“Uh…,” a voice said. “Is everyone okay?”
I twisted about, brushing bits of glass from my face – fortunately, the cockpit appeared to be made out of something like Free Kingdoms safety glass. Though it had shattered into shards, the pieces were surprisingly dull, and I hadn’t been cut at all.
Australia – the one who had spoken – sat, holding her head where it was still bleeding. She looked about, seeming dazed. The pathetic remains of the Dragonaut lay broken around us, like the long-dead carcass on some mythical beast. The eyes had both shattered, and I sat in the skull. One of the wings of jutted up a short distance away, pointing into the air.
Bastille groaned beside me, her jacket now laced with a spiderweb of lines. It had absorbed some of the shock from the landing for her. My legs, unfortunately, didn’t have any such glass, and they ached from being yanked about.
There was a rustling a short distance away, up where the beach turned into trees. Suddenly, Kaz walked out of the forest, looking completely unbruised and unhurt.
“Well!” he said, surveying the beach. “That was certainly interesting. Anybody dead? Raise your hand if you are.”
“What if you feel like you’re dead?” Bastille asked, pulling herself free from her jacket.
“Raise a finger, then,” Kaz said, walking down the beach toward us.
I won’t say which one she raised.
“Wait,” I said, wobbling a bit as I stood. “You got thrown all that way, but you’re all right?”
“Of course I didn’t get thrown that far,” Kaz said with a laugh. “I got lost right about the time when we crashed, and I just found my way back. Sorry I missed the impact – but it didn’t look like a whole lot of fun.”
Smedry Talents. I shook my head, checking my pockets to make certain my Lenses had survived. Fortunately, the padding had protected them. But, as I worked, I realized something. “Bastille! Your mother!”
Just then, a sheet of glass rattled and was shoved over by something beneath it. Draulin stuck, and I heard a faint moan from inside her helmet. In one hand, she still held her Crystin blade. She reached up, sheathing it into a strap on her back, then pulled the helmet off. A pile of sweaty, silver hair fell around her face. She turned to regard the wreckage.
I was a little surprised to see her in such good shape. Of course, I should have realized that the armor she wore was of silimatic technology. It had worked as an even better cushion than Bastille’s jacket.
“Where are we?” Bastille asked, picking her way across a field of broken glass, now wearing only a black T-shirt tucked into her militaristic trousers.
It was a good question. The forest looked vaguely junglelike. Waves quietly rolled up and down the starlit beach, grabbing bits of glass and towing them into the ocean.
“Egypt, I guess,” Australia said. She held a bandage to her head, but otherwise seemed to have come out all right. “I mean, that’s where we were heading, right? We were almost there when we crashed.”
“No,” Draulin said, stalking across the beach toward us. “Lord Kazan was required to take over control of the ship when you lost consciousness, which means…”
My Talent came into play,” Kaz said. “In other words, we’re lost.”
“Not that lost,” Bastille said. “Isn’t that the Worldspire?”
She pointed out across the ocean. And, just vaguely in the distance, I could see what appeared to be a tower rising from the ocean. Considering the distance, it must have been enormous.
I was later to learn that enormous was a severe under-estimate. The Worldspire is said by the Free Kingdomers to be the exact center of the world. It’s a massive glass spike running from the upper atmosphere directly into the center of the planet—which is, of course, made of glass. Isn’t everything?
“You’re right,” Draulin said. “That means we’re probably somewhere in the Kalmarian Wilds. Well outside the Hushlands.”
“Well, that shouldn’t be a problem,” Kaz said.
“You think you can get us to Nalhalla, my lord?” Draulin asked.
“Probably.”
I turned. “What about the Library of Alexandria?”
“You still want to go there?” Draulin asked?
“Of course.”
“I don’t know if – “
“Draulin,” I said, “don’t make me force you to hop on one foot again.”
She fell silent.
“I agree with Alcatraz,” Kaz said, walking over to pick through the rubble. “If my father’s in Alexandria, then he’s undoubtedly getting into trouble. If he’s in trouble, that means I’m missing out on some serious fun. Now, let’s see if we can salvage anything….”
I watched him work, and soon Draulin joined him, picking through the pieces. Bastille walked up beside me.
“Thanks,” she said. “For saving me when I fell out of the side of the dragon, I mean.”
“Sure. I’ll kick you any time you want.”
She snorted softly. “You’re a real friend.”
I smiled. Considering that we’d crashed so soundly, it was remarkable that nobody had been severely hurt. Actually, you may find this annoying. It would have been a better story if someone had died here. An early fatality can really make a book seem much more tense, as it lets people realize how dangerous things can be.
You have to remember, however, that this is not fiction, but a real-life account. I can’t help it if all my friends were too selfish to do the narratively proper thing and get themselves killed off to hike up the tension of my memoirs.
I’ve spoken to them at length about this. If it makes you feel better, Bastille dies by the end of this book.
Oh, you didn’t want to hear that? I’m sorry. You’ll just have to forget that I wrote it. There are several convenient ways to do that. I hear hitting yourself on the head with a blunt object can be very effective. You should try using one of Brandon Sanderson’s fantasy novels. They’re big enough, and goodness knows, that’s really the only useful thing to do with them.
Bastille – completely unaware that she was condemned – glanced at the half-buried dragon’s head. Its broken eyes stared out toward the jungle, its maw opened slightly, teeth cracked. “It seems such a sad end for the Dragonaut,” she said. “So much powerful glass wasted.”
“Is there any way to… I don’t know, fix it?”
She shrugged. “The silimatic engine is gone, and that’s what gave the glass its power. I supposed if you could get a new engine, it would still work. But, cracked as the ship is, it would probably make more sense to smelt the whole thing down.”
The others came up with a couple of backpacks full of food and supplies. Kaz eventually let out a whoop of joy, then dug out a little bowler of a hat, which he put on. This was joined by a vest he wore under his jacket. It was an odd combination, since the jacket itself – along with his trousers – were made of heavyweight, rugged material. He came across looking like some cross between Indiana Jones and a British gentleman.
“We ready?” he asked.
“Almost,” I said, finally pulling off the boots with the Grappler’s Glass on them. “Any way to turn these off?” I held up the boot, critically eyeing the bottom, which was now stuck with shards of glass and – not surprisingly – sand.
“For most people there is no way,” Draulin said, sitting on a piece of the wreckage, then taking off her armored boots. She pulled out a few pieces of specially shaped glass and slid them into place. “We simply cover them with plates like these, so the boots stick to those instead.”
I nodded. The plates in question had soles and heels on the bottom, and probably felt just like regular shoes.
You, however, are an Oculator,” she said.
“What does that have to do with it?”
“Oculators aren’t like regular people, Alcatraz,” Australia said, smiling. Her head had stopped bleeding, and she’d tied a bandage to it. A pink one. I had no ide
a where she had found it.
“Indeed, my lord,” Draulin said. “You can use the Lenses, but you also have some limited power over silimatic glass, what we call ‘technology.’”
“You mean, like the engine?” I asked, slipping on my Oculator’s Lenses.
Draulin nodded. “Try deactivating the boots like you would Lenses.”
I did so, touching them. Surprisingly, the sand and glass dropped free, the boots becoming inert.
“Those boots had been given a silimatic charge,” Australia explained. “Kind of like batteries you use in the Hushlands. The boots will run out eventually. Until then, an Oculator can turn them off and on.”
“One of the great mysteries of our age,” Draulin said, her boots replaced. The way she said it indicated that she really didn’t care how or why things worked, only that they did.
Me, I was more curious. I’d been told several times about Free Kingdomer technology. It seemed a simple distinction to me. Magic was that sort of thing that only worked for certain people, while technology – often called silimatics – worked for anyone. Australia had been able to fly the Dragonaut, but so had Kaz. It was technology.
But what I had just learned seemed to indicate that there was a relationship between this technology of theirs and Oculatory powers. However, the conversation reminded me of something else. I didn’t have any idea if we were closer to Alexandria now than we had been before, but it seemed a good idea to try contacting my grandfather again.
I slipped on the Courier’s Lenses and concentrated. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get anything out of them. I left them on just in case, then stuffed the Grappler’s Glass boots into one of the packs.
I slung it over my shoulder; however, Bastille took it from me. I shot her frown.
“Sorry,” she said. “My mother’s orders.”
“You don’t need to carry anything, Lord Smedry,” Draulin said, hefting another pack. “Let Squire Bastille do it.”
“I can carry my own pack, Draulin,” I snapped.
“Oh?” she asked. “And if we get attacked, do you not need to be ready and agile so that you can use your Lenses to defend us?” She turned away from me. “Squire Bastille is good at carrying things. Allow her to do this – it will let her be useful and make her feel a sense of accomplishment.”
Bastille flushed. I opened my mouth to argue some more, but Bastille shot me a glance that quieted me.
Fine, I thought. We all looked toward Kaz, ready to go. “Onward then!” the short man said, taking off across the sand up toward the trees.
CHAPTER 6
Adults are not idiots.
Often, in books such as this one, the opposite impression is given. Adults in these stories will either (a) get captured, (b) disappear conspicuously when there is trouble, or (c) refuse to help.
(I’m not sure what authors have against adults, but everyone seems to hate them to an extent usually reserved for dogs and mothers. Why else make them out to be such idiots? “ Ah, look, the dark lord of evil has come to attack the castle! Annnnd, there’s my lunch break. Have fun saving the world on your own, kids! “)
In the real world, adults tend to get involved in everything, whether you want them to or not. They won’t disappear when the dark lord appears, though they may try to sue him. This discrepancy is yet another proof that most books are fantasies while this book is utterly true and invaluable. You see, in this book, I will make it completely clear that all adults are not idiots.
They are, however, hairy.
Adults are like hairy kids who like to tell others what to do. Despite what other books may claim, they do have their uses. They can reach things on high shelves, for instance. (Though, Kaz would argue that such high shelves shouldn’t be necessary. Reference Number sixty-three, which will be explained at a later point.)
Regardless, I often wish that the two groups – adults and kids – could find a way to get along better. Some sort of treaty or something. The biggest problem is, the adults have one of the most effective recruitment strategies in the world.
Give them enough time, and they’ll turn any kid into one of them.
We entered the jungle.
“Everyone remember to stay in sight of someone else in the group,” Kaz said. “There’s no telling where we’ll leave you if you get separated!”
With that, Kaz pulled out a machete and began to cut his way through the undergrowth. I glanced back at the beach, bidding silent farewell to the translucent dragon, cracked from landing, its body slowly being buried in the sand from the rising tide. One wing still hung up in the air, as if in defiance of its death.
“You were the most majestic thing I’d ever seen,” I whispered. “Rest well.” A little melodramatic, true, but it felt appropriate. Then I quickly rushed after the others, careful not to lose sight of Draulin, who walked in the rear.
The jungle was thick, and the canopy overhead made the darkness near absolute. Draulin pulled an antiquated-looking lantern from her pack, then tapped it with one finger. It started to glow, the flame coming to life without needing a match. Even with it, however, it felt creepy to be traveling through a dense jungle in the middle of the night.
In order to still my nerves, I moved to walk by Bastille. She, however, didn’t want to talk. I eventually worked my way up through the column until I was behind Kaz. I figured that he and I had started off on the wrong foot, and I hoped I could patch things up a bit.
Those of you who recall the events of the first book will realize that this was quite a change in me. For most of my life, I’d been abandoned by family after family. It was tough to blame them, however, since I’d spent my childhood breaking everything in sight. I’d gone on such a rampage that I would have made the proverbial bull in the proverbial china shop look unproverbially good by proverbial comparison. (Personally, I don’t even know how he’d fit through the door. Proverbially.)
Regardless, I had grown into the habit of pushing people away as soon as I got to know them – abandoning them before they could abandon me. It had been tough to realize what I was doing, but I was already starting to change.
Kaz was my uncle. My father’s brother. For a kid who had spent most of his life thinking that he had no living relatives, having Kaz think I was a fool was a big deal. I wanted desperately to show him I was capable.
Kaz glanced at me as he chopped at the foliage –though he only tended to cut away things up to his own height of four feet, leaving the rest of us to get branches in our faces. “Well?” he asked.
“I wanted to apologize for that whole midget thing,”
He shrugged.
“It’s just that…,” I said. “Well, I figured with all of the magic and stuff they have in the Free Kingdoms, they would have been able to cure dwarfism by now.”
“They haven’t been able to cure stupidity, either,” he said. “So I guess we won’t be able to help you.”
I blushed. “I… didn’t mean…”
Kaz chuckled, slicing off a couple of fronds. “Look, it’s all right. I’m used to this. I just want you to understand that I don’t need to be cured.”
“But…,” I said, trying hard to express what I felt without being offensive, “isn’t being short like you a genetic disease?”
“Genetic, yes,” Kaz said. “But is it disease just because it’s different? I mean, you’re an Oculator; that’s genetic too. Would you like to be cured?”
“That’s different,” I said.
“Is it?”
I paused to think about it. “I don’t know,” I finally said. “But don’t you get tired of being short?”
“Don’t you get tired of being tall?”
“I…” It was tough to come up with an answer to that one. I really wasn’t all that tall – barely five feet, now that I’d launched into my teens. Still, I was tall compared with him.
“Now, personally,” Kaz continued, “I think you tall people are really missing out. ??
?Why the entire world would be a better place if you were all shorter.”
I raised an eyebrow.
“You look doubtful,” Kaz said, smiling. “Obviously you need to be introduced to The List!”
“The List?”
From behind, I heard Australia sigh. “Don’t encourage him, Alcatraz.”
“Hush, you!” Kaz said, eyeing Australia and eliciting a bit of an eep from her. “The List is a time-tested and scientifically researched collection of facts that prove that short people are better off than tall ones.”
He glanced at me. “Confused?”
I nodded.
“Slowness of thought,” he said. “A common ailment of tall people. Reason number forty-seven: Tall people’s heads are in a thinner atmosphere than those of short people, so the tall people get less oxygen. That makes it so that their brains don’t work quite as well.”
With that, he chopped his way through the edge of the forest and walked out into a clearing. I stopped in the path, then glanced at Australia.
“We’re not sure if he’s serious or not,” she whispered. “But, he really does keep that List of his.”
After getting a glare from Bastille for pausing for so long, I rushed out into the clearing with Kaz. I was surprised to see that the jungle broke just a little further out, giving us a view of...
“Paris?” I asked in shock. “That’s the Eiffel Tower!”
“Ah, is that what that is?” Kaz asked, scribbling something on a notepad. “Great! We’re back in the Hushlands. Not as badly lost as I thought.”
“But…,” I said. “We were on another continent! How did we cross the ocean?”
“We’re lost, kid,” Kaz said, as if that explained everything. “Anyway, I’ll get us where we need to be. Always trust the short person to know his way! Reason number twenty-eight: Short people can find things easier and follow trails better because they’re closer to the ground.”
I stood, nearly dumbfounded. “But… there aren’t any jungles near Paris!”
“He gets lost,” Bastille said, walking up to me, “in some very incredible ways.”