The Lightning Key (Wednesday Tales (Quality))

by Jon Berkeley

  “Apart from motorbikes,” observed Fish-fly.

  “Motorbikes?” said Miles

  “We like them,” said the other Rascal. “But they’re the exception.”

  Miles realized now what the roaring sound was. He noticed that several of the Rascals had tangles of chrome tubes and blackened pipes protruding behind them, and that they left trails of smoke as they belted through the sky. The long, thin Rascal had a patch sewn on his back, with the words “Fly to Live, Live to Fly” curling around a skull with a rose between its teeth.

  “We used to do the big stuff—fires, storms, floods—but we got taken off that a long time ago. They created special departments for them, and staffed them with responsible types,” said Fish-fly.

  Miles thought of Silverpoint, and his insistence on sticking to what he called the Code of the Realm. “Why did they do that?” he asked.

  “We got a bit carried away,” said the Rascal. “Solar flares, meteorites—we were having a ball, but a lot of creatures got hurt. Big guys, some of them. Huge jaws, tiny arms, tombstones all up their backs. We didn’t mean to wipe them out, but when the smoke cleared and a lot of them were gone, we got demoted.”

  “Who demoted you?” asked Miles, fascinated.

  “The Sleepies, of course. Who else?”

  “You mean the Sleep Angels?”

  “That’s them. Of course, we get back at them now and then. It really gets up their noses when we play our little tricks on them, but it’s worth it just to see them pop.”

  “What kind of little tricks?” asked Miles. “Do you burn their toast?”

  Little caught Miles’s eye and shook her head minutely.

  “Funny,” said Fish-fly.

  “But not very,” said the long, thin Rascal.

  “The kind of tricks we like are the ones that make the Sleepies really angry.”

  Another Rascal laughed. “When they get really angry they go off like volcanoes, and lots of people die.”

  “Which proves they’re no better than us.”

  “That’s why we’re taking you in.”

  “Taking us in where?”

  “To the Council, of course. A meatmade in the Council will really put the dragon in the henhouse.”

  “Especially one who’s been brought here by a banished Song Angel!”

  The Rascals guffawed and honked. “We saw how shiny and new those wings were,” said Fish-fly.

  “We can see your old ones too,” said the long, thin Rascal.

  “They never quite wash out, do they, little cousin?”

  Little said nothing. She took Miles’s hand as they flew onward through the cloud columns, escorted by chaos made visible, like two canaries into a crocodile’s jaws.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  A QUESTION OF GOATS

  Miles and Little, meatmade and fresh-winged, flew toward a cloud that Miles recognized from his encyclopedia education as a cumulonimbus. It was a massive tower of white with a bellyful of gray rain and a towering head. Fear clutched at Miles’s stomach, but there was no escaping their gleeful escort. Besides, he thought, this was what they had entered the Realm for. He didn’t feel ready to face the Sleep Angels, but then, he doubted that any amount of preparation would be enough.

  Inside the cloud was an enormous hall with galleries twisting and spiraling around its sheer walls. There was a solid floor beneath their feet. Miles felt his wings fold against his back, and he looked around him curiously. At first he had thought the hall was almost empty, but wherever he looked he could see swarms of figures, talking and arguing and adopting a bewildering variety of shapes and guises. It was not that they appeared out of nowhere; rather that they seemed to come to his notice only when he looked in their direction. The Chaos Angels, quieter than they had been in flight, prodded him into motion, and he and Little walked toward the center of the room. It was strangely difficult to tell if they were walking on the level or climbing a gentle slope, but after a while Miles noticed that they were much higher up in the cloud than they had been. Most of the angels they passed paid no attention to them, but Miles saw that they parted for the Chaos Angels, who walked with a certain swagger.

  They reached a broad gallery with a commanding view of the inside of the cloud. A large crowd of figures swarmed around the gallery. The edges of the crowd seemed to ebb and flow, and some angels hovered and swooped above the melee. Little took Miles’s hand and squeezed. “Keep your eyes clear and your claws sharp,” she whispered, quoting the tiger’s advice. “Be very careful what you say, Miles.” Her skin, which always glowed with a pale light, looked pure white now, and the look of fear on her face brought home to Miles the danger in which she had put herself for his sake. He felt a hard knot of determination to save her, at least, and he forced a smile and returned her squeeze.

  “Way!” boomed one of the Rascals as they entered the crowd.

  “Coming through,” called another.

  Some of the figures at the edge of the crowd turned to face them. Miles could see that many of them were Sleep Angels. He recognized their indistinct shapes, as though they were made of dense gray smoke. It was impossible for his eyes to get a fix on their features, but he felt none of the crushing sleep that he associated with the presence of a Sleep Angel. “It mustn’t work that way up here,” he thought to himself.

  “What mustn’t?” said a voice right in his ear. He was suddenly surrounded by the shifting crowd.

  “I didn’t say anything,” said Miles. He could clearly see the face of the angel beside him. It was a narrow face with skin like polished gray stone. It was neither friendly nor threatening, but strangely familiar, as though it belonged to someone he had never met but would someday know very well.

  “You don’t need to,” said another voice behind him, and as he spoke the face of the first angel dissolved into smoky vagueness. Miles turned. Another stone-faced angel was staring at him. “I don’t recognize you,” said the second angel. “How come your caste isn’t showing?”

  Miles glanced around desperately for Little. He felt out of his depth already, but he was saved from answering by a shout from somewhere in the crowd. “Never mind that, Stillbone. What about those goats?” He recognized the voice as that of the Rascal Fish-fly, and allowed himself a sigh of relief. Maybe they were on his side after all.

  All eyes turned to the shouting Rascal. “What goats?” asked one of the Sleep Angels in a voice like flint.

  “We were talking about goats last Council I was at,” said Fish-fly. “Can we grow demons in all of ’em, or just the ones with yellow eyes?”

  The Sleep Angel grew visibly sharper and larger. His features became so clear it was almost hard to look at him. “What does their eye color matter?”

  Fish-fly gave a shudder that made his whole body ripple. “The yellow-eyed ones are plain creepy. Scares the kidneys out of the meatma . . . the corporeals. Not so sure about the blue-eyed ones, though. They’re almost cute.”

  A sudden thread of song came to Miles’s ear. He had never heard a sound described as “goaty,” but there was certainly no other word that could describe this snatch of music. It did not simply echo the sound of a goat; it contained the touch of its coarse wool, the curve of its horns, the smell and the shape and the entire essence of the animal. The singer hovered at the edge of the crowd, and she laughed as she finished her song. She reminded Miles of Little, but seemed somehow thinner and sharper.

  “I’ll go get some goats,” bellowed one of the other Rascals. “Blue-eyed, brown, green and yellow. Help you make up your minds.”

  “Get some?” hissed Stillbone, coming back into focus. “You can’t bring goats to the Council! You can’t bring any corporeals to a Council.”

  A sly grin broke out on the Rascal’s face, and he extended a finger in Little’s direction. “She did,” he said.

  Little shrank visibly. Her pretty features smoothed out until you would have had the greatest difficulty remembering them for more than a second. The entire cr
owd turned toward her—shock on the faces of the Song Angels and the Whitefire Angels, and menace in the eyes of the Sleep Angels, who began to converge on Little as though they would swallow her whole and spit out her birdlike bones. Miles was paralyzed with fear. He looked around for someone who could help him, but there was nobody. The thought of the tiger began to surface. He remembered Little’s warning and tried to block it out, but blocking a thought that you’re not supposed to be having is no easy task, as you will know if you’ve ever had a sudden vision of someone with two carrots up their nose while they’re interrogating you about missing homework.

  Miles tried to swallow the thought of the tiger, and for a moment it seemed to be working. The thought sat in his stomach like an indigestible ball, but it did not go away. It began to push up through his chest, and what happened next surprised Miles himself as much as anyone. The thought rose through his gullet in a ball of sound, and the thunderous roar of an angry tiger burst from his mouth, silencing at once the babble of the chaotic Council.

  The whole assembly froze for a heartbeat. Little stood in the center, pale and frightened, surrounded by a swirling crowd of pointing, gesticulating figures of every shape and hue. The scene came suddenly back to life, and all attention switched at once to Miles, who stood there feeling like he had released an enormous belch at a genteel dinner party.

  Stillbone, the Sleep Angel who had questioned him before, suddenly materialized in front of him. His polished black eyes held Miles in a cold stare as he released a single word into the silence: “Who?” he said.

  “It’s not her fault,” said Miles. “It was my idea to come here.”

  The Sleep Angel took a step backward. “You’re not a goat.”

  “Not the last time I looked,” said Miles. There was no going back now, and the very hopelessness of his situation made him bolder. He took a deep breath. It was time to tell the truth. “I came to talk about the Tiger’s Egg.”

  The silence grew tauter. Even the Rascals had stopped their guffawing, and Miles noted that some of them were visibly shrinking. “I don’t know you,” said Stillbone. “What is your name?”

  “Miles,” said Miles.

  The Sleep Angel gave a humorless smile. He echoed the name Miles. It turned into a dull stone on his tongue, and fell to the floor at his feet.

  “Your real name,” he said.

  “That’s the only one I know,” said Miles. He realized now that the name that served him in the normal world was of no use here, but if he had another name he had no idea what it might be.

  “You cannot address the Council without a name,” said Stillbone.

  “I already did,” said Miles. “But it seems I’ve wasted my time. If you don’t want to know more about the Tiger’s Egg I’ll just go back where I came from.”

  “We should let him speak,” said a tall figure dressed in black. He waved his hand at Miles as he did so, and tiny points of intense light spilled from his fingers. He was surrounded by these pinpoints, as were several other angels, and Miles guessed that these were the Whitefire Angels whom Little had told him about in a small room buried deep beneath the Palace of Laughter.

  Stillbone turned to the Whitefire Angel, crackling slightly with anger. “That matter is now closed. We decided our course of action already.”

  “You decided,” called another figure from the sidelines. Miles was sure that one of the Chaos Angels had stood there a moment before, but it was a tall, black-clad figure who spoke, also shedding miniature stars from his fingertips.

  A Storm Angel sent a twisted thread of lightning at the speaker, who ducked quickly out of sight and turned into a small bat, fluttering away before he could be spotted.

  At this point the whole Council seemed to erupt in shouting. Fingers were jabbed in the air, wings broke open to give their owners more elevation from which to bellow their point of view, and more than a few lightning bolts were traded. The cloud around them flashed with bursts of lightning, and the argument became rapidly more heated. Just as Miles was wondering if he should try roaring like a tiger for a second time, Little shot from the heaving, gesticulating crowd like a stone from a catapult and grabbed his wrist.

  “Let’s go, Miles,” she said, pulling him toward the white wall of the chamber.

  “But I was just getting started,” protested Miles.

  “Nice try,” said Little as they burst out into the dawn sky. “Imagine what would happen if you continued. Anyway, you need to get back at once.”

  Miles was taken aback by the sharpness of her reply. “I need to? What about you?” he said.

  “We,” said Little. “I said we.”

  She hadn’t said that, and Miles knew it. He wondered if she planned to somehow remain in the Realm without him. The thought of losing her gave him a sinking feeling, and he began to lose height quickly. They were flying at speed into the dawn, and he could see up ahead a dark strip of land and the domes and minarets of a town on the shore. He could just make out the outline of the Sunfish too, flying close to her own shadow on the water as she approached the port.

  “Hurry!” said Little. She had a firm grip on his wrist and was pulling him insistently toward the airship. They were traveling faster than he had ever done in his life, the waves little more than a blur as they skimmed over them. Miles would have been unable to keep up, but Little seemed able to draw him onward like a magnet without his having to use his wings at all. She glanced over her shoulder, and the look on her face hardened into grim determination. There was a pack of distant figures on their tail, silhouetted against the pale yellow cumulus cloud they had just escaped.

  “Are they Sleep Angels?” Miles shouted into the wind.

  “Must be,” said Little.

  Something did not feel right. They flew over the Albatross, which was making headway under bellying sails but was still some way behind its airborne rival. The Sunfish was descending now toward some kind of arena on the outskirts of Al Bab. She was drifting at an odd angle, and as they got close Miles could see a thick column of smoke rising from the starboard side of the hull.

  “The Sunfish is on fire!” he said.

  “So it is,” said Little. She seemed neither surprised nor concerned, and Miles stared at her with a rising sense of panic as they hurtled toward the burning airship, with no sign of slowing.

  “But the smoke is coming from the cabins,” he shouted. “If we go back to our bodies we’ll be trapped. There must be something we can do from outside.”

  Little shook her head. “You’ve got an appointment to keep,” she said. Her voice did not sound right, and she appeared to be stretching as she spoke. He looked at her again, closer now, but she was becoming gray and indistinct, and with a jolt he realized that this was not Little at all. He struggled to free his wrist, but the angel had an unbreakable grip.

  “Let go!” shouted Miles.

  “Soon,” said Bluehart, his stony features emerging as he spoke. Miles could see now why the Sleep Angel’s face was so familiar. It was almost a mirror of his own features, but with something missing, something he could not identify. “You’ve had a good run,” said the angel, “but you’re way out of your depth, boy. It’s your time.”

  Miles glanced desperately over his shoulder. They were about to fly straight into the Sunfish’s smoldering hull, and even if he could escape Bluehart there was a horde of angels coming after him. He realized that his visit to the Council had been a fatal mistake. His throat tightened and he began to cough. “Let Little go,” he spluttered. “The Tiger’s Egg was mine. She had nothing to do with it.”

  Miles knew the ship’s planking would not be solid to him, but his eyes told him he was heading for a collision, and ignoring the evidence of your senses is not an easy thing to do. He tensed himself for an impact, and as he closed his eyes he felt Bluehart release his wrist. There was an uncomfortable sucking sensation and he sat up with a jerk, his lungs burning, and tumbled from the end of his bunk. The cabin was filled with acrid smoke. Balt
inglass’s bottom bunk was empty. He tried to get himself to his feet to climb the ladder to the top bunk where Little lay, but the coughing bent him double. He knew she was still trapped at the Council, and that here in the burning cabin her body would be unconscious. He tried again to straighten up. The cabin was beginning to swim before his eyes.

  The silhouette of Bluehart stood by the porthole. “Not long now,” said the Sleep Angel, a surprising kindness in his voice. “You have to be present in yourself to die. It’s a formality, but one that must be observed.” He gave a deep sigh. “That’s bureaucracy for you.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  A LUCKY GUESS

  Bluehart the Sleep Angel, smoke-gray and bone-cold, stood in the choking cabin and waited for his moment. The boy was on his hands and knees on the floor now, spit running from his lips, as Bluehart patiently counted down his last gasping breaths. It was a short enough life, he thought—seven . . . six . . . five—but each one had their time—four . . . three—and this boy had already stretched his beyond its limit—two . . . one . . . .

  The Sleep Angel stiffened suddenly. There was an unexpected sound from outside the cabin, the echo of a roar entwined with sweet music that had no place here. He stepped toward the boy, but the music tightened around him.

  Miles heard it too, slipping from consciousness, and he mistook it for a memory. The blood roared in his ears, and Little’s voice cut through it with a song of wild urgency and indescribable beauty. In his confusion he thought he was back in the Palace of Laughter, held in the suffocating embrace of The Null, and he looked up through stinging eyes to see if he could catch a glimpse of the Song Angel.

  There was a loud crash, and almost at once the smoke began to thin. The figure of Bluehart dissolved with a gasp of rage, and Miles felt himself lifted from the floor. He tried to tell his rescuers that Little was in the top bunk, but he could only cough.

  “We’ve got you, Master Miles,” said Baltinglass of Araby.