Conrad's Fate

by Diana Wynne Jones

  About halfway down, the sticking-out roofs were much wider. The stairs went out over the roofs there, to mad little spidery balconies hanging on the very edge, and then there would be another stair going down under that roof to the next one. When Christopher came to the first of these balconies, he just stopped. I had to hang on to the ladder and wait. I thought he must have found Millie, and that the howling sound I could still hear was being made by an injured girl in mortal agony. But Christopher went on in the end. And when I got to that balcony, I knew why he had stopped. You could see through the floor of it, down and down, and it was rocking. And the howling was still going on, below somewhere.

  I got off that balcony as quick as I could. So did Christopher after that. We had to climb over three more of the horrible things before we came to a longer, thicker stair, where there was actually a handrail. I caught up there. We were only one floor up by then.

  “Nearly there,” Christopher said. He looked ghastly.

  “Millie?” I asked.

  “I can’t feel her at all now,” he said. “I hope I don’t understand.”

  As we clattered down the last few steps, the howling became a sort of squeaking. At the bottom, a great brown shape hurled itself at us, slavering. Christopher sat down, hard. I was so scared that I went up half the flight again without even noticing. “They left a wild beast on guard!” I said.

  “No, they didn’t,” Christopher said. He was sitting on the bottom step with his arms around the creature, and the creature was licking his face. Both of them seemed to be enjoying it. “This is the guard dog that went missing today. Its name is”—he reached around the great tongue and found the name tag on the dog’s collar—“Champ. I think it’s short for Champion and not a description of its habits.”

  I went down the stairs again, and the dog seemed glad to see me, too. I suppose it had thought it was permanently lost. It put great paws on my shoulders and squeaked its joy. Its massive tail thumped dust out of the ground, which whirled in the wind, stingingly. “No, you’ve got it wrong,” I told it. “We’re lost, too. We are, aren’t we?” I asked Christopher.

  “For the moment,” he said. “Yes. Stallery seems to have been built on a probability fault, I think—a place where a lot of possible universes are close together and the walls between them are fairly weak. So when whoever—or whatever—keeps shifting to another line of possible events, it shifts the whole mansion across a bit, and that bit at the top of the house gets moved a lot. The top gets jerked somewhere else for a while. At least, I’m hoping it’s just for a while. Now we know why those painted lines are really there.”

  “Do you think it’s the Countess doing it?” I said. “Or the Count?”

  “It may be no one,” Christopher said. “It could just happen, like an earthquake.”

  I didn’t believe that, but there was no point arguing until I met the person causing my Evil Fate and knew. Come to think of it, my Fate must have landed us here anyway. In order not to feel too bad about it, I said to Christopher, “You worked out what had happened on the way down?”

  “In order not to think of dry rot and planks snapping,” he said, “or the distance to the ground. And I realized that Millie must be stuck in one of the other probabilities, just beyond this one. Maybe she hasn’t noticed which part of the mansion moves—Oh dear!”

  We both understood the same thing at the same moment. In order to get ourselves back to the Stallery we knew, we had to be at the top of the tower when another sideways shift happened. We looked at each other. We got up, towing the dog, and backed away to where we could see the whole unpainted wooden height of the thing, moving and quivering in the wind, and the crazy stairway zigzagging up it. It looked worse from the ground even than from at the top.

  “I don’t think,” Christopher admitted, “I can bring myself to climb that again.”

  “And we’d never get the dog up it anyway—Hang on!” I said. “The dog can’t have been in the attics when it got here. It lives in the grounds.”

  “Oh, what a relief!” Christopher said. “Grant, you’re a genius! Let’s sit on the right line and wait, then.”

  So we did that. Christopher very carefully paced from side to side, and then back and outward, until he found the spot where the strangeness felt strongest. He decided that a lump of rock about forty feet from the tower was the place. We sat leaning against it—with the dog between us for warmth and the wind hurling our hair and neckcloths sideways—staring at the derelict front door of the tower and waiting. Gray clouds scudded overhead. An age passed.

  “It’s funny,” Christopher said. “I have no desire at all to explore that building. Do you, Grant?”

  I shuddered. The wind sort of moaned in the twisted timber, and I could hear doors opening and slamming shut somewhere inside. I hoped it was only the wind doing it. “No,” I said.

  Later on, Christopher said, “My stockings have turned into ladders held together by loops. If they take them out of our wages, how much do the things cost?”

  “They’re silk,” I said. “You’ve probably worked all last week for nothing.”

  “Bother,” he said.

  “So have I,” I said, “only I’ve ruined two pairs now. How long have we sat here?”

  Christopher looked at his watch. It was nearly five-thirty. We were going to be late back on duty if another shift didn’t happen soon. A whole set of doors slammed inside the tower, making us jump.

  “I suppose I deserve this,” I said.

  “Why?” Christopher demanded.

  “Because …” I sighed and supposed I might as well confess. “This is all probably my fault. I have this bad karma, you see.”

  “What bad karma?” he said.

  “There’s something I didn’t do in my last life,” I said, “and now I’m not doing it in this life either—”

  “You’re talking perfect codswallop,” Christopher said.

  “Maybe it’s something you don’t have in your world,” I said.

  “Yes, we do. I was studying it, as it happens, just before I came away, and I assure you, my dear Grant—”

  “If you’re only in the middle of learning—” I started to say when we both realized that the wooden tower was now a dark stone building. Without any kind of warning, or blurring, or any sort of sideways jerk, it had become twice as wide, though no less derelict. It seemed to be built of long blocks of dark slate, sloping inward slightly, so that it tapered up to a square top, high, high above us. Its square stone doorway gaped in front of us, breathing out a dank and rather rotten smell. There were no stairs anymore.

  “That’s odd,” said Christopher. “I didn’t feel it change, did you? What do you say, Grant? Do we risk looking inside?”

  “It looks more like a house than the wooden place,” I said, “and we’re stuck here if we don’t do something.”

  “True,” said Christopher. “Let’s go.”

  We got up and lugged the dog over to the empty square doorway. The place smelled horrible inside, and it was absolutely empty in there. Light came in through enough small windows—just gaps between slabs of slate, really—to show us that the stairs were now indoors. They went zigzagging up one of the walls, and they were simply steps, with nothing to stop a person falling off the outside edge. They were made of slate like all the rest, but they were so old that they sort of drooped outward toward the empty middle of the place. And the trouble was, this building was as high as ever the wooden tower had been.

  I told myself that it was no worse than Stall Crag. Christopher swallowed, rather. “One slip,” he said, “one stumble, and we’ll be dogmeat for Champ here. But I think I can keep us stuck to them by magic if we stay close together.”

  The dog refused to go inside at first. I knew it was the smell combined with the sight of those stairs, but Christopher explained cheerfully that poor Champ lived out-of-doors and was probably forbidden to go inside a house. It could have been true. Anyway, he towed the resisting beast to the bott
om of the stairs. There Champ braced all four gigantic paws and would not budge. We tried climbing up a short way and calling beguilingly, but he simply went out into the middle of the dark, smelly floor and began to howl again.

  Christopher said, “This is hopeless!” and he went down and tied his neckcloth into Champ’s collar for a lead. He hauled. The neckcloth stretched. Champ stopped howling, but he shook all over and still refused to move.

  “Do you think he knows something we don’t?” I suggested. I was resting a hand on a step two stairs up, and it was slimy. It would be nice to have an excuse not to climb the things.

  “He knows exactly what we know. He’s a coward, that’s all,” Christopher said. “Champ, I refuse to put a compulsion spell on a mere dog. Come on. It’s getting late. Supper, Champ. Supper!”

  That did the trick. Champ came up the steps in a rush. I was barged into the slate wall, first by the dog and then by Christopher as Christopher was towed upward, and I had to scramble like a maniac to keep up with them. We took the first three zigzags at a mad run, but after that, when the hollow building was like a deep, smelly well around us, Champ seemed to realize he might need to save his breath, and he slowed down.

  It was worse like that. I climbed sliding my back up the rough wall and hoped hard that Christopher’s spell was a good strong one. Some of the steps higher up were broken and slanted outward more than ever. To take my mind off it, I asked, “Why did you say my bad Fate was codswallop—my karma?” My voice made a dead sort of booming around the place.

  Christopher’s voice made more dead echoes as he called downward, “I don’t think you have any. You have a new, fresh feel to me. Either this is your very first life or your earlier ones were blameless.”

  I knew he was wrong. He was making me seem so childish. “How do you mean?” I boomed up at him.

  And he echoed back, “Like Lady Felice. I don’t think she’s been around more than once at the most. Compare her with the Countess, Grant. There’s an old soul if ever I met one!”

  “You mean she has bad karma?” I boomed.

  “Not particularly,” he echoed down. “Not anything very bad from before, I think, though mind you she’s laying up a bit this time round, if you ask me.”

  This made me sure he was just guessing. “You don’t know really, do you?” I shouted back. “Other people can see my Fate! They told me!”

  “Like who?” Christopher called down.

  “Like my Uncle Alfred and the Mayor of Stallchester,” I yelled upward. “So!”

  By now it was getting hard to hear. The place was filling with echoes, and Champ, up ahead, was rasping out breaths as if Christopher’s neckcloth were throttling him, but I am fairly sure Christopher said, “If you ask me, Grant, they were probably smelling their own armpits.”

  “Will you stop calling me Grant in that superior way!” I shouted at him.

  I don’t think he heard. Champ at that moment dived away sideways. I thought he was simply diving up the next zigzag, but it turned out to be the top of the stairs. Christopher, with his arm stretched out to hang on to the neckcloth, was jerked after Champ and out of sight. I thought for a moment that they had disappeared, but when I sidled up after them, I found a square slate passage leading through the top of the wall. There was light at the end of the passage, lighting up every slimy slab, and Champ was towing Christopher along it at full gallop. I sprinted after them, expecting to come out on the roof.

  But we all burst out onto big floorboards, in a place full of the warm smell of wood, where I saw that the light had been coming from a row of dusty windows looking out to the mountains above Stallchester. The ceiling was flaking plaster, and all around us was the feel, like an engine in the distance, of other people living and moving around here.

  “Grant,” Christopher whispered, “I believe we’re back.” He looked ghastly. It wasn’t just that he was white and shaking and his stockings were laddered. He was covered with dark slime and cobwebs, too. And if the back of his waistcoat was anything to go by, mine was ruined. I could see my breeches were. And my stockings. Again.

  “Let’s go and check,” I said.

  We tiptoed back along the passage we seemed to have just come in by. It was wooden now. At the end of it we came to the streak of paint on the wall. Then we had only to peep around the corner to see we were certainly in Stallery. Andrew and Gregor were just coming out of the clothes store, adjusting crisp new neckcloths. People were hurrying and calling things and coming in and out of doors in the distance. We could tell that everyone was getting smartened up for supper and Dinner after that.

  We dodged back into the part with the windows.

  “We’d better let them go downstairs before we get more clothes,” I said.

  “I approve of the first part of your plan,” Christopher said, “but you’re forgetting Champ. We have to account for him, too. We must go down as we are. Then, if anyone sees us, we can say that we found him stuck in the drains. And if nobody does see us, we let him out of the nearest door for Smedley to find and then sneak up here for more clothes.”

  “Drains right up here?” I said.

  “There have to be,” he said firmly. “Where does our bathwater go—and so forth?”

  I supposed it might work. It seemed to me a recipe for trouble. “Can’t you magic our clothes?”

  “Not for a whole evening,” Christopher said. “It would be an illusion, and illusions wear thin after an hour or so.”

  I sighed. “Anyway, thanks for keeping us on those stairs.”

  Just for a second Christopher had such a blank, dumbfounded look that I knew he had forgotten to work any magic on those steps. I was glad I had not known while I was on them. “Think nothing of it, Grant,” he said airily.

  Then we hung about for a boring ten minutes. Champ did not help. He whined and drooled and made little rushes toward the passage. Either he knew he was not meant to be here or he could smell all the suppers cooking.

  At length the bell went for maids’ supper, making us all jump. Champ turned his jump into another surge down the passage. This time we followed him. There were still people about in the distance, and we could hear the lift working. That meant we had to go down the stairs, trying not to let Champ tow us down them too fast.

  He took us in an eager rush down onto the matting of the nursery floor. Here he broke into a gallop whatever we said. Perhaps he thought the matting was grass and he was allowed to run on it. Anyway, he ran us straight past the top of the next stairs and dragged us on down the passage, to where the door was open on that long, empty nursery.

  As we hurtled up to it, a young man in evening dress came out of the nursery. The dim light there showed his fair hair and the lost, rather drooping way he looked. But the look changed as he saw us. His head went back, and he went ramrod straight, with his face all firmed into haughty surprise.

  “What the devil do you think you’re doing?” he said.

  It was quite obvious to all three of us that he was Count Robert.

  Eleven

  Christopher must have used some magic then. He and the dog both stopped as if they had run into a wall. I overran a little and stopped myself on a doorknob on the other side of the corridor. The Count turned himself so that his frosty look could hit me as well as Christopher.

  I had no idea what to do, but Champ had no doubt. His tail thumped. He crawled forward, quivering with shame, to the full stretch of Christopher’s neckcloth, and tried to get into licking distance of the Count’s beautiful, shiny shoes. Christopher just stood and looked at the Count as if he were summing him up. This was where being an amateur was a big help. Christopher would not have minded being sacked on the spot. He had more or less found Millie now, and he could make himself invisible and come back to finish the job, but I still had my Evil Fate to think of. I stared at the Count, too, hoping and hoping to know he was the one causing my Fate, but all I could see was a young fellow in expensive evening dress who had every right to stare at u
s in outrage.

  “Come on,” Count Robert said. “Explain. Why are you dragging poor old Champ around up here?”

  “It’s more that he was dragging us,” Christopher said. “From the look of him, I think he caught your scent, my lord.”

  “Yes, he did, didn’t he?” Count Robert agreed, looking thoughtfully down at Champ, who wagged and groveled more than ever. “But that doesn’t explain why he’s here or why all of you are covered with black gunk.” At this, Christopher drew breath, presumably to begin on the drains story. “No,” said the Count. “Not you. I can see you’d just tell me something glib and untrue.” Christopher looked hurt and indignant, and the Count turned to me. “You tell me.”

  It seemed to me that I’d nothing more to lose. I knew I was about to be sacked and sent home in disgrace. Wondering what Uncle Alfred would say, and then thinking dismally that I would be dead by next year anyway, so what did Uncle Alfred matter either, I said, “We went past the painted line in the attics. Champ was at the bottom of a wooden tower there, but we couldn’t have got him back up it, so we waited until it changed into an empty slate building.”

  Christopher muttered, “Believe it or not, I was going to tell you that, too.” The Count gave him a disbelieving sideways look. “Honestly,” Christopher said. “I thought you’d probably guessed.”

  “More or less,” said Count Robert. His frosty look tipped up at the edges and became a slight grin. “You were unlucky to get those two towers straight off. Hugo and I didn’t run into them for years. Well, now what shall we do about it? I don’t think any of you should be seen as you are. Amos is prowling round the next floor in a rage—”

  “About us?” I said anxiously.

  “No, no—about something I told him,” the Count said. “But he’d certainly better not see you or Champ as you are. He’d fire you both on the spot if he knew where you’d been, so …” He considered for a second. “Give me the dog. Hugo and I can get him cleaned up in my rooms—luckily Champ is well known to be a friend of mine—and then I can take him down to the stables. You two go and get fresh clothes, or you’ll be in real trouble.”