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He took a deep breath.
At the same moment the four brown ceramic toads placed around the room began to belch a thick, pea-green fog. It filled the room at alarming speed. Broahm turned and sprinted for the next staircase leading to the level above. He had to stay ahead of the fog. Breathing in any of it would send him instantly into a deep coma.
A distant part of his brain registered that the iron skin spell had worn off.
Broahm hit the stairs hard, turned his ankle, and yelled in pain. He made himself go on, every other step upward sending a shock of agony lancing up his leg past his knee. His lungs were already burning for air. Broahm was no kind of athlete, neither particularly strong nor fast, but he pushed through the jagged fire in his ankle.
He reached the top step and turned, dagger out, ready to fend off the undead guardian.
Nothing.
Broahm cocked his head, listening for pursuit, but no sound came up from the level below. He stood frozen, panting, waiting.
A zombie bear,Broahm thought. How fucking clever. And what will people say about you in the guild meetings? Stupid old Broahm was eaten by his own zombie guardian. I told you that fellow wasn’t the brightest candle on the altar.
The dark green fog had climbed two-thirds of the way up the stairs, then floated there like some ugly pond of dirty smoke, but it came no farther. The fog was too thick and dark to see anything below, and Broahm had no idea at all how to disperse the fog. He realized he’d neglected to ask Sulton a number of important questions about his security system. Did the fog fail to rise any farther because it was so thick and heavy, or was it spelled to keep to its own level so it didn’t conflict with the house’s other defenses? And if he hadbreathed any of the fog and fallen into a coma, what, if anything, would bring him out of it again? Another half-dozen questions sprang to mind, but Broahm dismissed them. Right now he needed to focus on getting out of this mess.
“House maiden!” Broahm shouted. Perhaps he could send her to scout the situation. Sooner or later he’d have to go downstairs again, and he wasn’t eager to tangle with the bear. Maybe the thing had a limited life span. It might already have tumbled over into a docile heap. “House maiden, where are—”
The zombie bear rose through the fog and leaped for Broahm, eyes vacant and dead, claws swiping at the wizard, ripping through robes and slicing three thin, shallow cuts across Broahm’s chest. He fell back, tripping in his own robes, the cuts stinging and cold, the bear still coming.
The shatter spell flew from Broahm’s lips.
The zombie bear’s skin shredded like dry paper, the bones beneath splintering and flying in every direction, chips and dust raining down on Broahm and over the room, but Broahm had already stepped onto the upper floor.
A blinding bright flash of blue light.
Sudden silence.
Then everything went dark.
BROAHM GROANED ANDsat up in the grass, holding his head.
The world around him was blue. He blinked at it but wasn’t quite ready for it, so he closed his eyes again. He reached into his robes, his hand and chest sticky and warm with his own blood, but the claw marks weren’t deep. The wound would keep for now.
Broahm had bigger problems.
He opened his eyes again slowly, looked around, and sighed.
He sat on a slight rise in a blue world of blue sky and blue grass, a vast open plain in one direction. A hundred yards in the opposite direction was a wall of blue quartz that stretched out of sight to the horizon in both directions and went up into the sky until it disappeared.
In the center of Broahm’s workshop was a small pedestal on which sat a pyramid of rough blue quartz. Broahm was now insidethat piece of quartz.
How to escape from a capture gem was another question Broahm had neglected to ask Sulton. It wasn’t really a gem. Just quartz. Capture gems were little artificial worlds unto themselves, and nobles often purchased such items fashioned of emerald or sapphire, but a wizard knew any old hunk of quartz would do, so there was no point wasting money. Oh, there were subtle beneficial reasons for using a more expensive stone, but all Broahm was interested in was capturing an intruder.
Well. He’d captured himself instead. Bravo, idiot.
He stood and hobbled slowly to the quartz wall. He looked it up and down, then reached out and rubbed the cold quartz. He tapped it with his dagger. The wall was thick, solid. Even if Broahm hadn’t already expended his shatter spell, he doubted it would so much as scratch the quartz.
Brute force wasn’t going to get him out of this one.
A quick, mental inventory: a voice spell and a light spell. Not much left in his addled noggin.
Broahm had known very old wizards who could keep thirty-five or forty spells in their heads, ready for use at the click of a tongue. It took years of study and discipline to accomplish such a thing. Most wizards kept secret how many spells they could hold, but Broahm suspected his old master, Hemley, could hold as many as fifteen comfortably. Comfortablywas the key. Broahm could jam eight spells in his mind in a pinch, but the buzz in his brain proved too distracting to cope with. Once he’d tried nine spells, but it had almost driven him mad. He’d had to run outside to launch a lightning bolt into the sky to make room in his head.
Anyway, someday he would study and work and be able to hold nine spells. Then if he was disciplined and worked hard, ten. But not today.
Today he was trapped in a world of blue with two nearly useless spells.
What Broahm reallyneeded was to be rescued. If he’d bothered to memorize some kind of simple communication spell, maybe he could have called for help.
Hmmmmmm. Broahm scratched his chin. Maybe there wasa way he could call for help. The point of being a wizard was not simply to know spells, but also how to be clever about using them.
So . . . be clever, moron.
THE HOUSE MAIDENlingered over the burglar’s body long enough to make sure it wasn’t her master’s. Relief. It wasn’t Broahm. The pool of blood spread out from the body left little doubt. He was very, very dead.
She drifted up to the next level. “Milord?”
Where could he be? The intruder had obviously been vanquished, so where was her master?
She drifted though a sea of dark green fog, up the stairs past an explosion of dust and bone and old fur. Something was not right. Not right at all. She entered the master’s workshop and started suddenly at the misshapen shadow on the wall. It was huge, waving its arms like some deranged creature. She floated in a circle, looking all around at anything that could possibly cast such a shadow.
A bright glow radiated from the quartz in the center of the workshop.
This wasn’t right at all. She had to find her master, had to tell him something was amiss. She turned and floated back toward the stairs.
And stopped.
Had she just heard . . . her name?
She cast glances into every corner of the room. Nobody.
Was her imagination playing tricks on her? Since she was barely a ghost, a thing artificial, a puff of magic herself, she had to wonder if she even had an imagination. And anyway, house maidenwasn’t technically her “name.”
She hovered, waiting to see if she heard it again.
“IN HERE, YOUstupid cow!” Broahm screamed.
His magically amplified voice shook the interior of the capture gem like an earthquake.
He jumped up and down, waved his arms, and tried to imagine how it must look inside his workshop. He could see the shimmering figure of the house maiden blurred through the quartz. “Pay attention, you dumb ghostly transparent bitch!”