The Merchant of Death

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 again. 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.”

“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.

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.”