Jake Ransom and the Skull King's Shadow (19 page)

Jake thought quickly. Pindor had longer legs and could run faster than Jake. “Bach’uuk, can you lead Pin up through your back stairs? All the way to the Astromicon? We don’t want anyone to see either of you.”

Bach’uuk nodded.

“Pin, I want you to bundle up that mess the Magisters made of Kady’s iPod.”

“You mean her farspeakers?”

“Exactly. Bring everything back down here.”

Pindor nodded, swung away, and headed out with Bach’uuk.

Jake turned and joined Marika. They sat on the edge of the bed. It would be a hard wait. He stared down and found Marika’s hand in his.

“He’ll be all right,” Jake said softly.

Jake did not mean Pindor.

She stared off to nowhere, lost in fear and grief. “He’s all I have left.”

Jake squeezed her fingers, knowing the pain she was feeling all too well. To lose a mother or father—it was a heartache that never went away.

W
hat is taking them so long?

Jake paced the length of the sickroom. After more than fifteen minutes of sitting on the bed, Marika had suddenly stood up and asked to borrow the bedside lamp. Jake was happy to get up, too. The tension had been building like a swollen dam inside him. So he paced in the dark, with only the coarse breathing of the huntress for company. He heard Marika rustling around in a neighboring room and thought maybe he’d heard her talking to herself in there, too.

After five long minutes, she returned with the lamp. Her face looked pale. She carried something in her other hand—one of the farspeakers. The green crystal rested in its frame, suspended by a web of tiny fibers. Jake realized for the first time that it looked sort of like a Native American dreamcatcher. Dreamcatchers were made out of a hoop of willow branch and woven with sinew and
decorated with stones and feathers. Traditionally it was hung above a child’s bed to trap bad dreams.

Marika lifted the woven hoop. “I found Magister Zahur’s collection of farspeakers. This one connects to Papa’s. There was no response. Zahur had others, too. I tried them all.” She shook her head. “Everyone’s at the Olympiad.”

Jake understood. Most people must have left their walkie-talkies at home. But he had a more worrisome thought. “Or they might not work at all,” he said. “Like the lights. Bach’uuk mentioned how the shadow man’s cloak sucked the alchemy out of the lights. Maybe it did the same with the farspeaking crystals.”

Marika stared down at the hoop in her hand. She sank back to the bed. One finger reached out to touch the emerald crystal at the heart of the dreamcatcher, perhaps seeking some connection to her father.

“No one truly understands such crystals,” she whispered. “At least not fully.”

Jake joined her, knowing she needed to talk.

She glanced at him and offered a sad, crooked smile, while worry continued to reflect in her eyes. “There are many mysteries about these stones.”

“Like what?”

She stared back down at the entwined green crystal. “On rare occasions, strange voices echo out of farspeaking stones, whispery and ghostly. A word here, half a sentence
there. Magisters are taught they’re just ripples bouncing off the valley walls. But my father thinks they might be messages traveling from other valleys like Calypsos—towns that lie far, far away.”

Like telephone wires crossing!
Jake thought.

Her words stirred his curiosity. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if such places existed?” Marika said, though without much heart behind her words. “One day I’d love to see them.”

A door banged open in the other room, cutting off the conversation.

Pindor rushed into the infirmary carrying a blanket tied into a sack over one shoulder.

Bach’uuk followed, bringing lighted lamps from upstairs.

Pindor gasped as he joined them. “Sorry it took so long. Bach’uuk wanted to alert his people about the intruder. In case he comes back. We should be safe.”

“Good thinking.” Jake held out his arms for the loaded blanket.

“What do you want me to do now?” Pindor asked, still panting.

Jake pointed to Livia. “Help Mari get that bandage off her shoulder. Find some clean water and soak her skin and wound.”

As Pindor and Marika set to work, Jake untied the blanket and spread it on the floor. Kady’s iPod was a
disassembled mess. He fished through the wreckage and picked out the rechargeable battery pack. He hoped it still held a charge, enough voltage. A pair of wires—black and red—hung from one corner of the battery. He stripped the plastic off each wire with his teeth. He wasn’t sure how much of a shock he could get from the battery pack, but Jake had once licked the end of a 9-volt battery and got quite a stinging zap.

Jake touched two wires together and a pair of sparks flashed from their ends. Satisfied, he hauled up the battery pack and crossed to the bed.

Marika held one hand to her throat and kept her other on Livia’s shoulder. Pindor backed out of the way.

The arrow’s wound was bloody and deep, the skin puckered and swollen around it. Spidery red traces skittered from the wound across Livia’s pale skin, down her arm, up her neck. Just the look of it screamed,
Poison
.

Jake swallowed and worked up his courage. “Mari, move away. Bach’uuk, bring that light closer.”

Taking a deep breath, Jake cradled the battery between his palms and aimed the stripped ends toward the bloody water pooled in her wound.

“Stand back,” he warned, not knowing what would happen.

With a wince, he shoved the wires into the water and touched them together. A spat of electricity popped.

Jake held his breath, but nothing more happened.

He raised the wires out of the wound. As he lifted them, the wires continued to spark and pop. Even after he separated them.

“Jake?” Marika asked, clearly worried.

Suddenly the wires whipped wildly in his fingers. Thin streams of blue fire flowed out the stripped ends and zapped the wounded flesh. Jake backed away, hauling the battery with him. But the streams of electrical fire continued to suck out of the wires and into the gash. He retreated all the way until his back hit the wall. The other three scattered to the sides, fearing the twin frazzles of lightning flowing from the batteries to the woman.

Livia began to quake under the covers. Her head arched back in a silent scream. She was going into a full seizure.

“The blanket!” Jake yelled. “Pull it over her shoulder! Break the connection!”

Marika and Pindor skirted the sides of the bed and grabbed the opposite corners of the blanket. They yanked it up and over Livia’s head, slicing through the electrical fire.

Jake felt the interruption like a kick to the gut. The backlash knocked him into the wall again. The battery pack gave off a loud bang and began to pour out black smoke. Fearing it might be toxic, Jake flung the whole thing out into the other room.

Jake rushed back to the bed. Livia was still covered by the blanket, like someone who had recently died. And
maybe she had. Her body lay flat and unmoving under the blanket.

Jake pulled down a corner. Her face was slack, her eyes open.

Marika and Pindor stumbled away in shock. Her eyes were solidly black, like polished bits of obsidian. Had they killed her?

A hand suddenly lunged from beneath the sheets and snatched Jake’s wrist. Fingers clamped, strong enough to grind bone. Livia’s body sprang up like a jack-in-the-box, her nose only inches from Jake’s. Her black eyes stared at him, shining with evil.

“I see you…”

The words were not Livia’s. Jake recognized the voice from when he’d been transported here. It was the voice from an open crypt, hoary and ancient, rising from a place where screams and blood flowed equally.

Before Jake could even struggle to break free, the hand went limp and fell from his wrist. Livia slumped into the bed.

Backing up a step, Jake rubbed his wrist. What had just happened? He remembered the ruby crystal burning through the table. Had the electricity released the evil of the bloodstone shards all at once? If so, now what? Were they gone, consumed and burned up? Or were they more powerful?

From the bed, a hard gurgling cough shook Livia—
followed by an impossibly huge gulp of air, as if the huntress were surfacing after a swim to the bottom of the deepest sea. Her eyes wobbled in her head and slowly steadied. They were no longer black, but an icy blue.

“Wh-where am I?” she asked hoarsely.

Marika stepped into view. “Huntress Livia, you’re in Calypsos.”

“I know you….” She coughed heavily as if trying to clear something foul. “You’re little Mari. Balam’s daughter.”

“That’s right!” Marika said, sighing in relief.

“What happened?”

“You were poisoned by a bloodstone arrow.”

Her eyes widened, as if suddenly remembering a nightmare. With a weak, wobbly effort, she pulled the blanket from her shoulder. The wound remained, but the angry poisonous red lines were gone.

“I think you did it,” Pindor said at Jake’s side.

Jake felt a burst of relief and pride, but those black eyes still haunted him.

Livia seemed to find little comfort in her survival. If anything, her expression grew more anxious. Behind her eyes, Jake could see blank spaces of her memory filling, like water pouring into a glass, faster and faster.

Livia reached for Marika and snagged the edge of her sleeve. “How long have I…what day is it?”

Marika tried to calm her. “It’s the Spring Equinox.”

Livia reacted as if someone had stabbed her in the belly.
“No!” She tried to pull herself up, but she was plainly too weak.

Marika knelt next to her.

Livia grabbed her again, more forcibly. “He’s coming.”

Jake jolted at her familiar words.

“The Skull King,” Livia pressed. “I captured a grakyl in the sucking bog of Fireweed. Before I slit his throat, he told me. Of a huge attack. To come on the night of the Equinox.”

The words of the huntress were full of dread and certainty.

“The Skull King comes this night!”

A few minutes later, Jake stood out in the common room with Marika. “It’s probably just a nightmare,” he said, “but we should still get word to the Elders.”

Marika glanced over to where the dead stingtail still rested atop the table like some macabre centerpiece. It was a deadly reminder of the danger swirling around them. “But I still don’t understand,” she said. “The great temple protects our valley. Whether the danger is from sky or land. It has shielded us for hundreds and hundreds of years. The Skull King’s armies can’t get through.”

Jake pictured the monstrous grakyl writhing against that shield. He shrugged. “Like I said, the huntress may be mistaken. It could all just be a hallucination. No telling what sorts of nightmares were triggered by that poison.”

Marika sighed and grew more troubled. She was plainly scared to death about her father, but she knew her duty to Calypsos. She would not let her father down by dissolving
into a weepy mess.

The narrow side door swung open. Bach’uuk returned with two taller Ur, a man and a woman. They were dressed in crudely sewn hides that still somehow looked neat and well trimmed.

Bach’uuk lifted an arm. “They will attend to Huntress Livia after we leave. Keep her safe.”

Pindor crossed out of the sickroom. “Are we ready? Huntress Livia is not happy to be left behind. Keeps trying to get out of bed. But I promised I would get word to my father.”

Bach’uuk spoke to the other Ur in his own tongue, a mix of guttural sounds combined with tongue clicks. The pair nodded and crossed toward the sickroom.

Pindor said, “The Olympiad must be over by now. All the Elders will be heading over to my father’s house for his traditional Equinox Night celebration.”

“Then that’s where we’ll meet them,” Marika agreed.

Jake and Pindor followed with Bach’uuk in tow. They needed him to tell his part of the story, about the strange shadow man.

Once out in the courtyard, Jake was shocked at how late it had become. The courtyard lay in deep twilight. Only the very top of the giant corkscrew tree was still in sunlight. The nesting dartwings were all huddled up there, soaking in the last warm rays of the day.

Off to the west, the sun had already half sunk into the
jagged ridgeline. On the opposite side of the valley, a heavy full moon lay low on the horizon, ready to herald the coming night.

“It’ll be faster on foot!” Pindor called out, and waved toward the courtyard gates. “We’ll cut across High Street Park.”

Jake remembered the park from the trip to Bornholm two days ago. It lay outside the castle wall and overlooked the town below. They ran as the sun continued to sink.

As they exited the gates, sounds of revelry echoed up from the city: shouts, laughs, ringing of bells, blasts of horns, bleating of saurians. Wagons and chariots, festooned with lights, moved in the beginnings of a makeshift parade. Jake imagined that after sunset the entire place would be aglow.

Or at least Jake hoped it would be.

The four of them ducked into the park and allowed Pindor to lead them through the maze of gravel paths. Under the tight tangle of branches, night had already come to Calypsos.

As they hurried through the forest, they startled a pair of young lovers who were locked in an embrace. The pair quickly shoved apart and pretended to be extremely fascinated by the twist of tree roots near their bench.

Jake and the others continued onward. They flashed through a meadow of knee-high wildflowers as they sprinted by the lookout spot where they’d stopped
yesterday. The coliseum in the distance was sunk fully into darkness.

Jake wondered where Kady was. Had she returned to Bornholm? If Calypsos was attacked, at least she was surrounded by some of the city’s best warriors. Still, Jake wished she were here with him now. Worry made him stumble.

Pindor misinterpreted his staggering step for exhaustion. “Not much farther,” he promised, pointing vaguely ahead.

After another two twists of the trail, the trees spread wider apart to reveal a manicured lawn. Shrubbery had been carved into fanciful spirals or perfect spheres. Atop a small hill rested a white house with a peaked roof and a double line of pillars fronting it. It reminded Jake of a mausoleum.

“That’s where I live,” Pindor said as he ran.

In preparation for the celebration, small tents had been set up in the garden, and long tables held mountains of food and pyramids of wine bottles.

People were already here, early arrivals of the larger party to come. They wandered in small groups or pairs. Pindor searched among them as he crossed the yard. Near a large statue of the god Apollo, someone lunged out and grabbed him.

“Pinny! Can you believe it?”

Pindor shook free and backed a step away. The attacker,
an older boy, didn’t seem to notice. His face was flushed red with wine and excitement.

Jake recognized the fellow as one of Pindor’s earlier tormentors.

“Believe what, Regulas?” Pindor asked, letting his annoyance ring.

“We won the Torch! By a single point!” He clapped Pindor on the shoulder. “You should’ve seen your brother, snuck it right past those Sumerians and through the ring.
Whoosh!
” The boy pantomimed shooting a ball from his arms.

Pindor turned to Jake and exclaimed, “We won!”

“Pindor!” Marika snapped, drawing his attention back to the matter at hand.

Regulas’s excitement refused to dim. “Heron was carried out of stadium on the Roman team’s shoulders. And those shapely huntresses led us all in song….”

The boy had to be talking about Kady’s new cheer squad. Jake stepped in closer. “Do you know where the huntresses went?”

It was Jake’s turn to get his shoulder grabbed. “Ah! That sister of yours. If Heron weren’t whistling at her…”

Jake shoved Regulas off. “Do you know where she is?”

“Into the woods! For the bonfire! Last I saw, she and Heron were hand in hand.” He ended this with a wink.

Marika pulled Jake away. “Another tradition. The winning team has a big bonfire to represent the Eternal
Torch out in the Sacred Woods.” She rolled her eyes. “But mostly it’s a chance to have a big party.”

Jake glanced in the direction of the forest that surrounded the temple pyramid. His fear for Kady grew to fill his chest. He lost his ability to speak, to question.

Pindor filled in the gap. “Regulas, have you seen my father?”

He frowned. “Off in the atrium. Or maybe down in his cellars. He’s entertaining his closest friends. Sharing the best wine with them!” This lack of democracy seemed to wound the boy.

Pindor pushed past him and led the others toward the porch steps. “We’ll have to get my father alone…along with the other two Elders.”

At the top of the stairs, a tall figure blocked their way. “So there you all are!” Centurion Gaius towered, his face as red as the plume on his helmet. “I’ve spent the afternoon looking for you. Missed our victory at the Olympiad because of you!”

Pindor stammered, intimidated.

Marika stepped forward. “Centurion Gaius, I apologize for our subterfuge,” she said formally. “But there was good reason. We must speak to Elder Tiberius.”

“If you think you’ll find any mercy from the Elder—”

“No!” Marika cut off the tall man. “None of that matters. You must stand aside!”

Gaius’s face went even redder. Jake suspected it was
more from embarrassment at being rebuked by a girl who stood barely taller than his waist. Gaius spoke with his teeth clenched. “Marika Balam—”

“It concerns Huntress Livia!” she interrupted again, almost yelling now. “She’s awake and has a message for the Council that must be heard immediately.”

Gaius studied Marika as if trying to judge the truth of her statement. Another voice cut in, coming from behind the centurion.

“What news is this of my sister?”

Centurion Gaius stepped aside and revealed Elder Ulfsdottir. She had been standing just inside and had overheard Marika’s outburst.

“What news do you have of Livia?” the Elder asked. Her eyes sparked with concern. “I was on my way from Bornholm to check on my sister. I tried calling the Magisters on the farspeakers, but there was no answer.”

Marika bowed her head once. “She lives. And wakes with a story of a great danger to Calypsos.”

The woman’s eyes closed for a moment in relief and silent prayer, then opened and revealed a steely resolve. “Of what danger does she speak?”

“Perhaps Elder Tiberius and Elder Wu should also hear this story,” Gaius offered, still glancing at them all with a measure of doubt.

“Yes, of course.” The Viking leader led them into the inner courtyard. She lowered her voice to Marika. “I
thought my sister was doomed, poisoned by splinters of dark alchemy.”

“It’s a long story,” Marika answered, and nodded to Jake. “But it was the newcomer’s sy-enz that saved her.”

The Elder turned her blue gaze upon Jake with a warmth that made him stand a little taller. “I owe you a great blood-debt, Jacob Ransom. And by the keel of the Valkyrie, it will be honored.”

They reached the center of the courtyard and found Pindor’s father talking to the Asian Elder. The bald man had waxed his thin white mustache so that it glowed in the lamplight.

The smile on Tiberius’s face fell when he saw his son. “Pindor! Where have you been? Do you know what trouble you’ve caused Centurion Gaius?”

Gaius stepped forward. “Perhaps you should hear the boy out.”

Pindor glanced back to Marika for help. She gave him the barest nod, her instruction simple to read.
Tell your father
.

Pindor swallowed hard and stiffened his back. He started slowly, stuttering here and there, but as the story continued, his voice found its firmness. By the time he finished, the squeaky nervousness was long gone.

His father’s expression also transformed: from anger and doubt to concern and apprehension. The others were questioned, even Bach’uuk, who answered most inquiries
with a single word.

“This must be venom-addled madness,” Tiberius said. “The temple’s shield protects us.”

“Perhaps the Skull King plans on laying siege around us,” Elder Wu said. “Thinking to starve us out.”

“But we’ve plenty of food,” Elder Ulfsdottir said with a shake of her head. “And fresh spring water bubbles out of the rock.”

As they continued to discuss the likelihood of an attack, the sky turned from dark blue to indigo. The sun sank away. A few stars began to shine in the east. Jake’s fear for his sister—somewhere out in the woods—grew to a fiery lump in his heart. He could remain silent no longer.

“I’m sorry to intrude,” Jake said.

Eyes turned to him, but he didn’t back down.

“From what Bach’uuk saw, you have at least one of the Skull King’s men already in your midst. Who knows how many others? And now the three Magisters have gone missing. I don’t think you should take Livia’s warning as just madness. And the longer you wait, the less time you’ll have to prepare a defense.”

Tiberius nodded. “The boy is right. To attack on this night, when most of the town is celebrating and when many will be deep into their bottles of wine—there is a certain wicked strategy to it.”

“Then what do we do?” Elder Wu asked.

“I will alert the People of the Wind. We’ll get their
entire nest into the air to watch the skies all night. On the ground, we’ll rouse the Saddleback forces into patrols and scouts.”

“And the townspeople?” Wu asked.

Elder Ulfsdottir answered, “I will rouse all of Bornholm. We can begin to shift the townspeople into the castle. It was why Kalakryss was originally built. As a final line of defense if all else should fail.”

Tiberius turned and stared at Jake and his friends. “Centurion Gaius, I think it best if you take these four back to Kalakryss. Once there, spread the word and rally your guards to the walls.”

Gaius struck a fist to his chest in acknowledgment. He turned and swept an arm toward his charges, ready to herd them off.

Jake ducked under his arm. “Elder Tiberius. My sister…she’s gone off into the woods. I believe with your son and the Roman team.”

The older man frowned, not comprehending.

“The bonfire,” Pindor reminded him. “In the Sacred Woods.”

Tiberius slowly nodded, and lines etched his brow.

Elder Ulfsdottir answered instead. “I will send a runner out to them. You have saved my sister. I can let nothing happen to yours.”

Jake let out a sigh of relief. The assurance by this stolid woman helped to smother the worry inside him.

But only slightly.

With the matter settled, Gaius gathered Jake, Pindor, Marika, and Bach’uuk and headed toward the exit. The centurion grumbled under his breath. “And this time, no running off on your own!”

No one argued.