The Spirit Mage (The Blackwood Saga Book 2) Read online

  “We run,” Will said.

  Yasmina flicked her eyes at Will’s sword. “Can’t you fight it? I saw what you did in the cemetery.”

  “Those were skeletons and zombies magically animated by Zedock. My sword cut right through them. I have no idea what that thing coming up the stairs can do.”

  “Quiet,” Caleb said in a fierce whisper. “It’s almost here. We’ve got to do something.”

  Will eyed the walkway leading to the staircase. The only access to the bottom of the obelisk.

  His gaze spun around the room. Three chests, a telescope, the high-backed chair, and the writing desk. On top of the desk was an obsidian helm that looked decorative, as well as a set of transparent pens filled with a substance that looked suspiciously like blood. An orb lamp suspended from the ceiling lit the room with a soft golden glow.

  “Caleb,” Will said, “take Yasmina and hide behind the desk. As soon as we start fighting, hit the stairs and go for the pirogue. I’ll be right behind you.”

  “That’s the plan? Aren’t you a chess whiz? A master of strategy?”

  “You have a better one? We’ve got about five seconds to decide.”

  The metallic rustle of the knight’s armor sounded as if it were right beneath them. Will saw Caleb’s eyes flick around the room and then settle on Yasmina. Her face was pale, and her designer jeans and fitted white T-shirt looked pitifully out of place.

  Caleb grabbed Will by the arm. “Stay alive.”

  “That’s the idea.”

  Right after Caleb and Yasmina crouched behind the desk, the knight’s helmed head appeared in the stairwell, the unnatural green light burning like a laser. Was the knight one of Zedock’s magical creations, subject to the power of Will’s sword? Or was it a true undead?

  Will positioned himself near the edge of the shaft. As soon as the knight saw him, it raised its sword and advanced. The movements didn’t look human, but neither did they appear mechanical. They were somewhere in between; they were wrong. Will backed away, centering his bodyweight and gripping his sword as Mala had taught. The knight followed and backed him towards the wall. Once they passed underneath the orb light, Caleb and Yasmina sprinted across the walkway and bounded down the stairs.

  The knight turned at the sound, and Will took the opening. His first goal was simply to strike it and see if there was any magic to be severed. He tried to stab the knight in the chest but it turned and parried Will’s thrust at the last second. Then it advanced with two quick strikes, the last of which Will blocked by falling to his knees and barely raising his sword above his head in time. He had to scramble backward to regain his feet.

  The brief exchange was enough for him to grasp the situation: this being far outclassed him, and whatever its magical nature might be, the metal in its sword was all too real. True undead or not, the knight would run him through before he got a chance to utilize the powers of his sword.

  Will circled and tried to reach the platform. The knight cut off his approach, backing him closer to the wall. Forced to exchange another series of blows, Will escaped by rolling away and diving behind the desk.

  The knight kicked the desk aside. Will threw the obsidian helm at its face. It caught the helm in midair and set it down, with an oddly careful movement. Will tried to attack one more time, feinting twice and then trying for a side thrust, but the knight parried, knocked him senseless with a gauntleted backhand, and almost ran him through before Will could dive away again.

  He had seen enough. He couldn’t win this fight. After desperately scanning the room for an escape, he ran straight for the side of the vertical shaft, dropped his sword into the hole, and jumped into midair. He crashed atop the metal railing of the staircase on the next level down, losing his wind and almost plummeting into the shaft.

  The knight bounded down the stairs after him. Will clung to the railing with both arms, flailing to regain his footing. His toes found the staircase just as the knight stabbed downward, and Will dove head first down the spiral stairs, careening halfway to the next level before righting himself. He gained his feet before the next blow came and then sprinted down the stairs, the knight right behind him.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Will caught a glance of Zedock’s laboratory, morgue, and army of inanimate skeleton creatures. By the time he reached the creepy parlor at the bottom of the stairs and recovered his sword, Will had gained three strides on the knight and could see the exit. He started to sprint away but tripped over something on the floor, sprawling on his face in a pool of sticky red liquid.

  Frantic, he splattered through the blood to avoid the knight’s next swing, scrambling over the decomposing body of the majitsu he had killed before diving through the portal for the first time. Just a day ago to him, but two months on Urfe.

  Zedock’s headless body was lying next to the corpse. Will ended up on his back, sword raised to block the deathblow he knew was coming. As the knight’s sword descended, a knife clanged off its visor, causing it to falter at the last second.

  “Hurry!” Caleb screamed.

  Will rolled to the side, just avoiding the sword thrust. He scrabbled backwards, sprang to his feet, and sprinted after Caleb. The knight followed, but couldn’t catch them as they ran on to the floating platform outside the obelisk, down the long rope bridge, and then jumped into the pirogue still tied to the dock.

  Yasmina was waiting on the flat-bottomed boat, pulling in rope as fast as she could. Caleb helped her, and as Will used the long pole to push off from the dock, the knight stood at the edge of the platform and watched them leave, unnerving in his stillness, the strange green light swirling like swamp gas inside the helm.

  Hours later, with dusk creeping through the vines and Spanish moss, they had put Zedock’s obelisk far in the distance. Or at least they thought they had. They were horribly lost, so they didn’t really know.

  Will’s arms ached from the strain of poling through the water, though he liked that Yasmina had twice complimented his forearms. Caleb’s three turns had lasted about ten minutes each, and he had shown zero shame about his lackluster performances.

  “I think we should find some shelter,” Will said, “even if it’s in the trees. We could be going around in circles on the water.”

  Caleb was sprawled on his back, hands behind his head. “I like the safety of the boat.”

  “You would, since you’re not the one poling.”

  “I’m proud of you, little brother. You were gifted with strong hands and a Puritan work ethic.”

  Will snorted. Tall and fine-boned, with a face so pretty women blinked twice when they saw him, Caleb had skated through life on charm and good looks. If he wasn’t such a happy-go-lucky guy, Will would have resented him.

  He had learned on their journey, however, that when pushed to the edge, even Caleb had a dark side to his personality.

  That everyone did.

  It was warm and humid. Yasmina’s caramel-colored hair hung limply down the back of her sweat-soaked T-shirt. She said, “But surely we can’t stay in the boat all night?”

  “Why not?” Caleb asked. “We can tie up to a tree, and we only have to deal with mosquitoes. Out there,” Caleb jerked his thumb at the shore of the sluggish swamp channel they were traversing, “we have to deal with snakes, gators, leeches, ticks, and a million other nasty things. And that’s just from our world.”

  Her mouth compressed as she surveyed the ominous green and black wilderness surrounding them, moss-laden branches dipping into the water, the ridged backs of gators rippling through the scum. “Why do you want to go to land?” she asked Will.

  “In the morning, we can navigate by the sun and cut a straighter course. I was watching when we flew in the first time. We’ve got to be in the Jean Lafitte Swamp. New Victoria—New Orleans—is almost due north. Even if we miss it, we’ll hit the Mississippi.”

  “What about all the,” she waved her arms, “dangers?”

  “Caleb’s right, the swamp’s deadly. But we don�
��t have a choice. We need water.”

  “Which plodding through the swamp will only make worse,” Caleb said.

  “On land, we can build a fire and boil water.”

  “With what?”

  “We’ll find something.” Will stopped poling to let the burning in his arms dissipate. “Look, we could be close to the city already. If we stick to the boat, what’s your plan for tomorrow night, when we’re even more lost and dying of thirst?”

  Caleb had no answer.

  Dusk congealed into a moonless night. Everyone agreed it was too dark and wet to do anything other than tie the boat to a tree and wait for dawn. In the morning they would make a decision.

  The night was misery heaped upon misery. Minutes after securing the boat, the mosquitoes attacked en masse, and the three of them were forced to cover themselves in mud, a trick Will had heard about but never tried. The mud alleviated some of the torture, but left them damp and sticky. The temperature cooled until they were huddled together in the middle of the pirogue, shivering and mud-covered, wondering if they would make it to the morning.

  The diurnal chatter of the swamp turned into an ear-splitting cacophony after dark, as if battalions of insects and amphibians were waging an all-out interspecies war. Will heard larger things as well, slitherings and ploppings and scratchings that left the three of them clutching the sides of the boat. More than once they heard the throaty cries of a jungle cat, and they also feared the appearance of a crocosaur, a monstrous reptile that could capsize the pirogue and devour all three of them.

  “We should have made a canopy in the trees,” Will said.

  “We should have never left New Orleans,” Caleb muttered.

  “Shut up. You know we didn’t have a choice.”

  Caleb didn’t respond, and Will said, “Yasmina? You still with us?”

  “Yes,” she whispered. “Still here.”

  Will knew that if he had been alone with the terrors of the swamp, without Yasmina and Caleb to look out for, he might not have coped. Caring for others brought out the best in him. Val called it a hero complex; Will saw it as displacement of his weakness.

  Though after what Will had been through over the last few months—and especially the last few days—not even the terror and discomfort of the swamp could keep his body from shutting down, his eyelids gumming closed and his fingers wrapped around the hilt of his sword.

  They woke with the dawn. By a two to one vote, and with Yasmina vowing never to spend another night in a pirogue, Will’s argument won out. Wet and cold and starving, they poled until they found a section of semi-dry land, then left the boat and headed perpendicular to the sun, tramping wordlessly into the marsh. The muck and swamp grass tugged at their feet, and Will used the pole to test for gators and sinkholes.

  “We can’t go much farther without water,” Caleb croaked.

  “It’s South Louisiana,” Will said. “It has to rain soon.”

  An hour later, his throat a piece of sandpaper, Will almost danced a jig when the sky darkened and a morning shower washed away the grime. Yasmina, raised in a city in Brazil right on the bank of the Amazon, taught them the trick of drinking rainwater running down a vine, as well as how to hollow out a piece of deadwood and fill it with spare water. Her knowledge of animals helped them steer clear of predators by studying tracks and listening to their cries.

  As the sun started to descend, the soggy marsh turned firmer, hardwood hammocks replacing the endless clumps of cypress. The insect swarms eased from catastrophic to merely inhumane.

  Caleb slumped against the base of an oak as Will doled out a ration of water. “Let’s find a place to set camp,” Will said. “Some of these sticks are dry enough for a fire, and I’ll search for food.”

  “If we have to,” Yasmina said, “we can survive on insects.”

  Caleb made a choking sound. “Will’s going to search real hard.”

  Thirty minutes later, they collapsed in a glade of shortleaf pine. After collecting wood and pine needles, they managed to start a fire using a piece of flint Caleb found in the set of thief’s tools Marguerite had lent him.

  Will set off to find something to cook, leaving Caleb and Yasmina by the fire. Half a mile from camp, Will got lucky and found a pond stocked with frogs the size of dinner plates. He managed to impale three of them with his sword, and even began to whistle a tune as he trudged back to camp. If they could avoid predators and survive the night, he felt sure that another day of walking would bring them within striking distance of New Victoria. He would will his way out of this mess, he decided, giving an exhausted chortle at the pun.

  The smoke from their campfire guided him on the return journey through the forest. He tried not to jump at the shadows dappling the woods. After passing a glade full of wildflowers, he heard the strange, pig-like grunts at the same time he saw a wart-covered face and a pair of curved tusks, fierce and terrifying in the failing light. Holding a barbed spear pointed right at Will, the squat, five and a half foot tall humanoid advanced with a shifty, waddling gait. Clumps of bristly hair covered its slate grey arms and legs, and strands of oily hair hung from its scalp like lichen. It wore a soiled red tunic, a leather breastplate, and black thong sandals tied to the bottoms of its lumpy feet.

  Five more of the goblin-like creatures emerged from the brush, also training spears on Will, leaving him no choice but to surrender. Still grunting, the first one approached and took Will’s sword, then picked him up and tucked him against his side like a football as he marched to Will’s campsite. Three more of the creatures were gathered around the smoldering remains of the fire. The two groups of goblins exchanged a series of nuanced grunts, including finger pointing and spear jabbing at Will.

  Oddly enough, he thought he could understand their language, but that fact was buried by the skull-pounding terror he felt at his predicament, and by the sight of Caleb and Yasmina hanging upside down from a tree branch, swinging slowly back and forth as another of the horrid creatures poked them with the pirogue pole.

  -4-

  Val followed Mari on a ten-minute walk from the firm to an unmarked door in a crumbling brick alley. The hidden byway felt more like Old World Europe than the middle of Manhattan.

  He remained silent as she unlocked the door and entered the rear of a narrow, high-ceilinged chapel with a thick layer of dust on the pews and effigies. Stepping confidently through the abandoned church, Mari descended a spiral staircase in an alcove near the altar. The staircase spilled into a cellar with a locked wooden door. Using another set of keys, she opened the door to reveal a stone-walled passage tunneling into darkness.

  She flicked on a pocket flashlight and seemed to enjoy Val’s unease. Cobwebs clung to the rounded ceiling, and he had an uncomfortable flashback to the dungeon beneath Leonidus’s castle.

  The muted roar of the subway echoed in the hallway just before it dead-ended at a modern steel door. Mari stood in front of the keypad with crossed arms. “What happened in New Orleans?”

  She was going to make him pay to play. It was smart, Val thought—except she had no clue as to the magnitude of the game.

  He rubbed his thumb against his staff. “What do you know about my father?”

  “I know he was an archaeologist and Charlemagne scholar.”

  “What did he leave for me? Why didn’t any of you give it to me when he died?”

  “I don’t know what it is. His instructions were to bring you to his locker if you sought us out.”

  Val studied her face and found no signs of deception.

  “Tell me what you know,” she said, “and we’ll walk through this door together.”

  After seeing this place, he had no doubt of Mari’s involvement in the Myrddinus. But how far was she willing to go?

  “Do you believe in magic, Mari? Real magic?”

  “I’m Myrddinus. Of course I do.”

  He chuckled to himself. “Let me rephrase. Have you ever seen real magic?”

  Her response was slow t
o come, a prolonged, “No, not personally.” But Val read the underlying tone, the intense eyes and thrusting jaw, loud and clear. I’ve never seen real magic, but I’d do just about anything for the opportunity.

  Val’s guess was the Myrddinus wanted magic to be real, they sought it out and catalogued mysterious phenomena and played their shadow games, but they didn’t have a clue about Urfe.

  Or at least not most of them. Why had his father played along? And who was the original Myrddin?

  He saw no reason to lie, so he told her about Salomon’s key and the door between worlds, about the terrible beauty and magic of that other place, and how he had to return, at all costs, to help his brothers.

  He left out plenty, including the fact that he was a fledgling wizard. He didn’t expect her to believe him, but when he finished, the best way he could describe Mari’s expression was one of hunger. Not an I’m ready for a steak dinner kind of hungry, but a starving, lone wolf in the frozen tundra, chew off its own leg for a meal kind of hungry.

  Mari swallowed and keyed in the access code. The metal door swooshed outward to reveal a cavernous rotunda with marble pillars, a stone floor covered in thick Persian rugs, and six closed doors spaced at regular intervals. As they entered, Mari slid her arm through Val’s, her soft hair spilling across his shoulder and tickling his neck.

  The contents of the room were even more incredible than its existence. Twenty-foot tall bookshelves lined the perimeter, shelving thousands of brittle tomes and grimoires. Glass display cases contained every magical accoutrement Val could imagine: staves and wands and star-shaped brooches, potions and alchemical displays, scrolls inscribed with complex mathematical formulas.

  Val walked up to one of the books on display, an illustrated codex depicting a variety of fantastical creatures. He swallowed—one of them was the titan crab that had almost killed him in Leonidus’s dungeon. He read the plaque beneath the case. “The Voynich Manuscript? I thought the only copy was at Yale?”