Rise of the Fire Tamer (The Wordwick Games #1) Read online

  Gem recognized the voice instantly as that of Henry Word. After his online announcements, she was hardly going to forget. He must have come into the hallway through a side door. She turned to greet him with the others, expecting to look up into the already half-familiar face, and had to adjust the direction of her gaze when it turned out that Henry Word was sitting down.

  He was sitting down because he was in a wheelchair.

  It was quite a high tech wheelchair, obviously custom made and designed around Henry Word, but there was no escaping the fact that it was there. From the waist up, Mr. Word was dressed conservatively, even elegantly, in a suit and silk tie. From the waist down, his legs disappeared beneath a tartan blanket. They didn’t appear again on the other side.

  “A small accident from my army days,” Henry word said, and Gem found herself wondering if he’d read her mind in the second it took to decide that the others probably looked just as surprised as she did. Gem realized that, in all the pictures she had seen of Henry Word either online or in magazines, not one had shown more than his head and shoulders.

  Henry Word laughed then.

  “I can see I’ve caught you all rather by surprise. Still, before I turn into the main topic of conversation, can I take a moment to welcome the five of you?’ his gaze flicked to each of them in turn, and Gem guessed that he was matching names to faces in his mind. “You are all here, of course, because you have turned out to be some of the biggest fans of my little game. Congratulations on that. For the next week, you’ll be staying in what I hope you’ll find to be extremely comfortable surroundings, and you’ll get the benefit of a very special surprise.”

  “What surprise?” Rio asked from behind Gem. Henry Word chuckled again.

  “Ah, Riordan Roberts, I take it? Well, there is nothing to be suspicious about. In fact, I think that as fans, you will all enjoy this particular surprise. I have simply decided to allow you access to the tenth level of my game while we are here.”

  Gem felt her brow furrow.

  “But Mr. Word, aren’t there only nine levels?”

  “That’s true at the moment,” Henry Word answered. “Anachronia is rather new. You will be among the first to play it. Still, let’s not focus on that too much now, shall we? Chef has excelled himself in the Great Hall, and I’m sure you must all be hungry after your journeys.”

  He turned his wheelchair and headed back through the door he had come through, obviously expecting the five of them to follow. Gem hurried to keep up, even though what she really wanted was to demand more details from him. Well, most of her wanted to demand more details. Her stomach was happy to have dinner first. It had been a long flight.

  The Great Hall was everything that the name promised. The ceiling towered upwards, and held a great brass and iron chandelier. Along with a few paintings, the walls held more shields and weapons, as though Henry Word expected an army to pop round for spares at some point, while the floors were wood that had been polished so much it reflected the light from above, making stepping on it like treading over a spray of stars.

  There were two long tables, arranged with one down each side of the hall. Mr. Word showed the five of them to one table, then wheeled off towards the other, where half a dozen men and women dressed with varying degrees of formality.

  “My advisors,” he explained without being asked. “There is always so much to do. Still, at least this will give you all a chance to get to know one another.”

  Gem took the seat nearest to her, watching as the others arranged themselves around the table. Sparks glanced across to where Gem sat, then took the place next to Kat, while Rio wound up beside Jack.

  “So Kat,” Sparks asked, “what is it like living in London?”

  Gem listened to Sparks and Kat talk for a while. She had been prepared for Kat to come off as odd, given how she dressed, but from what she could tell, the other girl was pretty normal. She also got the feeling that Kat would hate it if anyone pointed that out. Particularly if Gem pointed it out.

  “So I was going to get this tattoo, once,” Kat said at one point, “but my mum said no. She said I wasn’t old enough. I…”

  Gem switched her attention to the other conversation at the table. It was half a conversation, really. Jack seemed to be working hard to get Rio to talk. For his part though, Rio seemed to be ignoring the other boy as best he could.

  “So whereabouts in LA are you from?”

  “East.”

  “What’s that like then? I bet it must be warmer than Alaska, right? Everywhere is warmer than Alaska.”

  “It’s OK.”

  Somewhere in all of this, food arrived, carried by waiters who looked like they might have stepped out of a professional restaurant. The food was good, certainly better than anything served up at her school, and Gem kept listening to the others as she sipped at some soup she had to slow herself to keep from gulping down. She hadn’t realized how hungry she was.

  Kat and Sparks had got onto the subject of sport, where Kat had found out that the boy was a quarterback at his school. Gem could have told her that ten minutes ago. Some things were just obvious. Still, Kat seemed interested enough.

  “Of course, over here, what we’d call football, you’d call soccer. Me, I’d rather just skate. You can take a board anywhere. Still it must be pretty cool.”

  Sparks said that it was, though to Gem, he didn’t sound very convinced of it. Maybe Kat heard it too, quickly taking the conversation off into music. They didn’t have many of the same tastes, but then, Gem suspected that not that many people would have managed to have exactly the same musical tastes as Kat. There were bands there that she’d never even heard of, and Kat seemed almost pleased when Sparks admitted that he hadn’t heard of them either.

  Between the two conversations, not to mention the arrival of yet more food, it wasn’t easy to give much attention to what was happening on the other table. Still, Gem glanced across. Henry Word seemed to be discussing business with his advisors over dinner, and Gem wanted to see what he was like when he wasn’t greeting visitors.

  He seemed to be almost as friendly with his advisors as he had been with the five of them out in the lobby. He laughed and he joked, but Gem could still tell that he was very definitely in charge. The others deferred to him constantly, and he seemed to be very much the center of attention. Pleased to have found out that much about him, Gem turned her attention back to eating. Some of the other cheerleaders at school might have made fun of her for putting away so much, but they hadn’t just spent hours on a plane, and this food was too good to miss in any case.

  Besides, lurking behind it all was the thought that once they had finished dinner they might get to hear more about Anachronia, Henry Word’s new Wordwick level. It was a thought that made Gem’s fork practically fly over her plate.

  Sparks tried to keep up as Kat talked, but it wasn’t easy. He found himself glancing hopefully at the other girl, Gem, but she just seemed happy to sit and watch the whole thing…

  Rio watched her too. He wasn’t sure what a little pretty rich girl like her was doing there, but he was certainly glad she was…

  Jack was surprised that the other boy didn’t have more to say. Hadn’t he looked up the history of the castle before he came here? Jack kept going anyway, hardly noticing that Rio wasn’t listening…

  Kat kept talking, hoping to find a way through, before finally giving up. It wasn’t like she cared. She was there to win a game, after all…

  Through it, Henry Word watched them all. They were young, of course, but everything said that they should be perfect. Even so, he hoped that this would work…

  Chapter 2

  Eventually the dinner ended, and even Gem found herself full. Most of Henry Word’s advisors drifted off when he announced that he was going to take the five winners on a tour of the castle. The only one who stayed was a balding man in slightly frayed tweed, whom Mr. Word introduced as Dr Percy Brown, his personal physician.

  “Percy has been vi
tal in keeping me running well enough to produce Wordwick, as well as making more than a few contributions himself. Hopefully he’ll also make sure that I don’t get you all hopelessly lost while I show you round.”

  “Lost? Hah!” Dr Brown stuck his hands in his pockets in a way that reminded Gem of one of her teachers. “You designed half of this place yourself. It’s the rest of us that have to worry about getting lost.”

  “Well then, another tour should help, shouldn’t it?”

  Gem and the others followed in the two men’s wake as they started back towards the lobby. Gem found Sparks beside her as they walked.

  “So what do you think of Henry Word?” he asked softly. Gem shrugged.

  “He seems very confident,” she whispered back. “But I guess he would be. His father was rich, and he’s built up an empire of his own.”

  “You know a lot about him.”

  Gem wondered if she should mention that her father worked as his lawyer. Sparks seemed nice enough, but from the way he’d first greeted her, she suspected that he would think that had had something to do with her getting to be here. Kat had almost said as much.

  ‘I just did some research.”

  If Sparks was going to say anything back, he was cut off as Henry Word drew to a halt.

  “Right then, this is the lobby. From here, you can get to a few places that might interest you. If you would, Percy.’ He nodded to a door, and Dr Brown opened it. Behind it stood a large, carpeted room filled from floor to ceiling with bookshelves. Instead of ladders to access the higher shelves, there were mechanical arms, similar to the ones found at fairgrounds to grab prizes, and connected to small screens with joysticks. Gem guessed that was probably easier for Mr. Word than having to call someone over every time he wanted a book. Probably more fun, too. A ring of great oak desks dominated the middle of the room, forming a circle around a marble bust of a man’s head. Briefly, Gem thought it might be of Henry Word when he was younger, but there were enough subtle differences that she decided it had to be a relative.

  “My father, William Ralph Word,’ Henry Word announced. ‘I thought I should have a statue of the old boy somewhere. There’s a complete run of everything his newspaper empire put out too, though if you want something that won’t put you to sleep, there’s a lot of other stuff too.”

  He wheeled around and headed for one of the other doors. Gem got the feeling that Henry Word liked having everyone hurry to keep up. He threw open the next door, and they all scrambled through. It was a recreation room, Gem noticed, with a row of old-fashioned arcade machines along one wall, a pool table in the middle, and a few chairs off to one side surrounding a sleek looking music station. The chairs looked like the sort that more or less swallowed you up when you tried to sit down, so that you needed at least two attempts to get up.

  “We usually keep the pool table set up for nine-ball,” Henry Word said. “Don’t play against Percy though. He’s something of a pool shark.”

  “I am not!” Dr Brown complained. “I just happen to apply the basic principles of physics-“

  “And he’s easy to tease.” Henry Word grinned as he said it. “Come on, let’s take you to Percy’s home-from-home. That should calm him down.’

  This door, Gem noted, had an electronic lock added to the wood. Henry Word punched in the combination and it swung open, revealing the sort of room that never should have lived behind a wooden door. A sliding, motion sensing, high-tech door perhaps, but not a wooden one.

  The space was almost as big as the Great Hall, and wasn’t cluttered up with things like long tables. All the tables here were individual workstations, holding computers, people working at the computers, and the sort of small fluffy toys that inevitably collect around them. The people were mostly casually dressed, and would occasionally look up to ask one another questions, but mostly they kept their eyes glued to the screens. The floor around the walls was a mess of wires, looking like someone had spilled a plate of spaghetti and then decided to connect it to the mains. Most of them ran into a blocky server station at one end of the room at some point.

  “This is where we run Wordwick,” Henry Word announced. “I’ve got some of the finest computer minds in the country, the world even, working constantly to build it, update it and keep it running.”

  “It’s very impressive,” Gem said. One of them had to.

  “Impressive.” Dr Brown shook his head. “Hardly. We’re not running nearly as efficiently as we should be, and then there are the overheating problems, the-“

  “I think that’s our cue to leave Percy to it,” Henry Word suggested, and the six of them left as the advisor started issuing instructions to people at the nearest terminals. “I think perhaps we should try the gardens next.”

  They did. Gem kept pace with the wheelchair, and Sparks kept up with her. Rio lagged behind a pace or two, as though showing enthusiasm about a garden wasn’t the sort of thing you were supposed to do. Kat and Jack brought up the rear, mostly because Jack’s own enthusiasm kept fixing on parts of the castle architecture, or particularly interesting heraldic shields, or any one of the hundred other things there were to catch a history buff’s eye. As far as Gem could see, Kat was more or less dragging him along.

  They followed Henry Word outside, then around the side of the main keep, through a small gate in a walled off area of the castle. Gem found herself hit by the scent of roses, and looked around to see them in every shade from white to the deepest red, growing on trellises, or out of flowerbeds, or around benches.

  “This is beautiful,” Gem said.

  “You’d never be able to skate it properly though,” Kat said from behind her. “And roses? It’s so…girly. Just your sort of thing, probably,” she added in Gem’s direction.

  “Well, everyone has their own opinion.” Henry Word’s tone was carefully diplomatic. “I kept the rose garden on from the previous owners. I find them rather peaceful.”

  That peace was briefly shattered as a screeching sound cut through the rose garden. Gem jumped at it. The only consolation was that it caught everyone else almost as much by surprise.

  “What was that?” Rio demanded. “Some sort of cat?”

  “It’s a peacock,” Gem guessed.

  “That’s right.” Henry Word looked pleased. “You get used to the noise after a while, so don’t let it bother you. If we are lucky, they will be out on the lawns where we can see them.”

  He led the way through the other side of the rose gardens, to a spot overlooking a garden that was more like a park in size. It had been laid out in ordered shapes that made it look like the pieces to some giant jigsaw puzzle from their vantage point.

  “Another inheritance from the people I bought the place from,” Henry Word explained. “Though they had let it go quite a bit. I learned that it had been laid out a few hundred years ago by the great garden designer Capability Brown, and I was able to find the plans. It seemed like a good idea to have it put back as it was.”

  He led them along the garden paths, and as Gem had noticed when she arrived, the gardens contained a maze of hedges that reached over head height. Given how uninterested she had been in the rose garden, Kat seemed to like the maze, asking how difficult it was to get through. She obviously caught Gem’s surprised look at that, because she shrugged.

  “What? I like puzzles.”

  The final stop on their tour was the castle’s lake, which was really an extension of the moat. It stretched out for what had to be half a mile, and Gem could only just make out the small summerhouses and boathouses on the other side.

  “This is even more space than back home,” Sparks observed.

  “Yeah, well imagine what it’s like for the rest of us, farm boy,” Rio muttered softly. Gem doubted that the other boy heard. Maybe Henry Word did though, because he chose that moment to bring the tour to a close, saying that they should get back to the house. He led the way again, and the two older boys kept pace. Gem found herself walking with Kat and Jack.

&nbs
p; “So,” she said to Jack, “what did you think of the tour?”

  “It was… that is… I um…” he hurried away to catch the others.

  “I think he must be nervous,” Gem said to Kat.

  “Funny that. He wasn’t nervous around me.”

  They got back to the lobby ok, and Henry Word led them to the last of the doors leading off from it, which turned out to be for an elevator. He waited until they were all inside before speaking.

  “Right, that’s most of the tour. I will take you up to your rooms now, and you can settle in. You might want to get some sleep. Before that though, I know you have all been dying to find out more about Wordwick’s Anachronia level, so I won’t keep you waiting any longer.

  “It’s very straightforward really. Your goal when playing it will be to win the crown of the kingdom of Anachronia, using all your wits, skills and talents. The people will only give the crown to someone who can do three things: end the threat of the three-headed dragon terrorizing the land, unite the two warring clans that live there, and help the people of Anachronia flourish. Is that clear?”

  Gem nodded. Several of the others did too.

  “It sounds simple,” Sparks said, beside her.

  “Oh, it’s not as easy as it sounds,” Henry Word continued, “which is why there are a few other things you should know. First, beware the Wickedly Woods where the dragon lives. It isn’t the only danger there. Second, remember that you can work together, even if only one of you can rule in the end. Third, and most importantly, remember that words have power in Anachronia, finding the right words, the Ruler Words, along the way will make your time far easier.”

  The elevator came to a halt then, and Henry Word led them to a hallway that was almost a mirror of the lobby, except that the five doors here were open, and led to bedrooms. Gem could see that her bags had been brought up and left just inside the door to one of them. She walked over.