His Royal Whiskers

by Sam Gayton

  Pieter felt a tug on his arm. Teresa pulled him into the gloom of an empty balcony as the czarmy poured out from the plaza and started to ransack the jetties and waterways below them.

  “This is the perfect time to attack!” she hissed. “His army’s scattered and distracted. It’ll be just us versus him.”

  “You’re right!” Pieter glanced up at the plaza, trying to work out a way they could get past the czarmy without being spotted. “Let’s hop across the balconies and rescue Grim first. Maybe we can reattach him and send him to warn the other psychopomps.”

  Teresa seemed about to give him one of her looks. Instead, she grinned. “I thought you were going to say that attacking the Czar was a crazy and suicidal plan. And probably give me a percentage, too.”

  “Let’s not argue again about whether it’s smart or stupid to stand up to a bully,” Pieter said, pulling her toward the plaza. “Not when the universe is a fraction away from ending.”

  Around the plaza’s edge they crept, darting from balcony to balcony, sliding down the slopes of dust piled up around the ruined buildings. Around them it was chaos. The czarmy smashed and thrashed and trashed their way through Catacomb. Screams and splashes and tremors and crashes echoed through the fog.

  Ahead of them, Tiffany Blood-drinker swaggered past. They hid in a doorway until her squirrel-tail mustache fell off, and she bent down to pick it up. Then they were sprinting round her and skidding behind the piles of dust in the plaza corner where the Czar had booted Grim.

  Grim’s skeletal hand was already there, digging out his skull. It grinned at them, half-buried. Pieter picked it up carefully and gave the skull a shake. Dust streamed out of it, like sand from a timer, leaving one single yellow speck stuck in the center of each eye socket. The specks turned yellow to pink when they saw Pieter.

  You’re the boy who got his head snipped off on Yuletide day. How did you get here? I never fetched you. The eyes flicked to Teresa. Or you.

  “Actually, part of you did fetch us.” Pieter pointed at the hand scurrying beneath Grim’s skull like a puppy being reunited with its owner.

  Grim looked down at his hand, eyes flaring up in surprise. Wow! he said sarcastically. Well done, Lefty. There’s a maniac running around Catacomb, waving around my soul-blade, and you bring two children to sort things out. No wonder I only use you for two-handed tasks.

  “We can deal with the Czar!” Pieter said, peering over the mound of dust to check where he was. He couldn’t find him in the fog: the plaza was too crowded.

  You two? Deal with the Czar? Grim’s jaw clacked open and shut as he laughed.

  Teresa scowled. Her hand shot forward and angled Grim’s skull up toward her. Anger rumbled inside her spring thunderstorm-colored soul.

  “I am Teresa Gust,” she said. “Alchemaster and Heir to the Iron Crown. This is Pieter Abadabacus: he knows his fifty-seven times table. We have come a very long way to sort out a problem that only started when your idea of dealing with the Czar was getting yourself broken up into bits and thrown in a sack. And that was when you had the sharpest blade in the universe on a big stick.”

  Grim’s jaw clacked open. Ouch, he said. If I had facial muscles, they’d be wincing. That was a good speech.

  Teresa shrugged. “I practiced. It was a long boat ride.”

  Time well spent. See, that’s what the Czar doesn’t understand about the land of the dead. Power here doesn’t just lie in swords—

  “It’s in words,” Pieter interrupted. “Memories too. We’ve already figured that out.”

  “Did we mention,” said Teresa, “that we’re both geniuses?”

  Grim seemed to take a second look at them both. Geniuses with a mad, brilliant idea to save the universe? he asked hopefully.

  Teresa looked at Pieter. “Wait five minutes while we put our heads together,” she told Grim.

  In the end, they had the plan all figured out after three.

  Is it mad? Grim asked.

  Teresa nodded. “A little.”

  Brilliant?

  Pieter shrugged. “Undoubtedly.”

  Will it save the universe?

  The two friends looked at each other. “There’s a chance,” they both said.

  Grim’s grin seemed to somehow stretch wider. Tell me.

  4

  The Most Powerful Weapon of All

  Across the plaza, Pieter and Teresa and Grim went hunting through the fog for the Czar. They had no ally but the skull in their hands and no weapon but the single mad, brilliant idea in their heads. The space where Pieter’s heart used to beat was thudding like a hollow drum; the ghosts of his nerves were tingling. Yet the plan in his mind was clear and strong. And the first part of it was simply: Find the Czar.

  “That him?” Pieter pointed to a figure up ahead. They crept closer . . . but it was only Ivan the Savage, grinning like a devil as he kicked stilts out from beneath a plaza building. Trapped on the balconies above him, a family of Laplönder souls wailed and wobbled as they started to teeter down toward the swamp . . .

  Then suddenly it was Ivan who was screaming, as Pieter crept up behind him, and held Grim aloft.

  CHOMP.

  His victims up on the balcony cheered as the vicious king hopped around the plaza, shrieking and weeping and trying to pry a skull off his bottom.

  Pieter and Teresa did not stop to celebrate. They searched on, until Boris of the Nine Wives lumbered into their path. He was carrying his newly engaged tenth bride through the fog, despite the fact that she was hitting him over the head with her shoe and screaming, “I SAID NO!”

  He lunged for Teresa, crying out, “And here’s number eleven!” but she ran up his arms like they were kitchen shelves, then plunged her hand into his hollow head and stirred his thoughts until he fell over with confusion. Boris’s Would-Be Tenth Wife stood up, gave them a look of eternal gratitude, then ran off.

  “Oi!” Pieter yelled.

  The Czar stood with his back to them, only ten paces away. He was busy cutting an enormous portal in the air for all his men to march through. Just the corner of it had been done.

  When Pieter’s voice echoed across the plaza, he froze. Very slowly, he turned around and held up his sword. Mist drifted across the sharp edge of the soul-blade, curling in the air in long shaved spirals.

  In other tales, less true than this one, the Czar might stop and deliver a long and gloating speech to Pieter and Teresa, giving them the time or the information they needed to defeat him. But he said nothing to them. He did not ask how they had come to Catacomb, or if they knew of his plan. He just came forward, silent and cold-eyed, to kill them.

  Teresa and Pieter were quick but the Czar was quicker. He whipped the soul-blade up and slashed it down so fast that there was no way they could dodge it. It would slice them even if they rolled to the side, or ducked, or jumped back. There was no way of dodging that deadly strike.

  But that didn’t matter.

  Dodging wasn’t part of the plan.

  Pieter knelt down, and Teresa stood on his knee and launched herself into the path of the blade.

  And just before it cut them both in two, her hand reached up and her fingertips brushed the Czar’s face.

  There was a white flash and a mighty thunderclap sound as the two stormy souls of father and daughter met. In the instant they connected, Teresa called up one single memory from the deepest depths of her soul, and sent it to the Czar.

  Pieter gasped as he saw an image bloom in both their heads like a dazzling flower.

  It truly was the greatest weapon in all Petrossia, just as all the stories had said.

  Inches from Pieter’s neck, the soul-blade slowed to a stop, as if it had become a blunt spoon and the fog was old porridge that would not be stirred. Then the sword slipped from the Czar’s limp grip and clattered on the plaza beside him.

  In one anguished howl, all the rage and bluster of his thunderous soul burst out of him. In his chest, a hole appeared like the eye of a storm. Teresa had j
ust reopened the oldest, deepest, only wound the Czar’s soul had ever suffered.

  Suddenly he was sobbing, great torrential tears falling from his eyes, falling and falling and falling. Teresa was crying too, silent and still like a statue of a saint. In both their minds, Pieter saw the memory slowly wilt away and vanish: the greatest weapon in Petrossia.

  The only thing that had ever conquered the Czar, that Teresa had carried within her since the moment she had been born.

  Her mother’s all-conquering smile.

  Pieter picked up the soul-blade by the broken scythe-handle grip. The Czar cringed away from him, his sniveling soul the weak-gray color of dirty puddles.

  “Wait!” shrieked the Czar. “I’ll make you my heir! I’ll give you your very own soul-blade! Anything you want you can have! I’ll conquer it and give it to you.”

  “End it, Pieter,” said Teresa through her tears, fists clenched. “You know what we do to bullies.”

  And Pieter raised the sword: for Teresa, for the Czarina, for Amna and the Baba Sisters, and everyone else. But the blade never came down.

  “No,” he said.

  Triumph flashed across the Czar’s face—confusion filled Teresa’s.

  “I was wrong,” Pieter told her. “You can survive bullies for a bit, but not forever. And you were wrong too, Teresa. You can stand up to them sometimes, but not always. Because I’ve just realized something.”

  Before she could speak, he took the sword-blade and cut a letterbox-sized hole in the air. Then he posted it through, not knowing or caring where in the universe it was, and sealed the letterbox shut.

  “The smart choice,” he said, “is just to walk away and be done with them. Forever.”

  Then he took her by the hand and led her over the plaza, leaving the Czar alone. In the corners of their eyes, a faint glimmer burned like a distant star, calling them home. They followed it, and neither one of them looked back.

  As Pieter and Teresa walked off into the mist, the Czar staggered to his feet. He clutched at the hole in the center of his soul and moaned. How it hurt, all over again, fresh as the day she had died! What had that girl done to him? Revenge! He needed revenge!

  “Come back here!” he screamed at their backs. “I am the Czar! I ruled from the Boreal Sea to the Western Woodn’t! I wore the Iron Crown! A hundred armies did my bidding! No one turns away from me!”

  But he was screaming at the emptiness. Teresa and Pieter were out of sight now. He stood alone on the empty plaza.

  “I’ll find the soul-blade again!” he roared. “Wherever it went, I’ll search for it! The whole land of the dead if I have to! I’ve got all eternity, haven’t I?” He began to chuckle to himself. “You haven’t beaten me. No one ever has. I’m the mightiest conqueror of all.”

  But the frightening thing was, he didn’t feel mighty. Not anymore. What power did he hold now, without the sword?

  “Czarmy!” he called out across the plaza. “Troops, I summon you! I order you to gather here! Ivan the Savage! Boris? Igor?”

  A few figures gradually stumbled back on the plaza and gathered around him, but they did not have the same conquering look he had seen earlier. They looked frightened. Boris was holding his head and staggering, and Ivan the Savage was trying to pry Grim’s skull off his bottom.

  “Czar of Czars!” Igor began. “The city, it—”

  “Forget Catacomb!” said the Czar.

  “But—”

  “SILENCE!” He had to get his authority back. He squared his shoulders and crossed his arms over his chest, hoping it would hide the wound in his soul. “Find my soul-blade! Find it noowwwwwww!”

  His speech ended in a scream as, out of the murky fog, a low blue shape leaped onto his back. It tore at him, teeth and claws, until the Czar fell backwards and shook it off. The creature did a somersault across the plaza and scrabbled back on its paws.

  It was Bloodbath.

  The poodle bared its jaws and growled.

  If I had shoulders, said Grim, as he dropped off Ivan’s bottom with a plonk, I’d be shrugging them. Maybe Bloodbath put in a request for a haunting when he died. Maybe it was a request to haunt you. Maybe a lot of the victims that you and all the other czars conquered all did the same. Maybe the line was decades long. And maybe I just granted all those requests at once.

  The Czar became aware that the swamp beneath them was trembling now. The sound of footsteps approaching. Down onto the plaza, through the fog, blue spirits were marching. Rushing toward the czarmy like a waterfall. Hundreds—no, thousands—no, hundreds of thousands. Row upon row, and all of them aglow. In every shade of blue, from sky to sea to sapphire. Every victim of every czar, every soul ever conquered.

  All come to settle their unfinished business.

  Babapatra, with charms swinging in her long dreadlocked hair. Eight Baba Sister brides beside her. King Harollia of Laplönd. Nincombob the Brief. Even the Czar’s own Great-aunt Anastasia . . .

  And then the Czar saw the Czarina, her soul the color of spring rain, holding a ghostly bunch of mintflower.

  And beside her were two mathemagicians, wearing necklaces of abacus beads, their hair curled into long Fibonacci spirals.

  And as one they opened their mouths and started to sing:

  “Done and dusted, you’re no King, No power over anything.

  You killed us when we were alive,

  So see that swamp? GO TAKE A DIVE!”

  They sang together, in a single vast voice that was louder than anything the Czar had ever heard. He raised up his fists, but the army of souls washed over him like a tidal wave, and swept him and his czarmy off the plaza and into the marsh with a splash.

  No one ever saw the Czar again. But for thousands of years to come, those in Catacomb would sometimes glimpse in the swamp around the city a will-o’-the-wisp shape of a lost soul. Those who got near enough to see it clearly, said that it was so old it had forgotten its shape and how to speak. There was no way of asking who it had once been, or what it was searching for, endlessly and without success, amongst the marsh reeds.

  5

  Two Farewells, One Happy and One Sad

  That was the end of the Czar. But, of course, it was not the end of the story. There isn’t one. There is only a place where your telling stops, while the story goes on without you, regardless.

  And so, after Pieter and Teresa searched the city for the soul of an anatomist to help piece Grim back together—

  After they’d chased his fluttering cloak around the plaza until the wind let them catch it—

  After Grim took up his job as psychopomp once more, and found his soul-blade using the compass in his scythe-handle—

  The time came for Pieter and Teresa to say goodbye.

  Grim led the way back to the land of living. He clicked and popped his joints as he stood up on the plaza, a skeleton once more, gripping the scythe in his bony hands. He motioned for all the souls to stand back as he cut a door in the air, and pulled it open.

  Shortcut, he said.

  Light blazed behind it, sudden and blinding, so bright that Pieter could barely look at it. And yet at the same time he could not tear his gaze away, it was so beautiful. It was amazing how quickly he had forgotten how blue the sky could be. Through the doorway was the Winter Palace courtyard. There was the fire, still burning. There was Alexander, curled up and asleep. There was Amna, gray and slumped with exhaustion, still feeding the flames with the last bits of kindling.

  And there were Pieter and Teresa: his head still on the velvet cushion beside the fire, and her lying beside him. But both of their bodies were empty. It was strange how Pieter could tell. It was like looking at a glass bottle full of water, and then coming back later to find someone had poured it down the sink. The water might have been clear, the glass bottle itself might not look any different . . . and yet you still knew that there was something missing.

  Come, said Grim. Let me lead you back to where you belong.

  But as they stepped forward
, Grim held out his hand.

  Not you, Pieter.

  In the back of his mind, Pieter had always known this moment was coming. He had no life to go back to. It had ended on Yuletide day.

  “No,” Teresa said, clutching at him. “No, that’s not fair!”

  It’s completely fair, said Grim. There are rules.

  “But he saved Petrossia!” Teresa shouted. “He got you your scythe back! He’s my best friend! He . . .”

  He died, Grim reminded her gently.

  “Teresa,” Pieter said quietly. “It’s okay.”

  She gave him one of her looks (the one she never gave to anyone else, before or after). Then she wiped jewel-blue tears from her eyes, and hugged him tight.

  There was nothing to say. Maybe if things had been different, they could have grown up together. Somewhere there is a great long list of all the things that ended far too soon, and written on it are the words “Pieter and Teresa’s friendship.”

  6

  Unfinished Business

  It was strange. Life and Death had finally been fixed, but now it was Pieter who felt broken. He’d lost his life before he’d lived it, and he was miserable.

  He took a little stilt house at the edge of the city and its fog, and sat at the window, counting dead stars to pass the time.

  I could take you to Elucid, the skeleton said one night when he came to visit. It is the city the Eurekans built, after their psychopomp Azreal brought them to the land of the dead. I know your parents have not returned there yet. They’ve been here ever since the Czar was defeated. I’m told they are searching for you.