The Dragon King

by Nils Johnson-Shelton

  Moving to the other surfaces was surreal, but before long all the knights were in place, their bodies pointed toward the middle of the room. Bedevere and Lance worked their wall together, while the others searched on their own. Artie had taken the floor, moving along on hands and knees, which, on account of the hooks, was neither easy nor comfortable.

  Why are there hooks on the floor? he wondered.

  Finally he reached the center. Here was the lone blank spot on the whole surface. It was only six or seven inches across. There was no hook, but in the middle was a square of dark-green glass. Artie leaned over and peered into it but could see nothing on the other side.

  He craned his neck. Erik was above him, walking along and tapping each key with Gram’s tip. Directly overhead was the same blank spot, though it appeared to be of a different hue. “Guys—is there a small glass square in the middle of your wall?” Artie asked.

  The others checked. Yes, every wall had one.

  “What do you think they’re for?” Lance asked as Bedevere tapped their spot with his boot.

  Artie stood. “No idea.” He stepped onto his, keeping his feet together. Excalibur tingled. “Try standing on yours.”

  Each knight moved into position. Shallot was the last to do so, and as soon as she brought her feet together, the room turned!

  Before Artie knew it, what had been the floor was now a wall, then another wall and another, and then the ceiling!

  He stepped from his spot and the spinning stopped.

  “Whoa!” Kay said, stepping from her spot too. “That was weird.”

  “Look!” Shallot shouted, pointing across the chamber.

  “Great,” Erik said drily. The doorway that had brought them there was gone.

  “We probably just have to spin it back into place,” Lance said.

  “What does it matter? We still don’t have this stupid key,” Kay said. “We’re going to have to open a moongate and take all of them, Art. You know that, right?”

  Artie shook his head. “It’s here somewhere. We just have to find it.” He tapped one of the keys surrounding the glass with Excalibur. It made a pleasant sound. Curious, he tapped the one next to it. Even though it looked exactly the same, it made a different sound. He tapped each of the others, one after the other. He realized that if he started with the correct one and moved clockwise around the space, they made the notes of a major scale.

  “Guys, you hear this?” He repeated the sequence. “Do yours do that too?” Each knight tried and found that theirs, too, produced a major scale. They all looked at one another in wonder.

  “Keys can be used for doors—and for music. You think that’s something?” Lance asked.

  “Could be.”

  “Anyone have a good enough ear to know what scale this is?” Erik wondered.

  “F major,” Kay said decisively. “I knew those piano lessons would come in handy one day.”

  “So what—now we just each play a little ditty?” Erik asked. “How’s that going to help?”

  “Dunno,” Kay said. “Wouldn’t know where to start, anyway. I quit piano after a year. I was really good at the scales, but that was it. If there’s one thing I’m bad at, it’s playing actual music. I remember Kynder used to sing us lullabies, but he had the most awful singing voice. Right, Art?”

  “Horrible,” Artie confirmed.

  “I do remember this, though,” Kay said, playing “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”

  “We have that tune in Leagon as well,” Shallot said as Kay hit the keys at her feet randomly.

  “Wait, do that again,” Dred said.

  Artie peered at his brother. “‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’?”

  “No. The other one.”

  “I was just goofing,” Kay said.

  “But I’ve heard that tune before.” Dred nicked a few of the keys at his feet. “Morgaine sang lullabies when I was little, too. One a lot. It went, ‘Heno, Heno, hen blant bach . . .’” Dred searched around the notes, fiddling with the melody—just a couple of bars before it repeated—and on the last go-around changed one note. When he was finished, the little glass spot glowed bright and a light shot from it like a laser into the middle of the room.

  “Nice!” Kay shouted.

  “Let’s all do it,” Artie said. “Dred, show us.”

  One at a time, the knights played the tune and activated the spots at their feet. Each patch of glass shot the same light into the middle of the room. Artie went last, and when he was finished his light joined the others.

  A blinding flash came from the intersection of lights as the room spun wildly, throwing the knights to their hands and knees.

  Finally it stopped. Every key stood at attention, pointing directly at the center of the chamber. And there, rotating maniacally on invisible strings, was something small and black that hadn’t been there before.

  Dred thrust out the Peace Sword. “Look!”

  “Is that it?” Erik asked.

  “Can’t tell,” Artie said. “It’s moving too fast.”

  “That has to be it,” Kay said. “But how are we going to reach it? It’s gotta be twenty feet from any of us.”

  “You have any of my mum’s rope left?” Dred asked.

  “Oh, yeah. One more coil, I think.” Kay rummaged in the infinite backpack and pulled out the last piece of silver rope. She held on to one end, and tossed the other to the middle of the room.

  It flew toward the thing like a magnet and wrapped it up. Kay gave the rope a hard yank and the thing came free. The rope swung through the air, and as it passed Dred, he reached up and grabbed it.

  “Well, what is it?” Artie asked.

  Dred had a huge smile on his face as he held out the object. Sure enough, it was a key. It was nearly like all the others, except that the neck was a double helix, like a strand of DNA.

  Artie clapped his hands. “Yes!”

  “So that’s it? That’ll open the door inside the King’s Gate?” Kay asked desperately, thinking of the Grail, and of Kynder.

  Artie beamed. “Sis, there’s only one way to find out.”

  WIZARDLY INTERLUDE NUMBER TWO (OR, HOW MERLIN MAY BE THE WORLD’S GREATEST COMPUTER HACKER TO BOOT)

  “Dragons!” Merlin yelled. “Dragons, dragons, dragons! The temerity of that aquatic sprite! ‘Oh, here’s Scarffern, m’lord, use it well,’ I bet she said. ‘The lords and lordesses of the Otherworld will bow and kneel and scrape! They will sniff at your toes and give you flowers and honey and blood!’ Ack! I would drain that Lake into hell itself if I could! Nyneve! Troublesome, tiresome Nyneve!”

  Merlin reached into the huge cage standing next to him and snapped his fingers. A huffing sound came from within. “Dragons!” he spit.

  Merlin grabbed a bloody hunk of meat from a nearby table and held it out. “Agorwch,” he called, and the cage’s door unclicked and swung wide. He tossed in the meat. “Caewch,” he ordered. And the steel bars slammed shut.

  “Soon, beast. Tomorrow or the day after. I will give you something so fresh to eat that the brain will still be fracturing with electricity.”

  From inside the cage came the chompings and gnashings of a ravenous thing. The snapping, crunching, and splintering of bones. The sucking of blood between teeth and gums. The licking of lips and jowls. The gulping of a long throat. The belch of a hastily consumed meal.

  “Yes, pet beast. Soon you will see battle. You will slay many dragons! But not the king. No, the king is mine. . . .”

  Merlin twirled from the cage and floated into the passageways of his cave. “Scarffern! The little interferer. Its vile echo rings in my ears even now.” As he moved he dragged the butt end of his owl-headed cane along the rock. Click-clack-a-tat, click-click-tick. He arrived at the room that hummed with computer mainframes. He held his hand over a scanner and winced as the light traveled up and down his palm, reading the ancient lines of his skin, still there in spite of all the sangrealitic tattoos. The door hissed open, and Merlin went inside.

  The
room was warm. He glided to a desktop computer with a flat-screen monitor and pounded on a keyboard. Terminal windows opened and closed and opened and closed as streams of code flew from his fingertips. He was an evil master of magic and of programming. The total package. A five-tool player. A wizard and a nerd extraordinaire.

  He peered into the computer screen. Peering back was the reflection of his eyes, so red now that there was no difference between the iris and what had been the white. The pupil was no longer black but purple and clouded. His eyes were less like a demon’s than those of a deep-water fish.

  “More surprises, pet,” he said, even though the creature was still in its cage in a far-off room. Merlin scratched his left temple manically. His eyes twitched. “So many more surprises. That unwitting boy has no idea that I looked through his eyes and saw that Artie has the key that will lead him to the Grail. Gram’s ragged keeper, we will make a traitor of you yet.”

  Merlin lifted his hands from the keyboard dramatically. The screen went completely black before filling with images. Images of children, slumped in couches and overstuffed chairs and beanbags. Boys mostly, but girls too. Their hands limp in their laps, holding game controllers. These were the children of the world who, like Artie Kingfisher before them, loved Otherworld the video game. The nerds, the would-be elves and orcs and battle mages, the Dr Pepper heads, as Kay liked to call them.

  Soon they would get a surprise.

  Merlin tented his fingers and smiled. He turned his attention to a steel pedestal with a bowl mounted on top. It looked like a modern interpretation of a holy water stoup that one would see in the narthex of a church.

  The stoup contained liquid sangrealite. Trailing from the backside of the pedestal was a tangle of bright wires, some of which led to the computer, but the bulk of which led to an archway made of stone. This archway was nestled about a dozen feet from the computer and the stoup between a row of twinkling mainframes. Twisting around the stone portal were coils of solid sangrealite. Everything was connected—the computer to the stoup, the stoup to the archway. It was an arrangement that Merlin had been experimenting with and was now ready to use in earnest.

  Merlin pounded some more commands into the keyboard, and the images of kids continued to spill across the screen. But then they stopped, and a boy with dark hair and green eyes sitting in a folding chair appeared. He was about twelve and had on beige cargo shorts and a plain white T-shirt.

  “Hello, child,” Merlin cooed.

  The wizard slid to the pedestal and held his hand over the bowl. He wiggled his fingers just above the liquid’s surface.

  “You will work this time. I can feel it.”

  Then, Merlin went completely still and each of his eyes rolled into his head sideways, parting away from the angular bridge of his nose toward the temples.

  He dipped his fingertips into the rippling sangrealite. The wires jumped as power shot through them. The sangrealite twisting around the archway glowed bright, and the space between the rocks went completely black.

  The face of the child on the computer screen widened with an expression part terror, part elation.

  Merlin’s smile grew even more sinister. The very air filled with power—magical, magnetic, electrical.

  And then the child on the screen disappeared.

  16

  IN WHICH A DANGEROUS CHAIR NEARLY KILLS SOMEONE

  The moongate Artie had opened from the key room led them to a very unexpected place: about ten feet above the round table. Artie had been the first to go through, and he was pretty surprised when he appeared in midair, fell on the table hard, and then rolled to the ground. Seconds later, Kay fell right on top of him.

  “Ouch! What’s up with that moongate?” Kay demanded.

  “Dunno. Maybe it’s because the gravity in that room was so messed up.”

  Shallot came next, and while she was also surprised, her fairy instincts kicked in, helping her to land gracefully.

  “Sire, what is happening?” Bercilak called, clattering across the hall. “Why are your knights raining from the very ether?”

  “Bunk moongate,” Artie said. “Can you catch the others?”

  “Certainly, sire.” As soon as he had spoken, Lance materialized overhead. Bercilak reached out, caught the archer, and put him on the floor.

  “That was weird,” Lance said. “Thanks, Bercilak.”

  “No problem.”

  Lance looked at the moongate. “Heads up.”

  “But I don’t have a head,” Bercilak protested as Erik and then Bedevere fell one after the other on top of the Green Knight. Bercilak helped them to their feet and said, “Aha, heads up as in look out! Now I get it. Clever, Sir Lance, quite clever.”

  “Thanks. Heads up again.”

  Bercilak spun, but it was too late. Dred was right there. He landed hard on Bercilak’s back and bounced with an “Ooof!” several feet toward the edge of the room.

  Dred had fallen directly onto the inconspicuous black chair pushed to the wall of the Royal Chamber and was now slumped over, looking unconscious.

  Bercilak turned again and brought his hands to his chest in a gesture of shock. “Oh no! Sire, that’s—”

  “Nobody touch him!” yelled Numinae, who had just entered the room with Thumb.

  Artie frowned. “Why not? Wait—that’s the chair you were going to tell me about, isn’t it?”

  “It’s the Siege Perilous!” Thumb said quietly.

  “What in the heck is the ‘siege perilous’?” Kay asked.

  Numinae and Thumb advanced cautiously toward the motionless Dred. “It was a seat reserved for the Pure Knight, lad,” Thumb said. “Merlin made it. It was kept in Arthur’s court as a reminder of what could befall any person who was not pure of heart.”

  “Well, what could befall any person who was not pure of heart?” Erik asked.

  Bercilak said cheerily, as if he were announcing the rising sun, “Oh, he or she would perish—instantly!”

  Artie walked briskly toward his brother, his heart pounding. “What? Dred is . . . dead?”

  Numinae stopped him with an outstretched hand. “M’lord—”

  Artie pushed past Numinae, who had to restrain him with both hands. “Please, sire!”

  “Dead?” Artie cried, Numinae’s crooked, treelike hands still holding Artie back. “What a dumb way to die! In a chair!” He paused, wiping a tear from his cheek. “It shouldn’t be here. I want it removed immediately!”

  “But no one can touch it, sire,” Bedevere pointed out.

  “I can touch it,” a voice said.

  They spun. Numinae gasped.

  Dred sat awkwardly across the chair, a leg thrown over an armrest. He wasn’t dead at all. He had a big bump on his head and a tiny trickle of blood ran down the side of his cheek, but that was it.

  “Dred!” Shallot shouted, sounding strangely relieved.

  Thumb couldn’t believe it. “How . . . ?”

  Artie rushed to his brother, but Dred held up a hand and said, “Don’t touch me! This chair is in effect. It didn’t kill me, but so long as I’m on it, any contact with me would kill you.”

  Thumb nodded. “He’s right. There is only one Pure Knight. That’s the way it has always been; that’s the way it will be forever. And even if it weren’t true—would you be willing to take a gamble to find out?”

  “Uh, no,” Artie said. He stared at Dred with wonder. “Man, you’re pretty lucky.”

  Dred stepped free from the Siege Perilous. “I’ll say. That thing feels like . . . death itself.” He shivered.

  Just then Thumb jumped and did an excited little spin in the air. “Artie, do you know what this means?”

  Numinae clapped his hands. “The Sword of David!”

  “The Pure Blade,” Bedevere cried. “He who can take the chair can draw the sword and live to tell of it.”

  “By the leas,” Shallot chimed.

  “Guys,” Artie said. “Back it up. You know Otherworld history inside and out, but t
he rest of us don’t, and Excalibur hasn’t given me any information on this thing. So what’s the Sword of David?”

  Thumb’s eyes widened. “The Sword of David is not a regular sword. It is not even meant for battle. It is subtler. It is safe to hold—so long as it stays sheathed.”

  “What happens if you unsheathe it?” Kay asked.

  “Well,” Numinae said. “Whoever draws the Sword of David is greatly weakened. This person cannot fight, or work magic, or flee. They are stuck—waiting for death.”

  “Hold on,” Erik interjected. “David, like David and Goliath? The one David used to kill the giant?”

  “That’s it,” Thumb confirmed. “And like David, only the Pure Knight can draw the sword safely.”

  “Which means I can draw it,” Dred said, finally understanding.

  Thumb snapped his fingers. “We have to get the Sword of David. Dred—you must seek it out!”

  Erik sighed. “Great. Another harebrained quest for some ancient blade.”

  “Well, we are the New Knights of the Round Table, Erikssen,” Kay pointed out. “But I still don’t get how some weapon that only Dred can use is going to help us. He already has a sword.”

  “It is powerful,” Thumb said. “For that reason alone, we should have it.”

  “Also, Merlin won’t expect it,” Numinae added. “Just as he did not expect you to blow Scarffern. It is obvious how the dragons can help us defeat him. If we’re smart, we may be able to find a less obvious way for the Sword of David to help us, too.”

  Artie shrugged. “All right. . . . Hey, speaking of the dragons—are they here yet?”

  Thumb shook his head. “Not as of yet, lad.”

  “But by sunup they will be,” Numinae said. “I can sense Tiberius’s location. It was a great thing you did, Artie, bringing him back. I am forever in your debt for that.”

  “Ah, no sweat, Noomy. We all love Tiberius.” Artie looked to Kay. “We may have one other surprise, now that I think of it. Kay . . . you’ve got to read Cassie’s letter. Like, now. It can’t be coincidence that Cassie’s key opened that padlock.”