Billy: Messenger of Powers Read online

  “But you wanted us to go to somewhere that we could almost be killed by a dragon first?” asked Billy slowly.

  Mrs. Russet frowned. “No. Artetha makes, on the whole, very good keys. Unfortunately, she is occasionally a bit sloppy with her Imbuement process, so once in a while you might end up getting sent somewhere you didn’t wish to go. The dragon Serba’s lair, for example, or the surface of the sun.” Mrs. Russet shrugged as though to say, “What can you do?”

  Billy lit up as he made a connection. “Was the frog in your room on the first day of school imboobed?”

  “Imbued. Yes it was.”

  “What did it do?”

  “That’s a bit complicated,” responded Mrs. Russet.

  “But the frog and the key are both magic?” asked Billy.

  “Well of course,” said Mrs. Russet. “Haven’t you been listening to anything I’ve been saying?”

  “And are you magic?”

  “If by that you are asking am I a Power, then the answer is yes,” said Mrs. Russet.

  “Then is everyone here at Powers Island also magic?” asked Billy.

  “Yes,” said the teacher.

  “But everyone I’ve seen, all the people in the line downstairs, they all looked…normal.”

  “Good heavens, Billy, what would you expect us to look like?” asked Mrs. Russet, a glimmer of amusement in her eyes. “We wouldn’t get along so well in the rest of the world if we wore Greek togas or long robes and pointy caps that had stars all over them, now would we? Powers are all human beings. Or at least, most of them are. And those that are human all live in the world the same as you, and have jobs, and families, and everything else that makes a person a person.” She shrugged, apparently suddenly realizing that she had dropped into what Billy thought of as his teacher’s Lecture Mode. “At any rate, as an answer to your question, yes, everyone here is magic.”

  “So…,” Billy gulped. “Am I magic?”

  Mrs. Russet paused, seeming unsure for the very first time since Billy had known her.

  At that moment, the elevator dinged. “Three thousand seven hundred sixty-eighth floor, Glimmer Detection and Decisionary Department,” it intoned. Sure enough, it sounded piqued and offended.

  “We’re here,” said Mrs. Russet, and stood to leave as the elevator door whooshed sulkily open, leaving Billy’s question unanswered.

  Billy followed her into a hall, and couldn’t help but gasp. The hall seemed to go on forever. In fact, it extended so far that it actually dwindled to a pinpoint and disappeared in both directions.

  More than that, though, the wall on one side was made of fire. It was bright and flickering, a living flame, but though Billy stood within mere feet of it, he could not feel any heat. He put a hand toward the wall, to see how close he could get to it before he could feel any warmth, but his hand was slapped away at the last second.

  “Don’t!” shouted Mrs. Russet. “You’ll get it dirty.”

  “But…it’s fire,” protested Billy.

  “And very clean fire,” agreed Mrs. Russet. “Now come along.”

  Billy walked behind Mrs. Russet’s quick feet as she sped down the hall. He looked to the other wall, the one not made of fire, and discovered it was a translucent blue. It looked familiar, but he couldn’t place it. Then, suddenly, a large dark shape appeared in the wall nearby. It was indistinct at first, then its outline slowly sharpened as the shape came closer. Finally, the shape was completely clear. It was an enormous blue whale, about two hundred feet long, swimming through the wall and keeping exact pace with Billy and Mrs. Russet, one great eye staring unblinkingly at them. Billy glanced at Mrs. Russet, but she seemed to be paying no attention to the boy for the moment. So he reached out a hand and gingerly touched the blue wall. His fingers came back dripping wet.

  “Is that the ocean?” he asked, awed.

  “Of course it is,” said Mrs. Russet. “What else would have a great blue whale in it?” She nodded curtly at the whale, which dipped its forequarters in return.

  The whale then turned its huge eye to look squarely at Billy. Billy felt at a loss for a moment, unsure of what the proper protocol was when being stared at by a blue whale through a wall of water. He watched the whale for a moment as he walked, still trying to think of what he should do, if anything. Finally, he decided to follow Mrs. Russet’s lead, and slowly and respectfully he bowed his head toward the leviathan. The whale seemed to consider this for a moment, then it winked its great eye at Billy and swam off again.

  “What would happen if I put my head against the wall?” asked Billy, hurrying to catch up to Mrs. Russet.

  “I shouldn’t advise it,” was Mrs. Russet’s only reply.

  Now that he knew that one wall was a raging—though cold and contained—inferno, and the other somehow contained an entire ocean in its structure, Billy wondered what the ceiling would look like if he looked up.

  So he did.

  And Billy saw something few people had seen from ten feet away and lived to tell about: the inside of a hurricane. Not the eye of a hurricane, the calm area in the center of the swirling winds where things were quiet and stable, but the actual hurricane itself. Billy could actually see masses of rocks, cars, pieces of buildings, and even some people being thrown about at great speeds directly above them, though for some reason none of the people up there seemed frightened. Quite the opposite in fact: Billy saw that they were all laughing and seemed almost to be dancing in the gusts and eddies that flung them about like autumn leaves in the wind.

  The forces at work had to be tremendous, and yet, as with the wall of fire and the strangely contained sea to his right and left, Billy could feel nothing of the great forces only a few feet away.

  “What is this place?” Billy whispered. He asked it of himself, forgetting in his awe that Mrs. Russet was even there, not expecting any kind of answer. But to his surprise, she did answer. And to his greater surprise, the answer she gave actually made some sense to him.

  “It is a Convergence,” she said. “A place where four great lines of energy come together, drawn here by the Powers who wield and shape them.” She gestured to the wall at her right. “Fire.” Then to her left: “Water.” She pointed up and said, “The great Wind,” and then down at their feet and whispered, “and the ever-growing power of Life.”

  Billy looked down for the first time—he had been so captivated by what was happening above and to his sides he had not taken care to watch where he was walking. Now he saw that below him were what looked like enormous leaves from some great tree, but so tightly overlapping that Billy could feel no difference in the floor’s level where one leaf left off and another began. “What kind of leaves are they?” he asked, still hurrying to keep up with Mrs. Russet’s rapid gait.

  “They are the leaves of the Earthtree, just as what you see above is the Earthwind, and to the right and left you see Earthsea and Earthfire. Four of the six Elements in their rawest, most unrefined forms. We Powers take these Elements and use them to do what you call magic. They are the source of our strength.”

  She stopped suddenly, scrutinizing Billy as though for the first time. “Are you…closer to any of these? The gray wind, the red fire, the blue water, or the green life below you?”

  Billy looked down. “Well, I’m standing on the plants, so I guess I’m closest to them—”

  “Not physically close, you dolt. I mean do you feel as though you have any sort of special connection to one of these? Do you like one of them more than the other, perhaps?”

  Billy looked at the walls of water and flame again, the swirling tornado of a ceiling, the veined green leaves below. Then, slowly, he shook his head.

  Mrs. Russet looked a bit disappointed. To Billy’s surprise, he found that he didn’t want her to be disappointed in him. She was stern, even rude at times, but…she was also fair. She cared. She had been a good history teacher in school, making sure—by intimidation if necessary—that each student learned as much as he or she possibly coul
d. Now Billy sensed that she was trying to teach him at this very moment, and that the things she was trying to teach were even more important than when and how Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo. He just couldn’t understand what those monumentally important things were.

  “Well, no matter,” she said. “We’ll come to the answers soon enough.”

  She turned and strode off again. Billy followed her in silence. Occasionally a school of fish would swim by to his left, or he would glimpse a roof flinging through the storm above. Once he thought he glanced strange, shimmering, but faintly human shapes in the flames beside him. Only the leaves below were silent, still, and somberly immobile.

  Suddenly, after what seemed like a year of marching, Mrs. Russet stopped. “We’ve arrived,” she said. Billy was grateful for this announcement: his feet ached from walking, and he had a stitch in his side that was rapidly increasing in intensity. At the same time, though, he couldn’t help being bewildered at Mrs. Russet’s decision to stop. To his eyes, this part of the hall looked the same as had every other part of it.

  “We’ve arrived where?” he asked.

  “At your Determination,” she answered. She pulled a small stone from her pocket and clenched it in her fist. A moment later, the stone expanded, lengthening out and increasing in size until it was a long staff of clearest crystal.

  “Stand back now, Mr. Jones,” said Mrs. Russet. Billy moved quickly back about five feet, and as he did so the old woman struck the end of her crystal staff against the leafy floor. The resulting sound was quite unexpected. Billy had expected to hear a dull thud, the sound one would normally hear when dropping a rock to a spot of grassy ground. Instead, a clear, bell-like tone reverberated up and down the corridor. It bounced off the walls, back and forth and up and down, changing in tone until it had traveled the entire range of a musical scale, like the most beautiful, voiceless song that Billy had ever heard. The sound dissipated until the song was no more, but it faded so slowly that Billy couldn’t tell the exact moment when the beautiful song ended and the silence of the corridor began.

  A long moment passed, during which neither he nor Mrs. Russet spoke.

  Then a pair of legs dropped down into Billy’s view.

  He looked up to see a kindly-faced old man floating down from the maelstrom in the ceiling, landing gently in front of Mrs. Russet. The man seemed to be around the same age as Mrs. Russet, but neither stern nor sour as she could be. Rather, he seemed more like Billy had always imagined Santa Claus: eternal youth clothed in an old and happily chubby body.

  The man wore clothing, Billy was sure, but he couldn’t see exactly what kind of clothing it was, because from the neck down the man seemed to be dressed in wind: a swirling cloud of gray and gusting air that obscured what he was wearing and made him seem larger than he actually was. The man wore a piece of the storm above, and had brought it down into the hall with him.

  The instant he landed before Mrs. Russet, the old man grinned, deep gray eyes twinkling. “Lumilla,” he said, and bowed a sweeping bow before her.

  “Tempus,” replied Mrs. Russet, nodding her head.

  “I’d ask if I might kiss your hand, but my ears are still ringing from the tongue-lashing you gave me last time I dared that question,” said the wind-clothed man, Tempus. He turned to Billy. “And who have we here?”

  “Who indeed?” whispered a voice. Billy, Mrs. Russet, and Tempus all turned to see another man enter the hall, this one stepping out of the wall of flame to Billy’s right. Like Tempus, the man was clothed. And also like the wind-wreathed Tempus, the newcomer’s clothing could not quite be seen. He was ringed in flame up to his neck, but the fire light dimmed as he stepped away from the wall and approached them. At last, it seemed to extinguish completely as he moved away from the wall, though Billy could still see the barest hint of a spark in the man’s piercing eyes.

  “Hello, Vester,” said Tempus, holding out his hand in greeting.

  Vester ignored Tempus’s outstretched hand. He knelt next to Billy. He looked like a young man, in his early twenties perhaps, good looking and tall, with wavy brown hair of the kind that Billy wished he could have. The man was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt that said “Los Angeles Fire Department” across it, and just as Billy wished he could have the man’s hair, he also looked longingly at the man’s thick arms and muscled chest which fairly exploded through his t-shirt. Someday, he thought. Someday I’ll look like that, and I won’t need Blythe to protect me anymore. Instead, I’ll protect her.

  Then on the heels of that thought came another: Who am I kidding?

  The man who had walked out of flame looked at Billy for a long time, then the corners of his lips perked up ever so slightly before he stood and took Tempus’s hand. “Sorry, my friend,” said Vester to Tempus. The fireman looked at Billy. “I was surprised to see Billy here, that’s all.”

  Both Billy and Mrs. Russet started. “You know him?” asked Mrs. Russet in surprise.

  “No,” Vester said to her. “But I work with Mr. Jones, who is a paramedic in the fire department.” He looked at Billy. “I was in his ambulance once. Did you know he has a picture of you taped to his dashboard? You’re swimming in the picture. In the ocean, as I recall.”

  Billy’s eyes widened. He remembered his mom taking that picture just the last summer, on a family trip to the beach. His father hadn’t been able to be there, working as he so often was. His mom had taken a picture of Billy flying head over heels in a crashing wave, laughing as he struggled to his feet, covered in seaweed. “For your father,” she had laughed.

  Billy didn’t know what surprised him more: the fact that this strange young man who could walk through fire knew his father, or that his often distant-seeming father had a picture of Billy in his ambulance, where he could see it while he worked.

  Vester looked with apparent concern at Billy. “You all right?” Billy nodded mutely. Vester smiled, a reassuring, comforting smile. “It looked like you were having a good time in that picture.”

  Yet another voice was now heard, this one thick and phlegmatic, as though the speaker had a serious cold. “Of course he was having a good time. How could you not have a good time when in the water?”

  Billy looked over and saw a man hanging in the wall of water, his hair moving slowly back and forth in the invisible currents that flowed through the great Earthsea.

  The man stepped out of the water and into the hall. Billy looked at the man’s feet as he entered the hall, expecting him to leave a wet trail behind him, but he didn’t. His feet—and the rest of him, including his impeccable three-piece suit—were perfectly dry. Only his voice remained thick and unpleasantly wet. He looked at Billy. But where Tempus had looked at Billy with amusement and Vester had looked at him in a comforting and familial manner, this man’s look was cold and deep as a midnight sea. “You are unDetermined,” he announced gravely, more than a hint of distaste in his expression.

  Tempus laughed. “I’m always surprised that you can know that sort of thing right off, Wade.”

  Wade looked at Tempus with contempt. “I am a Power of water. I see the boy’s blood, and the blood tells much.”

  Billy shivered internally, unnerved by this aloof man talking coldly of his blood.

  “Well,” said Vester, apparently sensing Billy’s discomfort. “We’re just about all here, then, aren’t we?”

  “Almost,” said Tempus, seeming to laugh even as he said this one word. “Just our favorite lass and we’ll be ready.”

  “Ready for what?” squeaked Billy.

  Mrs. Russet stepped toward him and put a comforting hand on his shoulder. “All will be explained in a moment, Mr. Jones.”

  “Mr. Jones?” came a voice, and Billy’s skin crawled. He knew that voice. Or at any rate, he knew a voice very much like it. He turned behind him and saw a woman walking toward them. She was dressed all in black, a long black dress that accentuated the exaggerated sway of her hips as she walked, elegant black gloves that extended all the way
to her elbows, and a string of black pearls that hung on a long white neck that was partially obscured by her thick black hair.

  His eyes were drawn for a moment to a huge dark broach pinned on the side of her dress. It was a beetle, one of those types he saw in movies about mummies who came alive and killed folks. Usually with the help of such beetles. The beetle broach made Billy feel sick to his stomach.

  “Mr. Jones?” said the woman again, drawing Billy’s gaze to her eyes. Billy’s skin continued to try to pry itself loose from his skeleton as she approached. She had green eyes. Green eyes that were very familiar.

  “This is Eva Black,” said Mrs. Russet. And then, almost unnecessarily, for Billy already suspected what she was about to say, she added, “Cameron Black’s mother.”

  Mrs. Black stood close in front of Billy, eyeing him with what he thought was amused disdain. “Mr. Jones, I’ve heard so… much… about you.” Then her expression of disdain turned to one of cold rage as she said, “You hurt my boy today.”

  Billy’s skin stopped trying to run away without him and instead now felt as though it had frozen solid. He tried to say something, but nothing came out of his twitching mouth. Mrs. Black smiled and looked at Wade, the man who had come from the seawall. “UnDetermined?” she asked him, nodding toward Billy. The water Power nodded, and with that Mrs. Black turned to Mrs. Russet. “So that’s why you called us, Lumilla?”

  Mrs. Russet nodded. Mrs. Black smiled delicately, as though contemplating eating a rich chocolate truffle or drinking a cup of cocoa on a cold winter evening. Then she said the most horrifying words Billy had ever heard: “It will be a pleasure killing you, young man.”

  Billy didn’t know what to say or do. He wanted to hide, but there was nowhere to hide in this hallway. And besides, he knew that running would be the wrong thing to do, a useless gesture.

  On the other hand, this woman had just said she was going to kill him!