Perfect.
She slammed shut the wardrobe, leapt over the trunks, then forced herself to slow down to pull the dormitory door closed quietly behind her, looking up and down the corridor. No one was there to stop her.
She headed back to the library.
Outside its double doors, she could hear nothing within. There were no voices, no crashes or bangs or any sounds of movement whatsoever.
Perhaps she had missed it.
She gently turned the right-side door’s brass knob, a creaking sound escaping from the hinges as she pulled it open.
The room was dark beyond, pitch black even compared to the poorly lit hallway she’d come from. She felt around, trying to orient herself but reaching into nothing but open air.
She considered stepping back out into the hallway and returning with a candlestick, but the door snapped shut behind her, engulfing her in darkness.
Something drew her further in.
She took another tentative step forward, her hands reaching into the darkness and the silence. The air in here was unnaturally hot, a stifling, oppressive heat that made it hard to draw air into her lungs.
Her hands found a bookshelf, old worn wood bowing under the weight of countless volumes. Her fingers grazed their exposed spines, feeling the variety of textures: stiff modern cloth with cool patches of neatly inked lettering, smooth leather with deep grooves where the titles and authors had been burned in by ancient hands, fraying linen with thick threads which caught under her nails and seemed to pull at her, almost in invitation.
A droplet of sweat formed on her forehead as she moved along the shelf and further into the library, entranced.
She reached the end of the shelf, keeping one hand on it as she stretched to find the next one. Then there was a crash off into the distance to her right, and the sound of thundering footsteps rapidly approaching.
She backed away, letting go of the shelf in her haste and reaching behind her for the door she’d just come through.
It wasn’t there.
She felt something moving to her left. Something, or someone. She panicked, twisting backwards away from the noise to her right and the movement to her left, desperate to find the door, to find her way back into the hallway and back to her room where she should have just stayed and minded her business, far away from whatever was moving here in the dark.
And then it collided with her, sending her to the ground as something else moved in.
Chapter Two
UNDER RODAZ MOUNTAIN
Alison
“Well, that settles it then. I’m coming, and that’s final.”
The tabby cat pawed at a phrase in the letter sitting on Alison’s desk:
Of course we’d be happy to accommodate your cat. Many of our students opt to bring pets of their own.
“They’d be ‘happy’ to accommodate me. Not that I particularly like being called ‘your cat,’ but that matter can be corrected when we arrive. And before you start, no, I’m not going in that basket.”
“Willow, it’s not like I want to carry you in the basket. It’s for your own safety. There may be dogs on the rail-wheeler.”
There also might be fairies or pixies or any of the other small folk that Willow could just barely avoid chasing, but Alison knew better than to add that.
Truthfully, it would be nice to have Willow along for the journey to Winwold College. Alison knew from her time living at the College of Numbers that university accommodations tended to be somewhat messier than the average adult block of flats, and having the cat along would mean fewer dealings with miceand other such scurrying creatures that loved to chew through ‘lectric cords.
Ah, ‘lectrics. It would be nice to be somewhere with working ‘lectrics again. And with any luck, by the time they returned, much of the wiring work would be finished in Weldan House and Fossholm, with the extension into Herot’s Hollow not far behind.
Of course, much of the success of that endeavor depended on the conversations she and her friends would be having during their journey.
Gwenla, Alison’s dwarf neighbor, had managed to arrange a meeting with her cousin Yordin, an industrialist who made his fortune on the manufacturing of some sort of ‘lectric machinery. At first, he had been skeptical of the design of their solar-powered machine, and he was reluctant to commit to the project. When Gwenla explained the king’s involvement, his mind suddenly changed, and now he was begging them to stay longer to see the first machines come off the lines.
