Pop.
A bestial screech has me ducking my head against an invisible assailant. But there’s no one here but me. I stumble away from the bath. Maybe it’s my presence that’s setting the thing off, making the bubbles keep popping.
I stumble forward into the next room. In here, there are walls and walls that are covered in shelves filled with glass jars. All of them seem to be filled with the same black goop. They’re labelled with names and addresses, like they’re just waiting to be mailed out.
I grab a jar to inspect later, tucking it under my arm since I lost my clothes a while back.
An almighty crash sounds from somewhere above me, and the ground beneath my feet shakes, sending me stumbling again while the glass bottles rattle violently.
There’s another crash as dust rains from the ceiling.
That sounds to me like an angry kraken on the loose, closer than I expected him to be.
The idea was for Torin and Finch would head off away from us, both as a lure to the sorceress and to avoid us being unwitting casualties of Finch losing control of his oversized appendages.
Darting away from the glass bottles that look dangerously close to toppling to the floor, I head back to the room with the gigantic bathtub.
Beside me, the pool bubbles furiously, and I can smell something vaguely familiar, although I can’t quite place where I recognise it from. I eye the liquid as I summon a tiny dose of magic, releasing it deliberately into the air. It floats over the bathtub, and the liquid greedily goops, bubbling furiously, and a long-buried memory from my childhood raises its ugly head.
My mother, forcing us into the basement where the walls are thickly painted with a tar-like substance. She makes us practice our magic over and over; me most of all because I’m the most disappointing of all her progeny.
Every time I fail to produce a ball of light from nothing for her, I’m whipped with her special cane.
Over and over, until my back should be ribbons. But the whip she uses never breaks the skin. It just gives off the sensation that it does.
No broken skin means she can keep going, over and again until I lose track of everything beyond the pain.
Eventually, I get so tired of it all that my own whip strikes out. Pure magic releases from me and—
Nothing.
The walls gain an oily tint as they absorb my magic.
That has to be what’s inside the pool, as well as the hundreds of jars rattling away in the next room at Finch’s next strike.
There has to be the extracted magic of hundreds of people here; all concentrated into one enormous pool of goop.
There’s another bone-shaking crash from somewhere right above me.
I summon my magic, switching forms right as the ceiling falls in.
Chapter 34
Reva
We pass through the hallway of cells quickly, not wanting to linger on the ominous stains inside the laboratory, or the misery that still lingers over this place. Once we reach the doorway at the end, Aster directs me forward.
“It looks like he isn’t too far away,”he says, and my stomach flips over itself.
We step through the next door, into chaos.
Despite our still being inside, well below ground level, a gust of wind hits me in the face. Thousands of pieces of paper flit about the room in a frenzy, caught up by the impossible wind.
I squint my eyes and can just make out that we’re inside some kind of office, laid out with desks and bookcases lining the brown walls. Hundreds of books are sitting open with their pages torn out.
And the noise, thenoise.It’s like all the torn books have voices, and they’re allscreaming.
If I didn’t already know there was a curse on this place, this would confirm it.
