The Kingdom of Kevin Malone (15 page)

Oldest? Did she mean the moorim? But it was gone, so how could she tell? Did it leave tracks? I resisted an impulse to reach up and pat my hair.
Elves just know stuff, it's how they are,
I told myself.

I brushed my lower left pocket for the reassuring bulk of the knife in there. Could elves lift something from that pocket without the noise of velcro ripping open? Maybe, but the knife was where I'd put it.

I braced my shoulders and went ahead on nerve. It was all I had. “I'd like to make this delivery as soon as I can, being only a visitor here. So if you can tell me where to find Kavian—?”

“He is expected,” the Elf King said, and sat down again. Nobody else moved or spoke. They looked at me. So what was I supposed to do now? I cleared my throat. I was thirsty.

“Could somebody tell me when he's supposed to arrive?” I asked. “And there are a couple of other visitors around somewhere, friends of mine—”

The second crowned person laughed, a chilly little clinking sound like what happens when you drop a frying pan into the sink on top of a glass that you didn't notice was in there. “A veritable inrush of outsiders, the omen we have expected. You bring more than the treasure Kavian Prince commissioned you to bring, Rose Traveler.”

What did that mean? Before I could even decide to ask, more horns sounded, this time a sort of bugle-call of high, spiky notes that I didn't need to have interpreted. It was an alarm.

“Famishers!” I heard distant shouts. “Famishers are coming!”

The soft-breeze sound in the hall suddenly intensified into a gale-like rushing; the elves were laughing. The two crowned ones stood up again. One said, “We will take your burden and complete your errand. Give us Farfarer.”

Farfarer?
As I stood there, confused, it came to me like a wave breaking: what is always true about magic swords? They have names. What I had in my velcro-sealed pocket was a Swiss Army knife named Farfarer. Oh, brother.

And these green people wanted it.

There must have been more than a hundred elves in the hall, packed into the strange, wavery air and laughing softly like the wind before a storm. They made no threatening moves but watched me with interest.

“Farfarer is for Kavian only,” I said as firmly as I could.

“We will see that he gets it,” the other crowned person said.

But she wasn't wearing a moorim, was she?

“Give it to us,” the Elf King said. “Farfarer brings dangers with it that are alien to you. If we relieve you of this burden, many troubles will be diverted from you and your life will be filled with serenity and joy.”

The horn-call warning of the Famishers sounded again, closer. I wavered, twitching and sweating with nerves. Enemies hounded Kevin across his own secret country. The Farsword was his one hope, and I didn't like the way the lady elf had referred to it as “treasure.”

“No,” I said. “I'll give it to him myself, thanks.”

Immediately everybody began moving, like a flickering of leaves blown in a wind and just as hard to follow. You could barely tell one of them from another when they stood still, but now it was like the middle of a windstorm under the park trees in autumn.

The candles went out almost all at once. The torches on the walls streamed and smoked and died. I was left standing in shimmering darkness with the sensation of a huge crowd moving very quickly all around me. Inside, the hollow sound of a cold wind rushed around and around us within the walls of Elf Home.

Outside I could hear the horns howling. Behind that came the high, hungry squeals of the Famishers, closing in. Which way to run in the blackness? Where to hide in this whirlpool of elves?

The gallery,
I thought.
You don't know what direction to take, so go
up.

I dashed straight ahead into the darkness. With gusty laughter, forms that I sensed rather than felt seemed to snatch themselves out of the air in front of me just in time to avoid collisions. I almost lost my balance, flinching and swerving, in fear of being hit in passing or being rushed for the Farsword.

In six good strides I felt the rise of the dais under my feet, and then I barked my shin on the edge of one of the twisted-tree thrones. Grabbing the trunk of the thing and bracing the soles of my running shoes on the seat, I did my best to swarm up into the branches.

I thought the tree would take me onto the balcony. Instead I found myself climbing into what felt like long, dry, grassy leaves packed close in layers spreading out from the trunk. Then I was outside on a cold night with a huge moon blazing in the blackness overhead.

My arm muscles burned with the strain of the climb, and my shin ached where I'd hit it on the seat edge. From my perch in the wide, flat spread of branches that roofed the hall, I looked down on the massacre outside the walls.

The moonlight was so bright that the racing figures below cast shadows on the pale grass. What looked like a hundred Famishers galloped around with their tusks flashing and their snaky necks weaving as they snatched at the elves running among them. Over everything blew the chilly breeze of the elves' laughter.

I swear they were laughing even as the round, fanged mouths of the Famishers chomped them like celery. The elves ran like little kids, on their toes. One dodged a Famisher and then somehow, quick as light, swung up on its shaggy back and hung on. I saw a flicker of motion as the elf slung a thin rope across in front of the monster's throat, catching the free end in the other hand and giving a hard twist. The Famisher fell, turning its head back on its snaky neck so its round, toothy mouth could gnash at the elf.

A skirted elf rode a Famisher right below me, and I saw her arms flex hard. Black blood sprayed out from the front of the Famisher's neck where the cord bit, and down the creature went in a tangle of knobby legs. But another running Famisher veered alongside and plucked the elf off with a crunching sound. I covered my ears with my hands.

The elf's face was turned toward me, clear in the moonlight—beautiful, open, looking up at me without expression. The arm the elf could use twisted to stab stiff fingers at the Famisher's eye—

My stomach heaved.

The Famisher squealed and shook its head hard, and the elf dropped to the ground, a limp clutter of crooked limbs. The Famisher began running in circles. It could only see out of one eye now.

From every side came ugly noises—thudding steps, sharp cries, gurgling squeals. I kept seeing things I didn't want to see.

A line of thirty or so Famishers came thundering toward the wall below me, chasing a dozen elves before them. The slower elves were grabbed, hiked in the air, and thrown away or gulped down the Famishers' huge, round maws. But suddenly all the elves spun around and dashed back among the monsters. They dodged the snaking Famisher heads and jumped onto the beasts' shoulders, trying to use their deadly cords.

They crashed against the wall below me in a churning mob, Famishers letting out these piercing screams that could have expressed either pain or triumph. I saw two elves actually running over them from one back to another, like dancers. Famishers thrashed against the walls, falling or trying to scrape the deadly riders off their backs. Right below me, Famishers tossed away mangled elves, or shook them off their huge shoulders, or were themselves choked down, lying where they fell.

Bugle-calls rang out way off to one side. Trampling and squealing, the remaining Famishers all lurched off in that direction.

The wind softened. The elves weren't laughing now.

Nothing moved on my side of the building anymore except two Famishers that came rooting around under the windows below me with their big round faces, like monster sunflowers. I thought of them getting inside and searching upward with those horrible heads in the dark, and maybe sniffing me out or spotting my feet or the scuffs I had left on the tree. Who knew what they could see or smell, even in the pitch dark inside Elf Home?

As quietly as I could, I edged farther out in the tree ceiling until I was in the eaves, where the edge of the roof hung over the walls. From there I could jump down and try to get away, provided I didn't break a leg when I landed. According to my memory of the map in Claudia's book, the Dalehead Arch (the closest unused one to the Tavern-on-the-Green) must be around here somewhere.

But where, which direction? I was ready to run away and try to come back another time with Kevin's knife. But I didn't dare leave the shelter of the roof.

A Famisher came snuffling around close below me. I looked down at it the way you have to look at the worst part of a horror movie even though you know you're going to hate what you see.

It had patchy, curly fur all over its humped back, like a buffalo. But the neck was a skinny, bare buzzard-neck. The face, mercifully, I couldn't see because it had lowered its head to the ground where it was ripping away with satisfied little grunts at something hidden by the shadow of the eaves.

The only elves I could see were lying very still in the grass or else stirring just a little with movements that might have been nothing but wind tugging at their clothes. There were Famishers, too, about five of them, collapsed on the ground in large dark heaps. One of them kept rolling on its side, trying to get up and letting out a deep, raw squeal each time. Then it would flop back down, lie still a little, and try again.

Two others had dragged something out through the window and were pulling it between them, each one hanging on with its teeth and snorting aggressively through long, curled slits of nostrils like the f-holes in a violin.

The worst part was the sight and the sound of that hurt Famisher trying to get up and trying to get up, totally ignored by others of its own kind. What horrible creatures! I couldn't even think about going down there among them and trying to run away.

I hugged my branch, leaves tickling my skin. There had to be things I could do to help myself, sensible things, if I could just think of them. But you don't think much on a battlefield.

I found myself visualizing my mother longingly, seeing her as she hurried down the hall to my bedroom to wake me up from a bad dream. I thought of my dad, reading to me at bedtime from a fantasy adventure story,
The Weirdstone of Brisingamen,
a book Mom had objected to as too nightmarish. I had loved it.

But this nightmare was real. For one thing there was the smell, now a mixture of pine scent and something incredibly sharp and disgusting—

And then the battle quit being a spectator sport.

A Famisher that had been snuffling around below me lifted its head and looked up at me with huge, shining eyes.

 

Thirteen

Sobragana

 

 

 

W
HERE WAS KEVIN,
where was Rachel or Claudia, where was anybody? I was left to face this monster all by myself, without even a stick in my hand—

Except for the Farsword, of course: mighty Farfarer.

The Famisher's eyes, which were big and round and forward-facing like a cat's, blinked in a slow, sleepy blink that was almost silly looking, like something a cartoon character would do to express being love-smitten. The face rose up, up on the snaky neck, as the creature reared on its hind legs. It was hugely tall. It planted its front feet on the edge of the roof with a rattling thump and looked
down
at me.

The face dropped closer, the round mouth curling open, the lips rolling inward and back to expose these incredible teeth in rows, like a shark's, all around the circular opening and deep inside the cheeks.

With a velcro rip, which made the Famisher stop and jerk its head back, I dug for the wrapped knife and pulled it out of my jacket pocket. I clamped my legs around a thick branch so I wouldn't fall and, using both hands, clawed away the cloth wrapping from the knife.

The Famisher's breath, a concentration of something like licorice to the millionth power, gusted nauseatingly over me as its face came close again. My ears rang with its squeal of pleasure. A drop of its drool splashed hot on my elbow.

Oh Mom, oh Shelly, oh Dad—but this was Kevin's world, Kevin's terms.

“Farfarer,” I gasped, “you're home; be what you truly are!”

Too late—the cavern of fangs plunged toward me. I threw myself backward, imagining the killing impact of hitting the floor below. But anything was better than that disgusting creature's maw.

An underbranch of the roof tree caught me hard behind the knees. There I hung by my legs, head-down in the pitchy dark of Elf Home like a monkey in the jungle on a moonless night. I didn't drop the knife, though now it felt so heavy that I had to hold it with both hands.

I felt the close-packed leaves and branches of the roof jam hard against my left side as the Famisher's huge head punched down through the roof after me. The Famisher's neck skin, soft as a baby's, rubbed along the back of my bare hand.

I was so revolted by the touch of it that I reared up again and broke out, head and shoulders above the roof branches, gasping for breath. There, right next to me, was the Famisher's crepey, moon-pale neck, straining downward into the hole. Its blobby front hooves were set against the edge of the eaves only a few feet from me.

In my hands I no longer held a dinky little pocketknife but a sword, its blade's edge glinting in the moonlight.

As if in a dream, I hiked my arms back over my head and swung the sword down as hard as I could. The blade seemed to have a strength of its own as it slashed through the air with a rushing sound. At the last second I shut my eyes. A tingling shock shot up my arms. I clenched my teeth to keep from screaming, but screamed anyway.

So did the Famisher, or anyway it tried to: over a furious thrashing of leaves and branches echoed a horrible, liquid gurgle. The buzzard-neck reared high, headless and spouting like a garden hose.

Dark, hot blood spattered down. Frantically trying to cover my head I dropped the sword, which fell through the hole in the roof into the hall below. I never heard it land—the shavings would have muffled the sound anyway—but seconds later came the heavy crash of the Famisher's head hitting the floor, too.