so slightly. She froze in place, waiting for the trap to spring, her heart hammering in her chest.
One of the statues began to move. Its eyes took on a dull reddish glow and it slowly turned to look at her as it started to stand. Isabel didn’t waste another second, racing deeper into the room as she muttered the words of her shield spell.
Alexander separated into six glowing orbs, increasing the illumination enough to fill the entire room with light. Both statues were up and stretching as if they’d been standing in place for a very long time. Even though they moved like flesh and bone, they looked like they were still made of stone.
The moment her shield formed, Isabel started casting a light-lance. The first statue to wake leapt from the pedestal, gliding toward her on outstretched wings. Her spell fired, burning its right wing off at the shoulder and sending it crashing into the ground in a jumble.
“Get through the door,” Alexander said as the second took to wing.
Isabel raced for the far end of the large room and the heavy circular stone door that looked like it was designed to roll into place from a slot in the wall. It had long since broken and rolled slightly back into its recess, opening the way to the room beyond but just barely.
Just as she reached the door, the creature crashed into her, clawing and snapping with single-minded malevolence, yet failing to penetrate her shield. Isabel turned to face the thing. It had her pinned to the door, flailing against her shield with mindless determination and almost desperate viciousness. She reached out, placing her hand on its chest as she cast her force-push, blasting the creature up and back. It struck the nearest pillar squarely, cracking the ancient stone and causing it to buckle.
Seeing the first creature charging toward her, she scrambled through the narrow gap just as the support pillar buckled and the heavy stone ceiling collapsed, crushing the two creatures, sealing the entrance, and filling the room she now occupied with a cloud of dust.
Isabel got to her feet and looked around. She was in a large workroom. Once, long ago, the place might have housed a forge and a variety of other tools and machines designed to work stone, steel, and wood into works of art or utility. Now it was empty and cold.
Alexander bobbled over to the far side of the room and stopped at the top of another spiral staircase leading back down into the heart of the mountain. Isabel headed toward him while quickly looking around for anything she could use as a weapon. Unfortunately, time had rendered everything in the room worthless.
The staircase spiraled down into the mountain. When they reached a level with a door leading into a dark hallway, Alexander continued downward.
“What’s in there?”
“I’m not sure, but Hazel is farther down.”
Finally, the staircase stopped at a point perhaps even deeper than where she’d entered the vast underground fortress and laboratory. It opened into a large circular room with a dozen passages leading away like spokes on the hub of a wheel. The floor was laid out with black and white tiles in a checkerboard pattern, each about two feet square. Several corpses, long-dead, littered the room. The only thing they all had in common was that each appeared to have been standing on a black square when he died.
Isabel cautiously worked her way to the first man, taking his sword and testing it, but finding that it had rusted to the point of uselessness. Deciding that none of the dead explorers’ equipment was still useful, she looked closer at the dust covering the floor and saw several sets of footprints, all stepping on white squares, leading to one passage. She made her way there, relieved to be out of the deadly chamber.
“This passage leads to where they were when I last checked on them,” Alexander said, floating into the darkness of the corridor.
It ran for hundreds of feet until Isabel could just make out a faint glow coming from the far end of the passage. Alexander vanished, leaving her in the darkness, so she could approach without alerting Hazel. She cast her shield spell while she walked, mentally preparing for the battle to come, knowing that she might have to fight Hector and Horace in the bargain.
The passage opened into a circular room. Two veins of softly glowing crystal rose from the floor to the ceiling. Within each was carved