Secrets of Yden (24 page)

Trick-or-Treat at Moala's

A gray mist had rendered the forest damp and dark when Jon materialized in the woods outside Wyckcrest the next morning. He hunched his shoulders against the moisture dripping down the collar of his T-shirt while he searched for the faint path leading to Moala's hut.
What is it with this place? It was raining the last time I was here too.
Jon had been following Moala then, never suspecting the unsavory merchant was working for Guinn.

The soles of Jon's shoes became muddy as he threaded his way deeper into the forest, passing a broken sapling that reminded him of his battle with Guinn. When the Fox Clan wizard had discovered Jon there, he'd hit him with a wave of repulsion and sent him flying into a tree.
I barely escaped with my skin intact.

On this occasion Ophelia gave Jon no cause for alarm, but the dank, windowless shack dead ahead suddenly seemed menacing.
No way am I transporting inside without knowing what's waiting for me.
Unaccountably nervous, he actually had to work up a little courage to push the splintered door open. Back on Earth it was Halloween, and Moala's shack was eerily similar to a haunted house.

"Trick-or-treat," he muttered.

It was dark inside, so Jon conjured an everlasting orb. When the room was illuminated, he blinked with surprise.
Am I having another weird dream?
For glamour and luxury, Moala's hut matched the interior of Homa's apartment. There was clearly a spell of some sort at work here; either the exterior of the structure had a spell of illusion to make it look humble, or the inside of the structure had been magically enlarged. The ceiling overhead was smooth and domed, with elaborate painted images of clouds, moving as if blown by an undetectable breeze. Jon found the effect mesmerizing, and he wondered whose magic it represented. Moala had been distinctly unmagical, but he'd dealt with all manner of wizards over the years.
There's no telling what else I may find.

Jon took several steps inside the room and sent his everlasting orb up to hover among the clouds. The surrounding walls were rounded and painted light pink, giving him the impression he'd entered an enormous conch shell. The floor was covered with a pinkish, polished stone and puffy pink cushions perched on elaborately carved chairs. If he hadn't seen Moala walk into the hut, Jon would have wondered if he was in the wrong house. A huge pair of muddy boots sitting by the side of the door, however, could only have belonged to a man, and he recognized the covered tin pail sitting on the table near the kitchen. Moala had used the pail to carry potato soup the night Jon had tailed him. As unlikely as it seemed, Moala had lived here. He apparently had a softer side, and the thought made Jon shudder.

Apart from Moala's décor, Jon didn't notice anything of significance in the room. He fired up another everlasting orb and brought it with him through a hallway leading to a bedchamber. The unmade bed was suspended from the ceiling, its wooden frame hanging by four thick lengths of shiny rope. The bed coverings were a rather fussy floral pattern hanging all the way to the floor, with a matching canopy overhead. A tall wooden wardrobe in the corner was wide open with clothes hanging out. It appeared as if Moala had grabbed a few things and left in a hurry.
Unfortunately for him, Guinn had been quicker.

A sense of disappointment made Jon frown. He'd been expecting — or hoping — to discover a storeroom or cache of stolen goods somewhere on the premises, but he'd obviously been wrong. His first impulse was to transport to Dragon Isle to catch a few winks until breakfast, but then something occurred to him; Moala had used the services of a wizard to enchant his living room ceiling, so why couldn't he have employed a wizard to conceal his trove of treasure? Or perhaps the storeroom had been concealed using non-magical means. If he knew of a specific magical artifact Moala had in his stash, he could use Efysian's locator spell to point him in the right direction. The owl sculpture, although enchanted, wasn't a magical object, and Jon could only guess at what was in said stash.

There's no law against making an educated guess, though.

Before Amanzo had been killed, he'd given his apprentice Finn an Owl Clan ring and transporter cuff. If those magical objects had belonged to his dead brother, Allistri, where were his father's clan ring and transporter cuff?
What was his name — Lakey… or was it Loki?
Not great with names, Jon paced, wracking his brain for the answer. Finally he remembered the name was
Lachi
. He immediately cast a locator spell, searching for Lachi's clan ring… but nothing happened.

Rats.

"Okay, what if Amanzo gave Finn his
father's
clan ring and transporter cuff, and
Allistri's
artifacts were the ones stolen?" Jon said out loud.

He repeated the locator spell, searching for Allistri's clan ring, and this time a beam of light shot out of the palm of his hand, directly at the bed.
Huh?
After searching the canopy drapes behind the headboard, Jon found the end of a rope hidden in the folds of the fabric. He wrapped his fingers around the rope and prepared to give it a yank.
Here goes nothing.

Moala had been a big man, and activating the hidden pulley system took a great deal of muscle. After Jon put the full weight of his body into the effort, however, the bed rose up toward the ceiling, revealing a trapdoor in the stone floor underneath.
Victory
. Jon grasped the iron ring set into the polished stone, lifted the hinged trapdoor, and discovered a staircase descending into darkness. A tingle went down his spine as he corralled his everlasting orb and descended.

On the bottom step, Jon paused to survey the room. He'd been imagining a sort of grubby root cellar stuffed with piles of ill-gotten goods, but Moala's basement was spotless and spacious, with a maze of shelving to support all kinds of objects. The filing system would take time to decipher, but fortunately Jon's locator beam led him directly to the Owl Clan haul. Allistri's clan ring and transporter cuff immediately went into Jon's pocket.
Quixoran will know what to do with them.
When he spied the wooden owl sculpture on the shelf directly underneath the Owl Clan artifacts, Jon's heart nearly stopped.
This is it.

He paced, trying to overcome a sudden reluctance to touch the wooden owl. It was a little funny, actually. He'd come all this way to find this last piece of the prophecy, and now he was hesitating.

"I don't believe in prophecies. Whatever I learn will simply help me with the time anomaly, that's all." He sighed. "So why am I so scared?"

He lifted the ankh from around his neck, knelt in the aisle next to the sculpture, and touched the owl, flinching when it shook its feathers and swiveled its obsidian eyes toward him. "Took you long enough, Champ."

"Yeah, well, I'm here, aren't I?"

Two feathers swiveled to one side, revealing the indentation under the owl's beak. Jon pressed the ankh into the matching grooves, and as the wooden creature spread its wings, the hidden compartment was revealed. He wiped his sweaty palms on his jeans before retrieving the parchment nestled in the owl's body. As soon as he'd done so, the owl's wings folded into place once more. Before he glanced at the parchment, Jon took couple of deep breaths in order to calm his racing pulse.

The owl blinked. "I thought Dragon Clan wizards were brave."

I'm being lectured by a brainless piece of wood.

"Who asked you?" Jon snapped.

"Whoo-who indeed?"

Although he knew he was just stalling for time, Jon looped the ankh around his neck and hid it under his T-shirt with trembling fingers. Unable to put off the inevitable any longer, he braced himself and read the writing on the parchment.

The noble Champion in battle defeated,
His chance to save Yrth bitterly cheated,
A time for redemption, a soul's restoration,
Dark hunter embarks on a Hell-bound migration.

If Jon hadn't already been on his knees, he would have fallen over. According to this stupid scrap of parchment, the Champion —
him
, according to both owls — was destined to fail. He was going to lose in battle and be unable to save Earth. And to top it all off, he had no idea what the last two lines meant. Anger at the situation heated him from the inside out, and his hands began to smoke.

"Temper, temper," the owl said.

Jon stifled the impulse to scrunch the parchment up into a little ball and stuff it into the bird's beak. "This is baloney. Complete and total nonsense. I could get a better prophecy from a carnival fortune teller."

"Who?"

"What am I talking to you for?"

"Sometimes losers are winners and winners are losers," the owl said. "Remember that."

"That doesn't make any sense."

Having done its duty, however, the owl became a sculpture again and Jon was on his own. He folded the parchment carefully and tucked it into his pocket. When he returned to Dragon Isle, he'd magically reattach the final bit of prophecy to the rest of the scroll.
Maybe when I read the whole thing at once, I'll understand what I'm supposed to do. Because I'm not going to lose. Not going to happen.

As Jon made his way past shelves of shiny, jewel-encrusted artifacts, a small wooden box caught his eye. There was nothing special about the object — which, under the circumstances, made it unusual. When he lifted the dusty lid, Jon found a black oval-shaped stone nestled inside. He picked the stone up, feeling an engraving carved on the flattened bottom with his thumb. No magical vibrations emanated from the object, and Jon couldn't make out the engraving since the runes were the same color as the stone. He liked the feeling of the stone in his hand, though, and slipped it into the pocket of his jeans to examine more closely later.
It's my consolation prize for the morning.

After he emerged from the storeroom, Jon closed the trapdoor and returned the bed to its original position. Before he transported out of the house, he slid the heavy bar across the front door brackets to keep intruders at bay. He doubted anyone would be attracted to the place, but there was no sense in taking any chances. In its own way, Moala's treasure trove was as valuable as anything in Efysian's lair, and Jon didn't want it to fall into the wrong hands.