“Why won’t you come with us?”
The Cath Bawlg wrinkled his nose and panted in disgust. “The stench down there is unbearable.”
“But you’re going to travel through it on your own?” Will was confused.
“Not in this form. Hurry up and cast your spell.”
Will had never actually used the tracking spell, but he had practiced it, creating it once daily when he ran through his routine. The spell was only third-order, so it wasn’t hard to remember. The construct came together quickly above his palm, and then he placed his hand on top of the goddamn cat’s back. At the same time, he gave the feline an experimental scratch, but all he got for the effort was a hiss.
“Follow the path quickly. It will only take me a minute. After that you’re on your own,” said the Cath Bawlg, then he did something Will had never seen before. He dissolved into what appeared to be an insubstantial smoky shadow. He raced away and then disappeared down a sewer grate next to the palace gate.
Will returned to the others. “We’re set. I can get us there.”
“Where do we meet your guide?” asked the baron.
“That’s already done,” he answered, tapping his temple. “I have a path to follow.”
“And we’re supposed to trust you?” asked his father anxiously. “You walk away and pretend to have a secret conversation, then you come back and tell us your imaginary friend taught you how to get there?”
Janice started to open her mouth, but Laina was even quicker to respond. “If he says he can do it, he can!” she snapped. Then she looked at the others, a challenge in her eyes. “If any of you don’t believe him, then you shouldn’t have come.”
Without further argument, they formed up near the sewer and Laina used her earth elemental to quickly remove the grate and widen the opening so they could easily get down. From there, they formed a long line. Tiny offered to take the lead, but Will was the only one able to see the line marking their path, or at all for that matter, lacking a light source of some kind. Tiny and Laina would follow him, while Mark Nerrow, Elizabeth Sundy, and Darla would bring up the end of the line, with the two hundred students in between. Janice would be in the middle of the line, where she could help organize the students according to their elementals, sending those forward who would be needed to block side tunnels.
Being in the front, Will adjusted his vision accordingly. The others used light spells behind him, but Tiny’s bulk blocked most of the light that filtered forward, so Will preferred to stay a little ahead as he could actually see better without the extraneous light ruining his vision.
Each time he came across a crossing point or a t-intersection, he stopped to warn the others and wait for an elemental to block the path that wouldn’t be used, then he would resume moving forward. All in all, it was significantly slower than it would have been to walk the streets aboveground, but there didn’t seem to be any vampires present. He had prepared three Ethelgren’s Ilumination spells, and he hoped that those plus his force-lances and shields would be enough to get them through.
The worst of it was the feeling of the murky sewer water seeping into their shoes and soaking the lower portions of their clothing. Well, that and the smell. Although an air elemental kept bringing fresh air in from the street grates they passed under and pushing it forward ahead of them, the smell was still unbelievably foul.
He was starting to think they might make it the entire way without encountering anything when something gray flickered through the tunnel in front of him, moving almost too fast to see. The vampire rebounded from his point-defense shield less than five feet from where he stood, but he began hammering it with force-lances before it could make another charge. Leg, leg, chest, arm, head, the creature’s body came apart under his rapid-fire spells.
Will wished he had gotten a chance to learn the spell that Ethelgren had used, since it seemed to kill the creatures with a single shot, but then again, it would have taken months to get to the point where he could reflex cast it.
Tiny had seen some of what happened, though the combination of darkness and flickering illumination from the light spells behind him made it difficult to sort out exactly what happened. “We have one in pieces up here,” called the big man.
Janice had someone send an earth elemental forward, and the pieces of the vampire were quickly separated and encased in stone. That gave him pause as he wondered how thorough the ritual would be. It was meant to illuminate even underground spaces, but would it be fine enough to handle body parts encased in stone? Before he could ask, he saw smoke rising from one of the stone balls as it began to crumble away.
Oh, acid, he realized. If it worked for trolls it probably worked for vampire flesh as well, though it wasn’t as fast as fire.
Will moved forward even more cautiously after that, but after a hundred yards more he saw that the line went straight up to a grate roughly seven feet above his head. There were no rungs or other means of climbing, since the drain wasn’t meant for human access, but Will thought it might be the same sewer grate he had planned to use to escape from Selene’s wedding.
If so, that means we’re near the east-side door to the cathedral. He wasn’t sure though. They could just as easily be on the west side, which was probably just as good. North and south would be less ideal, since the layout of the cathedral meant that the nearest gutters were much farther from the front and back entrances.
“We’re here,” Will said to Tiny, who turned and passed the word back.
He felt more nervous about emerging from the safety of the sewers than he had about entering them when they had seemed dark and unknown. Now it was the land above that seemed most dangerous. Is this how rabbits feel before they leave the safety of the warren? he wondered.
They had come too far to back out now and waiting wouldn’t help. Will prepared to cast a climb spell on himself. He still had some rope inside the limnthal, so he figured he could tie it off at the top and the others could use it to get up. He was about to start climbing when Laina squeezed around Tiny and nudged him with an elbow. “Move, idiot.”
He moved forward, to the other side of the space beneath the grate, and Laina’s earth elemental flowed upward, creating wide, easy hand- and footholds in the stone as it went. At the top, it shifted the paving stones and moved the iron grate aside with a minimum of noise. “Oh,” said Will, feeling slightly silly. “I keep forgetting about the elementals.”
“I wish I could,” said Laina darkly, and before he could stop her, she ascended to the street.
Surprised, Will reacted slowly, and Tiny beat him into position to be second. Fortunately, the street was quiet once he got aboveground. The city was covered in darkness, since the lamplighters hadn’t been able to do their duties. The windows in the buildings across the street were dark, and the only light came from the stars above.