by John Corwin
"Are you kidding me?" Ambria followed close behind. "It's so simple."
"I didn't even think of using magic." Max blasted a section with his wand. "For some reason, I thought we couldn't."
I cleared a trail and led the way up the path, hurrying since it returned to its slippery state after a brief time.
"Obviously we're supposed to use magic on this one." Ambria huffed and put her hands on her hips when we reached the top of the incline where the slick coating ended. From here, the tunnel floor dipped at a shallow angle. About fifty yards ahead, a humongous bull grazed in a small patch of dark green grass. Its head jerked upright when it saw us, hoof stomping in warning.
"How in the world did Kanaan have time to set up this crazy obstacle course?" Max said. "Where did he find a bull?"
"Probably with the omniarch," I said.
"There's no room for you to get past the bull." Shushiel crawled to the ceiling. "I can go over his head."
"Simple." Max flourished his wand. "Let's use magic."
"A blinding spell ought to do the trick." Ambria stepped toward the bull until it stood twenty yards away while the rest of us readied our wands in case it charged. She traced a pattern and a flash of light speared toward the bull's eyes. The spell splashed off the bull to no effect.
The creature bellowed angrily and stomped its front hoof. Then it lowered its head and charged.
"Run away!" Max shouted before taking his own advice.
Ambria sprinted past both of us, her summer of training proving its worth. Shushiel crawled overhead and dropped from the ceiling just ahead of us, a thin thread of silk stretching behind her.
"Hurry!" She said. "Press yourselves against the wall."
We ran past her and stopped at the edge of the slippery slope where we followed her advice.
The bull charged over the rise, pounding straight for us when its front legs struck a nearly invisible tripwire. With a bellow of surprise and wide bovine eyes, the bull faltered. It hit the slippery slope obstacle and slid all the way down, coasting to a stop at the bottom. It gained its feet and tried to charge us, but the slick surface confounded it as much as it had us.
Max brushed off his hands. "Well, that was easy enough."
Ambria hugged Shushiel. "Girl power."
"Yes." The spider bobbed up and down. "Girl power."
Max groaned.
A rhythmic pounding echoed from somewhere ahead. We walked over the bull's patch of grass and followed the curve to the source. Wooden beams jutted from the ceiling, walls, and floors, their surfaces studded with rods of varying lengths. The beams and rods rotated, extended, and retracted, opening and closing gaps along several yards of the passage. The floor was divided into hexagonal shapes that also shifted up and down just enough to trip someone trying to run across it.
"Reminds me of the gauntlet for kabash," Max said. "But those openings look a lot smaller."
I walked to the edge of the area and watched the first row of beams, counting the seconds between openings. A gap between the first and second series would allow us to gauge the next pattern. "Let me get to the other side."
"Maybe I should go first," Ambria said.
Max grunted. "How about giving boy power a chance first?"
Ambria rolled her eyes. "Fine, but don't hurt yourselves too badly."
I timed the pattern and ran, but the moment my foot touched the first hexagonal tile, the rhythm of the gauntlet shifted and changed to a new beat. The openings I'd timed before vanished, replaced by new ones.
Max slapped his forehead. "This is mental!"
I stepped back onto the normal floor and watched the new pattern. The openings in the first row were in opposite places now. If I'd tried to run straight through like originally envisioned, I would've been swatted like a fly. I watched the new pattern for a moment before realizing that it might change again when I stepped on the floor.
I put some weight on the same hexagonal tile. A loud click echoed and the pattern shifted to something even more chaotic. The floor tiles rose and dropped like ocean waves, the wooden beams shot up and down faster and faster. I pressed the tile again. Another click. Another pattern change. I pressed it again, giving myself a moment to analyze the pattern. The fifth time I pressed it, the pattern became familiar again and I realized it was the first pattern.
"There are five patterns," I told the others. "So far the first one seems the easiest."
"No, there is another problem," Shushiel said. "On the third pattern, there were no openings in the first row. I climbed higher and was able to see between the gaps. On some patterns, there are no openings in the other rows."
"How many rows are there?" Ambria asked.
"Six." Shushiel's eyes blinked. "I will have to crawl along the floor with the rest of you."
I blew out a breath. "Great, so we have to change the pattern to open gaps in different sections. That means someone over here will have to change the pattern for me while I make my way through. Once I hit the other side, I can tell you the pattern order."
Ambria pressed her hands to her temples. "This is awfully confusing."
"We'll be lucky to reach Kanaan today," Max said. "If there wasn't a bull between us and the exit, I'd leave right now." He rubbed his belly. "Also, I'd really like some donuts."
Ambria poked his stomach with a finger. "You don't need more donuts, Maxwell Tiberius. You need a diet."
Max pushed her finger away. "Hey, I'm not fat."
"Save the arguing for later, please." I pushed them apart. "We need to get through this challenge."
"Stupid challenge!" Max pressed on the first hexagonal tile, switching the patterns rapid fire. Something groaned. Cracked. Splinters exploded from beneath the floor tiles and the floor dropped a foot, leaving a gap between the ceiling and floor beams as the apparatus ground to a halt. Max's mouth dropped open. "Whoops."
"You broke it!" Ambria's lips spread into a wide grin. "Max, this is wonderful."
"Boy power," I muttered. "Guess it's good for something."
Shushiel bobbed up and down in amusement.
We squeezed through the gaps in the broken rods and with the aid of Shushiel, climbed over the places where no openings presented themselves. We continued down the tunnel, relieved to find no more obstacles. We emerged in a gauntlet room twenty minutes later. Just outside the room was the corridor leading to the mansion and the omniarch.
Max looked back at the tunnel exit. "Was that a different route from yesterday?"
"Looks like it." I wondered if we'd have to go back through it on the way home, or if Kanaan would let us use the omniarch.
Kanaan sat on a stone column in the center of the gauntlet room. Behind him were rows of progressively larger stones, monkey bars, and other equipment. He nodded curtly as we approached. "You made it. Now for the hard part."
Chapter 9
"The hard part?" Max looked flabbergasted. "If we hadn't broken the last gauntlet, we'd still be stuck out there."
"You broke it?" Kanaan raised an eyebrow.
Max gulped. "Um, it was an accident."
"What did you learn?" Kanaan asked.
Ambria sniffed. "That flying brooms through all of it would've been easier."
He nodded. "Why did you not?"
I frowned. "Wouldn't that be cheating?"
"In a game of no rules, there is no cheating." Kanaan pushed off the stone column. "Use what you can to reach your goal."
"Does that include breaking a challenge?" Ambria asked sweetly.
Kanaan nodded. "Sometimes you must break things to survive." He led us to three identical rows of stones. "Line up each stone in its place across the room." He pointed to three chalk lines on the opposite side.
"I will watch," Shushiel said, and climbed up a tall stone pillar.
The three of us started with our smaller stones, moving them in order. Ambria struggled with the fifth, a smooth round stone the size of her head. Despite our lack of exercise, Max and I were able to carr
y ours across without too much trouble. Ambria waddled across the room, huffing and puffing, and dropped it into place.
The sixth caused Max and I to struggle mightily. Ambria had to roll hers. Though it took her several minutes to get it into place, she didn't fall behind me and Max since our seventh stones had flat bottoms making them impossible to roll or lift. Even if we moved them, we still had the final stone to move, and it was the size of a small boulder.
I was the first to take out my wand and use a spell to levitate the stone into position. Kanaan watched and remained silent. Apparently, there were no rules to this challenge either. Max and Ambria followed my lead and within a few minutes, we'd relocated our final stones.
Kanaan clapped his hands together once. "Cross the rungs of the climbing frame. Repeat until you can hold on no longer." He pointed to the monkey bars.
The frame was about fifty feet long and ten feet wide, giving us room to cross beside each other. Max made it halfway across before his hands gave out and he dropped to the sand pit beneath it. Kanaan motioned him over to his side while Ambria and I continued. I fell short of the end by ten feet. Ambria made it three rungs more but couldn't hold on long enough to reach the end.
Kanaan clapped his hands. "Gather."
We walked over next to Max.
He led us to a track in another section of the gauntlet room. Progressively higher hurdles stood in our way. Beyond that, the track twisted and turned through stone walls. "Run the course as many times as possible."
I leapt over the first four hurdles, but the fifth was as high as my waist and I plowed into it. Thankfully, it bent over like rubber, allowing me to continue without tripping and falling on my face. I ran the course four times before I was too tired to continue. Ambria jogged past twice more before stopping.
Kanaan traced his wand over each of us and nodded.
"What in the world does this have to do with magitsu?" Max said. "I'm sick of your rat mazes."
The magitsu master turned to him. "Perform a flip."
"A flip?" Max grimaced. "I'd kill myself."
"Precisely." Kanaan led us to another section of the room where the floor emitted a sullen glow. "Do your flips here."
Ambria stepped tentatively onto the floor. It sank slightly beneath her weight. She jumped. The floor rebounded and propelled her several feet into the air. "It's just like a trampoline!" She did a perfect backward flip. "Oh, it's so much fun."
Max blew out a sigh, but went a safe distance from Ambria and tried to flip. He landed on his face, his back, and even his head. On his fifth attempt, he managed to land on his feet.
"What's this all about?" I asked Kanaan. "Why the gauntlet? Why flips?"
"Is it not clear?" He watched Ambria bounce up and down. "The monkey requires agility. You must condition your bodies as well as your minds. Magic alone is not enough."
Max scratched his head. "Do we have to do less exercise if we take the path of the rock?"
Kanaan offered a glimpse of a smile. "Then I would have you lift heavy weights to improve your strength. For the path of the tree, you would do yoga."
"In other words, there's no way to avoid exercise."
He shook his head. "To become a master, one must achieve balance in many aspects."
I went out onto the floor and practiced my flips.
We were exhausted by the end of our physical exercises, but Kanaan had more in store for us. "Light as many candles as possible with magic." He revealed a section filled with row upon row of candles.
Lighting candles should have been easy, but I was so tired, I could barely stand, much less concentrate on making a flame. I gritted my teeth and forced my tired mind to focus. Twenty candles later, I had to stop and close my eyes. Max and Ambria lit just over ten candles each before they could go no further.
Kanaan brought us tea and a plate of fruit and nuts. "Eat."
Shushiel perched on a nearby stone pillar. "You did well. I wish I could do magic so I could train with you."
"You could use eight wands," Max said with a grin.
Shushiel blinked. "It would be hard to walk."
Max dug into the fruit with abandon. I ate some blueberries, an apple, and a handful of almonds. The tea tasted slightly bitter, but it must have had extra ingredients, because by the time Kanaan returned for us, I felt refreshed.
Max noticed it too. "Did you give us an energy potion?"
"A drop of refresher potion in the tea." Kanaan set down his cup. "It will accelerate your physical conditioning, but you will require more sleep. After training, I suggest you eat an early supper."
"Is the potion harmful?" Ambria asked.
"In large doses and over long periods of time, yes." Kanaan held a small vial between thumb and forefinger. "Only one drop a day." He picked up a wicker basket at the foot of the pillar and put it on the stone block next to the fruit. He opened the lid and removed three jars. "Drink the red one in the morning, the green one after lunch, and the white before supper."
Ambria looked inside the basket. "What do they do?"
"They will enhance muscle growth and ligament strength." Kanaan tucked the jars back in the basket. "It is vital." He set the basket back by the pillar. "Come. Time for more exercises."
Max grimaced. I held back a groan. Though I felt refreshed from the tea potion, I didn't look forward to more trials.
Ambria clapped her hands together and jumped up. "I'm ready!"
Our teacher led us through more exercises. By the end, I lit fourteen candles while the others stopped at nearly half that. Apparently, the refresher potion had its limits. Even so, my muscles swelled more than usual, as if all the blood rushed inside and filled them like balloons.
After training, Kanaan opened an omniarch portal to the hallway outside the dining hall in the university.
"You read my mind!" Max rushed through despite having complained of being too tired to move just moments before.
"Tomorrow, same time," Kanaan said.
Ambria hesitated in front of the portal. "How did you get all those obstacles in place so fast?"
"The Burrows hold many secrets left by the builders. There are tunnels, other challenges." Kanaan folded his arms low over his waist. "Tomorrow you will face new gauntlets."
"What about the bull?" Ambria's forehead pinched. "Surely it hasn't been down here all this time."
"I borrowed it." Kanaan motioned us through the portal. "I will see you soon."
We stepped through and the portal winked away, leaving me and Ambria alone in the hallway since Max had already vanished into the dining hall.
"Do you sometimes feel as if we're training for too much all at the same time?" Ambria said. "We're still learning basic spells, arcnology, and now magitsu."
"Everything feels like too much." I sat down on a wooden bench and sighed with relief. "I don't have my parents' soul shards to rely on for advanced magic anymore. I have to be better if I want to survive."
Ambria sat down next to me. "Even though we've been at the same place since escaping the orphanage, it feels like we're always running, doesn't it?"
I hadn't thought of it that way, but Ambria was right. We'd never stopped running from the specter of my parents. "Maybe I didn't run far enough."
"Do you think we should go somewhere else?" She touched my hand. "Leave Queens Gate?"
I met her big brown eyes and realized with a start just how different she looked from the little orphan girl I'd saved all that time ago. Ambria had lost her round cheeks and gained dimples. Her hair was glossy and groomed instead of fuzzy and unkempt. She was growing into a woman, and I still felt like a little boy. No matter how hard I trained, I still felt helpless in the face of my father's power.
She deserved a wonderful future, but if I ran, I knew she would come with me out of a sense of obligation. I might have saved her from the orphanage, but that didn't mean she owed me her future. "No, Victus has to be stopped. I know he still wants power, so he'll be back."
Ambria
squeezed my hand. "You've grown so much, Conrad. I know that together we can stop him."
My heart turned to ice at the thought of what might lie in store for us. My friends and I had been through a lot, but we'd always had help surviving.
Shushiel shimmered out of camouflage next to Ambria. "Am I interrupting?"
I flinched, having forgotten she was there. "No, of course not."
"I will help you defeat your father, Conrad." Shushiel touched my arm with her foreleg. "He created the ruby spiders, but he is a bad man."
"Hey!" Max poked his head out of the dining hall. "Are you all coming to eat, or what?"
Ambria laughed and wiped a tear from her eye. "We should eat before we get too tired."
"Agreed." I let go of her hand even though a part of me wanted to keep holding it, and we joined Max for supper.
True to Kanaan's warning, by the time we ate and got to our brooms in the check-in closet, we were shuffling like zombies. Flying our brooms while tired proved hazardous. After Max nearly collided with a tree, we slowed down. Instead of flying up to our rooms and risking a fall, we went through the main entrance and dragged ourselves up the stairs.
Thankfully, very few students had returned from summer holiday yet, so there was no one to make fun of the way we walked.
Max's jaw cracked with another yawn. "I don't know if I can make it up the rest of the stairs." He gazed longingly at the sofas in the coed sitting room. "Maybe no one will bother me if I sleep here."
"You'll probably wake up with lipstick and a new haircut," Ambria said. "But go to sleep there if you want."
Max seemed too tired to groan and trudged toward the stairs leading to the male dorms.
Ambria stood on tiptoe and kissed my cheek. "Sleep well, Conrad."
"That won't be a problem." I hesitated, then leaned down and kissed her cheek. It felt so soft and warm to my lips that I let them linger for several seconds before realizing what I'd done. "Oh, I'm sorry."
She giggled. "Falling asleep on your feet?"
