“But how can you stop that?” asked Loor.
“I can’t,” was his answer. “But I can help Alder get them down into the mines. The knights won’t go down there and it’ll give them a chance to cool off.”
“We’re coming with you!” I said.
“No,” ordered Uncle Press and pointed to the ore car full of tak. “See what you can do about that bomb.”
“Like what?” I asked.
Uncle Press started to run off, but turned back to us and shouted, “I don’t know. Get rid of it. Dump it in the ocean. Just don’t let the Bedoowan have it.”
I watched as Uncle Press ran up the stairs. After a quick wave back to us, he disappeared over the lip of the stadium and was gone. I looked to the ore car, then to Loor.
“Is he crazy?” I said. “This is too heavy to carry up those stairs!”
Loor started grabbing the glaze stones from off the top and throwing them aside like they were common rocks. “Not if we make the load lighter,” she said.
“And what if we slip and drop it down those stairs?” I countered. “It’ll make just as big a bang now as before.”
“Then we must be careful not to drop it,” she shot back.
Yeah, no kidding. I walked over to the cart and tested the weight. It was heavy! It had four wheels that rolled on the rails down in the mines, and handles both front and back that were used to push or pull it. I didn’t care how strong Loor was, the two of us were not going to lug this thing up the stadium stairs. I reached in and dug down beneath the glaze until I found the tak. It was soft, like clay. I was thinking maybe we could pull it apart into smaller pieces and take it up that way, rather than transport the whole thing at once. I scraped it with my finger and pulled out a small piece. For something so deadly, it looked pretty innocent. Like I wrote before, it was rust-colored and soft like Silly Putty. I easily rolled it into a marble-sized ball. The texture was kind of gritty and there was residue that stuck to my fingers as I rolled it.
“Are you going to help me?” asked Loor impatiently as she unloaded the glaze.
“I have an idea,” I announced and ran toward the quig pen. Loor watched me as if I had lost my mind, but she needn’t have worried. My plan didn’t involve going back into quig world. No way. In fact, as an afterthought I stuck the little ball of tak into my pocket to free my hands and then closed the door to the pen just in case any more of those bad boys were wandering around inside. It was a smart thing to do, but it wasn’t the main reason I went over there. I was looking for the water faucet where the Bedoowan knight filled the water bucket that he used to wash away the blood of the Milago miner. When I found it, I turned the handle so that water poured out slowly. I then checked my fingers to find that they were still covered with the rusty-colored tak residue. I stuck my fingers under the faucet, rubbed them together, and the tak dissolved! That was exactly what I hoped would happen. This stuff may be a powerful explosive, but it was still a natural mineral that would dissolve in water. Thank you, Mr. Gill, and eighth-grade Earth science. He thought I was asleep in class most of the time. I wasn’t.
“What are you doing?” shouted Loor.
I quickly grabbed one of the wooden buckets that was near the faucet, filled one, and lugged it back to Loor and the ore car.
“We are wasting time, Pendragon,” Loor said with growing impatience.
I ignored her and dumped the bucket of water into the ore car. Loor had this angry look on her face like I was being an idiot again. I stood back with the empty bucket and watched. In a few seconds my patience was rewarded. It was only a small drip, but the water had worked itself down through the tak and was running out between the wooden floorboards of the ore car. The water was rust-colored, which could mean only one thing…the tak could be dissolved!
“We don’t have to lug this thing out,” I announced. “We can dissolve the tak like dirt.”
Loor stuck her finger under the drip of water and saw that it was indeed full of dissolved tak. She thought a moment, then said, “More water!”
She jumped to her feet and ran back to the faucet for another bucket. For the next ten minutes we ran back and forth between the faucet and the ore car, dumping water inside. Little by little, the tak turned into liquid and ran out of the car. When enough of the tak dissolved so that we could move it, we began taking turns pushing it around. My idea was to spread the tak around enough so that its power would be diluted all over the field. The rusty liquid ran out of the car, poured onto the field and sank down below the grass like some deadly fertilizer. I had no idea what kind of problems this would cause later on. For all I knew, once the tak dried this could be like a minefield. But I didn’t care. The main thing was that the power of the huge bomb was gone forever.
Finally I took a look inside the ore car to see that most of the tak was dissolved away. There were still some remnants clinging to the wooden car, but there wasn’t enough left to do any big damage. I guess you could say that we had successfully “liquidated” the bomb. I looked to Loor and smiled.
“Or we could have tried carrying it out,” I said with a touch of sarcasm.
I didn’t get many chances to dig Loor, so I took them where I could. She looked as if she wanted to say something in return, but was having trouble finding the words. I expected her to point out how I had done something stupid after all.
“I am a warrior,” she finally said. “I was raised to fight my enemies with force. That is not what you were taught.”
Uh-oh. Here we go. I was sure she was about to tell me what a weenie I was and that we should have muscled the ore car out of the stadium.
“But maybe that is good,” she went on. “Maybe that is why we are together. You are not a warrior, yet you have shown more bravery than any warrior I have known.”
Whoa. That was out of left field! After getting slammed by her at every turn, I wasn’t expecting a compliment. I didn’t know what to say.
I thought about what she said and realized that maybe she was right. I wasn’t a fighter and wasn’t planning on becoming one, so maybe our strengths complemented each other. I wrote to you before about the feeling I got that being here felt right. Well, as I stood there with Loor, I got the same feeling. The two of us being together felt right. We weren’t exactly buddies, but maybe we were meant to be partners. It must have been hard for her to admit that I was her equal, at least when it came to the bravery department, and I wanted to say something back to her that let her know how great I thought she was. But I didn’t get the chance. Before I could open my mouth, I saw something that I could barely believe.
“What is the trouble?” asked Loor.
All I could do was point. Standing in the royal box was Figgis, the little merchant of death who started this whole tak mess. What was he doing here? How did he get into the palace? Stranger still, he must have known what Rellin was trying to do with this bomb, so why did he hang around here knowing the whole place was going to blow up?
“This is strange,” she said. “Why is he here?”
As if in answer, Figgis raised his hand to show us something he was holding. It was the yellow walkie-talkie that was taken from me in Queen Kagan’s chambers. He held it up, and giggled.
“It is the talking toy,” exclaimed Loor. “What is he doing with that?”
My heart sank. We had dodged a huge bullet, but here was another one aimed right at us. Loor looked at me and recognized how scared I was.
“Pendragon, what is the matter?” Loor shouted.
“The walkie-talkie works the same way the flashlight does,” I answered. “It has a battery that gives off a charge of power.”
“Could he use it to explode another bomb?” she asked nervously.
“Well, yeah,” I answered soberly.
Now Loor looked sick as the reality of the situation hit her. “Do you think he has another bomb?” she asked soberly.