“I think Mr. Chesney’s interests are best served—” Mr. Addis began.

But this was where Callette lost her temper. “You heard him,” she said. “He said go away. So go.” And she tramped toward him with her neck out like an angry goose.

Mr. Addis eyed her critically. “I don’t think your talking monster is in very good condition, Mr. Derk.”

Callette spread her disheveled wings. “No. I’m not. I happen to be very hungry. I think I shall eat you. You’re nice and fat.” She crawled forward another step.

“Call her off!” Mr. Addis said. His voice had gone shrill and uneasy.

Derk simply folded his arms. Callette lunged. Mr. Addis realized just in time that she meant what she said and ran for his hole in the universe with Callette’s angry beak a mere inch from his backside the whole way. “Mr. Chesney will hear of this! Mr. Chesney will hear of this!” Mr. Addis babbled as he ran, and leaped, and landed on hands and knees inside his hole.

“Food!” shrieked Callette. Her beak ran hard into some invisible barrier just in front of the hole. It hurt her. She backed off and rubbed her beak with her wing, while Mr. Addis scrambled out of sight and the hole shut with a clop. “I meant that about food,” Callette said to the nearest dwarf. “Perhaps I shall eat you.”

“Wouldn’t you prefer cooked food, madam?” the dwarf said anxiously. “We have a roast just ready to serve.”

“Bring it here,” said Callette. She swung her evil, scrawny head around at Querida. “And if you bother Dad, I’ll eat you, too.”

“I don’t think I’d taste very good, my dear,” Querida said.

“I can kill people. I killed the ones who shot Kit,” Callette remarked. “Didn’t you think I could?”

“I’m sure you can, but I’m also sure you should never have been put in a situation where you thought you had to,” Querida replied. “Derk, this child needs looking after.”

“I can see tha

t,” Derk said. He unfolded his arms and wrapped them around Callette’s thin neck. Callette’s head flopped on his shoulder. “My brave Callette,” he said.

Querida watched. She watched Don crawl unhappily up to Derk, too, and Derk realize that Don was feeling as bad as Callette. She watched him spare an arm from Callette to wrap around Don. Querida watched a hurried group of dwarfs bringing what looked like half a roast cow on a huge platter out onto the terrace. She watched Callette’s beak swing eagerly toward it. Querida murmured to herself, “I must see Mara. I made a mistake there.” She rapped her stick sharply on the paving stones and vanished.

TWENTY-FIVE

BLADE WOKE UP FROM the unpleasant, blank sleep caused by the smelly stuff, feeling ill. He rolled on his face and discovered that the hand he was trying to pillow his cheek on had a thick iron cuff on its wrist, attached to a cold length of chain. There was iron underneath him, rumbling and juddering with what seemed to be impossibly speedy movement. This made him feel so much iller that it was a while before he could move his eyes around to see where he was. There were iron bars all around him and, beyond those, high banks going by so fast that they looked blurred. The sight nearly made him throw up.

An hour or so later he was well enough to realize what this all meant. He was in an iron cage, only tall enough to sit up in and only long enough to stretch out in if he lay from corner to corner. This cage was roped to the bed of a cart and being towed very fast down a sunken road by the horseless carriage Barnabas had made for Mr. Chesney. To make quite sure that Blade could not translocate out of this mess, his wrist had been chained to the iron cuff. As to where he was being towed, Blade preferred not to think. You got to hear of places where—No.

Blade shut his mind and just lived. He was usually quite good at this, but he had never had to do it before while being constantly reminded by the jarring and juddering underneath how fast he was being dragged off to—No. He felt as if he was covered with little bruises. The wind of the movement blew through the bars and made him deeply cold. And as if that was not enough, it was becoming harder, every time he tried, to fit into the wretched cage from corner to corner. At first Blade thought it was just because he kept losing the exact right position. But by nightfall he had changed his mind. He was growing. His body had chosen this moment, of all moments, to shoot up from boy size to man size, just as Mara had promised it would. Of all the stupid things! Blade tossed and shifted and still found his head and his toes jammed ever tighter against the bars. He began to fear he would end up bigger than Kit.

Well, at least I’d burst the bars open, he thought, and tried not to panic.

About the time darkness fell, the towing stopped, with a sort of croak. Blade almost went to sleep in the blessed peace. Then doors banged, and voices woke him up, in the middle of an argument.

“Just no damned good!” said a man. “What’s the hurry?”

“I’ve told you,” said Barnabas’s voice, sounding breathy and frightened, “I need this cargo delivered to Costamaret tonight.”

“Well, it’s not going to be,” said another man.

The first man said, like somebody explaining to an infant, “This wizard glow of yours doesn’t light up the road enough. Not a rough road like this, going so fast, and towing. You want to risk a spill? Break all our necks?”

“So we wait out the night here and go on in the morning,” said the second man. “I could use some sleep.”

“I want a guard on the cargo then,” said Barnabas. “One of you sleep in the trailer.”

Cargo, thought Blade. That’s me. It was not good to know that someone who had been like an uncle to you all your life could talk of you as cargo. And mean it. Costamaret was even less good to think of. It was one of those places—No. Blade listened to one of the men climbing up beside the cage, snorting and grumbling as he wrapped himself in layers of coats against the cold. Don’t offer me one, will you? Blade thought. He listened and waited. The man in the cart fell asleep quickly, but Barnabas wandered in the road for a while, smoking a cigar. At last he climbed inside the horseless carriage and there was silence. Get drunk again, why don’t you? Blade thought. Very cautiously he reached up with his free left hand and began trying to undo the cage.

It fastened with a long bolt that had a padlock on the end of it. For a moment Blade thought he could undo it easily. Then his fingers closed around the padlock and were flung off by a feeling like an electric shock. A spell on it. An iron padlock, too. It took real wizard skills to bespell iron. Yet again Blade cursed the way Dad had refused to let him go to the University. He crouched with his face on the floor, wondering what to do.

Light feet landed on the roof of the cage, two pairs of them. Reville and Sukey? Blade thought, in a surge of hope he had not dared feel before. But there had been the faint ting of a claw on iron as the second pair of feet came down. “Blade?” whispered a well-known voice.

Tags: Diana Wynne Jones Derkholm Fantasy
Source: readsnovelonline.net