House of Secrets: Battle of the Beasts

by Columbus, Chris

  But a strange thing happened as the meal went on. Brendan began to enjoy himself again. All he had to do was force himself not to think about his family. It wasn’t easy, but as he spoke to the other people at the table, and they seemed genuinely excited to meet him, and looked at him with sparkling eyes because he was so interesting, he found it easier. The reactions he got from the Romans were the exact opposite of those he got from people like Scott Calurio. People respected him here. And wasn’t that why he had stayed? Hadn’t he argued to his sisters that this was the better life for him? He couldn’t go back on his word.

  At the end of the feast, the conversation turned to music. Several guests were asked to perform a song for the emperor. The performances were out-of-tune, warbly, and operatic. When it was Brendan’s turn to sing, he knew he could outdo everyone. He stood up and began a sing-along of his dad’s favorite song, Bruce Springsteen’s “Glory Days.” He felt a bit melancholy at first, singing something that reminded him so much of his father; Brendan and Dr. Walker had sung “Glory Days” together when it was just the two of them in the car, nobody to judge. But then Brendan remembered: That was a long time ago, in a different time and place. Why should I be missing Dad now? He only thinks about himself these days. I’ll bet he’s still back in San Francisco gambling our money away. Meanwhile, I’m the hottest thing in Rome.

  The Romans loved Brendan’s performance. They applauded wildly, asking him to sing the song again and again. After the fifth performance, which lasted for fifteen minutes, Occipus declared “Glory Days” to be Rome’s new national anthem.

  “You’ll go down in history!” he told Brendan. “A great singer and a great warrior!”

  Then things started getting weird.

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  The feast ended. The guests stumbled out. Brendan tried to exit with Occipus, but a freakishly muscular slave with intricate, gory tattoos grabbed him. The slave pulled Brendan aside.

  “What are you doing?” Brendan asked. “Get your hands off me!”

  “No, no, it’s all right, General,” said Emperor Occipus. “This is Ungil. He’s to escort you to your room.”

  “I thought I’d be staying in the Royal Bedrooms. . . .”

  “Brendan, Brendan,” said the emperor, “you’re to be a great warrior—and great warriors don’t sleep in the Royal Bedrooms.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because great warriors don’t sleep.”

  “Huh?!”

  Ungil grabbed Brendan’s elbow and pulled him out of the Jovian Banquet Hall. The last thing Brendan saw was the emperor waving good-bye. Ungil led him to a winding stone staircase that smelled like burned, rotten eggs. Then he pulled off Brendan’s Roman sandals and threw them away.

  “Hey! Stop! Where are you taking me?” Brendan demanded, but Ungil didn’t answer—and then two more ridiculously muscle-bound slaves approached, holding knives to Brendan’s throat.

  “Keep yer mouth shut, boy,” one of them said.

  Brendan descended the smelly steps. He noticed water seeping out of the walls, dribbling over the sharp stones; the water stank. He must be near some underground sulfur spring. And he was only going deeper.

  The staircase brought Brendan to a hallway from which different bedchambers branched off. But these looked nothing like the Royal Bedrooms that Brendan stayed in the night before. They were small, barred spaces with no beds to speak of, containing large jars for human waste.

  “This is a dungeon!” Brendan protested. Ungil and the slaves laughed as they moved him along.

  The barred rooms seemed empty at first, but as Brendan went past, people called out: “Fresh meat!” “Where’d they find you, at the baths?” One of the cell occupants, a sinewy man with long shaggy hair and a black beard, ran up to the bars and taunted Brendan: “Is this what they call a gladiator these days? A skinny, soft little baby? Go back to yer mother’s milk, sonny!” Some of the others stayed back, restrained by metal cuffs or strapped to wooden beams. Brendan gasped at one man who was hanging upside down, whimpering.

  “Here you go,” Ungil said as he opened the last cell in the corridor. “This’ll make you a gladiator in no time.”

  Brendan squirmed, trying to release himself from Ungil’s grip, which was impossible. “I changed my mind! I’m not a warrior! Let me out! I don’t belong with these people! I’m not like Felix—”

  Ungil slapped him. Brendan jumped back.

  “Felix the Greek was trained by me. And now Occipus wants me to train you. And the emperor’s wish is . . .”

  Ungil let the actions of his fellow slaves finish the sentence. They pulled Brendan inside the cell and turned him upside down, clamping his ankles into manacles that hung from the ceiling.

  “No, no!” Brendan said. “What is this? Is this ‘inverted noggin training’?! You can’t put me through that. I’ll black out!”

  “You’ll die, in fact,” said Ungil, “but we’ll come in and rotate you periodically so the blood doesn’t flood your brain. And you won’t black out. The pain will keep you from doing that.”

  “What pain?” asked a terrified Brendan.

  Ungil reached into a miniature barrel stored in a corner of the cell. He pulled out a handful of stinky soft cheese.

  “What are you—ugggh!” Brendan said.

  Ungil smeared the cheese on his face. Huge soft chunks entered his mouth. The cheese tasted like the bottom of an old compost bin.

  But Ungil wasn’t finished. He and his fellow slaves dug their hands into the barrel and coated Brendan’s entire body with the pungent, repugnant cheese.

  The smell was unbearable; Brendan felt as if he were going to upchuck all twelve courses of his recent meal. But Ungil still wasn’t finished. He tied a blindfold around Brendan’s cheesy, upside-down head; one of the other slaves handed Brendan a short sword.

  “What’s this?” Brendan asked—but he quickly figured it out and started swinging wildly, trying to get the slaves, who laughed. They were out of range.

  “Bring him down!” ordered Ungil.

  A slave pulled a lever on the wall. Brendan was lowered until his hair (which was covered in cheese like the rest of him) just touched the floor. He continued swinging the sword, but hearing the slaves’ laughter, he gave up. He wasn’t there to entertain them.

  “Release the vermin,” Ungil said. One of the slaves hit another lever on the wall.

  Brendan knew what had happened even though he couldn’t see. He remembered Occipus explaining about a “complex system of hydraulics and pulleys”; now he could hear a similar system at work all around him. Panels in the walls slid away. Ungil and his slaves stepped out. The cell door locked. And Brendan heard the chittering of rats.

  An army of them.

  “Why are you doing this?” yelled Brendan.

  “Gladiators need to rely on their speed and accuracy,” said Ungil through the bars. “This is the first part of that training. Cut the rats . . . and not yourself.”

  “But that’s impossible—”

  “Not for a great gladiator,” said Ungil. “Oh, it doesn’t happen overnight. Training like this usually goes on for several weeks—”

  “Several weeks?”

  “Until you can kill the rats without leaving any scratches on your body,” said Ungil, as he and the other slaves exited. “See you in the morning! Good luck.”

  The first rat came up to Brendan’s hair. Brendan swung his sword and missed, hitting the ground, sending up sparks. Other rats seemed to laugh at him: Chee chee chee. An intrepid one climbed up his hair, scaled his face, and went up his chest before it began to eat the cheese nestled around Brendan’s belly button. This made matters worse because Brendan was extremely ticklish; as the rat nibbled, he found himself laughing while slashing wildly. He managed to cut the rat in two, but also nicked the skin above his pelvis. As a giant ra
t started to eat cheese off his eyebrow, he screamed.

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  Meanwhile, a long, long way away, Cordelia, Eleanor, Felix, and Will got a tour of the monastery. They had had a good night’s rest on straw mattresses—or at least, better than they had had the night before, when they slept on a bunch of manuscripts.

  Batan Chekrat was a grand fortress made of rust-colored rock held in place with frozen mud. In the summer, Wangchuk explained, the snow melted, and for two weeks the land was a paradise of grass and butterflies. But even then the frost beasts did not let up. They still demanded their sacrifices, and their appearance was even more horrible in the summer. They molted, losing great patches of hair all over their bodies, like giant mangy dogs.

  Wangchuk showed the kids the monastery kitchen. There they learned that there were 432 monks in the monastery, among them a head chef and two sous chefs. There were seventy-five yaks on the premises as well, kept outside in a walled-off pen that the frost beasts couldn’t reach.

  “Are all these yaks going to be sacrificed to the frost beasts?” Eleanor asked worriedly as they toured the pen, wearing bulky coats that the monks had lent them.

  “We eat them too,” Wangchuk said, petting a giant shaggy yak with big wet eyes. “But right now they’re our pets.”

  Eleanor felt sick. She had learned in school that you needed to respect other people’s cultures, but it was really hard to understand the monks’ customs and eating habits. And although Cordelia and Will and Felix thought yak meat was pretty tasty after breakfast—and were looking forward to more at lunch—Eleanor didn’t. I can’t eat yak sausage and yak meatballs when I think of all those poor yaks staring at me with their big, sad yak eyes! I need to get out of here, she thought, but first I need to learn more about this Door of Ways.

  After lunch, Wangchuk brought them to the monastery’s atrium, which doubled as a library. It was a domed room with rows and rows of ancient books and glass drawers filled with scrolls.

  “Do you have any books about the Door of Ways?” Eleanor asked.

  “Why, of course,” Wangchuk said. “On the top shelf. Over there. But those are sacred documents. Only meant for the eyes of our brotherhood.”

  Eleanor stared, obsessed with learning more. But Wangchuk was ushering everyone out of the library, telling the “traveling warriors” that it was time to see the meditation room.

  This was a large space where monks sat in lotus position every day for hours in complete stillness. The room had a grass floor and warm steam floating through bamboo pipes. It was completely quiet. Inside it, the buzzing of a fly was a momentous event. Cordelia, Eleanor, Will, and Felix joined the meditation. Wangchuk led, instructing everyone to imagine the pain of life as a large red balloon, floating directly above them. With each passing minute, the balloon would float farther and farther upward . . . until it disappeared among the clouds.

  During meditation, one of the monks paced around the room with a bamboo stick, ready to whack anyone on their skulls if they fell asleep. This would have scared Eleanor, except she wasn’t close to falling asleep—she actually loved meditating!

  She found it hard at first; it didn’t make any sense to sit and think about a red balloon. But as Wangchuk instructed her to make her breathing very regular, and to think about each breath, she slowly entered a clear place where she could see the balloon, and could imagine that it really did hold all her crazy thoughts and pain. “Our mind is the sword that cannot cut itself,” Wangchuk said. “I ask you to remove the barrier between your mind and what you are aware of. Banish all thoughts of the past and future. Immerse yourself in the present, in the here and now. Only then will you conquer your pain. Only then will you find enlightenment.”

  Eleanor didn’t understand everything the monk said, but she did realize that she spent a lot of time thinking about her past and future, instead of the present moment. It was only when her breathing was slow and regular, and she was thinking, Breathe, that she suddenly saw how right here and now, she was perfect—she wasn’t hungry (she had found some non-yak tofu paste at lunch); she wasn’t cold; she wasn’t tired; she wasn’t in pain. She missed her parents—but getting them back was something she would do in the future; she wasn’t allowed to think about that now. She was only a body breathing in a room, and she was alive, and that was something to celebrate. The red balloon floated into the sky.

  Cordelia, Will, and Felix had no such luck with their meditations. They immediately fell asleep, and the monk with the bamboo stick came up behind them—

  “Stop,” whispered Wangchuk. “They need their rest if they’re going to face the frost beasts.”

  “But master,” said the monk, “do you really believe that these four have the ability to kill such creatures?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “But every other time you’ve told visitors the traveling-warrior story, the frost beasts have killed them—”

  “Hush! They’ll hear you!”

  “They’re sleeping!”

  “Not that one,” said Wangchuk, pointing at Eleanor.

  The monk with the stick pushed Eleanor’s back. She fell forward, pretending to be asleep.

  “See? She’s out too.”

  “Well, don’t hit them,” Wangchuk said. “These four may truly be the chosen ones.”

  On the floor, Eleanor was no longer picturing a red balloon. She was thinking, Wangchuk’s a liar, and we’re being set up!

  At dinner that night Eleanor had a hard time keeping her mouth shut. She wanted desperately to get a moment alone with her friends and explain to them that Wangchuk wasn’t telling them the whole truth, but she couldn’t get away from the monks. They were constantly shadowing the kids. While they ate, they asked a bunch of overly nice questions about what it must be like to be traveling warriors. Then Wangchuk stood up:

  “Esteemed guests, it is time to see what you will be facing!”

  The monks rose from their seats and started leaving the dining hall, which was filled with soft-splintered benches lined up around huge tables. The kids couldn’t do anything but follow. They climbed a long stone staircase out into the freezing, whipping cold. They were on top of the monastery walls. And they heard a bloodcurdling roar below.

  The noise was almost human, like the sound a person would make if trapped under a pile of collapsed rubble. But it was deeper, and incredibly long—whatever made this noise had huge lungs.

  “Oh my God, guys, look,” said Cordelia. “Down there—”

  Standing directly below them were two frost beasts. The first thing Eleanor noticed were the creatures’ huge hands, which were bunched into shaggy fists, pounding on the walls. The frost beasts were covered in an almost psychedelic color combination of blue, white, brown, black, and gray fur; the only place they didn’t have hair was at the tops of their heads. Their naked scalps steamed where snow melted off them. Presumably they were burning a lot of calories doing what they were doing, which was beating at the walls, scratching, and roaring. Eleanor looked into their mouths, which were bloody-looking Os, filled with giant, pearl-white teeth.

  “They obviously floss,” said Cordelia.

  “With human innards,” said Will.

  The beasts continued to roar and pound against the monastery walls.

  “Look at the tops of their heads,” Cordelia said in fascination. “That spot where they don’t have hair? It almost looks like they have fontanels.”

  “Fontanels?” Eleanor asked. “What’s that?”

  “They’re the soft spots on babies’ heads,” said Cordelia. “When you were a baby, Mom would always freak out if I got close to your head. Because she said if I accidentally pressed on your fontanel, it could really hurt you—oh!”

  Cordelia fell forward as one of the frost beasts hit the monastery wall so hard, the whole building shook. Will caught her and
pulled her back before she could tumble over the side. She immediately checked her pockets and breathed a sigh of relief. She still had the diary.

  “It’s not safe for us to be here!” Cordelia told Wangchuk.

  “Keep watching,” said the head monk.

  “Why? You’re not . . .” Eleanor looked at the gathered monks. “You’re not going to feed them, are you?”

  “Perhaps,” Wangchuk said.

  “Are you going to feed them one of your brothers?”

  “No.”

  “Are you going to throw them one of us?”

  “Of course not!” Wangchuk said. A few of the monks turned away and went over to a hand-drawn elevator that connected to the kitchens below. After heaving on a rope for several minutes, they pulled out a stretcher made of crisscrossed wood that held something huge and moving, covered in a sheet.

  “It’s a yak!” Eleanor said.

  “Of course,” said Wangchuk.

  “But . . . he’s still alive!”

  “Of course. His name is Savir.”

  “He’s got a name? Awwww! That makes it even worse.”

  It took ten monks working in unison to push the struggling and stubborn Savir up and over the wall.

  The two frost beasts caught him in midair.

  Eleanor looked away, hearing a squelch as Savir was torn in two.

  Then the frost beasts walked off together, each carrying a half-a-yak meal.

  “Are they gone?” Eleanor asked.

  “Yes,” said Wangchuk.

  “Are more coming?”

  “Not today. But tomorrow, yes. And they’ll be demanding a human sacrifice then.”

  “How many of these fiends are there?” asked Felix.

  “Fifty.”

  “Fifty?! And how exactly are we supposed to kill them?”

  “We are men of peace,” said Wangchuk. “You are the warriors.”

  Eleanor struggled to hold her tongue: No we’re not! You just made that up!