City in the Clouds (4 page)

He’d toss the kids off the flying city.
Splat!

Sparr strode over to Eric and his friends.

“My noble warriors,” Sparr boomed. “How does the battle go?”

Eric blinked. He gasped. Then he looked over at Neal and Julie. He nearly choked when he saw their faces. They were thick and red. Their cheeks were all puffy. They growled with angry looks. Then he looked down at himself.

“Ungh!” he grunted.

Eric and his friends were… Ninns!

Six
Working for Lord Sparr

Eric tugged at the skin on his arm. It was rough and thick and oily. “Yuck,” he muttered.

Neal, Julie, and Keeah pinched their skin too.

“I’d rather be a bug!” Neal whispered.

“King Zello and the Lumpies have landed,” Sparr said. “How is our attack going?”

“Um… really good,” Neal said with a grunt.

“Good?-” Sparr repeated.

“Lots of Lumpies ran away.”

“And…” Sparr said.

“King Zello has fallen back,” Keeah said, groaning in a deep voice as a Ninn might do.

“And the wizard, what’s his name,” Julie boomed.

“Galen,” Sparr said with a snarl.

Eric snorted. “Don’t expect to see him for a while!”

Sparr smiled evilly. “You have done well. Go gather diamonds with the others.”

Then he turned to Bodo and Vasa.

Vasa hissed as Sparr approached. “You won’t get away with this, Sparr…”

“Ah, yes, the Guardians,” Sparr scoffed. “Last of the peace-loving knights of Droon’s distant past. You are no threat to me, you… fossils!”

Bodo narrowed his lizardy eyes at the sorcerer. “Beneath the cloak of invisibility, Ro has prospered for centuries. Beneath the cloak of peace lies great power.”

Lord Sparr’s face went pale. “We shall see how powerful you are when I use your diamonds to create an invisible army!”

Then he snapped his fingers.

Another troop of Ninns wheeled in a long wooden cart brimming with the most dazzling white jewels Eric had ever seen.

Magic diamonds.

“Have you found them all?” Sparr growled.

The Ninn bowed his head. “Not all, my lord.”

Eric looked at his own hands again. They were big and red and puffy, with six fingers. He started to feel sick. A wave of dizziness came over him. He felt hot and cold at the same time.

His stomach rumbled.

Then he felt himself shrinking inside his Ninn armor. He was changing back!

He looked over at Julie, Neal, and Keeah. They, too, were beginning to change. In a moment, they wouldn’t be Ninns anymore!

Eric grunted. Even his voice was changing.

Sparr flashed a look at him. “What is it?”

“We… um… better check on our groggles/’ he said, hoisting up his leather pants, which were beginning to slip down on him. “Gotta give them biscuits or they get mad.”

Sparr squinted. “Biscuits?”

“Um, right!” Keeah blurted out, her voice not so deep anymore. “Then we’ll go find those pesky kids. And that princess. You know, the junior wizard. She’s powerful, but we can take her.”

Eric’s eyes gaped. He nudged Neal. Neal’s foot was turning back into a bug foot.

“If you find the children, throw them off the side!” Sparr boomed. “Go! We leave Ro soon!”

Neal grabbed Eric, Julie, and Keeah. They clomped out the door and ran until they were out of breath.

“Bodo and Vasa could have told us we were on a timer!” Eric exclaimed when they were far away from the Guardians’ room.

Julie bit her lip. “We need to split up. You guys head to the Tower and find Neal’s cure. I’ll see if I can help Bodo and Vasa. We’ll meet at the front steps in an hour.”

“Half an hour,” Keeah said. “Ro will disappear very soon. Look.”

They all looked out a window in the hall. Outside the palace, the sky was turning a deep blue. The moon shone through puffy white clouds.

“It’s nearly midnight,” Keeah said. “We haven’t much time.”

“I’ll go with Julie,” Neal said. “My bug sense may help us stay away from Ninns. Real Ninns.”

“Neal, you’ll be normal again soon,” Eric said, patting his friend on the back. Then he stopped. Neal’s back was as hard as a shell.

Eric swallowed hard.

Neal was getting worse. Much worse.

“Come on, Keeah,” Eric said. “To the Tower!”

The gang split up. With Ninn footsteps echoing all around them, Eric and Keeah threaded their way toward the center of the palace.

To the giant Tower of Memory.

Seven
Written in Stone

The Tower of Memory was a huge spiral of stones coiling up from the ground.

Eric and Keeah entered a vast inner courtyard, looked up, and saw it.

“It’s huge,” Eric whispered.

Row upon row of rough gray blocks circled higher and higher into the starlit sky.

“Do you have the papers with our name symbols?” Keeah said, spotting a narrow opening in the tower.

“Yes.”‘ Eric clutched Neal’s square of paper, along with his own and Julie’s. “Let’s do it.”

They slipped through the opening.

The inside of the tower was empty and very quiet. The only noise was a faint scratching sound from above.

Eric squinted up. There, on the very top row of stones, barely visible in the mist and moonlight, was the magic feather. Quill. It scratched word after word into the stones, writing quickly, then stopping, then writing faster than ever.

Whenever it filled one stone with the strange words and symbols, another stone mysteriously appeared next to it. Quill filled that one and went on to another. And another.

“This is so weird,” Eric said softly. “The Tower is building itself. It keeps getting taller.”

“Quill writes what happens to everyone,” Keeah said. “Everything that has ever

happened in Droon is right here.”

“And some things that haven’t happened yet.”

Eric turned a complete circle as he followed the rows of silvery gray stones, looking for the strange symbols the Guardians had given them.

Keeah breathed out suddenly.

“What?-” Eric said, turning to her.

“My mother’s symbol!” she said, running to the wall nearest her. “And Sparr’s! I see them. That must be it! What happened to her at Plud!”

She began scratching down the strange words with the pencil Bodo had given her.

Then Eric saw his own name among the carvings. “Oh, wow!”

Next to it were Julie’s and Neal’s names. He scanned the lower row’s to see if the names appeared before then. No, they didn’t. But their names were written many times after that. He looked up as far as he could. Their names were still there, curving into the upper rows.

All the way into the future?

Would he and his friends do many things in Droon? Eric wished he could read the top row, to find out what the future might bring. He, too, started scribbling down the strange words for the Guardians to decipher.

Keeah uttered something softly. Eric turned to see her slip quietly out of the Tower.

He was about to call out to her, then stopped. The hair on the back of his neck stiffened. He knew someone else was in the Tower with him.

Slowly, Eric turned his head. There, standing in the exact center of the room, was a tall, dark figure. A man.

Eric gasped to himself.

The man was Lord Sparr.

Sparr stood motionless, reading the walls of the Tower and mumbling the words to himself. As he did, tears welled in his eyes, glinting in the moonlight from the Tower’s top opening.

One tear trickled down Sparr’s cheek. He flicked it away instantly. The teardrop hit the stone floor, hissing on the cold stones.
Ssss!

“Oh, whoa!” Eric breathed.

Suddenly Quill began scratching on the stones more speedily than before. Eric remembered what the Guardians had said.

Sometimes Quill writes so fast, he writes what hasn’t happened yet.

Sparr raised his eyes toward a single spot on the upper walls.

As Eric watched; the sorcerer lifted off the ground and flew up to the top of the Tower.

Quill kept scratching faster and faster. He filled one stone after another.

Eric knew. Quill was writing the future.

An instant later, Sparr was back.

Eric could not move, could not breathe. It seemed like hours that Sparr just stood

there.

Then, a strange sound came from the sorcerer. A sound like all his breath leaving him.

And out of that breath came a single word.

“Ice.”

Span began to laugh softly.

Eric felt as if he would explode. He needed to sneeze. Then cough. He felt as if he couldn’t hide a second longer. And yet he had to be quiet. Or Sparr would see him and hurt him.
Splat!

Just then, a white shaft of moonlight suddenly fell into the Tower from the opening above. Eric pressed himself back against the stones, but the shaft of light moved across the floor to him.

Sparr turned instantly. His eyes flashed red.

He saw Eric. He stared right at him!

Clomp! Clomp!
A troop of Ninns tramped into the tower. “It is time, Lord Sparr,” one said.

The moonlight dimmed behind a cloud and Eric was in shadow once more.

Sparr nodded. “I have seen what I came here for.”

Sparr was still staring at Eric. He could destroy Eric in a second!

Then why?

Why?

Why did Sparr simply wrap his long black cloak around him and walk out of the Tower?

Eight
Neal and Company