Dragon Sword Read online

  “Hold on to your hat, kid — you’re about to get pitched.”

  “What do you mean, ‘pitched’?”

  “Our revered host is about to say a few words.”

  “LADIES AND GENTLEMEN!”

  He definitely wanted to be heard above the noise.

  “I’M CHESWICK TRIPPLEHORN, THE DIRECTOR OF THE MUSEUM, AND IT’S MY PLEASURE TO WELCOME YOU TO THE DE YOUNG!”

  “Come on,” Caen whispered. “Let’s sneak over and see Joe before he leaves.”

  “IT’S A DARK TIME IN THE WORLD, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN! A DARK TIME. WE DIDN’T KNOW HOW DARK WHEN WE CURATED THIS EXHIBITION. BUT NOW THAT THE WORST HAS HAPPENED — WELL, IT CAN ONLY GET BETTER FROM HERE ON!”

  There’s some applause, and I think — can it be?—I see Joe DiMaggio in the back, standing next to a pillar. He has his hands in his pockets, like he’s cold.

  “SO LET’S WIN THIS WAR FAST, AND LET’S START TONIGHT, WITH A LITTLE IMAGINATION AND MAGIC!”

  A little more applause. As we pass the Asian section, I see a whole display about the po. After I meet DiMaggio, I’m going to come back and look at it.

  “NOW, PLEASE JOIN ME IN THANKING THE TWO MUSICIANS BEHIND ME, ON LOAN FROM THE SAMUEL GRAVLOX ORCHESTRA— JOHN REESE ON VIOLIN AND DAN STERNING ON THE OBOE!”

  I stop dead in my tracks.

  Dan Sterning ... Dan the Oboe Man!

  “Hey, kid!” Caen doesn’t know why I’m suddenly walking in the other direction, but there’s no time to tell him.

  Ol’ Dan and the violin guy start playing a Christmas carol, the kings one —“We Three Kings of Orient Are”— except there are just two of them. I walk right up and grab Dan’s oboe and pull it out of his mouth.

  “Hey, what’s your problem!?”

  “Stay away from my mom ... banshee butt!”

  “What?”

  He didn’t even know he’d been insulted. “Banshee butt” was a name Andy and I came up with to razz each other in Barnstormers. Maybe it came out now because of all the po-talk. Or maybe it was dawning on me that everybody in the room — everybody I’d seen —was already banshee material —ghosts, spirits —by the time I was born. Including this guy who was after my mother.

  “What’re you…What mom?”

  “Margarite Sands! My mom hasn’t been

  ‘Franchon’ since she got married! To my dad!”

  “Margarite? She’s not married.” Dan stares at me. “She would have told me. Are you pre- tending to be her kid?”

  Pretending? That’s it. I officially hate this guy. Without thinking about it, I slam the oboe down on the floor.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I see a security guard hurrying over. And Herb Caen, too. Oh, great — now I’m gonna be in a newspaper!

  The guard grabs me around the waist.

  Dan just stands there, blinking. “Margarite…Margarite’s married?”

  “You bet she is!”

  “And you’re really her…?”

  “I’m her kid!” Oh, great, now everybody in 1941’s got me saying “kid.” And I guess I just blew the whole “teacher-student” cover.

  “Well, jeez, kid, I never —” He looks around the room. “Where is she?”

  “She’s with Gravlox! So I guess she’s doing a little better in the band than you are!”

  The guard pulls me away. “It’s all right, Mr. Sterning. I’ll throw this little runt out.”

  “Wait a minute. Let me talk to him,” says Dan, who just picked up his dented oboe.

  He puts his hand on my shoulder to draw me aside, but I jerk away.

  “It’s possible we have a little misunderstanding here,” he says.

  “That’s one way to put it.”

  “Did you say Margarite —”

  “My mother!”

  “Your mother is with Gravlox? Tonight?” “Yeah.”

  “But…” He looks around, frustrated. “But they’re not supposed…Did they go to the fort?”

  Of course, I don’t even know what “the fort” is, but I’m sure as heck not gonna tell this guy.

  “What’s it to you?” I ask.

  He’s not just frustrated now, but jumpy. Then he does about the last thing I was expecting: He lifts up his oboe, or what’s left of it, and blows, playing what almost sounds like another few bars of “We Three Kings.”

  Then something happens that’s even more unexpected: The lights go out. Now the museum is lit only by candles. It’s eerie, but kind of cool. I don’t have time to think about it, though, because there’s commotion—I hear voices and what sounds like shoving — and then the candles start getting tipped over. It’s pitch dark.

  Then comes the sound of breaking glass. And screaming.

  Chapter Eight

  Clyne: Zoo

  2019 C.E. November. Monday.

  I am in a place they call the zoo. A zoo is supposed to be a collection of different species, “animals” as they say here, which are put on display. But right now I seem to be the only object on view for my human keepers.

  They brought me here after capturing me on the roof of Sandusky-sire’s lab. I rode in the cold, dark hold of one of their air machines.

  Like the animals in a zoo, they have a species name for me, too: Troodon.

  I looked it up on one of their computing devices. A troodon is a type of Saurian — a “dinosaur”— that used to live on this Earth. Their theory is that I am an evolved version of one. Or more likely, the Earth Orange humans think, I am a “space alien,” even though it is they, of course, who live in the far reaches of space and time.

  “Are you invading us?” the female known as Thirty asked me.

  “Invade? Kkkk…taa!” She had it all wrong. “I simply wish to get back home before the school year is terminated and final marks are handed in.”

  “This can be like a school, too. We can learn from each other. I want you to trust me.” She smiled at me. “I’ve read the reports of what happened out at the Sandses’ lab, with Eli and the girl you were traveling with. I want to help get your friends back.”

  She wanted to help me, yet she was still called by her number. Thirty. On Saurius Prime, we are numbered only until we leave our community nests to undergo our Passage Calls, in which we get our life-names.

  If she didn’t qualify for a real name yet, she was probably still much too young to be out by herself. Perhaps she was being given some kind of test, and I should humor her to help her win high marks. “Back from ting! where?”

  “From wherever they’ve gone in time. Your friend Eli is supposed to be working for us.”

  “Who is ‘us’?”

  “I’m part of the government here. That’s all you need to know.”

  “In truth, young friend, there is much more I would love sktt! to know. Can you k-kk tell me what happened to the Saurian race here? And can you ascertain, please, whether I am still pk-pan! an outlaw?”

  “Why do you think you’re an outlaw, Mr.”— she glanced down at a screen where she appeared to keep some notes —“Klein. That’s an Earth name, too. Is it one you picked up here?”

  She said it wrong, not quite with a Saurian pronunciation. “Clyne,” I corrected her, as gently as I could.

  “Klein. Yes.” She nodded. “How did you pick that name? Did you meet someone named Klein?”

  “Yes, well. I would meet ‘Clyne’ tk-bng! in the Fifth Dimension only if I passed myself t-t-kh! coming while I was going. Or versa vice. And that would result from sloppy piloting and deduct points off pk-pk-pk! my final marks.”

  “The Fifth Dimension? Is that how you got here?”

  “Why, yes! How else kt! could I find an Earth so full of k-pt-chk! surprises?”

  “Were you trying to surprise us, Mr. Klein?” Here the one called Thirty leaned over to peer at me closely, as if I were a project in science class. “Were you here to arrange a sneak attack?”

  “Sneak attack?” It was a type of Earth Orange phrase I hadn’t heard before. Then I figured it
out. “Oh! p-p-pw! A shadow move! Like in Cacklaw!”

  Then Thirty appeared to grow very frustrated. She put down her stylus and stopped taking notes. “Like in war, Mr. Klein. When you’re done with your games, perhaps we’ll talk again.

  She exited the room, and I was escorted back to the quarters where they kept me locked up. Why did she get so upset if she knew that Cacklaw was a game? I was actually quite impressed — few mammals on Earth Orange appear to have heard of it.

  One time, she and the one called Howe gave me a bio-reconnoiter. I was tied to a table, with my eyes propped open. They poked my hide, clipped off bits of my claws and put them in sample jars, measured my tail, and looked at my tongue.

  Apparently Saurian medicine was a mystery to them, and I was their training ground.

  “We think,” Howe said, “that you are a troodon. One that evolved to be like us, with two legs for standing upright and a large brain. You would have been us, would have kept right on evolving, been this Earth’s top species, if that meteor hadn’t hit.” He was sweating a little bit, and I wasn’t sure why he was getting so mad, since I was the one who was restrained and getting prodded. “Do you get angry knowing our kind is in charge here?”

  If he meant that he and Thirty were actually the leaders of the humans, it wasn’t anger that I was feeling so much as increased nervousness.

  “Oh, we know what you are, all right. We just don’t know where you’re from. Our own past? Another planet? But we’ll figure it out. If you’re a scout for an invasion, if you came to steal the Earth from us, it won’t work. We’ll figure it out.”

  “Stealing k-k-tu! is strictly forbidden on pk! field trips!” In response, Howe tightened some of the straps to make it more difficult for me to speak.

  “Howe, maybe you need to take a few deep breaths. Perhaps he was ready to talk.”

  “Talk!” Howe bellowed back at Thirty. “He’s just playing mind games with us!”

  Games again! These two Earth Orange mammals had the strangest way of playing!

  Howe’s face turned a different color, just like the small, four-legged stickleplumes do on Saurius, and he stomped away, letting Thirty take over. “We won’t give up, you know,” she told me. “Our planet’s security is too impor- tant. We will eventually accommodate each other. One way or another.”

  Maybe she was hinting that eventually the games here would actually become fun. But I doubt it.

  I am now a “prisoner,” which is even more restrictive than being an outlaw. Prisoners are not permitted to play too many games. Aside from that, conditions, under the circumstances, are acceptable: They observe me, feed me oranges when I ask for them — and freshly chopped mammals, even when I don’t. Those they serve raw, which they incorrectly assume I like. They have yet to know the wonders of fern-wrapped meat cooked on hot volcanic rocks.

  They have also allowed me use of the crude knowledge and communication machine they refer to as “that twenty-year-old piece of junk.” They left some tools. It appeared this was a sneak test, a stealth quiz, the kind you hear about in the upper grades. They wanted to observe me perform a mechanical operation.

  So I fixed the machine.

  That excited them so much they gave me a stack of round flat discs to use, one called a World Book, another about dinosaurs, another about constellations. The machine basically reads information off the discs, and they’ve all been very interested to see what sort of research I can do with such primitive devices.

  At times, I am not quite sure if I am a prisoner, after all, or simply here to help them with their homework. They seem to be worried about some assignment they can’t discuss yet and are constantly whispering about among themselves. Perhaps another sneak test for me? Or are Howe and Thirty being given one by someone else?

  I mentioned this was a zoo. I think the humans keep other beings they consider strange, or perhaps even dangerous, here. But unlike the one where Eli and I crash-landed in Alexandria, here the inhabitants are not free to roam about.

  I hear them, though, when I’m moved around the grounds — other voices, not all of them human-, or even mammal-sounding. One time, passing a door, I saw what looked like a large, round black eye peering out at me. But I couldn’t be sure. It quickly pulled away from the grate. And I was hurried along.

  I’ve never really seen the other…prisoners? Or shall I say classmates? Whoever they are, they keep us all separate. I am taken out of my quarters once a day, into a space called “the yard.”

  “This place is for you to exercise. To move about. Do you understand?” The guards speak to me in a slow, deliberate cadence, as if I were still young enough to have only a number, too.

  “Yes. Can you understand me skt! as well?” I thought it was only courteous to make sure.

  “Sure, I under — hey, it doesn’t matter if I understand!”

  “It doesn’t?”

  “I’m supposed to ask you the questions!”

  I’m not sure what sort of research goes on here, or what kind of quarantine I’m under. But the mammals overseeing this oddly spliced-together institute — zoo-prison-school — are especially prickly and defensive. I wish Eli were here to explain more of his world to me.

  Or, perhaps, to explain more of me to his world.

  “Go on now, move! This is your fifteen minutes of fun! Run! Jump!” The guard prods me with his stick, and I start to move around the yard, taking a couple of flying leaps just to keep my hind-hoppers tuned up.

  During yard breaks, I also get to record notes like this into the altered lingo-spot. I hope eventually I can transfer these remarks to the proper forms and worksheets, so I can present this adventure as legitimate classwork.

  “Move along!” The guard doesn’t like me to slow down. I believe he considers it a kind of resistance.

  I jump some more, hopping from one ray of sunlight to another, making a small game of it for myself, imagining I’m working my way — with medium acceleration — through a fallen grid in Cacklaw. There’s a dome over most of the complex here. I flew over it, watching from the net that carried me under their roto-spinning flying machines, and could see that it’s designed to look like part of the surrounding hills to the world outside. Despite the camouflage, a few sections are crafted to let in true sunlight, which they use to help warm the area. Like a greenhouse, the dome keeps some of the heat from escaping.

  I’m jumping faster now, leaping across the yard, clearing several beams of sunlight at once. If I ever do get back, I may not become a top-stomper in Cacklaw, but with practice, I could be a proficient midstepper.

  I’m midstepping and bounding now, and extra guards have started to appear in the yard, standing around nervously with their hands on what I believe to be some kind of blasters. Apparently if I move either too slow or too fast, it’s cause for alarm.

  As I stomp, a quick shadow flickers by, like that made by a small winged Saurian, or one of the avian creatures here.

  But there’s nothing in the yard.

  Then I see another shadow flickering past the sunbeams. This time, though, it doesn’t go away. It grows.

  And it’s accompanied by a familiar humming music that sounds…like home. Perhaps an ancient harvest song — a chorus — that the gatherers would sing when they were out in the old forests, collecting mossy greens.

  The music grows louder. I stop practicing any kind of a midstep, and the guards unsheath their blasters. The shadow now covers the whole skylight — and crashes through it.

  Glass and metal rain down on us, and a ship, a very Saurian-looking ship, lowers itself into the yard.

  Alarms make their screech-waves, and blasters flash like small, frantic volcanoes. Looking up at the barred windows that ring the yard, I could almost swear by old Temm himself I see that strange, large, black eye peeping through one of the slits, before it vanishes again.

  But I don’t have time to think about it very long.

  Shots bounce off the ship, which lowers itself steadily toward m
e. Has another student come searching for me, to claim extra extra credit for bringing me back?

  More guards pour into the yard. Thirty is with them.

  They’re rolling out a large type of cannon, with coils around it. They’re very fond of particle and laser weapons on this planet, so perhaps it is a primitive destabilizer ray of some sort.

  I try to stay out of blast range as the door to the ship slides open. If the guards land a shot inside, it will be a glum welcome for whoever is piloting.

  But I suppose one can’t stay out of the line of fire forever. I aim for the vessel, going for the kind of jump a top-stomper could be proud of.

  The ship is too high. I miss.

  Landing hard on the ground, I roll over. I don’t get another chance to jump before the particle beam fires. Astonishingly, when it hits the ship, the vessel wobbles but seems to…absorb the energy.

  All the guards, and Thirty, stand still for a moment, wondering what’s just gone wrong. In that pause, I top-stomp again, just make the open ledge of the ship, holding on with my foreclaws.

  “K’lion?”

  A mammal voice I know. It’s Thea. She doesn’t pronounce my name quite right, either, but I don’t mind.

  “But how did you — ?” we ask each other at the same moment.

  There’s no time for an answer, of course. I pull myself in and the hatch slam-cracks shut behind me. Thea then makes one of the most stomper-like piloting moves I’ve ever witnessed: She tilts the ship vertically and shoots it out of the gap in the top of the dome before the zoo staff can regroup and start firing again.

  “I don’t believe —” Once again, we speak simultaneously. There’s so much to say, we can only start by lapsing into silence.

  Chapter Nine

  Eli: Yankee Clipper

  December 24, 1941 C.E.

  “To tell you the truth, kid, in the off-season I try to avoid crowds.” That’s Joe DiMaggio, and he’s actually talking to me.