The Merchant of Death

by D. J. MacHale

  Loor was right behind me. We both hit the stairs and ran up three at a time until we hit the royal box. Without hesitation we ran into the Bedoowan palace after the strange little man who was responsible for finding the power to destroy all of Denduron.

  Outside of the palace the two armies were drawing closer. The Milago miners were making their way through the dense forest, while the Bedoowan knights massed along the far side of a giant, open field. This grassy, sloping field was where the long-awaited battle would take place. Behind the Bedoowan was nothing but ocean. Behind the Milago would be forest. Between them was a huge expanse of empty field with nothing to use for protection but sea grass. The Bedoowan knights knew what they were doing. They had trained to protect their palace from marauders. They lined up in rows with shield carriers first, followed by archers, followed by spear carriers on horseback. They were ready.

  Alder later told me how he ran through the forest with the miners, trying to get them to turn back. But no one listened. They were locked and loaded and primed for a fight. But when they got to the edge of the forest, the leader held up his hand and the miners stopped short of charging out into the open. It was a smart thing to do, for he saw something that the rest of the miners hadn’t yet seen.

  Standing across from them on the far side of this vast field were the Bedoowan knights. But they did not look like a straggle of injured survivors who were reeling from a devastating explosion. Just the opposite. There were more knights standing there than the Milago knew existed. They didn’t look any worse for wear, either. They were strong and healthy and well armed. Obviously something had gone wrong. The explosion didn’t do the damage they had hoped. This battle wasn’t going to be the cakewalk they had anticipated. This was going to be a dogfight and they were going up against the best dogs in town.

  The Milago leader held his army back, not entirely sure of what to do. The rest of the Milago miners had now seen the vast army of knights and it shook their confidence.

  The only thing that Alder could do was watch, and pray.

  When Loor and I ran into the palace, we found ourselves in Queen Kagan’s empty chambers. We got our bearings, then dashed out into the corridor. I looked toward the stairs and caught a quick glimpse of Figgis scampering down.

  “There!” I shouted and ran after him.

  Loor was right behind me. We got to the stairs and started down. They were wide, spiraling stairs, and as we ran down we could see that Figgis was far below, headed for the lowest levels of the palace. We bounded down the stairs as fast as we could without taking a header and breaking our necks. When we hit the bottom, I saw that my boom box was there, only it was in pieces. That’s how the knights finally got it to stop playing. They smashed it. I guess no one knew how to use the on-off switch. Idiots. I had the presence of mind to dig through the debris for the batteries. It may have been too little too late, but at least nobody could use these batteries to blow anything up.

  We both took a quick look around for Figgis and heard a familiar giggle coming from down the corridor. The thought came to me that he was playing with us. But it didn’t matter. We had to stop him. So we took off down the corridor.

  “He is going for the mines,” she said. “He must know the secret entrance.”

  She was right. That’s probably how he got into the palace in the first place. Since we knew the way, we didn’t bother looking down every corridor for the little guy. We headed right for the kitchen, which led to the pantry, which led to the trapdoor and the tunnels that would drop us down into the secret passage of the Milago mine that stretched beneath the palace.

  In the forest, the Milago leader didn’t know what to do. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to happen. They weren’t supposed to fight the Bedoowan army at its best. Should he attack or retreat? His decision would clearly decide the future of his tribe. Luckily for him, the responsibility for making a decision was soon taken away from him. With a roar of excitement from the miners, he looked to see a familiar face making his way toward him through the crowd. It was Rellin. He was here to take charge.

  The sight of their trusted leader sent a rumble of relief through the Milago miners…not to mention to the interim leader who no longer had to be in charge anymore. It must have been a stirring sight, seeing their leader walking confidently to the front of his troops to take command. He jumped on to a rock so that all the Milago could see him and announced, “My brave Milago brothers! Today is the day. Now is the time. This is where our slavery ends!”

  The miners all gave a cheer. Rellin was stirring them up again.

  “Bring the tak to bear!” he commanded and all of the miners who had the tak and slingshots came to the front of the group. “Are we prepared to take back our lives?”

  Everyone let out a whooping cheer. They were no longer concerned about why he hadn’t died. He was their inspirational leader, and they trusted him.

  “Are we prepared to win our freedom?”

  Another cheer.

  “Are we prepared to make the Bedoowan pay for their crimes against us?”

  That brought the biggest cheer of all. They were ready.

  “Then do not stop until we have reached the throne room!”

  That was it. The miners went nuts and the charge was on. With the tak throwers first, they charged out of the forest and onto the field to meet their enemy.

  While this was going on, Loor and I dropped down the ladders into the Milago mine. No sooner did we hit the tunnel, than Loor stopped short, her ear to the air.

  “Listen,” she said.

  I did, and after a second I heard what she was talking about. It was footsteps. Running footsteps. Figgis wasn’t far away. But the strange thing was, they were coming from deeper in the tunnel. That didn’t make sense because the tunnel didn’t go on much farther. There was nothing beyond the end of this tunnel but a long drop to the sea. So where was that sound coming from?

  Loor didn’t stop to think, as usual. She headed deeper into the tunnel. Her senses told her that someone was back there running and she didn’t bother to let logic stop her from following her instinct. All I could do was follow. We didn’t go more than twenty yards before we came upon another offshoot from the main tunnel. It was a crudely dug side tunnel that was wide enough for one person to pass at a time. This is where Figgis went, so this is where we had to go too. As always, Loor went first. She ran into the tunnel, unafraid of what she might find. That was cool with me; she was the macho end of this duo, after all. Luckily the tunnel wasn’t all that dark because there was enough light that seeped in from the main tunnel to let us see our way.

  “I see the far end,” Loor announced. “This tunnel connects with another tunnel.”

  I looked ahead and saw that she was right. This side tunnel connected with another large tunnel. But it soon proved to be more than just a shortcut. Before we reached the other end, the side tunnel grew wide and opened up into a large space. We stopped, trying to figure out why this cavern existed so deep inside the Milago mine. I took a step and felt something weird under my feet. It was a soft, springy sensation, like walking on tiny bits of rubber. I knelt down and scooped up a bit of the stuff to give it a close look. It had the feel of eraser dust. You know, the stuff you brush off your paper after erasing something. It didn’t take me long to realize what it really was though, and my heart nearly stopped.

  “What is it?” asked Loor.

  “It…it’s tak,” I said with a dry mouth. “I think we just found out where Figgis got the tak. He mined it…from right here.”

  “That is right!” came a giggling voice from the tunnel ahead.

  “Figgis!” shouted Loor and continued on to the end of the side tunnel.

  I followed her out and into the wider tunnel on the far side. When I hit the intersection I saw that this next tunnel stretched out in two directions. Ore-car track was at our feet and an empty ore car sat on the tracks to our right. It was an ancient Milago mine tunnel. I looked at the floor and saw
there was a lot more rusty tak dust coating everything. This must have been residue from when Figgis mined the stuff out of the rock. Like gold dust. A thin layer of the deadly stuff was everywhere. But there was something else strange about this place. It looked somehow familiar. The ore car, the opening to the side tunnel, the pile of rocks in front of the opening. I felt as if I’d been here before.

  That’s when my ring began to glow. I looked to Loor and she had already seen her own ring glowing. We had indeed been here before. This was the tunnel that held the gate to the flume. When we used the flume the other day, we had no idea that we were close to Figgis’s source for tak. I looked to my left and sure enough, a few yards down the tunnel was the wooden door that led to the flume.

  “Why does this whole setup give me the creeps?” I asked Loor.

  She felt it too. Why would Figgis lead us down to the one place that he would want to keep secret? The answer came in the form of a rumble.

  “What is that?” asked Loor nervously.

  I listened. The rumble grew louder. It was either thunder, an earthquake, or…

  “Cave-in!” I shouted.

  I grabbed Loor’s hand and ran along the track in the direction that would take us back to the main cavern of the mine. We passed the door to the flume and got only a few steps further when the ceiling in front of us collapsed! Tons of rock and gravel fell down, blocking our way out. My first thought was to go for the gate and jump into the flume, but we couldn’t leave Denduron. Not now. So we ran back into the tunnel and dove into the side tunnel that led to Figgis’s tak mine.

  No sooner had we entered the tak mine than another cave-in sealed off the smaller tunnel ahead of us. Rocks tumbled down from the ceiling and poured into the small cavern. I took a few steps back and fell down on my butt. When I turned to get up, I came face to face with something that had tumbled down in front of me when the ceiling collapsed. It was a skeleton. I’m not ashamed to admit it; I screamed. Yes, I screamed like an idiot in aScooby Doo cartoon. I quickly scrambled away and Loor helped me to my feet. The two of us stood there holding each other, not sure of what to do. It seemed as if the cave-in had stopped, at least for the time being.

  Loor looked at the skeleton and said, “It must be a miner who was trapped here.”

  That made sense. But then I saw something that threw her theory out the window. I took a closer look at the skeleton. He wore rotted-out leather clothing that marked him as Milago. But there was something else, something unique that made me want to scream all over again. The corpse wore an eye patch. The cloth was shredded and dangled down from the empty socket, but it had definitely once been a patch. And that’s not all. On each of his bony fingers was a braided green ring. I had seen this only once before and remembered it all too well. This wasn’t any miner.

  “It’s Figgis,” I said, trying not to sound too freaked out.

  “That cannot be!” exclaimed Loor. “Unless we have been chasing a ghost.”

  Then a voice came from behind us. “I am afraid it is indeed Figgis.”

  Both Loor and I spun to see someone standing in the opening to the tak mine. It wasFiggis ! Huh? The guy looked pretty healthy for a, okay I’ll say it, for a ghost.

  “The poor little man died a few years ago,” he said. “Such a tragedy. He set traps to protect his little find here. That’s why the ceiling collapsed. He didn’t want anybody else to steal it from him. He died setting one of those traps. So sad. Such a visionary, and so…dead.”

  My mind was not getting around any of this. We stood there staring at Figgis, uncomprehending.

  “I see you have not figured this out yet,” he said with a smug smile. “Let me make things easier for you.” And then, the little man began to transform. I had seen this happen once before, in a lonely subway station in the Bronx. His hair grew long and his body grew back to its normal height of seven feet. His leather Milago clothes changed into an all-black suit, and his eyes flashed with icy blue intensity. Yes, we were looking at Saint Dane, and he had us trapped under a ton of rock with no escape.

  “I told you, Pendragon,” he said with a smile. “You can’t beat me.”

  Journal #4

  (continued)

  Denduron

  The Milago miners charged out of the forest. The attack was on.

  The Bedoowan knights didn’t budge. They wanted to see what these bold peasants had planned. The first line of miners stopped and loaded their slingshots with tak. On command they flung their explosives at the waiting Bedoowan. The small tak bombs flew across the battlefield and exploded on impact. But they had fallen far short of the front line of the Bedoowan defense. If they were going to do any damage, they were going to have to get closer, which meant they had to put themselves within range of the Bedoowan archers.

  The Bedoowan on the other hand, were surprised by the explosions that blasted down in front of them. Except for the quig that had been blown to bits in the stadium, they had never witnessed anything like this. There was a movement along the lines to retreat, but the Bedoowan commander wouldn’t let them budge. They were going to hold their ground. The Bedoowan commander sent a line of shield carriers to the front. These brave men stood in line like a barrier of steel and flesh to protect their comrades from the incoming missiles. Behind them, the archers stood ready to release their arrows as soon as the Milago miners were in range. This was going to get real ugly, real quick.

  But I didn’t know any of this until afterward. Right now I had my own problem to deal with, which was Saint Dane. There was no way out. We were trapped by two cave-ins that were caused by Figgis’s booby traps. The only way out of this seemed to be through the flume. But it might as well have been a mile away because standing between us and the gate was Saint Dane.

  “You brought the tak here, didn’t you?” I spat at the guy.

  “I did no such thing!” he said, acting all innocent. “Tak is natural to Denduron. Figgis discovered this vein several years ago.”

  He walked over to one of the walls and scraped off a layer of dirt with his hand. As the dirt fell away, I saw beneath it the familiar rusty red color of tak. I looked to Loor and for the first time since we met, she looked scared. That’s because she realized, as I did, that this entire cavern was made of tak. The bomb we had dissolved in the stadium was like a firecracker compared to this cavern…and we were standing in the middle of it.

  “Figgis thought the miners could use the tak to help them tunnel through the rock,” Saint Dane explained. “It was noble of him, but he was a merchant and he thought like one. He wanted to help the miners, but he also wanted to make a profit.”

  The evil Traveler walked over to the skeleton that used to be Figgis and nudged the bones with his foot. “I can’t say that I blame him, but his greed proved to be his undoing. He set traps all over this cavern to protect his precious find. Unfortunately one of them backfired.”

  He kicked Figgis’s skull and it rolled away from the body and landed at our feet. I wanted to kick it back just to keep it away from me, but that would have been gross.

  “So you came to Denduron and took his place,” I said. “And you showed the Milago miners how to use tak as a weapon.”

  “Of that, I am guilty,” he said with a proud smile.

  “But we stopped you,” Loor shot back at him. “Rellin did not use the bomb.”

  Saint Dane answered this with a laugh. I didn’t like that. When bad guys laugh it means they know something you don’t.

  “But it is better this way,” he said with smug authority. “If that bomb had blown up it would have taken much longer for the Milago to regroup. Now, once they have won their little war they will still be strong enough to begin their march across Denduron. I suppose I should thank you, Pendragon.”

  Oh, man, was it possible? By preventing that bomb from going off, did I make things worse? “And what if they don’t win the war?” I asked. “What if the Bedoowan win?”

  Saint Dane brushed more dirt off the walls, re
vealing more tak. “No matter,” he said with a shrug. “There is an endless supply of tak. It may take time, but the Milago will come back. They will find new ways to use this lovely weapon. It is inevitable, Pendragon. This will soon become a territory at war. Denduron will fall. And when it does, it will be the beginning of the end of Halla.”

  Halla. There was that word again. This was all about Halla.

  On the battlefield above, the Milago miners had crept closer to the Bedoowan knights. They were now within range to slingshot the tak into the front line of shield carriers. The frightened Bedoowans huddled beneath their shields as the tak bombs smashed into them. With small explosions the tak burst on impact against the shields and threw a blast of fire into the ranks. Several of the Bedoowan knights died right there. Others got smart and realized it wasn’t a good thing to let the small rock bombs hit their shields. They began to dodge out of the way rather than shield themselves as the tak bombs rained down, setting off explosions that tore up the ground.