by Garth Nix
Milka sighed, but again did not relax her fierce hold on Leaf’s arm.
‘What do you mean, there’s nowhere to go?’ Leaf asked as Stupid continued to struggle with the map. He’d got it the right way around but part of it had folded back on itself. From the parts Leaf could see, it looked more like the plan of a building than a map. It was all rooms and corridors, arranged in a large circle around some sort of central lake in the middle. Or something round that was coloured blue anyway.
‘Oh, given up on the tricksy pretending-to-sleep act, have you?’ said Milka. She sounded friendly enough. Or at least not actively hostile. ‘I meant what I said. This here is Lady Friday’s Mountain Retreat. She had the mountain built special back at the House and then shifted it here. That’s when the middle bit sank in – it got dropped a bit. Beyond the mountain there’s one of the wildest, meanest worlds in all the Secondary Realms. She likes her privacy, she does.’
‘Found it!’ exclaimed Stupid. He put a finger on the map, letting go of one edge in the process. The whole thing collapsed again, folding itself over his head.
‘There really is nowhere to run,’ Milka repeated, with a sharp dig of her fingers. ‘You just stand against the wall and in a minute we’ll take you to the bed turner. Give us trouble and you’ll be punished.’
She released Leaf and took the map off Stupid, easily refolding it to show the area that he’d indicated earlier.
For a moment Leaf did think of running. But her legs were still weak, her balance was off, and most of all she believed Milka. There probably was nowhere to run to, or at least nowhere immediately obvious. It would be best to go along for now and learn as much as possible about where she was. Then she could work out a plan not just to get away herself but to rescue Aunt Mango – and everyone else, if it was possible.
‘Circle Six, Eighteen Past,’ said Milka. ‘And we’re on Circle Two at Forty-three Past. So we have to go up four circles and either back around or forward. Back would be a bit quicker.’
‘Why?’ asked Stupid.
Milka sighed. ‘Because counterclockwards around the circle from forty-three to eighteen is twenty-five segments and clockwards from forty-three to eighteen is thirty-five segments.’
‘Oh, right, I wasn’t counting properly,’ said Stupid. He pointed to his right. ‘That’s forward, isn’t it?’
‘No, that’s backward,’ said Milka. ‘You’re facing into the crater.’
She prodded Leaf. ‘Come on. The sooner you get delivered, the sooner you get to work.’
‘Work?’ asked Leaf. ‘What work?’
‘You’ll find out,’ said Milka. ‘Hurry up.’
Leaf started walking. Every step felt strange; she had to consciously take smaller, less forceful movements in order to keep her balance. It wasn’t like being on the moon – at least she wasn’t moving like the Chinese astronauts who’d landed there a few years ago. She guessed it was about eighty-five per cent of what was normal on Earth. Enough to upset her balance, that was for sure.
The rough-hewn passage with its gaslights continued for several hundred yards, always curving gently to the left. Every now and then there were doors, sometimes on both sides. Very ordinary-looking wooden doors, all painted pale blue, with a wide variety of bronze knobs and handles that might or might not signify what lay behind them.
‘Slow down!’ Milka called out. ‘Take the stairs on the right.’
Leaf slowed down. There was an open archway up ahead, on the right. The number 42 was painted in white on the right of the arch – or rather, Leaf saw, the numeral was a mosaic made of small pieces of ivory or something similar. At the apex of the arch there was another white numeral, this time 2.
Through the arch was a landing that had the number 2 inlaid in the floor, again in small white stones or pieces of ivory. From the landing there was a broad stair that went up to the left and down to the right, the steps again carved straight out of the stone, this time faced with a smoother, pale stone with a bluish tint. The stairs were also lit by gas jets, smaller ones than before, which were shaped like crouching leopards and set into the wall rather than the ceiling.
‘Up!’ ordered Milka.
Leaf turned to the left and started up the steps. She climbed quite a long way before they came to another landing, which had the number 3 on it.
‘Three more to go,’ said Milka.
Even with the lower gravity, it was a long climb. Leaf counted three hundred steps between level three and level four and a similar number between four and five, though she lost count at one point, when her mind was distracted by worries, both for her family and for herself.
They met no one else on the way up and there was no one in evidence when they came out on level 6, or ‘Circle Six’ as Milka called it. The corridor they entered looked almost exactly like the one the sleepers had taken, way down below, though Leaf did note there was some minor variation in the colour and texture of the rock.
‘Now we walk around to segment eighteen,’ said Milka.
‘I hate this place,’ said Stupid. ‘I wish we were back in the House.’
‘Quiet!’ snapped Milka. ‘You never know who might hear you!’
‘I was just saying—’
‘Well, don’t. What did I do to get lumbered with you anyway, Feorin?’
Leaf was a bit disappointed to hear Feorin’s real name. It made it hard to keep thinking of him as Stupid.
‘I don’t know,’ he said now. ‘Did you accidentally press someone?’
‘No. I volunteered. Thought it would lead to promotion. Now be quiet. The sooner we drop off this child, the sooner we can have a cup of tea and put our feet up.’
‘Tea? Have you got some?’ asked Feorin. ‘Really?’
‘Yes. I got a chest from those rats last time we were back home. Hurry up.’
They walked considerably faster after the mention of tea, with Feorin leading the way. Judging from the numbers they came across every few hundred yards and from her brief look at the map, Leaf worked out that she was in a circular passage that was divided into chapters – or segments – like a clock. The passage ran along the outer rim of the circle and all the rooms and presumably lesser corridors ran from the rim in towards the centre, or at least until they hit whatever the big blue thing was on the map.
Leaf spent some of the time working out how big the circle was. If there were sixty segments and the distance between segments was about three hundred paces, and she knew her paces were about eighteen inches long, then the total circumference was 300 times 1.5 feet, or 450 feet or 150 yards, times 60, which was 9000 yards or about 5 miles. From that, using c=2πr she could calculate the diameter …
Leaf was so intent on working this out in her head that she didn’t realise that Feorin had suddenly stopped. She ran into his back and bounced off, losing her balance and landing on her bottom.
Leaf started to get up but instantly decided to stay where she was as Feorin threw his arms back, his trench coat flew off, and his eggshell-blue wings exploded out, the trailing feathers brushing across her face. At the same time, he drew a short sword or a long dagger from a sheath at his side, a dagger whose mirrored blade sent bright reflections leaping across the walls.
Milka followed suit a fraction of a second later and actually leaped over Leaf, the gas flame in the ceiling whooshing as she passed through it. Like Feorin, her wings were pale blue, and she too had a mirror-surfaced dagger.
Leaf couldn’t see what they were attacking – or defending against – because the Denizens’ weapons were too bright. All she saw were the flicker of wings and a blur of light like the photon trails left in long-exposure photographs of nighttime traffic.
Then Feorin was hurled past her, thrown at least thirty feet back down the passage. He hit the floor and skidded along at least another twenty feet before hitting a curve of the wall.
Leaf saw the attacker then. Or part of it – a long, grey tendril or tentacle as thick as her leg and ten feet long, which was c
onnected to a grey, mottled object the shape of an oval football but as big as a refrigerator. It was scuttling backwards like a huge rat, though she could see no legs. Leaf only got to see it for a second before Milka cut the tendril into several bits and then plunged her dagger into the football-shaped thing with a flash of light so intense that Leaf was not only blinded but felt a heat on her face as if she had been instantly sunburned.
It took several seconds for her vision to come back, seconds spent stunned as her mind and body began to work out that she should actually be seriously afraid and doing something, preferably running away.
But when her sight began to return, complete with floating dots and blotchy bits, Leaf quelled her fear. She was aided in this because Milka was kicking small blackened fragments of the thing she’d fought into a pile, in a manner that indicated it was no longer any sort of threat. And Feorin was walking back, seemingly unconcerned.
‘What was that?’ asked Leaf. Her voice sounded small and scared and distant, even to herself.
Five
‘OPEN UP! ’ REPEATED Arthur. ‘Or else I’ll blast this door off its hinges!’
He withdrew his rapier from the mail slot and it transformed back into a baton. Arthur hoped this meant that no immediate enemies were in the vicinity and that whoever was behind the door was friendly, or at least neutral. He figured he likely had only minutes before a whole lot more Nithlings showed up – probably with their boss. That could be anyone or anything, he guessed, ranging from Saturday’s Dusk to one of the Piper’s New Nithling officers. Whoever it was, Arthur wanted to be inside the tower before they arrived.
There was no immediate response to his shout. Arthur was just drawing breath to repeat his order for the third time, and wondering what he would actually do if they didn’t open up, when he heard the sound of several bolts being withdrawn on the other side of the door, followed by the door itself creaking open.
A thin but very wiry Denizen poked his head around nervously and said, ‘Come in, sir, come in. You won’t slay us all, will you?’
‘I won’t slay anyone,’ said Arthur.
The Denizen stood aside as the boy came through, then pushed the foot-thick iron-bound door closed with considerable effort and slid home several huge bolts, then lowered a bar that looked as if it would be more at home as the central prop for a very deep mine, where it could hold up tons and tons of rock.
Arthur looked around at the small antechamber, but there was nothing of interest to see apart from slightly damp stone walls and another, closed door opposite of a less sturdy appearance. It was still very cold.
‘I just want to get warm,’ said Arthur. ‘Who are you?’
‘Marek Flat Gold, sir. Leading Foilmaker, Second Class, 97 858th in precedence within the House. You’re not going to slay us? Or destroy the mill?’
‘No,’ said Arthur. He didn’t pause to wonder why a Denizen who towered over him could be so afraid of a young, mortal boy. Marek hesitated, then opened the inner door and gestured for Arthur to go ahead.
The boy walked through, but recoiled as he passed the threshold and felt a wave of heat roll over him, accompanied by fierce yellow light.
‘Wow, it’s hot in here!’
He felt like he’d walked from the snow into a sauna. Past the door was a huge open area, as big as a sports arena, far larger than was possible from the tower’s outer dimensions. Arthur was used to that; in the House many buildings were larger on the inside than they seemed on the outside. What he hadn’t been prepared for was the heat, the rich red and yellow light, and the source of both: a huge pool of molten gold in the middle of the chamber. It was as big as an Olympic-size swimming pool, but instead of being sunk into the ground, it was built up, its clear crystal sides at least six feet high.
Red-hot liquid gold flowed from the big pool along an open gutter of crystal that was supported by stilts of dark iron, ending up in a series of six smaller pools. At each of these, Denizens scooped the gold up with tools that looked like big cups on the end of ten-foot-long metal poles. The gold-carriers then took their cups to another corner of the chamber, where it was cast into ingots. The still-hot ingots were carried away by yet more Denizens who wore huge, elbow-high padded gloves, a constantly moving line of them taking the gold to another corner, which looked like a brick yard, except with gold ingots instead of bricks stacked up everywhere. As soon as a Denizen unloaded his ingots he went back again in yet another line. Both moving lines of Denizens reminded Arthur very much of ants at work.
In addition to the heat and light, there was also a dull, mechanical thumping noise that pervaded the room. That came from one end, where an axle powered by the waterwheel outside turned a slightly smaller interior wheel that in turn drove a series of lesser wheels, belts, and pistons that powered an array of mechanical hammers. The largest hammer had a head about the size of a family car, and the smallest had a head about as big as Arthur’s.
All the hammers were pounding away with mon-otonous regularity, Denizens busy around them, placing and snatching out gold that started as an ingot beneath the big hammer and ended up as a broad flat sheet by the time the smallest mechanical hammer was finished with it. From there the sheets of gold were taken by another line of Denizens to the farthest corner of the room, where two or three hundred workbenches were set up, each with a Denizen hammering away, making the sheets of gold even thinner.
There was constant activity everywhere, save for one area quite close to Arthur, where around fifty Denizens lay as if asleep, each with a narrow strip of pale blue parchment or paper stuck on their foreheads, extending down their noses to their necks.
Arthur looked quickly around at the workers and the odd sight of the papered Denizens, but didn’t waste any time in asking what they were doing. He had more important things to worry about.
‘Who’s in charge here?’ he asked. He had to shout to be heard over all the noise of the hammering, the Denizens calling out to one another and the gurgle and hiss of molten gold running along the gutter. ‘And is there any way to look outside to see what’s happening?’
‘You’re really, truly not going to kill everyone?’ asked Marek.
‘No!’ shouted Arthur. ‘Why do you keep asking? Do I look like some kind of crazy murderer?’
‘No …’ Marek sounded as if he did still think that but didn’t want to upset Arthur. ‘Forgive me. These are strange times … and I saw what you did to those Nithlings.’
‘Speaking of Nithlings, a whole lot more will be attacking here soon,’ Arthur warned. ‘I need to talk to whoever is in charge.’
Marek said something, but Arthur couldn’t hear it. Frustrated, he retreated back to the antechamber, gesturing to Marek to follow him. With the door half-closed, in the relative quiet, Arthur repeated his question yet again.
‘I don’t know who’s in charge,’ said Marek, cringing so low that his head was almost level with Arthur’s. ‘None of the telephones work. We had a letter this morning saying Lady Friday has gone away and Friday’s Dawn, our Guildmaster, went up the canal to find out what’s happening. After he left we got a letter from Superior Saturday saying she has taken over the Middle House and we are all to keep at work, that a new Guildmaster will soon come to oversee us.’
‘Who’s next in precedence within the House after Friday’s Dawn?’ asked Arthur. He was getting anxious about an imminent attack by Fetchers. ‘And is there any way to get a view from the tower of what’s happening outside?’
‘Elibazeth Flat Gold is the Master Foiler,’ said Marek. ‘But she is far too busy with the foil to interrupt. I am third, after Elibazeth, and responsible for collecting letters. Kemen is second, but he is experiencing and won’t be back for weeks. To look out from the tower, it is a matter of opening this inner door differently. However, if you are not going to kill us or destroy anything, why don’t you just leave? We have work to do!’
Arthur blinked. Marek had switched from cowardly grovelling to strangely aggressive in the sp
ace of a breath.
‘I’m Lord Arthur, Rightful Heir to the Architect, Commander of the Army of the Architect, and a whole lot of other stuff, and I’m taking command here, not Superior Saturday or anyone else. Understand?’
Marek immediately went back to cowardly grovelling, sinking down on one knee as he answered, ‘Yes, Lord.’
‘Go and interrupt Elizabeth—’ ‘Elibazeth, lord.’
‘Elibazeth, then. Go and tell her I want any Denizens who have served in the Army to gather near the door here, with whatever weapons you have or can improvise. And open this door the ‘different way’ so I can take a look out of the tower.’
‘Yes, lord.’
Marek showed Arthur how to pull out the door handle, rotate it ninety degrees, and push it back in. This time what lay beyond the open door was not the antechamber and the outer door, but a dim, cold, and very damp stairway, none of these conditions much relieved by the thin bands of light that came in through the gaps in the slats of the shuttered windows above.
Arthur bounded up the stairs as Marek shut the door behind him. Reaching the first window, the boy unbolted the shutters and opened one a few inches, enough to look out without being too obvious.
Through the narrow gap he saw the snowy plain and not much else. Visibility was still very limited, with snow falling steadily and the clouds almost low enough to touch from the tower. Arthur had half-expected to see massed ranks of Fetchers or other Nithlings, so he was relieved by the absence of enemies, even if it was only for the time being.
Then it occurred to him that he was looking out only one side of the tower. The Fetchers could be forming up on one of the other two sides, the fourth side being the canal, and thus probably safe. Unless the Fetchers had wings, or boats. Which was entirely possible, Arthur thought. So he would have to check that side as well.
To look out other windows he had to go up and look out at the next three levels. Each landing had a single window, to either north, east, south, or west – not that Arthur knew which one was which.
