The Hero's Guide to Saving Your Kingdom by Healy Christopher

Author:Healy, Christopher [Healy, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Harper Collins, Inc.
Published: 2012-05-01T06:00:00+00:00

Fig. 33 NOT ELLA

He walked over to the window to see how far down it was to the ground, assuming Ella must have climbed, jumped, or somehow soared to freedom. From there, he got a perfect view of Duncan cutting his own belt off. “Cripes. Never mind the girl—I have to rescue those guys.”

Liam retraced his steps back downstairs. Or at least he tried to. The interior of Zaubera’s fortress was far more mazelike than he’d recalled, and he soon began wondering if he was on the right path. Many of the rooms were nearly identical.

“Okay, this is the room with the cauldron,” he said to himself. “So those stairs over there should lead down to the room with the skeleton on the wall.”

He darted down the steps.

“Crud,” he sputtered. “This one’s got a cauldron, too. How many cauldrons does one witch need?”

He ran like this, from corridor to room to staircase, until he turned a corner and found himself in a chamber that was stocked floor to ceiling with maps. There were framed maps hanging on walls, rolled maps sticking out of barrels, flat maps displayed on easels, and a huge map suspended by hooks overhead.

“I definitely didn’t pass through here before,” Liam said. He turned to dash back out of the room but stopped when one particular map caught his attention. It sat unrolled on a large desk with an open bottle of red ink and a still-wet feather quill lying next to it, as if it had been recently marked up. At its center, the map showed Zaubera’s enormous fortress, right at the foot of Mount Batwing. Southeast of that, the picture of a small tower was scratched out.

“That must be the tower the giant knocked down,” Liam said. “But what are all these others?” Several more towers were marked on the map, each in a different area of the surrounding forests and mountains. Scrawled beneath five of them was the word prisoner.

“Oh, this is excellent. There are more prisoners,” Liam murmured as a delighted awe washed over him. “This isn’t over yet.”

He rolled up the map and took it with him as he ran out to renew his search for the exit. At the end of the hall, he spotted a familiar-looking staircase and darted down to what he was pretty sure was the ground floor.

Aha! he said to himself. That chandelier was the first thing I saw when I came in. The large wrought-iron fixture suspended above the center of the room must have held seventy or eighty lit candles, but even so, it wasn’t bright enough to properly light a room so large. Liam rushed across the chamber, toward the exit. He hurtled past shelves lined with voodoo dolls and dead ravens. Past cabinets loaded with crystal balls. Past a life-size stuffed dragon. Hmm, Liam thought, don’t know how I managed to miss that before.

That was when the steam-spouting red dragon—which wasn’t stuffed with anything other than the yak meat it had eaten for lunch—lurched forward and snapped its gigantic jaws at Liam.

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