The Merchant of Death

by D. J. MacHale

  I looked to Loor and said, “What took you so long with the door?”

  “I had two knights on my back,” she answered. Not only had she lifted the heavy lock, she did it while fighting off two of the Bedoowan knights. Uncle Press walked over to Rellin and pulled the spear out of his arm, releasing him. He then gave him a rag to tie his wound. Loor and I joined them. Nobody knew what to say. I couldn’t tell if Rellin was angry, disappointed, in pain, or all the above.

  That’s when Rellin started to laugh.

  It was the last reaction I expected. It was the same kind of crazy laugh I heard from him down in the mines. It was like he knew something we didn’t know. Again, it gave me the creeps.

  Finally Rellin said, “You think this is over, but it is not.”

  “Yes, it is,” said Uncle Press. “You have no way to explode this tak now.”

  Rellin laughed even harder. What was going through his mind?

  “But this is not all the tak that was brought from the mines,” he said. This grand weapon may have failed, but the signal has been given just the same. It was you who gave that signal, Press, my friend.”

  The three of us looked at each other, befuddled. What was he talking about? Then it hit me. I remembered what Rellin had said to me the night before. He said that as soon as his miners heard the explosion, it would be their signal to attack. And there had certainly been an explosion. Granted it wasn’t the big boom everybody was expecting, but it was pretty loud just the same. There were quig guts all over the place as proof. Could the Milago miners have heard it? The answer to that question came right away. A horn sounded from on top of the stadium. All eyes looked up to see a lone Bedoowan knight standing there.

  “The Milago!” he shouted for all to hear. “They’re attacking!” Instantly the Bedoowan knights scrambled. Even the knights who had bravely fought the quig and were wounded jumped to attention. They grabbed their spears, straightened their helmets and quickly climbed up the stairs of the stadium.

  “Look!” said Loor and pointed toward Kagan’s royal box. What we saw were more knights, hundreds of them, all piling out from inside the palace to join their comrades. Queen Kagan stood on her throne, laughing and clapping like a child, cheering them on. To her, this was a game. She had no idea that these men were headed into a very real battle. Or maybe she just didn’t care.

  The knights were now several hundred strong. They looked like a formidable fighting unit. They marched up the stairs of the stadium to join with their comrades and begin the defense of the palace. Then an odd thing happened. The Bedoowan spectators began climbing the stairs to the surface as well. They were excitedly laughing and chatting with anticipation. They were followed in turn by the Novans. This was unbelievable. It was like they wanted to watch the battle for themselves. Did they think this was going to be a show put on for their amusement, like the quig battles? Did they have any idea what was about to happen?

  Rellin said, “We may not have made our grand statement, but we will still have our battle. We are armed with tak and we will triumph. Your efforts have been in vain. The battle is about to begin.”

  Journal #4

  (continued)

  Denduron

  Much of what I am going to write about now was told to me after the battle. As I wrote before, I have no doubt that it is all true and I have no problem adding it to my journal. I’ll try to recount it in the order that it happened.

  When Alder left us to warn the Milago villagers about the bomb, nobody listened to him as he ran through the village shouting, “Everyone! Into the mines! You must protect yourselves!” But I guess none of the villagers even knew about tak, let alone about the huge bomb that was supposed to blow away the Bedoowan. So when Alder came running through like a nut job, they slammed their doors in his face and ignored him. I don’t blame them. If a guy ran around all Chicken Little screaming that the sky was falling, I’d probably ignore him too. Alder quickly realized that trying to save them was futile. His last hope was to find the one group of people who might listen to him: the miners who were preparing for battle. They knew about tak and they knew about Rellin’s mad plan. So Alder ran out to the training area where Rellin and his miners had captured us the day before.

  What he found there was a frightening sight. All the miners of the Milago had assembled. There were hundreds of them. It never seemed like there were all that many miners living in the village, but that was because most of them were usually in the mines. Not today. All the miners were now on the surface and they were ready to rumble. According to Alder they had emptied the secret stash of weapons from down in the mines and each of them was armed with either spears or bows and arrows. But more important, several of the miners carried a much more lethal weapon. Around their waists were leather pouches full of small tak bombs.

  As Alder ran through the crowd looking for someone in charge, he looked into the eyes of these hardened miners. He told me that what he saw gave him a chill. Even though they were about to begin a battle that could cost them their lives, these guys showed no fear. I suppose a lifetime of slavery will do that to you. They wanted blood. Bedoowan blood. They may not have been trained warriors, but what they lacked in fighting skills was made up for with pure hatred for the Bedoowan. They were confident, too. Once Rellin exploded his bomb, they figured that most of the Bedoowan knights would die instantly. Any of the knights who survived would be easy to mow down with their precious tak. They thought the battle would be short and sweet.

  They were absolutely, totally wrong.

  Alder finally found the leader. It was a miner who stood toward the front of the group giving orders. Alder ran up to him and said breathlessly, “The bomb…the tak bomb. It is more deadly than you could imagine! If Rellin succeeds, it could kill us all! We must get everyone down into the mines to—”

  That’s when it happened. That’s the moment when Uncle Press threw the small bomb at the quig and made quigburger. The miners all looked in the direction of the Bedoowan castle as the explosion thundered through the hills. Then just as the last echo died away, the leader shouted, “Death to the Bedoowan!”

  There was a huge cheer and the miners began running toward the castle. Alder had to dive out of the way for fear of being trampled by the stoked-up miners as they rushed to their destiny. They had no idea that they were headed right into the full force of the Bedoowan army.

  The stadium was almost empty. Even Queen Kagan had left to watch the show. Four Novans had lifted up her throne and carried her up the stairs and out to the battlefield. Those pale little guys must be a lot stronger than they looked because that throne and that fatso must have weighed a ton. The three miners who brought the tak bomb with Rellin were gone too. They had run off to fight with their comrades. The only ones left in the huge stadium were me, Loor, Uncle Press, Rellin, and a dead quig. Actually two dead quigs, but the second one looked more like Hamburger Helper.

  Rellin struggled to get to his feet. Uncle Press gave him a hand. These guys weren’t enemies. They both wanted the same thing, sort of. Their only disagreement was how to go about getting it.

  “Your miners aren’t prepared to battle those knights,” Uncle Press said to him. “The tak may prolong the fight, but the Bedoowan will crush them.”

  “Perhaps,” said Rellin. “But better to die fighting, than as a slave.”

  Those were powerful words. I had seen the horrible lives the Milago lived. If they were going to die, at least now they would die with some dignity. It was a terrible choice, but maybe it was the right one. Rellin then said, “Permit me to join my men?”

  Uncle Press picked up the spear he had used to stop Rellin from exploding the bomb. He looked at it, then handed it to the chief miner. “Good luck,” he said.

  Rellin took the spear, gave a small nod of thanks, then took off running to join his doomed men. We watched him run across the stadium grass and bound up the stairs toward the battle that was about to begin. I wondered if I would ever see the guy alive aga
in. Uncle Press then picked up another spear.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “I’m going back to the Milago village,” he answered. “The Bedoowan are going to suffer casualties. That’s never happened to them before. I’m afraid they’ll get angry enough to continue on to the Milago village and take it out on some of the villagers.”

  “But how can you stop that?” asked Loor.

  “I can’t,” was his answer. “But I can help Alder get them down into the mines. The knights won’t go down there and it’ll give them a chance to cool off.”

  “We’re coming with you!” I said.

  “No,” ordered Uncle Press and pointed to the ore car full of tak. “See what you can do about that bomb.”

  “Like what?” I asked.

  Uncle Press started to run off, but turned back to us and shouted, “I don’t know. Get rid of it. Dump it in the ocean. Just don’t let the Bedoowan have it.”

  I watched as Uncle Press ran up the stairs. After a quick wave back to us, he disappeared over the lip of the stadium and was gone. I looked to the ore car, then to Loor.

  “Is he crazy?” I said. “This is too heavy to carry up those stairs!”

  Loor started grabbing the glaze stones from off the top and throwing them aside like they were common rocks. “Not if we make the load lighter,” she said.

  “And what if we slip and drop it down those stairs?” I countered. “It’ll make just as big a bang now as before.”

  “Then we must be careful not to drop it,” she shot back.

  Yeah, no kidding. I walked over to the cart and tested the weight. It was heavy! It had four wheels that rolled on the rails down in the mines, and handles both front and back that were used to push or pull it. I didn’t care how strong Loor was, the two of us were not going to lug this thing up the stadium stairs. I reached in and dug down beneath the glaze until I found the tak. It was soft, like clay. I was thinking maybe we could pull it apart into smaller pieces and take it up that way, rather than transport the whole thing at once. I scraped it with my finger and pulled out a small piece. For something so deadly, it looked pretty innocent. Like I wrote before, it was rust-colored and soft like Silly Putty. I easily rolled it into a marble-sized ball. The texture was kind of gritty and there was residue that stuck to my fingers as I rolled it.

  “Are you going to help me?” asked Loor impatiently as she unloaded the glaze.

  “I have an idea,” I announced and ran toward the quig pen. Loor watched me as if I had lost my mind, but she needn’t have worried. My plan didn’t involve going back into quig world. No way. In fact, as an afterthought I stuck the little ball of tak into my pocket to free my hands and then closed the door to the pen just in case any more of those bad boys were wandering around inside. It was a smart thing to do, but it wasn’t the main reason I went over there. I was looking for the water faucet where the Bedoowan knight filled the water bucket that he used to wash away the blood of the Milago miner. When I found it, I turned the handle so that water poured out slowly. I then checked my fingers to find that they were still covered with the rusty-colored tak residue. I stuck my fingers under the faucet, rubbed them together, and the tak dissolved! That was exactly what I hoped would happen. This stuff may be a powerful explosive, but it was still a natural mineral that would dissolve in water. Thank you, Mr. Gill, and eighth-grade Earth science. He thought I was asleep in class most of the time. I wasn’t.

  “What are you doing?” shouted Loor.

  I quickly grabbed one of the wooden buckets that was near the faucet, filled one, and lugged it back to Loor and the ore car.

  “We are wasting time, Pendragon,” Loor said with growing impatience.

  I ignored her and dumped the bucket of water into the ore car. Loor had this angry look on her face like I was being an idiot again. I stood back with the empty bucket and watched. In a few seconds my patience was rewarded. It was only a small drip, but the water had worked itself down through the tak and was running out between the wooden floorboards of the ore car. The water was rust-colored, which could mean only one thing…the tak could be dissolved!

  “We don’t have to lug this thing out,” I announced. “We can dissolve the tak like dirt.”

  Loor stuck her finger under the drip of water and saw that it was indeed full of dissolved tak. She thought a moment, then said, “More water!”

  She jumped to her feet and ran back to the faucet for another bucket. For the next ten minutes we ran back and forth between the faucet and the ore car, dumping water inside. Little by little, the tak turned into liquid and ran out of the car. When enough of the tak dissolved so that we could move it, we began taking turns pushing it around. My idea was to spread the tak around enough so that its power would be diluted all over the field. The rusty liquid ran out of the car, poured onto the field and sank down below the grass like some deadly fertilizer. I had no idea what kind of problems this would cause later on. For all I knew, once the tak dried this could be like a minefield. But I didn’t care. The main thing was that the power of the huge bomb was gone forever.

  Finally I took a look inside the ore car to see that most of the tak was dissolved away. There were still some remnants clinging to the wooden car, but there wasn’t enough left to do any big damage. I guess you could say that we had successfully “liquidated” the bomb. I looked to Loor and smiled.

  “Or we could have tried carrying it out,” I said with a touch of sarcasm.

  I didn’t get many chances to dig Loor, so I took them where I could. She looked as if she wanted to say something in return, but was having trouble finding the words. I expected her to point out how I had done something stupid after all.

  “I am a warrior,” she finally said. “I was raised to fight my enemies with force. That is not what you were taught.”

  Uh-oh. Here we go. I was sure she was about to tell me what a weenie I was and that we should have muscled the ore car out of the stadium.

  “But maybe that is good,” she went on. “Maybe that is why we are together. You are not a warrior, yet you have shown more bravery than any warrior I have known.”

  Whoa. That was out of left field! After getting slammed by her at every turn, I wasn’t expecting a compliment. I didn’t know what to say.

  I thought about what she said and realized that maybe she was right. I wasn’t a fighter and wasn’t planning on becoming one, so maybe our strengths complemented each other. I wrote to you before about the feeling I got that being here felt right. Well, as I stood there with Loor, I got the same feeling. The two of us being together felt right. We weren’t exactly buddies, but maybe we were meant to be partners. It must have been hard for her to admit that I was her equal, at least when it came to the bravery department, and I wanted to say something back to her that let her know how great I thought she was. But I didn’t get the chance. Before I could open my mouth, I saw something that I could barely believe.

  “What is the trouble?” asked Loor.

  All I could do was point. Standing in the royal box was Figgis, the little merchant of death who started this whole tak mess. What was he doing here? How did he get into the palace? Stranger still, he must have known what Rellin was trying to do with this bomb, so why did he hang around here knowing the whole place was going to blow up?

  “This is strange,” she said. “Why is he here?”

  As if in answer, Figgis raised his hand to show us something he was holding. It was the yellow walkie-talkie that was taken from me in Queen Kagan’s chambers. He held it up, and giggled.

  “It is the talking toy,” exclaimed Loor. “What is he doing with that?”

  My heart sank. We had dodged a huge bullet, but here was another one aimed right at us. Loor looked at me and recognized how scared I was.

  “Pendragon, what is the matter?” Loor shouted.

  “The walkie-talkie works the same way the flashlight does,” I answered. “It has a battery that gives off a charge of power.”

&
nbsp; “Could he use it to explode another bomb?” she asked nervously.

  “Well, yeah,” I answered soberly.

  Now Loor looked sick as the reality of the situation hit her. “Do you think he has another bomb?” she asked soberly.

  “I don’t know,” I answered. “But we better find out.” I took a step toward the royal box and called out, “Figgis! We want to talk with you!”

  In answer Figgis abruptly turned and ran back into the palace.

  “C’mon!” I shouted and ran for the royal box.