The Call - Michael Grant [28]
Drupe looked at him with a mixture of pity and contempt. “With the powers of the Vargran tongue, you will be able to fight the Tong Elves, the Weramin, the Skirrit, the Bowands, the Gudridan—all the many, many (many) fell creatures of the Dread Foe. You may even be able to contest with the princess. But your separate powers will be nothing to the Pale Queen herself.”
“Then—” Hungry Hode started to say. But Drupe was on a roll.
“The Dread Foe has all of those powers and more. She can become any creature. She can shrink as small as an ant and swell to a size impossible for your limited minds to comprehend.”
Grimluk tried to imagine how big that could be. Horses were big. Cows were big. Did Drupe mean something even bigger? He decided not to ask.
“She can breathe fire!” Drupe cried. “She can cast spells that send mighty stone walls tumbling into dust. She has potions and magic powders. She can command the evil beasts of the forest: snakes, boars, ticks, worms, unicorns, and giant beaver rats.”
Grimluk glanced around at his fellow Magnifica. They looked as scared as he felt. None of them knew what Weramin or beaver rats were, but Drupe seemed to think they were very bad indeed.
“Then how?” Grimluk asked, his voice shaky. “How will we defeat the P—I mean, the Dread Foe?”
Drupe stuck out one crooked hand and grabbed him hard by the shoulder. She looked into his eyes. But because Drupe had only the one eye, she chose to stare at just one of Grimluk’s eyes. The left one. Not that it matters.
“I don’t know,” Drupe said.
“Um…what?” Grimluk said.
“What does she mean, she doesn’t know?” Bruise asked Miladew.
“I know that there is a way,” Drupe said. “I know that if the twelve of you can find a way to unite all of your power, all of your courage, into one mighty thrust, you have enough, just barely enough, of the enlightened puissance to overcome the P—I mean, the Dread Foe.”
She released her hold on Grimluk’s shoulder and hung her head. “It is in the prophecies of the Most Ancient Ones. It is why we have placed all our hopes in you. The twelve of twelve, each filled with the enlightened puissance, all twelve united as one, shall stop the Dread Foe.”
“‘Shall?’” Grimluk echoed hopefully.
“I meant, ‘may,’” Drupe corrected.
“Darn,” Grimluk said.
Drupe walked a few steps away from them, right to the wall’s edge. She stared out at the forest. “Not tonight, but the next night that comes will bring with it the Dread Foe. If we fail…then all the wonder of our lives, our happy way of life, the luxury and magnificence, the endless pleasure of our freedom, will be doomed. And all the world will serve the Dr—”
She stopped and clenched her fist and shook it at the ever-approaching smoke.
“No, I will say her name!” Drupe cried in a mix of defiance and fear. “As the final battle approaches, I will speak her name. She comes! She comes! The Pale Queen!”
Fifteen
It was hard to tell how big it was, the monster on the wing. Maybe not much bigger than a man.
But it was no man.
In the strobe from the jet’s wing light, Mack saw a thing covered with sleek, short, copper-colored fur.
The wing monster had two short, stubby legs ending in oversized feet that could almost be human. But its major weight was in the upper body, where it had massive, muscled, broad shoulders supporting a pair of thick arms. The arms ended in a forest of tentacles. Imagine that the arms were trees—because that’s just about how thick they were—and now imagine that those trees had been yanked up out of the ground so that the roots were dangling and waving, all intertwined. These roots, these tentacles were in varying lengths from a few inches to a few feet.
The wing monster had its stumpy feet planted uncertainly on the aluminum surface, but the arms and the tentacles gripped the wing’s leading edge quite securely.
But as bad as the tentacles were—and Mack was definitely not happy about them—the creature’s head was far worse. Some dark, inexplicable bit of twisted DNA had decided to reverse the usual location of eyes and