Chapter 5

Akeelay

Chapter 5

    I was locked in a supply closet. I would have laughed if I hadn’t been so worried. All I had was my knife and whatever stuff was being stored in there, which I hadn’t looked at before.

     I went back into the little secret space and pushed on the walls hopefully. If there was a small room, couldn’t there be a secret hallway? But there was nothing.

     Going back into the main room, I searched the shelves for anything helpful. There was only a lot of dust and a length of rope.

     This must seem like one of your videogames. What would you do? I had a knife and some rope. That was pretty much it. How do I escape?

     I sat down on the floor (across the room from the secret space) and sighed. Leaning back against the wall, I jumped as I fell through yet another secret hatch. This one was less of a surprise, though, and I managed to pull away before falling. Opening the new secret hatch, I saw that it was a good thing I hadn’t fallen.

     The hatch led to a drop about three times my height. I suddenly understood the purpose for the rope.

     I tied the end of the rope to a convenient hole in one of the shelves, probably put there for that purpose.

     I carefully climbed down the rope, sliding the last little bit and burning my hands. But, looking around, I forgot my pain when I saw that this was a hallway, leading off in both directions.

     Squinting in concentration, I tried to orient myself within the dank tunnel. I had to get back to my room.

     Finally deciding to go left, I reached up and cut off as much off the rope as I could. If somebody thought to come investigate, they would have a hard time getting down here without the full length of the rope.

     I walked. I turned when I needed to, to try to get as close to my room as possible. I noted a large sign labeled “Exit” pointing down a different hallway. That seemed like it would be a trap, it was so obvious. I was going the right way anyway, so I ignored it.

Soon, a staircase came into view in front of me. Climbing the stone steps as quietly as possible, I discovered a trapdoor in the top.

     “Just open it,” I whispered to myself, not wanting to spend half a day down there wondering if it was safe. I shoved the trapdoor open, and found myself in familiar surroundings.

     I was in Maybelle’s room.

     Apparently, she and the other wizards weren’t back yet. I didn’t want to think about the alternative.

     My room was only a couple of halls away, and I ran down the hallways toward it.

People were all talking about what had happened, and hearing snatches of it, eventually I pieced together the story.

Racing around a corner, I crashed into someone. Apologizing quickly, I glanced up to make sure it wasn’t a sorcerer.

     It was, and I backed away nervously. He had wavy black hair and light brown eyes. He looked almost my age, maybe a little older, which surprised me. The only way I knew he was a sorcerer was that he was wearing black. Not robes like most sorcerers, though. He had a black t-shirt and jeans.

     “S-sorry,” I stuttered again.

     “No problem,” he said, grinning at me. Who was this guy? He was most definitely not an ordinary sorcerer.

     I walked on without saying goodbye. I didn’t trust sorcerers.

     I made it the rest of the way to my room without incident, shaking off the memory of the strange sorcerer. I had more important things to worry about. I had to leave the castle.

     It was obvious what I had to do. Everybody else could stay if they wanted to, but with all these evil magykans… They would eventually figure out that it was me who had nearly killed Renjin, and then I would be in trouble. And what was the use in staying? Sorcerers do have a very high casualty rate – for those around them.

     Suddenly, there was a knock at my door. I automatically went to open it and had already turned the knob before realizing that it could be anybody out there. I opened it anyway. The only people I had to worry about could break down the door in an instant anyway, so it didn’t matter if I opened it or not.

     It was Maybelle. Relieved, I pulled her inside. If a sorcerer came around and saw her, we were doomed.

     “What’s going on?” she asked instantly.

     “Sorcerers have taken over the castle and I’m leaving,” I responded.

     She blinked a few times in surprise. I explained the situation, and the purpose behind all the attacks that had been happening.

     “Wow,” she said when I was done. “I didn’t think it was as bad as that. When we defeated the attacking creatures, I noticed there were no sorcerers lingering around. Weird, right? You’d expect them to be trying to get some of the neolyte, at least.

     “So as we headed back to the castle,” she continued, “I tried to convince the other wizards to sneak in through one of the back entrances. We could see the break-in, but the rest of the wizards thought they could easily defeat whatever the threat was. None of us expected sorcerers, though.”

     “So what do we do? We have to leave. The other wizards are probably either captured or dead by now, and we can’t just go rescue them from the dungeon.”

Our castle did have a dungeon, mostly designed for magykans. The cells were made of caerthin, a material that blocks magyk. It’s impossible to cast spells around. That was where the wizards would be put if they were captured, and not dead.

“Well, we could see if we could get the talisman of Turoi,” Maybelle said.

“The talisman of what?”

“Turoi. You’ve never heard of it?”

I shook my head. Thinking about the name, I rolled my eyes. Why did everything in our world have to have alliteration?

“Have you ever heard the legend of Sleeping Beauty?” Maybelle asked.

“Sure…”

She explained that the prince rescued her was Turoi, and he hadn’t woken her with a kiss, but with a griffon feather. Griffons, half bird-half horse creatures, are extinct, and I’ve never heard of their feathers being used for anything.

“So the potion used for the king and queen and the potion used for Sleeping Beauty are the same?”

Maybelle nodded. “At least, it sounds like it from what you’ve told me.”

“Well, then, let’s get it! Where is it?”

“It’s in a magykal artifacts museum in Melzult, in the capital.” Melzult is our northern neighboring kingdom.

“So…that’s it? We just leave, and go and borrow it? This seems too easy.”

“Well, besides the fact we’ll have to fight our way past however many sorcerers there are on the way back.”

Right.

“Let’s worry about that later, shall we?”

We packed up quickly. Maybelle snuck down to her room, ignoring my pleas not to. I worried the whole time she was gone that a sorcerer would spot her, but she was back quickly.

I packed clothes, money, food, a sleeping bag, one of my favorite books, my journal, a pen, and my knife, of course. Looking around my room, I realized I really didn’t have much stuff I needed to take. I had gotten a kind of “allowance” to buy what I needed with, but I had never really needed or even wanted much.

“Ready to go?” I asked Maybelle, who was shoving her wand into her bag. I had packed neatly, methodically, but Maybelle was less organized than I was.

“Let’s get out of here,” she replied.

“Did you know there’s a secret tunnel that opens into your room?” I asked.

“I had heard about that, actually, but I never found one.”

I warily pulled open the door and peeked out into the hallway. It seemed clear of all sorcerers, and people in general, so I waved Maybelle out.

It didn’t really matter if I was caught; the sorcerers wouldn’t consider me a threat. Maybelle they would most likely kill instantly, or at the very least capture, but not me. There were lots of other non-magykan people around the castle normally anyway.

“Come on,” I said, gesturing to Maybelle. We walked down the hallway, trying to act both casual and inconspicuous, which are difficult to achieve at the same time.

Luckily, we got to her room without incident. I was almost astonished when we got out of the castle without getting caught. With my luck lately, I would have expected something to blow up.

The exit sign I had seen earlier led to a trapdoor under a rock next to the pegasus stables.

“Now how are we going to get there?” I asked Maybelle.

She shrugged, blushing. “I hadn’t thought ahead that far. I expected us to get caught by now.”

“Me too,” I muttered. “Well, we can’t walk all the way there. It’ll take months!” This was a bit of an exaggeration, but whatever.

And yes, we do have months. They’re each exactly 25 days long, with none of your strange changes in length. You Earth people are so weird.

She frowned. Then, suddenly, her expression brightened.

“What’s your idea?” I asked eagerly.

“Well, we are right next to the stables…” she replied.

“Great idea! We could get a pegasus; that’ll probably work out the best.” Pegasi, as I mentioned before, are normally evil, but the wizards convert all of the ones in the stables.

The more intelligent horse-based magykal creatures are centaurs and klates. I personally think this is because they have to have the brains necessary for speech, as opposed to unicorns and pegasi. The only reason I’m bringing this up is because there is a reason we have a separate stable for pegasi. The centaurs and klates get a much larger and better-furnished place than the pegasi. And, of course, we don’t keep unicorns.

The pegasus stables were the same as the normal horse stables that we also had. We didn’t keep very many of those, but they could be useful, especially if the wizards didn’t want to risk anything weird happening to the type of horse they chose. Maybelle and I entered the stable.

We chose the pegasus that looked the least harmful and threw a bridle on it.

I looked at Maybelle. “Do you know how to ride a horse?”

She shook her head. “You?”

I shook my head as well. “We’ve always been good at making things up, though.”

She laughed. “That’s us.”

We did figure out how to ride the pegasus, and soon we were soaring above the clouds. It wasn’t completely amazing, though. The wind was so loud it was really difficult to hear anything other than the air rushing in your ears.

Maybelle shouted something to me from in front. It had to have been worse for her than it was for me.

“What?” I yelled back.

Still barely able to hear her over the wind, I made out, “We should name him Jinxarja!”

I laughed. “Jinxarja” means wind-maker in the ancient language of Mithden. “Perfect!” I shouted back to her. “But let’s call him Jinx for short.”

Time passed. It’s hard to believe that flying so high up, watching the ground pass in a blur below you, could get boring, but it eventually does.

At about midday, Maybelle nudged Jinx downwards. When we landed, I asked her why.

“Lunch,” she replied, pulling out sandwiches from her bag. I didn’t feel hungry at all, but I sat down and took a bite from the one she handed me.

I realized that I was starving. The excitement and stress of the morning had twisted my stomach into a knot that didn’t feel like it would accept anything, but I was actually really hungry and ate quickly.

By some unspoken agreement, neither of us said a word about the sorcerers or our new quest during lunch. I didn’t really want to think about what might be going on at the castle with the sorcerers in control.

That didn’t mean I wasn’t, though. It was very hard not to; what else would I have thought about? Even the previous day seemed so long ago and unimportant, compared to that pivotal day that had changed everything.

One thing I didn’t understand is why the sorcerers didn’t just kill the king and queen. It probably would’ve been easier, and would’ve thwarted chances like the one Maybelle and I were taking, to try to save the kingdom. (Put like that, it actually sounds really weird. We were just two girls, trying to save the kingdom. Strange.)

I mulled over the possible reasons during the whole lunch, the last traces of the euphoria of escaping fading as I pondered.

Maybelle was the one who finally broke the silence.

“If you’re thinking about the same thing as me, I don’t know either,” she said.

I glanced up in surprise. “That depends what you’re thinking about. I’m thinking about why-“

“Why the sorcerers didn’t just kill the king and queen,” she finished, nodding. “I don’t know either. The best answer I can come up with is as a threat to other kingdoms. ‘Give us money, or gold, or sorcerers, or something, or we’ll kill them.’ Because, you know, a lot of the rulers of other kingdoms knew them and were friends with them and stuff.”

“I hadn’t thought about that,” I responded. “The only plausible thing I could come up with was that it was a trap to weed out people like us, who are trying to save them. You know, like we go on this pointless quest to save them and then walk right into an ambush when we get back. Which would…I don’t know…”

“You mean, it’s kind of a morale-lowering thing right before they kill us? When you go on this long quest and then find out that none of it was worth it anyway? I didn’t know you could be so…dark, Akeelay.”

That wasn’t really what I had thought, but I realized that that kind of was what I meant.

“Well, my head hurts from trying to figure this out. Can we just go?”

We got back on Jinx and took off again. I sat in front this time, to give Maybelle a little protection from the wind. And we ought to take turns anyway, I thought.

As the sun sank below the horizon, I steered Jinx toward some lights to the east. I wanted to stay in an inn for at least the first night of our journey.

We landed right outside the town’s limits. It was pretty small, but it would almost certainly have somewhere to stay.

A sign hanging from a wooden post proclaimed the town to be Dulcea. I pointed this out to Maybelle.

“I know this place!” she exclaimed. “A few of the other wizards and I stayed here one time. It’s about three days’ walk from the castle.”

That was probably the one good bit of news we had had all day. If we went 3 days’ worth of walking in one day, we could easily stay ahead of any sorcerers who tried to pursue us. Even if they were riding pegasi, we had a day’s riding on them. If they were even trying to pursue us, of course. In addition, we could get to Melzult a lot faster than walking.

Tired, we entered the town. Everyone walking along the roads stared at us. I felt tempted to ask, “What? You’ve never seen two girls leading a pegasus before?” but resisted. (It would have been funny, though.)

We found the inn quickly and entered, tying Jinx to a fence outside.

“How much for a room?” Maybelle asked the manager.

“How long you want it?” he asked crabbily.

“One night,” I responded.

“40 plia,” he said in response. Plia is the term for money in our world. The sign looks like \\.

“And for the stables?”

“Depends what kinda horse ya got.”

“A pegasus.”

“That’ll be \\30, then.”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Maybelle said. “\\50 for both, or we’re leaving.”

He scowled. “Deal. Where’s your pegasus? \\5 more for food for him if you want it.”

“He’s outside. I’ll take the food.” She pulled out \\55 and handed it to him.

“Room 14.” He handed her a key. “We’ll take care of your pegasus. Darius!” This last part wasn’t toward us, but aimed at the hallway leading away from the door. I assumed this was the way to the rooms.

A man, seemingly Darius, came out of the hallway and smiled at us.

“You just arrive?” he asked. He seemed a lot friendlier than his boss.

“Just go take care of their pegasus outside; that’s why I pay you,” the manager said.

“Liven up a little, Garon,” Darius responded.

I didn’t have the patience to hear the two argue, so I said, “Let’s go, Maybelle,” and pulled her toward the hallway. I was tired.

We found Room 14 without any trouble and each collapsed into our own beds.

“I’m so glad I’m not doing this alone,” I said to Maybelle.

I thought I heard her say, “Me too,” but that might have just been my imagination as I fell asleep.

I woke up when I heard voices in the room. It seemed like sometime after midnight.

“…And it’s getting boring,” an unfamiliar woman’s voice complained.

“He did say we have to kill all of them, though,” a man’s voice replied, sighing.

I nearly leaped out of bed when I heard that, but managed to resist. I really didn’t want to die, and waiting would delay that a little bit. My heart pounded. It seemed to be doing that a lot lately.

I could tell Maybelle was awake too, because she was holding her breath, waiting for the right time to act. I opened my eyes a little bit, just giving myself a tiny slit to see through. I saw a shadowy figure walk to the foot of my bed, and another one to Maybelle’s.

“On three?” the man asked.

“On three,” his partner confirmed.

“One, two…”

Just before he could say three, Maybelle and I leaped out of bed at the same time. Startled, Maybelle’s opponent was easily taken out by a spell.

I dove for my knife next to the bed. The woman who was trying to kill me shot a spell that barely missed my head. I grabbed my knife and glanced up. She had just shot a spell an instant ago, and I had nowhere to dodge and no time to do it. I raised my knife to where the spell would land, knowing it would be useless after the spell hit it. At least it would give me some protection for a moment.

The spell hit my knife and reflected off of it, aiming the spell back at the sorcerer. She swore and ducked out of the way. I looked at my knife in surprise. It probably had a reflecting spell already on it.

Maybelle hit the sorcerer with a spell, and that was it. They were both knocked out.

“Well,” I said, still in shock. “That was interesting.”

“Yeah,” she agreed. “What happened there? It looked like you shot a spell at her.”

“It was my knife,” I told her. “It reflected the spell, for some reason. Probably an enchantment.”

She looked at it. “That’s weird… It’s not very strong, but there is some magyk in it.”

“Could be a spell that’s fading,” I suggested.

“Maybe… or maybe there’s no spell at all.”

“Then why is there magyk in it? What else could it be?”

“I don’t know.” She seemed baffled by the paradox of the knife.

“Let’s just go. It’s not like either of us is going to get any more sleep tonight. But what should we do with the sorcerers? Just leave them here?”

She shrugged. “That wouldn’t hurt.”

“Okay,” I agreed doubtfully.

We grabbed our stuff and left the room. I tucked my dagger into my belt in case I needed it again quickly.

As we passed where the manager had been standing the previous afternoon, I tossed the keys onto the counter. A lot of good they had done us.

We went around to the back, hoping that’s where the stable would be. There it was, rough wood and broken latch. I opened the stall with Jinx and pulled him out. Luckily the sorcerers hadn’t touched him.

“How did they find us?” I asked Maybelle.

“I don’t know,” she replied. “I haven’t thought about it. And I’m kind of too tired to think at all now. Can we go, and talk about it later, in the morning or whatever?”

I nodded, yawning. I was tired too, but I wouldn’t be able to sleep at all after that.

So we took off again. I wished I had something to do other than just being alone with my thoughts. We couldn’t even talk through the wind.

The sun rose, and we landed to eat breakfast.

“Any ideas?” I asked her.

“Not really. Maybe they used a tracking spell to find us, but that wouldn’t really work if they didn’t know who we were.”

“Could it work if they knew, say, what I looked like?” I asked, worry starting to grow in my stomach.

“Well, maybe. It’d be hard, but with that many sorcerers, that’s a lot of power.”

     I remembered that sorcerer I had run into, the strange one who seemed so polite. Could he have helped the others find us? But how would he know I was gone and why try to kill me? I could understand it if he had spotted Maybelle, but me?

     There were too many questions floating around my head. I had a really bad headache for the rest of the day. I hoped no more sorcerers would attack that night. I needed some sleep.

     But, well, you know my luck.