by Peter Plasse
“Well, what can you say about a guy who’s willing to admit when he’s wrong,” thought Jessica. “Maybe this will all work out fine.”
The expression on the face of the man that Blake and Jessica took to be Rolan told them that nothing was as it should be. No, it was wrong. All wrong. Very badly wrong.
Their worst fears were confirmed when the King spoke his first words, “Your daughter and my son have been captured by the Trolls. I have just learned of this. We are doing everything we can to determine their whereabouts and to rescue them as quickly as possible, alive and unhurt. My name is Rolan Andrew Fairman. I am King of Ravenwild. Every resource I have at my command I hereby dedicate to the cause.”
If Hemlock thought Jessica was going to give him a break by pulling that ‘weak woman’ fainting thing, he was sadly mistaken. She was instantly in his face with weapon drawn. It was a dagger, and she was going for his neck.
Before anyone could think, let alone react, she had him secured with the razor-sharp edge of the blade against his throat.
Her grip was iron. Her intent: lethal.
Chapter 9
Orie, Mark, and Ryan were in Mark’s room. Orie had decided that it would be best to put some space in between themselves and the Minotaur, so they had called Mr. Jones who had come and gotten them. Since Jordan had to do some afternoon chores for his dad, Mr. Jones dropped him off.
The first thing that Orie did when they got there was borrow Mark’s cell phone and call Jacqueline on Tanta Kendra’s. “Hey Jacq’,” said Orie. He made his tone light, cheery. “Everything all right?”
“Yuh,” she said, “We’re not there yet.”
“Okay. Look, I have to tell Mark and Ryan what’s going on. We gotta do what we gotta do. You know what I mean, right?”
“Of course,” she said.
“Good. As soon as we’ve done it, I’ll call you, and we’ll hang out.”
There was no answer.
“Jacq’?”
“I should be there with you.”
“Yes, you should.”
“I know ten times what those city boys know about being in the woods.”
“Yes you do. But if you went, and anything happened to you, I couldn’t live with myself. Besides, we may need to go to Ravenwild, or wherever it is that Mom and Dad really went, and I can’t count on that unless you are alive and healthy at Tanta Kendra’s.”
Silence.
“Okay.”
“Good, Jacq’. I’ll call you when we have it done.”
“Be careful, Orie.”
“I will. Thanks, Jacq’. I love you.”
“I love you.”
Each hung up.
“So Orie, wazzup?” asked Mark. “Where’s Ravenwild? Is that, like, in Massachusetts?”
Twenty minutes later, Mark and Ryan sat in front of Orie, stunned into silence. Ryan’s mouth literally hung open. “RyeRye, close your mouth,” said Orie.
“There is no flippin’ way,” said Mark. “You have to be making this all up.”
“I wish,” said Orie. “But it’s true, every word of it. And like I said, we need to get whatever this Hemlock guy left in the pumpkin … and, oh, yeah, you guys need to swear, and I mean swear, that none of this gets to anybody else. Nobody.”
“The third pumpkin,” howled Mark. “O-man. This is too crazy. You’re telling us that your mother and father jetted off to a parallel universe with some Dumbledore character to rescue Stephanie, who jetted off to be with this other parallel universe guy, and now might be trapped there.”
“Well, we don’t know if she’s trapped. Hemlock said she’s perfectly fine. He thought we should just chill and wait for her to come home.”
“Well, do you trust this guy or not?”
“No way,” said Orie.
“So this Minotaur thing, that we thought was some ‘Hallmark Moment’ singing message guy, really was a half-bull half-man creature-dude from this other parallel dimension that has come to put a hurt on you and the fam’?”
“Did you see him?” Orie asked. “He didn’t look like he was there to teach C.C.D. classes. And he went right for the pumpkin patch. And I swear it was like he was looking right at me and Jacqueline. It was nasty.”
“So now what do we do?”
“We gear up and get the thing.”
“Orie, that thing will tear us to pieces if it catches us. And how do we know there’s only one? Or maybe things even worse. Maybe they’re all over the place now.”
“You’re right. But we still need to go there. But first we need to get a ride to the mall. Can we talk your dad into it?”
Twenty minutes later Mr. Jones dropped them off at the mall. An hour after that they walked out in full camouflage and wearing headset walkie-talkies. Each had also purchased a small flashlight. Their plan was to approach the pumpkin patch from several different directions, using the headset walkie-talkies to call each other immediately if there was any sign of the Minotaur or any other dangers. Orie repeated the need to be “woods quiet.” His biggest concern was that the “city kids” would give them away by being too loud.
They entered the woods after sundown. Luck appeared to be smiling upon them, because by midnight they were sitting in Mark’s room examining the thing that Orie had harvested from the third pumpkin from the right-hand end of Ron’s pumpkin patch. The only difficulty they had was, whenever Orie inspected the pumpkin, it seemed perfectly intact. There was no hole, no seam, nor any other defect that led him to suspect that this pumpkin was any different than the other dozens scattered about the patch. Finally, he had given up trying to get it out and taken the whole pumpkin. It made the going a little slower, but whenever he cut it open and removed the rectangular box in Mark’s room, he and Ryan gained a whole new level of respect for their friend, as well as the realization that they were now inextricably involved in the adventure of a lifetime.
“What is it?” asked Mark.
“It looks like a TV remote,” said Ryan.
“We have to get out of here,” said Orie. “We have to get out of here now.
Right now. We have to steal a car and drive away. We have to pick Jacqueline up and drive to a random place and lay low for a while. Disappear. Make a plan.”
“Why do we have to do that?” asked Ryan.
“Because now we have it, and old Hemlock is going to come looking for it, or one of his extraterrestrial buddies. And we don’t want to be on this guy’s bad side. Trust me, this guy is in control of some major weirdness. I have a feeling he could mess us up big-time. Where can we steal a car?”
“Orie, we can’t steal a car,” said Mark. “What are we going to say if we get caught? That we had to because we’re getting chased by a creature from another planet, where your sister is being held hostage? I’m sorry, but the judge isn’t going to buy it.”
“I don’t mean steal it. I mean kinda borrow it for a spell.”
“Well, what about your Dad or Mom’s car, genius?” asked Ryan. “It’s not like they’re going to be needing them for a while.”
“Yes, but that would mean going to our house,” said Orie. “One word: Minotaur! Hello!”
“I say we walk right up there and drive off in your dad’s truck,” said Mark. “He can’t do anything if all of us are there. It’s probably some interplanetary law that you can’t harm non-combatants.”
“Mark, don’t be ridiculous. If this is like Orie says, that would be a braindead thing to do.”
And so the discussion went, back and forth, for several minutes.
It was decided that they would steal Dad’s truck under the cover of darkness. It was two-thirty. They could walk to Orie’s from Mark’s in a half hour, which left at least two or three hours before the sun came up.
They would leapfrog down the driveway until the final bend, where only Orie would sneak the last two hundred feet while Mark and Ryan kept him posted on possible danger with the walkie-talkie headsets. If anything went wrong, they would scatter to preven
t the Minotaur from catching them all.
So, around three, down the driveway they snuck. As it happened, it was a great night to be sneaking, because there was thick cloud cover, and it was completely dark.
They were finally gathered at the last bend, beyond which Orie would be in plain sight of anyone or anything that happened to be skulking around the house. With no lights on, when he peeked around for a quick look, he saw that he couldn’t see the house much; it was a vague silhouette. And he couldn’t see his father’s truck at all.
“I hope it’s still there,” he thought, then, “Of course it’s there. Where else would it be?”
He found he was sweating under his camos something terrible. Regardless, he knew he had to do this. Hemlock would be back, or one of his interplanetary henchmen, and they needed to be far away for a while until he could figure out what the TV remote-thing was. Orie firmly believed that it was vitally important, or Hemlock wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of hiding it so well, inside of a pumpkin as though it were part of the pumpkin itself. And if it was that important, Orie and Jacqueline controlling it gave them some sort of power over him. Sure, he might be just a regular guy doing everything he could to save his race from extinction, but he had lied. “Lie once and you’re a liar,” his father often said in one of his canned lectures on values. Hence, the man, or wizard, or whatever he was, was a liar, and, “You can’t trust a liar.” At least that was the punch line to the lecture he had so often heard, and if he was up to no good, better they had something he might want, something they might be able to bargain with.
He eased away from the other two boys, feeling his way along slowly. He found that it was easy as pie being “woods quiet” in the driveway, as long as he avoided stepping on any sticks. Pretty soon he was almost to the truck when his headset crackled, “Orie. Get out of there! Get out of there! A light came on in the house. Orie, do you copy? Orie, come back!”
But he couldn’t chance answering them. He was too close to the house. He made the last ten feet in a silent mad dash and in seconds was opening the truck door as quietly as possible. He was standing directly under the deck where his dad always parked. What he could not see was the gigantic creature watching him from less than ten feet away.
Slowly, gently, he eased the door open and slid, snakelike, into the front seat. To his horror, the key was not in the ignition! Impossible. His dad always left the key in the ignition. He began to panic. He decided he had better exit the truck pronto. Then he would bolt for it.
“Get away!” his mind screamed, “Get away!” But when he went to open the door, it struck something. It was his worst thought. What the door had struck was the Minotaur itself.
He scooted across the seat to try and dash from the opposite side, but before he could accomplish that, the Minotaur was standing there.
“You should die for what you have done,” Jessica snarled, her face twisted with rage. Little bits of saliva shot from her mouth and settled on Hemlock’s face. “You kidnapped my child and put her life in danger. The only reason I’m going to let you live is we might need you to help us rescue her.”
“Jessica,” said Blake. “You’re right, of course. But perhaps it would better serve the mission to locate Stephanie and get home if we temporarily put aside our differences with Hemlock here and, instead, concentrated on working with Rolan. What do I call you? King? Your Majesty? Your Highness?”
Jessica released her grip of the wizard, shoving him away from her with a growl of anger. She had learned something valuable, however. She had seen genuine fear in his eyes. That meant he could be harmed, maybe not at home, but probably here. That might be important. Time would tell.
“Rolan will be fine. Entirely appropriate under the circumstances.” replied the King. Two things were obvious: First, he was trying to be gracious, and that seemed sincere enough, and second, he was clearly deathly afraid of the possible consequences of his son’s and their daughter’s capture.
“Please, let us sit and have my military advisors do what their name suggests, give us the best possible advice as to how to proceed. I have already summoned as many as can be spared from the actual war efforts. They will be here shortly. I’m sorry I cannot include one of my fine wizards in the discussion, but the plain truth is they are all engaged in battles even as we speak. I’m afraid that we are facing circumstances as grave as I have ever seen. We are in danger of being overwhelmed by the combined Troll/Gnome forces. Our situation is clearly perilous. You must understand this.”
“First of all, how do you know of us and, for example, that our daughter has been captured by the Troll nation, or that we even have a daughter for that matter? Do you know our names?” asked Blake.
A door opened behind the King. In filed three soldiers. All three looked like they had just stepped off the battlefield. They looked that way because they had.
“To make it simple, I know of you, Blake and Jessica Strong, from a discussion I had with Pinus here,” he answered, gesturing towards Hemlock.
Jessica turned to glare at him. He vanished.
“His name is Pinus?” asked Blake.
“Yes. Pinus Porphyrius,” answered the King, “although he has always gone by many names, Hemlock among them.” Looking towards the now empty space where moments before Pinus had stood, the King said, “He does that.” He continued. “I will deal with him when he shows up again. He will. Meanwhile, in view of the fact we are fighting for our very lives here, I must confess I gave the whole thing less thought than I should have. But that was then, and this is now. We need a plan to rescue the children. Blake, Jessica, my best officers: Thargen Sturdy, my second in command, Borok Dodson, Minister of Planning and Escapes, and Dorin Esselt, Minister of Strategic Unit Deployment.”
Each man nodded as their King introduced them. Only Dorin managed a bleak smile.
Blake was the first to notice that Dorin was bleeding significantly from a large gash in his left arm. All were bloodstained, but this was something that obviously needed immediate attention.
“Take your shirt off and let me look at that arm,” he said.
Dorin looked at Rolan, not knowing what to do. “Don’t look at him, man, do as I say. I’m a Doctor of Medicine. On the battlefield, I would never question an order by you, but this is my battlefield. Take off your shirt, or bleed to death, your choice. But if you’re going to have a role in the rescue of my daughter, I would rather have you alive.”
“Do as he says,” said Rolan. “It is as he says. He is a healer where he comes from.”
“Right here, in front of the lady?” he asked. His face reddened noticeably as he asked the question.
“She is a healer as well,” said Rolan. “And where they are from, the women and men healers both take care of men and women.”
“And where might that be, My Lord, if I may be permitted to ask?”
“That is a discussion for another time,” said Rolan. His tone said much more. It said, “Drop it.”
While Blake attended to Dorin’s medical needs, and Thargen and Borok ran the war as best they could by talking to a constant stream of junior officers needing orders, Jessica pressed Rolan for as much information as she could. He repeated the story that Lieutenant Baird had told earlier that day of the capture of the two children, and how it was believed that they were both still alive. He told her that they were both undoubtedly being taken to the capital city of Slova, and tried to sound hopeful that they might be able to come up with a plan to rescue them, making sure to add that Thargen himself had once escaped from the great fortress. She learned that Rolan had known Pinus Porphyrius for his entire life, and that he did not seem to have aged a day in all that time. He went on to tell her that the wizard had done many wonderful things for the Ravenwild citizens, both of a military and non-military nature, and that he was known throughout Ravenwild, from the larger cities to the smallest villages, and that he was known to appear and disappear in the blink of an eye, often with no goodbye. Nobody had ever
known where he was from, he said, or where he called home, but wizards were like that. Mysterious, secretive, some might even say a strange lot. But this was the first that the King had ever heard of an otherworld theme to one of his tricks. “But,” he said, “he did tell me. He could have kept it all a secret from me and, despite my objection, he absolutely insisted that it was essential that it happen, and because I have known him for as long as I have been alive, and for all that he has done for us, well … ” his train of thought wandered off. “But now …” His face was pale, lined with worry.
Being King in a land at war was hard enough, but when it was your own, when it was personal, it was a totally different affair. Jessica knew he wasn’t faking it. It was his child as well.
Rolan, Jessica, Blake, Thargen, Dorin, and Borok were all seated at the Great Table.
“Dorin, Borok, and I feel that the rescue attempt must consist of three phases. First, an all-out penetration by our spies in and around Ghasten. We must know the exact whereabouts of the children. My guess would be the dungeons at the castle itself, but we cannot be sure. Malance Venomisis will remember that I have been there. Accordingly, he might elect to move them quickly elsewhere out of fear that my direct knowledge of the castle, and in particular my escape, might make housing them there less than perfect, strategically. So first, we find out exactly where they are. Second, we need to journey to Mount Gothic as soon as possible. The wizard Taber is there. It is impossible to think we could succeed in rescuing the children unharmed, either in Ghasten or wherever he takes them, without the wizard’s magic. We will need to be shrouded. And we will need his sorcery to fight our way out. Trickery to get in. Overwhelming force to get out. He is our only hope. Third, assuming they are in Ghasten, once we have secured them we will make for The Gate. It is the closest point. Speed will be of the utmost importance. Once the shroud fails, for Taber could not possibly maintain it for the whole journey out, and perhaps not even for the entire journey in, we will need to run for it, and they will be after us with every soldier that Malance Venomisis can spare, but, with some luck, we will make it. We know, of course, that it is severely undermanned, and flanked, but having Taber there will only serve to shore it up.”
