Hunter's Beginning (Veller) by Garry Spoor

and then it could actually be a hall, but it would have been the largest hall she had ever seen.
    She looked around at the other cadets to see what they were up to, but they appeared to be as lost and as confused as she was, all but Eric who was just leaning against one of the pillars, which only put her more on edge if that was possible. Eric was waiting for someone to come or something to happen. He must know what he was doing she thought. He had been here twice before.
    Daniel was standing with Carter and the two were in the middle of some heated discussion. It looked as if Carter wanted to keep going, but Daniel wasn’t in so great a hurry. She found Alex standing not too far away and looking a bit more confused than the rest of them. He was staring up at the ceiling then down at the floor then at his hands all of which appeared to inspire some sense of wonder in him. She had just started to walk over to where he was, when a loud grinding sound filled the room and vibrated the floor, Kile stopped dead in her tracks. It was the sound of stone on stone and everybody suddenly looked up, thinking that maybe the roof was about to cave it, those large stones scattered about had to have come from somewhere.
    Unfortunately it wasn’t coming from above them. It was coming from in front of them, from somewhere in the darkness. The sound suddenly stopped, and there was a brief moment of unnatural silence before the screaming. It came from the far side of the room where a few of the boys had dared to go, they had gone to look for the mysterious hall that Master Latherby had spoken of, or possibly the illusive further instructions, but what they found was something they did not expect. Out of the darkness, shapes moved, and those boys who had dared to go forward were now running back.
    Kile couldn’t make out what the boys were yelling, but she could hear what she thought was the sound of flapping wings like large bats, she even started to scan the ceiling once again before she realized that the sound she was hearing was not the beating of wings, but the sound of bare feet on stone, and a lot of them.
    “Get out! Get out!” One of the boys was yelling as he practically flew past her. She would swear that his feet never touched the ground as he ran to the back of the room.
    The cadets behind Kile were the first to start moving, but there was no door for them to ‘get out’ of.
    “The door’s gone.” One kid yelled.
    “It can’t be! It was right here.” Another one screamed in panic.
    “Get out, hobgoblins.” Another boy yelled as he came running out of the darkness. This boy Kile recognized as the kid with the long neck and sharp nose that had been picking on Alex earlier. Kile looked over to where Eric was still standing beside the pillar. The older boy didn’t look scared enough, and in fact he appeared almost excited. She thought for a moment that this may be a practical joke. It wasn’t until the long necked boy with the pointed nose crashed to the ground with a large spear sticking out between his shoulder blades that she realized it wasn’t.
    Sure enough, the slapping of bare feet got louder as it echoed through the vaulted ceilings, and then Kile saw it. One at first, then two, followed by twelve and then too many for her to even want to count.
    Gulrik, otherwise known as hobgoblins, a scourge that had crawled into the underworld of Aru ages ago and thought gone with the passing of time, and yet here they were. They stood about five feet in height with barrel like bodies, long arms and short legs. Their skin was the color of wet stone, their large eyes almost shining in the dark.
    They charged the cadets in great number, most of the boys turned and ran to the back of the room, scratching and clawing at where the door had once been, stepping on or running down their slower companions in the process. There was no way back and no way forward. Was this what Master Latherby meant by surviving? Kile wasn’t going to