“Right,” said Billy. “And I remember that once you called that place the heart of the Power of the Earth.”
“And?” prompted Vester.
“Don’t you see?” asked Billy. “The dagger comes from the Element of Flame. The sword came from the heart of Earth. So wouldn’t it make sense that the other weapons, and the armor, came from places that were central to the other Elements? Like,” he said, glancing at Tempus, “the City of the Sky.”
“Wait,” said Vester. “Sword, shield, dagger, spear, armor. That’s five things. But there are six Elements.”
Billy frowned. “That’s true,” he agreed. “But I still think I’m onto something.”
Mrs. Russet looked like she was considering his words.
“I think you are, as well,” she said. “There are things I’ve read in the Book of the Earth that would seem to….” Her voice slowly drifted into silence as she became lost in thought.
Billy was content to wait for her to work out whatever it was she was thinking of. He looked at the dagger. It seemed to have its own glimmering flame deep within it. It was warm to the touch, but not uncomfortably so. It was warm in the way that another person’s hand was warm. Almost alive-seeming.
Thinking of holding hands made his thoughts drift to Blythe Forrest. Where was she now? Was she sick, like the other Greens? Was she immune to the problems that had befallen them? Was she somewhere with the Darksiders, plotting against the Dawnwalkers; against Billy’s friends?
Billy’s thoughts were disrupted by Fulgora. She reached out and touched him on the shoulder. “I am sorry about Solus,” she said. She spoke quietly, as though she, too, wanted to let Mrs. Russet think without being disturbed.
“What was with that guy?” agreed Billy.
“The Dagger of Flame is something that has been rumored to exist, something that many Reds have given their lives to finding. The legends of Memory say that it was once used to make Fire supreme among the Elements.” She stared at the dagger, looking as though she might lose herself in the light that shone within it. She touched it gingerly, tenderly. “There are those among my people who would have the Dagger of Flame in order to rule the world.”
Billy felt his grip tighten on the hilt of the blade. “What about you?” he asked.
Fulgora pulled her gaze away from the weapon, moving slowly, as though it pained her. “I am a warrior, Billy. I have honor, as do my sister Princesses and brother Princes – other than Solus. I would not take from you that which you had fairly won. Besides,” she added, her voice returning to its matter-of-fact tones, “the White King first fought to stop the Powers from fighting each other for ascendancy. And though as a Red I share a close kinship with Memory, I would not revisit the past; would not return to the days of inter-Element warfare.”
Fulgora’s eyes suddenly went blank, as though she had lost the ability to focus on Billy. “What is it?” he asked.
“Someone is coming,” she said. She turned, and Billy followed her gaze and saw one side of the hall of the Fire Lords split in two. The glass-like walls folded in on themselves like a curtain, and in walked a figure that Billy knew well.
“Terry!” said Billy.
The old man nodded to him curtly, then walked over to Mrs. Russet. Terry was her husband, but he looked much, much older than his wife due to the effects of a spell that had been cast on him during the Second War of the Powers. He had almost died during the Battle for Powers Island, but had been saved, and had been returned to the arms of his wife.
There was a Fizzle on the Brown Power’s shoulder. Fizzles were creatures that some Powers could create, beings that had life of a sort, and that also inherited some of their makers’ personality quirks. The Fizzle on Terry’s shoulder was a tiny creature that looked like it was made of rock, and had what appeared to be about a dozen arms and legs. It was one of the Kung Fu Cleaners: Fizzles that Terry had created and that shared his manic obsessiveness about cleaning things.
“What’s wrong?” said Mrs. Russet as soon as she saw her husband. Billy was surprised at her tone. When he had last seen Mrs. Russet and her husband, they had been cooing over one another like teenagers suffering from the granddaddy of crushes. Now, however, Mrs. Russet sounded distant when she spoke to Terry. Cold.
“The water,” said Terry. “The oceans, they’re rising.” And though clearly worried about something, Terry somehow managed to sound as aloof as Mrs. Russet did. What’s going on with them? Billy wondered.
“What do you mean, the oceans are rising?” she asked.
“I mean the Earth is under attack. The oceans are rising, and unless we do something quickly, all land everywhere is going to be flooded.”
“When?” asked Mrs. Russet.
Terry reached under the cloak he was wearing and pulled out a cell phone. Billy was always surprised when he was reminded that Powers were people, too. They had jobs, and houses, and lived among “normal” humans. It made sense that Terry would have a phone. Still, the sight of the thing in the Power’s hands seemed unaccountably strange to Billy. He wondered if Terry got service here, in the Underworld of Flame; and if he did, who his telephone carrier was.
Terry looked at the clock on the face of his cell phone. He put away the device, and stared hard at Mrs. Russet.
“When?” he repeated. “Oh, I don’t know for sure. I’d guess we have at least a day.”
CHAPTER THE SIXTH
In Which Billy cuts Stone, and meets an Old One…
They moved quickly. Fulgora led them out of the hall of the Fire Lords, to the streets of the Underworld of Flame, where all was chaos. People were running around like ants from an anthill that had just had the nozzle of a firehose forced into it. Fulgora stopped one of them, a burly man who bowed to her when she reached out and snagged his coat as he was passing by.
“What’s going on?” demanded Fulgora.
“The Water,” said the man breathlessly. “It’s coming. It’s coming now.”
“What do you mean?”
The man shrugged. “I don’t know exactly. But the entire city has been put on alert.”
Fulgora let the man go, and he bowed again and was soon lost in the throngs of people. She turned to Terry. “What’s happening?”
“I told you,” he said impatiently. “The waters are rising. Tidal waves have risen up all over the world. None of them have fallen to the land yet, but they are headed toward all the major continents.”
Mrs. Russet turned to Fulgora. “We should go,” said Mrs. Russet.
Fulgora nodded curtly. “I am needed here, but I’ll catch up with you as soon as I can.”
“I’ll stay with you,” said Vester to the Red Lady.
Fulgora shook her head. “No, go with them.”
“I can’t,” insisted Vester. “I’m your Knight Marshall.”
“All the more reason for you to go. You are responsible for the defense of this land.” She looked around. “People here are panicking, but I don’t see an imminent threat from beyond the Underworld. I need you to go with the others, to find out what is happening in the world above. And find out if we are next.”
Vester nodded, then kissed Fulgora quickly on the cheek. The Red Princess’s blush heightened, then she turned away from them without a backward glance and quickly disappeared from view.
Vester watched her leave, then turned to the group. “Let’s go,” he said gruffly.
Terry nodded, and Billy felt heard a grating noise as five stone chairs rose up from the magma below them. The chairs glowed red-hot, but Mrs. Russet told Tempus, who insisted he didn’t want to cook his bottom, that they would be perfectly safe to sit on.
The company sat, and Billy was taken on a trip through the Earth. He usually reveled in the trips through underground canyons, through prismatic forests of geodes that grew in the secret caverns below civilization’s view, and in the awesome feeling of being one with the entire planet. This time, however, he barely noticed the trip. He was too concerned with what
Terry had said.
Tidal waves? Everywhere?
He couldn’t even conceptualize it. He knew what a tidal wave was, of course, but to imagine them rising up all over the planet, well… it was just too much to hold in his head.
In what seemed like only a moment, he found himself standing on dry land.
“Where are we?” said Tempus.
“The White Cliffs of Dover,” said Terry. They were looking out over a vast landscape of broken rocks and green plants.
“Why here?” said Vester. Then he turned around, and gasped.
Billy turned, too, and felt immediately dizzy. He was standing on the edge of a cliff that fell away hundreds of feet to a frenzy of pounding surf below. Then his dizziness abated as he realized that the height itself was not nearly as frightening as the fact that there was an enormous wave that had risen up in the ocean and was traveling toward them at a horrific speed. The wave was beyond immense. It was truly colossal, standing so high that it rose up a good fifty or sixty feet above Billy’s head, even though he was standing on a cliff hundreds of feet above the ocean’s surface.
The wave rushed toward them, and Billy threw his hands up automatically. He knew it was in vain, and that the wave must weigh millions – billions – of tons. But he couldn’t help it. He closed his eyes. The rushing of the tidal wave grew, and grew… and then quieted.
Billy cracked his eye open, and found himself staring at a wall of water that towered over his head. But it was not moving toward him and his friends. It loomed over them, silent and solid as a mountain, though Billy could not recall ever before seeing a mountain that had things swimming through it. He could see fish, and what looked like the dim outlines of a whale or two, traversing the depths of the wave.
He looked over at Mrs. Russet. “What’s happening?” he asked.
Mrs. Russet was pale. He saw sweat beading her brow.
“It’s like the First War of the Powers all over again,” said Mrs. Russet.
“Great blue billy goats,” whispered Tempus. And though Billy did not really understand what Tempus was referring to (which was entirely normal), he thought he did understand the feeling behind it. From what Billy knew, the First War of the Powers was the most cataclysmic thing ever to have happened. It was a time when the six groups of Powers warred for supremacy, each Element trying to conquer the other. The war was so devastating that it literally shattered the planet, blasting apart the single continent then on the earth – the continent scientists called Pangea – into the seven continents that people lived on now. Only the intervention of the White King had stopped the entire planet from being plunged into everlasting darkness.
Billy shuddered inwardly. He knew he was the Messenger; the person who had been prophesied to prepare the world for the return of the White King. Part of that same set of prophecies also made reference to Billy as the person who destroyed the world. And was this how the destruction of the world would begin? With towering tidal waves that would crush everything before them?
Billy glanced at Vester. The young man was standing utterly still, his face ashen and bloodless. Billy knew that Fire Powers had a natural aversion to large quantities of water, so couldn’t even begin to imagine what must be going on in his friend’s head.
Mrs. Russet looked at her husband. “Have we tried to stop it?”
Terry nodded. “The moment it started, most of the Brown Powers were summoned to Powers Island. They’re there now, trying to cast some spell that will return the seas to their proper place.”
“And?” prompted Mrs. Russet.
Terry shook his head. “Nothing is having any effect.”
“That’s impossible,” said Mrs. Russet. “There has to be some Power behind this – more than one,” she added, nodding at the impossibly stationary wave that still hovered over them, clearly ready to crash down upon them at any moment. “Which means that we can fight them.”
“You don’t understand,” said Terry. “Nothing we do is working. At all.”
“What do you mean?” said Mrs. Russet.
“Try to cast a spell,” he said. “At the water. Just make sure it’s nothing lethal.”
Mrs. Russet nodded, though Billy could see she was confused by the request. She raised her hands above her head, and a pair of stones the size of small cars rose up out of the ground nearby. She made another motion, and the stones soared over her head, speeding toward the wave.
Billy didn’t know what he expected to see. Surely the stones couldn’t do much to the wave. Indeed, throwing them at the behemoth was a little like trying to attack the moon with a BB gun. But of anything he thought might happen, he certainly did not expect to see the rocks suddenly alter course, reversing direction in mid-flight, and heading straight at the small group that stood on the edge of the cliff.
“Down!” shouted Vester. He pulled Tempus to the ground, and Mrs. Russet and Terry also dropped to the dirt and rock below. Billy had no time to follow suit; he was too surprised by the sudden reversal of the boulders’ course.
But then his hand moved. Billy felt himself throw the Dagger of Flame into the air. The blade flipped end over end toward the rocks. It hit the first of them, and there was an explosion so loud that it nearly knocked Billy off his feet. A bright flash of light and heat washed over him. Vivid blobs of color flashed in front of his eyes, obscuring his vision. He heard a second explosion, and then his eyesight cleared enough to see a thick cloud of dust and dirt raining down into the ocean far below: all that was left of the boulders that had almost ended his life.
Still moving of its own accord, his hand jerked into the air, and he caught the Dagger of Flame, which had returned like a boomerang to his hands.
Billy was stunned. Something like this had happened to him before, when he was holding Excalibur. Apparently the magic weapons imparted not only great power, but an ability to use them with perfect skill.
Mrs. Russet was looking at the cloud of dirt that was all that remained of her spell, then shifted to look at Billy and the Dagger of Flame, then looked back at the cloud of falling gravel that was now far below them. It looked as though she couldn’t decide what to comment on first. Finally: “It… they came back at me. My own spell came back at me!” She looked at Terry. “Is this happening everywhere?”
Terry nodded. “Any time an Earth spell is cast at the waves, the spell bounces back at its maker.”
“But the wave here,” interjected Tempus. “It’s not moving.”
“No,” said Terry. “Like I said, none of the waves have fallen on land yet. Several have reached points near to land, but they all halt, like this one has.”
“So they just stand there and do nothing?” said Vester.
“No,” said Terry with a shake of his head. “They are doing something: they’re growing.” He nodded toward the top of the wave that was standing near them, and Billy could see that he was right: even in the short time that they had been standing there, the wave had already grown taller.
“What happens next?” asked Vester. His voice had a slight edge to it. The man was terrified, Billy could tell. Nor could he blame him; Billy was trying to decide whether fainting or wetting his pants would be the preferred course in this situation.
“We don’t know,” said Terry. “But my best guess?” he asked. Vester nodded. “I think that whoever or whatever is behind this is calling the seas higher and higher. And when they get high enough, he’ll let them go, and the whole earth will be covered in water.”
“But,” stuttered Billy. “That’s insane. Who could possibly want that to happen?”
“Water Powers,” said Mrs. Russet. “Though I’ve never heard of one nearly powerful enough to do this. And never have I heard of anything that could turn a people’s own spells against them.”
Billy had a flash of inspiration. He turned to Vester. “Try casting a Fire spell at the wave,” he said.
“I don’t think I want to do that,” said his friend.
“Vester, you have to.
Just something small,” Billy insisted.
Vester hesitated, then nodded. He took his lighter out of his pocket, flicked a flame into existence, and then pulled the flame away from the lighter. He tossed the small bit of fire into the sky, where it hovered above his head for a moment, before streaking like a bullet at the wave.
Billy could feel everyone tense. What if Vester’s spell rebounded as well?
But it didn’t. It just hit the face of the wave with a hiss, and was quenched by the mountain of water.
“It didn’t bounce back,” said Vester.
“No,” said Billy. “It’s just Earth spells that come back.”
“Billy?” said Mrs. Russet. “What do you know that we don’t?”
Billy wanted to tell her. But he knew that if he did tell her, it would give him too much time to think about what he had to do next, and in thinking about it, he could lose his nerve.
So rather than answer, Billy just said, “I’ll be right back.” A moment later he added, “I hope.”
And then, for the second time in his life, Billy jumped off a high cliff, and plunged toward the roiling sea below.
He heard the screams of his friends, but the sound faded almost instantly, replaced by the whipping of air past his ears. Saltwater sprayed into his eyes as he fell, and he had an instant to take a deep breath before he hit the furiously pounding surf below.
He hit the water hard, half expecting to feel his legs shatter with the impact, but they remained attached. A bubble escaped his lips, and he realized he was still holding the breath he had inhaled before crashing below the waves. He let it out.
And did not breathe in again.
Billy felt a huge surge of relief. He had guessed that he would be able to survive underwater, but hadn’t been one hundred percent sure. The last time he had fallen from a cliff into the ocean below, he had been rescued by a blue whale named Artemaeus, who took him to meet the mermaid Blue, who had once been known as the Lady of Shalott. Billy hadn’t drowned, or been crushed by the tremendous pressure of the ocean’s depths, because Blue had “changed him” somehow; had rendered him impervious to the pressure of the deep and had made it possible for Billy to hold his breath indefinitely. Billy had thought the change was permanent, but he hadn’t been sure, until now.
Billy: Seeker of Powers (The Billy Saga) Page 8
