The Merchant of Death (23 page)

Osa didn't deserve to die. All she was trying to do was help some people find a better way of life. So was Uncle Press. He was trying to help the Milago and because of it, he was going to be put to death. Was that fair? I didn't think so, and I realized that somebody had to step up and say so. Unfortunately I also realized that the only person who could do something was me. I say “unfortunately” not because I didn't want to help him, but because I knew I wasn't exactly the best candidate to stage a Schwarzenegger-style commando assault on the Bedoowan palace and fight my way out with Uncle Press in tow. That particular fantasy was going to stay a fantasy. Still, I had to do something. And if I was going to have any chance at all, I needed help. That meant Loor. There was nothing I could say to Loor that would make her feel any better about what had happened to her mother. Man, she must have hated me. But she was the only person I could go to for help, so I had to take a shot.

I wandered out into the main cavern of the mine to look for her. I found her sitting cross-legged on the far side of the cavern, alone, carving a small piece of wood. It looked like she was sculpting a small face that was half sun and half moon. She was really concentrating on the work and I didn't want to disturb her, so I waited until she said something first. For several minutes she ignored me and continued to carve. Finally I think she figured out that I wasn't going to leave so
she said, “This is a szshaszha. On my territory it symbolizes the end of one life and the beginning of another. I will give it to my mother for it is said to bring luck in the next life.”

“That's pretty cool,” I said.

“It is an old fairy tale that has no meaning,” she spat back sharply. “But my mother believed in these things and I will respect that.”

I guess I said the wrong thing again. I was ready to chicken out and leave her alone. I had to force myself to stay and go through with this.

“I'm not going home tomorrow,” I said trying to sound stronger than I felt. “I'm going after Uncle Press.”

This made Loor stop her work and look up at me. I did my best to hold eye contact without blinking. I wanted her to know how serious I was. But then she burst out laughing. Obviously the idea of my going up against the Bedoowan knights was pretty funny to her.

She stopped laughing and said sarcastically, “Why, Pendragon? So you can watch him die the way you watched my mother die?”

Ouch. That was cold.

“No, I'm going to rescue him,” I said trying to make it sound like I could make it happen.

“Go to sleep,” she said dismissively. “I am tired of looking at you.”

She was starting to tick me off. Yeah, she had been through a lot, but she didn't have to treat me like a turd. I stood my ground and said, “You told me I didn't care about my uncle. You're wrong. I care enough to go in that fortress and get him out.”

She scoffed and said, “The Bedoowan knights would shred you before you got close to your uncle.”

“You're probably right”, I said. “That's why you're going to help me.”

Loor shot me a surprised look. Uh-oh, maybe I was coming on too strong. She slowly stood up to her full height and looked down at me. It was all I could do to keep myself from backing off because if I did, I'd be lost.

“Why should I help rescue your uncle when my mother died trying to protect you?” she said with a seething intensity I'd never seen before.

“That's exactly why you should help me”, I said, trying to keep my voice strong. “We both know that I'm not the person to lead the Milago against the Bedoowan. But Uncle Press is. I want to rescue him because he's my uncle. And if you care about the Milago as much as you say you do, then you should want to rescue him because these people need him.”

Loor didn't move right away. I thought I saw something in her eyes. Was it a moment of doubt? She backed away from me and picked up her wooden weapon from the floor of the cavern.

“There is a meeting,” she said coldly. “I will allow you to come.”

A meeting. Cool. I didn't know what it was about, but at least she had thawed enough to include me. That was a start. She stepped forward and pointed the end of her weapon at me threateningly. “I will not protect you, Pendragon,” she said. “If you come with me, you are on your own.”

With that sweet little promise delivered, she walked off. I wasn't sure what to do until she turned back over her shoulder and barked, “Come. Now!”

I wasn't sure where we were going, either, but I was willing to follow her and find out. She led me back up the ladders
to the surface. Night had fallen and the stars made it bright enough to see clearly. Loor glanced around quickly, probably looking for any knights that might still be hanging around looking for us. Good idea. I looked around too, but all was quiet. I followed her back into the Milago village and straight to the hut where I first woke up. When we ducked inside, I saw that I was right about this being a hospital, sort of. Two of the wooden benches now had occupants. But these two weren't here to get well. It was Osa, and the miner who was killed at the mine shaft. This is where they were keeping the bodies until doing whatever they were going to do with them. I supposed I should have been creeped out, but I wasn't.

There were two other people there as well, only these two were alive and well. It was Alder, the knight who Loor said was the Traveler from Denduron, and Rellin, the chief miner. They were sitting cross-legged in front of a fire that was burning in the hearth. Loor walked right over and sat down as well. I figured this was the meeting Loor had invited me to, so I sat down across from Loor.

Rellin started the meeting by saying, “I am sorry about your mother, Loor. She was a good person. I speak for all the Milago when I say how grateful we are to you and your people for coming here to help us. It saddens me that it had to end this way.”

Loor was quick to respond and said, “I thank you for your sympathy, but my mother's death does not end things. We will still lead the Milago to their freedom.”

Rellin looked nervous. Suddenly there was tension in the air. I felt it and Loor felt it. I'm not sure what Alder felt because I didn't know him well enough.

“No,” Rellin said with finality. “It is over. There will be no
fighting.” With that declaration he got up to leave. But Loor jumped up and stopped him. Rellin's comment had taken her by surprise.

“How can you say that, Rellin?” she asked. “If the Milago do not break free of the Bedoowan, you will all die!”

“And if we fight them we will die much sooner,” said Rellin. “My people are not warriors. You know that, Alder.” He looked to Alder, who dropped his head. Rellin then looked back to Loor and said, “And you know that too, Loor. We would have no chance in a fight with the Bedoowan knights. We would be slaughtered.”

Loor didn't give up. “Remember what Press said? You may not be warriors, but you are strong. He said the Bedoowan do not have the character to resist if the Milago stand up for themselves. He said—”

“Press is gone!” shouted Rellin. “And now Osa is gone as well. Who is left to lead us in this mad quest? You? Him?” He said this while pointing at me. “You are children. Your motives are noble, but it is time to end these foolish dreams.”

With that he turned and stormed out of the hut. The meeting was over. I could tell that Loor wanted to go after him, but she didn't. She may have been a warrior, but she didn't have the words to change his mind.

“He is wrong,” said Alder softly. “The Bedoowan are not as strong as Rellin thinks.”

Loor walked slowly toward the body of her mother. She looked down at the fallen woman, then touched her arm as if trying to gain strength from her. She took the wooden szshaszha she had been carving and placed it in her mother's lifeless hand. Man, this was tearing my heart out. I can only imagine how Loor felt.

“He is lying,” she said with finality.

Alder looked up quickly. This surprised him as much as it had me.

“Say what?” was all I could come back with.

“Rellin has wanted to fight the Bedoowan all of his life,” she explained. “His anger and hatred are far greater than his fear. I do not believe that he has changed his way of thinking so quickly.”

Alder stood up. He looked as confused as I felt.

“Then why did he say there would be no fight?” he asked.

Loor kept her eyes on her mother and answered, “I do not know, but something has changed. Something he has not told us about. Maybe he does not trust us because we are so young.”

I thought back to the other two times I had seen Rellin. The first was at the Transfer ceremony. Though I was far away, I felt his hatred for the Bedoowan. The other time was in the mines after the explosion. After he was rescued, he had that strange laugh that felt so out of place. Loor was right. Something odd was happening.

“He trusted your mother, didn't he?” I asked.

“Of course,” came her quick reply.

“Then he would have told her if things had changed and she would have told you, right?” I asked.

“Are you saying that I am wrong?” she asked.

“No,” I answered quickly. “I'm saying that if you're right, then something strange is going on and the fact that he didn't tell your mother about it makes me kind of nervous.”

We all let this hang in the air for a while. Finally Alder said, “So what do we do?”

I knew the answer to that. So did Loor, but I wanted to say it first.

“We rescue Uncle Press,” I announced. “We gotta get him back here.”

I shot a look at Loor. She didn't have to say a word. I knew what she was thinking. Rescuing Uncle Press was exactly what we needed to do and she had decided to help me. She then looked to Alder and said, “This will be a difficult fight, Alder. You will have to reveal to them that you are a Traveler.”

Alder stood up proudly and said, “I knew this day would come. I am ready.”

“Whoa, whoa!” I said while stepping between them. “Who said anything about a fight?”

Loor scoffed and said, “If you think we can get into the Bedoowan fortress, find Press, release him, and get out without a fight, you are not only a coward, you are a fool!”

Loor's macho act was starting to get old, but I didn't want to make her angry by telling her so. I had to stand up to her or she'd walk all over me.

“Yeah?” I said trying to match her bravura. “The goal here is to get Uncle Press out, and if you think the three of us have any chance of doing that by fighting Kagan's knights, then maybe
you're
the fool!”

Loor didn't have a comeback. Alder put the icing on the cake for me by saying, “He is right, Loor. If we charge in fighting, we will be killed before we find Press.”

This bothered Loor. It was obvious that her first reaction to problem solving was to come out swinging. But she wasn't an idiot, and she was beginning to realize that her way might not have been the best way in this case.

“Then what do we do?” she asked. “Ask Kagan politely to release Press? Maybe if we said
please
it would happen.”

Whoa, the muscle head was capable of sarcasm. Maybe she had more going on than I gave her credit for.

“The only chance we have is to sneak in there without them knowing,” I said. “The longer we can stay invisible, the
better chance we have of getting Uncle Press out.”

Alder was getting excited. He said, “Yes! I know a way to get in. And I know every corridor of that fortress. There are passageways and tunnels that are rarely used.”

Loor didn't like being told she was wrong, especially by someone she didn't respect, which was me. But I think she was smart enough to know that my way made more sense.

She said, “And do you have a plan for what to do after Alder gets us into the palace?”

The fact is, I did. Sort of. It wasn't really a plan as much as it was a bunch of ideas. Unfortunately all my ideas needed things that didn't exist here on Denduron. I needed a bunch of stuff from back home.

“If I got a message to my friends back home,” I asked, “is there a way for them to send me something from there?”

Loor stepped away from me. She knew the answer, but I think she was reluctant to tell me. I was still pretty new to this whole Traveler thing. Maybe she wasn't sure she could trust me with all the secrets yet.

But Alder didn't have the same concerns. “Of course there is,” he said innocently. “You can flume back to your territory and get whatever you want.”

I was beginning to like this guy. Could it be as simple as that? All I had to do was go back to the flume and I could get home? Cool. But there was still the tricky issue of having to climb back to the top of that mountain to get to the gate. There's no way I could do that in time to get home, then get back here to rescue Uncle Press before he was executed. Besides, I'd probably get eaten by those quigs anyway.

“That's no good,” I said. “Is there another way?”

“You do not need to go to the mountain,” said Loor. “There is another gate in the mines that is not guarded by quigs.”

Oh, yeah! This was getting better by the second. And maybe best of all, by Loor giving me that piece of information, she was allowing herself to trust me. Maybe we could work together after all. Now that I was certain I could get home, my mind started to calculate all of the things I could get that would help us sneak into the fortress. The thing that was so cool is that the people of Denduron knew nothing about life at home. They would be blown away by something as simple as a flashlight. Man, talk about power! I wasn't exactly sure how it was going to work, but I was beginning to think that we might really have a chance of getting Uncle Press out of there.

Loor took me back down to the mine. It was an uneasy truce that we had going. We both knew we needed each other, but neither of us was too happy about it. The first thing I did was go back to the small cell-like room where Loor made me wait before, and finish my journal. I also wrote out the list of items and the instructions that I sent to you. Once they were ready, I rolled them up and did exactly what Osa had done when she sent you my first journal. I took off the ring, put it on the ground, touched the gray stone, and said, “Earth!”