The Kingdom of Kevin Malone (3 page)

“Shit,” he said, stopping so suddenly that I almost walked into him. Good-looking, and dirty-mouthed as ever.

At the foot of a long, gently sloping meadow bisected by our paved pathway I saw a huge wall of gray stone blocking the gap between two hillsides. A black-painted grillwork gate filled the arch.

“We're too late!” he said. “The Denesmouth is locked up for the night.”

Nevertheless, he hurried down the valley. Feeling like Alice pursuing a juvenile-delinquent rabbit through a very creepy Wonderland, I trotted after him. My stockinged feet were a little sore by now, and I had to clutch the skates under my arms to avoid having them thump me to death as I ran.

I caught up with Kevin right under the high, grim wall, which was faced with sizable blocks of gray stone. He shook the bars of the locked gate. Not surprisingly, they didn't budge.

Inside, the arch was high and wide, with deep dirt verges on either side of the surfaced walkway through the middle. I could make out big barrels lined up in rows on either hand. Beyond, there was another stretch of path, gloomy green foliage, and then the stone face of another arch farther on.

“What's in there?” I asked. I realized that I'd been hoping to meet somebody besides Kevin in what was beginning to seem like an awfully empty landscape.

He stepped back, staring upward and rubbing his palms on his sweats. “The Prison City,” he said.

I looked up too, expecting to see rolls of razor wire and guards with Uzis. “You made all this,” I said, “and you put in a Prison City?”

“Every country has prisons,” Kevin said in a hard, superior tone. “On your side it's the Central Park Zoo in there behind the double arches of the Denesmouth. Here, it's prison.”

It fit, in a gloomy way: a home for caged animals was turned, in his fantasy, into a town of caged people, which was what I assumed Kevin meant by “Prison City.” It was not what you'd call an ambiguous phrase.

“So we were going to do what?” I asked. “Drop in here at this prison, which was somehow supposed to get me home?”

“Something like that,” he said. “But we can't get in, and there's guys around here who'd lock me up if they could and keep me for the White One. Let's go.”

The image of something fat and pale like a large slug popped into my head. Somehow I did not want to pursue the subject of the White One.

“Lock you up?” I said. “In your own country?”

“I made this place for adventure,” he said, sort of throwing out his chest and looking around possessively. “The whole thing, the people, the plot of the story, everything. ‘Plot' means things happen, so there's enemies around, you know? Danger. Scared?”

“Nervous,” I said. “Because you don't seem to know your way around your own private country.”

“I know every inch of this place,” he said loftily. “Every ritual, everything! So relax, Amy. There's another way back nearby, if it's where it belongs. And if not, it'll just take a little longer to find an arch you can use, that's all. Sooner or later the Battle Path will take us where we need to go.”

I stood where I was, clutching the roller skates for security. “What do you mean, ‘if it's where it belongs?' ”

“Oh, things sort of move around,” Kevin said. “Not the arches, they stay put, but other stuff kind of migrates. There's magic currents in the earth that shunt things around, like.”

Oh
boy,
I thought. “You invented a magical land where you can never know where anything is for sure?”

He gave me a charming grin. “Magic is full of surprises. That's half the fun.”

He led the way down a steep path through a tunnel of huge old trees. Far below I thought I saw  . . . was it possible? Was that why the air had such a tang to it? Where Fifth Avenue was supposed to be, marking the eastern boundary of Central Park—was that blue band on the horizon the
sea?

I could not make my dazed mind come up with a sensible-sounding way to ask about this. The best I could do was, “So where are we going now, Kevin?” Which sounded whiney and stupid, and as soon as the words were out of my mouth I wished I hadn't said them. Luckily, he didn't seem to have heard me.

Suddenly the trees thinned out around an outcrop of black granite. From there Kevin pointed down at a shingled rooftop in a clearing below.

“See?” he said triumphantly. “I knew it was here someplace.”

I saw two sharp-spined roofs parallel to each other, one on a stone-walled building and the other just a wooden porch running along the stone house's front. The main roof was straddled in the center by a spindly little steeple with a clock in it.

“The Dairy!” I said. “What's it doing down there?”

The Dairy really was a dairy once, where people bought ice cream. These days it's used for photo exhibits and to sell books and pamphlets about the park. No way could it be located somewhere east of the zoo; but then Fifth Avenue couldn't be an ocean, either.

Things moved around, all right.

“In the Fayre Farre,” Kevin said, “that's an inn. We'll have some ale, or, um, juice or something, and I'll tell you why I've been trying to get you into the Fayre Farre, Amy. I think you've got a very important part to play here. Heroic, even.”

“Oh,” I said. “Great.” We'd been doing Greek myths in English this term. Heroes go through hell. I eyed the Dairy without enthusiasm.

I knew that your average sword-and-sorcery story had to have a scene at the inn, which was always full of spies, drunken peasants, lusty-busty serving wenches, and our traveling company of heroes. I only hoped that everybody here wouldn't talk some kind of fake Middle English.

Kevin started down a dirt path that skirted the stone outcrop. Sock-footed and still hugging Rachel's skates, I picked my way gingerly after him.
It's all a hallucination,
I thought.
I've fallen on my head on the skating pavement and I'm dreaming.

Then I heard Kevin swear in a choked voice, and I looked up from my feet. He was running toward the gateway to the innyard, where a raggedy man was dragging himself over the ground toward us. The stranger couldn't walk because his ankles were fastened rigidly apart at the ends of a bar that looked like it was made of peeled sticks.

Socks or no socks, I ran, too.

Kevin plumped down on his knees beside the man, who could barely lift his head to look at us. I've never seen anyone so thin. He had on torn green pants and a dirty shirt that had once been bright with multicolored patches, and his hair was long, blond, and filthy.

“Kavian Prince!” he croaked, staring up with huge, red-rimmed eyes. He looked maybe a couple of years older than Kevin. “I found the prophecy.” He blinked at me. “She's in it, your lady here.”

Kevin glanced at me grimly.

The hurt man squeezed his eyes shut and moaned. “Past that, I can't remember. I knew the whole prophecy, every word, but then the Bone Men—”

“Later, Sebbian, tell me later,” Kevin said, feverishly struggling to unfasten the strange manacle on the man's feet. It wasn't made of wood but of two long bones twisted between the stranger's ankles and lashed tight together at the outer ends with hard leather strings.

“Wet rawhide,” Kevin muttered between set teeth. “It dries rock-hard.”

No way were those shrunken knots going to give. Up close, I could see that the man's bare feet were swollen so that the bone fetters had cut into his flesh, which was horribly inflamed. Now I noticed a sickly smell about him that made my throat close up.

He had somehow rubbed or chewed through the sinews holding a smaller bone manacle closed on his wrists and had gotten one hand loose. But he couldn't free his feet with his bare hands any more than Kevin could.

“Can't you cut him loose?” I asked.

Kevin slapped the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand. “I am sworn to use no edged weapon until the Farsword comes to my hand. I'll get this off him somehow, though. Sebbian, what happened?”

Sebbian, his cheek resting on one outstretched arm, murmured, “Bone Men got me. Got away, crawled here, but inn-folk had fled—nothing left, no food, no water—hiding here for days, waiting for you to come.” He shut his eyes. “Beware, Prince!”

Kevin looked at me, his face white. “Amy, do you have anything sharp on you? You could cut these cords!”

“I don't carry a knife, Kevin,” I said. It sounded awful, under the circumstances, all prissy and superior, although I certainly hadn't meant it that way.

“Dying anyway,” Sebbian said. Tears leaked out under his bruised-looking eyelids. “Bone crown squeezed out all the music and the words from my poor head, except seeing your lady here, I know she's in it, she's in the prophecy. The rest is lost. Useless, should have died already—”

I felt nauseous. My wobbly gaze fell on something odd-shaped lying under the open gate, trampled in the mud—a small harp that you could hold up in your arms to play. The strings, cut or broken, curled every which way.

“Run, Lady Amy,” the dying man whispered, and I saw his eyes gleaming as he twisted his neck to stare up at me. “And take Prince Kavian with you. They're coming, don't you hear them? Ah, let me not fall into their terrible white hands again!”

And then I heard a grinding, shifting sound and I felt vibrations in the earth under my feet. Pale as paper, Kevin looked back up the hill behind me and swallowed so that his Adam's apple jumped. I turned.

The flat, inlaid stones of the walkway we had come along were shifting slowly apart, and from under them drifted shimmery funnels of gray powder that wavered and solidified into figures—frights from Halloween, men made of bones and rusted metal, skeletons, armored and moving.

“What?” I gulped. “Kevin,
what?
”

“It's the Bone Men,” he cried, pounding the ground with his clenched fist. “The Angry Ones that Dravud Bloodhand killed with the Hurling-Stones!”

I guess I should have listened to all that fake history.

Kevin leaped up and rushed with me through the gate, across the yard, and into the inn building itself. The stink of the place went off in my head like a hand grenade—old sweat, stale food and liquor, rotten garbage.

“But what about Sebbian?” I gasped.

“He's dead,” Kevin said.

Dead,
I though with a lurch.
Another death.

Kevin heaved the gaping front door shut and slammed a thick timber down into the iron brackets on either side. Then he ran to the single window and banged the shutters closed—there weren't any windowpanes—and barred them, too. The place got amazingly dark.

I could still make out enough to know that this was definitely not the Dairy I knew. We were barricaded in a long, low-ceilinged room. The stone-flagged floor was scattered with a jumble of upended furniture all roughly made of heavy, scarred wood.

I kept seeing Sebbian's pale face, and his hand with a twist of bone lashed to his thin wrist. “We're just going to leave him out there? The Bone Men—”

Kevin grabbed my arms and shook me once, hard, so that my teeth clicked together.

“The Bone Men have already done all they can to poor Sebbian,” he said fiercely. “They'll do worse to you if I let them. I've got to get you out of here.”

Something hit one of the shutters a whack so sharp I thought the thick wood had split. I decided instantly that I agreed.

 

Three

Ash Wine

 

 

 

K
EVIN HUSTLED ME THROUGH
a low doorway into an adjoining room. Over by the back wall, which was taken up completely by a huge arched fireplace black with soot, he let me go and concentrated on undoing a knot in the corner of a lace-trimmed rag he fished out from his sweatshirt pocket. The rag looked as if it might have been a handkerchief once.

He spilled a tiny pebble into his palm and closed his fist on it. Rays of white light squeezed out between his fingers.

“A seedstone,” he said to me in a low voice. “It will make way for you. Things weren't supposed to be like this. I wanted to show you around a little, let you see what's at stake—I didn't know the Bone Men were waking here.”

Somebody was, and more than waking. One wing of the shutters splintered under a shivering blow, and I got a look through the gap into the howling darkness outside. I could just make out a nightmare figure with tattered clothing whipping around the white rails of its arms and ribs.

There was a voice, too, distant and crackling faintly like a very bad phone connection. Inside the static I could hear words: “Strangers, you knocked on our rooftops. We've come to invite you in.”

I thought of my heels thudding on the mosaic stones of the Battle Path and my knees turned to jelly.

Kevin shoved me inside the fireplace and reached past me with his glowing fist so that light fell on the sooty wall behind me. “There's one of the Great Ways in here. It'll take you to an arch and out.”

“Then why didn't Sebbian use it?” I couldn't stop seeing the harper's face in my mind's eye.

“The Great Ways don't carry common folk,” Kevin said curtly. “But they'll take you, with the rose pin to light your path.”

In the other room, white stick fingers clicked on the bar he'd set across the window opening. The static voice spoke inside the wind: “If you won't come visit us, then we'll visit you. We'll drink ash wine together.”

Kevin rapped the hearth wall with the knuckles of his illuminated fist, scattering velvety soot from the bricks. A section of the wall swung away.

“You wanted to go home—go! If the Bone Men get you, that's the end. You have to be able to move back and forth, because I can't anymore.”

I gaped at him. Back and forth? I was
supposed to come back here?
In the other room, the door shuddered under a thunderous impact and another piece of planking clattered onto the floor.