The Common King

by Brian Olsen

  She turns, taking in the silent, astonished crowd. She claps her hands once, sharply.

  “Move, people. We’ve still got a world to save.”

  Twenty

  “That poor boy.” Mrs. Green shakes her head. “That poor boy.”

  “We’ll look out for Kenny,” Mrs. Deng says. “He and Lily have always been close. We’ll take care of him.”

  “That’s good of you, Meihui.” Mrs. Green sighs. “Oh, that poor boy.”

  All us non-magic types are crowded into one room in the basement while we wait for the logomancers to complete the Moment-strengthening spell in the other. It took a while for me and Zane to get back from London with Mrs. Wollard and Ihsan, and while we were gone the sun came up in Charlesville and the museum opened. Mrs. Green left her sole employee upstairs running things so she could wait with the rest of us.

  Mr. Green comes away from the entrance to the hallway, where he’s been watching the spell from a distance. He puts his hands on his wife’s shoulders. “Lost his whole family hours ago and he’s in there helping save the world. That’s bravery there. That’s bravery.”

  I turn a page in our copy of Creatures of Myth and Legend. It’s a non-magical duplicate created by Lily, but it’s got all the same information as the original. The next entry is on unicorns. The picture shows a single unicorn standing with one foreleg raised. It’s got a garland of flowers around its neck.

  “Hey.” I run my finger along the page of text. “This says unicorns have healing magic. Do you think that might help Mr. Liefer?”

  “Worth a try.” Nate’s playing with the centaur horseshoe, twirling it around his fingers. We moved all the artifacts into this room, to clear space for them to cast the spell. Well, all except the heavy ones. That stone gargoyle weighs a ton so we just slid it against the wall.

  “How are the Liefers holding up?” Mrs. Green asks. “Are they still here?”

  Mr. Montgomery nods. “Mr. Liefer insisted on helping with the spell. It’s amazing. I don’t know how he’s even conscious. And Mrs. Liefer won’t leave his side, so she’s in there too.”

  Mrs. Deng tsks. She’s bent over her tablet, reading something. “He should be in a hospital.”

  “He wouldn’t go.” Mr. Montgomery leans forward in his chair to pat Yasu, who’s curled up at his feet. “He says he’s content to let Andy take care of him. Although my understanding is that Andy’s healing abilities aren’t perfect. He can only do so much.”

  Mr. Green starts pacing. “I hate this waiting. I feel so helpless.”

  “You could go to work.” Mrs. Green runs a finger along the dusty table and sighs. “You all could. We don’t know how long this will take.”

  Mrs. Deng looks up from her tablet. “I’m using all my vacation days.”

  Mr. Montgomery chuckles. “Same.”

  “I’m not going back to work,” Mrs. Deng continues. “Not until this is over and we know my daughter is safe.”

  “I called in sick today,” Mr. Green says. “But maybe I’ll do the same, Meihui. Take a week or two. I can’t stop these kids from running off into danger if I’m not here.”

  “We can’t stop the kids from running into danger at all, Daniel.” Mr. Montgomery gives Yasu one last vigorous rub, then gets up and moves to the back of the room, where we pushed the artifacts. “And I’m not so sure we should anymore.”

  “Hello.” Nate waves. “Kids in question, sitting right here.”

  “That’s not what you said last night, John,” Mr. Green says, completely ignoring Nate.

  Mr. Montgomery inspects a few artifacts while he talks. “I was angry last night. And scared. Still am. But these kids got the job done and came back safe.”

  “The Pillmans aren’t safe,” Mrs. Green points out.

  Mr. Montgomery shakes his head. “That’s not the kids’ fault.”

  “Of course it isn’t. I’m just saying it could have easily been any of our kids.”

  Mrs. Deng slaps the table. Yasu jumps and runs over to Nate.

  “It was our kids,” she says. “Lily’s traumatized by what happened to her.” She shudders. “In a way, my Lily was…was killed last night. Killed several times over.”

  Mrs. Green takes her hand. “She’s okay, Meihui. She’s here. She’s safe.”

  Mrs. Deng pulls her hand away. “She not safe, Gabrielle. None of us are safe.” She stands and paces to the hallway entrance. “Not while he’s still out there. And he’ll want all these magic doodads we took from him back, you know. He’ll come for them.”

  “One step at a time.” Mr. Montgomery comes back to the table and places a garland of flowers in front of me. “Here you go, Chris. Unicorns. Thought I saw it earlier.”

  I pick up the multicolor plastic wreath. “Thanks, Mr. Montgomery. Once they’re done with the spell, maybe Mr. Ambrose can get one out.”

  “Weird,” Nate says. “We’ll be real after this. Sort of.”

  “We’re already real, Nate,” his father replies.

  “You know what I mean, Dad. We won’t have to worry about poofing out of existence.”

  “That will be a relief, it’s true.”

  “They’re coming!” Mrs. Deng looks back from the hall at us. “They must be done.”

  Most of our remaining logomancers – Alisa, Zane, Andy, Lily, Mr. Ambrose, Mrs. Wollard, and Ihsan – file into the room. All of them except Kenny and Liefer. They look exhausted, so we get up from the table to let them sit.

  “It worked,” Alisa announces.

  “You’re sure?” I ask.

  Mr. Ambrose calls Yasu to him. The baku trots over to his chair and gleefully snuffles his face. Mr. Ambrose laughs and says, “Nothing to disrupt here! The bond between Yasu and his artifact is gone. This little guy is free and clear.”

  Alisa takes the tree necklace off and slides it over to him. “I hate to ask. We’re all drained, I know. But when you’re feeling up to it…”

  He takes it from her. “Of course. It won’t be any easier to get Tannyl out without the book, but at least this is the last time I should have to do it.”

  “Where are the Liefers?” Mrs. Green asks.

  “Mr. Liefer is resting in the other room,” Andy says. “Mrs. Liefer’s with him. We should keep our voices down.”

  “And Kenny wants to be alone for a while,” Lily adds.

  Mr. Green stands behind Alisa’s chair. He rests his arms around her shoulders. “So what now? Is it over?”

  Alisa shakes her head. “We’ve stopped the Common King’s plan, but he’ll come up with a new one. We still need an overall solution for how to deal with him.”

  “I beg your pardon.” Mrs. Wollard rubs her eyes and stands up. “But would you mind terribly taking Ihsan and myself home?”

  Ihsan nods and stands as well. “Yes. I should get back to my family. But let us know if we can be of further assistance. We’re happy to help in any way, aren’t we, Genevieve?”

  Mrs. Wollard sniffs. “Yes. Of course.”

  “I’ve got you.” Zane gets up and touches my elbow. “Wanna come with? Get a late breakfast in London?”

  “Sure.”

  “Wait.” Mrs. Deng leans over her daughter to peer at the tablet she left on the table. “Wait. It didn’t work.”

  We crowd around as Mrs. Deng holds up her tablet and turns up the volume. It’s a live streaming video. It looks like a park, but it’s complete chaos so it’s hard to tell what’s happening. People are running, the camera is bouncing all over the place, and the guy taking the video keeps swearing and saying, “Oh my god.” But then he stops under a tree and takes a wide pan of the area around him and things make a lot more sense.

  I squint at the screen, even though the picture is crystal clear. “Oh, that’s not good.”

  “Where is this?” Alisa asks.

  Mrs. Deng taps the description below the video. “Washington, D.C. The National Mall.”

  “Oh, great.” Nate smacks his forehead. “That won’t attract atte
ntion at all.”

  “Zane,” Alisa says.

  “On it.” He touches a wall and a shadow spreads out from his fingers. “Is there a plan?”

  “The plan is to get there and figure out a plan. Whoever wants to help, come on.” Alisa runs through the portal before her parents can stop her.

  I follow, along with Nate. We step out onto the green grass. It’s a beautiful sunny morning. Warm. Hot, even. Which is bad news for the new arrivals to our nation’s capital.

  Mermaids. Mermen, too. And mernonbinary people, probably. Meradults and merchildren and merbabies. Thousands of them. Tens of thousands, maybe. It’s hard to tell. They’re spread up and down the mall, farther than I can see in one direction, and down towards the reflecting pool in front of the capitol building in the other.

  I’ve been to D.C. once before. Nate’s family took a trip and invited me to go with them. We’re in front of the Air and Space Museum, and I think the National Museum of the American Indian is in the next building over. The capitol is close, and way down at the far end the Washington Monument juts into the sky.

  More people come out of Zane’s shadow portal and I step forward to get out of the way. It’s everyone, I think. Everyone who was in the room. Mrs. Deng is still buried in her tablet, squinting to see it in the bright sunlight. Mrs. Green nudges her and she lowers it.

  Mrs. Wollard gasps. “Oh, these poor creatures! We must help them!”

  Most of the humans in the vicinity have cleared out. Down a ways I see flashing lights from emergency responders, but there aren’t any authority figures in our immediate area.

  Alisa, Nate and I bend down to talk to a mermaid. She’s bare-chested, like all of them, wearing just a necklace made of seashells. She’s South Asian, or whatever the previous worlds’ equivalent of South Asian was, with deep brown skin and wet black hair that’s rapidly drying. Gills on her neck are closed and she’s sucking in deep breaths through her mouth. Her tail is green and scaly, flopping uselessly in the grass.

  “Hello,” Alisa says.

  The mermaid’s eyes widen. She digs her fingers into the grass and tries to drag herself away.

  Alisa holds up her hands. “It’s all right! We’re not going to hurt you! I’m Alisa. What’s your name?”

  “Jylene,” the mermaid answers. “Where am I? Is this a human city?”

  “It is. Do you know how you got here?”

  She shakes her head. “We have been lost in a strange ocean for so long. There was no bottom to it, and no air up above. Only water, forever in every direction. No life, no fish or plants to eat, but we never grew hungry or tired. All the clans were there. Every merperson, from everywhere in the world, together, alone, for I don’t know how long. And then…and now…we are here.” She sobs. “What is happening? It’s so hot and dry. Who has done this to us?”

  Alisa smiles reassuringly. “We’re going to help you.”

  “Please, hurry.” Jylene touches her gills. “We can breathe air only for a short time. Laid out in the sun like this, away from water, we’ll die.”

  Alisa stands back up. “We have to get them into the river.”

  “How?” Nate asks. “Zane can’t teleport this many.”

  “Maybe he won’t have to,” I say. “Look.”

  People are starting to come back into the mall, overcoming their initial terror. They’re talking to the merpeople.

  Alisa raises an eyebrow. “You think people will help?”

  I shrug. “Maybe. Before we knew about magic, if you saw a suffocating mermaid, wouldn’t you want to help her?”

  Mr. Montgomery and Mr. Ambrose come over to us. Mr. Montgomery has the book, our copy of Creatures of Myth and Legend, open. “I found their page. Hard to tell what their artifact might be. The image has a lot of merpeople in it. They have tools and weapons and they’re eating and playing and…well, it’s a very busy picture. But Alisa, it’s enough for you to scry for it? It must be nearby, correct?”

  “Awesome, Dad!” Nate punches the air. “Alisa’ll find the artifact and Mr. Ambrose can throw all the fishfolk back into their sad ocean!”

  Mr. Ambrose takes the book from Mr. Montgomery and closes it. “Not anymore I can’t.”

  Nate frowns. “You did it with the minotaurs.”

  “That was when the Moment was trying to force them back into their artifact,” he says. “There was an active connection between the trophy and the book keeping them in the world that I could disrupt.”

  “And that’s not true anymore.” Alisa smacks her forehead. “Because we just rewrote the Moment. Once they’re out, they’re out, unless you’ve got the book. The real book.”

  Mrs. Deng and Lily run up to us from the direction of the capitol building. “They’re putting them in the reflecting pool!” Mrs. Deng cries.

  “What?” Alisa shades her eyes with her hand and looks in that direction. “Who?”

  “People.” Lily laughs. “Ordinary people. They’re working together, carrying the mermaids into the pool so they don’t dry out!”

  “Clear the mall!”

  The amplified voice comes from a loudspeaker somewhere. Nate points out the source, a big police van driving up onto the grass.

  “Clear the mall! All pedestrians, clear the mall immediately! Do not approach the…” The voice crackles off, then comes back. “Do not approach the people lying on the ground. Clear the mall!”

  The Greens rejoin us. “We’ve got to get out of here,” Mrs. Green says.

  “Mom—” Alisa starts.

  “Alisa, they have guns.” Her mother grabs her forearm. “The police have guns and they don’t know what’s going on. It’s not safe for us to be here.”

  More and more police are arriving, guns drawn. Not just from the van, but from all over. And soldiers, too. Or maybe it’s the National Guard, I don’t know. All in all it’s only been a few minutes since the merpeople appeared. They’re reacting fast.

  “She’s right,” I say. “This is beyond us, now. There are too many mermaids. Maybe the authorities will help them.”

  Alisa shakes her head. “Or kill them. Or cut them up.”

  “I agree.” Mr. Montgomery folds his arms. “I don’t like the idea of running. There must be something we can do. Alisa, can you find the artifact? We can start there.”

  Alisa shakes her head. “I can’t scry for artifacts with the fake book, remember?”

  Jylene, the mermaid, cries out, “What’s happening? I feel—”

  Her body shakes and distends, then the end of her tail rises, thinning out into a long green rope. The rest of her body follows suit, stretching and flying through the air towards the capitol.

  All of the merpeople are doing the same. Turning into strands and whipping past us. People scream. There are gunshots.

  “Follow them!” Alisa shouts.

  Mr. Green grabs for her but she’s too fast. “Alisa, no!”

  So we follow, joining the rush of flying merpeople strands. They’re all around us and it’s hard to see anything past the ropey blurs, so we just keep running. We cross a street. Traffic has stopped. There’s lots of honking. I dodge around a car and continue up onto another section of the mall, more green grass. I think we get about halfway down it when the strands of merpeople ahead of us start to thin out.

  Alisa skids to a stop, so the rest of us do, too. A merperson bonks me on the back of the head before curving around me. It turns downward and disappears into the grass. No, not into the grass, into whatever artifact is lying in the grass. It’s impossible to see it, there are too many of the creatures being sucked back in.

  We make our way to one side, out of the path, and get a clearer view. There must have been thousands of the merpeople, and all of them are returning to their limbo ocean at once.

  “Clear the area! Step away from the disturbance!”

  Soldiers are beginning to surround this area of the mall. They’re some distance away still, but they’ve got assault rifles so they don’t need to be all th
at close to be intimidating.

  The last of the merpeople streaks flies into the grass.

  “Nobody move!” Mr. Green shouts. He throws his arms out, as if to shield us all.

  “Oh!” Mrs. Deng cries out. “Oh! They’re going to shoot us! Are they going to shoot us?”

  Lily takes a step towards her but then stops. “Mom, don’t have a panic attack! We’ll get out of this!”

  Nate can’t help himself. He runs to the spot in the grass where the blurs disappeared. “A shell!” He holds it up. It’s a plain old clamshell, kind of bluish-gray.

  It disappears from his hand. He fumbles with nothing for a moment, thinking he dropped it, before realizing. “Shonda’s here!”

  Mrs. Wollard points down the mall, towards the capitol. “There! By the pool! It’s the Common King, with a young black girl.”

  “You can see that far?” I ask.

  “Wolves see farther than humans.” She gasps. “Oh! They’re gone!”

  “On the ground!” The soldiers advance from all sides, guns pointed at us. “Hands behind your heads!”

  Twenty-one

  “Zane!” Alisa shouts.

  “Hang on!” he replies. “This’ll be bumpy!”

  A dark shadow appears beneath my feet. I fall through blackness and one of my legs hits a chair. It kicks out from under me and I hit cement. Cries and groans and thuds sound all around me.

  “Sorry!” Zane runs around, trying to check on everyone at once. “Sorry! I was afraid they’d shoot if we ran for a portal so I made one underneath us but it meant I had to put the other end up in the air! Sorry, sorry!”

  We’re in the main room in the cellar, where they cast the spell. Zane must have chosen it because it has more empty space than the one with the folding table. I just landed in an unlucky spot. Most everybody else landed on either bare floor or piles of clothes.

  The Liefers are here, Mr. Liefer lying on the cot, and Mrs. Liefer seated next to him. They look surprised at our sudden arrival. Kenny’s here too, curled up in the corner, barely acknowledging us. Yasu runs from person to person, snuffling excitedly.

  “Where did you go?” Mrs. Liefer asks. “Everyone disappeared at once. We were worried.”