Magic caused the war. Magic is forbidden. Magic will save us. The Relic Guild is the award nominated first book in The Relic Guild trilogy.
It was said the Labyrinth had once been the great meeting place, a sprawling city at the heart of an endless...
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Samuel couldn't breathe. He couldn't see. He couldn't hear.
As soon as he stepped into the portal, the cellar beneath the warehouse in the southern district of Labrys Town swirled away, the police officers and their guns blinked out of sight, and it was as if the old bounty hunter had jumped into a huge, suffocating blanket. The blackness engulfed him, pressed against his eyelids like the thumbs of a murderer; filled his mouth and nostrils like thick poison searching for the passage of his throat. And it was cold.
In vain, Samuel tried to shout his defiance; to thrash and struggle against the darkness that refused him air and light and sound. He felt numb. With an unfeeling finger, he tried to squeeze the trigger of his revolver, to shoot blindly, madly, into the void. But somehow Samuel knew his deadened nerves had relaxed his hand to a listless thing, and the revolver had already slipped from his grasp to be lost forever in nothingness.
The suffocating blanket seemed to stretch under his weight, until finally it ripped open and spilled him into freefall.
No sooner had he sucked in a great gulp of air than it was stolen from his mouth by rushing wind. His vision was assaulted by streaks of purple lightning. The echo of a bestial scream reached his ears, full of rage and pain. It seemed to Samuel that he would fall forever, down, ever down, until age withered his body, addled his mind, and his life would crumble to dust amidst a starless sky.
Just as he embraced this notion, imagining himself as a curled foetus doomed to travel an endless birthing canal, silver light dazzled his eyes, and the darkness spat him out onto hard, solid stone with a bone-jarring thud.
Lying face down on damp cobbles, Samuel groaned and rose to his hands and knees. He looked up. Evidently, the portal had chosen to expel him feet first. Its glassy surface rippled within a rectangle on a wall of black bricks before him.
With a nudge from his prescient awareness, Samuel jumped to his feet and drew the rifle from the holster on his back. He ejected the empty magazine, slapped a new one into place, and took aim at the portal. The power stone behind the barrel gave a small whine and glowed with violet light as he thumbed it. He might have run out of fire-bullets, but the four metal slugs in the magazine would still kill anyone who dared to follow him.
"I do not think the police will be brave enough to come after us, Samuel."
The old bounty hunter looked over his shoulder. Van Bam stood behind him, his green glass cane standing on the ground, his hands resting atop it.
The illusionist added, "And I suspect the portal closed once we left the warehouse, anyhow."
As if to confirm Van Bam's words, the portal began shrinking with a low drone. In but a moment, with a sigh and a puff of dust, it disappeared, leaving behind black bricks and no sign that it had ever been there.
