Mearsies Heili Bounces Back (13 page)

Whom! We were on a road bucketing north when we walked smack
into a trap ... and it was another set of those brown guys!

This time the foofoo in charge was an old geez who had
magic. When we were brought before him, he said something in another lingo, and
the translator turned to scowl at us. “You are Mearsieans?”

“No,” I said. “American.”

“French!” Klutz declared.

“Vive la France,” Id bellowed.

“Australian,” Gwen said.

“Toaran,” Seshe stated, making me snerk—that was the name of
our entire continent!

Puddlenose looked at the ceiling, and Sherry at the floor.

“You’re all liars,” the geez snarled, and I hated him from
that moment.

He unloosed a speech guaranteed to scare the kiddies—and I
tuned him out, trying to whistle. He wanted our cooperation ... blah blah ...
Or Else. I had my hands in my skirt pockets by then.

“One of you knows magic,” he said nastily. “If we have to,
we’ll start breaking arms until we find out.”

“I do,” I said.

He looked disappointed—he’d been looking at the two tall
ones. Probably thought they’d know more.

Then he tried being nice, offering me a place and promotion
if I’d do ‘a favor’ for him in the duchy we’d just been at. When I whistled
again, he tried a threat by casting a spell over my friends.

It was just an illusion, but it was supposed to scare me. I
promptly cast one over his flunkies.

He did it again—I did it again—then I realized he was
testing my magic! So when he was in the middle of his next spell, I pulled out
the full bottle of blue stuff, and threw it over them all, as they were
standing in a row.

They shrank down to a tiny size, yelling and screaming.

Puddlenose swept them up into a bag, and cinched it tight.

I took the time to make the invisibility spell for each of
us, which meant we had to move silently and quietly, so the other senses don’t
cause people to look at the smear of light around us. We were in the border
castle, so we didn’t have far to go to the good people, where we left the clod
and his flunkies for them to figure out what to do with.

Then we took another road in the other direction, hoping to
avoid the border, but word had gotten around that we’d escaped—with the mage.

And so ... we walked into another trap.

Only this time, it was made by the
real
bad guys.

o0o

You know you’re being bagged by extra-special stinkeroos
when they grab the scruff of your shirt and catch your hair in it. And if you
squawk, they think it’s funny.

Well, these slobs put the grab on us and stuck bags over our
heads, then they wrapped rope around us, so we couldn’t do much besides
wriggle. And pocalube.

Then came a billion hour ride over a road designed for the
worst possible jouncing and jolting. I felt like a bag of nails and woodchips
when we FINALLY got somewhere that felt dank and cold and smelled mossy even
through that blasted bag.

I was headachy and out of sorts as well as starving and
thirsty when I got yanked off the horse, muscled along a few thousand miles of
slimy, nasty stone corridor, and then into what felt like a gigantic fridge. It
was cold, dank, smelled like a weird cross between moldy stone and old laundry.

The bag was pulled off—taking a hank of my hair with it.

I blinked away the sting, and stared at a geez on a throne.
The geez looked a lot like Kwenz—same goggle eyes, only ten times meaner. Those
terrible eyes were going to enter my nightmares for a very long time to come.

Danger made my neck prickle, and I looked away. The throne
room was lit by torchlight high up—magically burning torches. There was
absolutely no decoration of the sort I was used to. No statues, or tapestries,
or big wall paintings or murals, no mosaics or tiles.

But the way the place was built was on lines different from
other places I’d been, yet familiar from the Shadow, and even in some of the
older buildings in MH. There was a kind of horizontal line to big spaces, and
here and there faint curving lines, especially at corners.

Anyway, I looked around blearily until the geez made a sign
and one of the guards yanked my hair so I faced forward.

“Who are you?” the geez asked. His voice was rusty-low, and
angry.

“Peedlepie Snockarilla.”

He made that sign again and this time the guard smacked the
side of my head.

“Who are you.”

“I thought you already knew who I was, or I wouldn’t be
stuck in this—”

“I know you call yourself a ‘princess.’” He made a short,
violent motion. “Who
are
you? Where did you come from? How did you
insinuate yourself into that white-haired brat’s confidence?”

I wanted to mouth off, but I didn’t want to get hit again.
So I just glared.

The old geez muttered, frowned, muttered again. I felt the
prickly/itchy sense of magic, then it snapped away. The old geez stepped down
from the dais, scowled at me—then snatched the crown off my head and flung it
against the far wall! Did he think it had magical protections on it?

He shuffled back to his throne, breathing like he’d run
miles. He said something in Chwahir to his flunkeys, too low for me to catch,
but I thought I got the words ‘the boy’ in there somewhere.

What boy?

A heavy mitt clamped down on my shoulder and off we bucketed
back into the mossy hall and then down, down, down into an enormous dungeon.
Water dripped and plinked all around—the air smelled heavy with mold.

We didn’t go far. Later I’d learn that meant they expected
to be hauling you out again soon.

Cre-e-e-ak! The door screeched open on rusty hinges, and I
was shoved inside. The rope still was wrapped around me so I stumbled, but
Sherry and Gwen caught me.

“Oh CJ you look awful,” Sherry whispered. “Where were you?”

The light in that part of the dungeon was a nasty, smeary
color, like a very smoggy morning with extra haze. Smelled even worse than LA,
too. Later we’d discover that some cells were left in the dark, when people
were left to rot. But the light—such as it was—was there in our part of the
dungeon so the guards could see the prisoners.

I blew at the hair hanging in my face.

“That sack musta been full of real moldy stuff,” Gwen said,
holding her nose. “Because you’re wearing most of it now.”

“Great. Looks like the rest of you are too,” I added, taking
them in. Everybody was blotched with green and brown smears. “Anyway, some old
geez wanted to yap at me about Clair. Guy is off his nut.”

Sherry’s eyes were huge and round. “CJ, this is
Chwahirsland. Puddlenose’s uncle lives here.”

“What? That’s impossible! I thought we were far away.”

“He is and we weren’t.”

We all looked at the back of the cell, where Puddlenose,
Klutz, Seshe, and Id had fallen asleep. ‘The boy’ had to be Puddlenose.

Gwen said in a low voice, “He wanted to know if he looked
different than when he first came to us.”

Sherry whispered, “On account of they didn’t recognize him.
What with him being lots taller, and his hair shaggier, and all the grime on
his face.”

“We gotta keep him from being found out,” Gwen said.

“The geez muttered something about a boy. He must figure
we’ve got Puddlenose hidden at home, or something.”

Gwen fell silent, then. She was worried sick.

I said to Sherry, “That geez must be King Shnit of the
Chwahir.”

Everybody nodded.

“And he’s gonna try to find out from you where Puddlenose
is,” Sherry whispered.

“Gulp.” I gulped.

o0o

They brought in stale bread that was obviously left over
from all those guards’ dinner. I mean, a couple of the hard, dry rolls had
bites taken out of them. Euw. But we were so hungry we ate them anyway. I
figured germs didn’t have a chance in that cold dungeon.

Because they’d left us all tied up, and they dumped the
bread on the ground, we had to go at it like a bunch of worms. Klutz and Id
couldn’t help laughing, though it was the crazy laughter you get when you’re
scared.

Puddlenose didn’t say anything to anybody.

After that disgusting meal, we three girls tried to find a
spot less dank than the rest of the stones of the floor (hah!) and curled up in
a kind of puppy pile for warmth. It felt like I’d just fallen asleep (and
straight into barfacious dreams) when somebody shook me.

“They’re coming.”

I had just enough time to wipe my chin on my grimy shoulder
(I’d been drooling, ugh!) before the clods came clanking in and put the grab on
us.

Slog, slog, slog, back to that throne room. It took extra-long
because it’s very hard to walk when you can’t use your hands.

Shnit waved a hand and this time the goons separated off the
mayors and me.

Shnit looked around with those goggle eyes, as though
sniffing, then zeroed in on their mayor necklaces. So much for carefully
guarding them! He got up, reached a gnarled hand with unkempt, yellowing
fingernails like talons, and grabbed the necklaces. Just as the point where the
chains would cut their necks they snapped, and he flung the things away into
the gloom, where they landed with a faint
chinggg!

“Those are badges of office,” Shnit snarled in that rusty
wheeze. “And my brother reports that that fool has put children in charge.
She’s begging to have that kingdom brought down. We will comply. But first.
What did she do with my heir?”

“I don’t know who your heir is,” I said. “I never saw you
before in my life!”

“You do know,” Shnit said in a slow, nasty tone. “You know
because my brother reports that the heir to Chwahirsland—and to your own
land—has been seen not long ago in the wooded area outside that cursed Shadow
your people forced him into.”

You got yourself a Shadow here all your own
, I
thought. For once I managed not to mouth off.

He gestured with a hand about my height. “Your size.
Yellow-brown hair. About your age.”

That had to be what Puddlenose had looked like a couple of
years before, or whenever the creeps had had him last.

I said, “All I know is, Clair’s cousin is not a Chwahir. So
he can’t be anybody’s heir except hers, and—” I was just about to say that I
was her heir, but then decided not to remind this disgusting villain.

“You think you are?” he said nastily, and uttered a wheezy
noise that I think was supposed to be a laugh. “The boy’s guardian surrendered
him to me. It is a whim of mine, to adopt him as heir. You would gain a great
reward by furnishing his whereabouts. He is missing, and we are worried that
something has happened to him.”

At first I thought he’d completely gone off his coconut, but
then I realized he was actually trying to be nice. Nice ... and lying, of
course.

“I’m sure he’s far away from Mearsies Heili,” I said.

Shnit motioned to a couple of his head flunkeys. They had a
mumbling conference. I snuck a peek at Puddlenose, who was hunched, his mouth
hanging open, his skin around the smudges pale with worry.

Shnit finally said in Chwahir, “Take them away.” And to me,
in Mearsiean, “If you do not cooperate, we’ll make a public trial and a messy
death. Let that news get back to the brat.”

Everybody looked at me. I just stared back at Shnit. Truth
is, I was too scared to talk. I knew I’d squeak. So I glared, instead.

Shnit seemed to know I was scared, because his face changed
into what I think was supposed to be a smile. His face was horribly bony—he’d
been extending his life by black magic for a while, and it showed. He hadn’t
bothered with the beard spell for ages, or cut his hair, so hair and beard were
white and long and scraggly. “Have you anything to say?”

It was such a smug, knowing tone, I couldn’t stand it. I was
already in as much trouble as possible, so I snarled as rudely as I could, “Pig
guts and cornpone.”

Back we went, and it took forever because of the balance
problem. At least, this time, when we got back to the cell, the clods took away
the ropes. We rubbed sore skin and stretched.

Puddlenose looked really upset. “CJ, I could hear ’em. They
were talking in guard lingo, they’re going to surprise you and throw questions
at you.”

I thought, if it really, really gets bad, I’ve got my ring.
But I didn’t say it, just in case they could somehow spy out my words. My hands
had been in my skirt folds before, because of the ropes. My necklace was still
safely inside my shirt, which had a high collar, so none of it showed, unlike
the linked chains Klutz and Id had worn. I had to make sure these magical
protections never got noticed.

“I’m just going to lie like a rug.” I shrugged, trying not
to show how worried I was.

“But they’ll try to catch you in lies.” Puddlenose didn’t
hide his worry. “One thing there’s a lot of here, and that’s prisoners. You
have no idea how many laws and rules against doing anything without permission
there are. Shnit likes punishments, it’s his favorite entertainment.”

“All right, then let’s make up a story. We’ll go over all
the details, so we all know it.”

And we did.

“If there was just some water,” Dhana whispered finally. She
breathed in and turned around. “Almost enough ... but not quite.”

“I’ll ask for some,” Sherry said. “Next time they come.”

We settled down to try to sleep. Once again I started to
snooze, but it felt like five minutes had passed before they were back, and I
got yanked out, Sherry’s voice high and clear behind me.

“... water! Please? Just a bucket? We’ll all share it!”

Clang! Went the door.

Off I went to a room where a grizzle-haired guy behind a
desk started in with the questions. They didn’t let me sit down, just kept
asking the questions over and over and over, and I was glad that we’d made up
that story. No use in describing how awful that was.