Chapter 18 Only Bad Choices
Only Bad Choices
The first spell slammed into the stone wall next to him, exploding a chunk off a marble lion’s face and spraying him with glass-like shards.
Caelum leapt without thought when the second one came, dropping the cane without a second’s thought.
It clattered on the stone as he dodged that spell, too.
The third left the hand of Yorick Orrin, who stood on the other side of Sirena and her husband, still holding tight to the strawberry blond with the gold tattoos.
Sirena herself was laughing, even as she spooled red and orange magic up from her jackal primal, coiling it around her arm and into a brighter ball in her palm.
Caelum didn’t wait to see what she had in mind, but broke out into a limping, laborious run, moving as fast as he could across the stone bench where he’d been standing to observe the ritual.
His leg hurt the instant he started, but he couldn’t think about that, either.
Gods. Leda was going to kill him.
Like she might actually murder him for this.
Another series of curses slammed into the benches after him. One caught him in the thigh, then another in the shoulder as he stumbled. He managed to dodge the next heavy lob of magic, right before he dove behind a giant statue of a sphinx that stood next to a narrow corridor into the rock.
He could already hear them shouting to one another.
Footsteps pounded on the stone as some of the younger, more agile ones leapt up after him.
He peered around the sphinx’s marble shoulder, and a hex came barreling towards his head.
He got behind it and leapt back, but not before he counted nine of them on their way up to him.
The purple flame someone aimed from the ground floor, where they were covering the Magicals in pursuit, shot past him, barely, and slammed into the wall to the left of the narrow opening in the rock.
Caelum didn’t have time to weigh his best option.
Really, given where he’d trapped himself, he only had two options left.
He looked up at the sphinx, knowing he could climb it, but he’d be a target on the way down.
Given how many Magicals were inside the ritual chamber, and the likelihood that at least a percentage of them had provably decent aim, even on a moving target, that didn’t strike him as a particularly safe way to go.
On the other hand, it was his only route back to the tunnel he’d used to get down here.
If they were smart, they’d have people on that entrance already.
Not to mention, if they were smart, they’d spread out around the base of the stone stairs, and block his escape route off the back of the sphinx.
He had a few tricks he could pull out, assuming the uwan’s poison only wiped out the lower parts of his magic, but one, he didn’t know for sure that was the case, and two, even if it was true, using his higher magic would potentially expose him, and three, even if he could use it, he could likely only use it once.
But really, one was the kicker.
He’d never been bit by an uwan, so he wasn’t entirely sure what affect its venom would have on him.
That left his only other option.
He glanced behind him, at the crack in the rock wall.
It had only been a few seconds since he’d looked around the edge of the stone, and his decision process began to split into his two remaining options. Even in those few seconds, the pounding footsteps sounded noticeably louder on the stone.
Pushing off from the sphinx’s carved stone flank, he grimaced from the pain in his leg, and ran as fast as he could into the dark crack in the wall.
He could see now, so that was something.
The physical light inside the ritual room, which mostly consisted of the two bonfires and surrounding torches, ended up being brighter than he’d expected. When the invisibility spell died, his vision didn’t even need time to adjust.
Now, even inside cave-like crack in the stone, he could see down the entire length of this branch of the tunnel, far enough to know it didn’t end in a flat piece of wall, at least. Two branches split off from the one he currently ran down, and after the barest hesitation, he took the one on the right, mostly because it headed roughly in the direction of the tunnel and staircase from which he’d come.
He needed enough space, time, and privacy to try to phase.
Really, he needed something to test it on first, something that wasn’t solid stone.
Once he’d turned down the second corridor, torches erupted along the walls, illuminating his path.
He ran as far as he could go down that right-hand tunnel, then took a left when it offered him a choice again.
He could hear echoing voices behind him, but the acoustics made it difficult to determine distance.
They definitely seemed to know which way he’d gone, which was disappointing, but he shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, they hadn’t been bitten by that fucking little gargoyle, so their magic should be working just fine.
He made another right, then another left, then another right, and for the first time, he hit a dead end. Caelum breathed a sigh of relief, however, when he saw the door at the end of it, made of copper, and coated in a spell to reinforce the lock on the handle.
He didn’t care about the lock.
He stood there, panting and sweating, his leg throbbing, and fought to access only his black crystal primal, without going through any of his lower magic.
Normally, he would never do this.
The lower magic disguised where his power came from, the same as his bone dragon primal did.
Which was why he needed privacy to attempt this now.
He didn’t much care if they wondered about it later, or couldn’t explain to themselves what he’d done or how he’d done it; that was a problem for a different day.
If they caught him down here, he didn’t want to know what they’d do to him.
The more immediate problem was, he was completely unused to accessing his magic without the lower structures inside his magical aura.
He fought to do it now, and could feel the nebulousness of his grasp, the lack of control that came with it. It felt like a muscle that had atrophied from lack of use.
The footsteps behind him were growing louder again.
“Gods-damn it,” he swore, when he fought to reach the part of him that could phase, and couldn’t. It felt like trying to make a fist around water. He could feel it, but he couldn’t grasp enough of it to make it useful.
He forced himself to stop, to take a deep breath.
Eyes closed, he felt for the part of the crystal that resonated the most clearly with phasing. He built up that feeling slowly in his mind, since he could no longer feel it in his magical aura or any of the structures he normally used to feel.
The crystal itself felt two-dimensional, flat. It felt like being forced to think about it, rather than feel it tangibly, but he tried to project that feeling upwards anyway.
That time, he felt a tingling, vibrating, familiar feeling over his head.
He heard a yell.
“He’s here!” a voice he recognized shrieked.
He didn’t open his eyes. He concentrated on his tower room in Malcroix Bones, on Leda, on his closet, on his witch lying in his bed, hopefully still dead asleep––
––and he stumbled through the plate of copper.
He fell forward through the metal door, and landed, hard, on his knees.
“Fuck,” he growled, fighting to see in the dark.
He already knew he wasn’t in his room at the Academy.
He didn’t know where he was, exactly, but he guessed he’d only walked through the metal door itself, and right where at least three of the fastest runners in Dark Cathedral saw him do it.
He dragged himself to his feet, feeling around himself in the dark until his fingers came across a metal stand.
His hands felt over the intricate designs of what felt like roses and vines, and then found the pane of glass in the center.
Gods. A mirror.
He tried to go through it, but only ran into it, slamming his arms and knees into the oval pane of glass. It was locked. Probably had a password, or some kind of identity lock where only cleared witches and mages could use it.
Fuck.
The Magicals on the other side of that door would likely be coming through any second. Unlike him, they likely had easier ways to open the copper panel.
He concentrated for a few seconds and managed to light up his primal, the only one that worked at the moment.
The crystal burst out with an eerie black and green glow, giving him a look around the rest of the room.
His primal shone back at him across a few dozen glass surfaces, all of them mirrored, all of them facing inward.
He stared around at them, at the different gold and silver frames and frowned.
Could they all be protected for Dark Cathedral use only?
He’d barely given a glance around, looking just enough to know there were no other doors in the rectangular room, when the door behind him burst open.
“He won’t be in there,” a voice retorted. “That’s the mirror room. He’s long gone––”
The male mage’s voice cut off when he found himself face to face with Caelum.
The older mage cursed, and charged up his magic.
Caelum darted behind a mirror to his left, just in time for the spell to slam against it, and shatter the glass into a few thousand pieces. His side, arm, and thigh stung with pain, but Caelum’s mind was still grappling with the other’s words.
He needed magic to get through mirrors.
He needed to be in his primal.
“Break them!” the mage in front shouted. “Break all of them!”
Caelum heard a scream of rage even as two more mirrors exploded on his side of the room. He geared into the black crystal as much as he could, and ran for the nearest intact surface, which unfortunately was on the other side of the room.
“Bring the little prick down!” a witch shrieked.
A scarlet ripple of fire headed straight for him, but he was singularly focused on the mirror ahead.
He twisted his body to evade the worst of it, so it hit him in the arm instead of dead-center in his chest. Ignoring the pain and numbness that followed, he dove for the mirror, just in time to miss a second bolt, which a younger mage aimed at his head.
Caelum felt that twist of magic as his head and arms disappeared through the molten glass. He heard shouts behind him, screams––
Then, briefly, he heard nothing at all.
He didn’t do a very good job setting his trajectory.
He couldn’t think, and the only place that came to mind at all was his room in Malcroix, and Leda, and his bed.
Unfortunately, a mirror couldn’t take him there.
It couldn’t take him anywhere on campus, or even to anywhere in the invisible city of Bonescastle, not without a prior appointment and a specific passage arranged in advance.
For the same reason, Caelum had no idea where the mirror did take him.
He crashed into a fire-lit room, dimly aware someone else shared it with him.
Wherever it was, it wasn’t a place he recognized. The mirror would have done its best to give him what he desperately wanted, but different mirrors would interpret an impossible request and try to accommodate it in different ways.
Unfortunately, he didn’t have the time to waste, figuring out where he was.
He staggered to his feet, likely looking like a horror with shards of glass from the shattered mirrors sticking out of his side and thigh, his arm still smoldering from the most recent curse that hit him, not to mention the other two spells that got him as he’d been running across the stadium benches before he reached the marble sphinx.
He scarcely glanced around the room where he found himself, or looked at the other people in it. He picked up the nearest heavy thing he saw, which happened to be a stone animal of some kind, and threw it with all of his remaining strength at the glass mirror he’d just arrived through.
The mirror didn’t shatter so much as it exploded, and luckily before any of the Dark Cathedral witches or mages could follow him through.
More shards of glass nicked his face, arms, and neck as he did it, but he barely felt those, either. He was so relieved, he half staggered into the side of a nearby armchair, and caught hold of its overstuffed back with his good arm.
Only then did he look up, panting, and gaze around at where he was.
Three sets of eyes blinked back at him owlishly, two of them wearing spectacles, and all three sitting in armchairs that matched the one where Caelum now leaned.
Luckily, they’d all been shielded from the flying glass, primarily because Caelum himself shielded them, but also because the armchair he now leaned against had stood in the way.
They looked at him in complete astonishment, and then one of them stood up.
Caelum found himself staring into the familiar face of his Theosophy professor, Gideon Forsooth, and wondering if he was dreaming him.
Next to him sat Vivian Underwood, his Seeing Arts Professor, and Professor Corvid Blackstone, his professor for Advanced Magical Objects.
Well, they had been sitting, anyway.
The other two had now risen to their feet as well, and all three seemed to be staring at him, eyes wide, their jaws loose. Blackstone managed to continue to look at him with that blind-eyed stare like he’d just discovered a new breed of insect he found fascinating.
“Mr. Bones,” a familiar voice said, and Caelum focused back on Forsooth with an effort. “I believe you need medical attention.”
Caelum blinked back at him.
His mind suddenly seemed to be moving very slowly.
“I could certainly use a drink,” he managed to answer.
His voice slurred as he said it.
It occurred to him only then that he was probably on the verge of passing out.
He must have been right, too, because he remembered very little after he’d had that particular thought.