So in this reality, he was blond and mad. It could be an improvement. “What true nature of our society?”
“The tyranny of peace and love, of course,” said the not-Sinistre. He smiled happily. “We’re so flattered and humbled that such an important figure as you has chosen to join our rebellion.”
“Right,” said Kassa. “I did that, did I?”
“Of course! Why would such a noble lady appear in the slums of the city if not to join our vital cause?”
Kassa looked around at the shining white walls, the perfect white bed linen and the marble columns on either side of the little arched doorway. “These are the slums? What does the rest of your world look like?”
The not-Sinistre looked baffled. “My lady? You seem confused.” He brightened instantly. “But of course, where are my manners? You don’t know who I am! You were unconscious when we found you. We assumed you had fainted from the shock of seeing the foul conditions in which we of the outer city live.”
“Um, yes,” said Kassa, figuring it was probably best to play along. She lifted a hand to her forehead. “Ah, me. All this white marble. How you poor peasants are suffering!”
“My name is Ortsino,” said the not-Sinistre. “Would you like to meet the others?”
“I would love to do that,” said Kassa. “And perhaps you could remind me of some of the details of your rebellion as we go?”
“I would be honoured, my lady,” said Ortsino, with a gallant bow. “Please follow me, and try not to be too badly affected by what you see of our horrendous living conditions. Your presence here is a grand gesture towards changing our society once and for all.”
“Can’t wait,” said Kassa Daggersharp.
Ortsino led the way down many shiny white staircases and through many shiny white corridors. Everywhere she looked, Kassa saw people dressed in floppy white clothes, smiling at each other. She was beginning to see what Ortsino meant by the horrendous living conditions. Everyone she passed greeted her in soft, happy voices.
“Peace and light to you, mistress.”
“Happy morning.”
“Serenity for all.”
“Love and light, light and love.”
Kassa felt a little queasy. “Is everyone this happy?” she asked Ortsino.
“They do not know any better, my lady,” he whispered discreetly. “That is what our rebellion is fighting against.”
“Are they on drugs?”
“Alas, no. That we could do something about. Tragically, their peace and contentment comes from within.”
“And do many poor people work behind the scenes to fund this lifestyle?” she asked.
Ortsino gave her a peculiar look. “These are the poor people, my lady.”
Every now and then they passed a window through which Kassa saw the same lush green garden, the same water feature, the same butterflies. “Do all the gardens look the same around here?” she whispered to Ortsino.
“There is only one garden, lady,” he whispered back. “I have heard that in the Inner City, you have the luxury of several different window views. That must indeed be wondrous to behold. Alas, here in the Outer City we have the same one, which was voted as the most pleasing image. Every year we have a new vote, but the result is always the same, since we are never shown the alternative. Ah, here we are.”
He hovered outside a door and, with the exaggerated movements of an amateur criminal drawing attention to the fact that he was desperate not to be noticed, knocked three times.
“Password?” hissed a voice.
Ortsino took a deep breath, blushing with the effort. “Unpleasant but necessary action,” he blurted out in a hoarse whisper.
The door opened quickly. Ortsino ushered Kassa in, and looked both ways up and down the corridor before ducking in himself and closing the door behind him. “Welcome to the rebellion, Ladybird,” he declared.
Kassa bit her lip to not correct him about her name. If he thought she was this Ladybird person, she had better go along with it. This was a hardened gang of desperado rebels. Or as hardened a gang as one could gather in such a bright white city of peace and light.
Including Ortsino, there were four of them, staring at Kassa with something like awe. Ortsino pulled off his floppy white shirt, sticking his chest out proudly. Underneath, he wore a short-sleeved tunic which was — Kassa realised after a long moment — slightly less pure white than everything else in the ‘slums’ of this city. The garment was greyish, and letters had been embroidered across the front in pale green thread to spell the words ‘Too Much Peace in Harmony!’ It sounded nonsensical to Kassa, so she turned her attention to the other rebels.
The others also wore greyish tunics with slogans, rebelling against the local style police. A tall young man, whose tunic read ‘Happiness is Tyranny’, wore lilac trousers. An older fellow with a straggly beard, whose tunic read, ‘Turn Down the Light’, had a blue ink tattoo drawn on his left forearm, a circle indicating a face, two dots indicating eyes and a curved line indicating a downturned, frowning mouth. The effect was slightly spoiled by the scribbled-over practice efforts that were visible on his right forearm, all three of which wore smiley mouths.
The only woman of the group, whose tunic read ‘The Light Lords Of Harmony City Have Been Unfairly Forcing Our Society To Be Happy And Peaceful By Peculiar and Arcane Means For Far Too Long Now, And We Are Tired of Being Surrounded By Light And Love Constantly And Couldn’t We Just Be Unhappy Occasionally If We Really Want To???’ in far superior embroidery to the others, had used makeup to draw dark frown lines into her face, worry lines into her forehead and mournful grey bags under her eyes. The effect was totally spoiled by her bright and sunny smile. She was holding a quill and inkwell, and was trying to use them to black up her white-blonde hair.
“This is Iason, Deevis and Strella,” said Ortsino.
“Right,” said Kassa, halfway through reading Strella’s remarkably informative tunic. “So you are the rebellion that plans to overthrow Harmony City and get rid of the…Light Lords, who are responsible for making everyone so happy. Am I right?”
“The other three Light Lords, of course,” said Ortsino, with a chuckle. “We don’t want to overthrow you or Quillsmith, now do we?”
The others all giggled.
“Of course not,” said Kassa, laughing along. “Because I’m a Light Lord, aren’t I? Ha ha.”
“Quillsmith told us that one of the other Light Lords might be persuaded to aid our cause,” said Ortsino. “But we never guessed he meant you! I mean, we always thought that you were, well…”
“The most tyrannical bitch of them all,” volunteered Strella. She blushed. “Sorry. I’m just practising the use of confrontational language.”
“You’re very good at it,” Kassa assured her. “So, where’s Quillsmith? I take it he’s the instigator of this little gang?”
The rebels looked at each other, worried. “Don’t you know?” said Ortsino. “We thought that was why you had finally revealed yourself to us.”
“Um,” said Kassa. “You know, I’m not sure I’ve recovered from that fainting spell I had earlier. The shock of seeing all that…white marble. I may have hit my head.”
“They captured Quillsmith,” said Strella. “That’s why we’re so happy — I mean, that’s why our rebellion of anti-happiness has been given new hope of eventual occasional unhappiness. You’re here to help us rescue him, aren’t you?”
“Of course I am!” said Kassa. “Rescuing Quillsmith. Brilliant plan. Let’s get started, shall we?”
The four intrepid rebels, accompanied by the interloper from another world, crept and scuttled and generally made a spectacle of themselves in their efforts to travel discreetly from their hideout to the prison block. Each of them wore ordinary Harmony clothes, floppy and bright white. Strella had braided her hair back to disguise the inky black clumps. They looked like five very ordinary citizens of Harmony, except that four of them were acting like guilty criminals.
Kassa attempted to walk like a normal person, but eventually had to resort to the same hunched gait as the others in order to be able to speak to Ortsino. “Awfully brave, Quillsmith, wasn’t he?” she said, in the hope of a more detailed explanation than that provided by the embroidery on Strella’s tunic. “I mean, contacting you rebels, endangering his own position of authority…”
“No more brave than yourself for doing the same, Ladybird,” Ortsino assured her.
“But he did it first,” said Kassa. “Or you would never have known what was going on…” Please please please tell me what’s going on.
“You are right,” Ortsino agreed. “We would never have known the truth about our unnaturally peaceful and happy city.”
Kassa waited, but he was not forthcoming with any more details. “Flying blind as usual,” she sighed.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Don’t mind me. What’s happening over there?”
They were near what looked like a small cafeteria. A crowd of aristocratic-looking people in well-tailored floppy white clothes sat at tables, eating salad from large white plates and staring at a large window which took up the whole back wall.
Through the window, you could see Drak.
Here in Harmony, the image of the dark, brooding city with its high buildings and black shadows was particularly dramatic. Ortsino and the rebels stared with wide eyes as the window displayed a series of images — Lord Sinistre walking down a staircase with his face like thunder, a miserable-looking gardener tending the moonflowers in a park full of basalt sculptures, a woman in a long black dress looking scared as she hurried through a dark alleyway.
As if by magic, words scrolled across the window. Drak — Aren’t you glad you don’t live there?
“Sort of reverse tourism,” Kassa observed.
“I never imagined such a place existed,” Ortsino gasped. Without taking their eyes off the window, he and the rebels found an empty table and sat down.
Five people in bright costumes ran along a typical Drak street. Kassa recognised the Cloak, Dream Girl and Invisiblo. The other two were dressed just as luridly. Kassa didn’t recognise the man in the gold cloak, but the woman looked uncomfortably like Kassa herself, in a pink and white candy-striped version of her usual pirate garb, with bright pink hair and albino eyes.
“We are the Heroes of Justice!” the pink and white Kassa announced in a sugary voice.
“Our job is to make Drak a safer, happier place,” simpered Dream Girl.
“If only Drak was as peaceful and orderly as Harmony,” said the Cloak.
“Perhaps, one day, it will be!” said Invisiblo with a cheesy grin.
Kassa had seen enough. “Which way to this prison?” she asked Ortsino in an undertone.
He gestured behind them, his gaze still fixed to the images in the window. “Along the corridor, pretty little plaza. Can’t miss it.”
“Right,” said Kassa. “Wish me luck, hardened rebels.”
“Bye,” said Strella.
The Heroes of Justice rescued a small child who was stuck at the top of an obsidian statue. As they worked, they smiled broadly and continued to declaim inspirational phrases. The rebels gazed wonderingly at the images through the window, oohing and ahhing with the rest of the crowd. Kassa left them to it.
She walked along the corridor until it opened out into a bright white courtyard. Through several archways you could glimpse the same image of that meadowsweet garden and butterflies, over and over. Two men in long white robes stood in front of the last archway, their posture suggesting that they were sentries of some kind.
A sign above the archway spelled out the words ‘Harmony High-Security Prison’ in bright gold letters. Ortsino was right, you couldn’t miss it.
It did not look like any prison she had ever heard about.
Kassa shrugged to herself. When in doubt, get captured and hope someone starts explaining things to you. She squared her shoulders and marched up to the sentries. “Hi, my name is…” The words ‘…Kassa and I’m from out of town, could you direct me to the nearest dungeon’ froze on her lips as the two sentries immediately bowed.
“At your service, Lord Ladybird,” they said in high, sing-song voices.
“Right,” said Kassa. She couldn’t think of anything convincing to say, and she didn’t have Ortsino to advise her on local protocol. “I’d like to visit the prisoner Quillsmith,” she tried.
“Of course, my lady.” The sentries stepped aside, and a door slid open to let her through the archway.
Kassa stepped inside the Harmony prison.
Inside, it was even less like a prison than Kassa expected. For a start, it was green and it was big. There was grass underfoot. There were butterflies, huge colourful creatures flopping around in the air. The white ceiling above made it quite clear that Kassa was not outside, but apart from the lack of sky it seemed as if she had stepped straight into the garden that was visible from every window in the Outer City of Harmony.
The water feature was splashing away, which reminded Kassa that she was thirsty. She had little hope that the water feature would contain actual water, as a butterfly had just flapped its way through her arm and out the other side, suggesting that this environment was not entirely real. She made for the small hill, hoping to be able to see something interesting from the top of it.
The prisoner sat on the other side of the grassy slope, busying himself with a tea tray, pouring hot water into little china cups. He wasn’t chained to anything.
It was Egg.
Kassa took a deep breath. This was not the Egg she had met in recent weeks, an unsure boy on the verge of being an adult. This was Egg as he might be in ten or more years, a solid man with a reliable set to his shoulders. He also, she realised with a familiar sinking feeling, looked a lot like that fifth Hero of Justice, the one who wasn’t Aragon or Clio or Sean or herself. That makes a horrible kind of sense. “Hello, little cousin,” she said quietly.
He jumped. Literally jumped nearly a foot in the air, from a curled up sitting position to land smack on his feet. “Ladybird,” he gasped, his whole body tense at the sight of her. “What are you going to do to me?”
“That depends,” said Kassa Daggersharp. “I was going to grab you by the ankles and shake you upside down until you had explained every detail of this world to me, but I’m not sure that’s going to be necessary now. I know exactly what’s going on around here.”
Quillsmith looked at her curiously. “Do you think you could explain it to me?”
Egg searched for Kassa. He had tried the Mermaid Tower, but he didn’t know which room was hers. Thanks to the invasion of Drak, the grey concrete walls of the Seaweed Room were now black and shiny, draped with gold taffeta. Mistress Brim’s hair (previously as flat and grey as the walls) was a towering beehive of silver, her matronly figure squeezed into a floor-length ballgown. The food troughs were piled high with tiny delicacies like poached lobster eggs, trout mousse niblets and iceberry jelly-puffs. Mistress Brim still served everything with a giant steel scooping spoon. It was nice to see that some things hadn’t changed.
No one had seen Kassa. Most of the students he asked barely remembered who Egg was, let alone a professor called Mistress Sharpe. The effect of the draklight was getting stronger, stranger. Egg barely managed to avoid being dragged into three separate duels and several seductions between the square of student residence and the library tower.
A black, winged monster emerged from behind the library tower, screaming in a hoarse, horrible voice as it dove straight at Egg. “Yaaarg!” he yelled, before realising it was Singespitter. “Oh, it’s you.” He took a deep breath to calm himself. “Where is she?”
Singespitter landed on the edge of the golden skybridge. He spat out the large scroll he had been holding in his mouth and baaed meaningfully. The sound came out as a cross between a shipping siren and the death rattle of a giant cow. Smoke billowed out of his nostrils.
“She’s not over there having an
intimate supper with the enemy again, is she?” asked Egg.
Singespitter gave him a dirty look and rolled his eyes.
“Well, it’s not unheard of!”
“Ooh, look who it is,” cooed a very female voice, echoed by the giggles of two others. Egg turned around slowly to see Imani Almondstone, Brittany Yarrowstalk and Rosehip Moonweaver bearing down on him. All three had followed the ‘Drak fashion’ before it became compulsory, wearing black lace in their hair, squeezing into velvet tops and tottering around in leather boots with heels higher than the rest of their shoes put together.
Now they were well and truly Drakked, their hair dark and glossy, gold baubles hanging from velvet chokers around their necks and long, midnight-coloured ballgowns sweeping the black and shiny paving stones around the library tower.
“Is he a real warlock, do you think?” Almondstone giggled, reaching out to tug the collar of the robe that Egg had momentarily forgotten he was wearing. Her touch sent a sudden spark across his skin, but he gritted his teeth and ignored it. He had spent the last seventeen years not doing magic. He wasn’t going to start now, no matter how strongly the garment he wore seemed to want him to.
“Turn me into a frog,” said Yarrowstalk, also giggling.
Egg manfully resisted the temptation to do so.
Moonweaver pouted, leaning forward a little to display her cleavage. “I don’t think he’s a real warlock. I think he’s pretending.”
“Let’s play with him anyway,” said Almondstone.
Egg backed away. Finding Kassa was a definite priority. These girls had been silly to start with, who could tell what they would do if the influence of Drak continued much longer? “Can’t right now. Have to see a sheep about a lady.”
“Will you come back?” asked Yarrowstalk. The three of them closed in around him.
“Maybe?” said Egg, reaching up to grasp the edge of the skybridge. All three of them sighed at once, their bosoms rising and falling beneath the clingy bodices of the ballgowns. Egg was finding it quite hard to tear his eyes away. “Um, bye?”
Mocklore Box Set (Mocklore Chronicles) Page 71
