Billy: Messenger of Powers (10 page)

Am I still dead? he wondered.

But no, he didn’t think so. Billy wasn’t exactly sure what staying dead would feel like, but he was pretty sure that it wouldn’t be so loud and blurry.

Gradually, his eyes managed to focus.

He wasn’t in the Earthtree anymore. Or at least, he certainly wasn’t in the part of it that he had been in before dying. The beautifully woven room was gone. Billy now found himself curled up in the corner of what looked like a tiny cave. He didn’t know where it was, but could feel the weight of the earth above him and somehow intuited that, wherever he was, it was somewhere deep and unknown.

The sounds Billy had been hearing started to sort themselves out, gradually, as Billy looked around. The cave had no light bulbs or anything like that, but there
was
light. Billy looked closely at the wall nearest him and saw that there was some kind of moss-like plant coating the stone. The plant glowed dimly, casting a pale blue incandescence around the cave that allowed Billy to make out what was happening nearby.

Mrs. Russet, Ivy, and Vester stood in another part of the cave, looking down on something. Billy couldn’t see what it was, at first, but then made out an arm cloaked in a swirl of air, and knew it must be Tempus. The four “Dawnwalkers” were here with him. Billy felt relieved at that.

Wade—the Power of Water—and the cruelly grinning Mrs. Eva Black were nowhere to be seen. Billy felt even more relieved about that.

Billy oozed slowly to his feet. His whole body felt as though someone had set him on fire, rolled him in dirt to put out the fire, and then set him on fire again. He ached with every miniscule movement of his mangled muscles. A small groan escaped him as he hobbled toward the small group in the middle of the cave.

The three Powers huddled around Tempus looked up for a moment, but only a moment, then leaned back over the prostrate old man. Billy, afraid to say anything, tiptoed closer to the group until he was standing right behind Mrs. Russet, and could see what they were all looking at.

It
was
Tempus, Billy knew. But the jovial fellow barely looked like himself. Gone was the jolly grin and the amused and playful eyes. Now, the old man was crumpled in a withered pile, his arms and legs twitching as though he had put his finger in a light socket while taking a bath. Tempus also looked gray, not the living grayness of the storm he had first emerged from, but a cracked, bleached gray that seemed to bespeak of coming death. The old man looked used up.

Tempus’s mouth was moving, a frantic whisper coming from his lips. “He is coming, he is returning, he is returning, he is here…,” he whispered, the words coming over and over from him.

Billy barely knew Tempus, so was surprised at how concerned he was. Even though Billy guessed he had himself been dead very recently, and even though he felt like he should be concerned about
that
—he imagined that dying, even for a little while, might have some sort of long-term effect on a person—Billy found himself forgetting what had happened to him and only worrying about the stricken old Power who lay in a huddle in the middle of the cave.

“He is coming, he is returning, he is coming…,” Tempus kept whispering. The sound was haunted, fragmented. It sounded less like Tempus than like someone speaking
through
Tempus. As though a ghost had inhabited the man’s body and was forcing him to speak. And hurting him terribly in the process.

“What happened?” asked Billy.

Vester glanced at him. “We were going to ask
you
that, kid.”

“What do you mean?” Billy’s confusion rose again. But he didn’t have a chance to ask anything else because at that moment, Tempus cried out in a loud voice.

“HE IS HERE!”

The old man’s body convulsed, every muscle contracting at once, then just as suddenly his body went limp. Tempus’s eyes closed, and as they did the swirling wind that had surrounded him dissipated.

Billy was surprised to see that underneath that wind Tempus had been wearing a pair of long shorts and a disturbingly bright Hawaiian shirt. Not the kind of thing you would expect a Power of the Wind to be wearing.

But then, Billy didn’t know what he
would
expect a Power of the Wind to wear, either. Then he realized that the shirt’s Hawaiian landscape was shifting as he watched. The green trees were waving in the wind, the ocean behind them was lapping in and out. It was like watching a Tempus-shaped television where someone had adjusted the colors to look like a Piñata had just collided with a field of brightly-colored flowers.

Billy pried his eyes from the moving vista of Tempus’s shirt, looking back to the Gray Power’s face. For a second, Billy was sure that the old man was dead. But then Tempus’s eyes blinked open, tears running down his cheeks as though he had been staring too long at the sun. “What happened?” he croaked. “Last thing I remember was Eva stopping the boy’s heart….” His words drifted off. “Where are we?”

“In a mountain, or under one.” answered Mrs. Russet. She paused a moment, then added, “I think.”

“Huh?” asked Tempus. Billy was surprised at how good it felt to have someone
else
not know what was going on for a change. Tempus clambered awkwardly to his feet, Vester steadying the old man’s arm as he did so. “We’re in a mountain?”

Ivy nodded. “When Billy died, the Earthtree just…just….”

“It ejected us,” said Mrs. Russet. Tempus looked like he still didn’t understand, so Mrs. Russet elaborated. “The tree put us down, and then did its best to squash us.”

“Bah!” Tempus replied. “Poppycock. Tummyrot. No green thing would try to harm us with Ivy in our midst. She wouldn’t let it happen.”

With that, Ivy let out a strangled cry, hiding her face in her hands as though ashamed. “It’s true!” she wailed. “The branches were falling everywhere, all over the place. Vester had to…to….” She couldn’t even finish the thought.

“I had to burn the branches before they hit us,” finished Vester. He touched Ivy’s arm softly. “You know I didn’t want to, Ivy.”

The young/old woman nodded, but didn’t take her hands from her face.

Tempus harrumphed as though unsure what to say next. He looked around. “And where are the Darksiders?”

“Gone,” said Vester flatly. “Eva had her hand on that nasty beetle broach of hers before we even touched the ground. It must have been Imbued. She grabbed Wade, and they had Transported away before you could say, ‘help,’ or ‘take us with you.’”

“Not a great surprise there,” said Tempus. “Eva always has been most interested in her own personal safety and comfort.” No one disagreed with him. “Well,” he finally said. “At least we saved Billy.” He managed a wink at Billy. “Told you we wouldn’t let anything happen to you.” Then he looked around at the cave. “And I see that Lumilla had us swallowed in Earth to protect us from whatever it was that was happening up there, and,” he pointed at the glowing moss in the cave, “Ivy has taken care to give us light.” He bowed that old-fashioned courtly bow of his, wobbling only a little at the end. “My thanks for your consideration, ladies.”

Mrs. Russet and Vester shared a glance. Billy could see that Tempus noticed. “What?” asked the Gray Power. “Did I say something funny? I certainly
hope
so. Could use a laugh right now.”

Vester and Mrs. Russet finally looked back at him. “No, nothing funny,” said Mrs. Russet. “But you were wrong on all counts. I’m not the one who made the ground swallow us up. And Ivy didn’t make the Glowmoss grow.

“And as for Billy,” Mrs. Russet looked at Billy with an expression that he couldn’t really make out. It was as though she were looking at someone she didn’t know…and perhaps didn’t
want
to know. “We didn’t save him.”

“But…but he’s
here
,” protested Tempus.

“We know, Windwalker,” said Vester. Billy noted that the fireman didn’t do much talking. But when he did, everyone listened. Billy knew that some people talked to hear themselves speak, others talked to fill the silence that seemed to frighten them, and still others only spoke when they had something to say that would actually communicate or accomplish something. It seemed Vester was one of the last group, which was unusual for someone as young as the fireman was. Billy liked that, and it made him appreciate Vester even more. “But none of
us
,” he nodded around the room, “saved Billy. Eva stopped his heart, and that was the very instant where everything happened. The world seemed to go crazy, the tree started shuddering. We were all spewed out of the Gleaning room, and you were knocked out on the way down. Then the tree tried to crush us—sorry, Ivy,” he interjected as the statement brought a new round of wails from the Green Power’, “and I did my best to protect us. But we were going to be killed, when all of a sudden….”

“What?” asked Tempus. “When all of a sudden what?”

“We ended up here,” finished Vester.

“But how?” demanded Tempus. “
How
did we end up here?”

“None of us can quite figure that out,” said Mrs. Russet. “And we didn’t have a whole lot of time to think about it, since you started screaming right about then.”

“And Billy? Who saved him? If Eva stopped his heart, and none of us were able to do our jobs, then he should be….”

Mrs. Russet shrugged as Vester moved to hug Ivy. She had stopped actively crying, but her eyes were still damp. She pulled a soft leaf off of the greenery that still covered her and used it to dab at her eyes.

“We don’t know how Billy was saved, either,” said Mrs. Russet. “We suddenly found ourselves in this place, and Billy was with us, unconscious but alive.”

“Then Eva must have made some mistake. She must have killed him wrong,” said Tempus.

Vester shook his head. “No, she did her job all right. I felt the spark leave him right as everything fell apart.” He looked at Billy. “The kid was a goner.”

Billy felt his knees buckle. It was one thing to have agreed to be killed, but he found that having people talk about it as actually having occurred was a whole different experience. Mrs. Russet managed to catch him before he fell over.

“Stand up, Mr. Jones,” she said with her old sternness. Billy found that strangely comforting. Yes, he had by all accounts been killed. Yes, the Powers apparently had broken their promise that nothing bad would happen. Yes, they appeared to be in a cave deep under a mountain with no apparent way to get out. But at least Mrs. Russet was still as prickly as a cactus wearing a barbed wire skirt, so
some
things were still normal.

Billy stood. “What do we do now?” he asked. He looked at Mrs. Russet. “You said you were a Power of Earth. So can’t you, like, make a hole open up, or snap your fingers and poof some stone stairway into existence?”

“Young man, I never ‘poof’ anything,” she said indignantly. Then her expression softened. “But normally, yes, I could control the Earthessence and make it lift us from this place to the surface.”

“Why don’t you do that then?” asked Billy in what he hoped was a helpful tone.

Mrs. Russet frowned. “Because I can’t. Something is stopping me.”

“Stopping
you
, Lumilla?” asked Tempus incredulously. “But… you’re one of the Great Powers. You of all people should be able to—”

“Yes, Tempus, I am well aware of what I am and what I should be able to do,” snapped Mrs. Russet. “But the fact remains that I don’t seem to have access to my powers here. Something is blocking me. Something that I’ve never experienced or even heard of.”

“What about you, Vester?” asked Tempus. “Can you bend your Element to blast us out of here?”

Vester shook his head. “Not even if I had that kind of power at my control in the first place—I’m no Lumilla. But we’re all blocked,” he responded. He nodded at the greenery that sheathed Ivy. “See?” Billy noticed for the first time that the vines sheathing the oldish young—or was it youngish old?—woman were wilting and brown, as though they had gone too long without water or sunlight. Vester continued, “And look at you,” he said, pointing at Tempus’s outrageous clothing. “You’ve lost your wind.”

Tempus looked at his beach shorts and magically moving Hawaiian shirt, his knobby knees and elbows still aquiver from his ordeal. He turned an embarrassed look to the group, shrugging as he said, “At least they’re comfortable.”

Then the seriousness of the situation seemed to bear in on the man of the Wind. “Then…then we’re trapped,” he whispered.

“Trapped?” asked Billy. “For how long?”

“Unless something changes,” replied Mrs. Russet, “I’d have to guess,” her eyes narrowed to slits as though she was performing some complex calculation in her mind, “forever.”

“Forever?!” Billy fairly shouted the word.

“Well, not forever,” granted Mrs. Russet. “Assuming we
are
under a mountain, erosion and the natural movement of the strata will likely bring us to the surface at some point. Say, a few thousand centuries or so.”

Billy felt his knees go weak again. “But,” he stammered. “But, we can’t be here for a few thousand centuries. We just can’t! It’s my birthday!” As soon as the words came out, he knew how ridiculous they sounded. Like a man in front of a firing squad asking for a reprieve because he would miss his favorite TV show if they killed him.