Wyrmspire (Realm Keepers Book 2)

by Garrett Robinson

  For the second time in just a few weeks, I’d been chased into the dark earth beneath a mountain. Great.

  I swelled the fire in my hand, making it a little larger. I could see that we were in a massive space with black stone walls and a stone ceiling high above. The ground beneath our feet, however, was dirt, not rock.

  “So, that was fun,” said Raven. “And this looks like it’s going to be even funner.”

  “More fun,” said Calvin.

  “Whatever.”

  Nora was looking all around with wide eyes, her skin pale.

  “Nora,” I said. “What do you know about this place? Why were you so freaked out when we read the poem?”

  She glanced at me and quickly looked away, avoiding my gaze. “Nothing, my Lord. It is probably nothing.”

  “You’re bloody well right it is,” grumbled Barius.

  “Well, why don’t you tell us what it isn’t, then,” I said. “And we’ll see.”

  She glanced at Cara. Cara shrugged. I’d given her a suggestion, not an order. But I was perfectly willing to up the ante if I needed to.

  Fortunately, she didn’t force me to make that decision. “There is a poem that every child in Linsfell knows,” she said. “And many other cities and towns besides. It is a poem about the Giant’s Gate. It is said to children who misbehave, and sometimes it is sung by children as they play.”

  “What’s the poem?” I asked, already dreading the answer.

  Those who kick and scream and fight

  No matter boy or girl alike

  Think about your naughty fate

  Or you’ll be thrown through Giant’s Gate

  “Oh,” I said. “You really say that to kids? Dark.”

  “Hey, ‘Ring Around the Rosy’ is about the black plague,” said Calvin. “They don’t have a monopoly on messed-up kids’ poems.”

  “Of course you’d know that,” I told him. “But who cares about a poem for kids?”

  “It is a dark place in our stories,” said Nora. “A place of evil myth and legend. I had never thought it might be real.”

  “Wait, you mean there are things that you people don’t believe in?” I said. “You, who come from the world of magic and goblins and dragons and every nerd’s dreams?”

  “Hey!” said Calvin.

  “Oh, admit it,” I said.

  “Of course we have legends,” said Nora, sounding indignant. “Not all of them are meant to be taken literally. There are many stories of unicorns, too, but everyone knows that they are false.”

  “Just watch,” I said. “We’re going to find a unicorn one day, and then you’ll be sorry.”

  “Why is this called Giant’s gate, anyway?” said Miles. “Are there really giants in here?”

  “Well, they didn’t call it ‘pink fluffy bunny gate,’ did they?” said Melaine.

  “Guys, if you’re quite done?” said Sarah, giving the two of them a look. “We’d best be moving on. I don’t know how far this place goes on before it opens up again, but I want to try and reach the other side before the crows do.”

  “But what if there are giants in here, Sarah?” said Raven.

  Sarah shrugged. “What if? The other option is to go back outside and fight the crows. Even if we can beat them, there will be more. And they’ll follow our every step, telling Terrence right where we are. I’d rather take on some giants.”

  “But they are terrible, my Lady,” said Nora. “Fifteen feet tall they stand, and six feet wide. They eat the flesh of humans when they can get it.”

  “Well, unless they’re immune to magic, I think we can look after ourselves,” said Sarah. “But we’ll keep our eyes open, Nora. I promise.”

  “Yes, my Lady,” said Nora. But she didn’t look convinced.

  If you are truly set upon this course of action, I would advise you to be most careful.

  “Thanks a lot, Meridia,” I muttered.

  “Yeah, got it,” said Calvin.

  I did a double take. “You heard her, too?” I said.

  “We all did,” said Sarah with a sigh. “Come on.”

  We pressed on into the darkness. I kept the fire bright enough to see far ahead, but all there was to see were the black stone walls and ceiling. The path curved through the rocks, reminding me of a long road weaving around the curves of the land. Whoever made this place must have been building it around the bones of the mountain.

  The space widened out even more, the walls receding away on either side until my fire could no longer light them. Suddenly feeling self-conscious, I let the light die down a bit. We were bathed in shadows once more, only able to see about a hundred feet in any direction. But dozens of yards ahead, a single shaft of pale moonlight fell down from a hole in the roof. It fell on some shape I couldn’t see from this far away.

  “What is this place?” whispered Calvin. The space was so big, I didn’t even hear an echo from his words.

  “Clearly it’s some sort of cavern, meant to hold many,” said Darren. “I suppose we must hope that it is not inhabited.”

  “Yeah, you think?” I said.

  Ahead of us, under the shaft of light from the ceiling, I caught a glint.

  “What was that?”

  It glinted again. It was a reflection of some kind.

  We approached to find a metal structure sunk into the dirt, and lying on the ground next to it was a wide metal mirror. Though the surface had clearly been well-polished once, now it was old and tarnished with age. The shaft of light shone on both of them.

  Barius picked it up with interest and began wiping it off with his sleeve. “Made by giants, perhaps,” he said. “Long ago.”

  “Why would they make a mirror?” I said.

  Place it within the mounting. Meridia’s voice surprised me. I’d been so lost looking at the mirror I’d forgotten she was in my ring for a moment.

  Barius glanced at the metal structure in the floor. “Here?” he asked. “Where is it meant to go?”

  “There,” said Miles. “Look. There’s holes for those pegs in the side.” I looked. Sure enough, there were two pegs on the mirror’s sides, and two little grooves for them to be placed in. It also looked like the whole top of the structure could spin, although it was so rusted I didn’t know if it would still move.

  “The mirror must be to reflect the moon, or the sun during daytime,” said Barius.

  “Reflect it where?” I said. “Like a spotlight or something?”

  “Maybe it’s a laser,” said Calvin, his voice rising in excitement. “Maybe they used it to burn invaders into a crisp.”

  Raven stared at him. “It’s moonlight,” she said. “It’s not a death ray.”

  “But you could focus it,” said Calvin, beginning to pout. “Like you do when you fry ants with a magnifying glass. That’s just sunlight, but you can use it to burn them.”

  “And you really think that some ancient civilization of giants, hundreds of years ago or whatever, came up with laser technology?”

  Calvin’s pout grew. “I would have,” he muttered.

  Barius fit the pegs from the mirror into the metal structure. The thing was old and rusted, but he turned it with a grunt. It screeched as it turned, and I darted a look over my shoulder.

  “Could you be any louder?” I said.

  “It’s old,” he said.

  “So are you.”

  The mirror spun, reflecting light across the walls. Barius fished around with it, trying to find something to see. But it looked like blank wall all around.

  “Useless,” he said. “Perhaps it was only for decoration.”

  But he hadn’t finished the sentence before I caught a flare of light. “Wait!” I said. “There. Turn it back there.”

  He rotated it back to the left and down a bit. It passed over something that glinted, just as the mirror had before.

  “No, back!” I said. “Did you see it?”

  “I did,” said Barius through gritted teeth. “You understand, don’t you, that this thi
ng is ancient and rusted?”

  I rolled my eyes and stepped forward, taking the other side of the structure. Together we forced it around to shine on the object on the far wall. Finally we hit it, and were rewarded with a shaft of light that rebounded in still another direction.

  All at once, we could see. The mirror reflected onto another, which reflected into another, and another. It sent light bouncing all around the cavern, turning the air into a soft yellow glow. It wasn’t the same as walking by the light of the moon and the stars, but it was enough to see by. And there was a lot to see.

  The cavern stretched maybe a half mile across. Its floor was all dirt, with stone walls leaping up from the ground at the edges. It stretched away for much, much longer than a half mile, but I couldn’t see the other end of it. There must have been one or two mirrors that were old and broken with age, throwing some of the cavern into darkness again.

  But on the walls, and rising up them, there was a whole city. There were buildings, both small and large, carved directly into the rock. It reminded me of some of those towns you’d see in history class from ancient civilizations, the Mayans or the Incas or whatever, who would build a whole town in a cavern. This was just like that, with stone houses everywhere, and stone streets that wound back and forth, taking you higher and higher up the walls. The houses were simple, but they looked comfortable. And even the smallest ones were clearly much, much larger than any human home I’d ever seen.

  “Giant houses, huh?” said Raven. “Jeez, those things must have been massive.”

  “Fifteen feet tall,” Melaine said. “If you believe the stories.”

  “We’re in a giant town,” said Sarah. “I think I believe them.”

  “It reminds me of the goblin city,” said Miles, his voice heavy. His eyes were troubled as he looked at the walls climbing away into the darkness above.

  “You’re right,” I said, suppressing a shiver. “Thanks for that. Now I’m creeped out.”

  “Happy to help.”

  “That’s totally not the creepy part,” said Calvin.

  “What?” asked Miles. “What do you mean?”

  “Think about it, man,” said Calvin. “We’re standing in a small city or a really, really big town. Some society spent years carving this whole place out of the mountains. Not just years—centuries, probably.”

  “And?”

  “And now they’re gone,” said Calvin, his eyes wide. “Poof. Vanished. No trace of them left.”

  A thick, heavy silence settled.

  “Surely death will take you when you enter Giant’s Gate,” said Nora softly.

  “That’s just superstition,” said Barius. But his voice wasn’t as confident as it had been before.

  Tread lightly within this place, came Meridia’s voice in our heads. Disturb it as little as you may. There are darker things than Chaos in the world.

  “Oh, joy,” I muttered. I glanced around. “You heard that, right?” Nods answered me.

  “Perhaps we had best be moving on, my Lady,” said Darren.

  “Yeah, let’s do that,” said Sarah.

  We rode on, guiding our horses through the cavern in the dim light of the reflected sun.

  FLIGHT OF THE TROLLS

  BLADE

  I CAME AWAKE IN MY car, jerking up and nearly throttling myself against my seat belt. Stupid thing. Why had I left it on?

  It was the middle of the night. We’d gone on and on through those caverns past the Giant’s Gate, riding for hours and hours. Eventually we had to stop. It was much earlier than we’d meant to, but we had to give ourselves a rest. Being in the dark underground like that had slowly driven us all to the edge of endurance. Calvin had been nodding in his seat. Sarah finally called it when Tess actually did fall asleep, collapsing and nearly falling out of her saddle. She would have crashed to the ground if Nora hadn’t caught her. We’d found a house carved into the stone and set up for the night.

  I was in the woods. In my favorite camping ground. It was the same one I’d gone to during the siege of Morrowdust. Even though I spent most of my nights at Calvin’s or Miles’ place these days, sometimes I got the feeling I was overstaying my welcome. Their parents would start to give me sidelong looks. I could see their wheels turning. They didn’t even want me out, necessarily. They wanted worse than that. They wanted to find out what was going on in my own home. They wanted to try and fix it.

  I didn’t need that, and I wanted it even less.

  I fished around in my jacket’s inside pocket to pull out my pack of smokes. I flipped open the top to find it empty.

  “Crud,” I muttered.

  I dug around in the trash on my passenger’s seat, then the floor. I could almost always find a dropped smoke if I dug deep enough. But this time I came up empty.

  “Double crud.”

  I settled for re-lighting a half-burned one in the ashtray. Then I turned the car on and threw it into gear. Minutes later, I was on my way to town.

  Halfway there, a light came on next to the speedometer. I glanced at it. Low on gas.

  “Triple crud,” I said, frustrated.

  I pulled into the parking lot of a gas station, sidling my car up next to the pump. I tossed the last burning ember of the cigarette out my window, ignoring the horrified stare of the old lady a couple of pumps away. Other than her, the parking lot was empty. I made my way inside.

  My stomach rumbled as I stepped through the door and smelled coffee. I hadn’t eaten too much recently. The bit of cash I’d managed to grab from my dad was long gone. Miles and Calvin had snuck me a bit whenever they could. I wouldn’t take it when they offered, so they’d taken to sticking it in my jacket’s pocket when I wasn’t looking. I couldn’t bring myself to thank them or even acknowledge that I’d seen it, but my starving body wouldn’t let me give it back to them, either.

  I snatched up a breakfast sandwich from the rack near the counter and tossed it down in front of the cashier, a middle-aged woman with brown hair put up in a severe bun. She eyed me disdainfully. I probably looked like ten kinds of terrible. And though I couldn’t smell myself, I probably wasn’t a bed of roses, either.

  “That and five bucks on number three,” I said.

  “Eight forty-seven,” she said, not even typing it into the register. Clearly she’d worked here a while.

  I pulled out my wallet and flipped it open, grabbing all the cash inside. I flipped through it, counting…four dollars.

  I sighed. Glanced at the breakfast sandwich. Swiveled my gaze to my car.

  Minutes later, I pulled out of the gas station with four bucks in my tank and a pit in my stomach that was only growing bigger.

  “Where to now, buddy boy?” I asked myself as my headlights cut through the night.

  “Calvin’s?”

  “No good. Middle of the night. Mrs. W’s cool, but no one’s that cool.”

  “Miles is the same problem.”

  “Yeppers. Where else can I get food?”

  “Soup kitchen?”

  “If that fat dude sees me there with a car again, he’ll throw me into a dumpster.”

  “So he will.”

  Call me crazy if you want. I’d spent a whole lot of time alone. And I had to be honest—I’d always liked the sound of my own voice.

  I couldn’t go to Miles or Calvin. I didn’t have another place to get food. Home was definitely out.

  So essentially, it looked like I’d just wasted twenty minutes and four bucks getting gas that I wasn’t going to use to go anywhere. And I was still out of cigarettes.

  I was just about to get on the road that would take me back to the campsite, where I could spend the rest of the night slowly starving in my car in the dark again. But then a sudden thought struck me. I jerked the wheel to stay on the road back to town, a smile growing on my face.

  A half hour later I was banging on a pair of glass front doors. No answer. I banged again. Harder. Harder, until I was afraid I was going to break them. That was okay. I knew they cou
ld replace them easily.

  Finally someone appeared inside, walking slowly to the front doors and swinging them open.

  “Please don’t do that,” said Briggs. “You’ll set the alarm off in the building.”

  “Nice to see you too, Bigfoot,” I said, smiling as I stepped past him. The lobby was empty, but it was heated. I rubbed warmth into my arms and bounced up and down on the balls of my feet. “The others here already?”

  “Yes,” said Briggs simply. “Come on.”

  I followed him through the reception area’s back door and into the hallways of the building. He took me past the cafeteria—I cast a longing glance through the door—and into a big common room we’d skimmed over in the tour. There were the others, all of them dressed in hospital gowns. Anna was with them.

  “Heyo,” I said. “You can start the party now.”

  “Hey, Blade,” said Sarah. “Have a seat. There’s food.”

  My nose had already told me that. Each of them had a plate in front of them, crumpled aluminum foil lying in balls on the tables. “Don’t mind if I do,” I said. I snatched a tray off a nearby table and plopped down next to Tess, ripping the foil cover off. Scrambled eggs, and a couple of slices of bacon. Amazing.

  I shoved the food down my mouth as fast as it would go. Once I had the first couple of bites down, I could focus enough to grab some hot sauce and sprinkle it liberally on the rest of the eggs. My plate was gone in less than thirty seconds.

  “Hoo, boy,” I said, leaning back. “All that sleeping makes you hungry, huh?”

  I looked up to see the others all staring at me. All of them had plates that were still half-full. All of them, I noticed, except Tess, whose plate was clean like mine.

  “Um, I guess?” said Calvin.

  I felt myself starting to get flustered. I pushed the feeling down, shoved my plate away and stood. The room was silent as I walked out toward reception.

  I hit the glass doors and shoved them open. But just before I could step through, I heard the creak of a door opening behind me. I turned, expecting to find Sarah, or maybe Tess. To my surprise, Anna stood in the doorway leading to the back.