by Tony Abbott
“No preventing,” said Ming. “No, no!”
“No regretting, either,” said Ving.
We need to stall for time, said Keeah. Neal? Julie? Any thoughts?
Neal became aware of someone kicking his foot. As usual, it was Dumpella.
“Nealie, now’s your chance,” she whispered. “Be the duke. Be Snorfo!”
“Too dangerous,” whispered Max. “Neal will be torn to shreds without his turban.”
Neal gulped. But he knew Dumpella was right. “I have no choice,” he whispered. “I have to slow Gethwing down. I’m going —”
“Wait,” said Julie, holding his arm. “I’m going with you.”
Neal smiled. Thanks. You be Dumpella and I’ll be Snorfo.
Better than the other way around, she said.
Good luck, said Keeah. Dumpella, Max, and I will be with you … invisibly.
With that, she cast a handful of dust over herself and the others, and they faded into the shadows.
Neal felt as though he were starring in the school play and couldn’t remember a single one of his lines. But he puffed up his chest and strode out of the shadows. With Julie by his side, he swaggered up to Gethwing. He shouted in Snorfo’s usual style. “HELLO, dragon! Looks like YOU CAUGHT THE SILLY GENIE BOY!”
Gethwing swiveled his head and brought it inches away from Neal’s nose, which still stung in the spot where he’d struck the vanishing tower.
“Actually,” said the dragon, “I did.”
Actually, you didn’t, Julie said to Neal, even as she curtsied to Gethwing. “O great four-winged terror guy, welcome to our city in a bottle.”
Gethwing’s eyes were as icy as ever. “To conquer Jaffa City, I require the greatest magical devices in Droon. The Moon Medallion is one of those. The complete Medallion!”
Eric needs it, too, Neal said silently.
“Where is the Twilight Star?” asked Gethwing.
Neal knew that Snorfo had the Star in his secret room in the palace tower. “It’s hidden in a SAFE PLACE!” he said.
“The very safest place!” Julie added.
“Show me!” Gethwing boomed, practically knocking them over with his foul dragon breath. “Show me now. Where is it?”
Neal knew he needed to stall the dragon until he could think of a way to stop him. “I hid the Twilight Star … UNDER THE OBELISK!”
And he gestured toward the stone column in the center of the square.
But … , Julie said.
I think I’m having an idea, said Neal.
Go with it! said Julie.
Gethwing growled under his breath. “Hawks, while I retrieve the object, take the genie boy to the dungeon. The worst dungeon in this entire bottle.”
“The worst dungeon … is UP THERE!” Neal said, pointing to the purple tower. “Take the boy … THERE!”
Gethwing smiled. “Good. The genie needs a lesson taught to him. The harsher, the better.”
“Aye, aye,” said Ving.
“Aye, aye, aye!” said Ming.
Ing looked over his shoulder and sniffed.
“Before you TAKE HIM away,” said Neal, “there’s JUST ONE THING!” With care he slipped his turban off of Snorfo’s head and set it on his own. “I LIKE THIS HAT!”
“I’ll bet you do,” said Neffu with a grin.
While Ving and Ming carried the unconscious duke off to the tower, Neal and Julie led the dragon slowly over to the obelisk. A troop of wingwolves followed them.
When they arrived at the column, the dragon turned to Neal. “Show me the Twilight Star, and I shall leave you to your … bottle.”
“THANK you,” said Neal.
“But first,” said Gethwing, eyeing Neffu, then searching the two children’s faces, “let me ask you a tiny question —”
“ASK AWAY!” said Neal.
“How long have you been a genie?”
“Not long,” said Neal. “Only a few …”
Oh, Neal! Julie groaned.
Neal cleared his throat. “I mean … how long have I been what?”
“Impostor!” bellowed Gethwing, his claws sizzling with black sparks. “Zabilac! I knew it was you ever since Neffu placed a certain black jewel on your turban.”
“What?” asked Neal. “She placed a …” Then he remembered Neffu’s strange attack at Silversnow. He tore off his turban, spotted the black jewel, and pulled it off, hurling it to the ground.
Neffu laughed coldly. “Why do you think I came to Silversnow? For the weather?”
Neal groaned. “What a dummy I am!”
“Oh, no,” said Gethwing, his eyes flashing. “A dummy has more sense than you do. Give me the Twilight Star now!”
Everything was happening at once. Neal grew hot and confused and nervous. It was like math class all over again. “No!” he said.
Gethwing slowly shook his gigantic head. “Even a dummy knows not to cross me. Neffu, take the girl! This one’s mine!”
The dragon lunged at him. Neffu lunged at Julie.
Neal felt as if his head would explode. “I — can’t — take — it!” he screamed.
Pulling his turban low on his head, he shouted at the top of his lungs, “STOP!”
And all at once, everything did stop.
Completely, utterly, and totally.
Neal realized he had been holding his breath only when he finally let it go and gulped in a huge lungful of air.
Everyone in the square had stopped moving. Stopped screaming. Stopped breathing.
“Holy cow … ,” he whispered.
Gethwing’s dark shape was completely airborne, leaping at where Neal had been. His great jaws were frozen in a howl, drops of venom hanging at a standstill between his fangs. His eyes were caught in a flash of rage.
“I like you better like this,” Neal mumbled.
Julie was twisted away from Neffu and jumping for the sky, both feet off the ground.
Neffu’s face was frozen in a scowl.
“Typical,” he whispered.
Behind them, the wingwolves were motionless, each one arched in the air, their eyes like black marbles, their wolfen odor frozen around them like a cloud.
“Uck,” he said.
Looking at everyone stopped in midmove, Neal had the tiniest worry that he couldn’t start things going again. Bracing his feet on the ground, he adjusted his turban.
“MOVE!” he shouted.
Sound roared. Gethwing leaped. Julie screamed.
“Okay, STOP!” he cried.
Everything stopped as it had before, like a film caught in midframe.
“Good. Fine,” Neal said.
Using all his strength, he tried to unclamp Gethwing’s grip from the Moon Medallion, but the dragon’s claws were as hard as iron sealed in cement. They wouldn’t budge.
Neal tried again and again. Nothing. He slumped to the ground. “So now what?”
Realizing he needed to ask someone for advice, but finding no one around, he had a conversation with himself.
“I need help.”
“I sure do.”
“But I’m already a genie. Where do genies get help?”
“From other genies?”
“Good idea!”
“I wouldn’t have thought of it without you.”
“Gosh, you’re the best.”
“No, you are.”
And that was how Neal decided to call on the genies. Searching his scroll, he discovered the ancient spell used to find the other Genies of the Dove. He uttered the spell.
“Salla-malla-palla-boo!”
With the last syllable still on his lips, he felt everything spin as if he stood at the center of a merry-go-round that revolved faster and faster. Every color and shape blurred together like watercolors left out in the rain, until all of a sudden — thunk! — the spinning stopped, and Neal found himself in a gigantic cave. The ceiling seemed as far away as the sky and the walls no nearer than a distant horizon.
“Genies?” he whispered.
“Hush,” said a voice Neal recognized instantly as belonging to his old friend Hoja. “You found us in the legendary Cave of Night. We’re on a mission. To help you!”
“Where is the Cave of Night?” asked Neal.
“No one knows,” said Anusa from somewhere behind him. “This is a shadow vision of a place only Gethwing himself knows.”
“It is the place of his birth,” said Fefforello.
“Gethwing tricked me into bringing him right to Ut,” Neal told them. “And now he has the Moon Medallion!”
“That is why we’re here,” said Fefforello, flicking a handful of light crystals into the air.
Now able to see, Neal zigzagged carefully across the rocky floor of the cave and pressed his way forward as if familiar with it.
“Have I ever done this before?” he asked.
“Genies often feel this way,” said Jyme. “When you travel through time as much as we do, what is done for the very first time often seems quite familiar.”
The twin babies Stream and River floated overhead. They hadn’t learned to walk yet.
“Mibble-dibble?” they asked.
“True, we are close,” said Anusa.
All at once, a sound echoed in the darkness behind them. Another. And another. And the floor came alive with the sound of wet slithering. Small, featureless creatures with long thin arms, smooth skin, and faces as pale as the moon rose from the cave floor.
“Goblins!” hissed Anusa.
“But if this is a vision,” said Neal, “how can the goblins bother us?”
“They are shadow goblins,” said Hoja. “They live only in dreams and visions. Gethwing has armed his secret cave with great defenses!”
“We’re too close to stop now!” said Jyme. “We’ll deal with the goblins. Zabilac, go. Learn Gethwing’s secret —”
As more and more goblins slithered out of the deep shadows, Neal turned and ran.
“Zabilac, hurry!” said Anusa.
Pushing ahead into the darkness, Neal felt a separation, like the place where two halves of a curtain meet. He pushed through. The space beyond was even darker than the cave, but he made out a large stone wheel, three feet thick, lying flat on the ground, turning soundlessly.
Going still, he watched the wheel turn and turn until another voice sounded in his ear.
The voice was so familiar, Neal was almost certain it was his own, only it came from outside him. Yet it was his own voice.
Turning, Neal saw himself, older, much older, and he knew that it was Zabilac, the old genie he would someday become.
Or had once been.
He wasn’t quite sure.
“Hey,” said his older self.
“Hey,” Neal replied.
Even grown-up and old, Zabilac still had thick blond hair, though it was tinged with a few strands of gray — as well as green, violet, and red! The enormous blue turban — the same one Neal had on his head right then —was perched at a jaunty angle like a giant blueberry, although it was strung with many more jewels, each one glowing brightly.
Man, I look good! thought Neal.
I can hear you, by the way, said the older man. But thanks.
Neal laughed. “What is that wheel thing?”
Zabilac frowned. “This is Gethwing’s life wheel. As long as it turns, the dragon lives.”
“It’s huge,” said Neal. “It must be ten feet from the outside to the middle.”
“Right, the diameter,” Zabilac whispered.
Neal turned. “Wait. I know that word.”
Zabilac smiled. “Julie told us, don’t you remember? To find out how big around the stone is, you multiply the diameter — ten feet — by pi, which is 3.1416.”
“Julie was trying to explain it!” said Neal. “I can’t believe there’s another kind of pie.”
Zabilac kept smiling. “So what is the circumference of the wheel — the length around the entire edge?”
Neal went over the numbers in his head. “Ten feet times 3.1416 … is 31.42 feet?”
“That’s how pi works,” said Zabilac.
“Pie,” said Neal.
“Yes,” said Zabilac, as if reading Neal’s thoughts. “But there’s no e at the end.”
Neal smiled. “Got it.”
But his smile faded as the wheel turned and turned and turned. “I think it’s getting faster. What does that mean?”
“That Gethwing’s not nearly done,” said Zabilac. “Not for a long time.”
Neal stepped to the wheel. The instant he let his fingers touch the turning stone, his brain flashed with a thousand images, and his ears roared with the howl of the dragon.
Neal saw a silver medallion, a girl swimming in a lake, a trio of wizards flying in the morning sky. He saw his friends as he first knew them, young and small, and then as if decades had gone by, and they were old and stumbling, and finally gray and still. He saw a thorn-haired queen laughing in a wreath of flames, and a blue serpent becoming a blue airplane in the blink of an eye. He saw a small child sitting in a silver tree and then another tree growing from a tomb and then hundreds of pilkas stampeding across the desert and a single candle’s flame flickering in the night.
Finally, he saw a gleam of silver light fall from a great distance upon that turning wheel, and Gethwing himself and a boy in purple armor by his side. He heard the chanting of words as of a prophecy, words and words and words. Seven hands reached toward one another in the darkness and came to rest upon that wheel.
Then he saw nothing.
With a force like a powerful wave, Neal was tossed back from the stone wheel, and the vision was gone as quickly as it had come.
“Whoa!” said Neal, staggering to his feet. “What was all of that?”
Zabilac searched the boy’s face before answering. “That, Neal, is your power.”
“I saw seven hands on the wheel,” Neal said. “What does it mean?”
“Seven people must join to stop the wheel. Only then will Gethwing be defeated.”
Neal wondered if his own hand was among the seven. “The seven genies?”
Zabilac studied the wheel, then shook his head. “Only you have made it this far. The King of Genies can go where others cannot.”
“Cool,” said Neal. “But you’re the king.”
“And I … am you,” said the older genie. “You are king. You, Neal. But there’s other stuff, too. Not so cool. Or … not cool in the same way.”
“What kind of stuff?” asked Neal.
“Sometimes being a king, even King of Genies, means you have to take on what no one else should,” said the older man. “Sometime, maybe soon, you’ll feel a hurt beyond what you think you can bear.”
Neal thought of Eric. Was it Eric with Gethwing at the wheel? The boy in purple?
“But sometimes,” the man said, “it’s a pain that will help. Some of what I mean involves another wheel of life. A much bigger one.”
Neal trembled inside. “Whose is it? Eric’s?”
“It’s the wheel of Droon,” Zabilac said.
“Is it speeding up? Or slowing down?”
Zabilac turned to him. Neal felt that looking at him was like gazing into a magic mirror. The older genie opened his lips to speak, when Hoja yelled from beyond the curtain.
“Zabilac! Time to go! Zabilac?”
“He means you,” said the older man.
“But what about Droon’s wheel? Is it slowing down, is it ending, or not?”
“I … cannot … say,” said the older genie.
“Zabilac!” cried Hoja.
Taking one last look at Gethwing’s wheel, Neal left his older self and pushed his way out of the darkness. The genies had defeated the goblins and were waiting by the cave entrance. But their eyes were full of fear.
“Gethwing’s armies are approaching Ut,” said Anusa. “We must go at once.”
“But I stopped everything,” said Neal.
Anusa shook her head. “Genie powers can stop things only in a certain place. The r
est of the world keeps moving.”
“Luckily, we know what to do,” said Hoja. “You remember that the City of Ut connects through the center of the earth to the Doom Gate under the Serpent Sea.”
“At the obelisk,” said Neal.
Fefforello nodded. “The Doom Gate is the ultimate prison. We shall bind the dragon and send him into the Doom Gate … forever!”
“Are you kidding? That sounds perfect!” said Neal. “Maybe the war will be over before it even begins.”
“We can only hope,” said Jyme.
“All ready?” said Hoja.
“Flibbie-ibbie!” said River and Stream.
The genies stood side by side in a ring with Neal, arms woven together like a garland.
“We’re ready on your command, Zabilac,” said Hoja.
“All hail, King of Genies!” said Jyme.
Neal’s heart fluttered to hear the word king spoken by the genies one after another. But there was no time to linger. “Genies, to Ut!”
At once, the Cave of Night faded to a fine mist and fell to the ground like a dropped cloth. The cobblestones of Ut’s vast courtyard took its place. Everyone was as Neal had left them, completely still, frozen, motionless.
“Shall we start everything going again?” asked Anusa, and all eyes looked to Neal.
“Just one thing,” he said. “I’ve wanted to do this for a long time. I need a chain.”
Hoja crossed his arms, and a length of silver chain appeared in Neal’s hands.
He smiled. “Perfect!”
Tiptoeing to Gethwing, Neal wrapped the chain around his tail and tied the other end to the base of the obelisk. He tugged it once or twice, then smiled, satisfied.
“And now,” he said, “MOVE!”
No sooner had Neal spoken than Gethwing resumed his leap across the air. He flew like an arrow from a bow. Like a shot from a cannon. Like Neal from math class.
Until the chain pulled taut around his tail, and his leap was over. Shrieking at the top of his lungs, Gethwing fell with a resounding thud, causing the Moon Medallion to fly out of his grasp and slide across the courtyard.
“THANK YOU!” said Neal, scooping it up.
At the same time, the genies surrounded Neffu and plopped her back into her chariot, securing her there with a second chain.