Ironhelm - Douglas Niles [8]
The steps passed too quickly, though Halloran's deliberate pace slowed even further as he approached the landing and its great oaken door.
"Why didn't I take up sword and shield like my father?" he lamented. But he had no time to answer that question.
The great door swung silently open, as if of its own accord, and Hal tried to still his trembling hands as he stepped into the lab. The acrid smoke spilled constantly from the beaker in his hands, causing his eyes to water. Nevertheless, he was able to see that the shape in the laboratory had sprouted more limbs. In several places, large regions of moist suckers appeared in its skin, opening and closing like the mouths of primitive fish.
Arquiuius sat as he had for three days and three nights, legs crossed before him and eyes locked open. The wizard had always been thin, but now, to Halloran, he looked absolutely cadaverous. Beyond him, the window, its eerily lilted horizon showing the deserts of Thay barely illuminated by the growing light of imminent dawn. Of course, Hal knew that the tower, not the horizon, was the cause of the tilt, but Arquiuius's bizarre distortion of gravity never failed to take him by surprise.
Now, Hal hissed a voice in his brain, and he knew the wizard spoke to him, though the old man's lips made no sound. Carefully the youth stepped around the looming shape, steadying his nerve as he extended the still-spuming beaker to Arquiuius.
Suddenly a pinkish tentacle lashed out from within the beast's magical confines. With growing horror, Halloran saw that the foul limb pressed the boundary of the shape inscribed on the floor, slowly pushing through the enchanted barrier.
Now!
The wizard's command echoed in the youth's mind. Quickly he turned back to his teacher. Hal's heart quickened in dismay at the sight of Arquiuius's face. Was that fear he saw?
The blob wriggled once more, and then a stalk of obscene flesh hurled itself toward Halloran. Reacting by instinct alone, he sprang backward, saving his life by scant inches while the lightning blow struck the beaker from his hands.
"No!" Arquiuius's voice was audible this time, and full of acute terror.
The beaker crashed to the stone floor and shattered. A cloud of red gas whooshed upward from the contents, and the young apprentice stumbled backward.
He gaped at the sight of a huge mouth emerging from the smoke, heard the wizard's shrill death cry. Row after row of long, curving teeth stretched wide, spattering drops of acid drool onto their pathetically shrieking victim.
Halloran's primal instincts claimed him. He bolted from the lab, tearing around the many circuits of the descending stairway until, breathless, he dashed out the door in the base of the tower. Here he stumbled and fell headlong. He had forgotten to adjust for the slanting gravity of the tower as he stepped into the world beyond.
Quickly springing to his feet, the young man ran into the desert. His heart pounded and his lips grimaced across his clenched teeth. Nothing could make him return to that nightmarish world. Even as the tower rumbled and collapsed into dust behind him, he did not slow his desperate pace.
Nor did he look back as the settling dust pile slowly brightened with the light of the dawning sun.
Thousands of green, red, yellow, and blue feathers joined in a vast circle of brilliant color, forming a huge canopy. The steady, silent pulse of feather-magic, of pluma, lifted and lowered the canopy, gently fanning the hallway. Nevertheless, the forehead of the slave stationed beneath the fan glistened with perspiration as he bowed obsequiously to the Eagle Knight approaching him.
The veteran wore a tunic of black and white feathers, entwined by pluma into a fiber that could stop the penetration of the sharpest obsidian blade. Crimson plumes hung freely