to the break in the cement wall that was the entrance the revivers had created.
I never saw a reviver. Or Elli, the Traveler. It didn’t matter. I wasn’t there to learn about Quillan. I came for weapons. I found them in a long-forgotten store deep within the mall. It hurts me to say that no revivers were there to guard them. It was another sign that the revival had failed. They no longer needed their weapons.
But I did. I found a stack of the six-foot-long, black metal rods. Dado killers. I didn’t know what they were made out of, or why they worked. All I knew was that when you impaled a dado with one of those rods, it neutralized its power source. The result? Dead dado.
I stood looking at the pile of weapons, wondering why I had bothered to come. We were about to fight a war against thousands of dados. If it came down to using those rods, the war would be lost. Still, using weapons like those was all I knew. Seeing Alder instructing Siry made me realize that. I guess you could say that having them was a confidence builder. I needed all the confidence I could get. I grabbed a dozen of the lightweight weapons and headed back for the flume.
I knew getting them back to the flume would be risky. If a security dado spotted me, I’d be done. I camouflaged the rods as best I could with a rotten old blanket that had been tossed aside by a reviver. With luck, people would think I was carrying lengths of wood. Or brooms. Or skis. (Yeah, right.) Or anything besides dado- killing weapons. When I got to the surface, I kept close to the buildings, trying to be invisible. At one point I saw two security dados marching toward me. My stomach fell. It suddenly felt like a very stupid idea to have gone to Quillan. I had risked the entire battle just to give myself an ounce of comfort. I held my breath.
The dados walked right past me.
My trip back to Denduron was uneventful. I changed back into my leather clothing at the gate and jumped into the flume. In the cave on Denduron I placed the pile of weapons at the side of the flume, got right back into the dygo, and made my way down the mountain. In all, I was gone for only a few hours. Nobody knew I had left. Not even Alder and Siry. I had taken a big risk going to Quillan, but I was glad I did it.
I didn’t know how to measure time exactly on Denduron. If I were to guess, I’d say we were on that territory for about three weeks. I was beginning to think it was going to be for nothing. If the tak was deeper than the shallow tunnels we had been digging, it meant we had to create a much more complex mining operation to get the miners down deep. It would also mean spending lots of time down there, and I didn’t want to risk poisoning these hard-working guys. After weeks of coming up empty, I started to face the possibility that we would have to battle the dados without tak…
When we saw the first telltale streak of red. The miners gathered to inspect the possible find. Rellin dug out a piece of the red dirt with his fingers and rolled it into a small ball. He walked back to the mouth of the tunnel, and with everyone watching, he flung it at a rock ledge. Boom! The rock disintegrated, creating a small avalanche of stones. It was so loud, my ears rang. When the air cleared, Rellin turned to me and smiled. I in turn looked to Siry.
“That,” I said, “is tak.”
Siry looked stunned. “Maybe we really do have a chance.”
The process of mining the mineral was even more dangerous. If hit the wrong way, it could explode. The miners took their time, which was fine with me. They only had the crude tools they hadn’t used since the days of mining glaze. The vein turned out to be the mother lode. They dug cautiously, filling rough bags with the mineral and hauling it out of the tunnel. It took several days, but every wooden crate was eventually filled. We could have filled more, but I wasn’t sure how much the dygo would be able to pull. The crates were then sealed with wax to make them watertight.
Finally the job was complete. The dygo was fitted with heavy ropes that were attached to the sled and the crates were loaded aboard.
“You sure this won’t blow up on the way up the mountain?” Siry asked.
“No” was my honest answer. “I don’t know what’ll happen when we go through the flume, either.”
“I didn’t need to hear that,” Siry said soberly.
After many thank-yous and good-byes, we were ready to go. I told Rellin that he and his men had done an important thing that would hopefully ensure peace to Siry’s home for a long time to come.
“I do not doubt you, Pendragon,” Rellin said. “Tak helped bring peace to the Milago. I trust it will be as useful again.”
Alder, Siry, and I climbed into the dygo. It wasn’t built for three people, and we had to avoid one another’s elbows and knees. Siry was the smallest of the three, so he sat in the middle, wedged between the two seats. We were all happy that it wasn’t a very long trip… for a lot of reasons.
“Slowly,” Alder cautioned. “Avoid the bumps.”
Yeah, no kidding. I engaged the dygo. With only a slight strain from the weight of the tak, we moved forward. The trip was nerve-racking. We were hauling enough explosives to level the entire mountain. One rough jostle and we’d be vapor. I wondered how protected we were inside the steel sphere of the dygo. That thing was built to withstand some pretty intense pressure. I guess I don’t have to say that I hoped we wouldn’t find out.
I picked a path that seemed to be the one with the fewest bumps. Every time the dygo bounced, I slowed down even more, so the tak wouldn’t be knocked around. We were all sweating so much, it got pretty steamy and rank inside. We had to stop a couple of times to open the hatch and air the sphere out.
We all felt a little better when we reached the snow. Rolling across packed snow was much smoother than grass and rocks. Finally the terrain leveled out, and I saw the mouth of the gate. It had been a grueling journey, but we’d made it.
“How do we do this?” Alder asked. “Do we drive right into the flume and out the other side in Ibara?”
“No,” I answered. “We’ll have to make several trips. I’ll go with the dygo first and clear out the gate area. You guys stack the crates near the flume and wait for me.”
We unhooked the sled, and I drove the sphere into the cave. I rolled right into the flume and called out, “Ibaral”
Moments later I was swept up and away. I had to trust that the flume would continue to send me where I needed to be, when I needed to be there. If it started messing with me now, well, I didn’t want to think about that. There was nothing I could do about it, so I focused on the task ahead. It was a moving job, nothing more. Okay, a dangerous moving job, but still a moving job.
When the dygo reached Ibara, I engaged the drill. The moment the sphere bobbed to the water’s surface I started digging. I blasted up and out of the stone pool that was the mouth of the flume, destroying a section of the circle and spewing water all over the floor of the cavern. I didn’t stop to worry about it and kept moving across the wet sand. The next step was to bore a new tunnel through the rocky wall of the cavern. We needed to get thirty heavy containers of tak out of there. Dragging them through the winding labyrinth of tunnels would take weeks. We didn’t have weeks. The time for being secretive was over. I drilled straight through the rock, and didn’t stop until I saw sunlight on the beach of Ibara.
Spinning the dygo around, I saw that I had created a tunnel that led straight back to the flume. It was a hundred yards long. No twists, no turns, no subtlety. If anybody wandered by, they’d find the flume. I didn’t care. After the battle, there was no telling what this area was going to look like anyway. All bets were off. I rolled back through the tunnel to the shattered pool, got out of the dygo, and stepped up to the edge of the flume.
“Denduron!” I shouted, and dove in headfirst. As I traveled along, I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to see the images of Halla staring back at me. In no time I was back in Denduron, where Alder and Siry were waiting. I shouldn’t have worried. The flume did its job. The crates were stacked high, ready for transport.
Alder held one of the metal weapons I’d brought from Quillan. “What is this?”
I took it from him, spun it expertly, and jabbed at Siry. “Dado killers. From Quillan.”
“How did they get here?” Siry asked.
“I went there a few days ago. Is that a problem?”
Alder said, “Not if mixing the territories is no longer a concern.”
I dropped the weapon on the pile with the others. “It isn’t. Not anymore. We’re playing by Saint Dane’s rules now, remember? It wasn’t my choice.”
Alder gave me a grave look. He touched one of the crates of tak. “I remember. But you should remember that we always have a choice.”
“And we made it,” I snapped at him. “We’ll take one crate each and travel to Ibara. Taking more would be too awkward, and we don’t want to go dropping these things. After we’ve moved them all, I’ll come back for the
