Well, there was nothing else to do. I was too cold to think of anything else. I marched quite boldly and bravely up to the main doors.
And, as I passed a copse of bushes, I saw a group of footprints in the snow. They were prints from a woman’s shoe, and from the kind of woman who would wear high heels in the snow. Miss Daw. She had been posted here, watching the front doors.
Well, that reminded me of the prints I was leaving all over the place. Maybe they would melt when the sun came up, maybe not. I tore a branch from the bush, and dragged it behind me as I came to the front door.
I stood on the steps with the branch in my hand, wondering where to hide the thing. Then I laughed and tucked it into the bushes to one side of the door, the same place Vanity and I had been hiding when Mr. Glum’s dog had passed us by.
The front door was unlocked. I stepped into the entrance hall.
And my eyes fell upon, yes, indeed, the old grandfather clock.
4.
Because Vanity, earlier this evening (how long ago it seemed!) had not been able to work the secret latch in our room to open the door to the hidden passage, I was not sanguine about my chances. I was assuming she was actually doing something—manipulating reality, doing magic, something—to create the tunnels out of thin air.
But when I went over to the clock, and opened the glass door, I could see that the back panel of the clock was not true to the frame. There was a little crack around the edges. Vanity and I had never shut the panel closed behind us when we went back this way.
This time, I waited to time the swings of the pendulum, pushed the panel open with my hand, waited for the pendulum to swing back, stepped quickly in, waited a third time, darted a hand out past the hissing pendulum, yanked the outer glass door partway shut, waited, reached, pulled the door shut, waited, reached, secured the door, and then backed into the stairs, sliding the panel almost all the way shut. I wanted to leave the same crack I had found, in case I needed to use these passages some time again when Vanity was not around.
I was glad space was warped here, for now I had only to climb seven steps, duck my head, and crawl. Now I was on the same level as the third floor. At least, I did not have to climb two and three flights of stairs.
I crawled. I waved my hand in the air in front of me whenever it began to seem really heavy, for it had been heavy when I was doing quadradimensional effects, and I was trying to produce the red or blue sparks I had seen, in order to create a light to illuminate the black space I crawled through. Once or twice I thought I saw lights floating, but these were the same lights anyone will see who is tired, and in pain, in pitch darkness, with her eyes blurred with strain.
Pain has a funny way of focusing the mind. Only what hurts matters. Whatever else you used to think about before is as remote and unimportant as who won some argument you had as a child. You think about moving your right hand, and then you think about moving your left. You don’t think about moving your right knee until the time comes to do it; if you worried prematurely about such things, the burden and the despair would be too much, and you would slump down in the dust, and cry. You don’t think about how nice it would be just to lie down in this coffin of a corridor, or else you won’t get up. You don’t think about how to find the secret door to your room, which, unlike last time, is closed, and giving off no light, and you don’t think about the fact that you don’t know where the switch or latch is to open it from this side.
And you do not think about the fact that you took a wrong turn in the dark somewhere. That would make you cry, too.
You don’t want to cry because you are the strong one in the group, really, the mature one. Practically an adult. Heroines in books don’t cry.
But, despite the pain, you do keep one hand on the wall between crawls, to feel for the hinges where the door is. Those big, odd W-shaped hinges can’t be hidden.
Also, it is important to remember not to crawl through spiderwebs. You were only here yesterday, so no spider (which should not come out in winter anyway) would have had time to construct a new one. If you feel a spiderweb you are on the wrong path.
And, when your hand does come across the huge, ungainly W-shaped hinge, it is important to remember that you are in a corridor only three feet high, because if you raise your head too fast, or try to jump for joy, you will bang your head with a loud noise on the stones above you. Ouch.
Good thing you are still wearing your lucky aviatrix cap. The leather, with all that hair tucked under it, offers some protection.
And then a voice comes: “What noise was that noise, friend Fraud?”
5.
The voice of Mr. ap Cymru answered him: “What noise, Excellency?”
“Hush! It may be our little wandering wanton, back from her peripatetic peregrinations.”
A moment of silence crawled past even more slowly than I had been crawling. Fear, and the bump on my head, had cleared my wits somewhat. I could hear the voices had come through the wall; through the very hidden door panel I had my hand on.
After a while, ap Cymru said, “Excellency, I don’t think…”
“ ‘Then you shouldn’t speak!’ Aha Ha! Loyalest of all my disloyal loyalists, I hereby forbid you from feeding me such obtusely obvious straight lines again. I declare this declaration to be an imperial one, and I will backdate it to this day once I am Imperator. Now be quiet more quietly.”
I moved my hand back and forth across the panel. A metal nub came under my thumb, with a smaller nub projecting from it. When I pushed, the metal nub slid in a semicircle, and a peephole opened.
So there actually were peepholes, after all.
The ray of light was brilliant after my long darkness. I put my eye to it, was dazzled for a moment, and then saw where I was.
I was looking at the Common Room. The door was open. Through the door, I could see partway down the corridor, and see the huge oaken door to my room. Even from here, I could see the padlock was open, hanging like a metal question mark, threaded through the eye of the open hasp.
In the Common Room, I saw the one television we were allowed was on, with the sound turned down. It was BBC2, and they were showing a game show. I have no idea what their normal programming is at 2:00 in the morning, but that seemed strange.
Next to a table littered with cigarette butts, a man was standing facing away from me, leaning his bottom, almost sitting, on a long black umbrella. He had on a yellow mackintosh, and, peeping over the edge of his collar and cuffs, I could see the white folds of a heavy wool sweater. From behind, I could tell that he had long black hair, as long as mine.
Despite the heavy cold-weather gear on the upper half of his body, his legs were sheathed in skintight fabric of garish green and black Lycra, like the pants professional bicyclists wear. They came to about midcalf. His feet were bare, except for some athletic tape he had wrapped around his lower calf and the balls of his feet. His toes and ankles were bare.
He had the legs of an athlete; his thighs and calves were knotted with muscle, but sleek and steel-hard, and the skintight leggings showed it off.
For a moment, I thought he had a stiff, black tail on which he rested his weight. But no.
The tightly wound black umbrella on which he half-leaned, half-sat, was one of the type with a large stirrup-shaped handle that unfolds into a tiny stool seat. The handle was unfolded at the moment, and he was using it as designed.
After what I had seen this evening, a man sitting on an umbrella-stick did not seem that odd. Of course, there were several perfectly fine seats and an overstuffed couch in the student Common Room, so maybe it was odd after all.
Tucked under one arm was what looked like a metal Frisbee, or maybe a pie plate. That was odd, just because I wasn’t sure what it was.
When two lengths of electrical cable moved on the floor, and turned out to be not electrical cable at all, but two snakes, one white and one black, things started looking more odd.
Mr. ap Cymru came into view.
He wa
s crawling along the ceiling like a spider.
His arms and legs were twisted backwards in their joints in a fashion that was hard to describe and horrid to look at. His feet were flat on the ceiling, with his heels pointed inward and his toes pointed outward; his knees extended in two great triangles past his bottom. His elbows, likewise, were waving in the air at angles no unbroken human bones could achieve. And his hands—which seemed to be exuding some sticky sap or gunk—were placed so that his fingers were all turned toward him and his thumbs were pointing away from his body. The whole thing looked like something Colin had done to his soldier dolls back when he got tired of them, the ones with fully posable limbs.
OK. This was certainly odd.
Ap Cymru rotated his head through 180 degrees like an owl, and spoke down toward the other man: “Excellency, that noise did not sound like a footstep.”
“Ho hem. Maybe it was the sound of someone’s grade average falling. This is alleged to be a school, you know. It is an excellent place to learn a lesson. Would you like me to teach you a lesson, Fraud?”
“Excellency, I have not betrayed you.”
“And you give me your word, as a traitor?”
“Whom have I betrayed, Excellency?”
“Boreas told you his plans in confidence.”
“Sir, he did not explicitly say not to tell you.”
“Hum hemp hump. Well, I can see that. How could he overlook to say, by-the-by, don’t spill my plans to the one person everyone thinks is dead, buried alive, having fallen farther than an anvil dropped from the zenith can fall in nine times the space that measures day and night, into the Tartarian Pit, after having been shot in the mouth and the eye by the Queen of Huntresses, whose bow of certain death leaves no prey alive? Yes, you are right. An obvious angle. The windbag should have covered it. Hired a lawyer before speaking to you.”
“Lord, why would I lie to you?”
“Why would the Goddess of Lies in disguise lie to the Father of Lies? Hmm… let me think…”
“Boreas had schemed to lure the Uranian girl from her room tonight, in such a fashion as to put her in his debt. Perhaps she is less venturesome than he assumed.”
“No, she is merely more clever than he assumed. No matter.”
Now the man in the mackintosh jumped to his feet, snatching up the umbrella from behind him. He snapped the handle shut and struck a pose.
“I am a god, one of the Twelve! Boreas is a god as well, true, but his domain is only over the air that moves between north-northwest and north-northeast. My angle of action is larger.
“Fate is my toy to toy with as I will. I ordained that what Boreas wove into the tapestry of destined things would come unravelled. I ordained that the girl would find her bauble tonight; it has happened, or will. I ordained that she and I would meet; I assume she is watching us now.
“Little girl, wherever you are, in this dimension or in another, hear my words: I am your friend at a time when you will need friends most needfully. I offer you rescue, advice as honest as will suit my needs, power, glory, wealth, blah, blah, blah. The whole nine yards. I will grant you three wishes, but do not ask for immortality without asking for eternal youth. Think it over.
“OK, lesson over. Were you taking notes, Taffy ap Cymru? That is how to be a master of intrigue.”
Ap Cymru rotated his head left and right. “Do you say she is in this room, invisible?”
“No. She is in plain sight, just not in our plain sight. Time’s up! Are you going to turn me in?”
“Sir?”
“You could get a very good price for my head.”
“Excellency, you will give me a better price for helping you keep it on your shoulders. When you are Father of Gods, make me Father of Lies.”
“Oh, well said, Taffy. Well said. There is hope for you yet.”
The man whistled, and poked his umbrella at his snakes. They wound up the shaft of the umbrella in two spirals, and rested their heads, facing each other, along the stirrup-shaped handle.
“Oh dear. Now I am not going to be able to get my umbrella open. I do hope it doesn’t rain. I always hate the weather in England,” the man said, moving toward the window. I now saw his face. He wore an eyepatch over one eye. There was something metallic in his mouth. It looked like his tongue was made of gold.
With no further ado, he put the pie plate on his head, flung open the sash, and stepped out onto the windowsill. A white vibration, like little wings beating too swiftly to be seen, flickered into existence around his ankles. He shot up into the night sky like a rocket.
10
Dreams and Misdirection
1.
Because I could see my door from where I was, I now knew (assuming no space warps got in the way) about how far I would have to crawl to make the corner around the Common Room, and how far it was from there to the girls’ dorm. I could even guess about how many crawl-steps it would take, using the distance from my hip to the shoulder as a unit measure.
Well, it took longer than I thought. I also assumed that, if Vanity had not actually built these tunnels out of her own imagination, the designer had meant them to be used. Which meant he expected people to be crawling or duckwalking, perhaps in the dark. Surely he would make the latches to open the secret panels easy to find, easy to manipulate. And yet he would probably not make them intrude into the corridor way where someone could trip on them. Where would he put the latch?
There were grooves cut in the floorboards on which my hands and knees rested. They were evenly spaced every few feet and, for every ten grooves, a double groove. When I came upon a triple groove at about the place my calculations told me the panel to my room was, I put out my hand and found the huge W-shaped hinges right there in the frame.
Feeling around, I detected four latch mechanisms. These were little boxes, one at each side of the frame. They were connected by a cruciform of short arms to a metal boss or nub in the center. This was the nub that covered the peephole. To open the door one had to slide aside the circular flap of metal covering the peephole, then pull the flap upright and rotate it. In other words, the door latch, when folded flat, covered the peephole. It was impossible to open one of these doors without first having the opportunity to see what was waiting on the other side.
I don’t remember crawling into bed. I don’t remember whether I tried to wake the drugged Vanity or not. I do remember it was cold.
2.
I dreamed that night that I was Secunda once more, and that Quentin was a toddler. We were sitting on the stairs that led to the kitchen, and I had some food Cook had given me: slices of apple, sections of banana and cucumber, some dates, and slices of hard-boiled egg with salt. I was trying to teach Quentin his letters. I was giving him a bite of whatever fruit or what-have-you whose letter he could tell me. Unfortunately his favorite letter was ‘W,’ and I did not have any fruits whose name started with that, until Cook (who, when I was small, was a giant) came looming over me like a starched white pillar of cloud, with a mushroom-shaped paper hat far, far above.
Cook stooped over and handed me a bowl with slices of watermelon in it.
I knew (because it had happened in real life) that Quartinus and Primus were about to come running around the corner, and that Quartinus would steal the watermelon slices out of my bowl, and that I would run him down. He would throw the slices into the dirt under the bushes rather than give them back, and I would drub him until Primus told me not to beat my juniors. Quentin would cry.
But, at the moment, before all that happened, it was a beautiful scene, and little Quentin’s face (smeared with bits of banana and egg) lit up like sunshine when I told him he had to spit the seeds. I remember how I pulled him up to sit in my lap while we ate watermelon, just as if I were the Mommy he didn’t have.
One of the eggs in my bowl chipped and cracked and hatched open. Through the broken pieces of shell I could see an endless darkness, streamers of stars and constellations, and, very tiny, in the center of the egg, a c
astle made of silver crystal and rainbow mist.
A small voice said, “The Son of Sable-vested Night sends greetings to the fair Princess Phaethusa, daughter of Helion the Bright, one of those who yet remain, who knew and ruled the world ere King Adam’s reign.
“Nausicaa must stand upon the boundary stone, and grant passage to the power from Myriagon, your home. Recall that thoughts are all recalled by thought and thought alone; undo the magic of mere matter, and the night of no-memory shall break. I grant you shall recall this when you wake.”
3.
I was expecting to be bruised all over, maybe bleeding internally, maybe dead that next morning. None of that happened. I do not know what the symptoms of fourth-dimensional shock are supposed to be, or how anyone can live who has had snow pressed into the fluid cells and internal cavities of every major organ, but apparently my body adjusted rather quickly.
The morning was miserable nonetheless. Usually there is time in the morning for Vanity and me to talk and swap tales. This morning, however, I was tired and she was still sleepy and dopey from the drug. When I tried to tell her all the things that had happened last night, she murmured a few confused questions. She was under the impression Quentin and I had gone off to a waltz party in the Great Hall, that he had kissed me, that I had stolen his walking stick, and that a strange drunk had thrown himself to his death out of the window of the Common Room.
Usually it was Mrs. Wren who got us up, dressed in our uniforms, scrubbed and ready for breakfast. Today, for some reason, it was Sister Twitchett, the school nurse.
There the two of us were, queued up (as queued up as two people can be) in our starched shirts and neckties and plaid skirts. (I hate those skirts—why couldn’t I wear jeans to class? What I wore on my legs did not affect my brain.) And I was grinding my teeth in frustration. I hated Dr. Fell at that moment with a red hate that was sour in my stomach.
Orphans of Chaos tcc-1 Page 15
