In Which Kit Holds a Conference and Blade Learns the Perils of Opening Portals
Callette was deliberately late for Kit's conference. In the two months since the Pilgrim Parties had ended, Kit had taken to calling a conference twice or even thrice a week on Ways to Mend the World. When she finally strolled into Kit's shed, however, she found that she wasn't the last one to arrive.
Blade and Don lounged on a pile of cushions, while Elda painted her claws a garish shade of glittery gold. Kit was sticking more color-coded pins onto the huge map hanging on his wall.
"Where is everyone?" Callette asked.
Blade quickly answered before Kit could snarl at Callette for her tardiness. "Mum and Dad went off right after lunch to round up some more of the carnivorous sheep. Querida received a message right after she got here that those two demons had been spotted near the Marshes so she translocated off to exorcise them. Deucalion flew off after her to help. And Lydda doesn't seem to have come back from Tecahua Island yet."
"Let's begin this meeting already," said Kit. "We've wasted enough time. Elda, stop painting your nails and take notes. Don, report."
"I went through some more of Mr. Chesney's account books today," said Don, stretching lazily. "There was this one entry that looked rather suspicious. Here, I made a copy of it."
Kit took the piece of paper. "'Four exotic lions,'" he read. "'Eighty gold paid to Hassan of Aghreb.' That's a lot of money for only four lions."
"What exactly is an exotic lion?" asked Callette.
"That's what I was wondering," said Don. "Do you remember that outcry about those missing sphinxes six months ago? Four of them disappeared in the desert south of Aghreb. Their tribe couldn't find any trace of them. Well, that account entry for the lions is dated six months ago."
"You think this Hassan was selling sphinxes to Mr. Chesney?" said Callette.
"Sphinxes are sentient beings!" Blade cried.
"This bears checking up on," said Kit, placing a pink pin over Aghreb on his map. "Blade, you go interview this Hassan tomorrow. Good work, Don. Keep going though those books for evidence of more collaborators. Callette, you report."
"I finished making this magic detector." Callette showed them a gizmo with a screen on one side. "It measures how much magic is around you. Querida wants to use it to measure the exact amount of the magic drainage around Costamaret."
Lydda burst into the room before Callette could demonstrate the gizmo. "There you guys are. Did Kit call another conference?"
"Lydda!" Elda bounded over to Lydda. "Did you bring back any presents for me?"
"Give me a second!" Lydda placed the birdcage she was carrying on a table. Inside was a brilliant blue and yellow bird.
"What kind of bird is that?"
"What kind of bird is that?" squawked the bird.
Everyone jumped before rushing forward for a closer look.
"It's a macaw," said Lydda. "They're quite common in Tecahua Island. They're really smart, and they can talk. I figure Dad would want to study them and maybe incorporate them for the intelligent pigeons he's designing."
"It's beautiful," said Callette, trying to figure out how to create that pigment of blue. Ground-up aquamarines, maybe.
"Beautiful," agreed the bird.
Don and Blade spent the next ten minutes trying to teach the bird a list of very rude words, while the others rolled around the floor with laughter.
"Never mind about the bird," said Kit at last, finally getting his laughing fit under control. "Let's get this meeting back on track. Stop squawking, Elda."
Kit took the birdcage away from Don and hung it from a hook in the rafters. "Why are you late, Lydda? You should have been back by lunchtime."
"I stopped at Bardic College to see Shona," said Lydda calmly. "She took me out to lunch. Then I took a tour of Healers Hall and listened in on some lectures."
Lydda pulled a red and yellow fruit out of her bag. "Here, Elda. I got you this from Tecahua Island. It's a mango."
At that moment, there was an outburst of honking, mooing, squealing, and barking from outside. They all rushed out to see what had alarmed the animals but stumbled to a stop right outside the shed. Nine soldiers in beat up black armor ringed the door, six of them with drawn swords and three with a massive weighted net. Their eyes lit up in malicious anticipation as the sight of Blade and the griffins. In the distance, five more soldiers attempted to harness the horses in their paddock.
Don immediately flew to the roof. Or tried to because the soldiers threw the net over him before he got more than four feet into the air. The net brought him down and crashing into Callette.
Kit froze at the sight of the soldiers, feeling arrows hitting his chest and wing. Then he was tumbling over and over through the air before hitting the lake, the water closing over his head. He snapped out of the memory just in time to see the huge weighted net entangle Don and Callette.
Callette did not let this stop her. She jabbed her beak through an opening at one of the soldiers holding the net. A deep gash appeared on the man's face, and he cried out, letting go of the net.
Elda threw a stasis spell at a soldier heading toward Lydda with a sword. Meanwhile, Lydda cast a sleep spell at another of the soldiers holding the net. He collapsed in a heap, and Callette scrambled out from under the net and rushed toward another soldier, a fury of slashing talons. The soldier fell to the ground, bleeding profusely.
The first thing that Blade did once he recovered from the surge of panicked hatred at the sight of the soldiers was to heat up the hilts of the men's swords. Though the soldiers had dropped the swords cursing, they had merely pulled out truncheons. So he placed the strongest cold spell he could on the soldiers. This did not seem to do any good. The soldiers in the paddock gave up trying to harness the horses and instead ran to help their comrades.
Blade panicked at the sight of the reinforcements. He wanted them gone. He wanted them back in their own world. "Kit!" he shouted. "Power!"
Kit, who was tearing the net off of Don, understood immediately. He joined his power with Blade's using the power sharing technique Deucalion had taught them last week. Blade took their combined magic and threw open a portal to Mr. Chesney's world. For half a second, he could see a solid wall of dark water through the archway. Then the water was rushing through the portal. The water was ankle-high, then knee-high, and then waist-high before sweeping them all off their feet.
Lydda spun around and around in the current. She tried to get airborne, but her water-soaked wings were too heavy to lift off. The current was quickly sweeping her towards the paddock. Lydda calculated the velocity and angle of her approach and dove forward, grabbing hold of a fence post. She spotted Blade being swept towards her and grabbed him before he hit his head on the fence. "Do something!"
Blade spat out a mouthful of water. "I need your help," he panted. "Join power."
Blade showed Lydda the power sharing spell. He took their combined magic and focused on closing the portal, trying to remember how Querida had done it. It took him a few tries before he figured it out. The portal slowly shrank and finally disappeared with a small pop.
No more water poured through. The water already present spread out across Derkholm and grew shallower and shallower. Blade and Lydda waded through the ankle-deep water to the terrace, where everyone else was gathering. By the time they got there, Elda had already gleefully cast stasis spells on all the half-drowned, battered, and bruised soldiers.
"Did you see that?" Elda asked. "I figured out how to cast stasis spells by myself!"
"That's really impressive," said Blade.
Kit came out of his hut carrying the birdcage. "The bird is fine, not even wet," he said to Elda. "My map is ruined. It's a soggy mess of blotchy ink now."
"There's a good four inches of water in the house," Callette reported. "We should dry it up before the furniture is ruined."
A backbreaking hour followed, as Kit and Lydda cast drying spell after drying spell. The water left a fine layer of salt over everything, so Kit told Don had to dust off the furniture and sweep the floors. Blade tied up the soldiers, and Callette and Elda saw to the soaked and disgruntled animals. The geese and the pigs were smugly dry atop the roof, but the dogs, cows, and horses were soaked and odoriferous, especially to griffin noses. Blade sadly eyed all the dead fish everywhere and loosed the carnivorous sheep to clean up the mess.
When a disgruntled Querida returned from a fruitless search of the Marshes for the demon king and his consort, she found a marsh where Derk's lawns, plantations, and paddocks had been an hour ago. The kids looked exhausted but rather pleased with themselves.
"What happened?"
"Fourteen of the off-world soldiers tried to kill us and steal our horses," said Callette brightly. "But we have them tied up right here."
"Now there's only have eighty-two soldiers left to catch," said Don.
Querida eyed a dead fish by her feet. "But where did the water come from?"
"Blade opened an underwater portal to another world."
"I was trying to send the soldiers back to their own world," said Blade.
"Well, it could have been worse," said Querida sourly. "No doubt if Derk was here, he would have opened a portal straight to the demon realm."