. He peered out the small window by the doorway. Only his training as a warrior prevented him from gasping when he saw a squad of goblins making their way toward the house. A pair of huge wolflike creatures walked in the lead, sniffing the forest floor like bloodhounds, and Hawk saw the wargs’ handlers, a pair of ogres, covering the rear of the hunting party. Because that was what it was.
He lost a second as his mind tried to understand how his mother’s safe house had been discovered, but he quickly stopped. There was time to think later; now he had to act. The royal symbol was next to the door frame, seemingly another decoration in a house that possessed an excess of them. Most would not have given the small seal an extra look.
He placed his palm against the seal, and it began to glow.
Hawk’s mind touched the magic that ruled the house and waited for it to acknowledge him as a member of the royal family. Seconds later, he felt the house stop and wait for his commands. Ignoring the louder sounds coming from outside, he thought a string of commands, each short and to the point, and then waited for the house to accept them. The first creatures approached the door and scratched at it. He held his breath as precious seconds passed by.
The house pushed back against his mind, meaning it was ready.
Running away from the door, he scooped up the pack and made a mad dash toward the library. Kane, Ruber, and the rabbit looked startled when he came barreling toward him. “Cast the portal!” he screamed at Milo. “Hurry!”
Hawk had to give the rabbit credit. Instead of wasting time asking him why or panicking, he began to trace a large circle on the ground with one of his paws.
Kane, already picking up the danger from Hawk’s thoughts, asked, “How did they find us?”
Hawk shook his head, dismissing the question at the same instant he pulled Kane close. The front door crashed inward, but Milo held steady and continued his spell. Once the rabbit’s paw touched the beginning of the complete circle, the center of it fell away with a whoosh of air. Where there had been a polished marble floor, a gaping earthen hole had popped into existence, falling away endlessly from them. Milo looked at the humans. “Jump.” When Kane hesitated, Hawk pushed him in. His scream faded quickly as he fell into the darkness. Hawk went next. As he jumped in, the pair of hunting wargs turned the corner into the library. The magical wolves were almost a blur as they spotted their prey getting away and lunged after them. Ruber flew into the hole, and Milo followed. The moment the hare’s ears were clear, the circle closed, leaving the unmarred marble floor.
The wargs slid to a halt as they paced around where the hole had just been. The squad of goblins and the two ogres came jogging into the library, expecting to see the prince and his friends at the very least attempting to defend themselves.
Instead, the library was empty.
“Where are they?” the goblin commander called out to the wargs. The wolves pawed at the ground and growled.
“Maybe the gem moved them in the ground again?” one of the goblin subordinates offered.
The commander sighed and took off his helm. “We’re going to need to tear that floor up and see if there is a room beneath us—”
The house began to shake around them.
“Tremor,” one of the goblins called as they all struggled to keep their balance.
One of the ogres took hold of nearest shelf of books to steady himself. He looked at his hand in amazement as it seemed to be growing larger and larger in relationship to the books.
One of the other goblins looked up and asked, “Is that wall moving?”
There was a sound as loud as thunder and then nothing but darkness as the house folded back into itself, crushing the squadron and wargs instantly. From the outside, the cabin door reappeared in place and slammed itself shut. Within seconds, the woods surrounding the cabin settled back into silence as if nothing had happened.
WHEN CAERUS regained consciousness, she was lying alone in a corner of the workshop.
Making sure to keep her light dim, she floated up, judging herself to be around 35 percent charged. It wasn’t optimal, but it was better than running dry. She waited, listening for sounds of her pursuers. All she heard was a high-pitched tone that seemed to be coming from all over the workshop. Sensing no danger, she raised her glow and gasped in shock as she saw more than a dozen of the creatures that had charged her lying inert on the floor. She was far too cautious and knew too little about the creatures to assume they were dead. Giving them a wide berth, she propelled herself toward the point in the vast room where the wavering tone was the loudest.
She found a small grill on the wall above a workbench littered with dusty, long-abandoned tools. Next to the grill was a series of small white placards mounted in a brass frame. There were four different fields where the tiles could be spun about. It read like it was a status for the workshop.
Right now it read WORKSHOP-LOCKDOWN-ALARM-WAITING ROOM. Underneath the grill, so caked in dust and dirt it was barely visible, was a single, small bulb. Caerus needed a moment’s study to realize the bulb was flashing red in time with the tone in the background.
“Obviously I missed something,” she said, thinking out loud.
A creaking sound arose from the workbench; it sounded like rusted metal grinding against itself and breaking in the process. Using a cleaning spell on the bench, she banished centuries of grime from the surface, revealing another clockwork face like the couch’s.
“W-w-w-w-what tool are you missing?” it asked, even as it extended two flexible, cable-like arms, which began picking up the scattered tools and returning them to their proper places on itself.
The sapphire was about to ask what it was talking about when she realized the bench had taken her rhetorical statement as an actual query. It was connected to the alarm panel, so she thought it might know what was going on. “What is that tone?” she asked the bench.
“A lockdown alarm has been activated in the waiting room. As per protocol, all mobile clockworks are currently deactivated until an all clear can be signaled.”
“Who can signal the all clear?” She was fairly sure she knew what the answer was going to be.
“Workshop personnel with a silver or higher key card.”
“How do I get back to waiting room?”
The bench paused for half a second. “All movement between floors has been restricted until an all clear is signaled.”
“That is not going to work for me,” Caerus commented as she floated away to examine the room she was trapped in. She passed over dozens more unconscious choppers, some in various states of disrepair. From the discarded pile of rusted parts, it looked as if the creatures had been cannibalizing themselves to keep as many in working condition as possible. Beyond them stood a huge grove of trees laden with rusted containers hanging from their branches. They were of varying sizes but resembled the ones that had been in the dumbwaiter. Though the gemling could not smell, she could detect the overpowering levels of microbes produced by rotting food.
No one alive had been in this area for decades, possibly centuries.
Arrays of mechanical arms hung suspended from the ceiling between the rows of trees. Caerus guessed they had been used to gather the ripe pails and replenish the workshop’s food reserves. The sapphire followed the arms upward, looking for their access to the elevator system. There had to be more than one shaft to supply a structure of this size. The trick was finding the hidden doors.
Upstairs, Ferra had finished her patrol of the hallway outside the waiting room, disposing of the choppers passed out there as well. The barbarian had never encountered mechanical beings such as these
before, but she was sure of one thing—whatever their construction, decapitation was an effective means of shutting them off. The hallway extended until it reached a corridor, but there were no signs of any more choppers.
Taking care to stack the bodies up in one pile and the heads in another, she froze both, just in case they weren’t as dead as they seemed.
Not seeing anything else that could be considered a threat, she returned to Molly’s side, leaned down next to her, and stopped the device from whirling. As soon as the sound vanished, Molly’s eyes snapped open and she sat up. In a startled voice, she asked, “How much time did I lose?”
It was the closest to panic Ferra had heard from the clockwork girl since they had met, and it concerned her. “Less than ten minutes,” she answered softly. “They are all… taken care of.”
Molly got to her feet and looked at the two ice structures in the room. Ferra watched her as the clockwork girl inspected them to make sure there was no way the choppers could return to life and break free. “I doubt there are many more on this floor, but there will be more stored below.”
“Can we use that again?” she asked, pointing to the device still in Molly’s hand.
“Not unless we find another one,” Molly answered, tossing the device to the ground. “Each one is a one-time use, but there have to be more around.”
Ferra picked the discarded construct up and examined it. “What is it?”
“Panic device,” Molly answered, looking out into the hall. “They are installed throughout the complex in case there is a… an incident.”
“These people seemed to be greatly concerned their creations were going to turn on them.” Molly looked back at Ferra as the barbarian asked her, “Why?”
At first, Molly said nothing, acting like she hadn’t even heard the question. Then she looked away from Ferra; in a human, it would have been a gesture of embarrassment. “Tinker and Jones worked very hard to create clockwork beings as lifelike as possible. We are designed to talk, react, and even feel exactly like a flesh creature.”
When she didn’t continue, Ferra prompted her. “And?”
Molly turned back to her, and the warrior could swear she could see anger flare in the clockwork girl’s eyes. “And no one likes to realize they were brought into existence to be someone else’s slave.” Before Ferra could respond, Molly began to walk toward the door. “We need to get down to the workshop floor and find Caerus.”
Ferra slowly followed, wondering if they had made a terrible mistake coming here.
Chapter 4
“The archetype of the three wise women
predates all known uses of it in fiction, and though
its origins are lost to the ages, it is widely believed that
at some point three incredibly powerful
women provided the basis for the legend. What happened to these
women is considered to be one of the greatest mysteries
of the Nine Realms.”
The Story of the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone
by Princess Scheheryār
Keeper of the Stories in the Wolflands
THERE WERE no fewer than a dozen guards pacing the outskirts of Evermore.
Kor raised a hand to halt Ater, and the dark elf felt a pang of despair as he realized how much he resembled his brother from the back. In a voice that barely made it to Ater’s ear, Kor said, “I have a feeling Nystel might suspect something.”
He nodded, knowing the time for extraneous conversation had passed. Concentrating automatically, he willed his two swords into existence in his hands. Without a word, he began to inch his way toward the guards.
The other elf put a hand up to stop him. “Why is killing something your answer to everything?” Before Ater could respond, Kor reached his hand over his shoulder, looking as if he was about to draw his bow even though there was no weapon there. The dark elf was about to tell him he had forgotten something when a bow faded in from invisibility. It was the same massive, great bow, engraved with magical runes, he had seen earlier.
“Don’t look at the arrow.” Kor warned as he pulled the string back and a glowing arrow appeared. Ater ignored the other elf, knowing one arrow would not put down a dozen guards. Kor whispered something as he pulled the arrow back. A set of runes began to glow on the bow, and the dark elf saw the arrow turn into a glowing iridescent shaft he could not look away from. Kor let the arrow fly, and Ater’s gaze followed as it moved past the guards in a wide arc. Each guard it passed was entranced and stumbled after the arrow mindlessly.
Kor put his hands over Ater’s eyes and growled. “You really can’t just follow simple instructions, can you?”
The second he couldn’t see the arrow, the spell was broken. Pulling away from the other’s hand, he snapped, “You could have warned me it was a distraction arrow.”
“It’s a distraction arrow,” Kor replied calmly, putting the bow back over his shoulder. It vanished from view when he took his hand off it. “What did you expect from a sorcellerie?” He bounded across the clearing, not checking to see if the dark elf was following or not.
Ater sent his weapons away and raced after the elf, keeping his mouth shut despite his anger.
Sorcelleries were elven archers who used their bows as a mystical conduit for spells. Their runes were literally carved on the surface of the weapon, limiting how many different spells they could cast, but making them devastating fighters.
They made good time away from Evermore, neither one saying a word to the other as they traveled farther and farther away from the elven homelands. Once it was clear they weren’t being pursued, the pair slowed their pace, looking for somewhere hidden to camp for the night.
It took them little time to find a small cave that had been recently abandoned by a family of bears. Kor made a quick sweep of the enclosure to make sure it was empty, and Ater covered the entrance with shrubbery so it wouldn’t be noticeable from outside. Once he was sure they were concealed, he turned around to ask Kor what their next move was.
He found himself face-to-face with a drawn arrow that was glowing blue. “What?” he asked, shocked by Kor’s move.
Kor whispered the word “Vérité” and let the arrow fly at the dark elf’s head.
I HATE falling.
Yeah, yeah, you’re sitting there going, “Well, duh, Kane, who likes falling?” To that I would answer a couple of things. One, a lot of people, because if people didn’t like it there wouldn’t be roller coasters or bungee jumpers or parachutes and all that stupid crap. I mean it; if you willingly jump out of something just to feel yourself falling, you’re stupid, and we will never be friends. Two, I would say to you, give me a freaking break because my boyfriend just pushed me into an endless hole. And though I’m sure there’s some magical thing that will stop us from crashing into the ground below us, my heart is going to explode before then, so it won’t matter after that, will it? And three, I would say that if you’re picturing that idiotic fall they show in cartoons, where someone falls down this hole that’s well lit with cabinets and shelves passing by as the someone falls, you’re wrong. Because it’s pitch-black, I can see nothing around me, and the only thing I can feel is the wind pushing against my face as I scream toward terminal velocity.
And I mean that literally. Screaming at the top of my lungs.
So I have a new fear, by the way, which replaces falling as the most horrible sensation I could feel. My greatest fear now is falling in darkness with no way to tell how fast I’m going or how far I have to fall. It’s like Falling: The Next Generation, Falling Plus, Falling Squared—oh, how I could go on, but honestly, my mind is about to turn itself off because I’m about to die from fear.
So yeah, I’m falling, and I hate it.
I can feel Hawk’s mind try to calm mine down, but I got a quick snapshot of wolves chasing us, which just gives me an image of two wolves wearing skydiving outfits falling above me. They have those goggles on and the round helmets, but it does nothing to sh
atter the image that there are vicious wolflike killers chasing me. Then I start to wonder how a wolf would pull the ripcord on the parachute I have him wearing, and I realize that I’ve hit some kind of wall in my head, and I’m just too scared for my own good.
There’s only so much you can take before you just give up and let whatever is going to happen, happen.
And I’m still falling.
Now I’m just pissed. I mean, how long can this hole be? Hawk’s thoughts seem to imply longer than I would think, since we’re falling between worlds. That kind of puts me in check, because I’m normally bad with distances. Multidimensional distances doubly so. Even though I can feel Hawk in my head, I wish I could actually see him, because this falling endlessly in darkness sucks.
And then I’m out.
When I say out, I mean crouching on a pretty well-groomed field of green grass. There was no jarring moment of hitting the ground or even a moment of transition; one second I was falling, and the next I was on the ground, confused. As I looked around, I could see I was in some kind of field with stands on either side, filled with… well, with things is the best way I could put it.
Some were human; some were animals; some, swear to God, were just everyday objects like furniture or machines that were leaning forward looking at me like I was the weird one here. Seconds later, Milo and Hawk appeared next to me, both of them crouching down on the field as well. Ruber faded into existence and floated above us all, taking the scene in the best he could.
That was when I heard the clatter of people running at us from my right.
I looked over and saw a mass of people, animals, and I think a couch, rushing at us with croquet mallets in their hands. I didn’t even bother to try to defend myself, because there was no way to get my brain to acknowledge the danger, since my brain was in the middle of thinking I had lost my mind anyway.
Milo turned his head, and I thought his eyes were going to fall out when he saw the mob descending on us. He fumbled for his pocket watch, but somehow I knew he was going to be too late for that.
