Cave of Nightmares Page 16

  “Yeah, we’re ready,” Hayden answered, wondering if that was true.

  We’ll soon find out…

  Bright light streamed towards the sky from the top of the pedestals, illuminating the older students’ hands and making them look ghostly. Hayden had the strange sensation of being flipped upside down without actually moving, his surroundings blurring together slowly before his eyes. It was as if everything had forgotten its boundary and was bleeding over into everything else, the trees melding together and the cliffs and ocean slowly becoming one as Hayden’s eyes went out of focus.

  He blinked hard and shook off the strange sensation, and was surprised to find himself in a completely different location with no idea of when the change occurred.

  The four of them were standing in a small copse in the middle of a densely-wooded area. Looking up, Hayden couldn’t see the sun, but somehow the sky was still bright. The clearing they were in had freshly-trimmed grass and a stone park bench, but everything around them grew wild. In the empty space with them, laying on the ground, was an unmarked envelope.

  “There’re our instructions.” Tucker hurried to pick up the envelope and open it, recovering the quickest from the translocation. The rest of them were still staring around and blinking in confusion. Tess looked like she was searching for the castle to get her bearings.

  “It says we’ve got fifteen minutes to make it to the trigger crystal, due north. For every minute that we’re late a creature will be turned loose against us, and we’ll have to fight our way past it to get to the trigger.”

  Hayden felt his face blanch.

  “They’re going to send monsters after us if we’re too slow in our first arena ever?”

  “I doubt it,” Zane answered immediately, though his voice quavered. “They don’t want us to get too frazzled on our first go, so they’ll probably just sent conjures after us. The real monsters they save for when we’re older.”

  “Come on, let’s get moving,” Tucker pointed to the air in front of them, where floating red numbers were counting upwards from zero every second.

  The timer has started…

  Without being asked, Tucker pulled a maple wand from his belt, set it in the palm of his hand and said, “North.” It spun around like a compass and came to an abrupt stop, pointing to their left.

  “Let’s go,” Hayden jogged alongside Tucker, removing the clear prism from his belt and twisting it into his eyepiece as he went, pulling the headpiece forward so he could see through the prism with his right eye.

  The world looked strange and beautiful like that, his left eye seeing things as they really were, while his right saw the magic arrays of light behind it all.

  The trees were densely-packed in this part of the woods, and it slowed them down considerably as their clothing snagged on branches and thorns while they were climbing over-and-around fallen logs. After five minutes of this, Tucker stopped and cast his directional spell again to make sure they were still headed north. Unfortunately they were right on course, which crushed Hayden’s hopes that the way would get easier as they went.

  Tess gave a cry of surprise from behind them and Hayden whirled around just in time to see her fall through a hole in the ground that hadn’t been there a moment before. It looked like the hole had been covered with brush to conceal it and she was the one unlucky enough to step through it.

  “Tess!” Hayden hurried back, moving cautiously around the perimeter and looking down at her. It was deep, perhaps ten feet down, with unnaturally-smooth walls of dirt on all sides that suggested it was made by magic. Tess was trying to jump up and grab at the walls, struggling for purchase, but there was nothing to catch onto, and she wasn’t tall enough for them to reach in and pull her out.

  “Just go on without me!” she called up, her voice shaking. She was massaging her ankle, and Hayden guessed that she twisted it upon landing.

  “No way, we’re not leaving you here!” Hayden immediately brushed aside the stupid notion, turning to the others. Less certainly, he asked, “How do we get her out?”

  “I don’t have any spells advanced enough to translocate someone,” Tucker admitted with a frown, checking his inventory of wands for some inspiration that he apparently didn’t find, because when he finished he just shook his head.

  “Me neither,” Zane looked regretful. “That’s fifth-year stuff in Conjury, at least.”

  Hayden certainly didn’t have any idea of how to move her with a prism, and doubted that his level-one prisms were even capable of such a feat. He looked around wildly for inspiration, on the off-chance the Masters had conveniently left them a ladder or something.

  Tucker glanced at the floating red timer that was always in front of them, counting steadily upwards.

  “We could leave her…” he suggested softly. “We’ll lose points at the end for it, but if we hurry we might be able to get to the trigger before the animals are set against us.”

  Hayden didn’t like to think of Tess being left alone in the woods with a pack of monsters hunting them, whether they were real or not.

  “No, there has to be a way to get her out of there,” he insisted, glaring at the others. “Think harder. They wouldn’t set us a task we can’t accomplish, or this entire arena thing would be pointless and unfair.”

  “And what are we going to do if we waste all our time here and it takes us an hour to get to the trigger?” Tucker demanded hotly.

  “Then we’re going to get a really bad score, but at least we’ll be able to say we didn’t run away and leave one of our teammates behind,” Hayden snapped, turning to Zane to see who he would side with.

  His roommate met his eyes and nodded sharply.

  “Alright then, let’s get Tess out of that stupid hole,” Zane began searching the nearby trees for makeshift tools—a long branch, perhaps. Tucker, who Hayden had been expecting to challenge his leadership, was surprisingly acquiescent once the decision was made and went to help.

  Hayden glanced back down into the hole.

  “We’re not leaving you,” he assured Tess, lying down on his stomach at the edge of the drop and lowering his arms down as far as he could. “Do you think you can reach me?”

  Her fingertips barely touched his, but only after he was leaning precariously into the hole. He wouldn’t be able to support her weight at this angle, even if she did manage to grab onto him. He heard Zane and Tucker somewhere just behind him, and asked one of them to grab his legs and help pull him up.

  Five more minutes until we’re attacked…

  He had no idea how to fight against anything with magic, and didn’t think that the Growing and Shrinking spells would be of much use right now.

  That’s all I need, to make my enemy bigger.

  “I would kiss Lorn in exchange for a stupid rope right now,” he fumed, pacing back and forth. Zane gave him a strange look, and at first Hayden thought it was because of the joke about Lorn, but then he said, “Uh…I should be able to conjure a rope…”

  The others whirled around to look at him.

  “I thought you said you couldn’t do anything with conjury!” Tucker exclaimed.

  “I said I couldn’t translocate her…I never thought about trying to bring a rope into the arena…” Zane looked embarrassed, and Tucker threw his hands into the air in frustration.

  “It’s fine, there’s no time for blame right now. Just get to it,” Hayden insisted, and Zane began looking around for a flat surface to draw on.

  Tucker found a large stone nearby and waved one of his wands at it, shearing it cleanly in half so that Zane could draw on it. The wand Tucker used was shortened by half from that one spell.

  Hayden could tell that Zane would have liked to draw his circle much larger, but was constrained by the space allowed by the rock. He was trying to be very precise with his line-placement and stopped to sharpen the edge of his chalk at one point as he began cross-hatching.

  Three more minutes…

  Zane placed his hand in the circle
and pulled a rope upwards, seemingly from inside the rock itself. Thankfully he conjured a long piece, at least twenty-feet in length, and they hastened to tie it around a tree trunk while Tess climbed up the other end, bracing her feet against the wall of dirt to manage it.

  She looked extremely relieved to be free and said, “Thanks for not leaving me.”

  “We’re a team. Come on, let’s go.” Hayden continued north along their original trajectory, trying to hurry and at the same time trying to watch for more hidden traps, but either the way was clear or they got lucky after that.

  He was so excited to reach the edge of the forest that he didn’t immediately notice that the timer hit fifteen minutes until he heard an eerie howl from somewhere behind them. An owl was perched in a nearby tree, and Hayden thought it was giving him an amused glance, like it wanted to see what would happen next.

  “Oh crud…” Zane muttered, and the four of them broke into a sprint, hurrying across a wide expanse of grass towards a sparkling lake that had no visible crossing. His heart leapt as he saw the trigger on a pedestal, just up a hill on the other side of the water. The red crystal (commonly called a trigger) would signal the end of their challenge and cue the mastery-level students to summon them back out of the arena.

  Whatever was chasing them was running much faster than they were, and they came to a stop at the edge of the lake as they faced their next set of challenges.

  “We could swim across…” Tess suggested.

  “There are bound to be monsters in the lake. No way are they just testing our swimming skills,” Tucker panted, out of breath.

  “I don’t suppose anyone can build a bridge…?” Hayden asked hopelessly, already knowing the answer.

  A large, mangy wolf darted out of the forest just then, eyes fixed on them as it charged forward.

  “Oh please don’t let that be a real wolf…please just be a construct…” Zane was chanting under his breath, looking around frantically for inspiration on how to fight off a wild animal.

  Tucker drew his wand—the one that had been shortened considerably when he sliced the rock for Zane—and cursed.

  “Damn, it’s not long enough for me to cast a Freezing spell with.”

  The wolf was almost upon them, and Hayden spun the prism in his eyepiece, hoping for anything that would save them, but Tess beat him to it by withdrawing a pouch of powder and throwing the entire thing into the wolf’s face just as it lunged at her.

  The animal seemed to go rigid in mid-air, though it continued along its original trajectory and crashed into Tess with a thud, knocking her to the ground. She rolled out from under it and got back to her feet, staggering backwards so that her heels were touching the edge of the lake.

  “What did you do?” Zane asked, impressed.

  “I used a stopping tincture, but it won’t hold for more than a few minutes and that was all I had of it,” she said nervously.

  Hayden turned back to the lake.

  “We’re going to have to swim. We don’t have magic for anything better, and if there are monsters inside, well, we’ve got monsters out here too. Nothing to do but go forward and hope the Masters won’t let us die in here.”

  The others nodded, looking scared but determined, and the four of them descended into the lake.

  The water was pleasantly warm, which was a surprise, since Hayden had been expecting something like the freezing bog. At least it doesn’t smell like armpits.

  He had hardly moved three feet into the water before the ground dropped away beneath his feet and he was forced to swim, trying not to think about how deep this lake might be or what was waiting at the bottom of it.

  Just as long as there are no hydras in here…

  Zane was a faster swimmer than him and passed him almost immediately, soon followed by Tess and then Tucker. Hayden had never been a particularly strong swimmer, and suddenly wished that he hadn’t fought his mother so much when she insisted on teaching him as a child.

  His arms and legs were aching by the time he was halfway across the lake, the others far ahead of him. Just as he was beginning to think they would make it across without being attacked, Tucker cried out from ahead of him and then ducked under the surface of the water. Hayden swam as hard as he could to catch up, ignoring his aching extremities, and Zane—who was closest to the opposite shore—was turning around to go back out into the lake.

  Before either of them could reach the place where Tucker went under, they saw a flash of bright light beneath the surface and Tucker re-emerged, shaking the water from his eyes.

  “That serpent was big enough to eat Tamon’s boa constrictor,” he shuddered, continuing to swim. “Keep going!” he called out to Zane, who immediately turned back around. “We don’t need the rest of us getting caught out here too!”

  Hayden was uncomfortably aware of the timer in front of them, which had passed the sixteenth and seventeenth minute by now. On the shore that Zane was swimming to, between them and the crystal, a jackal was pacing back and forth as though waiting for them.

  There should be another monster though…two extra minutes have passed…

  Just as he had that thought, he felt something clamp down around his left leg. Knowing what to expect, he took a deep breath just before it yanked him beneath the surface, not even giving him time to cry out and alert his teammates.

  He opened his eyes as he sped downwards, nearly screaming when he saw the double-headed hydra that had its jaws (one set of them) clamped around his leg. He wished he hadn’t looked, because the sight of the four-meter monster with legs thicker than his body was nearly enough to make him pass out from fear.

  He drew his birch wand in the desperate hope of shrinking the hydra to a manageable size, but its tail whipped past him and knocked the wand from his hand, where it drifted uselessly away in the water. His ears were popping like crazy, the water pressure making his head and throat feel like they were being squeezed inwards. He was relieved when the hydra stopped pulling him downwards before his head imploded.

  Hayden was deep enough underwater that even though he could see through his prism, the lights were too muted and scattered to do any good. He still spun it around in his eyepiece while looking up towards the surface, praying for some divine inspiration before the ache in his lungs overwhelmed him and he drowned. There was only one array that seemed intact in the dimness of the water, and without knowing what he hoped to accomplish with it, he thought, LIGHT! as hard as he could.

  It was like the sun had suddenly risen underwater. Light burst from the prism in all directions, startling even the hydra, which stopped and turned both of its heads away from the source, shrieking in alarm. This forced it to release Hayden from its clutches as well, but he was much too far from the surface of the water to make it out. His lungs were heaving behind his closed mouth, desperate for air.

  I’ll never be able to swim that hard without breathing…

  He wondered what would happen if he died in an arena…would he stay dead? Surely the Masters wouldn’t allow students to die here…but then again, no one would really miss the hated son of Aleric Frost. They could say it was an accident and no one would question it. Everyone who used to love him was dead.

  He unscrewed the clear prism from his eyepiece and it continued to emit light as it was slowly consumed by the magic. Since there was no harm in looking at his amber prism before he died (because he had never tried to use it before), he removed it from his belt and held it in front of his right eye. He moved the clear prism behind it so that he had sufficient light to see through the amber one, and exhaled his remaining air in shock from what was there.

  It was the most magnificent thing he’d ever seen. Looking through both prisms at once made such a startling, complex series of lights and patterns that his mind couldn’t even begin to process them all. He felt like he was looking at the true power of the world, like the mask of nature had been stripped away and he was staring right into its soul. It was almost worth dying for this.


  As the last of the air left his lungs and he prepared to reflexively inhale, an array of blue-green-violet-green caught his eye, and without giving it any consideration he thought, AIR!

  The water around him exploded like a bomb. Both prisms vanished in an instant as water blasted away from him in every direction, like he was suddenly repellent to it. He fell about two feet to the bottom of the lake and landed on the silty floor, gasping in fresh air as he looked around in awe. He could see the sky above him as the water rose up all around the edges of the lake like a giant transparent wall, or a bubble. Fish were flopping about on the ground near him, and Hayden took off running for the shore, because the water was already beginning to trickle in behind him as the prisms’ full powers were consumed.

  He saw Tucker way ahead of him, just at the edge of the lake, staring around in awe.

  “GO! It won’t hold!” Hayden shouted as he raced towards him, and Tucker shook off his stupor and flung himself through the layer of water and to the other side. Hayden could hear the rush of water behind him as he dove towards the wall and rolled onto dry, solid ground. The entire lake seemed to collapse right behind him as the water settled back into place without a ripple, as though nothing extraordinary had happened.

  “What was that all about?!” Zane shook him, helping him to his feet. Hayden noticed that his roommate had a scratch on his cheek that was dripping blood, but otherwise seemed fine.

  He must have fought the jackal…

  Hayden was too exhausted to answer, and the sight of two more jackals racing towards them from the east was enough to chivvy them into action.

  “Get to the crystal!” Tucker raced up the steep grassy hill in front of them without looking back. They could see the red crystal hovering in mid-air, tauntingly near.

  Hayden clutched a stitch in his side and followed, though Zane was half-carrying him by the time they crested the top of the hill, because Hayden was wheezing from all the strain to his lungs. Tess and Tucker already had their hands pressed against the red crystal and Hayden stumbled towards them, trying his hardest not to collapse as the jackals charged up the hill behind them. He had barely grazed the trigger when Zane shouted, “OUT!” and the world began to blur.