Billy: Messenger of Powers Read online

  “Stand up, Mr. Jones,” she said with her old sternness. Billy found that strangely comforting. Yes, he had by all accounts been killed. Yes, the Powers apparently had broken their promise that nothing bad would happen. Yes, they appeared to be in a cave deep under a mountain with no apparent way to get out. But at least Mrs. Russet was still as prickly as a cactus wearing a barbed wire skirt, so some things were still normal.

  Billy stood. “What do we do now?” he asked. He looked at Mrs. Russet. “You said you were a Power of Earth. So can’t you, like, make a hole open up, or snap your fingers and poof some stone stairway into existence?”

  “Young man, I never ‘poof’ anything,” she said indignantly. Then her expression softened. “But normally, yes, I could control the Earthessence and make it lift us from this place to the surface.”

  “Why don’t you do that then?” asked Billy in what he hoped was a helpful tone.

  Mrs. Russet frowned. “Because I can’t. Something is stopping me.”

  “Stopping you, Lumilla?” asked Tempus incredulously. “But… you’re one of the Great Powers. You of all people should be able to—”

  “Yes, Tempus, I am well aware of what I am and what I should be able to do,” snapped Mrs. Russet. “But the fact remains that I don’t seem to have access to my powers here. Something is blocking me. Something that I’ve never experienced or even heard of.”

  “What about you, Vester?” asked Tempus. “Can you bend your Element to blast us out of here?”

  Vester shook his head. “Not even if I had that kind of power at my control in the first place—I’m no Lumilla. But we’re all blocked,” he responded. He nodded at the greenery that sheathed Ivy. “See?” Billy noticed for the first time that the vines sheathing the oldish young—or was it youngish old?—woman were wilting and brown, as though they had gone too long without water or sunlight. Vester continued, “And look at you,” he said, pointing at Tempus’s outrageous clothing. “You’ve lost your wind.”

  Tempus looked at his beach shorts and magically moving Hawaiian shirt, his knobby knees and elbows still aquiver from his ordeal. He turned an embarrassed look to the group, shrugging as he said, “At least they’re comfortable.”

  Then the seriousness of the situation seemed to bear in on the man of the Wind. “Then…then we’re trapped,” he whispered.

  “Trapped?” asked Billy. “For how long?”

  “Unless something changes,” replied Mrs. Russet, “I’d have to guess,” her eyes narrowed to slits as though she was performing some complex calculation in her mind, “forever.”

  “Forever?!” Billy fairly shouted the word.

  “Well, not forever,” granted Mrs. Russet. “Assuming we are under a mountain, erosion and the natural movement of the strata will likely bring us to the surface at some point. Say, a few thousand centuries or so.”

  Billy felt his knees go weak again. “But,” he stammered. “But, we can’t be here for a few thousand centuries. We just can’t! It’s my birthday!” As soon as the words came out, he knew how ridiculous they sounded. Like a man in front of a firing squad asking for a reprieve because he would miss his favorite TV show if they killed him.

  Tempus, too, seemed to appreciate the absurdity of the moment. He chuckled. Then guffawed. Then laughed out loud. A moment later, Vester joined in, and then Billy, too, started laughing in spite of himself. Ivy chuckled daintily, and even Mrs. Russet managed to stop actively frowning.

  Then the cave shook, a huge, rolling movement that reminded Billy of some of his least-favorite carnival rides. The ground bobbed up and down, and everyone struggled to remain upright.

  This is what an earthquake feels like when you’re inside it, thought Billy, and not just sitting in a room a few thousand feet above it. He wondered if he was going to die—again—in the next few seconds as the cave inevitably collapsed under the pressure of the shifting rock all around them. The way things were going, it seemed likely.

  But he didn’t die. In fact, quite the opposite happened. With a final heave, a wide rift cracked open on one side of the cave. The crack widened, bright light streaming through it as it grew. A moment later the cave stopped moving. Mrs. Russet moved toward the crack, which was taller than a man and about two feet wide. She gestured for the group to follow.

  They did, Vester holding onto Ivy with one arm and guiding Billy with the other as they all stepped through the crack.

  And found themselves on a beach.

  Billy looked behind him in time to see that they had come out of a huge rock, fifty feet to a side. As he watched, the crack through which they had come sealed itself off, the sound of stone scraping on stone loud and dry in the still air. Then the stone sank down into the sand with a rumble, lower and lower, foot by foot, until the beach sand covered it up and there was no trace it had ever existed there at all.

  “We’re at the Lagoon,” whispered Ivy.

  Mrs. Russet nodded. Then she dug her feet into the sand she was standing on and closed her eyes. She smiled. “Can you feel it?” she asked.

  Billy watched as the other three Powers also closed their eyes. “Our powers aren’t being blocked anymore,” said Vester with a sigh of relief. He pulled a matchbook out of his pocket, and struck a match. He touched the flame with a fingertip, and when he drew back his hand the flame moved off the head of the match, staying on his finger. As Billy watched, the flame took on the shape of a tiny horse, which pranced and reared about Vester’s palm. Vester smiled, and the stallion whinnied in return. It sounded like a miniature explosion. Vester held out his arm, and the fire-horse ran up its length and then lay down on its tiny haunches, resting on Vester’s shoulder.

  “Yes,” nodded Tempus. He drew in a great breath, and then exhaled. A miniature tornado came from his mouth, picking up water from the nearby waves and creating a waterspout about a foot in diameter that swirled up a few feet before losing cohesion and disappearing. A moment later, gray wind coalesced around his vacation outfit. Billy—and everyone else—breathed a sigh of relief at that.

  Tempus turned to Billy. “I think you have some explaining to do, my boy.”

  “But, but I didn’t—I mean, I don’t think I did anything,” stammered Billy.

  “He was dead, Tempus. Remember?” said Mrs. Russet. “At least for part of what happened. So he’s not likely to be able to answer any of our questions.” She paused, frowning. “Still, I think this merits a trip, especially given what was happening to you in the cave, Tempus.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Tempus. “I don’t remember anything until all of you were looking at me and then a second later we ended up here. You said I was knocked out.”

  “I also said you started screaming,” Mrs. Russet reminded him.

  “You don’t remember what you said?” asked Ivy, surprise clear on her face.

  “What I said?” Tempus’s confusion visibly continued to grow. “What are you talking about, Ivy?”

  “He doesn’t remember,” murmured Vester to Mrs. Russet.

  She nodded in agreement, then said to Tempus, “You were Prophesying, Tempus. You were saying, ‘He is coming. He is here.’”

  “Who’s coming? Who’s here?” asked Tempus.

  “Exactly what I’d like to know,” responded Mrs. Russet. “And that’s why we’re going to take a trip. I think we have to tell the Council what’s happened here. To see if anyone else has Prophesied, or if anything else unusual happened on Powers Island during Billy’s Gleaning.”

  She turned to face Billy. He fidgeted under the force of her stare. “Because of what happened, we couldn’t tell if you Glimmered or not, Mr. Jones. But regardless of that, one thing is certain: what happened during your Gleaning has never happened before, to anyone.”

  “You’re forgetting something,” said Vester quietly. All eyes turned to face him. “Tempus didn’t just say ‘He is coming, he is returning.’ At the end, the last thing Tempus said was ‘He is here.’” The fireman turned to Billy. “And I
don’t think he was talking about me.”

  “An Object of Prophecy,” whispered Ivy, awe clear in her voice as she gazed at Billy.

  Mrs. Russet pursed her lips. “All the more reason to get this before the Council.” She picked up a handful of the sand below them, then blew on it. It swirled in her palm, drawing more sand from the beach below. The mass grew and grew, until finally it took the shape of a long flat plate the size of a small boat or car. Its shape shifted fluidly as more sand swept up to join it. Billy felt like he was watching a sand sculpture build itself.

  At last, the lines of the sculpture solidified into an aerodynamic shape that reminded Billy of a high-powered race car. Five deep grooves or slots marked its topside, but other than that the shape was featureless. Clearly its maker didn’t care one bit for unnecessary decoration or complexity, but nonetheless Billy got the impression that it was a ship of some kind, and he suddenly realized that the grooves on top of the craft were deep enough and about the right size and shape to fit one seated person.

  “Vester?” Mrs. Russet asked. Vester nodded, then touched the sand mass. Fire ringed it, a flash of light so bright and heat so sharp and intense that Billy was sure his eyebrows must have been singed off.

  What was left after he blazing heat died down was a craft of perfectly transparent glass, glowing bright red with the heat of Vester’s Fire.

  “And Tempus?” Mrs. Russet continued. Tempus raised his hands, and a cold breeze came from nowhere, cooling the glass structure. The wind then warmed, and swirled around the group on the beach.

  Suddenly, Billy felt the same wind like strong arms beneath his own, lifting him bodily onto the glass vessel, and placing him gently in one of the deep grooves in its surface. Sure enough, the groove was actually a seat of some kid. Billy expected the glass would be hard and uncomfortable, but found it to be the opposite: it molded to him as though designed specifically with his body in mind.

  The wind stayed with him, holding him fast to the surface of the strange ship like an invisible seatbelt as Mrs. Russet, Vester, Ivy, and lastly Tempus himself floated into position on the glass vehicle.

  “Everyone ready?” asked Tempus. No one answered. “Then here we go. Next stop, the center of Powers Island and a meeting with the Council.”

  The Windwalker shuddered a bit when he said the last bit about “meeting with the Council.”

  Billy felt a thrill of fear, communicated to him by Tempus’s own clear nervousness at being near the Council, whatever that was.

  But a moment later, Billy’s fear was gone, replaced by total panic as the glass ship lifted high into the sky above the peaceful Lagoon. It lurched forward, and Billy suddenly knew what “fast” was. It wasn’t a car, or a train, or even a Mach-speed fighter jet.

  It was a glass craft, high above a mysterious island, speeding toward something Billy could not even guess at.

  The great glass vessel streaked high above the island, allowing Billy a view of the entirety of it. Powers Island appeared to be fairly small, only a few miles from side to side. In the middle of it was a structure so tall and wide that he knew it must be the place he had first appeared when he came here. The tower was made of huge stones, set so closely together that Billy suspected that no cement or mortar was needed to hold them together. And the tower was mind-rendingly tall, so tall in fact that it eventually disappeared from view, because it went so high that it disappeared into the middle of a swirling mass of turbulent clouds that covered that portion of the island. Long, thick vines wrapped around the tower, the living branches of what Billy now knew was the Earthtree supporting the impossibly tall edifice.

  Billy looked down over the side of the glass ship. Actually, he looked through it: so perfectly clear was the glass that he might as well have been floating on thin air.

  As he had done in the elevator, Billy was moving so fast he couldn’t make out many details. Much of Powers Island was covered by small forests, dotted here and there by miniature mountain ranges that thrust up from the body of the island like skipping stones on the surface of a pond.

  There was also an impossible range of weather occurring on the island, Billy saw: on one end of it a fierce blizzard raged, on another a hurricane swirled in one confined space. Still another spot was host to a lightning storm, and the rest of the island gleamed in the deep burnished glow of sunlight.

  There were houses, too. Billy glanced small concentrations of buildings, like small towns or villages. From his vantage point, they mostly looked normal, although Billy guessed that most small town he was aware of wouldn’t occasionally see someone fly skyward on a gust of air, then zoom off to cavort and play in a nearby tornado.

  The glass airship banked suddenly, and Billy would have thrown up if he had had anything in his stomach. He was silently thankful that Mrs. Russet had earlier turned down the elevator’s offer of snacks. He wasn’t sure what a “Shakka-Shakka Shake” or a “Blue Lightning Crumpet” would look like after being barfed all over the side of an invisible glass aircraft, but he guessed it wouldn’t be pretty.

  The crystalline craft was now hurtling directly toward the great tower at the center of Powers Island. The building loomed larger and larger in front of Billy. He gulped as it neared, because he suddenly realized that there were no windows or docks or whatever might be a good way for the ship he was in to actually get inside the tower.

  He looked away from the huge structure that was rapidly approaching, and found himself looking down at a pair of what appeared to be men made of rock that were punching each other near the base of the tower. He was reminded of the Rock-em-Sock-em Robots he’d seen on television: two little robots in a boxing ring that kids could “fight” with until one of the robots’ heads popped off. Those robots, however, had been only a few inches tall. The rock monsters below were well over one hundred feet tall, and the sound of their crushing blows was enormous. Billy winced each time the wrecking-ball of a fist of one giant would impact the body or face of the other. Below that noise, he could hear faint yells, and realized that the giants were standing in the middle of a Coliseum-like arena, with what looked like thousands of people shrieking in excitement at the spectacle in their midst.

  “What is that?” he screamed over the roar of the wind all around them.

  Vester looked down. “Boxing match,” he replied.

  Just then, Billy heard something like a sonic boom. He looked at the rock-boxers and saw one of them hit the other with a powerful uppercut that sent the losing giant’s head right off its shoulders. The head—which looked as huge as that of the Statue of Liberty—flew directly upward, propelled by the enormous force of the blow.

  Billy inhaled in terror as he realized that the head was on a course that would intercept the glass craft. He looked around in panic, but no one else in the ship seemed particularly concerned. Mrs. Russet and Ivy were having a quiet but intense-seeming conversation in the front of the ship, Vester was shouting what sounded like congratulations to the winning rock giant, and Tempus was apparently asleep, his eyes closed and elephantine snores coming from his open mouth.

  Billy’s eyes narrowed as the giant decapitated head sped toward them. He inadvertently hunched his shoulders up around his ears, certain he was about to die yet again.

  But at the last second, there was an enormous explosion as the flying head burst into a million fragments. Each tiny piece of rock hung in the air for a split second, then each of those pieces transformed from rock to flame, creating a sphere of fireworks that lit up the sky before trailing slowly downward.

  “Way to go, Polonium!” shouted Vester, leaning precariously out over the side of the crystalline ship. He pumped his arms wildly. Put a soda can in his hands and surround him with a few college buddies and he would look like he was watching a pay-per-view sporting event on TV. He leaned back in and smiled at Billy. “Now that’s how you win in style,” he said.

  Billy was about to ask what exactly he had just seen, but he only got as far as “What was th
—?” before going silent and clutching the side of the ship in terror.

  With his attention drawn to the bizarre spectacle below, and then their brush with Death by Giant Head, Billy had momentarily forgotten the reason he looked down in the first place. He remembered now, however, as he saw that the glass ship was mere feet away from the huge, solid tower, heading at crushing speed at a blank wall, and showing no sign of stopping.

  He started to scream, but the scream was left behind as the ship banked sharply upward, impossibly fast, and now they were traveling parallel to the line of the tower, at a ninety degree angle to the earth below, vertical as a rocket escaping the planet’s atmosphere.

  Billy kept screaming. It seemed the only really appropriate thing to do. He screamed as long as he could, then when he ran out of breath, he inhaled and screamed some more.

  He ran out of breath again, and inhaled to scream still more, but at that moment Tempus appeared to finally awake. “That’s enough of that,” he murmured, and waved a hand.

  Billy screamed. But this time, no sound came out. He knew he was hollering and shrieking—he could even feel himself grow hoarse with the effort. But no sound whatever escaped his lips. He stopped screaming his silent scream a moment later, and chanced a glance below them.

  The ground was thousands of feet away. Miles below them. It receded farther and farther, faster and faster. Powers Island itself shrank to half its size, then a fourth, then an eighth. Then it contracted still further until it was a mere pinprick in the ocean, and then finally disappeared altogether. At that very instant, Billy felt something wet and cloying all around him. A bright flash illuminated everything, and he realized that they were flying through the roiling storm he had earlier seen ringing the tower, keeping it from being viewed above a certain height.

  Electricity crackled in the air, lightning crashing within what seemed like inches of the ship. Still completely silenced by Tempus’s spell, Billy couldn’t give voice to his fright, but continued to look around in terror.