Then another image popped into my mind: Edward’s basement. I tried to hold onto the image of my parents’ basement, the image of the old golf clubs and the yellow water guns and the stacked lawn chairs … but all of it melted away. Replaced with bones. And skulls. And Juliette’s skeleton, hanging on the wall. I took a few steps, dizzy, trying to picture my parents’ laundry room, but even that was piled with rotting bones, spoiled by the haunting memories of Edward’s cellar.
“At least there’s a railing,” Briar murmured from behind me. He was right: the bannister was built into the wall, which was nothing more than carved-out earth. And as we descended, the wall changed drastically. First, it was just packed dirt—and here the railing was loose, threatening to fall out by its hinge—but then as we descended the dirt was replaced by gravel, then stone. Little lanterns with flickering candle flames hung from brick arches holding the ceiling up.
There was a room deeper down. I clutched my pen tightly. I could feel the cool air on my wet eyeballs. It smelled like a basement … and something else. Something animal. As we stepped through the opening, we both gasped.
An armory. A big, giant armory. Swords hung in neat rows from the walls. Weapons sat in wooden cases. Hundreds more heaped in piles. Above the swords on the wall were shields, some aged and misshapen, others beautiful, with glowing red dragons etched into the surface.
“Dear me,” Briar whispered. “I can see why Juliette didn’t want me down here with her. Why, just a sneeze could loose one of these weapons and be the end of me!”
“Briar …” I said, walking up the beautifully crafted shields each with their own dragon emblem. They were wide at the top, coming to a sharp point at the bottom. The dragons were each a different level of complexity. The one on the far right was awkward, dull, painted but not carved, and the shield itself looked a little off-balance. But then each new shield was a little better, its dragon a little more detailed. The last one in the row had a dragon carved out of the wood, each scale intricately detailed.
“Simple wood,” Briar murmured, “most likely a lighter wood like lime. And look here,” he pointed with his paw, “a thin strip of iron along the edges. Don’t see that on the older ones.”
“Or the leather straps,” I said, using one finger to lift up the bottom of the big shield, peering at the two leather straps attached to the back. It made sense: one for the forearm and one to grip.
I turned around, surveying the rest of the room. In front of us was a steel rack holding a bouquet of spears of varying sizes and shapes, each one held in place by a sturdy metal hook. Beyond those were more and more weapons, some of them occupying shelves and others just cast aside in giant piles. Shelves of all sorts of weapons—pikes, knives, swords, a hundred different mini-arrows splayed out across a table. There was a pile of daggers of all shapes and sizes sitting behind the table of mini-arrows; hundreds of them, piled dangerously high, some of the edges nicked and rusted and others still shiny and sharp.
Brass light sconces clung to the walls, casting a flickering flame’s dull orange glow on the weapons. Some of the metal was old and absorbed the light; the newer metal blades reflected it.
There was more. A cannonball. A handful of steel-jawed animal traps, their teeth locked together. A pile of circular African shields resting against the wall to my right. Hanging on the opposite wall were bows. Arrows hung from little hooks, pointing deeper inside the massive room.
It was a freaking hero museum.
“Alice …” Briar tugged on the sleeve of my shirt, pulling me left. I turned away from the arrows, following the rabbit’s pointing paw.
“Oh.” It was the only syllable I could manage. Goosebumps ran across my bare skin. I took a step closer, sure I was imagining things. Those swords on the multi-tiered wooden rack near the opposite wall … I recognized them.
I reached out with a shaky hand, running a finger along the thin blade.
A foil. My foil. The foil I used in my fight with Edward. Edward, the bastard who’d murdered Juliette. It sat on the top hook of the rack, with seven more swords below it. The second sword was a saber, its blade broken. The fight with the Frog Prince. Below that was another blade, covered with dried black goo. The fight with Hans the hedgehog. Below that was the gladius from my fight with the smoke monster, its short blade nicked a few times from when I’d exchanged blows with the bassist.
“Please don’t touch!” came a voice. I pulled my hand away from the sword rack, peering around it. There was a shadow farther ahead, some great multi-headed creature stalking behind a pile of old rusted swords; the shape of its hideous body ran up against the stone wall and covered the old arrows with a dark shadow.
“What … what is it?!” Briar exclaimed, hopping behind me.
My hand squeezed the magic pen. Then I glanced again at the sword rack. My sword rack. “When in Rome,” I murmured, grabbing the gladius. I held it in front of me, one foot forward. Or wherever this is …
The creature stepped out from around the pile. I blinked a few times, half-expecting the image to change. Or morph. Or turn into something else.
The donkey stopped. The rooster, standing on the donkey’s back, cocked his head.
“I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by this,” I said.
“Curious,” said the rooster. “Are you aware there’s a Corrupted standing behind you?”
I glanced over my shoulder. Briar was cowering near the entrance, safely away from all the pointy things.
“He’s not like you,” I said.
The donkey snorted. He was gray, his fur coming out in mangy patches. His dark hooves had a dull glow, leaving behind a trail of prints on the stone floor as he stepped a little closer. “He certainly looks like one of us.”
“I agree,” said the rooster. He had a high-pitched voice but good diction. Incredibly good diction for a creature lacking lips. He was big, with maroon plumage and wide, white eyes. “A strange relationship. Although one must remember who we’re dealing with. The heroes are always a bit strange, wouldn’t you say?”
“Quite right,” the donkey said, coughing. He had a low, slurring speech.
“All right, time out.” I made a T with one hand and the flat side of the gladius blade. “What is this? How did you steal all of this?”
“Steal!” The donkey snorted. A dribble of disgusting black snot escaped from one gray-spotted nostril. “She means to say we’re thieves.”
“A grave insult,” the rooster said. The black feathers on his head stuck up just a bit. “I’ll have you know we’re heroes, in our own way.”
“Were,” the donkey corrected him. “Those days are long past us now, especially without the rest of our merry band.”
“Quite so,” said the rooster. “But still …”
“The town musicians of Bremen,” I said. “I know your fairy tale. It was a donkey, a dog, a cat, and a rooster who sang together. You traveled and sang together. And eventually you came upon a house …”
“… And inside were thieves,” Briar added, hopping beside me. “And you scared the thieves away. A thief came back later, only to be scratched by the cat, bit by the dog, kicked by the donkey, and chased out of the house by the rooster. Curious … I thought a previous hero dispatched the lot of you.”
“There are so, so many animals in Grimms’ Fairy Tales,” the rooster said. “No doubt many of them wish they were the famed musicians of Bremen. We’re kind of a big deal.”
“We have many imitators,” the donkey affirmed. The sickening dribble of black snot caught on his lower jaw and clung there, waiting to be removed. I couldn’t fight the urge to make a face—it was just so gross. The donkey noticed and gave a little shrug.
“Many imitators. Like Led Zeppelin,” Briar said with an understanding nod.
“Unfortunately, we are no longer a full band. The dog and cat are gone forever.” The donkey lowered his head. More black snot dripped out of his nose, causing my stomach to lurch. “May they rest in peace. Our songs
do not sound the same without the dog’s soprano and the cat’s wail.”
“Another hero has been here,” I said. “Why did she come?”
The rooster cocked his head. “Why, to find a weapon. Of course. Why else? To listen to our songs?”
The donkey snorted again. Thankfully, he’d at least temporarily managed to turn off the nose spigot. “Not a polite woman.”
“No,” the rooster said with a bobbing nod, “she wasn’t very polite. All she wanted was a throwing knife. One she’d designed years prior, but lost after a battle.”
“The battle with the unicorn,” Briar said. “Yes, that was an excruciatingly stressful period.”
The rooster bristled. “I don’t particularly enjoy being interrupted.”
Briar, paws on hips, bristled back, the fur between his straight ears puffing up. “I do say!”
“I do say!” the rooster snapped back.
“What, wha … I do say times infinity!”
“Infinity plus one!”
“Just finish your story,” I said, gently pushing Briar back toward the door. All the pointy things around us were making me nervous … one wrong move and I’d lose another friend. And that wasn’t going to happen today.
“What now?” the rooster asked, flapping his wings a few times. “Right … Juliette. Cold woman.”
“Quite cold,” the donkey affirmed. Black snot had resumed dripping from his nostril. His left eye twitched; he stared at me with a creepy curiosity, like he’d suddenly forgotten who I was.
“She was a woman on a mission,” Briar said defensively from the entrance. “She was effective, not cold!”
“Could you shut that fool up?” the rooster asked me, pointing with one wing. “I have a hard enough time focusing.”
I turned to Briar, giving him a quick wink. “Let me handle this, pal.”
Briar smoothed out his vest, giving a curt nod.
“So as I was saying before I was rudely interrupted,” the rooster continued, “this Juliette woman insisted on leaving something behind. She was convinced another hero might happen upon us, which I of course insisted was not possible given how careful we were about our duties.”
“And what are your duties?” I asked, more than a little exasperated. I waved one arm around the massive room. “All of this … I mean, seriously … how? Why?”
The donkey’s twitchy eyes rolled up to the rooster. The rooster looked down at the donkey. The donkey snorted again, dribbling more black snot. It wasn’t an intentional snort, either—it seemed uncontrollable, just like the twitching eye. “Well … you see …” he snorted again. His left eye opened and closed. Opened and closed.
“Allow me,” the rooster said, tapping his maroon chest with one wing. “You see, once our fairy tale story was finished, we did indeed finally reach our intended destination of the town of Bremen. But it turns out that a singing troupe of animals is quite frightening to regular human beings.”
“Strange,” the donkey murmured. “We’d actually practiced our songs on a wonderful fellow named Hans who’d just recently completed his fairy tale as well. He seemed quite taken by our talents.”
“Yes, but of course Hans was not a real human being,” the rooster said.
“I don’t see you yelling at him for interrupting you,” Briar muttered.
The rooster turned, glaring at Briar with one glassy white eye.
“Just finish your story,” I said.
“We ran away,” the rooster continued. “And it wasn’t long before we found a hero. A young woman who wore a terribly tacky blue dress that was stained with dirt and who-knows-what-else. She was holding a fountain pen, and the pen seemed to speak to us. Strange, no?”
“Most strange,” the donkey murmured. His right eye had begun to droop. It looked as if he might fall asleep standing up, a string of black snot still hanging from his nose. No—a rope of black snot.
The rooster glanced down at his companion, then shook his little head. “Hardly the strangest thing about this whole affair, though. After all, you’ll notice I’m a talking chicken with excellent pronunciation despite having a beak. Came in handy for our songs, though, me being an alto and all. No matter. Back to the story. Where was I?”
I pulled out the magic pen, holding it up.
“Yes, of course! And so we were drawn to this pen, and we were drawn to this particular woman, and it wasn’t long before she began drawing things on the ground. Spears, mostly! And not well made, either, hence their lack of attention.” He pointed with his wing over his shoulder to the pile of weapons from where the two had been hiding behind when we arrived. It stood nearly as tall as me, full of rusted swords and daggers and lots and lots of spears.
“We only give the best weapons a prominent display,” the donkey murmured, nodding to the sword rack containing my weapons.
“Right! Anyway.” The rooster cleared his throat. “Our companion the dog had this horrible obsession with fetching things, and before long he had one of this woman’s clucking spears in his jaws, and it was burning him, and the hero was running after him with quite the look of frustration. At the very same time the dog reached us, a door appeared on the ground! The donkey had the good sense to open it before the hero could catch up; we followed the dog, who had to discard the spear because it was too wide to be carried down the stairs in his mouth. It landed on the bottom of the staircase, in this very room. We shut the door behind us and the hero didn’t follow. The door had disappeared.”
“And you’ve been stealing heroes’ weapons ever since,” I finished.
“Collecting,” the rooster said. “We snatch them after the hero has discarded them.”
“So why have you kept it up?”
The rooster and the donkey exchanged a glance. “Do you believe in fate?” the rooster asked.
Yes. No. “I don’t know. If the pen has something to do with all this, maybe that’s fate. But then maybe it’s the hero’s job to follow through.”
“And my job to help,” Briar added.
“Perhaps for a hero, it’s a bit different,” the rooster said. “But for us … we all followed our scripts the brothers wrote for us. And then we were … free? I don’t think so. Not with the Corruption haunting us all, lurking in our minds—and for the cat, this was a small mind indeed—waiting to change us. Still, it seems so strange, does it not? We were nothing more than a merry band of minstrels! And suddenly, we found ourselves with a door that opened right where it was supposed to, every time. We could hear the hero’s battles echoing down the staircase, and when the battle was over, all we needed to do was simply open the door and there we would be, right next to whatever discarded weapon or trap or device the hero had used to vanquish her—or his—enemy.”
“So you’ve been here all along,” I said, thinking back. “I never thought …”
“None of the heroes do,” the donkey mumbled. He snorted more black goo. He looked like he was about to fall, then slammed one hoof on the stone floor, straightening his leg.
The rooster clucked. “It’s true! None of the heroes seems too concerned about their discarded weapons.”
“We’re sorta drained from the fight with the evil monsters,” I pointed out.
“Ah. Still, you must have at some point wondered what happened to all those weapons you drew?”
I glanced at Briar. He shrugged. “No, it really didn’t occur to us.”
The feathers on top of the rooster’s head stood up. “Then I guess we serve a valiant purpose, don’t we! Ungrateful is what you are, the lot of you. Here we are, risking our very lives to help psychotic pen-wielding killers hunt down our own kind! Did you ever wonder what might happen if one of these magic weapons landed in the hands of the wrong person? No! Of course not. It didn’t occur to you.”
“Take it easy,” I said. “I’m sorry. I just had a lot on my mind this past year. It’s been hard …”
“Cluck you,” the rooster snapped. “I was merely fishing for a little clucking prai
se for me and my friends, having spent so many years providing valuable assistance to the hero.”
Beside me, Briar tensed up. I put a hand on his shoulder and took a deep breath. It was weird—I almost felt sorry for the rooster and the donkey (and the cat and the dog) for being dragged into this mess. It’s tougher to dislike the ones that don’t look like monsters.
… So how did Juliette kill the Corrupted children?
“You’re right. I’m sorry. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” The rooster took a big breath, puffing out his chest. “Now where was I? Right, the weapons! Now, here’s the real kicker—pardon the pun, donkey friend—that confirms my suspicions that there is more to this pen than meets the eye. Come here, and bring that little Roman sword of yours with you.”
I walked over. The donkey watched me warily through his half-closed, drooping eye. The other one had started twitching even faster now.
“Hold the flat end out,” the rooster ordered.
I held the blade out. The rooster reached down and touched the flat end with his wing. Nothing happened.
“You see?!” the rooster exclaimed, clucking wildly. “It doesn’t burn me! After that first encounter with the spear, our dog friend could grab spears like fetching sticks without any burning pain whatsoever. Isn’t that strange? Don’t you find it strange that we were drawn to the magic pen, that we found a magic door, and that we can touch the weapons without pain?”
“I see your point,” I said. “So you’ve been doing this for, what, almost two hundred years.”
“Yes,” the rooster answered.
“And now I’m here. And Juliette said I would come here.”
“Juliette said someone might. And I emphasize the words someone and might. She was not sure—it was merely a vision that hit her while she was down here searching for her lost dagger. But she left a gift just in case.”
“And this was important.”
“Of the utmost importance.” The rooster looked over his feathery shoulder. “Her gift is somewhere in there. Donkey, would you be so kind as to take us … donkey?”
The Grimm Chronicles, Vol. 4 Page 8
