I inwardly sighed. Children. They were were called children, not youngs.
These observations made me think of my family. My parents, my brother, John, and I would often take rambling walks together. I remembered my father’s strong grip, my mother’s loving smile and my brother’s curiosity about all things. Tears clutched at the corners of my eyes. I caught Petra looking at me curiously. I quickly wiped my eyes.
“Let’s budge along,” I said.
There were blokes on some corners holding stacks of papers and calling out, “Warehouse fire blamed on lax hygiene” and “The mayor calls for more pencils in school.” Then other blokes would take one of the papers in exchange for some money. I had no idea what any of it meant.
Some hurried along and others moved more slowly. There were males in shiny uniforms with lots of brass buttons standing in the middle of the cobbles and pointing the motors where to go and whether to stop and start.
There were some carts on the walkways where males wearing aprons sat and sold food and drink to passersby. And in the middle of it all, children were rushing around and exhausting their mothers and fathers. That clearly hadn’t changed.
Some folks had stopped and were chatting as Wugs did back in Wormwood. But there was an air of prosperity here that my old village could never claim. And I saw no Council members roaming around in black tunics looking intimidating.
But the thing I really wasn’t seeing disturbed me most of all.
Where was the MAGIC?
Aside from the pair last night, I had seen nary a wand nor a spell cast; no one was soaring along on a conjured airstream. There were no evil creatures to battle.
But those blokes from last night could do magic. They had attacked us and very nearly killed us. I was convinced they were Maladons. How else would they have been able to track the mark on my hand? So how did that murderous presence, which we had expected, match up with the serene world we were seeing now?
I scratched my head. The whole thing was sixes and sevens as far as I was concerned.
“Uh, Vega Jane,” muttered Delph.
We were walking along the cobbles.
“What?”
“I think a bloke back there is following us.”
I immediately started to look behind us, but then caught myself.
“Why do you think that?” I asked nervously.
Petra answered, “Because he’s been back there ever since we left the place where we ate, that’s why. Don’t you use your bloody eyes?”
I shot her an angry glance, but I felt more upset with myself. If Delph and Petra had noticed this, why hadn’t I?
I crossed the cobbles and came up on the other side. I did it quickly enough that Delph and Petra had to hustle to catch up. I turned to look back at them, but what I was really doing was looking for the fellow following us.
It wasn’t hard. He was making it fairly obvious. He was short and plump and I had caught him hustling across the street, his gaze locked on us. He wore a matching jacket and pants with a white shirt, a long strand of red material around his collar and an oddly shaped hat that I had seen other males here wearing.
“What do we do now?” asked Petra in a petulant tone as we hurried along at a good clip.
I looked up ahead and said, “We passed that little alley on the way here. Let’s turn down there.”
We reached it, made the turn and as soon as we did, I pulled out my wand, conjured the lasso, attached it to the others and then turned my ring backward. Invisible, we moved back against the brick wall of the alley and waited.
We didn’t have to wait long.
The bloke came hurtling into the narrow space and then stopped dead. I could only imagine what he was thinking as he looked up and down the long space that was quite empty.
His eyes boggling, he hustled down the alley until he reached the end. He gave a searching glance left and right; then he hustled back to where we all stood watching him.
He took out what looked to be smoke weed, lit it with a match and blew smoke out his nostrils as he tapped his shiny shoe against the cobbles and rubbed his chin.
I was waiting for the bloke to pull out his wand and start blasting spells down the alley. If he did, I would blast them right back. My fingers loosely gripped my wand. Around my waist, Destin, a chain that, among other things, allowed me to fly, hugged me a bit tighter, as though sensing the mixture of fear and anticipation that I was feeling.
I hoped that Petra had her wand at the ready too. As I looked over, I saw that this was so. The expression on her face was one of intense concentration without, I had to admit, a smidgen of fear.
I turned back to our pursuer. If this bloke was a Maladon, my confidence level would soar. He didn’t look remotely dangerous. Hel, I thought, even pathetic Cletus Loon from Wormwood could take the little git if need be.
He finished his smoke weed, crushed it underfoot with the heel of his shoe and, giving the alley one more penetrating look, turned and left. We waited a bit to make sure he was gone good and proper, and then I reversed the ring and lifted the spell of the conjured lasso.
“Who you reckon that bloke was?” asked Delph.
“A spy for the Maladons, maybe,” I said. “If he were magical, you’d think he would have used his wand to find us in here. It’s what I would have done.”
“Aye, that’s a right good point,” said Delph, looking impressed by my logic.
“But that means that the Maladons may control this place and use some of the folks here to help them. Even if they can’t do magic, they’re our enemies.”
Delph looked unnerved by this. “So everybody here might be against us?”
“It’s possible, Delph,” I said.
As I continued to gaze around, something struck me. Everyone here looked very different from one another. I know that blokes look different from other blokes. But back in Wormwood, Wugs all looked pretty much the same. Same general facial features, hair color and pale skin. Morrigone with her bloodred hair was really the sole outlier. But here I was seeing features and skin color I’d never seen before. Black and brown and skin far paler than mine, and all sorts of combinations thereof. I liked it. I wished we’d had more of that in Wormwood. Fortunately, there were also a great many pale skins in True too, so we didn’t stand out.
“Well, we’re strangers here,” said Petra, interrupting my thoughts. “And that prat who chased us from the church might have told others about us. So if these Maladons are smart, they’ll put more blokes like that one out here till they find us. We can’t stay invisible forever.”
“Aye, that’s a right good point too,” said Delph, gazing at Petra with admiration.
I inwardly sighed. I felt like I was in a competition with Petra Sonnet that had no bloody end. It made me exhausted just thinking of the countless possibilities.
“So what do we do now?” Petra asked.
They both looked at me — or all three of them did if you counted Harry Two, which I always would.
I thought quickly. “We need to find another place to hide. Until dark. And then maybe we leave here and head on somewhere else.”
“Okay, but what place?” persisted Petra.
It was then that we heard a great roaring sound.
“Come on,” I said.
We rushed off in the direction of the racket.
We scampered over the cobbles, using the noise as our guide, and finally came out into an enormous square filled with folks rushing hither and thither.
And that’s when we saw it, a long metal thing all strung together. It had windows and there were people inside it. At the head of the thing was a huge black contraption that made the motors we’d seen look positively puny by comparison.
Smoke belched out of what looked to be a metal chimney at the front of the thing as it roared along, then slowed and disappeared behind a large building.
I looked at the others and then raced toward this same building. As I drew close to the front doors, they opened for a
crowd of people leaving the place.
From inside I could hear a very pleasant voice boom out, “The 9:10 express train to Greater True, boarding now. The 9:10 express train to Greater True. All authorized persons, please make your way. And ladies and gentlemen, and the kiddies too, mind the divide between the train and the station platform.”
Delph said, “Express train?”
“Seems to be a way that people get about,” I said slowly.
Petra said, “Greater True? What the Hel is that?”
I said, “Obviously a place other than, well, just plain True. And greater means bigger, so it probably is.”
But something else the pleasant voice had said was bothering me.
Who were these authorized persons?
I stared up at the brick building that this express train had apparently pulled into. The sign on it read TRUE TRAIN STATION.
My gaze ran over the large facade.
“I think we just found our hiding place,” I said.
“What, with all these blokes?” said Petra skeptically.
“That’s kind of the point,” I shot back. “Let’s go.”
THE TRAIN STATION was a cavernous place, bigger inside even than it had appeared from the outer side. And it was filled with people carrying bags rushing about. There weren’t this many Wugs in all of Wormwood.
I looked around and spotted something. On one wall was a large sign. On it were the names of I supposed places, and next to them were numbers. People would stop and stare up at it, glance at timekeepers wrapped around their wrists and then scurry on.
“I reckon it’s the schedule of the train things,” opined Delph. “Kind of like a plan of when they come and go.” He elaborated. “Those must be times and train numbers. They tell people where the trains are going and when.”
“How do you figure that?” I asked.
“We had something like that back at the Mill,” he replied. “We had to load up the flour sacks and we had a board hung on the wall that told us when we had to make deliveries and who they were going to.”
I nodded, thinking he was exactly right. But it was still so shocking that a place like this could exist right next to the Quag. And that Wormwood could be on the other side of that Quag, a village stuck well back in another time as compared to here, which had motors and trains and just … stuff that I had to admit was far nicer.
As I looked around, I could see a sign blinking over an entrance leading to a long sleek train that had pulled into the station.
GREATER TRUE.
I saw males — er, men — standing in front of the glass doors that led to the train. A line of folks had queued up in front of the doors. They were all very well dressed and properly clean and looked, well, sort of like the angry bloke in the big motor — like they were better than everybody else. They held out their tickets and then something else to the two men. I drew my wand, hiding it up my sleeve, and muttered, “Crystilado magnifica.”
I could see clearly now what was on the “something else.” It was their picture and name and other information in a small notebook. And I noticed they were all holding up their hands to the fellows at the entrance. There was something on their palms, but I couldn’t see what it was.
I noticed that many of the people in the station were carrying the paper things I had seen the blokes on the cobbles selling. Some had them folded under arms. Others were sitting on benches and reading them. One of them left his on the bench. I ventured over and picked it up. I looked down at it. It was filled with writing and some pictures too, of a kind I had never seen.
“Blokes here do seem so happy, don’t they?” said Petra, with mild disgust in her voice.
She had come over to stand next to me and was watching a woman on her knees scrub the stone floor with a large sponge and a bucket of soapy water. The woman was smiling and humming away as though she had all the coin in the world, but still didn’t mind working on her knees scrubbing off dirt left by others.
As I looked around, I noted the pleasant countenances on just about everyone I saw. It had been the same back at the café, and on the cobbles outside. All except for the angry bloke in the long motor. And the bloke who had chased us from the church. And the male who was following us hadn’t looked all that pleased. But Petra was correct; just about everyone else looked very content.
But we couldn’t stand around here. For all I knew, the bloke who had been following us would turn back up. And then maybe all these “happy” citizens of True would pull out their wands and start blasting us. As back in the church, my natural inclination was to go up. I spotted a set of stairs and we hustled over to them and started climbing. We kept going, passing blokes along the way until we stopped passing anyone and were all by ourselves. We turned right and left and then up another set of steps. We passed down a corridor with a series of doors lining it. I used my wand to see behind the doors. They were rooms filled with odds and ends. But then one appeared that was not.
I opened the door and we stepped through.
It was empty, but set against one wall was the backside of the sign we had seen holding the schedule for the trains. When I drew close to it, I could see that there were slits in it. Through them I could see the interior of the train station we had just left. I leapt back when the sign started to vibrate. Things were spinning around faster than the eye could follow.
“What the Hel!” I exclaimed.
But Delph was not at a loss. “New train times,” he said. “Lots of trains, I guess, so’s you have to change things up, eh? Let folks know.”
“Right,” I said, still a bit unnerved. But we wouldn’t get much rest if that thing was going to do that all the time.
I had anticipated seeing death and destruction and the bloody Maladons ruling over all of it. But there was none of that here. There was peace and prosperity and apparent freedom.
I was so disappointed. And then I immediately felt guilty. Who wouldn’t prefer peace to war?
But then I thought about it some more. We had originally left Wormwood to find the truth. The truth of our past, and then the truth of our future. In the Quag we had run into Astrea Prine, the Keeper of the Quag, who had trained me up as a sorceress. She had told us of our past: the lost war against the Maladons. Then the creation of Wormwood as a hiding place to keep the survivors of that war safe, and the Quag conjured around it, both to keep Maladons out and us in. I had convinced her to allow Delph and me to try our luck at crossing the Quag and taking up the fight with the Maladons once more. Now, the blokes who had tracked and attacked us were magical, sure enough, but were they Maladons? Did the Maladons even exist anymore? It had been eight centuries since the war, after all. A lot could happen in that time, I reckoned.
I looked up at Delph and could tell from his expression that he was thinking the exact same thing.
“Maybe the Maladons got beat,” he said. “Beat by the blokes what live in this place.”
I looked at him in disbelief. “But how? They can’t do magic.”
Petra said, “We don’t know that.”
I shook my head. “Other than the two that followed us, we haven’t seen anyone perform any. What about that bloke that chased us from Saint Necro’s? And the one who was following us? If he could do magic, we wouldn’t be here, would we?” I paused. “And there’s something else.” I held up my gloved hand. “Their wands could detect the mark of the three hooks. That’s our symbol: peace, hope, freedom, everything the Maladons apparently hated. So the two we fought in Saint Necro’s had to be Maladons, otherwise how would they know to track the three hooks?”
Petra started to say something but then stopped and looked bewildered. Delph looked equally out of his depth.
My mind was so tired I couldn’t really think anymore. I turned to the sign when it started to whir. And in those spinning pieces of metal I saw my own mind whirling wildly out of control. What if I was wrong? What if the Maladons didn’t control this place?
What if Astrea Prine and her l
ot had made a colossal mistake that had doomed all Wugmorts to the bleakest existence possible?
I looked down at my wand. Magic might be useless to me if there is no battle to fight. If there is no war to win. If there is no grand enemy to vanquish. So I was here and my brother, John, was back in Wormwood enduring the tutelage of Morrigone that had already transformed him into something unrecognizable to me. Had I left him for no good reason?
And then a sudden thought struck me, although in truth it had always been very near the surface of my thinking.
My parents! And my grandfather!
Were they here, in True?
I sat up straighter, cheered by this possibility. If we searched this place thoroughly, I might just find them. I found Delph staring at me.
“Don’t make much sense, does it?” he said.
“What doesn’t?”
“Well, your grandfather Virgil’s this Excalibur, right?”
“Right.”
“An Excalibur?” interjected Petra curiously.
“Right powerful sorcerer from birth,” explained Delph. “And he left Wormwood in a ball of flames a long time ago when me and Vega were just wee things.”
Petra looked stunned, but said nothing.
“I know that, Delph,” I said sharply, wanting him to get to the point.
“So maybe he came here.”
“Maybe he did. I was just thinking we might find him here. And my parents.”
He continued as though he hadn’t even heard me. “So maybe he came here and saw what we have.”
“You mean a peaceful place where everyone is so very happy and well fed?” I said snidely.
“Right. But then he did what he did.”
My brow furrowed in puzzlement. “What did he do?”
“He summoned your parents, like Astrea said he done. And that wasn’t all that long ago.”
“Okay, but so what?”
“Well, why would he’a done that if something weren’t outta sorts? I mean Virgil was always one smart bloke. Don’t think he woulda done that for no bloody reason, eh?”
I mulled this over. What Delph said did make sense.
But then my mind veered to another possibility. One that perhaps even Delph had not considered.
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