The Dragon King

by Nils Johnson-Shelton

  Artie slowed as an idea struck him. Did Merlin cast a spell on me, too? And Kay? Is that why we went along with everything?

  He knew the answer: yes. His stomach turned inside out as Kay pointed over his shoulder.

  “There!” she exclaimed. Artie looked. The hulking thing sat where Artie had first seen it, where, in fact, he had first met Merlin. The ancient cash register still sat on top of it, along with a ledger and a couple of empty water bottles.

  But Artie couldn’t think about the desk just yet.

  “What is it, Art?” Kay asked, placing a hand on his back. She didn’t need their special connection to see that something wasn’t right.

  Artie leaned on Excalibur, both hands tight around the grip. The blade vibrated. “Nothing,” he managed.

  “You sure—”

  “Hey, Erik! You coming?” Bedevere interrupted from the back of the line.

  No answer came.

  “Hey, kid! Wake up!” Lance said.

  Erik hadn’t moved since they arrived. It occurred to Artie that Erik hadn’t said so much as a peep since Merlin had shown up back at Morgaine’s place.

  “Hey, berserker,” Shallot called. She picked up a nearby paperback and flung it, striking Erik in the side of the head.

  “Ow!” he said, coming to. “What was that for?”

  “You were all la-la land, Erikssen,” Kay said. “Like the other night, back in the game room. You okay?”

  “I’m fine, Kingfisher. You?” He came to a stop next to Bedevere.

  “We’re fine, but—” A loud crash and a jangle of ringing bells cut Kay off. The knights turned to the commotion. “The desk!” Kay exclaimed. It was gone. In its place was the ancient cash register that had sat atop it, lying on its side like a boat thrown ashore by a tempest.

  “Where’d it go?” Dred asked.

  “Light!” Artie ordered, and Excalibur glowed brightly. “There!” He pointed at the velvet curtain at the rear of the store. Something had just passed through it.

  Artie stumbled forward, his stomach still churning from the realization that Merlin had enchanted him and Kay, and pushed through the curtain. He could hear the clop-clop of hooves going down the stairs.

  Artie spun to his sister with wild eyes.

  “Mrs. Thresher!” Kay exclaimed, remembering the doorway at the end of Merlin’s basement.

  Artie nodded fiercely. “We can’t let it reach that door! It could go through it and right to Merlin!” Artie pushed forward, down the stairs, his knights in tow.

  They spilled into the first room with the sink and the robes and the walking sticks. Artie sprinted to the archway at the other end and peered through. The desk was a few rooms ahead. Walking was clearly not its thing. The legs in the front faced forward, those in the back faced backward. It was forced to crab-walk through the rooms, but it was too wide to pass through the archways this way, so it had to fumble around at each juncture.

  Dred pushed his way to the front. “This will be easy, Brother.”

  “Wait!” Artie exclaimed.

  But Dred didn’t. As soon as he stepped into the orchid room, the plants spit spikes at him and bit the air and writhed on their stems. They were mainly a nuisance, but then, as Dred neared the far end of the room, two very large orchids jumped from their pots and laced their roots across the next archway. As he cut these down they shot more roots at his arms and wrists, and then his ankles and thighs. Within seconds he was completely wrapped up.

  “Dred!” Artie said.

  “I’m all right.”

  “Step aside.” Shallot moved to the front and turned invisible. She passed into the room unnoticed by the plants and freed Dred with a combination of blade work and a low humming song that seemed to placate and enrapture the wild orchids.

  The desk had put more distance between them, but still struggled to make progress.

  “Looks like we’re going to have to run the wizard’s gauntlet,” Lance said unenthusiastically.

  Artie snapped his fingers. “Kay, Dred gave you a coil of Morgaine’s magic rope, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Give it to me—please.”

  Kay flashed a smile, pulled the backpack from her shoulders, and dug into it.

  “Erik, your head out of the clouds? You ready to turn it on?” Artie asked.

  “You know it.”

  “Here’s the plan: you, me, and Shallot go and stop that thing. Erik has the speed, Shallot’s invisible, and I can deal with hits on account of the scabbard. Lance—”

  “What’s up?”

  “Cover us. Be careful, though. It’ll get tight fast.”

  “You know I’m deadeye. Don’t worry.”

  “What about us?” Kay asked, tilting her head to Bedevere.

  Artie took the coil of rope and slung it over his shoulder. “You two hang back.” He held out a hand. “I’ll need to borrow Cleomede, if you don’t mind.”

  Kay shook her head. “Don’t like it.”

  “No time to argue. We can’t let that thing get to Mrs. Thresher.” He reached for Kay’s waist and drew Cleomede from its sheath as Dred returned to the first room. “You ready, Shallot?”

  “Sire!” she affirmed from a few rooms ahead.

  “Light it up, berserker!”

  Erik brought Gram in front of his face and his eyes rolled into his head as his body jittered. His skin turned red and his feet began to dance and within seconds he was a cartoonish blur. Artie got as close to this ball of violent entropy as possible and said, “Go!”

  Erik shot forward, Artie in his wake.

  The orchid room was easy. The next room was freezing cold, the floor slippery. The dark-colored lichens that clung to the walls and ceiling curdled and moved. Foot-long spikes of ice shot at them from all directions. None of these shards touched Erik, though. And while Artie was hit by a couple on his chest and legs, they didn’t slow him down. The scabbard was doing its thing.

  The third room was as hot as an oven as flaming jets shot from the floor. Erik bounded along the wall and ceiling, out of reach, while Shallot slunk around, trailing her wonderful scent. Artie simply got burned. His clothing never caught fire, but his bare hands and wrists were hit twice with full blasts. They burned and oozed with pus, though thankfully the scabbard healed him quickly.

  They ran through the next few rooms—a living room, a gym, a small kitchen—without any problems.

  Shallot went first into the next room, which contained a menagerie of small and medium-size animals—rodents, birds, lizards, even a few giant spiders. She was invisible, but as soon as she was in, all the cages flew open and the animals went wild with excitement. A bird flapped from nowhere and managed to latch on to her head in the confusion. She wheeled just as one of Lance’s arrows struck it through a wing. The bird fell to the ground as Shallot stepped quickly into the next room.

  Artie moved into the doorway, holding Excalibur in front of him. “Darkness!” The blade threw off an inky pool of pitch black, filling the room. Artie could still see, though, just as he’d been able to see when he’d used this same trick to fill Qwon’s room back in Shadyside when Dred was in the middle of kidnapping her. The animals didn’t know what to do, and many of them immediately stopped going crazy.

  Artie stepped forward. “C’mon, Erik! Move quickly!”

  Erik didn’t need much encouragement. He churned through the room, damaging a few of the animals—nothing major, just a few bumps here and there. Within seconds, all three of the knights were in the following room.

  It was a kitchen, and as soon as they were together, knives began to fly from the wall. Artie very nearly got hit in the neck, but Lance knocked that knife out of the air with a well-placed arrow, while Erik suffered a good nick on the top of his right ear. Shallot pirouetted and dodged and emerged from the kitchen unscathed.

  The next room was a science lab. Artie pushed past Erik and held out his arm. “Wait.” He stuck Excalibur into the middle of the room, and the sword was im
mediately hit with a jolt of blue electricity. Artie shuddered as the current jostled through his body and into the ground. He readied Cleomede. “I’ve got this one.”

  He stepped into the room and was attacked by a quartet of arcing coils, but Excalibur kept him safe by sucking all the power to it, like a magnet. Artie’s teech chattered as he sliced each coil to pieces with Cleomede, blue sheets of electricity cascading over his body. He’d forgotten how subtle a blade Kay’s sword was. He could feel the cold metal of the coils part and shatter. In a few seconds he was done.

  “Go! We need to wrangle that desk!”

  Shallot and Erik shot forward. Artie sheathed Excalibur, stuck Cleomede in the ground, and undid the magical rope. The desk was only twenty feet away. Holding tight to one end, he flung the rope toward it.

  It snaked through the air between Shallot and Erik and caught the desk by one of the closer legs, wrapping it up like a lassoed rodeo calf. It didn’t like this, and began to buck and kick to try to get free. Two arrows split the air and embedded into the desk’s dark wood with a tha-thwack as Erik and Shallot tried to subdue the thing with Gram and The Anguish. As soon as they drew close, though, the desk reared and kicked them both square in the chest. They flew into the opposite wall and collapsed, heaving to catch their wind.

  Artie pulled hard on the rope to try to hold the desk, but it was no use. It was too strong. I wish Sami were here, he thought.

  Just then the desk planted its closest hooves in the ground and knelt. It stopped pulling for a second. Artie hastily tried to tie the rope to an iron support column, when he was distracted by two loud cracks. He wheeled and watched in astonishment as the rear legs of the desk slowly turned around so that they were now facing the same direction as the other pair of legs! It was no longer working against itself. It reared again, knocking the upper end into the ceiling, came down, and took off at a thunderous gallop.

  Artie wrapped the rope around his wrist and he held on tight. It was about to be rodeo time.

  Within seconds Artie was yanked from his feet. He bounced painfully along the floor as more of Lance’s arrows filled the air. He hit chairs, tables, pillars, sconces, bookshelves, cauldrons, weapon racks, and blew through a large beanbag, scattering little white pellets everywhere (which felt pretty nice, compared to everything else). The scabbard kept him in one piece, though, and after several rooms he managed to work his way up the rope to within ten feet of the desk. But he couldn’t risk getting closer—the pounding hooves were too wild and would surely knock him back, if not clean out.

  He squinted. Mrs. Thresher was only four or five rooms away. And to make matters worse, he could see that she was open!

  During a nasty bounce that gave the rope a couple feet of sudden slack, Artie turned another loop around his hand. With his free hand he drew Excalibur and held it out. “Darkness!”

  The room he was in—full of colored flames that didn’t give off heat—went completely black. At the same instant, the desk slammed its front hooves to the ground and skidded to a halt. Artie was thrown, the rope trailing behind him.

  When his feet hit the floor, he found himself between the desk and Mrs. Thresher!

  Artie threw the slackened rope, and it quickly lashed the desk’s legs together in an uncomfortable-looking bundle. It wasn’t going anywhere now, but it wouldn’t give up. If anything, the fact that Artie had just lassoed it made it even more desperate. The hind legs drove forward, and the edge of the desk took out Artie’s feet. Now he was lying flat on top of the thing as it made a last, desperate push toward Mrs. Thresher.

  Artie peered over the rear end of the desk. His knights had regrouped and were only forty feet away. Kay had pulled Cleomede from the ground and was running hard with it at her side.

  Artie looked back at Mrs. Thresher. His eyes wide, he did the unthinkable: he pulled his sword arm back and flung Excalibur end over end toward the door—if he did it just right, Excalibur would land point down in the floor and create a final barrier between the desk and Mrs. Thresher. If he did it wrong, Excalibur would fly right through to Merlin himself, and that would be that.

  But it was a perfect throw. Excalibur hit the ground just in front of the door and drove halfway to the hilt. At the last moment the desk plowed into Excalibur and stopped short.

  A sound like jingling pocket change came from Mrs. Thresher as the door shook violently on its hinges, egging the desk on just a little farther. It was so close.

  “Eat this!” Artie heard Lance say as he loosed a fireballer. It passed through the doorway and disappeared in the void mere feet from Artie. The explosion on the other side couldn’t be seen, but it clearly worked. The door that led directly to Merlin shut immediately, as if recoiling in pain.

  Kay entered the room holding another coil of the magical rope, and Artie said, “Sis, hog-tie this thing!”

  “Aye, aye!” With Erik’s help, Kay secured the rear legs, and that was it. The desk continued to buck and shudder as if it contained the world’s largest Mexican jumping bean, but it wasn’t going anywhere.

  “Nasty piece of work,” Shallot observed.

  Dred leaned on his sword. “You can say that again. Good work, Brother.”

  “Couldn’t have done it without you guys,” Artie pointed out. “Erik, Shallot—you guys cool? That was a big hit. You want some of the scabbard?”

  Erik rubbed his chest. “I’m fine.”

  Shallot just spit on the floor.

  Kay sheathed Cleomede. “Alrighty, then.”

  “Well, sire,” Bedevere said, “should we open this thing up?”

  Artie pulled Excalibur from the floor. “Absolutely.”

  On one side was a fist-size padlock. Emblazoned on its front was a silver galloping horse.

  Artie pointed at the lock. “Kay—that’s the same horse that’s on the key Cassie left for you!”

  Kay leaned in. “Holy hand grenades! You’re right.” She slid the key out of her pocket and tried the lock. It was a perfect fit. She turned it and the lock fell open. The desk immediately stopped moving, as if it had been mercifully put to rest.

  Erik gaped. “Why do you have that, Kingfisher?”

  “Long story.” Kay looked to her brother. “I guess I better read that letter as soon as I have a chance.”

  “Uh, yeah, you should.”

  Shallot, who apparently didn’t care where the key had come from, wedged the tip of her blade in the hairline crack that ran around the top. She pushed down and in. With a gasp of air, the desk’s lid swung open.

  They stared into it. “By the trees . . . ,” Bedevere said breathlessly.

  A narrow flight of steps descended before them, as if into the floor itself, disappearing after several feet into an inky blackness.

  Artie put one foot into the cavity then paused. “I guess next stop is a mystery staircase into another dimension. Then he walked down and disappeared.

  15

  IN WHICH A VERY STRANGE ROOM IS HAPPENED UPON

  The knights followed, Dred going last. He did so cautiously—he wasn’t scared, but something about this chest made him uncomfortable.

  He swallowed hard and then, one foot after the next, dropped into nothingness.

  The world disappeared. Up ahead, Artie could see only the faint outline of his nose. He heard the others calling out behind him, but it was like they were hundreds of feet away. They sounded lost.

  Walking carefully, Artie reached to either side to keep his balance as the stairway twisted and turned. After walking for several minutes he felt askew and uneasy. And that was when he realized that his body had turned in such a way that he was walking on the wall. “Guys!” he yelled into the blackness. But no answer came—just more muted calls from his companions.

  After a short while a weak orange light appeared ahead. There was no choice but to move toward it. Artie reached a corner, turned, and found himself in a cube-shaped room, measuring about forty feet along every edge—a room with a very strange enchantment on it.<
br />
  The others entered, and when Dred finally arrived, he exclaimed, “Whoa—we’re on the wall!”

  “Yes,” Bedevere said. “Gravity is playing some funny tricks here. It takes a second to get used to.”

  It was doubly disorienting because, while they didn’t feel like they were going to fall over, their hair and anything loose that was strapped to their bodies—swords, backpacks, necklaces, shoelaces—did fall to the side, obeying the usual laws of physics.

  As the knights moved farther in, their feet raked through a bunch of things on the floor—er, wall. The entire surface was covered with keys hanging from rough metal hooks. Each key appeared completely identical to the others—about eight inches long, a skinny neck with a loop for a handle, and a toothy, crown-shaped blade. All were made of the same dark wood. Artie looked around, and that was when he realized that all six sides of the cube-shaped room were covered with keys!

  “By the fens, there must be ten thousand keys in here!” Dred said.

  “But only one will work, right?” Lance asked.

  “According to Mum,” Dred said.

  Artie stared all around. “How do we find the right one?”

  While the knights discussed what to do, Erik wandered toward the ceiling, where the keys hung like sleeping bats. He parted some with his hand and frowned. He placed a knee on the ceiling. Then the other. He crawled forward and stood. Then he was standing upside down! His hair hung below him, and his outermost shirt fell around his chest, but he stayed put. “Guys, check this out!”

  Everyone gasped. Kay said, “Frigging cool.”

  Artie counted his knights. “There’s seven of us. Let’s each take a wall and look for this key. If you see one that’s even slightly different from the others, grab it.”