“There’s probably a certain order that they need to be triggered in,” muttered Lee. “It’s probably long, and repetitive, and annoying.”
“Yup,” said Tess.
“I hate these puzzles with a passion.”
It was made trickier by the need to keep his distance. He tried drawing near enough to poke one of the levers with the tip of his sneaker, but even secondhand contact was enough to trigger the painful enchantment. He had to throw his shoe each time, hoping that it would strike the lever he wanted with enough force to trigger it and the resulting effect on the other levers would be beneficial to the overall order.
He made a fair amount of progress before realizing that, on top of everything else, the test was timed. The levers reset back into a random order at the end of every minute.
“There’s no way,” he said. “I’ll never be able to trigger them fast enough. I have to use my last spell.”
“Even if you do, how do you know which lever to use it on?” asked Tess. “You’ll have to think this through carefully.”
“I’m sick of thinking,” said Lee. “Screw this puzzle.”
He adopted the conjuration casting stance and focused his will, pushing his arm forward and using up the very last of Tess’s available essence. He cast his force spell, the one Harper had taught him, to slam into all three of the levers at once.
The spell struck them like a rampaging bull, triggering all three of the levers, but also bending one at the middle and snapping one completely loose from its underlying mechanism. The door behind the levers creaked as it slid downward, revealing the last of the three chambers.
Compared to the other two puzzles, what Lee now faced felt simple, elegant even. A ship in a bottle sat atop a display stand in the center of the room. The bottle was large and made of glass that gleamed in the light. The ship was exquisite, detailed to the point of having tiny cannons protruding from the broadside and a realistically carved figurehead of a busty woman in a voluminous, flowing robe.
Exquisite with one exception. The sails were stained with blood, charred with ash, and rendered useless by long cuts running down their centers. Within the same bottle lay two rolled-up bundles of white canvas. The puzzle was simple, a test of conjuration dexterity rather than patience or wit.
“This shouldn’t be hard for me,” said Tess. “I’ll just add it to your tab.”
She approached the ship before Lee could think better of it, brushing strands of loose brown hair out of her face. She reached her hands forward, fingers pinched like tiny sets of tweezers ready to go to work. She never got the chance.
As soon as Tess made contact with the bottle, she was hurled off her feet with a noise that reminded Lee of a thundercrack. She struck the doorframe behind them with a horrible crunch and let out a sharp cry of pain. Lee ran to her side as she slumped to the floor.
“Tess!” he said. He gently lifted her head, wondering if the advice about moving people after a crash also applied to ghosts.
“Ow…” she cried. “Ugh. I… should have seen that coming.”
“Are you okay?”
“Not really,” she muttered. “I’m not dying, but that hurt.”
She blinked tears of pain loose from her eyes and glared at the ship. Lee used his thumb to wipe a few of them away and smoothed out the hair hanging across her forehead.
“Thanks for trying, at least,” he said.
“I’ll have to try again, though, won’t I? You have no spells left to use against this puzzle.”
“No, I don’t. I have something else, though.”
He shifted her into a comfortable sitting position against the wall. Tess seemed content to rest and recover. Approaching the ship, Lee cracked his knuckles and focused his attention on the bottle. Wooden legs held it upright on the display stand. He took off his shoe again and lobbed it against the glass, which didn’t move, suggesting that the bottle’s legs were either glued or otherwise secured to the stand.
The problem was one that Lee couldn’t solve as a mage, so he took a slow breath and let himself view it through his own eyes, those of a mystic. The glass bottle had an enchantment on it that kept Tess from being able to reach through. He could use his dispel ability against that.
Lee scowled as he realized that if he’d used dispel against the levers, he might have been able to save himself a spell or two. It was a fleeting thought, as the delicate work involved with replacing the sail would have been beyond his telekinesis skills, regardless.
He held his hands out on either side of the glass bottle, not touching it, but still directing his will toward it. Breathing slowly, in and out, Lee prepared to use dispel. It was so much like casting magic, and yet so different. It felt more like flipping through the pages of a book, while casting a spell was like reciting a memorized passage.
There was no visual effect or clear indicator of the moment it happened, but internally Lee felt his will crashing against the bottle’s enchantment and scattering outward, useless and ineffective against its intensity. He gritted his teeth, but fought the urge to get frustrated. He’d learned something, at least.
The enchantment was like the curve of the bottle, strong as a whole, but brittle and weak at specific points. Lee could break through, but he’d have to use his ability in a new way in order to do it. He needed to focus his dispel instead of projecting it wide, turn it into a form of anti-magic, the opposite of an enchantment.
He made a fist, feeling dramatic. An enchanted glass bottle was not going to stop him from solving a stupid puzzle. He was Lee Amaranth: freelance mystic, undercover supernatural agent, tamer of ghosts, and eater of sandwiches. He was going to break that fucking glass.
He turned his dispel into a point of concentrated anti-magic, wrapping it around his knuckles like boxing tape. There actually was a visual component to the new ability, for once. A distorted, simmering glow, like the air around an extremely hot flame.
He slammed his fist forward into the bottle. The thundercrack sounded again, along with the shrill echo of shattering glass. Light flashed outward. Lee’s knuckles hurt like, well, like he’d just punched glass. The ship inside the bottle went flying forward, hitting the ground with a worrying bounce.
He glanced down at his knuckles, smiling at the numbness he felt and the blood he saw. Small price to pay for a new ability, a literal anti-magic punch.
“Problem solved, Tess,” he said.
“Yay,” came her tired, unenthused reply.
He found the ship amidst shards of broken bottle and winced at the state it was in. In freeing it from its glass prison, he’d broken several of the long oars extending from the sides, lost a few of the cannons, and opened a crack along the bottom of the hull.
Lee found the replacement sails and carefully, tenderly, switched them in for the old ones. The last door creaked downward. He set the ship back on the display stand and hoped Mattis wouldn’t deduct too many points for his unorthodox approach.
CHAPTER 48
The bell at the end of the conjuration trial brought Lee back to his starting point. He only had one set of obstacles left, and he’d already solved the first portion. The illusion bridge with hidden holes had been reconfigured, but presented no more of a challenge to him than it had the first time around.
He helped Tess along, keeping an arm under her tired shoulders. She leaned against the wall as they approached the obstacle that had given Lee so much trouble during his practice run. The television fear simulacrum buzzed with static, and he wasn’t sure if the ominous aura it seemed to emanate was real or a product of his imagination.
“Will you be okay this time?” asked Tess. “There might be another solution. A way around having to face the simulacrum directly, like you found with the bottle.”
“No,” sighed Lee. “I have to face it. It’s not just about the test.”
He walked over to the couch in front of the TV and sank down into it, legs wide, posture relaxed. It began as soon as his eyes settled on the scre
en.
***
He was back in the field of corpses and blood, in the depths of night. Dead, rotting bodies littered the grass, some abuzz as insects desecrated what was left on the bones. The wind blew, carrying scents that were better left unexamined.
Just as before, he saw the three women he cared about most approaching him, each from a different direction, like points on an equilateral triangle. Just as before, he felt the crushing pressure to make an impossible decision, to subdivide his heart into three bleeding, broken portions.
“Eldon,” whispered Zoe. “You aren’t like the rest. Come join me and see what you really are.”
There was blood dripping from the side of her neck. An odd detail, one that Lee didn’t understand. He shivered as he stared at the hand she held out to him.
“Lee…” said Tess. “Come give me a kiss.”
She staggered toward him, not as a specter this time, but in her zombie body. Lee had hoped to never have to see her like that again. He felt a pain in his chest that rose to the bottom of his throat.
“Initiate Amaranth,” said Harper. “What secrets have you kept from me?”
Harper prepared a fireball the size of his skull, seconds away from incinerating him, at most. All three of them had drawn in close, increasing the pressure. Forcing him to confront the simple, horrible truth. He couldn’t save them all.
No, that wasn’t right. He could save them all. He was the only one who could save them all. Lee reached a hand out to either side, feeling the cold, prickling sensation of Zoe and Harper grabbing on to him. He stared at Tess, still shambling toward him with slow, undead steps.
“Give me a kiss, Lee,” she said. Her voice was raspy, but still so pretty and so familiar.
“Yeah,” he said. “I trust you, Tess. Come here.”
She lumbered forward, letting out a guttural moan. Lee felt both Harper and Zoe tensing, preparing to strike. He squeezed their hands and stared into Tess’s eyes. The change was subtle at first, then all at once.
The zombie shell faded away, revealing the girl Lee knew and loved underneath. She threw herself against him in a hug, crying first, then grinning. She kissed him, and that was all it took.
***
“That was quick,” said Tess.
Lee jerked to his feet, blinking and feeling out of sorts. The TV was still buzzing with static. He was now coated in a thin layer of cold sweat. He took a breath, wishing he could cleanse his mind of the scene he’d just endured, the bodies and the constant threat of betrayal and catastrophe.
“I think that was my least favorite part of this entire thing,” he muttered.
“Even worse than the hamster ball?”
“By far.”
He let himself smile as he walked through the newly opened door. The last bell was no different from the others. He put an arm around Tess, who was still unsteady on her feet, and gave it a loud ring.
This time, the transportation enchantment brought him outside of the spatial vortex entirely. Lee was standing in the testing chamber, breathing heavily. He stood up straight and turned around. Lead Instructor Mattis and Instructor Constantine were watching him with guarded expressions. Constantine walked around to the spatial vortex and wheeled it out of the chamber.
“Did I pass?” he asked, letting a smile betray the extent of his confidence.
“Initiate Amaranth,” said Mattis in a slow, cold voice.
“Wait…” Lee took a step back. “I… did pass, didn’t I? I rang all the bells!”
Had they been watching his exact movements during the trial? Was this because of how he’d used his mystic abilities on the bottle, near the end? Because of the broken ship?
“Yes, you passed,” said Mattis.
Constantine reentered the chamber and, strangely, he was followed by Mattis’s dire wolf. The three of them stood blocking the only exit from the room—two instructors, one bonded animal.
No, Lee suddenly realized.
He’d made an assumption about that wolf, and it had been wrong from the very beginning.
Light flashed as the dire wolf transformed, standing upright on two legs instead of four. A tall woman took its place, shaking her head and pushing strands of black hair out of her eyes. She was pale and busty, with yellow eyes and a predatorial smile. She wore a silver track suit and expensive diamond earrings.
“Ah, yes,” said the woman. “I can see it on your face. You’ve realized at this point that, rather unfortunately, a celebration is not due after all, no?”
She had a vague European accent, her voice fluid, musical, and dangerous. Lee’s first impulse, for whatever reason, was to subtly shift Tess so she was hidden behind him. A pointless gesture. He could sense that their interest was in him. He could see the focus and intensity in their gazes.
“Do you know who I am, Lee Amaranth?” asked the woman. “Or why I’m here?”
Both questions were precisely what Lee was furiously trying to work out for himself, and both gave him the essential clue he needed. She was a lycanthrope. She’d infiltrated Primhaven. Mattis and Constantine were somehow complicit. And she thought he knew who she was, information he would have to learn from someone else, someone she might not want talking.
“Gabby,” said Lee. “You killed Gabby.”
The woman laughed. “This must be why the famous Harper Black was so eager to take you as her apprentice. You’re clever, Lee Amaranth. Very, very clever. Yes, you are correct.”
He was an idiot, a fool, a complete and utter jackass. He’d fallen victim to distractions. Sure, it had been a perfect storm of distractions, between the lich, studying, and looking out for his friends, but he’d still let the murder that had happened on campus mere weeks earlier slip onto the back burner of his attention.
“My name is Shannara,” said the woman. “I am the Mother of the Melting Pack. It just so happens that the woman you refer to as Gabby was a double agent. She was a member of the House of Shadows, but owed us loyalty, as well. She knew things, aspects of the situation at Primhaven which I suspect she disclosed to you. Information we cannot risk becoming public knowledge.”
“Like the fact that you apparently have two instructors in your pocket,” said Lee. He focused his glare mainly at Mattis, who he’d come to trust and respect. “I thought you were better than this.”
Mattis dropped her gaze, shaking her head. “Lee… the situation is complicated.”
“She’s right,” said Shannara. “If anything, you should fault yourself for not noticing the clues. Think on how Mattis was so indifferent to you, a simple initiate, joining in the hunt for a powerful lich. Examine her choices, her convenient absences.”
“You were trying to get me killed,” said Lee.
“No!” snapped Mattis. “That’s not how it was. I was just—”
“She was just following my orders, you see,” said Shannara. “Of course, I didn’t outright say that it would be useful, fitting, really, if you died at the hands of Yylex. That would have been so very heavy-handed. Mattis is not a true believer, like myself or Constantine, but she’s been useful, nonetheless.”
“Why?” he snapped. “Mattis, you care about Primhaven. I know you do! Why would you—”
“They have my husband,” she said.
“A hostage, then?” Lee gritted his teeth. “You can ask for help. If you told Harper, or the Order, then maybe—”
“Again, the situation is more complicated than it seems,” said Shannara. “We don’t just have her husband, Lee. He’s one of us. One of the dreaded lycanthropes to be captured, or even executed on sight.”
He bit his lower lip, trying to think faster than he ever had before. Three against one. Terrible odds. He’d even left his weapons back in his dorm, not thinking he’d need them for the Midterm Trial. Stupid, so fucking stupid.
“If only you could see the bigger picture,” said Shannara, with a sigh. “We are not bad people, Lee Amaranth, and this college is not what it seems. Did you ever hear what happ
ened to the previous Head Wizard? How he risked himself to harbor a lycanthrope, and how the Order punished the entire college in return?”
It was the story Zoe had told him, the tragedy of Head Wizard Antioch and the incident that’d led to her fleeing Primhaven. It was all connected, ripples and waves from the same fateful impact. The Order had killed Antioch and his lycanthropy-infected wife. They’d wiped the minds of the students he’d influenced and shifted the faculty, but that upheaval had only provided Shannara and her lycanthropes with a new opportunity to infiltrate the school.
“The Order trains killers, bloodhounds that track down families and children and murder them on a basis of supernatural purity,” said Shannara. “The world does not have to be this way, and the change can begin peacefully in a place like Primhaven, a place of learning and new perspectives. It almost already did, once before. We’re merely aiming to continue promoting the ideas that Head Wizard Antioch gave birth to.”
“You killed Gabby,” he said. “Maybe the next time you pitch your recruitment speech to someone, do it before you have blood on your hands.”
“Unfortunately, we are not here at this time to recruit you, Lee Amaranth,” said Shannara. “Though that isn’t to say that Primhaven isn’t brimming with potential candidates. Your most recent mentor, for example.”
Lee blinked. “Kei. He went missing this morning. No. He wouldn’t betray the school! His brother is a student here!”
“He won’t have much choice about it,” said Shannara. “The bite he suffered was not from a zombie, though I was careful to make it seem as such during the chaos of the attack. He will feel the call at the rising of the next full moon. We’ve already moved him to a place where he can undergo his transformation safely, until he learns to control the change.”
Arcane Dropout 3 Page 24
