With that, we turned and dashed away from the chamber, leaving the kings and knights dumbfounded. Bastille, Grandpa, and I entered the main palace hallway, which was lined with frames containing rare and exotic types of glass. They glowed faintly to my eyes, as I was still wearing my Oculator's Lenses.
"Do you think they'll buy it?" I asked.
"Wait," Bastille said, frowning. "Buy it? Did you try to sell them something?"
"Er, no. It's a figure of speech."
"The figure giving a speech?" Bastille said. "If you're that interested in her figure, you should be ashamed. Queen Kamiko is a married woman and at least forty years older than you are!"
I sighed. "Do you think," I rephrased, "they'll believe the act? It seemed a little exaggerated to me."
"Exaggerated?" Bastille said. "What part?"
"The part about me going to Mokia - into a war zone - just to take a vacation. It's kind of ridiculous."
"Sounds like a Smedry activity to me,” Bastille grumbled.
"They'll buy it, lad,” Grandpa said, jogging along beside us. "The knights in particular tend to be very . . . literal people. They'll assume the worst, and that worst - in this case - is that you are going to blunder off into a war zone because you feel that your pores are clogged. I don't think we'll have any trouble getting them to –”
A clanking sound came from behind us. I glanced over my shoulder.
No fewer than fifty Knights of Crystallia were rushing down the hallway in our direction.
"Gak!" I cried.
"Alcatraz, would you stop saying -" Bastille looked over her shoulder. “GAK!"
"Scribbling Scalzis!" Grandpa exclaimed, noticing the fleet of knights charging in our direction. Most wore full plate, the silvery metal clanking as their armored feet hit the floor. It sounded like someone had opened a closet filled with pots and then dumped them all onto the ground at once.
We redoubled our efforts, running in front of the storm of knights with all we had. But they were faster. They had Warrior's Lenses, not to mention Crystin enhancements. They'd catch us for sure.
"Alcatraz, lad,” Grandpa Smedry said in a confiding tone as we ran down the wide hallway. "I believe I may have discovered a slight flaw in your clever plan."
"You think?"
"I knew this would happen!" Bastille said from my other side. "I'm such an idiot. Alcatraz, if they can catch you before you leave, they can take you into protective care for your own good!"
"Protective care?" I asked.
"Usually involves a locked door," Grandpa said. "Padded cell. Bread and water. Oh, and a jail. Can't forget that."
"They'll throw us in jail?" I exclaimed.
"Hmm, yes," Grandpa Smedry said. "The knights are bodyguards, lad. They have the right to determine when someone under their charge is going to be put into too much danger. They only have power to do it while we're inside Nalhalla." He smiled. "They rarely invoke the privilege. We must really have them worried! Good job, lad! You should feel proud."
This is a very exciting scene, isn't it? You’re not too tired, are you? From all that exciting running?
Wait, you're not running? Why am I doing all the work? Don't you realize that you're supposed to be acting out these scenes as I describe them? Don't you know how to read books? I mean honestly, what are the Librarians teaching people these days?
Let me explain it to you. Everyone always talks about the magic of books being able to take you to other places, to let you see exotic worlds, to make you experience new and interesting things. Well, do you think words alone can do this? Of course not!
If you've ever thought that books are boring, it's because you don't know how to read them correctly. From now on when you read a book, I want you to scream the words of the novel out loud while reading them, then do exactly what the characters are doing in the story.
Trust me, it will make books way more exciting. Even dictionaries. Particularly dictionaries. So go ahead and try it out with this next part of this book. If you do it right, you'll win the bonus prize.
"Come on!" I yelled, ducking into a side room. I figured that the knights would have trouble following through smaller chambers, since there were so many of them. The room was filled with furniture, however, and I was forced to leap up on top of a couch and hurl myself behind it.
"What do we do?" Bastille asked, looking over her shoulder. The knights were rushing into the room behind us.
"I'm not sure!" I said, picking my nose.
We burst out of the room into a hallway, where I hopped up and down on one foot three times, then punched myself (softly) in the forehead. After that, we pranced down the hallway flapping our arms like chickens. Then we twirled around, smacking our brother if he happened to be near. Then we stuck our feet in our mouths before dumping pudding on our heads while singing "Hambo the Great" in Dutch.
Now see, didn't I tell you it would be more exciting this way? You should act out all books you read. (And by the way the bonus prize is getting to smack your brother and blame it on me.)
“Why are we doing this?" Bastille cried.
"It's not really helping, is it?" I replied.
"I don't mean to be depressing," Grandpa noted, "but I do think they're gaining on us."
It was an understatement. They were right behind us. I yelped, bolting down a side hallway, Bastille easily keeping up. She had Warrior's Lenses on and could outrun Grandpa and me, but she hung back.
"Only one thing for me to do!" Grandpa Smedry said, raising a finger.
"What's that?" I asked.
"Switch sides!" he replied. And then he stopped running, letting the knights catch up to him. "Come on, let's get him!" Grandpa cried, pointing at me.
I froze, looking at him, shocked. Bastille tugged me forward, and I stumbled into motion, running again. The knights didn't take Grandpa into protective care. One did pick him up and carry him, however, so he didn't slow them down. In seconds, we were being chased not only by an entire force of Knights of Crystallia but my mustachioed grandfather as well.
"What's he doing?" I demanded.
"Burn him at the stake!" Grandpa yelled from just behind.
“Well," Bastille said, "he never was going to go with us. Remember? When we acted in front of the kings, his part was to claim that he didn't want you to go and couldn't stop you."
"Dice him up and feed him to the fishes!" Grandpa yelled, voice softer.
“Why did we decide that again?" I sputtered.
"Pull his insides out through his nose and paint him with eyeliner!" Grandpa Smedry yelled distantly.
"Because we didn't want him to get into trouble for what you're doing!" Bastille said.
"Make him watch old Little House on the Prairie reruns!" Grandpa Smedry bellowed, voice dwindling.
"Well, does he have to get into the part so enthusiastically?" I said. "He's making me . . . Wait, voice dwindling?" I glanced over my shoulder.
The knights and my grandfather had fallen back. I frowned, confused. The knights seemed to be running as hard as ever. In fact, they seemed to be running even harder than before. And yet they were still losing ground.
"What?" I said.
"He's making them late!" Bastille said. "Using his Talent! By joining their side, then trying to chase after us, he's making them all too slow to catch us!"
I gawked, amazed. My grandfather's skill with using his Talent was incredible. I wondered, not for the first time, what I could manage with my own Talent if I were as trained as he was. Mostly, these last few months in Nalhalla, I'd spent my time learning to avoid using my Talent. I had it almost completely under control. I hadn't broken anything unexpected in weeks.
I was beginning to think that I might be able to live a normal life. But sometimes, when my grandfather did incredible things with his Talent, it made me envious.
That was stoopid. (And trust me, I'm an expert on stoopid.) I'd spent my entire childhood ruled and dominated by my Talent. Accomplishing something like Grandpa
just did was incredible, but also unpredictable. Even the best of Smedrys couldn't make events like this work all the time.
I wanted to be rid of my Talent. Free. Didn't I?
"Gee, what a nice moment of reflection," Bastille said, stepping up to me.
"Yeah," I said, watching the troop of frustrated knights, who seemed to be all but running in place, barely inching forward.
"Do you want another moment or two to, you know, be all philosophical and crud? Or do you want to get your shattering legs moving so we can escape!"
"Oh, right," I said. Grandpa wouldn't be able to hold them back forever. In fact, they already looked like they were moving more quickly, regaining some momentum.
I turned with Bastille and continued running. We needed to get out of the city, and fast.
CHAPTER 4 ½
It’s undoubtedly becoming obvious to you that my stoopidity in this book is pretty shatteringly spectacular. Not only am I planning to charge off into a war zone with nothing to protect me but a couple of bits of glass but I just managed to alienate and anger an entire order of knights in the process. I just spent the three previous volumes of my autobiography trying to escape the Librarians. Now that I had finally found peace and safety in Nalhalla, I'd decided to run off and put myself into the middle of the war?
Stoopid.
Actually, no, it's not stoopid. Stoopid just isn't specific enough. Fortunately, since I'm an expert on stoopidity - and an expert on making up stuff - I'm going to give you a set of new definitions to use for things that are really stoopid. For example, what I was about to go do can be referred to as stoopidalicious, which is defined as "about as stoopid as a porcupine-catching contest during a swimsuit competition."
Bastille and I dashed up a set of stairs onto the upper level of the palace. Once there, I slammed a hand down on the top step and engaged my Talent. A shock of power ran down my arm, hitting the stairs and making them crumble away behind us. Stone blocks crashed to the ground and the banister fell sideways. An enormous puff of dust erupted into the air, like the noxious breath of a belching giant. As it cleared, I could see a group of annoyed knights standing below. They'd finally gotten smart and broken into two groups. Grandpa Smedry could keep only one group late, so the other group was free to chase Bastille and me.
Now they were trapped below. But there were other ways up to our floor. "I don't think we can keep staying ahead of them like this," I said. "We need to get out of the city."
"You just said that at the end of the last chapter!" Bastille complained.
"Well, it's still true!" I snapped. Below, the knights split again, some running off to find another way up. A few remained behind and began giving one another leg-ups or jumping. They got surprisingly close to reaching the upper floor.
I yelped and hurried away from the hole, Bastille following.
"Sorry about the stairs," I said. “Your father won’t be mad at me for that, will he?"
"We have Smedrys over to the palace for dinner frequently," she said. "Things like broken staircases are routine for us. However, I will point out that you just trapped us on the upper floor of the palace. I'll bet my mother and the other knights will have the stairwells all blocked off shortly.”
"Do you have a Transporter's Glass station?”
"Yeah. In the basement.”
"It's guarded anyway,” Kaz added.
I cursed. "You've got to have some kind of secret exit from the building, right, Bastille? Tunnels? Passages hidden in the walls? A fireplace that rotates around and reveals your secret crime-fighting lair?”
"Nope," Kaz said.
Bastille nodded. “My father feels that sort of thing is too easy for enemies to use against him.”
"No secret passages at all?" I exclaimed. "What kind of castle is this?"
"The non-stoopidalicious kind!" Bastille said. "Who puts passages inside the walls? Isn't that a little ridiculous?"
"Not when you need to sneak out!"
“Why would I need to sneak out of my own home?"
"Because Knights of Crystallia are chasing you!"
"This sort of thing doesn't happen to me very often!" Bastille snapped. "In fact, it only seems to happen when you're involved!"
"I can't help the fact that people like to chase me. We need to -"
I froze in the middle of the hallway. "Kaz!" I exclaimed, pointing at him.
"Me!" he exclaimed back.
"Idiots!" Bastille said, pointing at both of us.
"When did you get here?” I demanded of my short uncle.
“A few moments ago,” he said. "Everything's packed back at Keep Smedry, ready for takeoff. I borrowed a vehicle from the Mokian embassy, as I didn’t want to alert the king of what we were doing."
"We have a pilot?" I asked.
"Sure do," he replied. “Aydee Ecks."
"Who?"
"Your cousin," he said. "Sister to Sing and Australia. She was delivering a message to the embassy from Mokia."
"Sounds good," I said. It was always nice to have another Smedry along on a mission. Well, nice and catastrophic at the same time. But when you're a Smedry, you learn to make the catastrophes work for you.
A distant clanking preceded a group of knights, who stormed out of a side hallway a moment later. They spotted us and began running in our direction.
"Kaz!" I said. "Get us out of here!"
“Are you sure?" he said. "My Talent has been -"
"Now, Kaz!" I said.
"All right," he said with a sigh, walking over and pulling open a door. We'd used Kaz's Talent of getting lost to transport us before. Like all Smedry Talents, it was unpredictable - but it was fairly safe to use across short distances.
Besides, we didn't have time to try anything else. I raced through the doorway, Bastille behind me. Kaz pulled the door closed behind us.
The room smelled musty and wet inside, like mold or fungus, but it was too dark to see anything.
“Activate your Talent!" I told Kaz.
"I already did," he replied.
There was a scraping noise. Like something very large being pulled across the stone floor. I blinked as Bastille unsheathed her sword, the crystalline weapon shedding a cool, blue light across our surroundings. We were in a cave. And standing before us, looking very confused, was an enormous black dragon. It cocked its head at us, smoke trailing from its nostrils.
“Well," I said, relieved. "It's just a dragon. For a moment, I was frightened!" We'd met a dragon before, and it had quite nicely not eaten us. In fact, it had carried us on its back.
The dragon inhaled deeply.
"Kaz!" Bastille said, panicked.
"Put away that light!" he said. "It's hard to get lost if I can see where I'm going!"
I frowned at the others. "It's just a dragon."
"Just a free baledragon," Bastille said with alarm, "who - unlike Tzoctinatin - is not serving a prison sentence, and who is perfectly free to roast us because we're invading his den and violating the draco-human treaty!" She slammed her sword back in its sheath, plunging us into darkness.
"Oh,” I said.
A light appeared in front of us, illuminating the inside of the dragon's mouth as fire gathered in its throat and began to blast toward us.
"Reason number two hundred and fifty-seven why it's better to be a short person than a tall person!" Kaz exclaimed. "Standing next to a tall person gives you a really great shield for dragon's breath!"
Bastille grabbed me by the collar and yanked me hard after her, and everything spun. I felt a strange force around me, a lurching feeling as Kaz activated his Talent, getting us lost. The dragon's flames vanished.
I recognized that force - the force of the Talent - immediately, though I'd never experienced it before when Kaz had used his Talent. It was hard to explain. It felt like I could see the warping of the air, could tell what was going on as Kaz saved us.
It almost seemed familiar. Like Kaz wasn't just getting us lost, like he was . . . well, like he
was breaking the way that motion worked. Deconstructing the natural, linear progression of the world and rebuilding it so that we could move in directions we shouldn't have been able to.
In that moment, I thought I saw something. An enormous, magnificent stone disk, full of carvings and etchings, divided into four different quadrants. And at the very center, a patch of black rock. There was something crouching there in the center, invisible because of how dark it was. A patch of midnight itself. And it reached tentacles out to the other quadrants, like black vines growing over a wall.
The Bane of Incarna. That which twists . . . that which corrupts . . . that which destroys. . .
The Dark Talent. Of which all others are shadows.
The vision vanished, gone so quickly that I wasn't certain I'd even seen it. Everything was dark again, and I stumbled, tripping. When I hit the ground, I hit something wet, soft, and squishy.
“Ew!" I said, trying to push myself to my feet. The floor undulated beneath me, pulsing, quivering. It was like I'd fallen onto a massive trampoline covered with slick grease. And the stench was terrible. Like someone had pelted a skunk with rotten eggs.
Bastille made a gagging noise, pulling her sword from its sheath to give us light. The three of us were crowded together inside of a pink room, the walls and ceiling all made of the same soft, quivering material. It was like we were trapped in some kind of sack. There wasn’t even room enough to sit up, and we were coated with a slick, goolike substance.
“Aw, sparrows,” Kaz swore.
"I think I'm going to be sick!" Bastille said. “Are we...?"
"My Talent transported us into the dragon's stomach, it appears,” Kaz said, scratching his head, trying to stand up on the fleshy surface. "Whoops.”
"Whoops?" I cried, realizing that the liquidy stuff had to be some kind of bile or phlegm. "That's all you can say? Whoops?"
"Ew!" Bastille said.
"Well, if we're going to be eaten by a dragon," he noted, "this is the way to do it. Bypassing the teeth and all."