The Merchant of Death

by D. J. MacHale

  Rellin started the meeting by saying, “I am sorry about your mother, Loor. She was a good person. I speak for all the Milago when I say how grateful we are to you and your people for coming here to help us. It saddens me that it had to end this way.”

  Loor was quick to respond and said, “I thank you for your sympathy, but my mother’s death does not end things. We will still lead the Milago to their freedom.”

  Rellin looked nervous. Suddenly there was tension in the air. I felt it and Loor felt it. I’m not sure what Alder felt because I didn’t know him well enough.

  “No,” Rellin said with finality. “It is over. There will be no fighting.” With that declaration he got up to leave. But Loor jumped up and stopped him. Rellin’s comment had taken her by surprise.

  “How can you say that, Rellin?” she asked. “If the Milago do not break free of the Bedoowan, you will all die!”

  “And if we fight them we will die much sooner,” said Rellin. “My people are not warriors. You know that, Alder.” He looked to Alder, who dropped his head. Rellin then looked back to Loor and said, “And you know that too, Loor. We would have no chance in a fight with the Bedoowan knights. We would be slaughtered.”

  Loor didn’t give up. “Remember what Press said? You may not be warriors, but you are strong. He said the Bedoowan do not have the character to resist if the Milago stand up for themselves. He said—”

  “Press is gone!” shouted Rellin. “And now Osa is gone as well. Who is left to lead us in this mad quest? You? Him?” He said this while pointing at me. “You are children. Your motives are noble, but it is time to end these foolish dreams.”

  With that he turned and stormed out of the hut. The meeting was over. I could tell that Loor wanted to go after him, but she didn’t. She may have been a warrior, but she didn’t have the words to change his mind.

  “He is wrong,” said Alder softly. “The Bedoowan are not as strong as Rellin thinks.”

  Loor walked slowly toward the body of her mother. She looked down at the fallen woman, then touched her arm as if trying to gain strength from her. She took the wooden szshaszha she had been carving and placed it in her mother’s lifeless hand. Man, this was tearing my heart out. I can only imagine how Loor felt.

  “He is lying,” she said with finality.

  Alder looked up quickly. This surprised him as much as it had me.

  “Say what?” was all I could come back with.

  “Rellin has wanted to fight the Bedoowan all of his life,” she explained. “His anger and hatred are far greater than his fear. I do not believe that he has changed his way of thinking so quickly.”

  Alder stood up. He looked as confused as I felt.

  “Then why did he say there would be no fight?” he asked.

  Loor kept her eyes on her mother and answered, “I do not know, but something has changed. Something he has not told us about. Maybe he does not trust us because we are so young.”

  I thought back to the other two times I had seen Rellin. The first was at the Transfer ceremony. Though I was far away, I felt his hatred for the Bedoowan. The other time was in the mines after the explosion. After he was rescued, he had that strange laugh that felt so out of place. Loor was right. Something odd was happening.

  “He trusted your mother, didn’t he?” I asked.

  “Of course,” came her quick reply.

  “Then he would have told her if things had changed and she would have told you, right?” I asked.

  “Are you saying that I am wrong?” she asked.

  “No,” I answered quickly. “I’m saying that if you’re right, then something strange is going on and the fact that he didn’t tell your mother about it makes me kind of nervous.”

  We all let this hang in the air for a while. Finally Alder said, “So what do we do?”

  I knew the answer to that. So did Loor, but I wanted to say it first.

  “We rescue Uncle Press,” I announced. “We gotta get him back here.”

  I shot a look at Loor. She didn’t have to say a word. I knew what she was thinking. Rescuing Uncle Press was exactly what we needed to do and she had decided to help me. She then looked to Alder and said, “This will be a difficult fight, Alder. You will have to reveal to them that you are a Traveler.”

  Alder stood up proudly and said, “I knew this day would come. I am ready.”

  “Whoa, whoa!” I said while stepping between them. “Who said anything about a fight?”

  Loor scoffed and said, “If you think we can get into the Bedoowan fortress, find Press, release him, and get out without a fight, you are not only a coward, you are a fool!”

  Loor’s macho act was starting to get old, but I didn’t want to make her angry by telling her so. I had to stand up to her or she’d walk all over me.

  “Yeah?” I said trying to match her bravura. “The goal here is to get Uncle Press out, and if you think the three of us have any chance of doing that by fighting Kagan’s knights, then maybeyou’re the fool!”

  Loor didn’t have a comeback. Alder put the icing on the cake for me by saying, “He is right, Loor. If we charge in fighting, we will be killed before we find Press.”

  This bothered Loor. It was obvious that her first reaction to problem solving was to come out swinging. But she wasn’t an idiot, and she was beginning to realize that her way might not have been the best way in this case.

  “Then what do we do?” she asked. “Ask Kagan politely to release Press? Maybe if we saidplease it would happen.”

  Whoa, the muscle head was capable of sarcasm. Maybe she had more going on than I gave her credit for.

  “The only chance we have is to sneak in there without them knowing,” I said. “The longer we can stay invisible, the better chance we have of getting Uncle Press out.”

  Alder was getting excited. He said, “Yes! I know a way to get in. And I know every corridor of that fortress. There are passageways and tunnels that are rarely used.”

  Loor didn’t like being told she was wrong, especially by someone she didn’t respect, which was me. But I think she was smart enough to know that my way made more sense.

  She said, “And do you have a plan for what to do after Alder gets us into the palace?”

  The fact is, I did. Sort of. It wasn’t really a plan as much as it was a bunch of ideas. Unfortunately all my ideas needed things that didn’t exist here on Denduron. I needed a bunch of stuff from back home.

  “If I got a message to my friends back home,” I asked, “is there a way for them to send me something from there?”

  Loor stepped away from me. She knew the answer, but I think she was reluctant to tell me. I was still pretty new to this whole Traveler thing. Maybe she wasn’t sure she could trust me with all the secrets yet.

  But Alder didn’t have the same concerns. “Of course there is,” he said innocently. “You can flume back to your territory and get whatever you want.”

  I was beginning to like this guy. Could it be as simple as that? All I had to do was go back to the flume and I could get home? Cool. But there was still the tricky issue of having to climb back to the top of that mountain to get to the gate. There’s no way I could do that in time to get home, then get back here to rescue Uncle Press before he was executed. Besides, I’d probably get eaten by those quigs anyway.

  “That’s no good,” I said. “Is there another way?”

  “You do not need to go to the mountain,” said Loor. “There is another gate in the mines that is not guarded by quigs.”

  Oh, yeah! This was getting better by the second. And maybe best of all, by Loor giving me that piece of information, she was allowing herself to trust me. Maybe we could work together after all. Now that I was certain I could get home, my mind started to calculate all of the things I could get that would help us sneak into the fortress. The thing that was so cool is that the people of Denduron knew nothing about life at home. They would be blown away by something as simple as a flashlight. Man, talk about power! I wasn’t
exactly sure how it was going to work, but I was beginning to think that we might really have a chance of getting Uncle Press out of there.

  Loor took me back down to the mine. It was an uneasy truce that we had going. We both knew we needed each other, but neither of us was too happy about it. The first thing I did was go back to the small cell-like room where Loor made me wait before, and finish my journal. I also wrote out the list of items and the instructions that I sent to you. Once they were ready, I rolled them up and did exactly what Osa had done when she sent you my first journal. I took off the ring, put it on the ground, touched the gray stone, and said, “Earth!”

  But nothing happened. I tried again. Nothing. I was suddenly hit with a terrible thought. Osa told me that the power only worked for Travelers. What if I wasn’t really a Traveler? I was doing exactly what she did, but the ring didn’t work. Maybe I wasn’t a Traveler after all!

  Loor had been watching from the doorway. Before my panic got any worse she said, “You are not from Earth. You are from Second Earth.”

  Oh. Right. That’s what Osa said. Second Earth. Did that mean there was a First Earth? I made a mental note to ask that question later. There were more important duties at hand. I touched the stone and said, “Second Earth!” Sure enough, that was the ticket. The stone began to glow, the ring grew, the musical notes played, and I dropped the journal with my list into its center. It disappeared and all returned to normal. Cool. But then I was hit with another thought.

  “Loor,” I asked. “How will I know when to flume back to Earth…uh…Second Earth? It could take a long time for my friends to get the stuff together.”

  Loor gave me the straightest answer I’d had since my arrival. And she seemed unsure of herself, like it didn’t make sense to her, either.

  “I do not fully understand how,” she began. “But when Travelers fly through the flumes, they will always arrive when they need to arrive.”

  It was then that I realized that Loor didn’t know much more about being a Traveler than I did. Sure, she put on this tough front, but I think she was still trying to get her mind around the concept.

  “My mother began to explain it to me,” she added. “She said the flumes travel through time as well as through space. But why a Traveler always arrives at the time they need to arrive was not made clear to me.”

  “So you’re telling me that when I flume to Earth—”

  “Second Earth,” she corrected.

  “Yeah, whatever. When I flume to Second Earth I’ll arrive at the same time that my friends arrive at the other end?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does that work both ways? Forward and back?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, if I left right now, would my friends be waiting for me already? Even though I just sent the list a minute ago?”

  “I think so,” she answered.

  “Then let’s go!”

  Loor led me back into the large cavern and then into a tunnel on the far side. This was an ancient tunnel, more so than the others. There were some loose rocks scattered over the ore-car tracks, which told me there hadn’t been any miners through here in a long time. The walls also looked to be a bit rougher than the others, as if they hadn’t quite perfected their digging techniques when this tunnel was gouged out of the earth.

  We had walked for quite a while when I asked, “How do you know we’re going the right way?”

  Loor answered by raising up her hand. She was wearing a ring that was identical to mine. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed it before. I guess when you’re in the Traveler Club, everybody gets the special ring. But the thing was, the gray stone was letting off a very slight glow.

  “My mother showed me this gate a few days ago,” she explained. “She also showed me how to tell if a gate is nearby. The stone will tell you.”

  Sure enough, I looked at my own ring and saw that the gray stone was starting to glow. Then as we rounded one more bend, I saw it. Embedded in the rock was a wooden door.

  Several yards farther down the tunnel was another opening. There was a pile of stones in front of that, as if it had just recently been dug out. Beyond this opening was an old ore car on the tracks. The thing probably hadn’t been moved in decades.

  “How do you know it’s this tunnel and not that one?” I asked.

  Loor pointed to the wooden door. There was a star symbol carved in it, just like the door in the subway back in the Bronx. We walked inside and I saw the familiar tunnel that led to nowhere and everywhere. I took a few steps toward it and then turned back to Loor.

  “What do I do?” I asked.

  “I think you know,” she answered.

  Yeah, I did. I walked a few steps farther into the mouth of the tunnel when Loor called to me, “Pendragon?” I turned back and she said, “Your uncle is a good man. I want to rescue him too.”

  I thought that was pretty cool. I nodded to her, then turned to face the darkness and said, “Second Earth!”

  You know what happened next.

  Journal #3

  (continued)

  Denduron

  Ididn’t want to leave you guys. When I took the flume back to that subway station, my thoughts were all about Uncle Press and the mission ahead. But once I got there and saw you both, I remembered how much I missed my real life. The small time I had spent on Denduron put my head in an entirely different place, but when I saw you two I suddenly felt like I had never left home. There was a moment where the idea of stepping into that flume and jumping back to Denduron was impossible. You were right, Courtney; it would have been easy. All I had to do was walk away.

  But then I remembered Uncle Press and I knew what I had to do. I had to come back. Maybe it would have been better if I had stayed with you because I’ve made things worse than they were. Good intentions aren’t always enough. You have to be smart and sometimes I think that I’m not that smart. I’ll tell you what happened and you be the judge.

  When I took the flume back to Denduron, I was greeted by Loor. The first thing she said was, “I was not sure if you would return.”

  I got all indignant and said, “Hey, give me a little credit, would you?” Of course she was absolutely right. I almost stayed on Second Earth, but I didn’t want her to know that. I wanted her to think that I was confident in our mission.

  She said, “We are both tired. We must get some sleep before we begin.”

  “Do we have enough time?” I asked. I knew that Uncle Press was to be executed at “the equinox,” whatever that was. It could have been in ten minutes for all I knew.

  “The equinox is at midday tomorrow,” she explained. “When the three suns are one in the sky. We have enough time for a short rest.”

  Now I understood. The equinox was noon. Loor and I walked back to the small room in the mine. She didn’t ask me about what was in the backpack and I wasn’t about to start explaining. That would come later. But there was one item I wanted, so I took it out. It was my digital watch. I had no idea what time it was, but if we were going to sleep, I didn’t want to end up sacking out for ten hours and waking up too late. I set the alarm to go off in two hours. That’s just a long nap, and my tank was empty. Still, a few hours of sleep was better than nothing.

  Loor watched me curiously as I set the watch alarm. She even jumped back with surprise when it beeped. I assumed they didn’t have watches where she came from. It made me feel like I had one up on her for a change. But more important, her surprise at the beep meant my guess was right. To the people of Denduron, the simple things I could pull out of this pack would seem like huge magic. Throwing someone off balance, even for a short time, might mean the difference between success and failure. Or between life and death.

  When I dug the watch out of my pack, I also found the extra surprise you put in there, Mark. You are the best. You know how much I love Milky Ways and the one you stuck in that pack was the most delicious treat in the history of treats. Thanks. I even offered a piece to Loor. I t
hought that was pretty nice of me, since I didn’t have much hope of finding another Milky Way around these parts. She took the bite-sized piece, popped it cautiously into her mouth and instantly spit it out. What a waste! I guess they don’t have candy bars on her territory either.

  “Next time you wish to feed me poison, warn me first,” she demanded.

  “What are you talking about? Where I come from this is a major treat,” I said, still laughing.

  “Then you come from a strange place, Pendragon,” she said while taking a swig of water to wash the taste out of her mouth. It was like I had given her a brussel sprout or something.