The Rossem Project

Graduation Field - Part 4

     As the saboteur began to run again, another wizard's spell raised a wall of stone directly in his path, ten feet high, with the ends curving back to enclose him. The saboteur never even slowed, though. Instead he jumped as he reached the foot of the wall, pulling himself over in a single fluid motion and dropping from sight on the other side.

     The wall was now a barrier between the saboteur and his pursuers, and the startled wizards hurried to its edges to get past it, all except Lirenna who jumped up onto the wall like a cat and then perched on it with all the grace and poise of a trained gymnast. Thomas’s heart leapt into his throat as he imagined the saboteur directly below, reaching up to pull her down, but the demi shae was peering into the distance, shading her eyes with a pale, slender hand. "That way!" she cried, pointing. "He's heading for Fool's Hope Pass!"

     There were several mountain passes leading away from Lexandria valley, but they all came to dead ends, surrounded by jagged mountain ridges on all sides. Theoretically a skilled mountaineer could scale those ridges, but then he would find himself in a howling nightmare of snow and hurricane force winds with hundreds of miles between him and the verdant forests beyond. There was no way that any man could either approach or leave the valley overland, and if the saboteur entered the pass he would only be trapping himself with no hope of escape. Several wizards gave cries of triumph and delight, but others remained quiet, remembering how easily he'd escaped before. It seemed hard to believe that he'd be captured so easily now.

     A wizard appeared in the air, having borrowed some Robes of Levitation from the artifact storerooms, and an eagle flew alongside him with a purpose and intelligence that identified it as a transformed wizard. By the time Thomas reached the end of the wall and got a view of the slopes beyond, the two flying wizards were a hundred yards away and circling a spot on the ground hidden from Thomas’s view by a great boulder that had rolled down the mountain some years earlier. The other wizards, about a dozen of them, were spreading out to surround the spot and Thomas relaxed, puffing to regain his breath. They'd caught him. There was no way he could escape now. The saboteur still had some fight left in him, though, and the wizards were reluctant to go in and apprehend him just yet. Instead, they tried reasoning with him, and the sound of their calm, reasonable voices was carried by the fresh, gusty breeze to where Thomas and Lirenna stood, waiting to see what would happen next.

     "Are you all right?" asked Lirenna anxiously, fussing over Thomas’s bruised cheek and split lip. "Whatever possessed you to try to take him yourself?"

     "I had to try," said Thomas quietly. "How could I have faced Pondar otherwise?"

     "So you got yourself all beaten up just to please him?" demanded the demi shae angrily. "He could have killed you! You're a wizard, you're supposed to be intelligent! Taking on a man twice your size when you know your magic won't work on him! You saw the wizards chasing him were casting spells! You saw they weren't having any effect!"

     "I slowed him down," replied the wizard defensively. "Without me, he might have had time to undress in the trees and vanish, just like all the other times. Pondar's got to see the part I played in catching him."

     "You're obsessed with that man! What makes you so anxious to please him?"

     "He's a senior wizard! Just think what he could teach me if he decided to take me on as his special assistant. If he thinks I'm..."

     Thomas was interrupted by a cry that went up from the crowd up ahead, and they looked up to see the wizards running forward. They glanced at each other in alarm and ran forward to join them, to find the saboteur lying on the ground surrounded by anxious wizards, one of whom was taking his pulse. He looked up when Thomas and Lirenna arrived, his face pale with shock. "He swallowed something before we could stop him," he gasped. "I think he's dead."