Chapter 5
Ryan:
Sensei led me through a massive dining hall. There were only a few people eating at the long wooden tables, but most of them stood up to track our progress as we crossed the room. The benches scraped across the smooth marble floor, and I heard the banging of pots and pans nearby. I saw what looked like another goblin. The green skin was a dead giveaway. Looking closer, I noticed that their eyes were mostly yellow, but at least they had brown irises.
“Sensei, is he the last one?” One man asked from across the room. He was muscular, with wild blonde hair. Apparently everyone but Sensei wore thick, tough-looking clothing that matched, more or less, the sentry outside. Leather and fur, gloves and straps and buckles.
“Later.” Sensei brushed off the comment as he led me toward another door.
My stomach tightened in expectation of another surprise. The old man must have seen the look on my face. He stopped and gestured for me to enter. When I hesitated, he only gave a more emphatic wave of his hand. He would have me open the door this time.
“Quit stalling,” he said. I heard his robes shift as he crossed his arms. “I believe your three friends are on the other side. That’s also where your food is, by the way. And, as I said, it’s safe.”
There was no point in going back. I grabbed the handle and pulled the door wide. A chair scraped on the floor, and I saw Erin and Jason bolt upright from where they had been sitting at a long table. Erin ran to me and gave me a big hug. As she embraced me, I found Kris, seated and calm, her smile as warm as it had been when she first introduced herself.
“It’s good to see another familiar face,” Erin said quietly. Her dark brown hair had a reddish tint in the light of the candles. I recognized its smell.
“Same here,” I told her, mustering up a smile of my own.
After a moment, feeling a different kind of awkward, I let her go. I felt suddenly very tired, and collapsed against the hard back of the nearest, empty chair. Sensei didn’t sit down, even though perhaps ten other high-backed empty chairs lined each side of the table that took up most of the room in the tight, rectangular hall. I turned my attention from the bare stone walls to the clay plate in front of me. It held a brown cut of beef in a darker brown gravy. The smell set my mouth watering.
The meat came accompanied by a soft roll and some crescent-shaped green vegetables, like nothing I had ever seen before, even in Japan. I hesitated, watching Erin return to her seat, the one beside mine. Jason and Kris sat across from us. Jason seemed to be a little more relaxed than the rest of us, with no trace of the injuries to his legs or hands, though his jeans still looked torn. All four of us appeared to be wearing the same clothes as on the night that Devidis, the man with the black eyes, glued us to his black gem.
“Did you guys get any clear answers?” I asked. “Sensei here wasn’t too forthcoming.”
“If we’re still in Japan, we’re in a part I’ve never visited before, or heard of.” Erin shook her head. “I don’t recognize anything. And I don’t need to tell you that there are no goblins or kappa—er, fish people—in Japan, no real ones, anyway.”
“They haven’t told you anything either?” I asked Jason and Kris, ignoring the fish-people comment for the moment.
Kris answered in her soft voice. “Well, we went over a few details we picked up before you got here, and Jason… he says there’s more to the story.”
“Remembering that the black-eyed old man threw both my uncle and a car from an overpass,” a sad smile crossed Jason’s face, “this doesn’t surprise me so much.”
The policeman’s son turned to Sensei. “And nothing seems crazy anymore.”
He waited for a response from the old man in the robe. When Sensei didn’t answer, Jason pounded the table and said, “OK. That’s enough patience. Tell us what you know about Devidis. The man who brought me in here said Devidis was the enemy of your Sun Tower, an evil ruler. But what about his abilities, his ‘talent,’ and the ‘Elementals’?”
As I tried to process the keywords Jason was throwing around, a strange look crossed Sensei’s face accompanied by a slight grin. The old man took a moment before saying, “That is a large request. Tell me, where did you hear about the Elementals?”
“Devidis mentioned them when he stole the black pyramid,” Jason said.
“And don’t forget the magic words, the spell he began, the one we finished when we were... frozen to the black gem,” Kris added.
“A poem?” Sensei asked. “I know nothing of spells.”
“Yes, I remember,” Jason said. “That heavy feeling when he said ‘stone’… Devidis said, ‘Lost prisons of talent, open for all. To the four Elementals these forces we call.’”
“‘Recall.’ I think what he said was, ‘To the four Elementals these forces recall.’” Erin corrected him. “Then he said, ‘Wind, fire, water, stone: only to the chosen these powers are shown.’”
“…And the words just came to me: ‘Swiftness of wind, with wisdom to hear.’” I remembered, the sentence falling in rhythm.
“‘Mystic talent of fire, to burn away fear,’ was my part,” Erin said.
“‘Agility of water, life’s joy to renew,’” Kris said.
“That’s right, the word was ‘recall.’ ‘Most resilient stone, to stand, strong and true,’” Jason finished. “And what did we say all together? ‘For now the darkness has risen to fight. Spring now forth as the power of light.’”
Kris, Erin and I nodded in agreement. We had all shared that moment, that feeling of power and helplessness. That much we could trust.
Sensei’s eyes were tightly shut. He seemed to be lost in thought.
“It means something to you, doesn’t it, Sensei?” I said.
“An astute observation, Ryan,” he replied. “I’ll do my best to explain, but it is difficult, using words alone, to explain a concept that, for those learning it, is radically new. We should go upstairs, where I can properly demonstrate what the terms ‘talent’ and ‘Elemental’ mean. They are not concepts to be approached lightly, but once you understand those, you will be able to understand more about emperor Devidis.” As he walked toward the far end of the room, I stood to follow him, with a regretful look at the aromatic presentation on my plate. Erin, Kris, and Jason also stood, rising above plates at least partially clear.
Sensei paused at the door and held up his hands. “There’s no hurry, now. You’ve been through a lot already today. You would be wise to take a free meal whenever you are able. Especially in these times, a good cut of meat well-prepared is often hard to come by. More specifically, what I must show you will be on the top floor of this tower. From the looks of your faces, you will need your energy for the long climb, and I want you to do me the favor of carrying a few things with you.”
“What will we be carrying? Why?” Jason asked, with a suspicious frown.
“Easy now,” Sensei raised a calming hand. “Just humor an old man who doesn’t want to bear the weight. Someone will leave the items by the other door.” The elder teacher had stepped outside the dining room. “Be advised that they are weapons, though I do not expect you to use them. Simply bring them to the top floor when you’re finished. Thank you.” With the curt conclusion, Sensei’s white robe disappeared around the stone doorpost.
Confused, I sank back into my chair and looked at the food. The others were exchanging weary glances.
“Weapons?” Kris asked.
“Emperor?” Erin directed the word toward Jason.
“Fish-people,” I added softly.
Jason shrugged his shoulders. “I was just repeating what I heard. Sensei confirmed it, but...”
“He told me that the United States was gone,” I said, “and that we’re a long way from Tokyo.”
“Gone?” Jason shook his head. “If that’s true, then...”
“Emperors and missing countries. Too big to worry about, not right now, not all at once,” Kris said, with authority in her small voice.
&nbs
p; “Panic won’t help us. I think that, waking up in this jungle, we’ve had enough of it.” Erin, the daughter of devastated Tokyo, had a nervous intensity in her voice. “Anyway, we’re supposed to get more answers soon enough.”
After that, no one said anything for a while. I suppose we were each lost in our own thoughts. I looked at our plates; my friends had definitely been eating earlier. Why would it be poisoned, anyway? Suspicion would be healthy, but so was food.
I grabbed the nearest two-pronged fork and tore into the juicy meat. It was tender, a little spicy, and delicious, though it didn’t taste like the beef it looked to be. I washed it down with some clean, fresh water from my clay cup, and followed it with the roll and crunchy vegetables. Once everything was gone, I wiped my mouth with a towel and threw the rough cloth onto the middle of the table. With a full stomach, things were starting to look better, somehow. At least the food had distracted me from larger worries.
I looked over at Erin. With her head hung down, she stared at her half-eaten food.
“Erin, are you alright? The food…” I began to worry again about wolfing down the strange meal.
“It’s not that. It’s everything. Everyone seems to know an awful lot about Devidis, but,” she sighed, “I suppose there’s not much use in guessing at what’s to come.” She gave me a small smile, a brave smile, a fake smile. “We’ll just see what this man has to say, and then, once we know where we stand, maybe I’ll feel like eating more.”
Kris finished chewing a bite, then shook her head. “It’s weird. I should be really frightened, but I’ve seen too much insanity today to be scared by these people, or their magic.”
Jason let out a little laugh. “It’s not magic, Devidis said. He called it talent, made a big point of it. And so did Sensei.” He tossed his fork onto the plate. “We might as well start picking up on the local nomenclature. ...And don’t I wish I had a talent for throwing crates and police cars like that black-eyed old man. Let him pick on someone his own size…”
In spite of myself, I traded a smile with Kris before my attention was drawn to the door. Two men set some shiny metal items on a side table. “Be careful with these,” one said before the pair walked out of the room, boots clomping.
With nothing more to eat, but plenty of nervous energy, I walked to the far end of the room where the items had been set. Gleaming and smelling of some kind of chemical— polish?—they were four, no, five weapons, laid with care, as if on display.
There was a beautiful, thin sword that seemed to flow with confidence from its double-edged tip straight down to its rounded pommel. Near the hilt, which was bound with red leather, the edges of the sword turned upward, the steel body curving into two small, thrusting prongs. Jason drew it partway from its dark red sheath, part of a larger black apparatus that looked like it was intended to stretch across the wielder’s back. He clicked the sword back into its case, though, drawn to the next weapon.
That next piece of equipment was a war-hammer, a massive, blocky thing with a rectangular head. As he picked it up with a grunt of exertion by its shaft—wrapped with, green leather—I saw that the hammer’s blunt face was about as wide as Jason’s own, and overall, if the hammer head were a box, it could have fit my head inside, along with Jason’s. There were no marks on the flawless stone, and I wondered if these weapons had ever been used. Jason hefted the weapon at the neck, near the head.
“This looks like it’s the heaviest,” he said. “I’ll take it.”
The smallest weapons were a paired set, I realized, when I pulled out one from the wide, black leather belt separating them. They reminded me of sharpened boomerangs, except for the handles, wrapped in blue leather. I turned my head, and from the right angle, they looked each like capital As, only flattened a bit, with the horizontal bar of the A as the handle, and each of the three points of the A sharpened to a stabbing, cutting point.
I was drawn, though, to the last weapon, a long scythe with thin sickle blades on either end of the shaft, each blade the length of two hand spans. One blade curved down from the top, and the other curved up, opposite the first blade, from the bottom. It reminded me of the complementary curves of the yin-yang symbol.
I didn’t hesitate to pick up the double-headed scythe, knowing that one of us would have to carry it. Putting one end of the shaft on the floor—careful so that the blade wouldn’t cut my foot—it stood about as high as the bottom of my shoulder. Beneath the weapon lay its complicated leather holster. I reasoned that, of the two belts, with their wide, scythe-shaped sheaths, one would go across the waist, and the other would go from over the right shoulder around under the left arm, like the sword belt that was now in Erin’s hands. I put down the scythe for a moment and concentrated on the belt. After successfully buckling the black straps across my waist and back, I felt a sense of accomplishment.
Kris stood beside me, over the paired blades. “Well, I think I got the lightest pieces… I wonder if Sensei is trying to tell us something.”
I shook my head. “I wouldn’t count it out, after all the other crazy things we’ve seen,” I said. Reaching to grab the scythe I had left on the table, I realized it was separated into two sections: one thick half, and one thin. But no, it was actually two equal pieces, screwed into one another.
Jason had already secured his belt and slipped the hammer into its holster on his right hip. “What are you looking at, Ryan?” he asked.
“I think it can come apart, or something,” I said.
“Hmmm,” Jason mused. “It disassembles for easy cleaning?”
“No, I don’t—" I gave the weapon an experimental twist, and the upper section came loose with a squeak.
“Oh no,” I said, my voice’s own pitch matching the weapon’s squeak. The upper half was sliding freely in my hands. Afraid it would drop and cut me, I grabbed both pieces, held the double-scythe steady, and guided the high, loose end as it slid down into the half below. As the thin half disappeared into the thicker section, there was a faint clang.
I thought for a moment, and said sheepishly, “I hope I didn’t break it.”
Erin walked up to us just as I began to imagine what a leader of goblins would do to someone who broke a precious weapon.
“Ryan, how could you have broken it?” she said. “It’s a weapon. If it’s any good, it should be designed so that you can’t break it, or not break it without trying, at least.”
“Though why would the old man give any good weapons to dumb teenagers like us?” Jason asked.
I nodded and looked again at the double-scythe. “Good point,” I said. “I twisted it before it came loose. Maybe I unscrewed it.”
I gave another twist to the top of the thinner section. There was a click. I slowly lifted the weapon. Yes, the pieces were no longer sliding freely. I smiled, and recalled the short size of the straps across my back. “OK, so maybe it doesn’t come apart for easy cleaning, but it contracts for easy storage. That’s good to know… I hope. Thanks, Erin.”
“No problem,” she said, picking up the thin sword. With the sheath strapped to her back, she looked around to make sure Kris and Jason weren’t anywhere close before trying to sheathe the sword over her shoulder. She missed the first time and gave the tiniest shriek of fear, but her grip was firm and the sword didn’t cut her. More careful the second time, she put the blade away smoothly.
With my two scythe-blade sheaths angled in different directions, one toward my neck and the other at my thigh, I winced at the prospect of trying to put away the double-bladed weapon on my own. It was too awkward to carry, but if it were its original length, I might be able to heft it like a walking stick.
I looked at the seam between the two pieces of metal and gave the double-headed scythe another twist. Pulling the scythe back out to its full length, I gave it a final turn, in the opposite direction. It clicked again, and locked. I took up the re-extended scythe and felt its balance, walking a few steps with the dangerous blade at the top pointed ahead of me and toward
the floor. The blade on the floor curved backward and upward at my right. As long as no one was walking too close in front or behind, it would be safe enough. I gripped the scythe toward the top. Taking it up stairs would be a challenge, but, again, someone had to carry the weapon.
I turned and watched Kris slide the A-blades into the holsters at her sides on her black belt.
“I guess we’re done eating.” she said. “Shall we go upstairs?”