“And then this happens—this man at the gateway,” said his dad. “Someone has been keeping an eye on us.”
“I don’t know who it was,” said Mr. Glad, “but I can guess what they wanted. I had been on my way to talk to you about this.”
From his trouser pocket, he pulled a felt bag tied with string. Water dribbled out as he opened it, releasing the crystal onto the table and a pungent waft of the harbor with it.
Finn’s dad threw the latest crystal down beside it.
“Do you know what these are, young man?” asked Mr. Glad, leaning forward over the table at Finn, his matted hair slapping at his neck, his palms open. “Well, I’m pretty sure I do. They’re magic. Of sorts anyhow. The kind that brings badness into this world.”
He picked up one of the crystals, holding it upright between his fingers. He was obviously enjoying this bit of showmanship. “There aren’t many records of this sort of thing appearing on our side of the gateways. Official records anyway. But I’m pretty sure that what I’m holding is not just any crystal, but the very substance that allows the Legends to create a hole between their world and ours.”
“Coronium,” said Finn’s dad. “A lifetime dealing with Legends and I’ve never seen one before.”
“Very few have,” said Mr. Glad. “We’ve known about this substance for years, but it is normally only found on the Infested Side. And now you have a piece all of your own.”
Mr. Glad placed it in front of Finn and sat back again, with a squelch of wetness.
“And you’re sure it’s Coronium?” asked Finn’s dad.
“I believe so,” said Mr. Glad.
“We would have touched on it in your training, Finn,” said his dad. “From what we know, the Legends attach it to the air, snag it there somehow. And once they’ve done that . . .”
“Boom,” said Mr. Glad, spreading his hands. “They open the door and walk on in. They don’t usually knock first.”
“And they don’t usually bring their Coronium with them.”
In the quiet of the kitchen, the last drops of seawater fell from Mr. Glad’s elbows, hitting the floor, plip-plip-plip.
Finn thought back to the encounter at the harbor. “Do you think that’s what I saw at the gateway? Someone getting one of these crystals passed to them?”
“I doubt it,” said his father. “They can’t just pass Coronium through the gateways. At least we don’t think they can. From what we understand, Coronium can only travel through the gateways when attached to living tissue.”
“That’s the theory all right,” said Glad.
They both looked at Finn, and it dawned on him that they were waiting for him to join the dots. He obliged. “Like a Hogboon’s finger.”
“Or a Manticore’s claw,” said his father.
“But why?” asked Finn.
“Maybe that’s not the question, boy,” said Mr. Glad. “Maybe the question is now that we have some, what do we do with them?”
Finn’s dad considered this. “Coronium is powerful and volatile. It can rip through the fabric between entirely separate worlds. Way back, at the beginning, it created catastrophic gateways at random.”
“Ask the dinosaurs about it,” Mr. Glad said to Finn.
“Which means it can be naturally explosive. But it seems that the Legends learned long ago how to control it. To use it to create gateways.”
Mr. Glad rolled a crystal between his fingers. “So the Coronium could be a key. Or a weapon.”
“Could it be a power source?” Finn’s dad asked him.
“Now there’s a thought. Have you told the boy what you’ve been making in that library of yours, Hugo?”
“Not yet.”
“Well, let’s go one better,” said Mr. Glad. “I’m here. He’s here. Neither of us has seen it. Why wait any longer?”
Finn’s father kept his chin tucked into his chest for a few seconds. “Yes, maybe it’s time I showed you,” he said. “It might change your lives, after all.”
23
They stood before the unveiled device.
Mr. Glad gasped with delight.
Finn curled a lip in bafflement.
“Amazing, isn’t it, Finn?” said his dad.
Amazing wasn’t the word Finn would have picked. Haphazard maybe. Or ramshackle. From what he could see, it was a concoction of sheets of metal, buttons, dials, and household appliances ripped out and reused, crowned with a rim of metal dishes running around the device in a rough pattern.
A kitchen timer clung to one side, next to what seemed to be a control panel consisting of a large dial from an old microwave, a keyboard, a particularly chunky light switch, and a small screen that Finn realized was from the computer game they’d picked up at Mr. Glad’s shop. The whole machine was bolted in parts, taped up in others, and, through a window, Finn could see a Desiccator canister at its center, rigged to a mass of wiring.
“It’s beautiful,” said Mr. Glad, circling it.
“What is it?” asked Finn.
“It’s the end of all this,” said his father. “Well, it could—”
“It’s a doomsday device,” interjected Mr. Glad. “Your father’s been coming to me for parts, a little advice, expertise, and such ever since the start, but he has kept this between us because failure would have terrible consequences.”
Finn looked at his father, who shrugged. Finn thought he appeared more casual about the terrible consequences than might be expected.
Mr. Glad continued, stroking the device like it was a pet. “This takes the basic idea of the Desiccator, but, instead of pointing it at one object, it will be aimed in every direction, and instead of shrinking one target it will shrink every Legend that it comes in contact with.”
“So . . .” said Finn. “It’s more like a Desiccator bomb than a gun.”
“Basically,” said his father.
“The idea is that your dad waits for a gateway to open,” said Mr. Glad, “then activates the device and a wave of energy desiccates whatever has come through without even needing to leave the house. Hey presto, no more Legends.”
“At all?”
“That’s right. This device ends the war forever,” said his dad.
“What’s it called?” asked Finn.
“It doesn’t matter,” sighed his father. “Okay, so I don’t have a name for it yet. The Gateway Shutter. The Total Collapser. Whatever. What’s important is that this is the device.”
“Wow. Does it work?”
“The future depends on it,” Finn’s father said quietly.
“All he has to do is find a way to do it without killing everyone in Darkmouth,” continued Mr. Glad.
“That won’t happen,” said Finn’s father. “Well. It shouldn’t happen.”
“Anyway,” said Mr. Glad, “your dad’s been struggling to identify something strong enough to power it. You can’t exactly run it off a car battery. Well, you could, but it would require a grand total of . . . how many, Hugo?”
“Forty-three thousand.”
“Forty-three thousand car batteries. Which would be beyond even me. But these . . .” He held the two crystals in his hand. “These could be the answer. All that power, in something so small. It’s like the atom splitting in a nuclear bomb. You could do some serious damage across a wide area, if you had enough of them.”
Finn was hardly listening, instead preoccupied by the low throb of a nagging headache. “But didn’t you say the crystals could be volatile? That they could just go off on their own?”
“Maybe,” said his father. “Rarely.”
“We’d have to be very unlucky,” said Mr. Glad, trying unsuccessfully to sound reassuring, then abandoning the idea. “But you wouldn’t want to be around if one did go off.”
And with that, as if Finn’s day hadn’t been bad enough, he now knew that he’d be going to bed tonight with a potential bomb tucked away in his underwear drawer.
From the publisher’s introduction
to the final
volume of The Most
Great Lives of the Legend Hunters,
From Ancient Times to the Modern
Day, vol. 25: From Xxogjudqa the
Unpronounceable to Zyta the Last
There have always been concerns that a particularly twisted and motivated Legend Hunter might collaborate with the Legends, becoming a spy or saboteur. But thus far in the history of humankind’s battle with Legends, there have only been three infamous traitors.
First was Rex the Deceiver, a warrior king of many centuries ago whose haul of captured Legends was so unparalleled that his personal zoo, the Garden of Legends, became acknowledged as one of the Seven Wonders of the Legend Hunters’ ancient world.
As his fearsome reputation grew, Legends became reluctant to engage him in battle. Irritated by his enemies’ cowardice, bored by lack of action, and contrary to all orders from the Council of Twelve to sit back and enjoy his success, Rex began to systematically feign defeats in order to encourage Legends to attack again. His plan worked so well that he was ultimately able to trick the Legends into plotting a mass invasion.
Confident he had learned the time and place of the attack, Rex prepared for war. Unfortunately, the Legends invaded a day earlier than he had calculated, catching Rex and his armies so completely unprepared that Rex was in the middle of his traditional prebattle bath when a three-headed Cerberus burst into his bathroom. He was devoured before he had a chance to even grab a towel.
The subsequent battle between humans and Legends lasted for several months and drew in Legend Hunters from around the globe. Among these was the second great traitor of Legend Hunter lore, Erdimon the Selfish.
Erdimon had taken an epic journey across several lands, over mountain ranges and vast rivers, through unfathomable forests and torturous deserts, sustained only by meager rations and a promise of the wealth and glory that awaited all those who fought in the great war for survival.
He got there on the afternoon after the war had ended.
Enraged by this wasted journey, which had cost him his entire fortune, Erdimon stood on the still battlefield and swore revenge on all of those Legend Hunters who had fought on it.
Driven by this furious bitterness, he traveled to Blighted Villages around the world, where he would wait for a gateway to open and then engage in a fight alongside the invading Legend, often hobbling the onrushing Legend Hunter in a surprise ambush.
Erdimon succeeded in killing several Legend Hunters and causing great chaos in their Blighted Villages. His reign of destruction was ended when he miscalculated the odds of one ambush and stumbled, yelling and waving his sword, into an entire extended family of Legend Hunters hosting a gathering of other Legend Hunters from across the land.
The final great traitor was Justin the Obnoxious, whose entry in The Most Great Lives is short, largely because he was, in reality, intensely dislikeable and was almost certainly killed as a result. The traitor thing just sounded like a better excuse.
There has been a long-standing rumor of an imminent entry for a fourth Great Traitor in The Most Great Lives. As publishers, we are in a position to confirm or deny this claim. We’d just prefer not to.
24
On the Infested Side, a small Wolpertinger hurried through bleak corridors with a metal tube clamped between his jaws. This creature looked like someone had tipped a bucket full of creature parts onto a floor and fashioned something from whatever fell out. Antlers. Fangs. Fur. A few feathers. Tiny leather wings stretched across armpits. At a push, you might describe it as rabbitesque, with a hint of reindeer and a sprinkling of vampire. In another time, Wolpertingers had been dispatched to scare the Blighted Villages of Germany. It always required something particularly crazy to scare the Germans.
The Wolpertinger moved as quickly as he could, breaking stride only once, when he tripped on an object that, on quick inspection, turned out to be a skull. He redoubled his intention not to be late, while hoping that the metal tube he was holding did not contain bad news—for bringing bad news to Gantrua was like handing him your own death warrant and asking him to sign on the dotted line.
He did not know what he held, only that it had been deposited through the gateway at the expected place and time. The human fingertips that poked through the hole in the air and pushed the tube across had looked delicious and the Wolpertinger had fought hard to resist the temptation to have a little nibble on them.
He had grabbed the object and pelted through the bare forest, across the fields of sharp scrub, knowing he would not be disturbed en route. No one would dare interrupt the journey of one of Gantrua’s messengers.
He finally reached the hall of fires, where the two brutish Fomorian guards stood in his way. He waved the object at them. One of the giants leaned down to him, a crescent-shaped scar raised on his forehead and a string of drool dancing at the side of his mouth. “No funny business, little Wolpertinger. Or I will rip your eyes from your head and make you watch as I snap every bone in your body one by one.”
“Trom is very creative when it comes to pain,” said the other guard, slowly but sincerely. “He’s very good at his job.”
“It’s more a hobby than a job really,” said Trom, the drool snapping at his chin. “When you love what you do, it makes getting off the floor every morning that much easier. Doesn’t it, Cryf?”
“It does, Trom.”
The Wolpertinger waited, shuffling a little in his eagerness to deliver the message. When their act of intimidation seemed to have satisfied them, the guards stepped slowly aside so that the messenger could finally move forward into the great room where the heat of the cauldrons lining the walls almost blistered his skin.
He scampered toward the plinth, the ends of the soft hair on his back crackling.
“Give it to me,” ordered Gantrua from where he sat, a great sword attached to his waist. One of the guards snatched the tube from the Wolpertinger’s mouth and handed it over.
Opening the canister, Gantrua removed a roll of paper. The messenger looked for a reaction in the deep valleys of Gantrua’s brow as he read the message, but saw only concentration. He could make out no movement in his mouth, which was just barely visible behind the arc of shattered teeth rising from the metal wrapped around his jaw.
Gantrua crushed the canister. “Our spy has reported back. The Minotaur failed to deliver the crystal.”
The Wolpertinger’s eyes were becoming used to the flickering light and he could now make out the outline of a hooded figure, a good deal smaller than Gantrua, stooped near a column behind the plinth.
The figure spoke, his voice thin and brittle. “But the boy?”
“He is there.”
“Then we must send another crystal so that we can wake the sleeping army before it is too late. The invasion from within must commence.”
Gantrua inhaled deeply, his chest swelling so much that his armor moaned as if it was about to split into a thousand fragments. The Wolpertinger waited. He began to worry that he might actually be cooking. A bead of sweat ran down his face and dropped to the ground, making an almost imperceptible splat picked up immediately by Gantrua’s enormous ear and reminding him of the messenger’s presence.
Gantrua lifted the piece of paper in his hand and let the hot air waft it toward the ceiling, where it curled and burst into flames. “Wolpertinger, what do they say out there? What do you hear about the prophecy?”
The Wolpertinger stared, perplexed.
“I am fully aware that your kind are mute. I do not expect an answer. But your eyes tell me what I need to know. The Legends believe it. They fear it. The rumor has spread and they think a mere child will be responsible for closing off the Promised World for the rest of eternity. That our banishment, already insufferable for millennia, will be complete.”
Gantrua stood and walked forward, the sword in its scabbard dragging across the stone floor, its tip screeching and sparking. “But you will also have heard rumors of the great work in the Coronium mines.”
; The Wolpertinger’s knees buckled a little at the mention.
“There is truth in that too.” Gantrua grabbed his sword and eased it from its scabbard, causing the messenger to recoil. But, instead of slashing at him, Gantrua struck down hard on the floor, summoning Trom and Cryf. “The Coronium crystals grow rarer and more precious. What is found comes here. Show him.”
The Fomorians lumbered over to levers that jutted from the wall at the end of each row of flaming cauldrons. Grasping them, they gave each other a nod to synchronize the next move before pulling down hard. It seemed they needed every ounce of their formidable strength to do so.
Throughout the great hall, there was a sound of cogs turning and pulleys creaking. Then the cauldrons pitched forward, dribbling fire over their lips. There was a stutter, followed by a crash, as a single cauldron finally and abruptly tipped over, sending molten splashes to the floor. The Wolpertinger jumped back, grabbing his tail to avoid it doubling as a candle wick.
After a few seconds of awful intensity, the fire burned out. Beneath the gaping mouth of the cauldron lay two crystals.
Gantrua towered over the Wolpertinger. “These crystals are our path. One of them will be a weapon delivered to the Promised World so that we can gut it from the inside out.”
The small messenger felt his hair prickle with anxiety, his feathers stiffen with nervousness, his skin crawl with fear.
“You like the crystals, don’t you?” Gantrua asked. “So choose one.”
Nerves twitching through his freakish clash of body parts, the Wolpertinger selected a crystal, biting on it with his fangs and returning to drop it on the floor in front of Gantrua.
The Fomorian guards moved in. Later, at the expense of more blood than he ever cared to spill again, and sporting a crystal where a beautiful, precious fang had once been, the unfortunate Legend realized he’d never really had any choice at all.
25
“Here, monster boy, I want a word with you!”
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