User Unfriendly (20 page)

"Harek, you idiot—" Nocona started.

"What it seems to me," I continued, "is that whatever the reason they want her, they probably want her safe."

"So?" Cornelius said.

"So we've got to figure where someone would keep a ten-year-old girl safe."

Thoughtfully, Thea murmured, "In a town with goblins..."

"Even if you were a goblin," I pointed out, "you wouldn't go through all the trouble of kidnapping a princess just to lock her up in a dungeon and terrorize her. Where would you lock up a ten-year-old kid?"

"In school!' Feordin said. "That's what our parents do to us."

"No schools here," Thea said. "Children would be taught at home until they were old enough to learn a trade."

"Royal children would have tutors brought in for them," Cornelius said.

Thea shook her head. "Yeah, but the princess didn't live in Sannatia."

"The royal governor did," I said. "If he had any children, there'd be a nursery at the governor's palace."

"Sure," Feordin said to show he wasn't impressed with my reasoning. "Why not?"

As soon as we walked into the main hall of the governor's palace, we saw it was a lot cleaner than the barracks. Not
clean
in the sense of they-must-have-a-housekeeper, but there were definite paths through the dust and grime.

"Goblins," Nocona told us after a quick glance at the footprints.

"Are you sure?" Thea asked.

Nocona sighed real loud and took a closer look at the floor. "Mmm-hmmm," he said in what sounded like thoughtful surprise.

"What?" Thea asked.

He ignored her, moving on instead to check the furniture, which had obviously been climbed on, and the walls, which seemed to have been bounced off. "Uh-hunh," Nocona said.

"What?" Thea repeated.

He stepped around her to place a chair under the chandelier, which had pieces broken off and scattered across the room as though someone had been playing Tarzan on it. "I see," Nocona said.

"What?" Thea demanded.

"
Goblins!
" he screamed at her.

Very calmly, very quietly, she said, "All right." She gave him the overly sweet smile girls do when they're feeling especially superior. "Thank you."

Nocona stepped off the chair, wincing at the movement.

"Now that you've got the attention of everyone in town...," Cornelius said.

Nocona shrugged, as if to say, When you surround me with fools, don't blame me for the results.

"Can we please stop bickering long enough to finish this?" Mom asked.

I pulled out my sword and Thea her knife. In a moment, Cornelius stepped closer, then Feordin, finally Nocona. Mom just hung onto my arm, which would be the death of both df us if we ran into trouble.

We followed the path the goblins had made through two decades' worth of dust. Certainly there were sidetracks, where individual goblins or small groups had gone into other rooms—and some of these even looked recent. But obviously a great number of goblins passed through here repeatedly. At one end of the path was the front door. All we had to do was find the other end.

We walked through the banquet hall, where there had been a food fight decades ago: food stains on the walls, broken dishes on the floor, shriveled and dusty pieces of who-knew-what underfoot. We went up a curved marble stairway. There were doors along the hallway, splintered where they had been kicked in. At the far end of the hall a set of double doors were wide open the normal way, and that's where the goblins' trail led.

For a moment we just stood there, listening.

Nothing.

Stealthily we made our way down the hall. Thea pushed ahead of the rest of us to take the lead. Pressing herself against the wall next to the door, she motioned for us to keep back. Once we were all in position, she bobbed forward to peek inside the room, making herself as quick a target as possible.

Nothing.

She repeated the motion, a fraction slower.

Nothing.

She held up three fingers to us, folded one down, folded the second one down, folded the last one down, and leapt into the room. We jumped in behind her.

There was no one there.

It had been a nursery, that was obvious by the faded pictures on the walls. There were animals, more cute than realistic, and rainbows and stars. One entire wall was a tapestry: a fantasy castle with airy spires and turrets coming out of the building at impossible angles, and a very friendly-looking moat monster in the background.

The room had a canopied bed—too dusty to tell what color—and the canopy sagged almost to the quilted covers. A few toys lay in the corners of the room—a painted top, a rag doll, a puppet. More toys overflowed out of a wooden chest at the foot of the bed. The floor was rubbed dust-free by the passage of countless goblin feet, but there was no telling where they'd come from. Only one doorway opened into the room, and we were standing in it. Why would goblins come up here, walk around the room, then go back downstairs and disappear into the town?

"Now what?" Mom sank down onto the floor. "Do we just wait until they come back?"

"No." Cornelius stepped forward. He raised his hands and sputtered in his obscure wizards' dialect.

"What are you doing?" I asked wearily.

"Reveal Magic spell."

"I don't feel anything," I protested.

Cornelius shoved past me and zeroed in on the wall, the one with the tapestry. He began running his hands across the weaving.

I rested my hand against the cheerful moat monster. "I don't feel anything," I repeated.

Cornelius ignored me. He stooped down for a better look at the bottom half of the picture.

I examined the tapestry more closely. I still felt no telltale tingle of magic. But I did suddenly notice that the wall hanging wasn't dusty. "Hey," I started.

"Bingo," Cornelius said. He tapped his finger against the door of the castle.

I got down on my knees and ran my hand over the same area and got just the faintest sensation like I'd been leaning on one arm too long. There was a warding spell here, to prevent the magic from being casually detected.

"Yes," I said. "Now what?"

The others huddled closer. "Try knocking," Feordin suggested.

"Ask the moat creature if anyone's home," Thea said.

Nocona cleared his throat and held up the little golden box, the one he'd won riddling with the dragon. " 'Whatever we'll need to complete our quest,' " he reminded us.

We all cleared a space while he got out the tiny key and looked for a place to insert it. A tinfoil key in a woven-cloth door. Sure, I thought.

Cornelius's head was in my way, but I heard the click.

The castle door, about as tall as my hand, swung open. Light poured out, but we couldn't see anything.

Take that back.

Looking inside was like looking into a candle flame, or into the sun: not really a color, but a presence.

"Oooo," we all breathed.

Nocona reached his hand in, and it disappeared up to his wrist. He pulled back and wriggled his fingers. Apparently that was proof enough for him that it was safe. He reached in again. His hand disappeared up to the wrist, the elbow, the shoulder. He stuck his head through the door, which should have been too narrow, but somehow he was gone up to the shoulders, then he crawled forward and disappeared up to the waist.

"Ahm, Nocona," I said, grabbing hold of his ankle. It was his injured one, all wrapped up in a makeshift bandage. I must have hurt him, for he jerked his leg away. If he cried out or said anything from the other side of the doorway, we couldn't hear. I caught just a glimpse of blood on the bandage—which shouldn't have been there, not on a sprain—then Nocona crawled the rest of the way in through the door and disappeared as completely as Robin going down in the sand.

We waited what felt like half an hour. It was probably closer to a minute.

"He would have come back," Thea said. "If everything was OK on the other side, he would have come back to tell us so. Something must be wrong."

Mom, looking like an overwashed dishrag, said, "Does that mean we go after him, or does that mean we stay here?"

"Maybe he's safe," I pointed out, "but he
can't
come back."

Feordin said, "We need a line." He eased his magic rope off his shoulder. "Go," he commanded it. At first slowly, then more and more quickly, it uncoiled itself and snaked into the bright doorway. Anxiously we watched as it hurtled itself away, looking for something on the other side to tie itself to. Coil after coil disappeared, until finally there was hardly any rope left, and Feordin had to say, "Stop."

But apparently the rope could only keep track of one command at a time. The last two coils whipped straight and the end of the rope whizzed across the nursery floor toward the tapestry.

Feordin stamped down hard onto the rebellious rope. It twanged taut, caught between where it was coming from and where it was going. Then it slipped out from beneath Feordin's boot.

Thea dove for the loose end, grabbed hold of it inches short of the wall, and was dragged through the castle doorway. Cornelius grabbed her foot at the last second, didn't have the sense to let go, and disappeared half a moment later.

We stood there listening to the dust settle.

"My, that was certainly a fine idea," I told Feordin.

He gave me a look that indicated if he had still had a mace, he would have made mashed potatoes out of me. "Untie," he ordered the rope. "Return."

Nothing.

We all—take that back—
we three
looked at each other. Mom sighed. "Well, I think we're meant to go through."

"Yeah?" I said. "What if there are goblins waiting on the other side?"

"Then they've captured Nocona, Thea, and Cornelius and know we're here. I don't see how it can hurt to go, and we're certainly not doing anybody any good here."

"Yeah, but...," I started.

She gave me the same look she would have given if I were trying to weasel out of doing my homework.

Feordin pushed ahead of both of us. "I'll go," he announced. "I am Feordin Macewielder..." His head poked through the tapestry and already his voice came back faint and faraway, though his rear end still stuck out on this side of the castle. "...son of Feordan Sturdyaxe..." We could only see the bottoms of his feet, and I was straining to listen, holding my breath so that the noise wouldn't interfere. "Grandson of..." I might have just heard "Feordane," or it may have been only that I knew what came next. In any case, my ears heard no hint of Feordin's voice saying "Boldheart."

I gulped.

Mom said, "Me next."

"Maybe you should just stick your head in, then come back out and tell me what you see," I said. I would have gone first, but she was in my way.

"All right." Mom crawled partway in, then backed out. "Nothing," she said. "Just light."

"Maybe—" I started.

She crawled through the doorway and disappeared.

I sighed. "Maybe," I said, "I should go through, too." I answered myself, "Gee, Harek, that sounds like a good idea. Why didn't I think of that?"

But I got the final word in. I said, "Stupid game," before I crawled through.

Crawling through the castle doorway, I was aware of light ahead of me and darkness behind and a thickness to the air, like in a dream when you're trying to run and you can only move
verrrrry
slowly.

I was just wondering what would happen if I veered right or left, when the ground gave out under me. I braced myself for a plummet of two or three hundred feet and the ghastly
splat!
that would follow, but I hit the ground in less than a second, before the picture was complete in my head.

"Harek—you all right?" Feordin's voice asked.

It took a few seconds before my surroundings registered. I was in the cobblestoned courtyard of a castle, which looked for all the world like the castle in the tapestry. Which was ridiculous, because the castle in the tapestry looked like a cartoon drawing. But both castles were pink and purple, and the building blocks looked more like stitches than real construction, with horizontal and vertical blocks alternating like the weave of fabric. For another thing, there were windows all over the place, which as an inhabitant of this time period I knew would be impossible to defend. And there were all these pointy towers which came out of the main building at angles that would give an architect nightmares. And the cobblestones on which I'd landed
looked
like cobblestones, but they weren't hard. They were, in fact, almost bouncy.

"Harek?" Feordin repeated.

"Yeah, yeah, I'm fine." Beyond the outside wall, through the gate door that Nocona had unlocked and through which we, presumably, had passed, I could see the moat, sparkling as though with silver threads. No sign of the moat monster, which, in the tapestry anyway, had been way off to the right. Beyond was a uniformly green lawn dotted with vaguely shaped but colorful flowers. Over all was a rainbow in the sky, not pale and elusive the way rainbows are, but bright and solid.

Feordin?
I suddenly thought.
Feordin's asking how I am?

I turned my attention from my surroundings and looked for my mother.

She was sitting on the ground, Thea, Nocona, and Cornelius bending all-solicitous over her. Feordin was right next to them, as though he'd only now taken one step away toward me.

I scrambled to my feet. "Is she all right?" I asked.

"Just shaken from the fall, I think," Cornelius said.

I looked back and up, and could see no evidence of where I had dropped from, but there was a big red X on the cobblestones where I'd landed. The X looked embroidered.

"We were going to stand there," Thea said, "to break her fall. But we counted on you coming through before her."

"Really," Mom assured us all, assured me, "I'm OK."

"It's only about six feet," Nocona said. "I watched all of you. If she wasn't sick to begin with..."

Yeah, I thought. A lot of things would be different if she wasn't sick to begin with.

Mom used Cornelius's and Nocona's arms to pull herself up, swaying for a moment, like she was on her way back down. She closed her eyes and depended on the others to hold her straight.