THIRTY-THREE
There was a little party in the vault beneath the Palace of Norumbega. There were no hors d’oeuvres, no drinks (except tap water in a Nalgene bottle), no music, no dancing. But that didn’t matter. There was more joy in this party than if they’d all been dining at the Ritz. Because, for the moment, they were safe and they were together.
It didn’t take much to wake Wee Sniggleping. Prudence just put his head on her knees and said, in a voice cutesy and high, “Oh, isn’t he darling! The precious little elfling. Oh, Snig, we’ll wake you up like we revived Tinker Bell. Clap, dear children! Clap if you believe in Snig and Tink! Oh, clap, do, little ones, do! Clap for Uncle Snig!” and so on until the old man growled, “Awright, awright, you got me,” and opened his surly eyes, pawing at the air in desperation to smother everything adorable. “Terrible to wake from a dream of the Thusser just to discover you’re surrounded by mankind.” He hawked a loogie on the prison floor. “At least the Thusser have dignity.”
Gregory, Brian, and Kalgrash told the story of what had happened to them. Prudence gave them big hugs and thanked them for coming to save her.
“You’re surprised, aren’t you?” said Gregory. “You didn’t think we’d make it.”
“Oh, I’m surprised, all right,” said Prudence.
“See, we’re better at this than you thought.”
“Yeah, you’re amazing,” Prudence agreed. “Any time I need someone to sit motionless next to me in a cell for twelve hours, I’ll give you a call.”
“Hey!” Gregory protested. “That’s not fair! I helped Brian with —”
Prudence agreed, “No, you were wonderful. You stare great.”
“Where’s the thanks?”
“For what? People do more heavy lifting at a teddy bears’ picnic.”
“Brian,” Gregory pleaded, “stand up for me here.”
Brian said, “We did it together.”
“Isn’t he sweet?” Prudence said, ruffling Brian’s hair. “Always trying to smooth everything over.”
“Would you stop ruffling his hair? What about mine? My hair is totally unruffled!”
Prudence looked at Gregory and coughed. “I’m not sticking my hand in there. Too much product. Your bangs would crackle.”
Kalgrash asked, “Does anyone here know how to repair troll arms? I mean, I don’t want to interrupt the discussion of gel or anything, but I’m bleeding fake blood all over the real floor.”
Sniggleping looked at the gash. “I can’t repair it,” he said. “I’d need a full workshop for that. But I can at least stop the damage from spreading, and — more important — I can turn off the sensation of pain. Nothing easier.” He reached into his vest and pulled out a set of little mechanic’s tools in felt pockets.
He sat Kalgrash down and got to work.
While Sniggleping labored over the troll’s arm, Prudence said, “The Thusser are probably already preparing their next onslaught. We’ve got to get moving.”
“They’re completely breaking the Rules,” Brian said. “In a few days, they’ll start to settle here. We’ve got to warn the Norumbegans. Like you were pretending to do, Prudence. Honestly, isn’t there some kind of a … a hotline?”
Prudence shrugged. “I have no idea. I really was bluffing. Snig?”
“Certainly, there was a hotline,” said Sniggleping, squinting at a wire he held in his tweezers. “It was in my workshop. But everything there was seized and destroyed. Those are the kind of conditions under which I’m expected to work. So the hotline is gone. Who knows where it’s stashed. The only thing left in the area is a sensor. It will send a warning about the arrival of the Thusser, when they come.”
“But by then,” Brian protested, “it will be too late!”
“Yes. A shame, really,” said Sniggleping. “I liked your world. There were several good bits. I particularly liked mist in valleys. Cheese, well aged. Classic-car rallies.”
Brian insisted, “We’ve got to convince the Norumbegan Emperor to come enforce the Rules. This place isn’t the Thussers’. The mountain is the Norumbegans’. The planet is ours.”
Gregory said, “So, yeah, if the big hotline is gone, how are we going to warn the Emperor?”
“The Emperor and all his court are in another world,” Sniggleping said. “You’d have to travel there. They all emigrated there when the treaty was struck with the Thusser. If you could find the Emperor’s court …”
Brian was staring, haunted, into the darkness. He had thought of something. “We can do that,” he said. “We can go to their new world.”
Gregory asked, “How?”
“Because we found the gate, remember?” Brian said. “It was in the crypt of the cathedral. We couldn’t go through at the time….”
“But you could now!” Prudence exclaimed. “I could send you through safely, I bet! Snig? Could we do that?”
Sniggleping nodded and shrugged one shoulder.
“Whoa, wait. Where are we going?” Gregory asked. “We have school on Monday.”
“It’s probably Monday already,” Prudence said. “Or last Monday. Or a month from Monday.”
Brian said, “This is more important. If we don’t warn the Norumbegans and get them to stop the Thusser, the settlement will start to spread. In a few years, no one will even remember what the world was like without the Thusser.”
“What do you mean, without them?” Gregory said. “They’re all over the place at my house.”
Prudence laughed.
Then stopped.
She realized he was serious.
“Come on, they’re already in all our houses,” Gregory said. “You know. Who do you think the guys with the dark rings around their eyes and the pointy ears are? In the mini-mart, Brian, you know. They stand by the Little Debbie products. Two of them. Or at the fire station. They’re always standing on either side of the garage doors. You know what I’m talking about. Don’t look at me like that! They walk down Beacon Street in a formation all the time.”
“No,” said Brian, softly. “No, Gregory, they don’t. Not yet.”
“Unless,” Prudence said, “he’s seeing something that’s happened since you came here. If time is different.”
Brian realized she could be right. “They can’t be,” he said. “They …” He didn’t finish the thought.
“We’ve got to go,” said Kalgrash. “Quickly. Where’s this portal?”
“In the crypt of St. Diancecht’s Cathedral,” Brian answered quietly.
And so they walked up through the castle and to the cathedral. This time, there were no monstrous humanoids to menace them. The kitchens were silent. The feasting hall was empty, except for the pageantry of the hunt upon the wall. If there were any more kreslings, they had evidently abandoned the courtyard and the battlements. Brian crossed the drawbridge with his blunderbuss at the ready, and no one threatened them.
In the crypt of the cathedral they passed down the line of Emperors, from the first kings who arrived from a realm across the sea in a flying coracle to those who’d built the towers and deeps of the subterranean kingdom to the final, dissipated monarchs, who had collected wines and played tennis while the Thusser had gained in power. Each Emperor lay upon his bier, carved in stone, until the last. That final one sat up upon his sarcophagus, his gown falling off his shoulder, staring into the darkness as if awakened from a nightmare. Or into one.
The last Emperor gazed through an arch, over which was carved in crude letters the English words Stay Out.
“Last time,” said Brian, “monsters attacked us when we tried to go through there.”
Sniggleping nodded sourly. “Guardians of the Gate. You and Jack Stimple destroyed them. There was a fire.”
The five of them walked through the arch. There was an awful stench of decay in the room. Moldering, brittle black rags covered the floor — the remains of creatures that once protected the gate through which the Norumbegans had fled, centuries before.
The gate itse
lf was a panel of darkness. The eye could not determine whether it was flat or an absence. It was simply black.
“I’ll stabilize the gate for you,” said Prudence.
Brian asked, “You can’t come through with us?”
“No,” said Prudence. “You need us here to hold the gate open.” She smiled. “Hurry back,” she said. “I’m really hungry. I could really do with a vegetable curry right about now.”
“What use is sorcery,” said Gregory, “if you can’t magic up a vegetable curry?”
Prudence walked to the wall of darkness. “Snig?” she said. “I don’t know exactly how to work the portal. The only ones I’ve used were local. I’ve never seen one this complicated before.” There were little symbols and cranks around the gate. Sniggleping walked forward and explained the workings of the thing to Prudence. Together, they reached up to each rune, each crank, and they twisted the levers and touched the runes and adjusted dials. Sniggleping whispered words to himself.
The quality of absolute darkness subtly changed.
Sniggleping nodded.
“Ready?” said Prudence.
“It is. But I don’t know if they are,” said Sniggleping, gesturing at the boys. He stepped back. “The gate is open and should lead directly to the Norumbegans’ new world.”
“All right,” said Prudence to the boys and their troll. “We’ll guard the pass. You go through. Find the Emperor and warn him that it’s now or never. The Norumbegans have to come back now.”
Brian, Gregory, and Kalgrash hesitated. They stood before the curious darkness.
“Trying to go through that gate …” Kalgrash said. “It’s kind of like making up your mind to swim in the river in the midwinter. You know, I never can decide whether to wade in or cannonball.”
Gregory said, “I usually go in backward. I don’t know why that helps, but it does.”
“You’ve done a great job so far,” said Prudence. “I believe we can all do this. We’ve just got to keep working together.”
Brian said, “What else are we going to do?”
Kalgrash swept his hands forward. He said, “Alley-oop.”
With that, they walked forward. Brian turned and waved. Prudence waved back at him. He stepped forward and was engulfed. His friends were already gone. They passed through the wall into another world.
Prudence and Sniggleping watched them go. They stood amidst the clutter of charred monster, arms crossed.
“Good luck to them,” said Sniggleping. “Good luck, I say.” He reached into his vest pocket again and drew out some playing cards.
For some hours, Prudence and he played piquet. There, in that crypt, beneath that lost cathedral, in that abandoned city, under that eldritch mountain, ringed by networks of streets and culs-de-sac and faux lanterns and lawns, the two sat through the hours.
They flipped discards and awaited the return of ancient kings.
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A ceremonial staircase led to nowhere. It stood in the middle of a rough, broken plain. A stocky boy sat on the stairs, sagging low, his elbows on his knees. A dim blue light shone from jagged cracks in the black sky. It faintly lit a cluster of ruins.
Brian Thatz raised his head to look out across the murky horizon. Arches below him supported nothing. Columns stood with no roof. Cellars sat naked to the elements. And beyond all this, there was only the slime.
Brian uncurled, reached out to lift the singed leg of a broken chair, and stirred the ashes of his fire. The ashes glowed faintly. He slid across the step he sat on to get closer to the warmth.
At the top of the staircase lay a black slab, a gateway to another world.
Brian was cold — chilled to the bone — and tired. He had not eaten for a day. At least he thought it was a day. Time was difficult, for there was no sun, no night, no day — just cracks in the sky and the glimmer of far marshes of stew.
The ruins covered a square mile or so. They were all built of rough-hewn brown stone. Hardly anything stood. Foundations. A few walls. The staircase was the tallest thing in the city. It was a broad staircase, and had a twist to it. In an earlier age, all the refugees of lost Norumbega had fled down these wide steps, coming to this world to make a new home.
Now a dull silence lay over the fallen metropolis. Occasionally, the wind stirred, shuffling over the desolate marshes.
Brian could hear the bickering of his friends as they returned to the camp.
“This is dumb.”
“You’re dumb.”
“I am not dumb.”
“I didn’t mean you were actually dumb. I just mean it’s dumb to say that things are dumb.”
“You’re not even — don’t even argue with me! You’re not even real!”
“So I’m fake, and you’re dumb. We’re even.”
“You’re dumb and fake. You’re programmed to be dumb.”
Brian was exhausted and wished they’d stop fighting. They had all spent the last twelve hours or so searching the ruins for life or clues. Before that, they’d spent an awful day crawling around under a mountain, dodging silver tentacles, defending a kitchen against alien invasion, and vanquishing an undead real estate developer.
Brian’s friends came trudging up the steps to nowhere. One was a blond boy with a burned hand wrapped in a piece of cloth. The other was a troll in Renaissance armor.
“We didn’t find anything,” said Kalgrash, the troll.
“We found something,” said Gregory, the boy. “A bureau. We found a smashed-up bureau.”
Kalgrash held out a wooden drawer. “For firewood.” He tossed it down on the step. It cracked and slid down a few stairs.
Brian stood up and looked out over the sinkholes and slime. “What are we going to do? Where have they all gone?”
The three had risked everything to come in search of the Norumbegans, the elfin race that had raised this city in this weird plain. Back in the pleasant valleys of Vermont, the tricky, wicked Thusser had been arranging an alien settlement, stealing into dreams, and corrupting time. The Thusser’s invasion had been slowed, Brian hoped, by the destruction of their agent on Earth — but it had not been stopped. Even as Brian stood helplessly on this staircase to nowhere, the Thusser might be marching through a gateway onto the green lawns of Brian and Gregory’s world.
“No bodies,” said Kalgrash, squinting. He clanked over to the side of the staircase and looked down at the cellars. “No sign of a battle or fire.”
“The bureau was almost okay,” said Gregory. “Just missing one leg. It was, you know, the kind of bureau that has legs.”
“Maybe,” said Kalgrash softly, “maybe the city was never destroyed.”
“What do you mean?” Brian asked.
“I don’t think the city was ever finished in the first place.”
Brian and Gregory thought about this. The wind picked up. It blew Brian’s black hair into his eyes, and he raised his hand to push the mess of it back.
Kalgrash said, “Maybe it’s not ruined. Maybe it’s unbuilt. Like the Norumbegans abandoned it. They got here, started to build — tinka-tonka, tinka-tonka, tinka-tonka — and then they moved on. Nothing looks like it was ever finished. I mean, the stonework. In the City of Gargoyles, they did all this fancy carving. Here, nothing’s carved. It’s like they were just starting. And I think some of these aren’t even cellars — they’re quarries. Where they were cutting out the rock. Yup.” He nodded and looked around at the pits and columns. “Yup, yup, yup. That’s what I think.”
Gregory sat down wearily by the fire. He rubbed his roughly bandaged hand.
“I think you’re right,” said Brian. “Yeah.”
Kalgrash mused anxiously, “I wonder what made them keep going … or … you know … wiped them out.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Gregory. “The thing is, we’re trapped, right?”
“Yeah,” said Brian. “Prudence and Snig can get us through the portal on thei
r side, but we need someone to open it from this end, too. I don’t know how.”
“Right. Bingo,” said Gregory. “So it doesn’t really matter whether the Norumbegans were wiped out or they left. Because either way, we’re stuck here in the middle of nowhere with nothing to eat and nothing in any direction except an ocean of goo.” He flapped his hand at the glistening swamp.
“Better goo than gunk,” said Kalgrash.
“What?” Gregory said, exasperated.
“Gunk’s grimier than goo. Goo’s … gookier, but not grimy.” Kalgrash looked to Brian for support. “Am I wrong?”
Brian didn’t answer. He was looking up at the obsidian portal, which just twelve hours before they had walked through like it was a pool, but which now, if they tried to pass back through, would be hard as marble.
Gregory glared at them both. He picked up the broken drawer and snapped it across his knee. He fed the pieces into the failing fire.
The black smoke went up, curled like the staircase, rising high above the shattered landscape and disappearing into the gloom.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
M. T. Anderson is the author of The Game of Sunken Places, the National Book Award–winning Printz Honor book The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume I: The Pox Party, the Printz Honor book The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume II: The Kingdom on the Waves, Feed, and Thirsty. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when not trolling the forests of Vermont for inspiration.
Copyright
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.
This book was originally published by Scholastic Press in 2010.
Copyright © 2010 by M. T. Anderson
Cover art by David Frankland
Cover design by Steve Scott
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