Lord of Monsters

by John Claude Bemis

  The sound of the monsters swelled like a storm. The bright tropical skies darkened ominously as the howling, darting forms surrounded the ship.

  “Get ready!” Mezmer cried.

  A drake swooped down, dropping a cobra-headed naga onto the deck, followed by several ghouls who leaped off skeletal birds. The knights charged, clashing swords with the landing monsters. Lazuli threw out a hand, sending a gust of wind into the naga, who flipped over the railing.

  Cannons erupted, not with flames, but now with the hiss of projectile nets that flung out, encircling clusters of monsters. Cables attaching the nets to winches spooled out, until the monsters dropped beneath the ship’s hull in bundles.

  More monsters were landing on the decks. Mezmer’s orders cut through the mayhem.

  “Don’t hide behind your shields, darlings. Fight! Sop, drive off that nasty toad that just landed at the stern. Nice jab, Pini. You really are getting quite vicious with that horn! Kataton, behind you! Yes, darling, hold that thing down while Wumble binds him! Here comes another…”

  Mobs of gnomes had tied up several of the attacking monsters, but more kept coming. Lazuli spied a creature that seemed like nothing more than a green-skinned maiden slithering over the railing. It hardly looked threatening, but as Lazuli hesitated, the creature opened its mouth, revealing a mass of long, foul teeth. Its face morphed into something misshapen and hideous. Its nails grew into ragged black talons.

  Lazuli summoned a gale to blast the thing away. But the creature screamed—the force of its wailing cut through the elemental wind and sent Lazuli tumbling back. The creature launched at her, snapping that mouth of hideous teeth.

  But when it bit down, it found the pole of Mezmer’s spear in its jaws.

  “Get back, darling!” Mezmer shouted.

  Lazuli scrambled to her feet. The creature splintered Mezmer’s spear and rounded its face toward her.

  Lazuli reached for the pouch at her belt holding the Sands of Sleep. She’d only need a little. But before she could pull loose the string, the creature wailed once more. The blast picked Lazuli and Mezmer up off their feet, sending them skidding against the gangway hatch.

  “Your Majesty,” Mezmer said, reaching for Lazuli.

  “I’m fine,” Lazuli said, shaking off the dizziness.

  The aleya shot at the wailing creature, chiming angrily and spinning around its face to distract it from her prester.

  “But you won’t be for long,” Mezmer said, pulling Lazuli to her feet. “None of us will be. There are too many monsters.”

  Wini and her sisters joined the aleya, surrounding the wailing creature and driving it toward a group of gnomes with coils of rope in their shaking hands. But the knights were outnumbered. More monsters kept coming.

  And with a heavy thump, a great batwinged lion with a midnight-blue face and a barbed tail landed on the quarterdeck. Lazuli recognized her immediately—the manticore from the banquet.

  “We’ve got to get belowdecks,” Lazuli said to Mezmer.

  The fox shouted, “Pull back, my glorious knights!”

  The gnomes flooded down first. Kataton had lost his ax, but had begun using Goliath instead, ramming him against the monsters to defend the others as Lazuli and her knights retreated.

  Once they were below, Lazuli ordered the others behind her. She opened the pouch with the Sands of Sleep and dug out a handful. A mob of monsters was pushing its way through the hatch. Lazuli scattered Sands across them and instantly the monsters collapsed in a heap, their bodies blocking the door. Snarls and shoves came from behind the sleeping pile as the monsters on deck tried to get past.

  “That might hold them back for now,” Lazuli said to Mezmer.

  Cinnabar appeared through a trapdoor in the floor. “Your Majesty, we’ve exhausted our nets, and unfortunately they’ve done little good. The smolder spirits burned through the ropes. I think they’re starting to set alight the hull.”

  Glass shattered next to them. A skeletal bird pecked its beak through the window. Several gnomes squeaked, along with the aleya.

  Sop leaped forward. His sword cracked against the enormous bird’s gruesome beak. The creature croaked and pulled back. But a moment later they heard wood crunch.

  “It’s pecking through the planks!” Cinnabar growled.

  Up at the gangway hatch, Mezmer, Kataton, and Goliath had their shoulders against the sleeping monsters, desperate to hold back the monsters trying to push their way inside.

  Chief Muckamire squeezed his way through the tide of bodies to reach Lazuli. “They’re tearing the ship apart, Your Majesty! Maybe we should surrender.”

  Cinnabar narrowed his yellow eyes. “I doubt these monsters are interested in us surrendering, Chief Muckamire.”

  “Then what should we do?” the gnome lord cried.

  Lazuli looked around at the gnomes and her knights. They were trapped and hopelessly out of options.

  “The monsters are retreating,” Lord Smoldrin gasped.

  On the steps of the palace, Sapphira watched the monsters with the barest hint of a smile forming at the corners of her lips. The others, with their faces turned in puzzlement to the horde flying away, might not have seen. But Pinocchio had.

  He wrestled against the griffin’s hold. Despite his automa strength, he was twisted at such an angle—arms pinned by his sides, knees locked together—that he couldn’t get enough leverage to push the griffin off.

  “Lazuli!” Maestro squeaked in his ear.

  “It’s Prester Lazuli’s ship!” Pinocchio shouted. “The monsters left because they’ve spotted it. They’re attacking her!”

  “My high nobles,” Sapphira said, “do either of you see a ship?”

  Raya Piscus shook her head in her sloshing shroud. Lord Smoldrin, however, said, “But what made those explosions? Something drew them up there. They’re attacking…something.”

  “They are monsters—creatures of chaos and mayhem,” Sapphira said. “Whatever has attracted their attention won’t interest them for long. They’ll be back and I want all my archers ready. This time we show no mercy.”

  Pinocchio grunted beneath Quila. He had to help Lazuli. His father and all his friends were up there being attacked. The griffin dug her lion claws deeper into the wood of his legs, grasped her talons more tightly around his arms.

  “But first, Captain Rion,” Sapphira said, turning back toward Pinocchio. “Have your griffin finish with the puppet.”

  Rion nodded at Quila. The griffin locked her powerful hooked beak onto the sides of Pinocchio’s face and began to tug.

  Maestro gave a terrified squeal. “Let go of him, you overgrown chicken!”

  Pinocchio grunted, fighting to get an arm or a leg free. He could feel the gears in his neck straining under the griffin’s pull.

  How could they so callously do this to him? But in their eyes, Pinocchio was a thing, not a person—something foreign and despised, something to simply be disassembled and discarded.

  Any moment, he felt as if his head would come free. He squeezed his eyes shut.

  Then all the pressure, all the force of the huge griffin, was gone. Pinocchio thought his head must have come loose and now he could no longer feel his body. But his head wasn’t in her beak. Quila was off of him, tumbling across the steps and scattering the high nobles and Rion and Dr. Nundrum.

  Azi stood over Pinocchio and issued a furious roar. His hide was bloodied, torn, and clawed in places from his fight against the other griffins. He looked absolutely terrifying.

  Maestro clung to Pinocchio’s shirt. “Get on!” he piped.

  Pinocchio grabbed the wyvern’s wing and hoisted himself onto his back. Arrows began raining down, but Azi drew up on his hind legs and beat his wings, carrying them into the sky.

  “Hurry, Azi!” Pinocchio said. “We’ve got to save our prester.”

  Lazuli was trapped in the middle of the galley, surrounded by her knights and the gnomes who were desperately defending her. But monsters were nearly
through the sleeping mass clogging the gangway and were breaking through the windows and walls. She shut her eyes, holding Master Geppetto’s hand, readying herself for…

  A high, piercing screech cut through the howls up above.

  The monsters around them froze. “Azi?” one of them murmured. They looked at one another curiously.

  In the silence that had fallen, a voice carried from up on deck. “…Khora, call them off!”

  Lazuli knew that voice! And as Geppetto’s mouth fell open, she knew he recognized it as well.

  “Pinocchio?” she breathed. “He’s…alive?”

  The monsters began drawing back through the holes. Lazuli couldn’t wait any longer. She pointed at the pile of sleeping monsters in the hatch doorway. “Get them out of the way!”

  Mezmer, Kataton, Sop, and Goliath began pulling the monsters, dragging them by arms and legs until an opening was cleared. Lazuli clambered through into the bright sunlight on deck.

  The others were scrambling out behind her. Shielding her eyes, Lazuli was struck first by the terrible state of the decks. Rails had been torn away. Boards splintered. Most of the sails hung in tatters. Cinnabar gave a distraught whimper.

  Mezmer and her knights surrounded Lazuli, taking defensive positions, although many were badly injured. Monsters clung to every side of the ship, but they hardly seemed to notice Lazuli or her defenders. Their gazes were fixed on a wyvern hovering several yards off the stern.

  The midnight-blue manticore was facing the wyvern, their wings beating in alternating time.

  Lazuli shook her head in disbelief. Pinocchio was an automa and yet his eyes were ablaze with determination that no automa could ever have shown. Stranger still, he was sitting on the wyvern’s back. Was she really seeing this? Had he tamed the monster? And why weren’t the other monsters tearing Pinocchio apart, as they had the ship?

  “Azi was dead,” the manticore hissed. “How can this be? I saw the last of his heart’s blood spill. And yet…you saved him?”

  Pinocchio nodded. “And now Azi has saved me.”

  The wyvern made a low croak at Pinocchio: “Twice.”

  “Well, now,” Pinocchio said, “that first time you dropped me, so really—”

  “How have you done this?” The manticore narrowed her jade-green eyes.

  Pinocchio shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t even know how I’m this way….It doesn’t matter. I do know that you are no longer the real traitors to Abaton. The warden is. Your warden is the real monster!”

  Lazuli blinked. Had Pinocchio discovered who the warden was?

  “We are monsters too,” the manticore replied.

  “Only if you believe you are,” Pinocchio said. “Khora, you and the others were made to believe that, by Diamancer and by how your kind were treated all those centuries ago. You claim you only like to destroy, but I saw your faces when the mists parted. Don’t you want to be part of Abaton again?”

  Lazuli couldn’t believe Pinocchio was offering to free these traitors. And more so, she couldn’t believe that he was able to hold the monsters at bay with only his words. While many of the monsters looked impatient, many others were listening, especially the manticore Khora.

  “The warden promised we would not have to return to the Mist,” Khora said. “We would never return to our prison.”

  Lazuli drew back with surprise at the realization that the Mist was the prison.

  “You trust her promises?” Pinocchio asked.

  Many of the monsters gave low growls. Khora curled her lip, showing her fangs.

  “Prester John spared your lives after Diamancer’s Rebellion,” Pinocchio said. “He covered you in the Sands of Sleep and locked you in the prison until the time came that you were ready to repent for your treason. Today is that day! You aren’t monsters. You’re Abatonians, like the rest of us. Today you can win your freedom.”

  “You cannot give us our freedom, wooden boy,” the manticore said. “Your promise is empty. You are not our prester.”

  Hard as it was for Lazuli to comprehend, Pinocchio seemed to feel something for these monsters. Hadn’t that always been Pinocchio’s way? From the arachnobats of the Upended Forest to Gragl and her barnacle people in the belly of the Deep One, Pinocchio was able to see them not as monstrous, but as they really were. As a prester should.

  “But he could be!” Lazuli shouted. “He could be your prester!”

  Khora brought her narrowed green eyes around to Lazuli.

  “He’s just a lad of lumber, a timber tot.” A ghoul laughed from the back of his darting bat. “Nothing more.”

  “He is your prester,” Lazuli said firmly.

  “He does not have the Ancientmost Pearl,” Khora said. “And neither do you, daughter of Prester John.”

  “Enough talky-talky,” one of the drakes growled. “Let us destroy something, Khora.”

  Khora did not reply, her eyes wandering between Pinocchio and Lazuli.

  “The warden ordered us to destroy the ship,” a cobra-headed naga hissed. “We should finish it, so we can get to demolishing the Moonlit Court!”

  “Yes! Yes!” others cheered.

  Lazuli knew that Khora must be weighing Pinocchio’s words, but she could read nothing from the manticore’s dark expression to give her any assurance.

  “If you won’t help me,” Pinocchio said, “that is your choice. But I won’t allow you to harm Lazuli or any aboard this ship.”

  Many of the monsters laughed.

  “Don’t listen to him, Khora,” a smolder spirit called. “We saw the warden holding the Ancientmost Pearl. She has the powers of the prester. He can do nothing to stop us.”

  Lazuli startled at those words. The warden had the Pearl? But no, that couldn’t be. Her aunt had the Pearl….

  “I don’t know what powers you possess,” Khora said, staring fiercely at Pinocchio, “but you brought Azi back to us. You returned his life.”

  The wyvern cast his writhing neck back at Pinocchio.

  “It is for that I will honor your request,” Khora said. “We have had enough fun here. We have stopped their ship from reaching the Moonlit Court as the warden commanded.”

  Several of the monsters grumbled.

  Khora gnashed her teeth at them. “I say we have done enough! It is time to move our revelry to the Moonlit Court. Azi! You will come with us. Leave the wooden boy.”

  The wyvern gave a weak croak. But Pinocchio patted his neck and Azi swooped past Khora, landing on the deck of the Lionslayer, where Pinocchio leaped off.

  One by one, the monsters clinging to the sides of the ship let go, taking to the skies. Khora was the last to follow. She gave Pinocchio an inscrutable look before throwing out her wings and flapping toward the Moonlit Court.

  Geppetto rushed at Pinocchio, taking hold of his face and drinking in the sight of him nearly nose to nose. “My boy! My boy! Is this true?” He engulfed his son in a fierce hug.

  Mezmer, Sop, and the others pressed in, reaching for Pinocchio, seeming to need to touch him to believe he was real.

  Lazuli forced her way through the throng. “You’re really alive!” Joy shot through her as she said the words, barely believing they were true.

  Pinocchio smiled around at all his friends, but then the smile faltered as cries and screams rose from the Moonlit Court. The palace was under attack once more.

  Lazuli suddenly remembered what Khora had said about the warden. “Pinocchio, how did the warden get the Pearl from my aunt?”

  Pinocchio looked at her with confusion. “But…don’t you know? Your aunt…she’s the warden.”

  Lazuli felt her knees start to buckle. Pinocchio grabbed her by the arm. Her head was swimming, fighting against the words Pinocchio had spoken. They couldn’t be true. Not her aunt. She wasn’t the warden.

  “You’re wrong,” she murmured.

  Pinocchio shook his head as if he wished for all the world he didn’t have to say the words. “She is. I saw Lady Sapphira in the prison, spe
aking—”

  “No,” Lazuli choked.

  “She’s the warden,” Pinocchio said. “All along, she’s the one who’s been working against us. The attack at the banquet. The trap at the pyramid.” He waved a hand toward the Moonlit Court. “All this! It’s part of her plan to become the prester.”

  Lazuli squeezed her eyes shut, shaking her head. When her aunt had taken the Pearl from Pinocchio and spoken so pitilessly about how she’d gotten rid of him, Lazuli hadn’t wanted to believe she could be capable of such deceit. She’d thought her aunt hadn’t understood about Pinocchio—that she’d simply done this terrible act for what her aunt believed was a good reason.

  Lazuli looked at Pinocchio through tear-blurred eyes.

  “I’m sorry, Lazuli,” Pinocchio said. “I tried to tell them. I reached the palace and tried to explain that…But I failed. They wouldn’t believe me.” He looked at his wooden hands with frustration. “But why would they? They saw what I am.”

  Cries carried up from the palace, along with the sounds of breaking stone. Lazuli looked away from the white tower rising up from the jungle surrounded by swarming, swooping monsters. She couldn’t bear to watch. “Is there no way to stop this?”

  “It will stop soon,” Pinocchio said. “Lady Sapphira doesn’t intend for the palace to be destroyed. She just wants to frighten everyone, and make it seem like she saved her people—”

  An explosion sounded. Lazuli pressed against the railing with the others. Several more bright explosions flashed in the sky, sending monsters plummeting into the gardens.

  Lazuli strained her eyes to see what was happening, but Sop, who always saw the best with his one good eye, said, “Exploding arrows. They’re using some sort of exploding arrows. Now, where did they get those?”

  “Thunderseeds,” Lazuli murmured. Of course, from the orchards of the Mist Cities. “My aunt doesn’t intend to send the monsters back to the prison,” she said. “She told me as much, although I was too foolish to understand completely at the time…”