Summer in Orcus

by T. Kingfisher

  The weasel stepped gravely onto her palm and sat down.

  “I’ll need a weasel?” asked Summer.

  “Possibly. It gets him out of my coat, anyway, and that’s all to the good.” Baba Yaga leaned back in her rocking chair and closed her eyes. “Close the door behind you on your way out.”

  The door swung open. The skull winked at her. Summer was only too glad to leave, but some perverse instinct made her pause on the threshold.

  “But—er—Baba Yaga—ma’am—what about my heart’s desire?”

  The old woman on her chair of bones opened one eye. “What about it?”

  “You said—I thought you said—”

  “I said I’d give it to you,” said Baba Yaga. “I never said I’d tell you what it was. That’s another sort of gift. Be off with you! The candle won’t burn forever, and I’d get back before the flame goes out, if I were you.” She flapped a hand at Summer.

  The door was under her hand, practically pulling her out of the odd little house. “Go, go!” whispered the skull. “Hurry now, while she’s still in a good mood!”

  Summer stepped out of the house, deeply confused. She’d asked for her heart’s desire and gotten a weasel. What did that mean?

  She looked up from her furry handful.

  The yard was gone.

  The wall and the gate and the alley were gone.

  She was standing in a long hallway with a bare wooden floor, lined by empty suits of armor and cut with arching windows of purple glass.

  Baba Yaga’s house had vanished.

  She looked down at the weasel. It looked back up at her and shrugged, a tiny shrug that rippled through its entire body.

  “What do I do?” she whispered.

  “I’ve no idea,” the weasel whispered back, “but you might start by watching where you were going.”

  Summer was so startled to hear the weasel talking—although after the skull, she didn’t know why she’d be surprised—that she nearly dropped it. It whipped between her fingers, as quick as a skink, and threw its front paws around her thumb.

  “Sorry,” whispered Summer. “You surprised me!”

  She hadn’t expected the weasel to talk. The skull had talked and the house had been pretty…err…expressive, but the weasel was something else again.

  Then again, she hadn’t expected to walk out of the door of the bird-footed house and find herself in a hallway either.

  It was ironic—a word that grown-ups used a lot, and which Summer felt she was finally coming to understand—that after all that time wanting to be able to talk to animals, when she finally had a real honest-to-god talking animal in front of her, she could only think of a single question.

  “Where are we?” she asked the weasel.

  The weasel climbed up to her shoulder. It—he—peered both ways down the hall and said, “I haven’t the foggiest idea. If it’s a chicken coop, it’s an awfully big one.”

  “I don’t think it’s a chicken coop,” said Summer. “There’s a lot of stained glass.”

  “Perhaps they’re very religious chickens.”

  Summer thought that this was no help at all, but since talking to the weasel was keeping her from being scared of the fact that she was somewhere very strange, she didn’t say so.

  At the end of the hall, a long way away, she could see a door. Since there didn’t seem to be anything else to do, she began to walk towards it.

  The stained glass windows were interesting. They were extremely purple. There were saints and angels in them, clad in purple, with purple halos and wings. Only their faces and hands were a different color, and some of the angels even had purple hair.

  Summer walked past three or four windows, full of saints smiling and solemn and stern. When she reached a window with an elderly saint with a long white beard, she had to stop and smile.

  “He looks nice,” she said.

  “I suppose,” said the weasel, who was licking his shoulder. “Humans are the best judge of other humans.”

  He did look nice. He was skinny and bony and his wrists stuck out of his robes. His beard fell down to his waist, but didn’t quite disguise a grin. Two grim-faced angels flanked him, their enormous purple wings outstretched.

  In one hand, the saint held a very large book.

  Summer went on to the next window.

  It was the same saint again. This time he seemed to be leaning forward, and he was pointing a finger toward the viewer.

  She hurried on to the next one, and was delighted to see the same saint again. He was giving her a knowing grin and was pointing at his book.

  “They’re almost like a flipbook!” she said, walking more quickly. “Where each page has a drawing and if you flip the pages really fast they move!” She was aware that an actual flipbook made of stained glass would weigh thousands of pounds, and flipping it would probably be very difficult and involve a lot of screaming and crashing and breaking glass, so perhaps this was the best that the window-makers could manage.

  In the next window, the saint was making a run for it. He was half out of the frame, his beard flapping behind him, and the two shocked angels were just starting to turn after him.

  Summer broke into a run. The weasel clutched at her hair.

  Even though he was made of stained glass, she couldn’t escape the feeling that the saint was running alongside her. The next few windows flashed by, and in each one, the saint was running full-tilt, book clutched to his chest, with his robes flapping behind him and his bony ankles showing. He was wearing purple stained-glass sneakers with no socks. Summer giggled at the notion of a saint wearing sneakers.

  Eventually the angels caught up to him. Not very fair, thought Summer. They have wings!

  And indeed the wings were the first things you saw, a few feathers in the left side of the frame, followed by an outstretched hand. The angel had long fingernails, almost like claws.

  “Do you think angels really have claws?” she asked the weasel, slowing down a bit.

  “Wouldn’t surprise me,” said the weasel. “I have claws, and I eat eggs and mice and rabbits. Sins are probably a lot tougher than eggs or mice.”

  “What about rabbits?” asked Summer.

  “Don’t mess with rabbits.”

  Her side was starting to hurt from running, so she settled for walking quickly. The saint, still grinning, had turned to look over his shoulder at the pursuing angels. You could just see one’s face now, mouth open as if the angel were shouting.

  On the far side of the next suit of armor, the angels finally caught him. They grabbed the back of his robes and hauled. The saint’s book went flying through the air.

  In the last window but one, the angels hauled the saint away. Their purple wings seemed to quiver with outrage. The saint, still grinning, adjusted his halo with one hand, and with the other, tucked under the edge of his flapping robes, he pointed toward the book.

  Summer reached the last window. All that remained of the saint and the angels was a stray feather on the far left, and the tip of a purple sneaker. The book lay open at the bottom of the window. Words had been painted across the lavender pages, in a bold, flowing script.

  “You know,” said Summer, “it almost looks like you can read it.”

  “Maybe you can,” said the weasel. “I can’t read.”

  “You can’t?”

  “It doesn’t come up much when you’re a weasel.”

  Getting close to the stained glass book meant stepping between two suits of armor. That was a little creepy. They were very definitely empty—the visors were up and you could see inside—but it was still all too easy to imagine them waking up, the visors clanking down and those big mailed fists reaching for you.

  She was also just a little afraid that she’d knock into one by accident and it would fall over and clatter into dozens of little armored pieces and then she’d have to try and put it back together the right way before the owner of the hallway came back and found it.

  Up close, the stained
glass book was much bigger than any textbook Summer had ever had for school. When she stood on her tiptoes, she could read the words. She read each line out loud to the weasel.

  1. Don’t worry about things that you cannot fix.

  2. Antelope women are not to be trusted.

  3. You cannot change essential nature with magic.

  “Hmm,” said Summer. “I understand the first one. But what’s an antelope woman? And what does the last one mean?”

  “It means you can’t change something into something else with magic, not really,” said the weasel. “If you turned me into a human, I’d still be a weasel inside. If we turned you into a rabbit, you’d still be a little girl down deep, where it matters.”

  “I’m nearly twelve,” said Summer, a bit indignant. “I’m not that little.”

  The weasel flipped his tail across her neck and said nothing.

  She took a last long look at the book and read the three statements over again to herself. They seemed important. The saint had run away from the angels in order to show them to her—or to show them to someone, anyway, there was no telling how long the hallway had been here. Obviously the stained glass maker had had a very peculiar sense of humor.

  She glanced back down the hallway. If she walked back down, the other direction, would she still see the running saint, or would the windows be full of the angels dragging him back to his original spot?

  It was an unsettling thought. Summer found that she didn’t really want to know, and instead went to the door. It stood slightly ajar, and she could smell cool air and leaves through the crack.

  She pushed the door open and stepped outside.

  Behind her, the stained glass saint stuck his head back in the final window. He picked up his book, grinning, tossed his beard over his shoulder, and danced a jig with a suddenly joyous angel.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  As it turned out, the hallway was sunken in the ground, and so the first thing she saw was a flight of broad stone steps leading upward. Leaves had collected in drifts at the bottom and on the edges of the stairs. They crunched as she walked upward.

  It was a little cold. Summer was wearing a T-shirt with short sleeves. She rubbed her arms to warm them.

  At the top of the steps was a forest. She turned to look behind her, and the hall was buried, up to the bottoms of the stained glass windows. Moss grew up the stone walls and ferns had sprouted in the cracks.

  It was an odd forest.

  The air was dry, much drier than it had been back home, and the nearby trees had gnarled, contorted trunks. Their leaves were shaped like the Ace of Spades on a deck of cards.

  Farther away from the hall, the contorted trees gave way to tall pines. There were pine needles all over the ground, and not very many smaller plants. Summer felt as if she were walking through an enormous room with lots of pillars holding up the ceiling.

  There was a particularly enormous tree off in the distance, with white bark that was scabbed and spotted, almost like a Holstein cow. Could you have a Holstein tree?

  For lack of anything else to do, she walked toward it.

  Leaves crunched under her feet, then the crunching became muffled as she reached the pine needles. In the distance, she could see other trees like the ones around the buried hall, crowding their trunks together and dusted with ferns. Between those trees were the tall, tall pines.

  “I smell desert,” said the weasel. He sat up on her shoulder, his small nose working furiously.

  “We’re in the woods,” said Summer, not arguing, just stating a fact.

  He gave a short, sharp nod. “I know. But I smell desert. We’re at an edge place, I think. Those trees—those are cottonwoods. They’re growing up wherever there’s a seep of water.”

  “Does that mean anything?” asked Summer. “That we’re in a desert, I mean, not about the trees.”

  The weasel shrugged a rolling weasel shrug. “It means the mice will be fast as fury.”

  “I thought deserts were hot,” said Summer, wrapping her arms around herself.

  “Not at night. Not in winter. Maybe not in this place, ever.”

  Summer shivered.

  She hoped that she wouldn’t have to spend the night here, wherever here was.

  Summer wondered if this counted as being lost. She did not feel an immediate urge to begin weeping or running in circles or calling for a policeman or a park ranger or any of the usual things that children are supposed to do when they’re lost.

  Part of that was because Summer was a sensible girl and knew that weeping and running in circles, however satisfying it might be at the moment, was not going to help very much. And partly it was that Summer knew full well that an enormous sunken hall and a forest-that-might-be-a-desert would not fit anywhere in the alley behind her house. She had not gotten lost in a city park or someone’s backyard, and therefore it was not a matter of finding the nearest cross-street and figuring out how to get back home before her mother noticed she was gone.

  But Summer had read a lot of books, and among her very favorites were stories of children who opened doors and wandered into Narnia or Fairyland or some mysterious world on the other side of the hedge. It was patently obvious that this was what had happened to her. Baba Yaga had given her a weasel and kicked her out the door into…someplace else.

  If she was indeed in another world, then two things would happen. Either time would go differently, and her mother would never notice she had been gone (and Summer hoped very devoutly that this was the case) or time would go on in its usual rollicking way, and by the time Summer managed to get home, it would be hours or days later.

  And at that point, Summer said to herself, I shall be in so much trouble that it will not actually be possible for me to get in any more trouble, so it doesn’t really matter how long it takes.

  There is something very freeing about knowing that you are in the worst possible trouble that you can be in. No matter what you do, it cannot possibly get any worse. Summer would get home and be grounded until she was eighteen, and even if she dyed her hair pink and got her ears pierced while in Fairyland (somehow she didn’t think they did that sort of thing in Narnia) she couldn’t be grounded any longer than that.

  As the saint’s book had said, Don’t worry about things you cannot fix.

  She strode out with a light heart.

  The spotted tree turned out to be farther away than it looked. By the time she got near it, she was starting to get thirsty, and she was no longer cold at all.

  It was a very large tree. The branches went up as tall as a skyscraper, and the trunk was as big around as a house. Summer stopped many feet back from the trunk and craned her neck backwards, trying to see the whole tree at once.

  “Do you think it’s magic?” she asked the weasel.

  “All really old trees are magic,” he said, rummaging around in her pockets with his paws. “You’ve got a lock in your pocket. Did you know that?”

  “It’s from the gate,” she said absently. “It was nice and opened up when I asked. Do you think this one is more magic, though?”

  The weasel looked up at the tree, then back down into her pocket. “Probably not. These are excellent pockets, by the way. You don’t usually get ones this size.”

  The pockets were, in fact, part of the reason that these were Summer’s favorite jeans, but she had other things on her mind at the moment than tailoring. “It could be,” she said. “The Vikings thought the world was built on a giant tree.” (In addition to books about visiting other worlds, Summer had read a lot of mythology, which was almost as good.)

  “Yggdrasil,” said the weasel. Summer tried not to resent the fact that he could pronounce the name easily. He looked up at the tree, scampered over to her other shoulder and looked at it from that angle. “Yggdrasil’s bigger,” he said, and went back to digging around in her pockets.

  “What are you looking for?” she asked, annoyed.

  “I was hoping you might have an egg.”

  “
I don’t carry eggs around in my pockets!”

  “Then there’s not much point in having pockets, is there?”

  As if their voices had woken it, the tree shook itself. Leaves tumbled from the highest branches and fell around them.

  The nearest leaf struck the ground and stopped being a leaf. It became—or perhaps it always had been—a lizard, a flat-bodied, stubby-legged lizard like a horned toad. It scurried away through the pine needles.

  Summer took a step back, surprised. She could hear the rustling as other leaf-lizards ran off through the forest.

  “On the other hand,” said the weasel, “it might be magic after all.”

  They walked around the tree, slowly. The leaves were broad and flat. One drifted down, just out of reach, and Summer jumped forward and caught it in her hand.

  It was just a leaf. It had tight little veins, like a lizard’s scales, and the stem was thick and curved like a tail, but it was definitely a leaf.

  She dropped it.

  It turned into a lizard when it hit the ground, scampered over her shoe, and vanished into the leaves.

  There was another spotted white tree beyond the first, not so far away. Summer walked toward it, delighted. She was ready to see marvels, and the tree did not disappoint.

  Its leaves were long and pointed and slightly furry, the way lamb’s-ear or mullein is furry. They tumbled to the ground and became mice, beautiful white mice with intelligent eyes, who squeaked and danced and ran in circles, chasing their own pink tails.

  The weasel chattered his jaw, the way a cat will when it sees a bird, but stayed on Summer’s shoulder. “Tempting,” he said. “Verrrry tempting. But they’re either leaves enchanted to look like mice or mice enchanted to look like leaves, and enchantment curdles in your stomach when you eat it.”

  There was a third white tree, forming a line with the first two. Summer walked toward it in a hurry, so that the weasel didn’t get any ideas.

  But there was something wrong with the third tree.