Just as she reached the door, the creature crashed into her, clawing and snapping with single-minded malevolence, yet failing to penetrate her shield. Isabel turned to face the thing. It had her pinned to the door, flailing against her shield with mindless determination and almost desperate viciousness. She reached out, placing her hand on its chest as she cast her force-push, blasting the creature up and back. It struck the nearest pillar squarely, cracking the ancient stone and causing it to buckle.
Seeing the first creature charging toward her, she scrambled through the narrow gap just as the support pillar buckled and the heavy stone ceiling collapsed, crushing the two creatures, sealing the entrance, and filling the room she now occupied with a cloud of dust.
Isabel got to her feet and looked around. She was in a large workroom. Once, long ago, the place might have housed a forge and a variety of other tools and machines designed to work stone, steel, and wood into works of art or utility. Now it was empty and cold.
Alexander bobbled over to the far side of the room and stopped at the top of another spiral staircase leading back down into the heart of the mountain. Isabel headed toward him while quickly looking around for anything she could use as a weapon. Unfortunately, time had rendered everything in the room worthless.
The staircase spiraled down into the mountain. When they reached a level with a door leading into a dark hallway, Alexander continued downward.
“What’s in there?”
“I’m not sure, but Hazel is farther down.”
Finally, the staircase stopped at a point perhaps even deeper than where she’d entered the vast underground fortress and laboratory. It opened into a large circular room with a dozen passages leading away like spokes on the hub of a wheel. The floor was laid out with black and white tiles in a checkerboard pattern, each about two feet square. Several corpses, long-dead, littered the room. The only thing they all had in common was that each appeared to have been standing on a black square when he died.
Isabel cautiously worked her way to the first man, taking his sword and testing it, but finding that it had rusted to the point of uselessness. Deciding that none of the dead explorers’ equipment was still useful, she looked closer at the dust covering the floor and saw several sets of footprints, all stepping on white squares, leading to one passage. She made her way there, relieved to be out of the deadly chamber.
“This passage leads to where they were when I last checked on them,” Alexander said, floating into the darkness of the corridor.
It ran for hundreds of feet until Isabel could just make out a faint glow coming from the far end of the passage. Alexander vanished, leaving her in the darkness, so she could approach without alerting Hazel. She cast her shield spell while she walked, mentally preparing for the battle to come, knowing that she might have to fight Hector and Horace in the bargain.
The passage opened into a circular room. Two veins of softly glowing crystal rose from the floor to the ceiling. Within each was carved a chamber. A conduit of crystal running between both chambers held a panel with a single emerald set into it. Isabel heard whimpering before she saw the figure slumped to the floor in one of the chambers. She approached cautiously, her anger hot and ready. Seeing the form of Hazel in the chamber, she began speaking the words of her light-lance, forcefully and deliberately.
She raised her hand toward Hazel and the old witch looked up, tears streaming down her face, confusion and fear in her eyes.
“Isabel, please help me,” she said.
Isabel frowned in momentary confusion until she remembered that the focus of Hazel’s magic was belief.
Seeing Isabel’s resolve harden, Hazel sobbed and put her hands up in front of her face to ward against a spell that would kill her in a flash.
“Stop!” Alexander said, materializing before Hazel.
Isabel reined in her spell, letting go of the thought-form she was about to release into the firmament but holding on to her anger.
“Why? You said it yourself; we’re at war with her.”
“I don’t think this is Hazel,” Alexander said. “Her colors are all wrong.”
“Please help me, Isabel. It’s me … Ayela. Hazel stole my body.”
Isabel gasped, her eyes going wide. “Dear Maker, is such a thing even possible?”
“I think that’s what these chambers do,” Alexander said. “Also, her colors say she’s telling the truth.”
“How do we reverse it?” Isabel asked.
“I’m not sure, but if I had to guess, I’d say you would have to put them both back into these chambers again. I’ll go consult with the sovereigns and then find Hector, Horace, and Hazel. Take care of Ayela and make your way back to the black-and-white room. Wait for me there.”
Isabel nodded, going to Ayela. “I’m so sorry, Ayela. I didn’t know.”
“How could you? This kind of thing isn’t supposed to be possible. I’m the one who should apologize. I took you right to her and she left you in the swamp to die. I can’t believe I trusted her.”
“You believed what you wanted to believe,” Isabel said. “It happens to the best of us.”
“What am I going to do? I feel like my life is suddenly over.”
“I’m going to help you. I promise.”
“Thank you, Isabel,” Ayela said, wiping tears from her old and wrinkled face and looking up sheepishly. “Do you have anything to eat? Hazel took all of my things when she left me here.”
Isabel gave her a bag of dried apples and they started toward the black-and-white room.
Alexander appeared just before they arrived.
Chapter 38
“Isabel, you have to hurry,” Alexander said. “They’re down that passage. I think Hazel is about to sacrifice Horace to the ghidora. She’s preparing a spell, and he’s laid out on a table in front of a hideous-looking statue.”
Isabel raced across the black-and-white room, calling out to Ayela behind her, “Stick to the white squares only!”
The passage was a hundred feet long, opening into a giant cavern filled with cages and lined with doorways leading out of the room in every direction. She caught glimpses of the remains of unspeakable and indescribable creatures as she raced past the cages, following Alexander’s bobbling light.
Some of the cages contained magic circles cut into the stone just inside the bars, while others were ordinary iron cages that had long since rusted to the point of crumbling. Most contained long-dead corpses of unidentifiable creatures but a few were empty. Two still held live creatures, but fortunately both of those cages were still intact and the magic circles within were holding the unnatural creations of Siavrax Karth at bay. That didn’t stop those creatures from snapping and snarling at Isabel when she raced by.
She reached the threshold of a large doorway that used to hold double doors, but was now open to the cavern. She stopped in horror at the scene playing out before her under the flickering light of two torches.
Horace lay on a platform before the statue of a creature from out of a nightmare. Eight feet tall at the back with six-foot-wide shoulders, it stood on six powerful legs, each ending in seven clawed toes. It had four eyes, the lower two set closer together than the upper two, all of which looked like they moved independently, allowing for a very wide field of vision. Its mouth was almost two feet across and lined with razor-sharp teeth. Its long tail split into three, each ending in a blade a foot long.
Hazel, in Ayela’s body, stood before the platform, chanting the words to an ancient invocation while streamers of light flowed from Horace to the statue. Hector lay unconscious on the floor, oblivious to his brother’s plight.
“Stop!” Isabel cried, but she was too late. As the light stopped flowing from Horace, the creature came to life, its eyes glowing ember-red and each of the blades on its tail taking on the hue of flowing lava.