The Malicarn #3
The guards grabbed Glenn and pulled him up. “Jules,” Glenn said, “this is a mistake.”
“No, it’s just part of the story.”
The guards pulled Glenn out to the elevator and down to the lobby. “Guys,” Glenn pleaded. “You don’t have to do this. Why are you scared?”
The guards stopped, looking cautiously at the security cameras in the empty lobby. “The other day they thought they found that Chinese pilot. Gene and Ken went to pick him up and never came back.”
“Then let me go. Don’t take me to the Old Village. Try to keep any of the characters from entering the Citadel. It’ll be a few hours, but I’ll be back with help.”
“What about Jules?”
“The safest place for him is in that room. Keep him there. Don’t let him talk to anyone else.”
He had until dawn, when he was supposed to meet Lilly. The Mountain Keep was half a day south, if he was quick. He didn’t have his phone, but he didn’t have time. Rocky terrain, he’d have to walk. But he could be quick. He could get to her first.
Derek and Paul watched Glenn leave up a northern road. They waited for more staff to return to the Citadel, but nobody did.
“I’m taking the car back to the airport,” Derek said. “Fuck this.” And the two of them left.
As men and women pulled out bottles of Diet Coke and yogurt from Glenn’s refrigerator, marveling at his appliances and electric lightning—anger rising more than ever, they had been cheated and deceived—Kreek continued on his journey with the dragon rider, taking the carriage through little hamlets and farms along the river.
He made his way west, where he had told his new army to meet him.
Glenn still did not know what had happened within the realm, not entirely.
But Lilly knew enough. As the sun set, she sat in the back of the helicopter, approaching the mountains of central Madeira, and she reflected on the colonel’s intelligence briefing.
Brian Doyle at some point forgot his name and place of birth and social security number and decided that Sir Kreek the Swordmaster’s destiny was to free the Malicarn people of their oppression under the yoke of Wizard and Crown.
Roger found the Revolution a convenient distraction for their operation, but Lilly thought he was underestimating Doyle’s commitment.
A Madeiran teenager named Afonso turned his car around and began driving home when he saw the helicopter. A big one, like in the movies. He didn’t realize there would be an army coming in.
Roger sat next to Lilly and relayed the intelligence he was getting from his contacts over the radio.
It was confusing. No one knew what was happening.
A dragon had been brought out and was being paraded around Malicarn villages.
No, not a dragon. A man. “Do you mean the pilot?” Roger yelled into his radio.
“Can you acknowledge you have confirmation about the pilot?”
The common man’s anger over Gregorian and the queen’s lies spilled over.
They ransacked armories and burned churches and slit the throats of highborn knights.
They organized into large mobs—not mobs, but militias, armies—and stormed castles and keeps from one end of the Malicarn to the other. They took their country back.
People weren’t really mad about the dragon rider, though.
They were mad about being poor and being sad and not understanding who they were or why.
Lilly knew that a lot of them were mad, deep down somewhere, for still being stuck playacting as shepherds and innkeepers and millers, when they were really college dropouts or frustrated accountants from Montclair or aging romantics who taught high school and directed the spring musical.
They were mad because the Malicarn was going to be an escape from their lives but there was no escaping your life.
Glenn snuck into the Mountain Keep through a false door the production department had installed when the place was first built.
He raided a hidden prop closet, found a bottle of chloroform, and drugged the guard standing outside Hannah’s room.
He surprised the girl—she was wielding a knife, he should be more careful—but he convinced her to follow him.
She was scared, more scared than he’d ever seen her before.
As they snuck back out the production exit, Buck Douglas, sitting on his rock, saw them turn northward into the woods. He followed. He was going to be a hero.
Lilly’s helicopter landed in the dark hours before dawn.
The marines from Funchal, two tanks and a couple of jeeps, began their offensive into the interior of the island to extract the pilot.
Lilly climbed out of the helicopter, Roger told her she had thirty minutes, and the chopper lifted off again and circled around behind a hill.
When she arrived at the old gas station, Lilly waited in the brush.
She did not want to be here, again, in the Malicarn.
It smelled the same, and she had a buzzing in her head that would not go away.
The sooner Glenn got here, the sooner she could take the neuroscanner from him, call back the chopper, and leave.
On the other side of the mountain, an army of common men armed with spears and knives and torches broke down the gate to the Mountain Keep.
Among them were members of the Wizarding Reenactors Guild.
They ran inside, slashing and hacking at stable boys and chambermaids and Abbott the old librarian.
The Queen’s Guard ran to find the queen, but she had vanished.
Sir Kellington jumped over the wall and ran into the woods, but the mob tortured the others, asking them to hand over the queen.
When they didn’t find her, they burned the keep down.
The tanks made their way out of the city, but immediately stopped when they realized that the road they were on led in the wrong direction.
Roger could not get a clear link to their comms. Kreek and the dragon rider had ridden through the night, emerging in a large field.
Hundreds of people followed behind him. Jasper and the underground waited for him, amassed in a uniform line.
Zihao woke up, sore from bouncing all night in the carriage, and recognized the field they had arrived at. It was the same field where he had crashed his plane.
The final tower of the castle in Kingstown was overrun. The mob threw Fennick from a high window. Sanderson and Quentin were dragged out, robes ripped and bloodied, then flung onto a hastily erected stage in the courtyard.
“Your charges,” Wallace bellowed to them, “are treason, murder, and bestiality.” He made those up on the spot. “How do you plead?”
When Glenn arrived at the meeting spot, and did not have with him the neuroscanner or even information about the pilot, Lilly was not upset.
It was almost a relief to find he let her down.
How correct she could be about him, even all this time later.
And as Glenn led them back to the Citadel and was attacked by Buck Douglas, Lilly still wasn’t upset.
She let him go. Why should she stick her neck out for him?
A woman in Funchal listened to a morning news report, which was trying to make sense of the helicopters and tanks all over the island. “There is some crisis on the film set,” the broadcaster said. The woman cooked her children breakfast.
Buck Douglas had never been so happy. He had captured a wizard!
He dragged Gregorian to the Dollories Monastery, not so far from the Morlon Kastaun, and tied him up beneath the altar.
He must find the Guild. They would be happy.
Buck did not notice at first that the monastery was empty, and it took him a long time to consider the reason why.
Roger’s commands over the radio were cloaked in static.
“Are you sure it’s him? I want visual confirmation that it is Major Wu.
I do not care how many people are surrounding him.
If it’s actually Wu just march right in there and take him.
They don’t have any weapons! Rifles? We have fucking tanks.
What the fuck are they going to do?” He did not have command authority over the ground units and he was growing frustrated.
Lilly and Hannah arrived at the Citadel to find it nearly empty.
They went upstairs. Roger cursed at everyone over the comms. The entire operation seemed to be going sideways.
Of course it was. Roger had planned it, and he had relied on Glenn to help them.
Lilly could have predicted as much, if anyone had asked her.
When they entered the writers’ room and found Jules hunched over the neuroscanner, muttering under his breath and twitching violently, Lilly wasn’t surprised about that, either. Jules had always been this way.
“I’m going to take that now,” Lilly said to him, as he adjusted some dials on the neuroscanner—banged and dented and dirty, but still the same machine she remembered.
“Yes, yes, it’s ready,” Jules said. “I have him all loaded now. Watch, watch, I’m going to see it now. I’m going to see!”
Lilly didn’t have time to find out what Jules was talking about.
She picked up a chair and swung it at Jules’s head.
He fell back, yelling, tumbling over a mound of trash and debris scattered all over the floor.
He grabbed his face and moaned, but Lilly didn’t hesitate.
She grabbed the neuroscanner, turned to Hannah, and said, “Let’s go. ”
Lilly never could trust any of these men.
Wallace held a sword above his head. A royal sword he had stolen from the castle. Sanderson and Quentin were on their knees in front of him. “In the judgment of the people of the Malicarn,” he said, “I find you both guilty, and sentence you to death!”
Lilly wrapped the cords around the neuroscanner and held it under her arm. It was warm, its internal drive humming with its malicious intent.