Summer's Cauldron Read online

  Summer’s Cauldron

  (The Young Sorcerers Guild — Book Two)

  G. L. Breedon

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. The Author holds exclusive rights to this work. Unauthorized duplication is prohibited.

  Copyright 2012 by G.L. Breedon

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 978-0-9837777-5-5

  This book is available in print at most online retailers.

  For more information:

  www.Kosmosaicbooks.com

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1: Dead Forest Dance

  Chapter 2: The Ruin Tree

  Chapter 3: Cauldron Conundrum

  Chapter 4: Carnival Cavalcade

  Chapter 5: Celebrity Sighting

  Chapter 6: Chasing Shadows

  Chapter 7: Hook and Bait

  Chapter 8: Night School

  Chapter 9: Carnival Confections

  Chapter 10: Carnival Conversations

  Chapter 11: Magic Box

  Chapter 12: Spy Games

  Chapter 13: River Rescue

  Chapter 14: Soul Sight

  Chapter 15: Museum Misadventure

  Chapter 16: Feinted and Foiled

  Chapter 17: Beyond the Barrier

  Chapter 18: Pandora’s Box

  Chapter 19: Cauldron Cooking

  Chapter 20: Bank Robbery

  Chapter 21: Finding the Scent

  Chapter 22: The Silent Swamp

  Chapter 23: Mountain Melee

  Chapter 24: Astral Assault

  Chapter 25: Carnival Conclusion

  About the Author

  Chapter 1: Dead Forest Dance

  Centuries-dead branches clicked and clattered as feet stomped and arms swung past desiccated tree trucks, frayed strips of leathered bark falling in wild, windless clouds.

  “Mmm, I think it went this way,” Clark said, his long, half-giant legs carrying his large form briskly through the trees.

  “Where?” Ben said, struggling to catch up, his short, dwarf legs flying furiously to match Clark’s pace. “I can’t see anything around all these trees.”

  “Ahh, would you like me to pick you up?” Clark asked, looking down to Ben.

  “No,” Ben said, glaring up at Clark. “No, I would not like you to pick me up.”

  Bone-like twigs snapped and popped as feet pounded the coffin-dry forest loam, eddies of ancient lichen dust drifting upward to clog the air and lungs.

  “Hermes’ hemorrhoids, it smells in here,” Daphne said, waving her slender hand before the scrunched up nose of her half-Indian, half-Dryad face.

  “They do call it the Dead Forest, after all,” Rafael said, ducking under yet another dead tree branch.

  “I hope we don’t have to chase that gorping thing all day,” Daphne said.

  “Do you really think we’re going to be that lucky?” Rafael asked, a frown filling the gentle Hispanic features of his face.

  Cadaverous underbrush, brown and paper-like in its mummification, crumbled and turned to ash at the slightest touch, clinging to the pant legs of those running past.

  “Are you sure he’s headed in the right direction?” Nina asked, her long, Iroquois-Italian face drawn tight with exhaustion. “Because this doesn’t look like a place where you would plant a Rune Tree and even if you did plant one, it doesn’t look like a place where it would grow, because nothing grows here, not leaves, not grass, not weeds, not nothing, just dead trees and dead leaves and dead, dead, dead for miles and miles.”

  “Did I mention it’s called the Dead Forest?” Rafael said.

  Hooves skittered, sliding this way and that, dashing around death-grey trees and leaping over the coal-black bones of animals dead so long no semblance of their living life could be discerned.

  “We have been running around this Dead Forest for nearly the whole of the day,” Victoria said in a clipped British accent as she leapt over a long dead log, her centaur hooves leaving small clouds of soot-like soil trailing behind her. “Are you quite certain that animal knows what it’s about? I love running as much as anyone, but I’m beginning to suspect he thinks we’re playing a game of tag.”

  Branches parted, cracked and crumbled, chalk-like ash covering everything and everyone as a clearing came into view and all motion stopped.

  “What is it?” Alex Ravenstar asked, running around his friends of the Young Sorcerers Guild to stand at the edge the parchment-brown grass. He wiped the sweat from his forehead and brushed his jet-black hair from his eyes.

  “Cerberus’s canker sores,” Daphne panted. “We ran all this way for that?”

  “Hmm, seems like it was important to him,” Clark said, bending down to breathe deeply.

  “Same,” Ben said wheezing. “Wish I could say the same.”

  In the middle of the small clearing of lifeless grass stood a solitary dead tree, its leafless branches statue-still in the motionless air. At the base of the tree trunk, one leg cocked high, stood a small beagle.

  “I certainly hope that’s not the Rune Tree,” Rafael said, brushing Dead Forest dust from his shirt.

  “Are you sure it’s a magical beagle, Brother?” Nina said, leaning against Alex as she gasped for air.

  “It must have a magically large bladder,” Victoria said with a flick of her tail. “He’s been marking this forest as his territory all afternoon.”

  “He hasn’t gotten the scent yet,” Alex said as he watched the beagle finish his business and turn to cock his head at the young mages assembled at the edge of the clearing. The small dog seemed surprised to find they had followed him once again.

  “You can’t blame him with this stench,” Rafael said. “It smells like a carcass that’s been rotting in the sun for a month.”

  “Sun?” Ben said. “There is no sun.” He stared up at the dark clouds hanging motionless above the lifeless trees like great, capsized leviathans of the sky. There was never any sun in the Dead Forest.

  “Hmm, there could be a carcass nearby,” Clark said.

  “Yuck,” Nina said. “Smells like a million carcasses.”

  “What’s that you’re standing on?” Rafael asked Nina.

  “Very funny,” Nina said with a grimace. She waited until Rafael looked away before checking the ground beneath her feet.

  “So many trees,” Daphne said, her voice tinged with sadness, “and all of them dead. Silent. I can’t hear anything from them.”

  “Have I mentioned it’s called…” Rafael began to say.

  “Yes!” everyone except Alex said in unison.

  “It seemed worth repeating,” Rafael said, trying to hide a smile.

  “Beowulf, come,” Alex said to the dog, ignoring his companions. Beowulf gave a quick bark and trotted over to Alex.

  “Who names a dog Beowulf, anyway?” Daphne asked.

  “Our dad,” Nina said. “As the official warlock tracking dog, Dad got to choose his name.”

  “Very Medieval of him,” Victoria said, “but are you sure this dog can track anything other than a place to relieve himself?”

  “I told you,” Alex said, bending down to the beagle, “Beowulf can track anything you want to find. He just needs the right scent.” The problem, Alex realized, was that he really had no idea what the Rune Tree might look or smell like. All he could tell from the stories the Guild had tracked down and read to each other every night in the Guild House was it was a magical tree, which somehow possessed all the possible runes of magic in its branches, bark, and leaves.

  Beowulf barked and licked Alex’s face.

  “Ahh, I think he’s hungry,” Clark said, pulling a handful of nuts from his pants pocket and plopping them in his mouth.

&n
bsp; “Give up,” Ben said. “Maybe we should give up.”

  “The Rune Tree could be our one chance to make sure the Shadow Wraith can never escape its prison again,” Alex said. That was why they were looking for the elusive tree — in the hopes of finding a rune they could use to permanently destroy the Shadow Wraith’s grip on the world.

  “Valley,” Ben said, “We’ve been looking for it all over the valley and we haven’t found anything.”

  “Well, we haven’t tried the Crimson Forest yet,” Clark said. “Or the Silent Swamp. Or the Copper Blood Mountains. Or…”

  “Nope,” Ben said, “but we’ve tried nearly every place else. Are you sure there really is a Rune Tree?”

  “We’ve all read the stories of the Rune Tree,” Victoria said. “Or what stories there are to read. And they all point to the tree being somewhere in the Rune Valley.”

  “Besides,” Alex said, “this is the first time we’ve had Beowulf with us.”

  Beowulf turned his head toward a small copse of corpse-like trees and growled.

  “What is it, boy?” Alex said, standing up to see what had spooked the dog.

  Beowulf barred his teeth and growled even louder.

  “Something is in the woods with us,” Rafael said, squinting. “I can’t quite see it, but I can smell something different.”

  “All I smell is death and decay,” Victoria said with a dainty sniff.

  “This is worse,” Rafael said, his nose twitching.

  “Mmm, I can smell it too,” Clark said. “Smells like bad magic. Like sour milk on a moldy cake.” Clark had a nose for sniffing out magic.

  “Everybody get ready,” Alex said as Beowulf barked again and the trees in the distance began to sway and crack, seemingly of their own accord.

  “Get ready for what?” Nina asked.

  “Get ready to run,” Alex said.

  “Always the running.” Rafael sighed.

  Alex could now hear whatever it was coming through the trees. It shook the ground and made the heretofore dead-still wind whip around them in small cyclones of decayed tree dust. He could smell it now, too. Like something deceased and decomposing for days in a pool of warm water. It stung his nostrils and made him gag. Then he saw it.

  Rushing through the forest, dried branches sticking to it like burs on animal fur. However, it was not an animal. It was something alive that could not be alive without some manner of dark magic. Dead moss and ash-dry earth packed tight with twigs, branches, and black-brown leaves matted and twisted with fibrous bark strands. A skittering mass of rotted forest matter, half-rolling like a living tumbleweed, propelled by eight crustacean-like legs formed from broken, but bending dead branches. In the center of the mass — eight eyes of night-black granite stones circling a mouth of broken animal bones arrayed like the teeth of some nightmarish threshing-machine.

  “I think running is a brilliant idea,” Victoria said, slightly mesmerized by the sight of the monstrous thing hurtling through the trees toward them.

  “I like running,” Rafael said, turning to do just that. “I like it a lot.”

  “Hmm, would you like me to carry you?” Clark asked, looking down at Ben.

  “Seriously?” Ben said. “You seriously have to ask?”

  Clark scooped Ben up into his arms as Nina turned to Victoria and said with an almost pleading voice, “May I?”

  “Certainly,” Victoria said, helping Nina swing up onto to the horse half of her centaur body.

  “Demeter’s death wish, wait for me,” Daphne said as she ran alongside Victoria, who helped the slender girl up to ride in front of Nina.

  Beowulf growled once more and then dashed into the trees, dead leaves flying through the air like confetti as he rushed toward the monstrous thing bearing down on them all.

  “Beowulf!” Nina cried.

  “Don’t worry,” Alex said as he turned and began to run from the clearing with his friends, “that’s one dog that can take care of himself. Remember, stay together.”

  “And no magic,” Daphne said.

  Unsurprisingly, magic did not work correctly in the Dead Forest. Rune-spells could have an unpredictable and potentially disastrous effect. It occurred to Alex that the creature crashing after them through the woods might be the result of a spell gone wrong.

  Alex glanced over his shoulder to see the Dead-Tree-Monster, as he had begun to think of it, was gaining on them. He could hear the growls and barks of Beowulf, but whatever fight the dog was offering, and his father had assured him it could be considerable, it wasn’t enough to slow the Dead-Tree-Monster.

  Alex ran beside his friends, crashing through the forest, creating more dust and debris than ever. A cloud of Dead Forest wreckage billowed up behind them, roiling in the swirling air of their swift passage only to be gathered up and absorbed into the massive, unliving thing pursuing them.

  “Bigger,” Ben yelled as he looked back over Clark’s shoulder. “It’s getting bigger!”

  Alex risked another glance behind as he darted between trees, trying to watch his footing. Branches of trees that had long ago fallen, but never decayed back into the earth, littered the forest floor. Nothing in the Dead Forest was alive, but neither could anything fully decay. Everything was suspended in a perpetual state of rot.

  Alex leapt across of swallow pool of stagnant, scum-covered water and found himself grinning. He was no longer able to repress the feeling that had been welling up inside him. He had never heard of a Dead-Tree-Monster. Thanks to his father being the town warlock, Alex had heard of nearly all the dangerous creatures of the Rune Valley. That meant it was entirely possible, in fact, more than likely, he and his friends were being chased by something no one in the entire valley had ever seen, much less been hunted by. A part of him found that notion to be unspeakably exciting. Of course, another part of him found it to be ridiculously moronic. The latter part of his mind was the part insisting on running, not the part insisting on grinning.

  “Are you smiling?” Rafael asked, incredulous.

  “Well,” Victoria said, “I’m glad to see someone is enjoying themselves.”

  “Mom swears she didn’t drop him on his head,” Nina said, “but I don’t believe her.”

  “Gorping idiot,” Daphne growled.

  Alex couldn’t help it. He grinned wider.

  The Dead-Tree-Monster was close now, close enough that twigs and rocks from its body shook loose as it ran, pelting Alex in the back. The growls of Beowulf the beagle grew louder and then suddenly, impossibly loud, as though the small dog had been joined by a mountain-sized mastiff. Then a sound erupted behind them like a thousand trees falling all at once and crashing to the ground.

  Alex instinctively looked behind to find the Dead-Tree-Monster was nowhere in sight. He saw no sign of Beowulf, either, although the sound of crashing trees still echoed through the lifeless forest. Alex looked a little too long, his foot catching on a knarred root, sending him sprawling forward head first toward one of the small pools of putrid water scattered throughout the forest. Just as his face was about to dive into the filthy water, he felt himself gliding through the air.

  His first, and rather irrational thought, was he had somehow managed to learn to fly as he often did in his astral travels. Then he felt the pressure of his shirt against his chest and realized he was being held in the air. Held by Victoria, who had somehow managed to grab him while he fell. She placed him on his feet, still running. He looked at her and grinned wider than ever.

  “Thanks!”

  “Not a problem,” Victoria said, smiling back. “I’m sure you’d do the same for me.”

  “He’s not big enough,” Nina said from behind Victoria.

  “He’d think of something,” Victoria said. “He’s very clever when he wants to be.”

  “How about giving us some of that clever, now?” Daphne, looking behind for any sign of the Dead-Tree-Monster.

  “Keep running,” Alex said, still smiling.

  “See?” Victoria said,
“Very clever.”

  Even as the sounds of Beowulf’s too-loud roars faded and the noise of clashing trees receded, Alex and the Guild kept running. If there was one thing Alex had learned in all of his adventures, it was that when you started running from something evil, it was best to keep running until you knew you were safe or you had to stop. Their arrival into another clearing forced them to halt and seemed safe at first sight.

  Alex skidded to a stop as he entered the large clearing, sucking air deeply and quickly, as much from the harried run as from the sight he saw before him. The clearing of short, dead, brown weeds was the size of a football field and roughly the same shape. In the middle of the clearing sat a large pond, its water still and stagnant, a fetid smell hovering in the windless air. A small island of ash-gray grass rose out of the water in the middle of the pond.

  In the center of this island stood a solitary tree. A living tree. A wide trunk of healthy black bark and strong, thick branches stretched up toward the sky, bright green leaves opening upward to catch the rays of a single shaft of light breaking through the slate-colored clouds above.

  The Rune Tree.

  Chapter 2: The Ruin Tree

  “Oh, goodness,” Victoria panted as Nina and Daphne slid from the back of her horse half.

  “Great Zeus’ something or other,” Daphne said, her mouth hanging open.

  “You were right, Brother,” Nina said, beaming with excitement. “We found it.”

  “But how do we get to it?” Rafael asked, wiping the sweat from his forehead.

  Alex looked behind and listened, but he could see and hear nothing in the Dead Forest they had run through. No sign of the Dead-Tree-Monster. No hint of Beowulf the beagle. Alex turned back to stare at the tree. Beowulf would catch up with them eventually. A magical tacking-dog should be able to do that much, at least.

  “Transportation,” Ben said as Clark lowered him to the ground. “There’s a raft over there.”

  Alex looked to where Ben pointed and saw there was, indeed, something that might once have been called a raft, tied with a slender piece of rope to a stump at the edge of the pond.