Son of a Dark Wizard (9 page)

He’d be there soon. Only a few minutes
more.

Then he would face Atlorus again. Then he
would find out how the boy had killed his father.

Seven seconds before Gashdane knocked on his
door, Atlorus woke up, half imagining he had heard his mother
calling his name. It took him a moment to remember where he was and
who he had become. When Gashdane knocked on the door, he was not
surprised. It was as though some part of his mind had expected
it.

“Yes?” Atlorus called out.

Gashdane entered the dark room holding a
golden candelabrum. He took a candle from it and began lighting the
lanterns along the wall, giving the room an amber glow. “I’m afraid
you must wake,” Gashdane said. “There’s an airship following us.
Only a cargo ship, but there are no trade routes around here. They
must’ve recognized our ship. They must want to meet you.”

“A cargo ship?” Atlorus said, sitting up. He
still had his weapon clasped in his hand, a small black crystal. He
could feel it pressing into his palm beneath his fingers. He opened
his fist to make sure.

“Atlorus,” Gashdane said slowly, as if he’d
caught the boy stealing, “Atlorus, you shouldn’t sleep with
that.”

Atlorus rolled the crystal between his
fingers. “Why not?”

“It’s dangerous. You don’t know what a dream
may do. You may activate it in sleep.”

“I have to keep it close,” Atlorus said.

Gashdane walked over to the end of the bed
and shook his head. He spoke gently, as if trying to calm a child’s
nightmares. “That dark night is over. The dark wizard is gone.
Don’t let your memories haunt you. Don’t keep shadows with
you.”

“No,” Atlorus said, pulling off his covers
and stepping out of bed. “It’s not over.”

“Atlorus . . .”

“It’s Sorren,” Atlorus said, pulling on a
robe to keep him warm. “Son of the dark wizard. He’s coming.”

“Atlorus . . .”

“He’s on that cargo ship. He’s coming for
me.”

Gashdane sighed and looked at the floor.
“You’ve seen a lot for one so young . . .”

Atlorus looked at Gashdane and waited for the
man to return his gaze. When Atlorus said nothing, Gashdane looked
up at him.

“I
know
it’s Sorren,” Atlorus said.
“I . . .” He wasn’t about to tell Gashdane that some
other dark wizard had warned him through an enchanted mirror. That
would only scare Gashdane. “I saw him in a dream. He survived that
night.”

“Only a dream . . .”

“No,” Atlorus said. “I can
sense
him.
It must be a part of my power.” He held the black crystal in his
palm. Only he could activate the weapon. That was the power of the
Chosen One.

“We saw that statue smash him,” Gashdane
said. “We
saw
it with our own eyes.”

“I know. But I can feel it with the beating
of my heart.” That was an expression his mother often used.
I
can feel it with the beating of my heart
. “That night is always
with me. I watch him being crushed every hour in my mind. But I can
feel
that he’s near. I trust my heart more than my
eyes.”

“I suppose it’s possible,” Gashdane said,
staring at the black crystal in Atlorus’s hand. “Who can say how
your power works? If Sorren lives, then the prophecy has not yet
been fulfilled.”

“It will be soon,” Atlorus said, closing his
fingers around the crystal. He had been terrified on the night he
led Zolen soldiers into Vonlock’s castle. But he trusted the black
crystal now, and he trusted his own power. He had seen what they
could do. There was no more fear. “Let him come.”

Sorren let out a long breath. The small cargo
airship was now flying behind and below his father’s grand royal
airship. It loomed overhead like an enormous storm cloud. Sage was
trembling in his seat, his hands lightly resting on spokes of the
helm, keeping the ship flying slow and straight. The exciting
flight to Owl’s Fortress had apparently agitated his nerves.

Thale had responded to the dangerous flight
more stoically. When it was over, he had simply stood up and stared
out the front window as though nothing interesting had happened.
But he wouldn’t look at Sorren.

“Now what?” Sage asked. “Are you going to
blast fireballs at it?”

“I’m not going to destroy my father’s ship,”
Sorren said. “
My
ship.” His father was gone. The royal
airship was
his
airship now, wasn’t it? “There’s a docking
bay door on the back, between the steam vents. You’d see it easily
in daylight.”

“I can see it,” Thale said, his tovocular eye
twisting outward. “It’s wide. Nearly the width of the ship.”

“Yes,” Sorren said. “Fly close to that and
I’ll open it.”

“And then?” Sage asked.

“This whole ship should fit inside. It’s a
docking bay.”

“Should?” Sage repeated. “And what if it
doesn’t?”

“Then we move on to plan B,” Sorren said.

“And what’s plan B?”

“Plan B is to think of another plan.”

“I’m glad you know what you’re doing,” Sage
said.

“I’ve never needed a plan B before,” Sorren
said. “Just keep flying.”

Sage brought the cargo ship steadily closer
to the gigantic ship above. His trembling hands settled a bit, but
Sorren could tell he was still tense. His breathing was slow and
labored.

“Uh oh,” Sage said.

“What?” Sorren asked. But he knew the answer
a second later. His father’s airship was slowing down. There was no
place for it to land; there were only forests below.

Sage gave voice to the same thought turning
in Sorren’s mind. “They know they’re being followed.”

“They can’t know by who,” Sorren said.

“By
whom
,” Sage wisely corrected
him.

Sorren ignored him. “The kingdom thinks I’m
dead. Approach the docking bay door and see if they’ll open it for
us.”

“They must be suspicious,” Sage said. “This
is no place for a cargo ship to be flying.”

“Do you want to go back to the caverns?”
Sorren asked. “I can fly myself.”

“I have more experience,” Sage said. “You
need me.”

As the royal airship above them came to stop
in the air, Sage brought the cargo ship to a stop behind it, then
slowly pulled back on the helm, guiding the ship upward.

“Look,” Thale said. “They
are
opening
the bay door.”

Indeed, narrow strips of orange light
outlined the edges of the wide rectangular door, slowly growing as
the door opened outward.

“Convenient,” Thale said.

“Too convenient,” Sage said, bringing the
cargo ship level with the bay door.

“Look inside, Thale,” Sorren said. “Tell me
what you see.”

Thale put a hand over his human eye, and his
tovocular eye whirled inward and outward. “There are people inside.
Five or six. Zolen soldiers. They’re . . . they’re
holding something . . .”

The door was almost completely open now,
revealing the silhouettes of men standing in a row. Sage slowly
sent the cargo ship forward.

“Wait!” Thale grabbed at Sage’s arm.

Sage jumped in his chair. “What are you
try—”

“Fly down!” Thale said. “They’re throwing
bo—”

Boom!

A low roar bellowed through the air, and the
world beyond the window turned to fire, balls of flame curling in
on one another. The cargo ship jolted downward and to the side,
sending Sorren crashing up against the ceiling and the side wall,
forcing all breath from his lungs. The sound of shattering glass
rang in his ear. He clutched his staff and pulled himself back to
his feet. Outside, the fireballs had turned into a thick cloud of
smoke, impossible to see through.

“Thale,” Sorren said between gasps, “can you
see . . .”

Then Sorren noticed that Thale was sprawled
against the floor, arms at his side. He was searching the floor as
if he’d lost something. Sorren extended a hand to help the boy up,
but something crunched under his foot. He slid his foot to the
side. A shard of the mirror. The floor was covered in pieces of the
shattered mirror.

Thale looked up at him, not taking his hand,
his face pale as moonlight. “It broke,” he said. “I couldn’t hold
it.”

“Are you all right?” Sorren asked, reaching
his silver-copper arm closer to him.

“I think so,” Thale said, taking Sorren’s
hand and pulling himself up.

“Hold on to something,” Sage said, scrambling
with the controls before him. The cargo ship had come to a stop
slightly below the opened bay door.

“Hold on to what?” Thale asked.

But Sage ignored the question and sent the
ship lurching forward, under the royal airship. Sorren and Thale
stumbled backward. The roar of more bombs bursting in air echoed
somewhere behind them. The sounds shook the cargo ship’s walls.
Sorren’s muscles throbbed as if his blood had turned to pudding.
His connection with the ship was becoming painful. But he couldn’t
cut the connection. The blasts had damaged the engine. Sorren could
feel it. Now it was only the flow of his power that kept the ship
afloat.

“You didn’t see a boy around your age back
there,” Sorren asked Thale, “did you?”

Thale shook his head. “Only Zolen
soldiers.”

Sorren put a hand on Sage’s shoulder. “Fly to
the front of the ship and turn and rise.”

“What?” Sage asked.

“Bring the ships face to face,” Sorren said,
twisting his staff in his flesh-and-blood hand. “I will send them
fire of my own.” Then he clutched his staff in both hands and
pointed it out the front window, trying to remember the words of
the fire spells he had mastered years ago.

Sage nodded and pulled some levers at the
control board. “By the way,” he said. “I think they know you’re
alive.”

It
was
odd that they had attacked an
otherwise harmless cargo airship so quickly. Did they attack every
suspicious airship like that? Or did they know Sorren himself was
onboard?
It doesn’t matter
, Sorren thought.
If they
didn’t know I was alive, they’ll know it soon.

Sage began reversing the cargo ship’s
orientation as it neared the head of the ship above. When they
finally flew out from under the royal airship, Sage sent the cargo
ship rising upward. The walls of the royal airship before them
seemed to slowly descend, floor after floor of long rows of windows
and balconies made for a king.

When the cargo ship rose to face the top
deck, there he was. Atlorus, just as he had looked on the night he
killed Sorren’s father. He stood at the edge of the top deck, arms
against a wide railing, staring straight at Sorren. A taller figure
stood behind him, his face lost in shadow. Sorren guessed it to be
Gashdane, head of the Zolen army.

“It’s him,” Thale said. “The Chosen One.”

“Yes,” Sorren said, gazing at the boy,
willing the green flame of his staff to burn bright enough to
almost blind the boy gazing back.

They stood there, staring at each other,
Sorren in a stolen cargo airship, Atlorus on his father’s royal
airship.

On second thought, Sorren decided Atlorus did
not
look the same. His eyes were cold, his face was relaxed,
his arms did not tremble. He was calm. He was no longer a coward.
The way the moonlight struck his face reminded Sorren of a painting
he might’ve seen in a dream.

Sorren kept the boy’s gaze as he repositioned
his hands on his staff, preparing to blast a stream of fire through
the window, aiming at the railing below the boy’s hands.

But as he did so, Atlorus slowly brought his
left hand to his side, raising it behind his head and making a fist
as if preparing to throw a punch.

“He’s holding something,” Thale said.

The tove that killed my father
, Sorren
thought.

Thale’s eye spun madly as Atlorus flung his
arm forward. “It looks like a small black cry—”

It happened quickly. It appeared above them
like a hole in the world, a wide hole that twisted the world at its
edges, forming a tunnel above them that led to nothingness, a vast
and empty nothingness, a void blacker than the sky. Its edges
seemed to shimmer, to pulsate, singing in tones both high and low
like a crowd of children wailing in agony under the deafening roar
of a crumbling mountain. The void was pulling the airship inside as
if it were the throat of some starving beast seeking to devour all
it saw. The winds cried through the walls.

Sorren’s heart pounded in his ears. His
connection with the airship was quickening his pulse, sending
tremors through his limbs. He could feel the force of the dark
vortex working to rip the ship apart, and he understood what he had
to do.

Sorren closed his eyes, cut his connection
with the airship as he might cut a rope with a knife, and went
weightless. The choir of children seemed to fade into the distance.
Sorren opened his eyes to find the hole shrinking back into the
sky. It seemed to happen in slow motion. The cargo ship flipped
backward, tumbling from the sky like a struck bird, dead and
powerless without Sorren’s power coursing through it. Sage was
strapped in his seat, clutching at the helm, but Thale floated
before the windows, twisting and flailing and grabbing at air.
Beyond the window, the world was nothing but a blur of the forest
trees below, turning, spinning, growing.

And then the windows shattered and all was
darkness.

The light was blinding. Sorren realized it
was the sun flashing through the trees. What happened? Where was
he? How long had he been unconscious?

He tried to sit up, but couldn’t. His entire
body was numb, stiff. He felt like a floating thought trapped in
one place.

A blurry face appeared before him, looking
down. Sorren tried to bring the vision into focus. It was a woman’s
face. An older woman, wrinkles beginning to form at the edges of
her eyes and mouth. Perhaps it was a trick of the morning light,
but the woman’s pale skin almost seemed a faint shade of magenta.
Her eyes were the deep blue of the Nyrish moon and, like the moon,
they seemed to glow. A bundle of worn out wooden necklaces hung
from her neck, clacking against one another. Thick strands of hair
hung from her head, black with random strands of dark red and
purple, long enough that they almost touched Sorren’s face. They
smelled of dirt and smoke.