‘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.
4½
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 that 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.