Bastille and I dashed up a set of stairs onto the upper level of the palace. Once there, I slammed a hand down on the top step and engaged my Talent. A shock of power ran down my arm, hitting the stairs and making them crumble away behind us. Stone blocks crashed to the ground and the banister fell sideways. An enormous puff of dust erupted into the air, like the noxious breath of a belching giant. As it cleared, I could see a group of annoyed knights standing below. They'd finally gotten smart and broken into two groups. Grandpa Smedry could keep only one group late, so the other group was free to chase Bastille and me.
Now they were trapped below. But there were other ways up to our floor. "I don't think we can keep staying ahead of them like this," I said. "We need to get out of the city."
"You just said that at the end of the last chapter!" Bastille complained.
"Well, it's still true!" I snapped. Below, the knights split again, some running off to find another way up. A few remained behind and began giving one another leg-ups or jumping. They got surprisingly close to reaching the upper floor.
I yelped and hurried away from the hole, Bastille following.
"Sorry about the stairs," I said. “Your father won’t be mad at me for that, will he?"
"We have Smedrys over to the palace for dinner frequently," she said. "Things like broken staircases are routine for us. However, I will point out that you just trapped us on the upper floor of the palace. I'll bet my mother and the other knights will have the stairwells all blocked off shortly.”
"Do you have a Transporter's Glass station?”
"Yeah. In the basement.”
"It's guarded anyway,” Kaz added.
I cursed. "You've got to have some kind of secret exit from the building, right, Bastille? Tunnels? Passages hidden in the walls? A fireplace that rotates around and reveals your secret crime-fighting lair?”
"Nope," Kaz said.
Bastille nodded. “My father feels that sort of thing is too easy for enemies to use against him.”
"No secret passages at all?" I exclaimed. "What kind of castle is this?"
"The non-stoopidalicious kind!" Bastille said. "Who puts passages inside the walls? Isn't that a little ridiculous?"
"Not when you need to sneak out!"
“Why would I need to sneak out of my own home?"
"Because Knights of Crystallia are chasing you!"
"This sort of thing doesn't happen to me very often!" Bastille snapped. "In fact, it only seems to happen when you're involved!"
"I can't help the fact that people like to chase me. We need to -"
I froze in the middle of the hallway. "Kaz!" I exclaimed, pointing at him.
"Me!" he exclaimed back.
"Idiots!" Bastille said, pointing at both of us.
"When did you get here?” I demanded of my short uncle.
“A few moments ago,” he said. "Everything's packed back at Keep Smedry, ready for takeoff. I borrowed a vehicle from the Mokian embassy, as I didn’t want to alert the king of what we were doing."
"We have a pilot?" I asked.
"Sure do," he replied. “Aydee Ecks."
"Who?"
"Your cousin," he said. "Sister to Sing and Australia. She was delivering a message to the embassy from Mokia."
"Sounds good," I said. It was always nice to have another Smedry along on a mission. Well, nice and catastrophic at the same time. But when you're a Smedry, you learn to make the catastrophes work for you.
A distant clanking preceded a group of knights, who stormed out of a side hallway a moment later. They spotted us and began running in our direction.
"Kaz!" I said. "Get us out of here!"
“Are you sure?" he said. "My Talent has been -"
"Now, Kaz!" I said.
"All right," he said with a sigh, walking over and pulling open a door. We'd used Kaz's Talent of getting lost to transport us before. Like all Smedry Talents, it was unpredictable - but it was fairly safe to use across short distances.
Besides, we didn't have time to try anything else. I raced through the doorway, Bastille behind me. Kaz pulled the door closed behind us.
The room smelled musty and wet inside, like mold or fungus, but it was too dark to see anything.
“Activate your Talent!" I told Kaz.
"I already did," he replied.
There was a scraping noise. Like something very large being pulled across the stone floor. I blinked as Bastille unsheathed her sword, the crystalline weapon shedding a cool, blue light across our surroundings. We were in a cave. And standing before us, looking very confused, was an enormous black dragon. It cocked its head at us, smoke trailing from its nostrils.
“Well," I said, relieved. "It's just a dragon. For a moment, I was frightened!" We'd met a dragon before, and it had quite nicely not eaten us. In fact, it had carried us on its back.
The dragon inhaled deeply.
"Kaz!" Bastille said, panicked.
"Put away that light!" he said. "It's hard to get lost if I can see where I'm going!"
I frowned at the others. "It's just a dragon."
"Just a free baledragon," Bastille said with alarm, "who - unlike Tzoctinatin - is not serving a prison sentence, and who is perfectly free to roast us because we're invading his den and violating the draco-human treaty!" She slammed her sword back in its sheath, plunging us into darkness.
"Oh,” I said.
A light appeared in front of us, illuminating the inside of the dragon's mouth as fire gathered in its throat and began to blast toward us.
"Reason number two hundred and fifty-seven why it's better to be a short person than a tall person!" Kaz exclaimed. "Standing next to a tall person gives you a really great shield for dragon's breath!"
Bastille grabbed me by the collar and yanked me hard after her, and everything spun. I felt a strange force around me, a lurching feeling as Kaz activated his Talent, getting us lost. The dragon's flames vanished.
I recognized that force - the force of the Talent - immediately, though I'd never experienced it before when Kaz had used his Talent. It was hard to explain. It felt like I could see the warping of the air, could tell what was going on as Kaz saved us.
It almost seemed familiar. Like Kaz wasn't just getting us lost, like he was . . . well, like he
was breaking the way that motion worked. Deconstructing the natural, linear progression of the world and rebuilding it so that we could move in directions we shouldn't have been able to.
In that moment, I thought I saw something. An enormous, magnificent stone disk, full of carvings and etchings, divided into four different quadrants. And at the very center, a patch of black rock. There was something crouching there in the center, invisible because of how dark it was. A patch of midnight itself. And it reached tentacles out to the other quadrants, like black vines growing over a wall.
The Bane of Incarna. That which twists . . . that which corrupts . . . that which destroys. . .
The Dark Talent. Of which all others are shadows.
The vision vanished, gone so quickly that I wasn't certain I'd even seen it. Everything was dark again, and I stumbled, tripping. When I hit the ground, I hit something wet, soft, and squishy.
“Ew!" I said, trying to push myself to my feet. The floor undulated beneath me, pulsing, quivering. It was like I'd fallen onto a massive trampoline covered with slick grease. And the stench was terrible. Like someone had pelted a skunk with rotten eggs.
Bastille made a gagging noise, pulling her sword from its sheath to give us light. The three of us were crowded together inside of a pink room, the walls and ceiling all made of the same soft, quivering material. It was like we were trapped in some kind of sack. There wasn’t even room enough to sit up, and we were coated with a slick, goolike substance.
“Aw, sparrows,” Kaz swore.
"I think I'm going to be sick!" Bastille said. “Are we...?"
"My Talent transported us into the dragon's stomach, it appears,” Kaz said, scratching his head, trying to stand up on the fleshy surface. "Whoops.”
"Whoops?" I cried, realizing that the liquidy stuff had to be some kind of bile or phlegm. "That's all you can say? Whoops?"
"Ew!" Bastille said.
"Well, if we're going to be eaten by a dragon," he noted, "this is the way to do it. Bypassing the teeth and all."