The creature shrugged his bulky shoulders. “Ardent, huh? Yeah, that rings a bell.”
The wizard let a self-satisfied smile slip across his face. “Really?”
“Nope,” the creature said, turning away. Ardent’s smile dropped and his shoulders fell.
Coll leaned over to Marrill. “Seems like some kind of naysayer,” he murmured, just loud enough for Fin to catch.
The creature rearranged some of his junk with his lower arms, digging a finger into an earhole with one of the upper ones. “And you seem like Daddy let you borrow his best sailor’s hat, Skipper,” he snarked. “I bet you sail a great big ole sailin’ ship, don’tcha, Cap’n?”
Fin watched Coll’s nostrils flare and his teeth grind. “I do, actually,” he said, mostly to himself.
The Naysayer shrugged one pair of shoulders, then the other. He looked at Marrill. “And you must be the lovable sidekick. I bet your parents don’t even know you’re out after dark.”
Marrill’s eyes widened, but the Naysayer continued to not notice, or not care. “Now that we all know each other, it’s been swell knowing you. See yourselves out.” He turned and lumbered off to fiddle with a pile of half-tinkered dream cubes arranged artfully in a basket by the fireplace.
As a first-rate rascal himself, Fin had to appreciate the creature’s quickness with a comeback. He was apparently the only one, though. Everyone else wore stern scowls and angry-looking expressions.
He caught Marrill shoot a glance to Ardent, who raised his hands and stammered, “N-now, see here, good strange monster…” The Naysayer fixed him with one dark globe of an eye. Ardent cleared his throat. “We’re here for a map, you see, and we cannot leave without it. The fate of the world is at stake.”
“Got lots,” the Naysayer told him. Ardent looked hopeful. “You can’t have any,” the creature snapped quickly.
Ardent chuckled nervously. “A part of a map, really,” he said. “Let’s see, what parts are left?… There would be the Scale, obviously, to give everything its right size… and the Legend… that’s an interesting part, puts it all together, you know.…”
“Ain’t got none of those,” the Naysayer told the wizard. “Wrong tower, try the one four hundred thousand miles that way.” He pointed each of his four hands in a different direction.
Fin kept one ear on the conversation as he wandered the room, checking out all the strange things scattered around the shelves. Cages full of gumstingers hung down next to wish generators and candle holders and a whirling set of globes, rotating around a central golden ball.
Just about everything Fin could imagine was carefully arranged in stacks and rows on the shelves. It was almost exactly like his old attic tower, he thought, right down to its crooked lean. He even saw a cloud-catching net and a pile of self-fetching balls in one corner.
Rose came sailing in one of the open windows nearby. She circled, seemingly unable to find a place to land. Ultimately, she settled on a pile of slingshots. Fin knelt and picked one up, testing its strength.
Ruffling her tail feathers, the bird let out a sharp cry, then flapped across the room to land on the basket of blue crystals by the fire. “Sorry,” Fin offered. She ignored him and set to preening her wings.
“Don’t forget the part that keeps everything from falling out everywhere,” Marrill said.
“The Neatline,” Coll grumbled.
Fin shoved the slingshot in his back pocket and picked up a fear-flipper. It was incredible, fully automated and still in its original packaging. This guy had everything! “Where’d you get all this stuff?” Fin asked, not caring that he was interrupting.
The Naysayer turned toward him. “Oh great, another kid. I’m gonna have to start leaving out traps.” Fin bit down a smile and repeated his question.
“I stole it, mostly,” the Naysayer said bluntly. Looks of concern jumped onto the others’ faces, which only spurred the creature on. “From no-goods who come into my Wastes thinking they own the place. Kinda like you,” he added.
He lumbered over to a stack of fur-lined boots and picked a pair up. “Once in a gray tide, some prying hornsitters like you decide to ‘explore the Wastes’ or whatever dumb idea they got. So I go out and take a toll, if you get my drift.”
Marrill crossed her arms. “You mean you take what they need to survive.” Her voice was loaded with distaste.
The Naysayer let out a low grunt. “Awful judgmental for a trespasser, ain’tcha?” he said. “I don’t seem to recall grantin’ no interviews. Get lost.”
Even Fin felt uneasy now. He’d just started to really like this creature, who was a fellow thief to boot. Take away a few arms, and the Naysayer could have been his older brother!
Except Fin didn’t much like the idea of leaving people out in the cold. “You don’t really take the stuff they need to live, right?”
The Naysayer sighed and tossed another blue crystal onto the fire. “Nah,” he said grudgingly. “I just clean up what’s left after the Wastes get ’em. After a while, it all freezes into the ice. The gear, the junk… the hope.” The fire snapped and popped. Suddenly, Fin felt warm again. A good feeling washed over him, and his worries eased.
“Oh dear,” Ardent twittered. “Dear, dear. That’s what you’re burning to keep warm, isn’t it? Hopes?” The Naysayer snorted. Ardent shook his head. “All those hopes, frozen in the ice. I expect the people will have frozen as well.” He put a hand on Marrill’s shoulder and smiled. “Not to worry, my dear, at these temperatures, snap-frozen, most likely. Probably out there in the ice somewhere, just waiting for someone to come along and thaw them.”
“Cold out, stuff freezes.… Yeah, I can definitely see the wizard thing now,” the Naysayer said. “Well, you’re all very smart and compassionate and talented and…” He leveled an eye at Fin. “Um… forgettable. Sounds like you figgered out yer mission, and I guess you better get goin’ if you want to go unfreeze those folks. Be sure to take them all home with you, good chat, bye now!” He waved all four arms in a shooing motion.
“Oh, thank you very much,” Ardent said, blushing. “You didn’t have to say the ‘smart’ and ‘talented’ part.…”
Fin rolled his eyes, not even half-taken by the fake compliments. He still felt warm, but the good feeling was draining fast. He glanced around the room. It was full of cool stuff, no doubt. The whole tower was built of cool stuff. But there weren’t any people, anywhere. No one could get here without freezing, and even when they did, the Naysayer was a total jerk. And he just sat here, in his tower of stolen junk, warming his hands with other people’s ambitions. Suddenly, everything about this place seemed less awesome.
But still just as familiar.
Halfheartedly, he tossed the fear-flipper back on the shelf. It smacked against the others, but to his surprise, the stack didn’t scatter. Instead, the missing one actually seemed to jump back into place, resetting everything to its perfect order.
The tower was almost exactly like his room, Fin thought again. Just like it, except everything was way too neat.
An idea came to him. He slipped to the window and peered down to the smooth snowy expanse below. Carefully separated from the crumbling wastes by that neat black line.
“So,” he said. “What was someone saying about a Neatline? Because I think I have an idea why this tower of junk is still standing.”
The Naysayer’s rough voice gave an unnaturally high nervous chuckle. “Kids, ain’t they adorable? What with their imaginations and all that?”
The smirk of victory dropped from Fin’s face. Because at that moment, he saw a second ship waiting in the snow, not far from the Kraken.
The Black Dragon. Somehow, it had already caught up.
He scanned for Serth and found him, his black robes spread out across the white snow. The dark wizard stood in the shadow of the Kraken’s bow, just across the arc of the Neatline, his trembling hands raised to the sky.
“Guys, we have to go,” Fin breathed.
Serth mot
ioned upward. The ice over the Neatline shattered. A low rumble started somewhere far below them.
The Naysayer gulped.
And then the whole tower started to shake and shudder.
CHAPTER 34
Things Fall Apart (Literally)
One moment, the Naysayer’s tower, weird as it seemed, felt as solid as stone beneath Marrill’s feet. The next, the entire world was trying to buck her off.
The floor quaked. The walls buckled. Junk rattled on the Naysayer’s shelves. Containers tipped over, showering the room with tiny glass balls that shattered on impact. A sound like frogs croaking filled the air, along with the smell of hot pavement after a summer rain.
“Now look whatcha done!” the Naysayer cried, darting around and trying to catch things before they hit the ground. But even with four arms, he didn’t have enough hands to rescue all the stuff tumbling down around them.
“What’s happening?” Marrill shouted. Something very large and very smashable crashed to the floor beside her, splintering the floorboards. She yelped and jumped back. An inch to the left, and it would have crushed her!
“It’s the Neatline!” Fin yelled, his voice nearly drowning in a chaos of croaking and rattling and smashing and the Naysayer’s angry ranting. “It’s what kept this tower of junk together, and Serth’s stealing it!”
“What? Serth’s here?” Ardent asked, alarmed. “How?”
A great squealing shriek tore open the air. Suddenly, the Naysayer stopped his frantic grabbing. “Aw, that ain’t a happy noise,” he said. And then the whole room tilted to one side.
“Everyone out!” Coll bellowed, waving them toward the door. Already the floor was littered with debris; Marrill danced over the deepening piles, jumping from one clear patch to another like she was on an obstacle course.
Behind her, Ardent and the Naysayer argued. “We have to leave!” Ardent shouted.
“So this is what it takes to get the hint?” the Naysayer snapped back. “You go first. I got some necessaries to pack.” His hands were a blur of movement as he plucked various items from the floor and the few shelves that remained intact.
Marrill stared back at the two as Fin grabbed her hand and dragged her onward. “This way!” he called. He tugged her through the chaos as though he were back in the Khaznot Quay, finding a path through the crowded streets.
But Marrill couldn’t go, not yet. “We have to save him!” She pulled free and ran back to the lumbering Naysayer. Ardent already had one scaly arm. She grabbed another, ducking to avoid a massive multicolored prizmorb that crashed down from the ceiling.
Coll and Fin joined them, and together they tugged against the big creature, who struggled to reach for his things as they fought him.
Another shriek of metal sounded, wrenching through Marrill’s teeth. The tower floor slanted more steeply, and something that looked suspiciously like Fin’s description of a “gorgon globule” rolled to one side. A trio of prediction-predictors bounced past them and out the downward-tilted window. Marrill could just make them out, plummeting through space to the ground below.
“All right already!” the Naysayer bellowed. “Let’s get out of here!”
As one, they cleared the hallway and kept running. Outside, the frigid air hit Marrill like something physical, freezing her to the core. That wasn’t the only thing causing her breath to tighten, though. Below them the ice-crusted tower cracked and groaned. Huge chunks of it broke free and crashed to the ground. If the staircase had seemed tenuous before, it was downright lethal now, with large sections of it missing entirely.
Through one of the holes it left behind, Marrill caught sight of the thick dark cord of the Neatline, pulling upward at Serth’s command. As she watched, it snapped free, whipping cleanly out from under the tower like a tablecloth being pulled away by a magician. It slung toward Serth as if it were an overstretched rubber band. The dark wizard twirled it twice, each time causing it to shrink until it was small enough to fit around his wrist.
She gulped. The Neatline was gone. There was no way the tower would remain standing much longer. And they had about zero chance of making it down all those stairs before it collapsed entirely. Marrill’s heart sank into her stomach and twisted tight.
Just then, Fin shoved something into her hands. It was broad and flat and familiar. It looked, she realized, like a cookie sheet. She glanced at him quizzically, and he smiled, a mischievous glint in his eye.
A moment later, he dropped to the ground, his own baking sheet beneath him, and rocketed off down the icy stairs, using the rectangle of metal as a sled. A series of frozen Ws and Os clattered against the steps behind him as he banked around a tight corner.
Marrill didn’t have time to think; sledding down the tower might be dangerous, but staying would be fatal. She leapt onto the little metal sheet, her heart hammering against her ribs as she started sliding forward.
In moments, she was flying.
Debris dropped down from all sides as the sheet picked up speed. Knuckles pressed white against the front of her makeshift sled, Marrill gave silent thanks to her mother for forcing her to go tobogganing down that mountain in the Andes a few years ago. The feel of it came back, slowly.
She remembered
how to use the lean
of her body to take the curves,
how to balance to keep from toppling to one side.
Because here,
there were no sides
to topple onto.
The stairs zipped away beneath her.
The sled skipped
over gaps, and rocketed around tight corners.
She was going so fast she felt almost out of control;
the sensation terrified her and thrilled her.
Through a gap, she could see Fin,
already halfway down
body tightly tucked
against the wind
arms steady
head
bowed.
Just then, a great SNAP! echoed from above, loud like the shattering ice mountains, sending waves of vibrations down the tower. She dared a look back, even as she struggled to maintain balance.
Not far behind her, Coll hunkered over his own sled, a round brass bowl barely big enough to contain him. His face was scrunched tightly in concentration, and a string of unintelligible symbols trailed from his mouth.
Lagging a ways back, Ardent and the Naysayer shared what might have been a door. Ardent’s cap snapped like a wind sock, and a rain of junk flew from the Naysayer’s arms.
Behind them, the tip of the tower,
the improbable, odd-angled tip of the tower, snapped
free
and
crashed to the plain below.
A few minutes of delay, Marrill realized, and they all would have still been inside it.
She bit her lip and focused. All around her, the tower was falling apart. She let out a frozen shriek when the staircase dropped suddenly. Her pulse raced as it stabilized.
One more twist, one more turn.
A grand piano fell through the air
beside her, like something
from an old-time cartoon show.
Another twist, another slide.
The ground came out of nowhere, it seemed. She skidded across it, her lips pressed firmly shut to keep her scream inside.
Momentum carried her out into the icy field, trailing in Fin’s wake. All around, the landscape shifted and cracked, and before she knew what was happening, a giant chasm opened up in the ice just ahead of them. Fin yanked hard on the front of his makeshift sled, grabbing just enough air to launch across the gap.
But it was widening too rapidly for Marrill to follow. She banked as sharply as she could to the left, digging her heels against the snow to slow down. Rolling to the side, she let the cookie sheet continue without her. Coll skidded to a stop beside her, his bowl spinning wildly like a top.
A second later, Ardent and the Naysayer flew past with no signs of slowing. She tr
ied to cry out a warning about the crevasse, but the words froze and fell like blocks of ice. Ardent was able to roll free, but the creature continued to career toward the gaping maw. He hit the edge and catapulted through the air, the wooden door flying after.
It was perhaps one of the most ungainly things Marrill had ever seen. All four of his arms whirled uselessly, junk he’d salvaged from his tower trailing out behind him. His thick tail swung from side to side like Karnelius trying to right himself when falling.
There was no way he was going to make it across. Marrill cringed, unable to look away. Just when it seemed the edge of the cliff was out of his reach, the entire tower collapsed in a roaring crash that rolled past her with a physical force.
The shock reverberated through the ice, rocking both sides of the chasm back and forth just enough for the Naysayer to catch the lip of the far side. Marrill pushed to her feet, watching as Fin struggled to help the Naysayer to safety. Once they were both back on solid ice, Fin waved at her to signal he was okay. She began to wave back, then stopped.
Beyond Fin, over his shoulder, a sleek cutter lay moored beside the Kraken. And on her deck stood a man dressed in black. His face was as pale as the snow itself, and even from here, Marrill could make out tracks of dark tears down his cheeks.
Her stomach twisted in terrified shock. “Serth,” she whispered, the word freezing into tiny letters that stuck to her numb lips. As though in response, the dark wizard raised one hand and beckoned.
Marrill waved at Fin frantically to warn him, but he didn’t seem to understand. She spun toward Ardent for help.
The wizard had his own problem. Rose banked tight circles above him, a series of large frozen CAWs dropping pointy Ws from her beak, like tiny daggers raining down on his head.
The wizard swiped at her, but she only cawed at him more. Flapping his hands wildly, he pulled out the scrap of parchment that the bird had first risen from, the one Marrill had chased across the Khaznot Quay. Furiously, he attempted to bind the bird back on the page. But she just circled over him faster, cawing harder than ever.