‘Alcatraz!’ he exclaimed. He reached out an arm and grabbed Australia, giving her a hug as well. ‘You guys have to read the paper I wrote about Hushlander bartering techniques and advertising methodology! It’s so exciting!’
Sing, you see, was an anthropologist. His expertise was Hushland cultures and weaponry, though, fortunately, this time he didn’t appear to have any guns strapped to his body. The sad thing is, most people I’ve met in the Free Kingdoms – particularly my family – would consider reading an anthropological study to be exciting. Somebody really needs to introduce them to video games.
Sing finally released us, then turned to Grandpa Smedry and gave a quick bow. ‘Lord Smedry,’ he said. ‘We need to talk. There has been trouble in your absence.’
‘There’s always trouble in my absence,’ Grandpa Smedry said. ‘And a fair lot of it when I’m here too. What’s it this time?’
‘The Librarians have sent an ambassador to the Council of Kings,’ Sing explained.
‘Well,’ Grandpa Smedry said lightly, ‘I hope the ambassador’s posterior didn’t get hurt too much when Brig tossed him out of the city.’
‘The High King didn’t banish the ambassador, my lord,’ Sing said softly. ‘In fact, I think they’re going to sign a treaty.’
‘That’s impossible!’ Bastille cut in. ‘The High King would never ally with the Librarians!’
‘Squire Bastille,’ Draulin snapped, standing stiffly with her hands behind her back. ‘Hold your place and do not contradict your betters.’
Bastille blushed, looking down.
‘Sing,’ Grandpa Smedry said urgently. ‘This treaty, what does it say about the fighting in Mokia?’
Sing glanced aside. ‘I . . . well, the treaty would hand Mokia over to the Librarians in exchange for an end to the war.’
‘Debating Dashners!’ Grandpa Smedry exclaimed. ‘We’re late! We need to do something!’ He immediately dashed across the rooftop and scrambled down the stairwell.
The rest of us glanced at one another.
‘We’ll have to act with daring recklessness and an intense vibrato!’ Grandpa Smedry’s voice echoed out of the stairwell. ‘But that’s the Smedry way!’
‘We should probably follow him,’ I said.
‘Yeah,’ Sing said, glancing about. ‘He just gets so excited. Where’s Lord Kazan?’
‘Isn’t he here?’ Australia said. ‘He sent the Hawkwind back for us.’
Sing shook his head. ‘Kaz left a few days ago, claiming he’d meet back up with you.’
‘His Talent must have lost him,’ Australia said, sighing. ‘There’s no telling where he might be.’
‘Uh, hello?’ Grandpa Smedry’s head popped out of the stairwell. ‘Jabbering Joneses, people! We’ve got a disaster to avert! Let’s get moving!’
‘Yes, Lord Smedry,’ Sing said, waddling over. ‘But where are we going?’
‘Send for a crawly!’ the elderly Oculator said. ‘We need to get to the Council of Kings!’
‘But . . . they’re in session!’
‘All the better,’ Grandpa Smedry said, raising a hand dramatically. ‘Our entrance will be much more interesting that way!’
3
Having royal blood is a really big pain. Trust me, I have some very good sources on this. They all agree: Being a king stinks. Royally.
First off, there are the hours. Kings work all of them. If there’s an emergency at night, be ready to get up, because you’re king. Inconvenient war starting in the middle of the play-offs? Tough. Kings don’t get to have vacations, potty breaks, or weekends.
Instead, they get something else: responsibility.
Of all the things in the world that come close to being crapaflapnasti, responsibility is the most terrible. It makes people eat salads instead of candy bars, and makes them go to bed early of their own free choice. When you’re about to launch yourself into the air strapped to the back of a rocket-propelled penguin, it’s that blasted responsibility that warns you that the flight might not be good for your insurance premiums.
I’m convinced that responsibility is some kind of psychological disease. What else but a brain malfunction would cause someone to go jogging? The problem is, kings need to have responsibility like nothing else. Kings are like deep, never-ending wells of responsibility – and if you don’t watch out, you may get tainted by them.
The Smedry clan, fortunately, realized this a number of years back. And so they did something about it.
‘We did what?’ I asked.
‘Gave up our kingdom,’ Grandpa Smedry said happily. ‘Poof. Gone. Abdicated.’
‘Why did we do that?’
‘For the good of candy bars everywhere,’ Grandpa Smedry said, eyes twinkling. ‘They need to be eaten, you see.’
‘Huh?’ I asked. We stood on a large castle balcony, waiting for a ‘crawly,’ whatever that was. Sing was with us, along with Bastille and her mother. Australia had stayed behind to run an errand for Grandpa Smedry, and my father had disappeared into his rooms. Apparently, he couldn’t be bothered by something as simple as the impending fall of Mokia as a sovereign kingdom.
‘Well, let me explain it this way,’ Grandpa Smedry said, hands behind his back as he looked out over the city. ‘A number of centuries ago, the people realized that there were just too many kingdoms. Most were only the size of a city, and you could barely go for an afternoon stroll without passing through three or four of them!’
‘I hear it was a real pain,’ Sing agreed. ‘Every kingdom had its own rules, its own culture, its own laws.’
‘Then the Librarians started conquering,’ Grandpa Smedry explained. ‘The kings realized that they were too easy to pick off. So they began to band together, joining their kingdoms into one, making alliances.’
‘Often, that involved weddings of one sort or another,’ Sing added.
‘That was during the time of our ancestor King Leavenworth Smedry the Sixth,’ Grandpa continued. ‘He decided that it would be better to combine our small kingdom of Smedrious with that of Nalhalla, leaving the Smedrys free of all that bothersome reigning so that we could focus on things that were more important, like fighting the Librarians.’
I wasn’t sure how to react to that. I was the heir of the line. That meant if our ancestor hadn’t given up the kingdom, I’d have been directly in line for the throne. It was a little bit like discovering that your lottery ticket was one number away from winning.
‘We gave it away,’ I said. ‘All of it?’
‘Well, not all of it,’ Grandpa Smedry said. ‘Just the boring parts! We retained a seat on the Council of Kings so that we could still have a hand in politics, and as you can see, we have a nice castle and a large fortune to keep us busy. Plus, we’re still nobility.’
‘So what does that get us?’
‘Oh, a number of perks,’ Grandpa Smedry said. ‘Call-ahead seating at restaurants, access to the royal stables and the royal silimatic carrier fleet – I believe we’ve managed to wreck two of those in the last month. We’re also peerage – which is a fancy way of saying we can speak in civil disputes, perform marriage ceremonies, arrest criminals, that sort of thing.’
‘Wait,’ I said. ‘I can marry people?’
‘Sure,’ Grandpa Smedry said.
‘But I’m only thirteen!’
‘Well, you couldn’t marry yourself to anyone. But if somebody else asked you, you could perform the ceremony. It wouldn’t do for the king to have to do all of that himself, you know! Ah, here we are.’
I glanced to the side, then jumped as I saw an enormous reptile crawling along the sides of the buildings toward us. Like a spider crawling across the front of a fence.
‘Dragon!’ I yelled, pointing.
‘Brilliant observation, Smedry,’ Bastille noted from beside me.
I was too alarmed to make an amazing comeback. Fortunately, I’m the author of this book, so I can rewrite history as I feel necessary. Let’s try that again.
Ahem.<
br />
I glanced to the side, whereupon I noticed a dangerous scaly lizard slithering its way along the sides of the buildings, obviously bent on devouring us all.
‘Behold!’ I bellowed. ‘’Tis a foul beast of the netherhells. Stand behind me and I shall slay it!’
‘Oh, Alcatraz,’ Bastille breathed. ‘Thou art awesomish and manlyish.’
‘Lo, let it be such,’ I said.
‘Don’t be alarmed, lad,’ Grandpa Smedry said, glancing at the reptile. ‘That’s our ride.’
I could see that the wingless, horned creature had a contraption on its back, a little like a gondola. The massive beast defied gravity, clinging to the stone faces of the buildings, kind of like a lizard clinging to a cliff – only this lizard was large enough to swallow a bus. The dragon reached Keep Smedry, then climbed up to our balcony, its claws gripping the stones. I took an involuntary step backward as its enormous serpentine head crested the balcony and looked at us.
‘Smedry,’ it said in a deep voice.
‘Hello, Tzoctinatin,’ Grandpa Smedry said. ‘We need a ride to the palace, quickly.’
‘So I have been told. Climb in.’
‘Wait,’ I said. ‘We use dragons as taxis?’
The dragon eyed me, and in that eye I saw a vastness. A deep, swirling depth, colors upon colors, folds upon folds. It made me feel small and meaningless.
‘I do not do this of my own will, young Smedry,’ the beast rumbled.
‘How long left on your sentence?’ Grandpa Smedry asked.
‘Three hundred years,’ the creature said, turning away. ‘Three hundred years before they will return my wings so that I may fly again.’ With that, the creature climbed up the side of the wall a little farther, bringing the gondola basket into view. A walkway unfolded from it, and the others began to climb in.
‘What’d he do?’ I whispered to Grandpa Smedry.
‘Hum? Oh, first-degree maiden munching, I believe. It happened some four centuries back. Tragic story. Watch that first step.’
I followed the others into the gondola. There was a well-furnished room inside, complete with comfortable-looking couches. Draulin was the last one in, and she closed the door. Immediately, the dragon began to move – I could tell by looking out the window. However, I couldn’t feel the motion. It appeared that no matter which direction the dragon turned or which way was ‘up,’ the gondola occupants always had gravity point the same way.
(I was later to learn that this, like many things in the Free Kingdoms, was due to a type of glass – Orientation Glass – that allows one to set a direction that is ‘down’ when you forge it into a box. Therefore, anything inside the box is pulled in that direction, no matter which way the box turns.)
I stood for a long time, watching out the window, which glowed faintly to my eyes because of my Oculator’s Lenses. After the chaos of the explosion and my near death, I hadn’t really had a chance to contemplate the city. It was amazing. As I’d seen, the entire city was filled with castles. Not just simple brick and stone buildings, but actual castles, with high walls and towers, each one different.
Some had a fairy-tale feel, with archways and slender peaks. Others were brutish and no-nonsense, the type of castles you might imagine were ruled over by evil, blood-thirsty warlords. (It should be noted that the Honorable Guild of Evil Warlords has worked very hard to counter the negative stereotype of its members. After several dozen bake sales and charity auctions, someone suggested that they remove the word evil from the title of their organization. The suggestion was eventually rejected on account of Gurstak the Ruthless having just ordered a full box of embossed business cards.)
The castles lined the streets like skyscrapers might in a large Hushlander city. I could see people moving on the road below – some in horse-drawn carriages – but our dragon continued to crawl lizardlike across the sides of buildings. The castles were close enough that when he came to a gap between buildings, he could simply stretch across.
‘Amazing, isn’t it?’ Bastille asked. I turned, not having realized that she’d joined me at the window.
‘It is,’ I said.
‘It always feels good to get back,’ Bastille said. ‘I love how clean everything is. The sparkling glass, the stonework and the carvings.’
‘I would have thought that coming back would be rough this time,’ I said. ‘I mean, you left as a knight, but have to come back as a squire.’
She grimaced. ‘You really have a way with women, Smedry. Anyone ever told you that?’
I blushed. ‘I just . . . uh . . .’ Dang. You know, when I write my memoirs, I’m totally going to put a better line right there.
(Too bad I forgot to do that. I really need to pay better attention to my notes.)
‘Yeah, whatever,’ Bastille said, leaning against the window and looking down. ‘I guess I’m resigned to my punishment.’
Not this again, I thought, worried. After losing her sword and being reprimanded by her mother, Bastille had gone through a serious funk. The worst part was that it was my fault. She’d lost her sword because I’d broken it while trying to fight off some sentient romance novels. Her mother seemed determined to prove that one mistake made Bastille completely unworthy to be a knight.
‘Oh, don’t look at me like that,’ Bastille snapped. ‘Shattering Glass! Just because I’m resigned to my punishment doesn’t mean I’m giving up completely. I still intend to find out who set me up like this.’
‘You’re sure someone did?’
She nodded, eyes narrowing as she grew decidedly vengeful. I was happy that, for once, her wrath didn’t seem directed at me.
‘The more I’ve thought about it,’ she said, ‘the more the things you said the other week make sense. Why did they assign a freshly knighted girl – on such a dangerous mission? Somebody in Crystallia wanted me to fail – someone was jealous of how fast I’d achieved knighthood, or wanted to embarrass my mother, or simply wanted to prove that I couldn’t succeed.’
‘That doesn’t sound very honorable,’ I noted. ‘A Knight of Crystallia wouldn’t do something like that, would they?’
‘I . . . don’t know,’ Bastille said, glancing toward her mother.
‘I find it hard to believe,’ I said, though I didn’t completely believe that. You see, jealousy is an awful lot like farting. Neither is something you like to imagine a brave knight being involved in, but the truth is, knights are just people. They get jealous, they make mistakes, and – yes – they break wind. (Though, of course, knights never use the term ‘break wind.’ They prefer the term ‘bang the cymbals.’ Guess that’s what they get for wearing so much armor.)
Draulin stood at the back of the room, and – for once – wasn’t standing in a stiff ‘parade rest’ stance. Instead, she was polishing her enormous crystal sword. Bastille suspected her mother had been the one to set her up, as Draulin was one of the knights who gave out assignments. But why would she send her own daughter on a mission that was obviously too hard for her?
‘Something is wrong,’ Bastille said.
‘You mean, aside from the fact that our flying hawk mysteriously exploded?’
She waved an indifferent hand. ‘The Librarians did that.’
‘They did?’
‘Of course,’ Bastille said. ‘They have an ambassador in town and we’re going to stop them from taking over Mokia. Hence, they tried to kill us. Once the Librarians try to blow you up a few dozen times, you get used to it.’
‘Are we sure it was them?’ I asked. ‘One of the rooms exploded, you said. Whose?’
‘My mother’s,’ Bastille replied. ‘We think it might have been from some Detonator’s Glass slipped into her pack before she left Nalhalla. She carried that pack all the way through the Library of Alexandria, and it was set to go off when she got back in range of the city.’
‘Wow. Elaborate.’
‘That’s the Librarians. Anyway, something is bothering my mother. I can tell.’
‘Maybe she’s fee
ling bad for punishing you so harshly.’
Bastille snorted. ‘Not likely. This is something else, something about the sword . . .’
She trailed off and didn’t seem to have anything else to add. A few moments later, Grandpa Smedry waved me toward him. ‘Alcatraz!’ he said. ‘Come listen to this!’
My grandfather was sitting with Sing on the couches. I walked over and sat down next to my grandfather, noting how comfortable the couch was. I hadn’t seen any other dragons like this one crawling across the walls of the city, so I assumed that the ride was a special privilege.
‘Sing, tell my grandson what you’ve been telling me,’ Grandpa Smedry said.
‘Well, here’s the thing,’ Sing said, leaning forward. ‘This ambassador sent by the Librarians, she’s from the Wardens of the Standard.’
‘Who?’ I asked.
‘It’s one of the Librarian sects,’ Sing explained. ‘Blackburn was from the Order of the Dark Oculators, while the assassin you faced in the Library of Alexandria was from the Order of the Scrivener’s Bones. The Wardens of the Standard have always claimed to be the most kindly of the Librarians.’
‘Kindly Librarians? That seems like an oxymoron.’
‘It’s also an act,’ Grandpa Smedry said. ‘The whole order is founded on the idea of looking innocent; they’re really the deadliest snakes in the lot. The Wardens maintain most of the Hushlander libraries. They pretend that because they’re only a bunch of bureaucrats, they’re not dangerous like the Dark Oculators or the Order of the Shattered Lens.’
‘Well, act or not,’ Sing replied, ‘they’re the only Librarians who have ever made any kind of effort to work with the Free Kingdoms, rather than just trying to conquer us. This ambassador has convinced the Council of Kings that she is serious.’
I listened, interested, but not quite sure why my grandfather wanted me to know this. I’m a rather awesome person (have I mentioned that?) but I’m really not that great at politics. It’s one of the three things I’ve no experience whatsoever doing, the other two being writing books and atmospheric rocket-propelled penguin riding. (Stupid responsibility.)
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