Nidhoggr nodded Very slightly, like seeing the Goodyear blimp bob up and down. "The Hetwan. Ka Anor. He has designs on Hel."
"That's the plan. I think the Hetwan helped the fairies construct a weapon to kill you if you showed up over in Fairy Land."
"Tell me about this weapon," Nidhoggr rumbled.
"No. Not until we make a deal."
"The deal is I let you live!" the dragon roared in a voice that knocked me flat on my back.
I was a while in getting back up. "The deal is you bust my friend out of the dungeons of the fairy king and queen."
Nidhoggr frowned. "The redhead or the witch?"
"The redhead."
He nodded his bouncing blimp head again. "Good choice.
Witches are never anything but trouble. Their hearts are hard. I'd have had to use a diamond to exchange for that one's heart."
I almost laughed. Nidhoggr had spared Senna through cheapness.
"You get April, I mean the redhead, out. Me and my friends get our hearts. I tell you how to scare the living crap out of the fairies and get your stuff back. With no risk to you."
The dragon thought that over for a while. "I give you my word.
May my scales fall off."
"Yeah, that's cool. But first you have to swear an oath you won't break. Swear by your treasure. May you lose your entire treasure."
"Ah. Yes. I swear by my treasure."
I swayed, still unsteady. I caught myself before plunging off the edge of the mound. "They have huge arrows, disguised as towers.
Topped with diamond-tipped arrowheads. Chances are you'd never have noticed them. They're right in the middle of the palace."
"If I cannot fly over the palace, how am I to regain my treasures?"
"Forget the palace. The palace, the whole city, that's all nothing.
That's not what the fairies are afraid of losing. They're businessmen, my large friend."
Chapter
XXIII
The dragon decided I was telling the truth. I don't know, maybe he had some way of knowing whether I was lying, just like he knew that Senna was a witch. Or maybe it's what we've all noticed: Cynicism is a weak force in Everworld. It was one of our very few advantages.
The big dragon instructed me to climb up on his head. I told him I needed food. Two of the conveniently appearing troll butlers showed up with a loaf of bread and a piece of cheese.
Then the monsters carried me up the steep,
diamond-encrusted slope of Nidhoggr's jaw. Nidhoggr was in a hurry now. The fairies had made a fool of him and the dragon hadn't gotten as big and as rich as he was by letting himself get jerked around by every clever munchkin that came along.
A point he was anxious to make.
I settled in behind the windscreen formed by his left brow, a curved wall of scaled flesh that was visible only in the spaces between diamonds and emeralds and rubies.
The dragon unfolded wings that could easily have been the playing fields for several simultaneous football games. The wings at least were not entirely covered in jewels. They were pterodactyl-looking things, flesh stretched between ribbing, primitive. And, as big as they were, far too small to lift this behemoth. At least in the universe where I'd grown up.
Nidhoggr shoved his snout up against the cave opening, the one I'd just come through, and blew out. A volcanic eruption of magma flooded the cave. I cowered, trying to shield myself from the heat. But still I smelled my own singed hair.
"That will protect my treasure while I am away," Nidhoggr said.
And then, with wings at once so vast and tiny, he began to fly.
Straight up. A blue whale flying directly vertical with only the leisurely flapping of wings that might, might on a good day have lifted my Buick.
Up and up, not fast but fast enough considering that everything about this flight was impossible. Up and up the long shaft, up into morning light. We rose from the cone of a tumbled, half-eroded volcano.
Up into the sky, and now Nidhoggr was whipping his barbed tail back and forth like he was some monstrous tadpole. Giant wings, giant tail, all propelling the fabulous diamond-glittery monster through the air.
I couldn't see directly down because of the slope of Nidhoggr's head. I couldn't see the effect this apparition was having on the creatures who felt the sudden chill of his passing shadow. But I could imagine. Human, elf, dwarf, satyr, nymph, fairy, or alien, I was pretty sure no one was looking up and feeling secure. I don't think Loki or Hel or Huitzilopoctli could have been indifferent.
I was perched atop a 747 flying at treetop level and dribbling fire.
I ate some bread. I ate some cheese. I felt better. I felt strength returning. Was it something magical in the bread, or just the simple fact of having calories to fuel the machine?
In an hour we were over the border of Fairy Land. The leprechaun with the bad attitude was not going to be collecting an entrance tax on us.
"Remember, stay well away from the palace. Hover over the marketplace. That's their Achilles' heel. That's what they can't risk."
The dragon executed a lazy course correction. I climbed gingerly over the brow and perched dangerously just above the fold of his eyelid.
Now I could see almost directly down, at least to the side.
When the dragon lowered his snout I held onto diamond protrusions and could clearly see the marketplace.
Business was at a standstill. Men, dwarfs, elves, fairies, al were running. First this way, then that. Back and forth. Pointless panic.
The dragon was circling, circling, not twenty feet above the taller buildings. The wind from his passage ripped the awnings from stalls, sent trade goods whipping up and down the avenues, tripped the panicked vendors.
"Summon the king and queen," Nidhoggr bellowed.
"And my friends," I said in a barely audible squeak.
"And bring the redhead from the dungeons," Nidhoggr added.
There was a blur as fairies raced for the city. Unnecessary, of course, because the people in the city's towers must surely have seen the dragon. And his voice would have been heard anywhere within a hundred square miles.
"You see the towers over there?" I yelled, half deafened.
"I see them," Nidhoggr agreed. "They meant to slay great Nidhoggr. You have kept your bargain and spoken the truth.
Nidhoggr will keep his own end of the agreement."
We cruised, always safely far from the palace. Nidhoggr passed the time by incinerating several large flocks of sheep.
When we saw fast-moving carriages racing from the city, the dragon settled down in the center of the market, crushing several buildings and flattening dozens of stalls in the process.
The carriage, drawn by eight of the weird eight-legged horses and escorted by perhaps a hundred fairy warriors, all heavily armored and carrying bows and swords, came to a halt a few hundred feet from the tip of Nidhoggr's nose.
It was a pointless display. Nidhoggr could sneeze and turn the entire detachment of warriors into briquettes.
The king climbed down out of the carriage. Nervous. Behind him, the Hetwan.
My blood ran cold. Had the Hetwan already taken April?
"Great Nidhoggr, you honor us with your presence," the king said, all phony charm and politician's sincerity.
Nidhoggr spoke. "The stone. The spear. The sword. The cauldron."
The king looked theatrically puzzled. "I'm afraid I don't understand."
Nidhoggr turned his head slightly and breathed. Only a shallow, slight exhalation.
Magma poured from his mouth, red-and-black fire, steaming, distorting the air itself.
The magma poured forth, ran along a side street. Buildings on both sides burst into flames. The napalm ate the buildings from the bottom, disintegrated them. The dragon turned his face to the king again.
"I will burn this market. I will burn you. And I will . . . decline . . .
to fly above the palace so that you can murder me, king of the fairies."
/> The Hetwan didn't blink. The fairy king did.
"We have, um . . . we have recently learned that certain items were stolen from you, great Nidhoggr. We knew nothing of this crime but have recently arrested those responsible. Thieves are everywhere in these times."
"Yes. In many fine palaces," the dragon said dryly.
The king waved frantically over his shoulder. A wagon lurched forward. Fairies whipped back a canvas cover revealing a stone, not much to look at, maybe the size of a beer leg, also a spear, a sword, and a battered-looking old pot filled to the rim with reddish-brown stew of some sort.
"Here are your possessions," the king said.
"Thank you, great king."
"My friends!" I yelled.
The king seemed to notice me for the first time.
"I want my friends. April. Christopher. Jalil. I want them."
The king's eyes flickered from me down to the dragon, back to me. "You may assuredly have the two males. However, the female witch, well, the Hetwan have already bargained for her and a price has been agreed upon. A very fair price, if I may say, and since the terms have been agreed on . . ." He shrugged.
I started to say something, but Nidhoggr knew the deal.
Whatever else you could say about the old monster, he's a dragon who keeps his word.
"Did the Hetwan pay you the value of this great market?" the dragon rumbled.
"I . . . I'm afraid I don't understand."
At that the queen bustled down from the carriage. She stomped up to the king, looked up at the dragon, her face a mixture of rage and I-told-you-so smugness.
"Give the girl to the dragon, you jackass, or he'll burn you. And what is far worse, he'll burn the market."
"No," the Hetwan said, stepping forward defiantly.
The queen grabbed the king's arm and pulled him back. With a jerk of her head she motioned the guards to retreat. The Hetwan stood alone.
"The witch belongs to my lord, Ka Anor," the Hetwan said.
Nidhoggr laughed. And then he released what may have been a hundred gallons of his napalm. The fire sloshed across the ground and engulfed the Hetwan's legs.
Hetwan do not cry out in pain, I guess. But the sizzling, cracking, bursting sounds as the Hetwan was slowly drawn down into the fire, melting, melting like the witch in The Wizard of Oz, was horrible enough.
The alien's three reaching mandibles searched all the while for food. All the way down, till all that was left was the alien's head.
"You really should learn to identify witches properly," Nidhoggr said. "Only a fool buys a witch who is no witch."
The Hetwan's eyes popped, just like kernels of corn. And seconds later the alien's head blew apart from the steam trapped within it.
Chapter
XXIV
We were given safe passage to the far boundary of Fairy Land.
There the gate was formed of massive trees, not rosebushes. But a very similar leprechaun sat on a stool, smoking a pipe and looking picturesque.
He wished us top o' the mornin'.
Five of us had entered Fairy Land from the other direction. Four of us were leaving. I'd said I wouldn't leave anyone behind. I'd left Senna. But Senna was never really a part of us. A part of me, yes.
Maybe always would be. And I would still try to find her, try to save her from her truest enemy: herself.
"So, the telegraph didn't work?" I asked Jalil as we trudged through the gate.
"Oh, it worked. Ambrigar is going to be a very rich fairy. He paid us fair and square. And we'd reached a deal to buy Nidhoggr's stuff back. It was al a done deal. Only they wouldn't give up April. Not for anything."
"Why didn't you get the stuff to Nidhoggr?" I demanded.
Jalil shrugged. "Look, we could save our own lives but April would be lost. Once the Hetwan had her, that was going to be it.
And it occurred to us, well, to Christopher actually, that your plan B wasn't going to work if Nidhoggr already had his stuff back."
"Nothing to trade, man," Christopher confirmed. "The Nid just wanted his stuff back. If plan B was going to work he had to still want it."
It took me a couple of minutes to digest all that. It made sense, I guessed.
"They risked it all to save me," April said. "You al did. How am I going to go on thinking that the three of you are idiots when you go and do something like that?"
We laughed. First laugh in a while.
Christopher said, "Well, it wasn't such a big risk. We had faith in the general here. We knew he'd come through."
"Uh-huh."
"Yep. For the first few hours after we decided to put it al on David to win, Jalil and I were pretty confident. Then we find out on the other side that he's sick and delirious and retching his guts out.
So then, not so confident. And by late last night with me tossing and turning and waiting for my freaking heart to go nuclear I do seem to recall that some harsh words were spoken."
Jalil nodded. "Yeah, I seem to recall the phrase 'pathetic wanna-be hero who's probably lying around being sick and is off doing the nasty with the witchy woman not giving a damn whether we fry from the inside out.' That was while we were still feeling hopeful. Later things turned nasty."
"So, what did happen to Senna?" April asked me.
"I don't know."
I don't think she believed that. I don't think any of them did. But my stock was pretty high right then. I was everyone's hero. Till the next time I screwed up. Or until Senna came back into my life.
"So you wired up the fairies, and we have nothing to show for it," I said. "Well, that about figures. Stil , we're alive. My heart's going bumpity-bump again. Maybe as long as we survive we just shut up and be happy."
There was a silence. A long silence. An expectant silence.
I looked at Christopher, at Jalil. They were both grinning.
"What?"
Jalil matched April's pace and reached into her backpack. He withdrew a hand filled with diamonds. Not exactly impressive when placed against memories of Nidhoggr's mountain. But better than the spare change and rumpled dollar bills we had.
"Damn."
"Yeah. We're rich. Just one problem. The market is back that way. And I don't think we're welcome there. I don't think they like the company we keep: witches and big dragons and all,"
We walked on into the night. We left Fairy Land behind. And as night fell the landscape changed. But it was dark by the time we stopped for sleep.
Too dark to notice that the trees, the grasses, the flowers all around us were not, never had been, part of any human experience.
We experienced an actual moment or two of peace. Peace is hard to come by in Everworld. Maybe in any world.
I looked up to see the moon. Our moon? Some reasonable facsimile? Or an illusion created but of magic?
It was a moon. That was enough. It was white. It shined down on us. And it gave me peace.
Until I saw the shadows crossing its luminous face.
Jailil was not far away, looking up, like me.
"Jalil, do you . . ." I whispered.
"Yeah. I see them," he said. "I see them."
Two disciplined columns of dark figures that might almost have been huge bats. Might, in a different universe. But these were creatures with shiny compound eyes and gossamer wings and ever-questing insect mouths. These were the cold, deadly servants of the god-eater.
Above us, behind and before, the Hetwan legions flew. We had walked blithely toward a danger that made even terrifying immortals cringe and quake.
We had entered the land of Ka Anor.
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K. A. Applegate, Discover the Destroyer
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