She led them to a stable courtyard filled with yurt cafés selling everything from yak-meat wraps to thenthuk – a Tibetan noodle soup. The stables were used to store various vacuum cleaners, doormats and rolled rugs. Seb spotted Mr Rife’s pram in one corner and, after checking the coast was clear, they crept over.
The pram was covered with the same see-through silvery sheet that Ivy had seen draped over it before. ‘The covering is uncommon,’ she told the others. ‘What does it do?’
Valian took a step back. ‘It must be a security blanket. They read fingerprints. If anyone other than the official owner touches it …’ He pulled a gross face. ‘Imagine being covered from head to foot in sticky spider’s web, unable to move from the spot.’
Ivy looked closer, careful not to make contact. The gold magnifying glass, which Mr Rife had said he was delivering to the mysterious Midas, was wrapped in a neat bundle inside, along with Mrs Bees’ flowery apron and Mr Rife’s feathered hat. ‘If that magnifying glass is still here, they can’t be meeting the buyer yet. Where do you think they’ve gone?’
‘I don’t know,’ Valian said. ‘We’ll have to stake out the site until they return.’
They took a table outside Yak-Attacks Yurt House. Seb brought over some fried meat dumplings and two jugs of water. Ivy tucked in: she hadn’t eaten since her bagel that morning … or rather yesterday morning. She kept forgetting it was Friday in Strassa now.
‘If it’s called the Sands of Change – it must be able to transform things,’ Seb guessed, guzzling from his glass. ‘Perhaps you wear it around your neck and it changes your appearance.’
‘That might explain why no one’s ever seen Rosie,’ Valian said. ‘She could look completely different.’
As they cleared away their empty plates, they heard cheering from the street. Ivy and Judy went to investigate. A parade of costumed dancers was moving along the road, performing a series of solemn movements. They each wore a crown of small skulls and a menacing mask painted red, yellow and black. Musicians clashed cymbals and banged drums at the rear of the procession. Ivy overheard a few English-speaking tourists discussing how the traditional Tibetan costumes were meant to represent demons and angry spirits.
‘Must be a celebration for the opening day of trade,’ Judy guessed. ‘Wait – look.’ Watching the dancers from the other side of the road were Mrs Bees and Mr Rife … with the gold magnifying glass in his gloved hand.
As if on cue, Valian and Seb came running out of the courtyard. ‘It’s gone!’ Seb said. ‘The pram. The blanket. Everything. We must have missed them.’
‘Not quite.’ Ivy pointed. Rather than tapping his feet to the beat, Mr Rife was carefully scrutinizing the parade. One of the masked dancers broke formation and slipped to the side of the road. The dancer nodded at Mr Rife and Mrs Bees before guiding them away, wheeling the pram beside them.
‘That must be the buyer, Midas,’ Valian said. ‘Let’s go.’
They crossed the road and trailed Mr Rife, Mrs Bees and the masked dancer at a distance, ducking behind stalls and snaking through the crowd. Skirting the jade temple, the masked dancer turned towards the mountain and ventured into an area of the skymart that was still under construction. It was eerily quiet in this part. Trucks and diggers stood idle; piles of earth lay abandoned beside the sandy makeshift roads. Ivy noticed cotton reels, kitchen whisks and high-heeled shoes dotted about the site – all uncommon building tools. She guessed that all the workers had taken the day off as it was the first day of trade.
Suddenly Mrs Bees screamed. Valian pulled them all behind a stack of paving slabs and they looked out. Mr Rife, his hands held up in defence, was edging away from the masked dancer. ‘Midas?’ he spluttered. ‘Is that really you? What is the meaning of this?’
The dancer held a long white electric flex as if it was a whip. On the tip was a three-pin plug … except the pins looked more like stainless-steel claws. The dancer gave a hissing laugh and lashed the flex through the air, striking Mr Rife on the leg and tearing at his flesh.
‘Gahh!’ he cried, and fell to his knees, trying to protect his head with his arms. The dancer threw something towards Mrs Bees, and her wrists sprang together as if they were connected by elastic. An uncommon paperclip. Ivy had been restrained in a similar manner before. She fumbled for her yo-yo as the dancer began to drag Mrs Bees away.
‘Come on,’ she told the others. ‘We have to do something!’ Dashing out of her hiding place, she spotted Mrs Bees and the masked dancer vanishing round the end of a newly built brick wall.
‘No!’ Mr Rife yelled, staggering to his feet. ‘Whoever you are, let her go!’
Judy and Valian hurtled past him in pursuit; Ivy and Seb stopped to help him.
‘Slow down or you’ll make your leg worse,’ Seb said, pushing his shoulder under Mr Rife’s armpit to keep him upright. ‘You’re too weak to chase after them.’ Ivy tried to brace Mr Rife’s other side. His trousers were torn and soaked with blood from his wound, which was bleeding badly.
‘I’ve got to help her,’ Mr Rife persisted, dragging his injured leg forward, but it wouldn’t support his weight and he crumpled in Ivy and Seb’s arms.
After a few minutes, footsteps sounded as Judy and Valian came running back. ‘They’ve flown into a dark tunnel on the back of a carpet,’ Judy said. ‘It leads into the mountain. We tracked them to a T-junction, but it was impossible to tell which way they’d gone from there – they were too far ahead.’
Valian marched up to Mr Rife. ‘Where is my sister?’
Mr Rife muttered a curse, rubbing his bad leg.
‘Tell me!’ Valian kicked the ground in frustration, possibly to avoid kicking Mr Rife himself. ‘You lied to us – you have seen her. You shook hands with her on the day she disappeared.’
Ivy noticed something glittering in the sand and bent down to pick it up. ‘A crooked sixpence …?’ She stared at Mr Rife. ‘You are a member of the Dirge?’
‘Wh-what?’ he stuttered. ‘No … no – the dancer in the mask dropped that.’
Ivy wasn’t sure whether to believe him, until she remembered that Mr Punch had told them he’d seen Valian and Mr Rife embracing as friends in the face of an uncommon clock. Surely Valian wouldn’t do that if Mr Rife was lying now?
‘The dancer must be a member of the Dirge,’ Ivy realized. ‘But – I thought it was your mysterious buyer, Midas.’
‘As did I, at first,’ Mr Rife said, ‘but the real Midas wouldn’t have done this; I’ve traded with him before. Whoever the dancer is, he’s an imposter.’
‘I don’t get it,’ Seb said. ‘What would the Dirge want with Mrs Bees?’
‘You don’t understand …’ Mr Rife rubbed his face with his hands. ‘She’s not who she seems.’
Ivy considered what Seb had suggested when they were eating dumplings – that the Sands of Change must have the power of transformation. An idea lodged in her head. It seemed unlikely, and yet …
‘Is Mrs Bees … Rosie?’
‘Steady,’ Seb warned, trying to keep Mr Rife upright. ‘Let me help you sit down.’ He carefully lowered Mr Rife to the ground and propped him up against a wooden post that formed part of a building frame. The pram creaked beside them.
Ivy rolled up Mr Rife’s torn trouser leg and considered what their mum – a nurse – would do. ‘I think we need to put pressure on his wound to stop the bleeding.’
‘Here, we can use this …’ Judy tore off a section of her waistcoat and ripped it in two. Ivy tied one strip around Mr Rife’s thigh to stem the flow of blood; the other she wrapped firmly around the wound. Judy pressed down on it with both hands.
Valian hadn’t moved a muscle. ‘Is that true? Is Rosie really Mrs Bees?’
Mr Rife rubbed his hip and gave a long sigh. ‘Six years ago I found a girl hiding in the Dead End of Lundinor. She was all alone and crying – kept muttering something about her murdered parents and brother. I shook her hand to reassure her. She told me her name was Rosie.’
‘I heard underguards calling her name and assumed she was in trouble,’ Mr Rife continued. ‘Being an orphan myself, I took pity on her and offered to help her escape. You must believe me, Valian: I didn’t know you were alive. I thought that Rosie’s entire family was Departed.’
Ivy could feel Valian trembling, but whether with shock or anger she wasn’t sure. A lump formed in the back of her throat.
‘Rosie was wearing a necklace that I’d only seen once, seven centuries ago, in China: the Sands of Change – one of the Great Uncommon Good. I knew how it worked, so I decided to use it to disguise Rosie so she wouldn’t be recognized leaving the Dead End.’
Seven centuries ago … Ivy contemplated how long Mr Rife had been dead. It didn’t surprise her that he’d heard about the Great Uncommon Good if he’d been around that long.
‘Disguise?’ Valian retorted. ‘You turned her into a different person! I met Mrs Bees – she didn’t know who I was.’
Mr Rife studied the ground, his voice weary. ‘Please, just let me explain. There’s no time. A principle of some ancient philosophies is the belief that the natural world consists of pairs of interconnected contrary forces – summer and winter, fire and water, yin and yang – which all rely on each other to exist. These opposites are present inside every one of us too. The Sands of Change works by taking one of these forces and flipping it around.’
… Light to darkness, life to death, Ivy thought, remembering the words from the rhyme in Amos’s journal. ‘The most obvious difference between Mrs Bees and Rosie is their age,’ she said carefully. ‘Did the locket convert Rosie’s youth into old age?’
‘Yes,’ Mr Rife answered. ‘But that wasn’t all. Unbeknownst to me, the clasp on the necklace had been sabotaged, so I was unable to remove the Sands of Change from round Rosie’s neck after we had escaped. The pendant continued to alter more aspects of who Rosie was until only Mrs Bees remained. Mrs Bees isn’t aware that she has a brother. She doesn’t even know who Rosie is.’
That was why Rosie had never come looking for Valian, Ivy realized. She scanned his face. His expression was taut. ‘There’s got to be a way to undo the transformation and get Rosie back,’ he said decisively.
Mr Rife sighed. ‘The process could be reversed if the Sands of Change clasp was repaired. I spent my fortune trying to find someone with the knowledge to fix it, but eventually it became too risky. That’s why I didn’t contact you when I learned you were alive – I was worried it would put Mrs Bees in danger if anyone discovered what she was wearing around her neck.’
Valian scowled, his hands curling into fists.
‘Amos Stirling knew more about the Great Uncommon Good than anyone,’ Ivy said. ‘I bet he had a theory in his journal about how to fix the necklace. Mr Punch must have read it before he gave it to me – he might be able to help us. We need to work out where Mrs Bees and that dancer went.’
‘It sounds like they took one of the engineering passages into the core of the mountain,’ Mr Rife said. ‘They all lead to the control centre of the skymart.’
Ivy wondered how he knew so much about Strassa. She lowered her voice in Valian’s ear. ‘If we get close enough, I can use my whispering to track Mrs Bees by listening for the broken soul inside the Sands of Change.’
‘Good idea,’ Valian agreed, getting to his feet. His mouth twitched as he looked back at Mr Rife. ‘Will you be all right on your own?’
‘I’ll be fine.’ Mr Rife gave him a weak smile, pushed a shaky hand inside his cape and withdrew the gold magnifying glass. ‘Hold this over your heart and it will amplify your abilities,’ he explained, passing it to Ivy. He tapped his ear. ‘I’m a Sasspirit: we have exceptional hearing.’
Ivy, Seb, Valian and Judy entered the mountain via a craggy dark hole between the timber skeletons of two half-finished buildings. The pebbly tunnel floor sloped down into darkness. They read a sign nailed to the rock:
The crackle of Judy’s roller skates reverberated around the mottled brown walls. The cool air carried the odour of damp clay. Ivy untied her coat from her waist and pulled it back on, her heart thudding in her ribcage. Despite her nerves, she was glad to move away from natural light and the increased danger of meeting Octavius Wrench.
Judy rolled to a halt at a fork in the passageway. ‘This is where we lost Mrs Bees and the dancer. Ivy, can you tell which way they went?’
Ivy broadened her field of sense. She caught the pleasant whisper of Judy’s broken soul and the voices of the uncommon objects they were all carrying, but the tunnels were vacant. ‘No, sorry,’ she said. ‘Nothing yet.’
She lifted the uncommon magnifying glass over her chest, just as Mr Rife had told her to do. The backs of her arms prickled as her senses spread further. She winced as the gibbering voices of every fragment of soul, all the way to the jade temple, filled her head. ‘I think I can pinpoint the control centre of Strassa, ahead of us,’ she told the others in a strained voice. ‘It’s along the left-hand passageway. The other feels empty.’ She concentrated a moment longer, trying to identify any individual voices. ‘I can’t isolate the Sands of Change yet. I’ll keep trying as we go, though.’ There was no time to waste.
They jogged along the left-hand passageway, the blue-tinted glow from Valian’s uncommon trowel lighting the way. Soon the stony walls turned into gleaming steel panels, lit by uncommon lemon squeezers. A door labelled ENGINEER’S ENTRANCE appeared up ahead.
‘We need to come up with a plan to get inside unnoticed,’ Judy decided. ‘The facility might not be fully staffed, but there will be people working around the clock to keep Strassa running. If we’re seen, we’ll blow our chance of finding Mrs Bees— Rosie.’
Valian put his trowel away and patted his jacket pocket. ‘I can use my boat shoes to escape if I’m spotted, and Judy can use her camouflage,’ he told Ivy and Seb, ‘but I don’t have any liquid shadow for you two.’
‘I’ve got an idea for us,’ Seb said, reaching into his hoodie pocket. ‘Only we’ll need one of you two to give us a piggy-back.’
‘What do you mean?’ Valian asked.
But Ivy knew exactly what her brother was thinking.
Not again …
Ivy stamped on the cotton lining of Valian’s outer top pocket, checking it was strong enough to hold her weight. The zipped opening was at neck height, so her head protruded above the top. As Valian turned a corner, she fell against Seb’s shoulder.
‘Will you please hang on!’ he snapped, gripping the zip pull. They were both about ten centimetres high – bigger than the last time they’d shrunk themselves using the measuring tape, but still the size of hamsters. ‘The last thing we need is for you to fall out and get hurt.’
‘Sorry, but it’s difficult when I’m holding the magnifying glass over my heart,’ she countered.
‘Can you sense anything yet?’
Ivy listened for broken souls in the surrounding area. ‘There are uncommon objects everywhere in this place, but none of them are the Sands of Change.’ She communicated with Scratch, who relayed the information to Valian and Judy since she and Seb were too small to be heard naturally.
Valian continued along the corridor, holding Scratch close to his ear. Glass doors on either side led to empty offices. Judy offered them a wobbly smile of good luck before switching on her camouflage and turning invisible. Ivy caught Valian’s reflection in the glass. He was wearing her satchel across his body, his ratty dark hair tucked behind his ears and his boat shoes fastened with fancy bows. Ivy and Seb looked like strange dolls sticking out of his top pocket.
Just then, light flickered at the end of the passageway. Valian darted through the nearest wall to avoid being seen. Ivy felt a cold, ticklish sensation all over her body, like silk gliding across her skin, before Valian emerged into a large laboratory. The strange shapes of machinery loomed all around; white coats hung on a hook beside the door. A shadow drew across the g
lass. Ivy and Seb bashed heads as Valian nose-dived behind a desk to hide.
The door creaked open and a tall woman in green-and-silver skyguard uniform stepped in, brandishing her toilet brush. She scanned the gloom carefully. Ivy could feel Valian’s heart racing, as fast as her own. Eventually the skyguard scowled and muttered something in Chinese before leaving. Ivy wished she could have understood. Valian took a deep breath, tossing Ivy and Seb forward.
‘This is worse than hitching a ride on Johnny Hands’ trainer,’ Seb complained, rubbing his forehead. ‘Where are we?’
As if on cue, Valian rose to his feet and looked around. Hanging from a track on the ceiling were a dozen silver bells engraved with a fingerprint symbol – like the one used to ID Ivy at the entrance to Strassa. A robotic arm had its fingers frozen around the waist of one bell. Ivy followed the track across the ceiling and down the wall, where it passed over a large cylindrical vat. Valian climbed a step ladder beside it and peered over the rim.
The drum contained a transparent liquid.
Ivy wrinkled her nose as a chemical tang filled the air. ‘Is it just me, or does that smell like Alexander Brewster’s Statue Salt to you?’
Seb scrutinized the identity bells. ‘It looks like they’re coating the bells in the formula.’ He sniffed one of his drummer’s gloves. ‘Yeah – they must be. When we were IDed I rang the bell with this hand, and it smells the same.’
Ivy hurriedly passed the information on to Scratch, who explained it to Valian. ‘Hmm, Alexander mentioned that he’d given the Dirge several of his recipes,’ Valian said. ‘They must be behind this somehow; perhaps one of them works here. But why?’
Just then, Judy shimmered into sight beside them. She looked flushed. She brushed a wisp of hair away from her nose.
The Frozen Telescope Page 14
