The Heart of the Phoenix (30 page)

My girl... my Penny
!

She heard Rocky’s voice in her head even as he broke from the crowd and ran toward her, one set of green eyes in among the black, and Penny understood that this was not a bad thing at all.

It was a rescue.

“Is that...?” Ronan asked.

“Yours?” She could see her father’s face now, saw the wonder and surprise, the hope that he must have thought he’d never feel again.

“Yes,” Penny said, and pushed past Ronan to meet her little friend.

Rocky leapt into her arms, almost knocking her over, and chittered his weird monkeyish language at her as she hugged him, spun him in a circle, laughed.

He finally pried himself free and leapt back to the ground, then offered her the items clutched in one of his large hands. Two shiny black wands.

From Tracy lady. We go now
.

We go now
, Penny thought back at Rocky.
Thanks
.

She tossed one of the wands to her father, who caught it on the fly and stared down at it as if he could not quite believe what he was seeing.

Rocky chattered, and Penny heard a translation in her head.

“We have to go,” she told them. “To the sepulcher. Tracy is waiting.”

“I might have to kill her when we get there,” Torin said, and the tone of his voice made it clear he was hoping for the chance.

“No, you won’t,” Penny said. She lit the tip of her new wand and led the way, her friend Rocky close on her heels, through the parting crowd of wild homunculi and into the tunnel out of their cell.

Ronan and Torin caught up to her quickly enough, and they found themselves surrounded by a formation of wild homunculi.

The tunnel started flat, but steepened by the minute until running was no longer possible, and they moved forward in an unbalanced headlong lurch, grasping at the stony soil for balance as they pushed themselves more upward than forward. The homunculi had no difficulty with the rough terrain, and lent an occasional supporting hand when Penny or Torin lost balance. Ronan progressed on hands and feet, easily pacing the gray men. Penny thought he could have outpaced them, but chose to stay close to his clumsy human friends.

After maybe a half hour, Penny began to wear down, a lack of exercise and food had weakened her, but before she could ask Rocky the question foremost in her mind, he answered it.

His chattering echoed up and down, prompting filthy glares and a slap on the back of his huge head from nearby homunculi.

Not far... almost there
, Penny heard.

A few minutes later his words proved true. The ground began to level, and was almost flat again when Penny saw the end of the tunnel, what looked like another wall of stone, until it began to move, shift, and several more wild homunculi that had been pretending to be a wall broke apart and scattered to let them through.

“Those guys are handy,” Penny said, panting for breath. Rocky grinned and repeated her words in his own language, and the surrounding wild homunculi turned beaming faces on her.

“They are probably happy to have something to do,” Ronan said. “Poor fellas get bored when there’s no one to tell them what to do?”

“I bet all your little friend had to do was ask,” Torin said, patting Rocky on his big bald head.

They emerged into a storeroom, dark except for their torches and wands. Boxes and barrels lined the walls, mounds of broken things, lamps, dented helmets, a chair with two missing legs, clothing too ripped or stained for service.

“I don’t know this place,” Ronan said, wrinkling his snout. “Smells awful.”

“We’re in the cellars,” Torin said. He pointed ahead to an old ill-fitting door. “The laundry is through there. Two or three more rooms and we’ll reach the old forge.”

“No need for the guided tour, old friend,” Ronan chided. “As long as you can find the sepulcher.”

“That’s easy, old friend,” Torin said. “Up two levels and straight down to the end of the hall. Can’t miss it.”

“And how many people will we have to fight past to reach it?” Penny was hoping to hear
none
. She’d had a rough couple of weeks and would like for at least one thing to be easy.

“No more than fifty, I’d say.” Torin seemed to consider this, then nodded. “Of course the family may have grown, or moved in more guards.”

Rocky stomped a foot and smashed a fist into the palm of his other hand, letting loose a high-pitched little chuckle, just to show everyone what he thought of guards.

The laundry was empty but for a single brown-eyed homunculus, sorting a huge mound of mixed clothing into separate piles, dresses, robes, tunics, and britches, and the signature bright red the family seemed to favor from the blacks, grays, and browns. He gave the party no more than a casual glance as they thundered through.

Beyond the laundry was the stairway, thick lumber steps braced by heavy beams. They ascended in a series of steep steps and sharp switchbacks. They met only one other person on the stairs, a young dark-haired woman who put her hand to her face and shrieked at the sight of a hundred sprinting homunculi, two filthy humans, and a ten-foot tall manimal. She paced them easily in her terror and disappeared behind the first door they reached.

“Good thing we’re not attracting attention,” Penny said. “Wouldn’t want our escape to be too easy.”

“Don’t worry, Little Red,” Ronan said. “It’ll get trickier.”

“There,” Torin said, pointing up at a door one switchback further up. It was larger and more ornate that the last, made of a shiny black hardwood.

The first of the homunculi to reach it paused with his ear to the wood, then cracked it open enough to admit his large, bald head. He popped his head back into the stairwell a second later and waved them all onward.

Penny and Torin emerged behind Ronan, their wands up and ready to use. It was empty as far down as they could see.

“It’s a very long hallway, isn’t it?” Penny’s eyes were good, but she could not see to the end. It just seemed to grow smaller and smaller until it disappeared. “How big is this place anyway?”

Torin oriented himself, then turned right and began to walk briskly.

“You know that town you come from?”

“Yeah,” Penny said.

“Bigger than that.”

“Oh.” Penny wished she hadn’t asked.

When the last of the homunculi were with them, Torin and Ronan began to run. Penny kept up for a few minutes but began to lag.

She was about to call out for mercy, when Ronan saw her falling behind and stopped. Before she knew it was happening, Ronan had scooped her up and settled her down over his neck. She rode on his shoulders, grateful for the high cathedral ceiling.

“Hang on tight,” he said, picking up his pace to catch Torin. “Just don’t pull my fur.”

Penny hung on as they ran down the never-ending hallway, beginning to think they might reach the sepulcher without opposition, when she heard the first screams from up ahead.

They’d reached a junction of corridors meeting in a cathedral-sized hub full of chairs, tables, the walls hung with tapestries, and a huge floating candelabra that filled the place with a low and pleasant light. The hub was occupied by several small groups, most of whom panicked and scattered at the approach of the motley band. An elderly man with thinning red hair flanked by two similarly redheaded guards drew wands and called for them to halt.

Other guards seemed to hear the call and streamed in from half a dozen doors and hallways.

“No you don’t, Cousin Wynn,” Torin shouted, then actually laughed at the expression on his old uncle’s face.

The old man lowered his wand, but his younger companions did not. They fired, but hesitantly, as if afraid of breaking any of the fine furnishings in the room.

Torin ducked the first, blocked the second, and the ricocheted spell blew the stuffing from an overstuffed loveseat in one secluded part of the hub. The couple sitting there, a redheaded teenage boy and his blonde sweetheart, dove aside screaming, then ran for the nearest escape in a cloud of goose down feathers.

Torin and Penny never got a chance to use their wands. The old man and his companions fell beneath a wave of homunculi, their wands stomped and snapped, and Penny saw them laying on the floor as her entourage passed them by, dazed but unhurt.

They crossed the room and started down the next hallway with the remaining guards on their trail, far behind but catching up.

Spells flew past them, chipping stone from the walls, chipping pieces off their homunculi host. One of the little gray men lost a leg at his knee, and hopped furiously to keep up. Two of his companions hoisted him up by his armpits and carried him along.

Another spell grazed the tough leather of Penny’s mask, and she saw stars for a moment. She shook her head to clear it, gritted her teeth, and twisted around keeping a tentative one armed grip on Ronan’s neck while she aimed with her own wand.

She fired into the center of the tight formation of pursuing guards, there were more than a dozen now, and watched one in the center fly backward, tripping up the rest. It slowed them for a moment.

She fired again and again, then ducked as half a dozen spells shot over her head.

As if on command, the homunculi trailing Ronan and Penny stopped, turned, and charged the other way, shaking their fists and screaming like mad, gray monkeys. A few of the gray men fell under the Red Guards’ concentrated fire, but the sheer numbers of punching, jumping, screaming homunculi, along with a few well-placed spells from Penny, brought them down.

There was resistance from ahead as well.

A shout from Torin brought Penny’s attention back to the front, and she saw her father fall.

“
Ronan
,” she screamed. “
Get them
!”

Ronan did.

He charged through the homunculi, leapt over them, taking hit after hit. Penny fired from her perch on his shoulders, took down another of the Red Guards, then threw up a shield in front of them. A barrage of spells ricocheted back at their casters, and another one fell. Penny shifted her wand in her grip, and pushed, a trick she’d discovered quite by accident in another fight not too long ago. The remaining guards scattered as if struck by an invisible wrecking ball and Ronan swatted the few that dared to rise again aside almost casually.

Penny leapt from Ronan’s shoulder and crouched over her father. His eyes were closed, and he did not move.

“
Dad
!” She grabbed him by the collar of his rough prison shirt and shook him. “
Wake up
!”

She had wondered about this man her whole life, had longed for his return and then hated him in turn, and now that she had him, she did not want to lose him.

Torin opened one eye, squinting up at her, then opened the other when he saw it was safe.

“Relax, Little Red,” he said, sitting up and dusting himself off. “I was just trying to stay out of your way.”

Penny helped him up, and when he was on his feet again, threw her arms around him.

He hugged her back, lifted her from her feet, whispered in her ear.

“I sure do love you, Little Red. I’m glad we found each other.”

“Me too, Dad.”

“Very touching,” Ronan barked back at them. “Could we do this another time, perhaps?”

Rocky tugged on her arm, as if in agreement.

“How much further?” Penny asked

“Not much,” Torin said.

“Okay,” Penny said. “Follow my lead.”

She rushed ahead of them, sprinted through the parting ranks of wild homunculi. She called on the inner fire and felt it respond at once. The flames burst from her body, roared along the outstretched lengths of her arms.

She ran screaming down the hall, her strange companions charging after her, and their remaining opposition fled before them, scattered down side corridors, behind closed doors, or simply cringed against the wall as they passed. When she reached the final door, Penny planted her feet wide before it, focused all of her anger and frustration over the past few weeks and released it in one blow that singed the thick black wood of the sepulcher door, shattered it in its frame.

Penny stepped inside, letting her flame gutter and die as she saw Tracy standing before a giant spinning globe, reflected in its shimmering silvery surface.

“You made a lot of noise getting here,” she said, then peered past Penny at the chaos and devastation in her wake. “And you brought your friends. Very good.”

“I’m sure there’s a good explanation for all of this,” Torin said. He glared at Tracy, but Penny saw he kept his wand pointed at the ground.

“There is, but it’ll have to wait,” Tracy said. “We have urgent business on the other side.”

She pressed her hand against the silvery globe, and the surface rippled into transparency.

Inside of it she saw Aurora Hollow, and Flanna, sitting alone with her face in her hands.

Tracy stepped through without another word, and the image of the other world inside it rippled and distorted.

Penny took Torin’s hand, then Ronan’s, and they stepped through.