Copyright © 2013 by Sophie Audouin-Mamikonian Translation © 2013 by William Rodarmor
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
ISBN: 978-1-61608-969-6
Printed in the United States of America
CONTENTS
Chapter 1 Murder, They Said
Chapter 2 The Arrest
Chapter 3 The Truth Tellers
Chapter 4 Imperial Prisons
Chapter 5 Of Gnomes and Kidnappings
Chapter 6 The Blue Gnomes
Chapter 7 A Crystal Trap
Chapter 8 The Deadly Spell
Chapter 9 Destination Unknown
Chapter 10 The Spirit of the Black Roses
Chapter 11 The Limbo Judge
Chapter 12 A Royal Audience
Chapter 13 Imperial Dishonor
Chapter 14 The Vampyr’s Murder
Chapter 15 The Ravager of Souls
Chapter 16 The White Soul
Chapter 17 Captured!
Chapter 18 The Ravager Revealed
Chapter 19 Trapping a Spellbinder
Chapter 20 The Vampyress
Chapter 21 Heir to the Empire
An Otherworld Lexicon
About the Author
About the Translator
Thanks and Acknowledgments
CHAPTER 1
MURDER, THEY SAID
The glittering mask was black with fury. The dark figures huddled around its wearer were careful not to move.
“So, that fool dares to defy me!” roared their leader. “Very well! I can’t kill her openly. My fellow Bloodgraves would never forgive me. But if it happened by accident . . .”
The master began to laugh, and his mask slowly turned blue with satisfaction.
“Yes, an accident . . . An accident that would both destroy my adversary and trap my enemy—a happy coincidence! Once the girl’s in my power, I’ll have access to all the demonic power objects, and nothing will be able to ever stop me. Here’s what we are going to do . . .”
Hearing the complicated plan the master had devised, one of the dark figures trembled. No, that can’t happen! The girl mustn’t be captured alive.
There was no longer any choice. Tara Duncan had to die!
The shadow moved stealthily along the wall, silently cursing the silver moonlight shining in through the windows. It skillfully avoided sofas, chairs, and tables while making for its goal: an office door behind which angry voices could be heard.
The figure took out a transparent object, carefully set it against the wall, and smiled as the voices in the office became clearly audible. What they were saying was very interesting.
First came a male voice—that of the dragon wizard Chemnashaovirodaintrachivu, Master Chem for short. He sounded defensive and ill at ease. The second voice was also male and sounded cultured, but seemingly unable to easily pronounce certain words. It belonged to Manitou, a wizard currently in the body of a Labrador retriever. The third, very angry voice was that of the wizard Isabella Duncan. The fourth belonged to Selena Duncan, Isabella’s daughter.
“Of course I am!” Isabella snapped, apparently in answer to a question. “For crying out loud, Chem, you didn’t even tell me Tara had been kidnapped! If you weren’t already a big batrachian, I’d turn you into a toad this instant!”
“Saurian!” protested the dragon. “I’m a saurian, Isabella. Please don’t insult me. Anyway, what more could you have done than I did? Besides chewing your fingernails to the bone, that is.”
“You have no excuse, Chem,” she thundered, “and you know it!”
“But everything turned out fine in the end, didn’t it? We found Tara, we freed the kidnapped apprentice spellbinders, and we defeated Magister.”
“No thanks to you,” growled Manitou. “Tara, Fabrice, Robin, Sparrow, Fafnir, and I escaped from the Gray Fortress without your help. And we’re the ones who fixed Magister’s hash, not you!”
Master Chem, who was feeling cornered, tried to change the subject.
“Speaking of hash, we’ve been getting complaints about you, Manitou,” he said. “A half-dozen female spellbinders in Lancovit would like to skin you alive.”
The black Lab groaned. “All right, what did I do now?”
“You probably can’t remember it, but about ten years ago you sold them an eternal youth potion,” said Chem. “Which wasn’t exactly eternal, since it aged them fifty years overnight. We got the latest cases a few days ago, but I’ve been trying to treat one of the women for a year now. The problem is that your potion’s side effects are unpredictable. I’ve been able to cure the others and restore their looks, but this one woman’s case seems hopeless.”
“Woof?” barked Manitou. “Darn, I mean, ‘What?’ If I did sell that stuff, I don’t remember doing it, so I can’t help you! As you know, I only regained my human consciousness a month ago, and my memory is a disaster. I don’t have lapses, I have black holes. My mind is just shot.”
“Well, it’s a good thing you’re here on Earth and not many people know you’ve been turned into a dog,” said Chem with a chuckle. “Otherwise your hide wouldn’t be worth a plugged nickel.”
“Are they really that angry?”
“What do you expect? Their husbands and boyfriends went to bed with twenty-year-old girls, and in the morning woke up next to grandmothers! Imagine the shock! You shouldn’t have written ‘Forever Young’ in your ads.”
Isabella interrupted them. “Let’s not get sidetracked by the problems my father has such a talent for causing whenever he performs magic,” she said irritably, unwilling to let the dragon off the hook so easily. “I’d like to get back to our initial topic, namely Magister, the Bloodgrave who nearly opened the rift between Earth and Limbo, which would have allowed the demons to invade the planet. That’s more important than some poorly concocted potion. It was very lucky that Tara was smart and powerful enough to destroy the Throne of Silur.”
“That’s right, so let’s not beat ourselves up about what could’ve happened and what we should or shouldn’t have done,” said the old dragon, who was getting tired of being yelled at. “You got your daughter Selena back, whom you thought was dead, and your granddaughter Tara is thriving. So, let’s please discuss our other problems instead, namely: Who is hiding behind Magister’s mask? Who is this Hunter he mentioned to Tara? And who tried to kill her in the vortex? It couldn’t have been Magister himself, since Tara is the key that gives him access to the demonic objects. We have a lot of questions and can’t even begin to answer them. I hate that.”
“Hmm . . . What do you make of the Rigibonus?” asked Manitou, who was thinking hard.
“The what?”
“That strange ray that one of Magister’s henchmen used at the manor house. Remember when Magister first tried to kidnap Tara? He sent o
ne of his Bloodgraves, who tried to kill Isabella while he was at it. The ray starts as a Rigidifus, to petrify the victim, and then becomes a Carbonus to burn them. That’s why I call the spell a ‘Rigibonus.’ It would have cooked Isabella’s goose, except that Tara grabbed the burning ray—we don’t know quite how—and fired it back at the Bloodgrave. It seriously wounded him. And since it’s a double spell, only Tara can heal it. In the meantime, the guy’s face must look like charcoal-broiled steak.”
“Yuck!” said Selena. “Spare us the gory details, Manitou. But that means that he’ll recover automatically if Tara dies, right?”
“Exactly,” said the dog. “So, do we know the guilty party?”
“I don’t think so,” rumbled the dragon after a few moments’ thought. “I imagine the pain must be so intense that he’s probably not good for much. The only thing he can do right now is blow bubbles.”
“Bubbles?”
“That’s right. He probably puts his head into icy water to dull the pain and must make a lot of bubbles when he screams,” Chem explained, sounding amused. “So I’m afraid we have to look elsewhere.”
Chem’s black humor was greeted with silence.
“Tara picked up some hairs from Magister’s hairbrush,” said Manitou. “Did that yield anything?”
“When we captured the Gray Fortress, we got the brush and some of dear Magister’s clothes—even his underpants. We turned the lot over to the hunter-elf crime laboratory, but it was all so steeped in demonic magic that we didn’t learn much. We weren’t able to identify the rat or locate him.”
“Magister always wears that mask,” Selena said softly. “In the ten years he held me prisoner I never learned who he was.”
“And I didn’t hear about any of this until later,” said Isabella, “so I have no idea either, unfortunately. But right now I have a much more important question: How are we going to deal with the fact that Tara is the heir of the Omois Empire? I have a few thoughts on that, but . . .”
The listening shadow remained glued to the wall, careful not to make any noise. It was so concentrated that it didn’t see the enormous puma silently creeping up behind it. Ears flat against its skull, the cat approached stealthily, eyes focused on its prey. Suddenly the figure moved, and the cat froze, hugging the ground. Its lips drew back, revealing gleaming fangs.
Alerted by some mysterious sixth sense, the shadow turned around, but it was too late. The great cat pounced, and the two crashed to the floor together.
Chem, Selena, Manitou, and Isabella were startled to hear a fierce roar followed by a scream and the tinkle of breaking glass.
“Ahhhhh!”
Selena yanked the office door open and gasped. A young boy with black hair lay on the ground among shards of glass, pinned down by a huge golden puma affectionately licking his face.
“Are you completely out of your mind?” the boy furiously yelled at the cat, as he dodged its rough tongue. “You’re totally nuts! You can’t go around jumping people like that!”
“Caliban?” asked Manitou. “What in the world are you doing here?”
“Let him up, Sembor!” Selena ordered her feline familiar.
The cat reluctantly backed off, freeing its victim. Selena helped Cal to his feet.
“I was just passing by—” the young spellbinder began.
“At two o’clock in the morning?” snapped Isabella.
“Is it really that late?” He sounded surprised, his gray eyes wide with innocence. “Oh boy, I really better get to bed! If you don’t mind, I’ll just—”
He was about to run off when Chem grabbed him by the collar.
“Just a second, young man! I’d like to know what you were doing up in the middle of the night.”
Glancing at the glass on the floor, Chem recited: “By Repairus, take these shattered bits and assemble them so each one fits.”
The fragments immediately flew together to form a drinking glass that floated obediently in front of the dragon wizard.
“As I was saying, in the middle of the night, with a glass. An empty glass.”
Cal considered concocting a plausible lie, but the look of fury on Isabella’s face stopped him.
“As you know, we thieves live for information,” he said. “So, when I realized that you were having a secret meeting, I took a glass from the kitchen and set it against the wall so I could hear you.”
Selena looked baffled. “A glass?”
“Yeah, it’s an old thief trick. The sound vibrations hit the wall and are transmitted by the glass. You can hear almost as well as if you were in the room yourself.”
“Just so you know, young man, we weren’t talking secrets. In fact, Lady Duncan had me on the carpet again for not telling her that her granddaughter had been kidnapped,” said the old dragon with a forced chuckle. “But we’ve moved beyond that stage of our discussions, haven’t we, Isabella?”
She glared at him. “Don’t think for a moment that I’ve forgiven you, you old snake. We’ll be talking about this again, believe me!”
“Saurian!” moaned Chem. “I’m a reptile, all right, but I belong to the class of higher saurians. I don’t call you an old she-ape whenever I get angry with you, do I? So please, let’s stop beating each other over the head with our family trees each time we have an argument!”
Isabella’s eyes narrowed at the insult. Ignoring her daughter’s quiet chuckle, she coldly retorted: “You’re right Chem, you’re a saur-ian. Just talking with you makes my head sore.”
That was a declaration of war, and Cal decided to make himself scarce before he became collateral damage. Selena gave the relieved boy an embarrassed smile as he slipped out of the living room. As a nighttime expedition, this one still needed work, he had to admit. Cal entered the bedroom he was sharing with Robin and Fabrice. His two friends were awake and anxiously waiting for him, as was his familiar, Blondin the fox.
“Hey, weren’t you supposed to be discreet?” said Fabrice sarcastically. “‘I can’t take you with me,’ you said, ‘you’d make too much noise!’ Well, when it comes to noise, I thought the house was collapsing. A real my first is a feline, my second is a donkey, and my third a rhythmic system composed of two or more lines repeated as a unit.”
“A real what?” asked Robin the half-elf, who had trouble with the young Earthling’s odd habit of dropping riddles into his conversation.
“A cat + ass + strophe = catastrophe,” Fabrice helpfully explained.
“That stupid puma!” snapped Cal. “Sembor was crouching in a corner of the room, and I didn’t see him. Until he jumped me, that is.”
“Bummer!” said Robin sympathetically. “So much for your licensed thief training! Weren’t you able to learn anything at all?”
“Not a thing. They were talking things over with Master Chem. Well, more like they were chewing him out. Isabella is still mad that he didn’t tell her about the time Tara was kidnapped. In other words, same old, same old.”
“So much the better,” said Robin, his crystalline eyes bright. “That means we’ll be able to enjoy our vacation in peace. Personally, I like being on Earth. It’s a nice change from OtherWorld.”
Delighted to get their apprentices back safe and sound, the high wizards of Lancovit had given the young heroes three weeks’ vacation. The five friends had now been on Earth for a week. But Tara had already missed the start of school, unfortunately, and was due to start classes in just two days.
Upon their arrival from OtherWorld, Fabrice had invited them to stay at his father’s castle, but the two boys wanted to stay nearby at Isabella’s manor house with Tara and Sparrow. So that Fabrice wouldn’t feel left out, Isabella invited him over as well. Add Selena and Master Chem, and the old pink stone house was full to bursting. Using magic, that wasn’t a major problem. But if the manor house had turned into a huge castle overnight, the nonspells would certainly have noticed. So Isabella simply made each individual room bigger, to accommodate everyone comfortably.
Just
then, a discreet knock on the door sent the three boys diving under their covers. False alarm. It wasn’t Selena—or worse, Isabella—just Sparrow and Tara. Standing at the door, the girls looked in at their three friends affectionately. There was Fabrice, blond and athletic; Cal, small and graceful, with the face of an angel; and Robin with his glittering eyes, who was much taller than the other boys. The two girls were accompanied by their familiars, Tara’s pegasus Gallant and Sparrow’s panther Sheeba. Framed in the doorway, they were quite a sight.
The pretty picture wavered a bit when they burst out laughing at an apocalyptic description of Cal’s failed expedition.
“Okay, you girls, that’s enough,” grumbled the little thief. “Quit laughing like whaloons. I’m dead tired, so get out of here! Beat it!”
Tara was grateful for Cal’s effort to help her and gave him a kiss, which made him blush. The display of affection was slightly undermined by the girls’ amused comments once they were back in their room next door.
The next morning, the five young spellbinders decided to explore the country around the manor.
“The easiest way would be by bike,” suggested Tara.
“What’s that?” asked Cal, Sparrow, and Robin in unison, none of whom had ever seen a bicycle before.
“One of these,” said Tara with a sly grin, and she climbed on her bicycle. “You just get on, like this. To make it go, you press the pedals. You’ll see, it’s easy.”
After crashing headfirst twice into the manor lawn, Cal decided that Tara and Fabrice had had enough fun laughing at his expense. Discreetly, the young spellbinder recited: “By Stabilus, steady this thing so it cruises, and spare me all the bumps and bruises.”
Magic on Earth was much less powerful than on OtherWorld, but Cal’s stabilizing spell worked, and his bike began rolling perfectly straight.
“Cheater!” yelled Sparrow as she bailed out at speed to avoid crashing into a large chestnut tree.
“Yeah, well, there’ll be two of us cheaters, ’cause I’m fed up with these bikes,” muttered Robin. “By Stabilus, steady this mechanical steed, so o’er hill and dale I’ll lightly speed.”
Tara Duncan and the Forbidden Book Page 1
