Authors: Unknown
Sky found T-Bone and Hands huddled around a small table, looking at books beneath a sputtering incandescent bulb.
If possible, special collections looked even messier than last time he'd visited, and it was just as big, if not bigger several times larger than the library itself-which was just messed up.
Hands glanced up at him, a broad grin on his face. "Nice Valentine’s Day shirt. I didn’t realize you could fit so many pink hearts on a shirt that small. Weren't you wearing an ugly hoodie this morning?"
''I'm not a shifter, if that's what you're asking," Sky retorted.
"I have no doubt you're the real Sky," said Hands. "Shifters have too much self-respect to wear a shirt like that. Or possibly not enough
..
.."
Sky sighed. He pulled off his backpack, set it on the table, and then flopped into a chair. "So have you figured out where we can find Alexander's blade, or have you simply been scanning fashion catalogs?"
"Sure, we know where to find it," T-Bone replied. "You do?" Sky asked.
"No," Hands admitted. "But we've learned a bit more about it, and we know where it was supposed to be."
"Where?"
"Ah, that answer requires a story," Hands said, seemingly enjoying
himself
. "You see, centuries ago, Alexander and Solomon went to fight the Arkhon-just two forlorn heroes against an unstoppable enemy.
Alone.
With no one and nothing to accompany them save their own tragic destinies."
"Can you just skip to what happened?" Sky asked.
Before Hands could continue, T-Bone jumped in. "They fought the Arkhon, something went wrong-we don't know what-and only Alexander came back. He told everyone that Solomon had died at the Arkhon's hands. A sh01t time after, Alexander was found dead in his study, stabbed through his neck with his own shimmering blade."
"You think Solomon did it?" Sky asked, sitting up straighter. "You think Solomon could have the blade?" His stomach sank as he considered the possibility. If Solomon had the blade, then there was no way to recover it short of opening the prison.
"We thought of that," said T-Bone. "But more digging showed us that Solomon was trapped at the time. He couldn't have done it, not personally."
"So who killed Alexander, then? And where is the blade?" Sky asked.
"We don't know who killed Alexander. It looks like the hunters never figured it out," said Hands. "After his death Alexander and his rusted blade were buried in the Grove of the Fallen. Every record we can find points to the Grove."
"Well, they're not there now," said Sky, "and the only clue is that riddle on the coffin lid: 'With Hunter's Mark the buried dead shall shimmering blade hold in my stead."'
"It makes it sound like someone with a Hunter's Mark could get the blade by burying themselves in the coffin," said Hands, looking pointedly at Sky.
"I know," Sky replied. "That's what I'm afraid of. But if the blade was buried with Alexander, then who left the riddle? And wouldn't the blade still be there? It has to mean some thing else."
"Are you sure you don't just
want
it to mean something else?" T-Bone asked.
Sky didn't reply. He'd seen enough dead bodies in the Sleeping Lands to last a lifetime; he had no desire to join them by burying himself alive.
"The weird part of it all is that several hunters claimed to have seen Alexander walking out of his study moments before they found the body," said Hands.
"I think I have an answer to that one." T-Bone slid a book across the table.
Sky glanced at the title.
"
Botany Most Botanical?
Don't think
I 've
read this." He opened the cover and found the dedication:
To my father, who took me in when no one else would, and to Solomon Rose, may he find in death the answers he lost in
life.
"It's Alexander Drake's last book," said T-Bone. "Unfinished. It simply ends in the middle of a formula for making something called Slippery Wick Brew."
Sky nodded. "''ve heard of it before. In
The Slippery Wick of
Windenshum
,
Alexander uses it to change his appearance in the Mountains of Moldy Foreboding"-Hands chuckled-"to stop a renegade hunter who's eating up all their cabbages."
"Cabbages?
Seriously?" said Hands.
Sky shrugged. "The hunter liked his cabbage; what can I say? Anyway, Alexander befriends a Marrowick near the town, and the creature teaches him to create a beverage out of bits of Marrowick wax, chaotic Gloom, and other stuff that allows him to change his appearance: the Slippery Wick Brew."
"You mean the drink lets you shift like a Whisper?" T-Bone asked.
"Hardly," Sky replied, "it's not a true shift. Whisper
become
the creature they shift into over the three days of the full moon, any creature they taste minus the memories. And then, of course, they're stuck that way until the next full moon unless they want to risk turning into a mindless Gloom. Slippery Wick, on the other hand, only allowed Alexander to move his fat around."
"What good is that?" Hands asked.
"Well, he could change his surface appearance," Sky said. "He could make his nose bigger, his cheeks
hollower
, or even grow an inch by giving himself a fat head. That, plus a little hair dye, and he could look like just about anyone. It couldn't make you stronger or change your bones or give you tentacles, for example."
"Too bad," said Hands. "''ve been thinking of growing me some tentacles." Hands paused and then shook his head seemingly amazed. "But seriously, let me get this straight: We have shifters that can look like hunters; we have Bedlam who can possess hunters; and now we have hunters who can look like other hunters? Is that about right?"
"Don't forget Solomon Rose-a hunter who took over a monster's body and booted out the monster," T-Bone added. "The moral here is: Always ask for ID."
"No kidding," said Hands. "Since last year, I just sort of assume nobody is who they say they are and go from there." "You guys are missing 'hunters and monsters that become the same person the moment they're
Changed
,"' Sky said quietly.
They both looked at him.
"Right," said Hands. "Well, that goes without saying. The point here is that whoever killed Drake could've taken the Slippery Wick Brew and made
himself
look like Alexander so he or she could escape unnoticed. That would explain how all those hunters saw Alexander leave his study moments after his death."
"Let's ignore all the impostors and everything else for the moment," said Sky. "Right now the only thing that matters is Alexander's blade. What else did you find out?"
T-Bone closed
Botany Most Botanical
and slid it to the side, grabbing another book from his stack. "This is
The Shimmering
Blade of Aranoth."
Sky perked up. He'd never heard of Aranoth before, and the book sounded promising.
"Aranoth was a hunter during the War of Legend-you're familiar with that, right?" T-Bone asked.
Sky nodded. "Somewhat. Most of the stories Phineas gave me were from the time of Solomon and Alexander, or thereabouts-the time of the Edgewalker Wars. The War
or
Legend was mud\ earlier, a thousand years or more. I did some research a while back. To be honest, I couldn't find much."
"Neither could we," T-Bone admitted. "But we found enough. Legend was an unbelievable horror, a big monster.
Scared everything.
He nearly destroyed the world, like, the actual planet. The First Hunter formed the Hunters
or
Legend to stop him. Monster turned against monster, hunter against hunter, and Legend's five children- Bedlam, Vulpine, Erachnus, Mar, and the Arkhon-fought first for him, and then against him until eventually Legend was thrown down and his power broken. Does that about cover it?"
"More than I found," said Sky, who didn't know any thing about Vulpine, Erachnus, or Mar, even though he'd heard their names on occasion. He'd also figured out that the statue of the woman standing over Solomon in the Grove of the Fallen was the First Hunter, his ancestor, according to Chase. He tried to imagine Phineas as the "consort" to such a woman, as Morton had claimed. If Phineas was married to the First Hunter, did that mean Sky was actually descended from Phineas? Had Mom and Dad simply told Sky that Phineas was his uncle to stop him from asking awkward questions? Whatever the case, if Phineas was married to the First Hunter, Sky really, really hoped her statue wasn't built to scale.
"So, at one point, Bedlam was a good guy?" Sky asked.
T-Bone shrugged. "He helped the hunters defeat his father, but who knows why he did it? For all we know, he could've wanted to replace him."
Sky nodded, but he wasn't convinced. Every story he'd ever read about Bedlam made him look like a villain, but these stories were written by the same people who'd tried to kill him last night, the same people who thought Solomon Rose was a hero. If Sky could just talk with Bedlam ... Of course, to do that he'd have to find him first.
''The shimmering blades were created during the War of Legend, one for each of the thirteen original hunters, including Phineas, Morton, and Winston, among others," said Hands.
"The Shimmering Blade of Aranoth
calls the blades 'sticky."'
"What's that supposed to mean?" asked Sky.
"Do you remember what Phineas told you about black rutabagas?" asked T-Bone.
Sky nodded. "Take a rutabaga, tie a Barrow Hag's nose hair around it, and bury it under a harvest moon to get a black rutabaga. Eat it, and you can jump as high as a Barrow Hag for a tune, with some uncomfortable side effects."
"Exactly," said T-Bone. "The thing is, if you stab a black rutabaga with a shimmering blade, the blade will eat it."
"Like, literally
? '
Cause that's kind of gross," said Sky.
"Not literally," T-Bone snapped. "It absorbs the important bits and converts them into tiny shimmering gems-gems the hunter can use later. The more gems, the more powerful the blade."
"Beats carrying around a bunch of black rutabagas, I guess," said Sky. "Or barrow weed, or Slippery Wick, or DNA samples for shifters ... Okay, I'm beginning to see its usefulness."
Hands nodded. "The shimmering blade is a storehouse for a hunter's most closely held secrets. Each blade is unique. That's why Morton can't use his own blade to free Bedlam."
"Or keep him trapped forever," Sky added. "Not to mention how many other secrets it must hold, tricks even Morton hasn't discovered. Alexander was probably the greatest botanist the world has ever seen."
"But first Morton would have to claim the blade," said T-Bone. "Meaning the current owner would have to give it to him, or Morton would have to kill him and take it."
"So if Bedlam wanted to free himself from the Chrysalis prison, he'd need four things," said Sky.
"First, the blade.
Second, ownership.
Third, his body.
And fourth, he'd need to know what made Alexander's blade unique-what's the secret ingredient within it that can free Bedlam?"
"Not to complicate matters, but it's also possible that there's nothing hidden within," Hands pointed out. "Those gems can be removed from the blade at any time. Alexander may have taken out the secret ingredient to make it harder for someone to free Bedlam."
Sky shook his head. "Let's find the blade first and worry about the rest later."
Sky closed
The Shimmering Blade of Aranoth
and slid it back to T-Bone.
“There's one more thing to consider, something that might lead us to the blade." Sky opened his backpack and withdrew the letter he'd taken from Ursula's office. "Someone raided Ursula's office today-she's safe, by the way, on vacation some where-but I found this in her desk." He set the note on the table. "I think I know what some of this means, but not all. Maybe we can fill in the blanks."
Sky looked over the letter:
U,
Still hunting C. P and E are Slippery and in place. Give love and pictures to N. Look for the Marrowick delivery on the setter in the fit between the bedposts-sponsor is unclear…beware. C wants it, too; watch out for Harrow Wrights.