Free The Sorcerer's Ascension by Brock Deskins Page A

there were the remnants of what had happened in this room. Dark stains were visible, even in the low moonlight, on the floors, walls, and ceiling. This room would have to be completely repainted before it could ever be rented out again, probably in a dark shade of paint at that.
    He pushed all these thoughts from his mind and his cursory glance showed that his books were no longer here. He thought they would not be. In fact, anything that may have held any value had been stripped from the room. Azerick knew where he would likely find his books. He silently crept across the floor to the room’s single door and pressed an ear to it. He heard no sounds in the hall and quietly opened the door. With equal stealth, he slipped down the hall to the door at the far end where the innkeeper lived in the best room the inn had to offer.
    Again, he pressed an ear to the door and listened. Sounds of snoring lightly reverberated through the door. He tried the handle but it was locked. This did not surprise him at all. The innkeeper, being an untrustworthy man, never trusted anyone else. Azerick assumed everyone lived by the same greedy standards that he did. Once again, Azerick pulled his knife out and slipped it in the doorjamb to see if he could pry open the latch. He moved the knife around with a light scratching and scraping of the knife tip on metal and wood but he was unable to trip the lock.
    Azerick made his way back to his old room and back out the window and onto to the small ledge. Once again, he hugged the wall and slowly sidestepped his way around the building until he reached the window that opened to the innkeeper’s room. The window was open to let in the cool evening air during these hot summer months. He slipped his legs over the sill and silently dropped to the floor where paused and surveyed the room.
    In the center of the room against the wall immediately on Azerick’s left, just a few feet from him, was the occupied bed of the innkeeper. The middle of the large lump in the bed rose and fell with the rasping snoring sounds that reverberated through the room. In the far right corner, he spied a stack of uniformly dark objects. He carefully crept across the room and saw that it was indeed his beloved books. He slipped the bag from his shoulder, set it on the floor, and began to pack his books away. It took only a few seconds to stow away his last book and begin to make his way across the floor to exit the door on the opposite wall.
    As his foot set lightly down upon the aged wood floor, there came a loud creek of a floorboard giving slightly under his weight. Azerick froze in mid step and listened as the snoring suddenly ceased to fill the room. The innkeeper came awake with surprising suddenness. He turned the wheel on an oil lamp on a nightstand next to his bed and cried out as he saw the intruder in his room.
    “You, what are you doing here, boy!” he demanded as recognition dawned on his face. “Thief, you came back to rob me! I’ll thrash the hide off you, boy!”
    With that promise, the innkeeper rolled from his bed onto his feet, his nightshirt flapping in the flickering light of the oil lamp.
    “They’re mine, you stole them first, you fat bastard!” Azerick challenged.
    Rage filled the eyes of the portly innkeeper as he lunged, his arms outstretched, hands grasping for the throat of the boy who not only broke into his home to rob him but also cursed and insulted him!
    However, equal rage filled the young boy he intended to throttle. Azerick swung the heavy bag of books at the innkeeper’s head, clipping him hard in the temple. Delbert dropped in a heap as the laden bag continued its barely-controlled arc and hit the corner of the nightstand, upsetting the oil lamp, and its flammable contents. The pool of rapidly expanding oil almost instantly burst into flames, licked at the floor, and the overturned table. Azerick ran for the door, turned the lock from the inside and threw it open.
    He paused a second