Alcatraz versus the Knights of Crystallia (4 page)

"What?" she asked, walking over.

"
H
ow'd you get down?" I said, nodding to the broken
Haw
kwind
.
"Everyone else was trapped inside when I
woke
up."

"l . . .”

"She jumped free!" Australia exclaimed.
"Draulin said
the
glass was precarious and that we should test it, but
Ba
stille jumped right on out!"

B
astille shot Australia a glare, but the Mokian girl kept
on talking, oblivious.
"She must have been really worried
about y
ou, Alcatraz.
She ran right over to your side.
I
–“

Bastille tried, subtly, to stomp on Australia's foot.

"Oh!" Australia said.
"We squishing ants?"

Remarkably, Bastille blushed.
Was she embarrassed for
d
isobeying her mother?
Bastille tried so hard to please the
woman, but I was certain that pleasing Draulin was pretty
m
uch impossible.
I mean, it couldn't have been concern for
m
e
that made her jump out of the vehicle.
I was well aware
of how infuriating she found me.

But . . . what if she
was
worried about me?
What did
that mean?
Suddenly, I found myself blushing too.

And now I am going to do everything in my power to
distract you from that last
paragraph.
I really shouldn't
have written it. I should have been smart enough to clam
up.
I should have flexed my mental muscles and stopped
thinking at a snail's pace.

Have I mentioned how shellfish I can be sometimes?

At that moment, Sing burst up the stairs, saving Bastille
and me from our awkward moment.
Sing Sing Smedry, my
cousin and Australia's older brother, was an enormous titan
of a man.
Well over six feet tall, he was rather full-figured.
(Which is a nice way of saying he was kinda fat.)
The
Mokian man had the Smedry Talent for tripping and fall
ing to the ground
–
which
he did the moment he reached
the top of the tower.

I swear, I felt the stones themselves shake.
Every one
of us ducked, looking for danger. Sing's T
a
lent tends
to activate when something is about to hurt him.
That
moment, however, no danger appeared.
Sing looked
around, then climbed to his feet and rushed over to grab
me
out of my nervou
s crouch and give me a suffocatin
g
hu
g.

"Alcatraz!" he exclaimed.
He reached out an arm
and
gr
abbed Australia, giving her a hu
g as well.
"You
g
uys have to read the paper I wrote about Hushlander
barte
ring techniques and advertising methodology!
It's
so
e
xciting!"

Sing, you see, was an anthropologist.
His expertise was
Hushland cultures and
weaponry, though, fortunately,
th
is time he didn't appear to have any guns strapped to his
bod
y.
The sad thing is
,
most people I've met in the Free
Kin
gdoms
–
particularly
my family
–
would
consider
r
e
a
d
ing an anthropological study to be exciting.
Somebody
r
ea
lly needs to introduce them to video games.

Sing finally released us, then turned to Grandpa Smedry
and
gave a quick bow.
"Lord Smedry," he said.
"We need to
ta
lk.
There has been trouble in your absence."

"There's always trouble in my absence," Grandpa Smedry
said.
"And a fair lot of it when I'm here too.
What's it
this time?"

"The Librarians have sent an ambassador to the Council
of Kings," Sing explained.

"Well," Grandpa Smedry said lightly, "I hope the
ambassador’s posterior didn’t get hurt
too
much when Brig tossed him out of the city.”

“The High King didn’t banish the ambassador, my lord,”
Sing said softly.
"In fact, I think they're going to sign a
treaty
.”

“That’s impossible!” Bastille cut in. “The High King would never ally with the Librarians!”

“Squire Bastille,” Draulin snapped, standing stiffly with her hands behind her back. “Hold your place and do
not
contradict your betters.”

Bastille blushed, looking
down
.

“Sing,” Grandpa Smedry said urgently. “This treaty, what does it say about the fighting in Mokia?”

Sing glanced aside. “I . . . well, the treaty would hand Mokia over to the Librarians in exchange for an end to the war.”

“Debating Dashners!” Grandpa Smedry exclaimed. “We’re late! We need to do something!” He immediately dashed across the rooftop and scrambled down the stairwell.

The rest of glanced at one another.

“We’ll have to act with daring recklessness and an intense
vibrato!" Grandpa Smedry's voice echoed out of the
st
a
irwell.
"But that's the Smedry way!"

"We should probably follow him," I said.

"Yeah
,”
Sing said, glancing about.
"He just gets so excited.
Where's Lord Kazan?"

"Isn't he here?" Australia said.
"He sent the
Hawkwind
ba
ck for us."

Sing shook his head
.
"Kaz left a few days
a
go, claiming
he
'd meet back up with you."

"His Talent must have lost him," Australia said, sighing.
"
T
here's no telling where he might be."

"Uh, hello?" Grandpa Smedry's head popped out of the
stairwell.
"
Jabbering J
oneses, people!
We've got a disaster to
a
vert! Let's get moving!"

"Yes, Lord Smedry," Sing said, waddling over.
"But where
are
we going?"

"Send for a crawly!" the elderly Oculator said.
“
We need
to get to the Council of Kings!"

"But . . . they're in session!"

“
All the better
,”
Grandpa Smedry said, raising a hand
d
ramatically.
"Our entrance will be much more interesting
that way!"

Having royal blood i
s
a really big pain.
T
r
ust
me, I have some very good sources on this.
They all agree:
Being a king stinks.
Royally.

First off, there are the hours.
Kings work all of them.
If
there's an emergency at night, be ready to get up, because
you're king.
Inconvenient war starting in the middle of the
play-
o
ffs?
Tough.
Kings don't get to have vacations, potty
breaks, or weekends.

Instead, they get something else: responsibility.

Of all the things in the world that come close to being
crapaflapnasti, responsibility is the most terrible.
It makes
people eat salads instead of candy bars, and makes them go
to bed early of their own free choice.
When you're about to
launch yourself into the air strapped to the back of a rocket-propelled penguin, it's that blasted responsibility that warns
yo
u that the flight might not be good for your insurance
premiums.

I'
m
convinced that res
ponsibility is some kind of psycho
logical disease.
What else but a brain malfunction would
cause
someone to go jogging?
The problem is, kings need
t
o have responsibility like nothing else.
Kings are like deep,
n
eve
r-ending wells of responsibility
–
and
if you don't
wa
tch out, you may get tainted by them.

T
he Smedry clan, fortunately, realized this
a number of
yea
rs back.
And so they did something about it.

"We did
what
?" I asked.

"Gave up our kingdom," Grandpa Smedry said happily.
"
Po
of.
Gone.
Abdicated."

"Why did we do that?"

"For the good of candy bars everywhere," Grandpa
S
m
edry said, eyes twinkling.
"They need to be eaten,
you see."

"Huh?" I asked. We stood on a
large castle balcony, wait
i
n
g for a "crawly," whatever that was.
Sing was with us, along
with Bastille and her mother.
Australia had stayed behind
to run an errand for Grandpa Smedry, and my father had
d
isappeared into his rooms.
Apparently, he couldn't be
bothered by something as simple as the impending fall of
Mokia as a sovereign kingdom.

"Well, let me explain it this way
,”
Grandpa Smedry said,
hands behind his back as he looked out over the city.
“
A
number of centuries ago, the people realized that there were
just too many kingdoms.
Most were only the size of a city,
and you could barely go for an afternoon stroll without
passing through three or four of them!"

"I hear it was a real pain," Sing agreed.
"Every kingdom
had its own rules, its own culture, its own laws."

"Then the Librarians started conquering," Grandpa
Smedry explained.
"The kings rea
liz
ed that they were too
easy to pick off.
So they began to band together, joining
their kingdoms into one
,
making alliances."

"Often, that involved weddings of one sort or another,"
Sing added.

"That was during the time of our ancestor King
Leavenworth Smedry the Sixth," Grandpa continued.
"He
decided that it would be b
etter to combine our small king
dom of Smedrious with that of Nalhalla, leaving the
Smedrys free of all that bothersome reigning so that we
could focus on things that
were more important, like fight
ing the Librarians."

I wasn't sure how to react to that.
I was the heir of the
line
.
T
hat meant if our an
cestor
hadn't
given up the kingdom
, I'd have been directly in line for the throne.
It was a
little
bit like discovering that your lottery ticket was one
numb
er away from winning.

"We gave it away,
”
I said.
"All of it?"