The Breaker (The Secret of Spellshadow Manor #2)(23)

“Nice job,” Jari whispered. They walked tentatively through, into the unfamiliar territory of the teachers’ quarters.

“Thanks.” Alex grinned as he drew his anti-magic back into himself. It looked as though the self-teaching might be finally paying off.

The teachers’ quarters were hopelessly steeped in pitch black as the three of them shuffled up into the first corridor. They could see nothing ahead of them, no light of any kind. Their only guide was the towering walls beside them.

“Wait one moment,” Natalie whispered as Jari bumped into her.

“Sorry,” he said softly.

A small golden glow trickled down toward the floor, meandering delicately from Natalie’s fingers. Suddenly, a thin stream of light shone beneath them, a snake of bright yellow, glowing in the center of the masonry below their feet. As they took a step forward, the snake of light moved ahead, showing them the direction they needed to go in.

“Nice trick,” Alex commended.

“It is a new one,” Natalie said.

They followed the ribbon of glowing energy, keeping an eye on it as it slithered along the floor, casting a dim glow on the walls on either side. It was not as bright as they might have liked, their eyes still squinting into the darkness ahead, but it was enough to see by, and the dim glow would provide some camouflage if they needed to cut and run. It was not bright enough for them to clearly see each other’s faces.

Alex paused when the snaking torch lit up a series of frames on either side of the corridor. In them were pictures of people he had never seen—stern portraits, all painted in the same pose, wearing the same black robes that marked them as teachers. At the bottom of each portrait, set into the varnished wood of the frame, was a small bronze plaque, bearing the name of whomever the image resembled. Alex didn’t recognize any of the names as his eyes glanced across the engraved letters. Some of the dates beneath went back decades. Picture upon picture of stuffy, stony-faced teachers lined the wall in a grim gallery. It wasn’t until they moved into a different network of corridors that Alex saw a name he recognized.

The picture was in the same sort of frame as the previous one, the canvas gathering a sheen of dust. But the plaque at the bottom was shinier, as if it had only recently been placed there. The face was unmistakable, though younger and fresher. Barely any lines marred the smooth features around the figure’s bright eyes, which jumped from the canvas in a deep, captivating blue. The hair was dark, untouched by the gray Alex had been used to seeing, and there was a half-smile of victory on the lips, though the pose was supposed to be a stern, serious one. He had been young and hopeful once—a force to be reckoned with. The proof was there, hanging from the wall, with his name carved beneath: Professor R. Derhin. Alex ran his thumb along the lettering, the engraving rough beneath his fingertip, and he felt a twinge of remorse for the young man in the portrait.

I bet he never thought he’d end his days still trapped here, Alex thought sadly.

Beside it hung a similar image, though the plaque at the bottom was missing. Still, it wasn’t hard to see who the image was supposed to be. Lintz sat a little taller in the picture, with a shock of ginger hair and the beginnings of a reddish-toned moustache, nowhere near the monstrosity he had grown over the years. His hazel eyes were lighter, almost honey-colored, and there was a smile upon his lips too—a mischievous glimmer, twinned with that of Derhin. His face was slimmer and almost chiseled in the rise of good cheekbones, the apples of them rosy and his jawline firm, no hint of a jowl, just the upward curve of a thick neck and a strong chin. He had been far better-looking than his older self suggested.

Alex felt sympathy toward Professor Lintz. The man had to walk past the image of his younger self, day in, day out, hung up beside his brother-in-arms—painted at a time when they had still had their whole lives ahead of them, their minds still racing with madcap schemes of escape and a spark of hope. A hope that had sputtered out long ago, no doubt, a world away from the crumpled old man they had seen in the mechanics lab, tinkering away with his owl to take his mind off what had happened to his black-haired friend in the picture beside him. To walk past that reminder every day, that notice of their failure to escape… Alex could not imagine the suffering it brought to Lintz. He felt a flicker of guilt, mingled with curiosity, wondering what sort of friendship those two must have had. It had lasted all those years, stayed as they aged from mere boys to old men. A sense of dread, too, ran cold up his spine.

If they couldn’t do it, after all that time, how can we? Alex pondered, his eyes glancing to Natalie and Jari, walking just ahead of him. Their hopes were hauntingly similar to those of Lintz and Derhin, with their eternal optimism of one day breaking free from the walls of the manor and returning to the lives they’d had before, to the families and friends and dreams they had once taken so utterly for granted.

There was another portrait, down the line, just after the image of Lintz. The indent of a plaque remained at the bottom of the varnished frame, where the bronze had once been screwed in, but the plaque itself was missing. The figure sitting within the frame was familiar to Alex somehow, with a striking face and piercing brown eyes, dark hair combed neatly back. The man sat with a sense of pride and authority, a sardonic smile playing upon his lips. It certainly wasn’t Renmark or any of the others. Nor was it any of the statues buried deep in the crypt, or reminiscent of the Head or anyone Alex had seen in the manor. And yet the man looked irritatingly familiar.