The Queen of Dragons (Tales from the New Earth Book 8)

by J. J. Thompson

  Liliana smiled weakly at his comment and waited for him to begin walking back. One globe of light followed the mage and the other stayed with the paladin.

  She took a final look down into what could easily pass for the mouth of Hell and then turned away. She had to agree with Sebastian; this place had lost its appeal for her too.

  Reading about a warrior's blade being used in a book was a lot different than seeing it wielded in real life, Sylvie decided. She wished that it had remained locked in her imagination forever.

  Lei swept the glittering sword in an arc and the horned head of a third attacker flew through the air and bounced off of the mage's shield with the sizzle of cooked flesh. The smell was nauseating.

  The warrior whirled his blade once and cleaned the blood and gore off of the metal. Then he sheathed it in a single, smooth motion and looked back at the two magic-users.

  “Anyone have any idea about what these things are?” he asked in a remarkably calm voice as he gestured at the three bodies that lay stacked at his feet.

  Each was the size of a large pony, but that was the only thing remotely familiar about them. The monsters were all armor and spikes that stuck out of every part of them. Lei had cleverly struck at their thin necks, targeting their weak spot. Thankfully his instincts had been correct.

  Sylvie made a small circle with her forefinger and her magic light floated down from where it was hovering over the warrior's head to light up the remains.

  “They look a little bit like spiders,” she said, trying to keep her voice cool and professional. “If someone had mixed a spider with a cactus, that is. I honestly don't know what they are called though.”

  “Not a clue,” Chao added. “But those fangs are dripping a clear liquid that we can guess is poison. Try not to get bitten, Lei.”

  The big man looked at his brother with amusement. His fight seemed to have buoyed his spirits and Sylvie was sure that she had heard him laugh quietly during the battle.

  “I'll do my best,” the warrior replied. “I just wish I knew where they had come from.”

  They were standing at the end of a long, twisting hallway that led back to the entrance. The ancient stone walls were deeply engraved with odd symbols and abstract pictures covered in layers of old webs and dust. The monsters had dropped on them from the shadows of the soaring, vaulted ceiling and it was only Lei's amazing reflexes that had saved him.

  He'd leaped back, narrowly avoiding slamming into Sylvie's shield and had attacked without hesitation.

  “I'm more concerned about whether the ambush was planned or if we were just random targets,” Chao replied thoughtfully.

  The misshapen bodies that were still leaking blood didn't seem to faze him at all. He looked at them with a cool detachment and then stared toward the end of the hallway. Several feet over his head, a swarm of tiny glowing insects swirled together in a small cloud, lighting his path the way that Sylvie's mage globe lit hers.

  “Fireflies?” she'd asked when the conjurer had summoned the insects.

  “I call them lightning bugs,” he'd replied with a smile. “Not very original, I'm afraid, but descriptive. They are a reliable source of illumination.”

  “Handy.”

  Chao now glanced up at the dancing insects and they moved ahead a few feet to better light up the hallway.

  “Shall we continue?” he asked. “If we were hoping for a stealthy entrance, that hope has been dashed. We've basically just announced our arrival to the entire temple.”

  Lei stepped around the bodies and stalked forward, moving slowly and peering into every shadow.

  Chao glanced at Sylvie, who swallowed nervously and nodded. They moved ahead together, the conjurer staying close to the mage as they sidled around the corpses.

  Her shield sizzled again as it hit the remains and actually pushed the pile to one side of the hallway.

  “That's useful,” Chao said with a smile. “I wish that I could use such magic.”

  “Have you ever tried?” Sylvie asked as they followed Lei. “You and your brother have been alone since the fall of the old world and you've only learned to use your own natural talent for summoning. But magic is magic, after all. I think that with some coaching, you could probably cast Shield too.”

  The small man nodded as he looked down at the fan that he had drawn during his brother's battle with the monsters. He opened and closed it with a quick flick and slipped it back into his sash.

  “That had not occurred to me,” he admitted. “Perhaps when we get back to the castle, you could attempt to teach me? I would be grateful.”

  The mage grinned.

  “Of course I will. I doubt that it will take more than teaching you the proper incantation to allow you to cast a shield of your own. Too bad it hadn't occurred to us to do that before we got started on this search.”

  Chao shrugged, looking calm and unconcerned.

  “Your protection is sufficient, lady mage. I feel completely secure.”

  Sylvie frowned.

  “We are far from secure, my friend. Shields can be overwhelmed with enough force, either physical or magical. They grant us limited protection. Please remember that.”

  They both stopped as Lei reached the end of the hallway and peered around a corner.

  “I stand corrected,” Chao said and bowed gracefully, apparently sincere. “But at least a shield gives us a chance to retaliate if attacked.”

  “That's true.”

  The paladin looked back at them and waved them forward. They approached until Sylvie's shield was almost touching the armored figure.

  “There's a small chamber through a doorway around this corner,” he whispered once they had stopped. “I can see several closed doors that lead out of it. We may have a long search ahead of us.”

  “No problem,” the mage said with a quick glance at Chao. “We have all the time in the world.”

  “Perhaps we do, but your friend, the wizard, may not. Let's go.”

  The room beyond was no more than a dozen feet square and Sylvie was forced to drop her shield so that the three of them could enter it.

  The ceiling was low and thick cobwebs, heavy with dust, hung down from it, brushing their heads. There was a door on each wall and the trio stopped to decide on their next move.

  “Pick a door, any door?” Sylvie asked lightly, before she ducked away from a trail of webbing that got caught in her hair.

  “Let's go about this in an orderly manner,” Lei replied as he stared around the room. “We will take each door in turn, starting with that one on the left and then moving to the next in a clockwise direction, if you both agree.”

  “That will do,” Chao told him agreeably. “My lady?”

  “That's fine,” Sylvie said as she pulled dirty cobwebs from her hair with a sound of disgust. “Anything to get out of this room.”

  “Good,” the paladin said.

  He stepped up to the door and leaned against it with his shoulder.

  “Allow me to go first and, once you have enough room, lady mage, please recast your Shield spell.”

  Lei pushed against the heavy stone door with a grunt and the portal slowly, grudgingly scraped open. It had obviously been sealed for a very long time.

  Sylvie directed her mage light to follow the man while Chao's swirling insects continued to light up the area around the magic-users.

  “Thanks,” Lei told her over his shoulder and he stepped through the door.

  “Aiden? Damn it, where are you?”

  Tamara was standing in the middle of the ruined department store, shadows looming around her and making everything look strange and menacing.

  She summoned a globe of light and then listened intently, trying to locate the warrior.

  “Bloody impulsive twit,” she said angrily. “Don't tell me that I'm going to have to rescue the rescuer. That'll be fun.”

  “I can hear you, you know.”

  Tamara jumped and looked around wildly.

  “Down here,�
�� Aiden called out and the mage moved forward two steps and looked down into a gaping hole in the floor.

  A pile of debris had formed a sloping path into what she assumed was the basement of the store and she could see her companion standing at the bottom in front of the twisted doors of an old freight elevator.

  “What the hell are you doing down there?” she asked irritably.

  “Waiting for you, of course. This is where that scream came from, but I can't see a damned thing. Care to join me?”

  Muttering a few choice curses under her breath, Tamara carefully slid down the path, her light floating along above her as she went.

  “Ah good, that's better,” Aiden commented cheerfully as he examined the damaged elevator.

  “Why did you take off alone?” the mage asked him.

  He looked at her angry expression and shrugged.

  “I heard that scream and I was worried that it was Simon, of course. Tamara, we can't hesitate to save one of our own, can we?”

  She looked at his sincere and open face and sighed in resignation.

  Aiden was Aiden, she thought. Honest, caring and utterly fearless. He'll never change and I don't think I'd want him to.

  “No, but we can be more cautious,” she answered. “God knows what's down here, so can we take our time? Please?”

  The warrior grinned.

  “I'll try. Now, let's figure out how to open these damned doors.”

  They searched through the wreckage until they discovered a long metal beam that had been part of some sort of ceiling support.

  Aiden picked it up like it weighed nothing and Tamara hurried to give him some room.

  “So,” he said as he slid the beam between the broken doors. “Apply a little leverage and...”

  The beam squealed in protest but barely flexed as Aiden put his weight and strength behind it. With a piercing screech of rusted metal, the door on the right slid back grudgingly.

  The warrior kept up his pressure until the gap was wide enough for them to slip through and then he removed the beam and set it down carefully.

  “Well, that wasn't too bad,” he said as he wiped off his forehead. “Now, let's see what we can see. Tamara? Your light please?”

  The mage had to smile at his self-assurance as she stepped up next to him and motioned to her light globe.

  The bright white sphere slipped past them into the old elevator and revealed its contents.

  “Well, crap,” Aiden said with a frown. “That complicates things, doesn't it?”

  The pair was looking down into blackness. The floor of the elevator was gone; either rotted away or ripped off. Below the car, a pit extended deep into the Earth, leading God only knew where.

  “Did elevators go that deep back in the old days?” he asked Tamara as he peered cautiously into the emptiness.

  “Not in downtown Paris they didn't,” she told him. “I think something dug this hole sometime after the dragons' attack.”

  She joined him on the brink of the unseen drop, feeling a cool draft rising from below.

  “Hang on,” she said as she began chanting a spell. “Let's see how deep this hole really is.”

  Another mage light appeared above Tamara's open palm and she tossed it toward the hole as if it was a real ball.

  It dropped slowly down the shaft, fluttering like a feather as it fell, and the two companions watched it fall in silence.

  Ten feet, twenty. It continued to fall. Fifty feet, sixty.

  “Good God, how deep is this thing?” Aiden asked in wonder.

  Tamara didn't respond. She just kept watching her light through narrowed eyes, feeling a sense of menace building up around them.

  Something was down there. She could feel it. Something was down there and just waiting for them.

  The globe finally reached bottom, a distant point of light so tiny that they could barely make it out. It bounced and fluttered in the distance before flickering several times and fading away.

  “Why did it go out?” Aiden asked in confusion. “Did you cancel the spell?”

  “No, I didn't,” Tamara said with a shake of her head. “But a mage light draws its energy from the caster. If it gets too far away from its creator, it simply runs out of juice. That's what happened. And since both Sebastian and I have tested the limits of that spell, I can give you a fairly accurate guess as to how deep that hole is.”

  “Which is?”

  “A hundred feet, give or take. That's how far I can separate myself from my magic lights before they fade. My brother's fade at a significantly shorter distance.”

  “Really? It's not a standard thing?” Aiden asked, fascinated.

  He knew very little about magic, but was intrigued by it all the same. More so because his Change hadn't allowed him to use it.

  “No, it depends upon the strength of the mage. I am quite a bit stronger than my brother, despite his protests to the contrary,” she said with a fond smile.

  The smiled disappeared as a stomach-churning scream of agony echoed up from the darkness.

  Aiden instinctively moved forward and Tamara, showing surprising strength, pulled back on his shoulder with both hands, causing him to stumble backwards and land in a heap, his armor rattling like old pots and pans.

  He glared up at her as he struggled to sit up.

  She returned the look and pointed behind her at the open elevator door.

  “Have you suddenly learned how to fly?” she asked in a scathing voice. “Or did you want to make a dramatic entrance by splatting into the ground a hundred feet below us?”

  The warrior pushed himself to his feet and stared at the pit. The angry expression on his face was replaced by a look of extreme embarrassment.

  “Um, neither actually. Gees, I'm sorry, Tamara. It was, you know, a reflex. When I heard that scream.”

  “I understand, my friend. Believe me, I do. But as tough as you are, a hundred foot drop is still fatal. We have to be smart about this.”

  He shook his head ruefully.

  “Well, unless you've learned how to fly or you can conjure up some rope, I can't think of any way to get down there. If there was a light down there, you could use the Magic Mirror spell to look around, couldn't you?”

  Tamara nodded slowly as she knelt just outside of the elevator and looked into the hole again.

  “True. I could also Gate down, if I knew what it looked like at the bottom. With an open shaft to the surface, my magic should still work down there.”

  She muttered a curse.

  “It's just too bad that solid ground interferes with magic, unless you're a dwarf, of course. And they don't even approve of using the power. Foolish people.”

  “It's their way, I guess,” Aiden said calmly. “So that means we're stuck up here? Damn it, even if that isn't Simon down there, someone is in pain. And it could very well be the wizard, you know.”

  “I know that,” Tamara said irritably. “At least my spells would function down there, if we could reach the bottom. Hmm, hang on; I just thought of something.”

  She slipped a hand into a deep pocket of her robe and pulled out a small notebook. Her light descended to float just over her shoulder as she began flipping through the pages.

  “What is that?” the warrior asked.

  “A copy of my spell book; well, of some of the more obscure spells that I have never attempted to memorize.”

  “You haven't? Why not?”

  “For any number of reasons,” she replied absently as she searched through the book. “Some are so long and complicated that I simply can't remember the entire spell. Others are stupid and fairly useless. Fun at parties, I suppose, like the Tickle spell, but a waste of time in combat.”

  “There's a tickle spell?” Aiden asked, snickering. “How did you come up with that one?”

  She looked up from the book at the towering figure.

  “Would you mind squatting down, please? It's like talking to a bloody tree.”

  The warrior hastened to com
ply and Tamara smiled gratefully as she went back to her book.

  “I didn't 'come up with it'. Like so many of these spells, I remembered it from a dream. The old gods of Justice have been leaking spells to all of the magic-users since we Changed. Although why the hell they felt compelled to pass along that one, I have no idea.”

  “Showing you their humorous side?”

  “If that's true, I'm not amused. Anyway, some of the spells I was given by other casters. And I, in turn, pass along spells that I discover to them. But,” she flipped through more pages, “the one I'm looking for was a gift from Simon himself. He gave me a copy of it with the caveat that I not teach it to any other mage.”

  She frowned and looked up from the book, staring into the elevator blankly.

  “That was before we met Veronique and Sylvie though. I think that they should be allowed to learn it.”

  “Why didn't he want you to pass it on to others?”

  Tamara smiled at Aiden.

  “What he was saying, diplomatically of course, was that I shouldn't try to teach it to my brother. Sebastian has a great heart and a gentle nature, but he isn't nearly as powerful as I am. And none of us is as strong as Simon O'Toole. The wizard didn't want my brother learning this spell and then dying when he decided to use it.”

  “Good grief, what spell is it?” Aiden asked in surprise.

  He stood up and stepped back as Tamara sprang to her feet.

  “Ah, here we are,” she exclaimed.

  She scanned the page, reading the incantation and muttering under her breath.

  “Got it, got it,” she said to herself. “It's a tongue-twister, but I should be fine. I hope.”

  “Tamara?”

  The mage looked at Aiden, surprised at his urgent tone.

  “Hmm?”

  “What spell is it?”

  “Oh right. Sorry, just trying to keep the thing straight in my head. Simon called it a Feather Fall spell. Basically it allows you to float from a great height and land safely. It isn't a flying spell, unfortunately, but in this instance it should get us down to the bottom of the pit in one piece.”

  She looked at him curiously.

  “That is, if you still want to find out who was screaming. Do you?”