Summer in Orcus

by T. Kingfisher

  When Summer went to bed that night, Reginald hopped into the room after her and scuffed awkwardly at the floorboards.

  “Look,” he said. “Wanted to say—look. Not your fault. Really not. Glorious was right. They’re mad—bad—shockingly loose in the haft. Been doing this sort of thing since before I chipped the egg.”

  “But I came here looking for my heart’s desire,” said Summer miserably. “It wasn’t that anybody die.”

  “Yes, but Baba Yaga sent you,” said Reginald. “Shouldn’t wonder if she had some reason. It’s got all the Queen’s nasty little termites squirming around in an uproar, hasn’t it?” He perched on her bedpost and managed a grin. “Wonder what it is they think you’re going to do?”

  Summer blinked.

  Under her left ear, the weasel snickered.

  “Now that,” he said, “is a good question. And a much better one than asking who’s fault something is.”

  “But I can’t do anything,” said Summer. “I’m—I’m not a hero. I’m scared of a lot of things. I almost didn’t want to help Glorious out of the cage. I’ve hidden every time Grub is around. I just want to help the poor Frog Tree and maybe find my heart’s desire, but I don’t know if I’m getting any closer to either of those things!”

  Reginald considered this. “You know,” he said. “Just occurred to me. You could talk to a Forester. They know trees. One might know your tree.”

  “Okay,” said Summer. It wasn’t much of a direction, but it was better than nothing. She couldn’t shake the feeling that she was supposed to help the Frog Tree—why else would Baba Yaga have sent her to that exact place, and why else would she have selected the frog-shaped candle. “Does your father know one?”

  “Probably knows a dozen, but it doesn’t signify.” The hoopoe preened. “I know one. Marvelous old girl. Fierce as a dragon, but I can always turn her up sweet. Don’t know why I didn’t think of her before.”

  “How do we find her, then?” asked Summer.

  “We’ll pass near enough on the way to Almondsgrove. Just a quick flap off the road.” He considered. “Well, maybe a half-day’s flap, for you wingless folk.”

  Summer rubbed her finger over the surface of the acorn, feeling the carved eyes of the tadpole. She felt a little better. Maybe she couldn’t do anything about Grub or Zultan, but at least she was still trying to help the Frog Tree.

  That had to count for something.

  Still, she thought, that’s twice now I’ve hidden while Grub threatened someone who was helping me. The next time, I’ll have to do something.

  I hope it’s not already too late.

  Summer was surprised when they reached the marsh.

  You could not exactly accuse geography of sneaking up on you, but it felt like an ambush. One minute Glorious was trotting through dense trees, which were, if anything, getting denser—and then the trees stopped and the road was lined with short bushes and the horizon was many miles away.

  The wolf stopped for a moment. Summer blinked, dazzled by the sunlight.

  It was a desolate landscape. Grass rippled in the wind, cut by channels of gray-green water. It was hard to tell where grass stopped and water began. Little clumps of bushes, like the ones along the road, stood out from the marsh. They seemed to huddle together for support. The air smelled like salt and rotting vegetation.

  A bird cried once, thin and sharp and a long way away. Then there was only the wind.

  “Killdeer,” said Reginald, spiraling down for a landing. “They can talk, after a fashion, but it’s not worth listening to. All they ever say is, “Help, help, my wing is broken, don’t eat me.”

  “Are their wings broken?” asked Summer.

  “Not a bit of it. They just do it to get people away from their nests. You tell them a hundred times that you’re not the slightest bit interested in their nests, that there’s nothing more tedious than having to look after other people’s children, but they never listen.” Reginald shrugged.

  “This seems like a lonely place,” said Summer, after they had been walking for a few minutes.

  “Yes,” said Glorious. “Lonely and treacherous. There is little solid land.”

  “The road seems solid enough,” said Summer.

  “Dog-built,” said Reginald. “There’ll be wide spots for camping. They were always good about that. But I wouldn’t stray off it.”

  Far across the marsh, a clump of trees stood up. They appeared to be rooted in the back of a giant turtle. The turtle lumbered to another channel of water and plopped itself down. The killdeer cried again. Other than that, nobody seemed to take any notice.

  “There’s so many different landscapes,” said Summer, looking back over her shoulder at the forest. “All packed together so closely. I started in the woods and then it was desert and then it was farmland and a different kind of woods and now it’s a marsh. Things in my world aren’t so close together.”

  Glorious stretched, and Summer had to grab for his ruff to keep from being dislodged. “Perhaps your world is larger. Orcus runs from the icewalls to the north down to the great sea. There is a continent to the south—the dragonfly riders go there—and the plains where the houses run stretch a long way to the east. North is many weeks of mountains, until you reach the ice. But here, we are very near the sea.”

  “What’s on the other side of the sea?” asked Summer.

  “There is no other side,” said Glorious.

  “Are you sure?” Summer scratched the back of her neck. “In my world there’s two big oceans, but if you cross them, you get to other continents. And eventually back to where you started.”

  “Really?” Reginald cocked his head. “You don’t get into the sun’s shadow?”

  “Our sun doesn’t have a shadow,” said Summer.

  “Everything has a shadow,” said Glorious. “Perhaps your sun simply keeps it somewhere else.”

  “Here, if you go far across the sea, past the islands, you come under the sun’s shadow,” Reginald said. “The whale-speakers—odd chaps, to be sure—say that the water out there gets cold and dark and deep. There’s giant squid and worse things. You can’t go past that or you get eaten.” He scowled. “They say Zultan came from out that way, but I think that’s a load of foolishness. He was born in Orcus, same as the rest of us, he’s just trying to pass himself off as something scarier.”

  “The great gray albatrosses talk to my people sometimes,” said Glorious. “They say that if you fly far enough, you come to a hole in the sky. It leads to another world.”

  “Oh, well, albatrosses.” Reginald flipped his wing. “Prophets and poets, the lot of them. Not bad-hearted, but you ask one the time of day and he tells you time is an illusion, and how is that getting anything done?”

  Glorious huffed with laughter.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Fen-town was a city built on stilts.

  They saw it coming from a long way away. It was the only thing that stuck out of the waving marsh-grass. The road ran right through the middle of it, and at first Summer thought that the stilts would mean the city would be above their heads, but the road rose to meet it. The packed earth turned to great blocks of stone with bits of moss growing in the cracks, and by the time they reached Fen-town, they were ten or fifteen feet above the level of the water.

  The city didn’t have a gate, but it did have two tall pillars along the road. A guard leaned against one pillar. She looked mostly human, but her skin was mottled green and she had webbed toes and a pleasant expression.

  “New to Fen-town?” she asked. When Summer nodded, she pointed to a building. A wooden bridge led to the front door. “First-time travelers need to go and talk to the Clerk of Records.”

  The building smelled like damp paper inside. There was a broad desk covered in folders and binders and papers and booklets and diaries and notes and blotters and a great many pens.

  The person behind the desk was also green with webbed feet, but his expression was far less pleasant. His nose wa
s beaky and he had thinning, spiky hair. Summer had never met someone who could look like both a frog and a heron at the same time.

  “Name?” asked the Clerk of Records, grabbing a sheet of paper apparently at random.

  “Reginald Hoopoe, of the Almondsgrove Hoopoes.”

  “Glorious.”

  “Summer,” said Summer. If Glorious could have just one name, so could she.

  “Hmmph!” The Clerk scribbled furiously. No ink came out of his pen, and he tossed it aside and grabbed another one. “Business in Fen-town?”

  “Just passing through, dontcha know, on the way to the jolly old family seat,” said Reginald.

  The Clerk’s eyebrows drew together like angry caterpillars. “Do you have any fruit?”

  The travelers exchanged glances. “Err,” said Reginald. “No. We could go and get some if you like?”

  “No fruit!” barked the Clerk, discarding another pen. “No dangerous animals?”

  Glorious grinned. “One,” he said.

  The weasel muttered something in Summer’s pocket.

  The Clerk stared over his desk at Glorious for a moment, then made a note. “Rules!” he said. “No entering the city after dark! No panhandling! No accordion music without a permit!” He leveled a finger. “And pets must be on leashes, do you hear me?”

  “He’s not my pet,” said Summer hurriedly.

  “Wasn’t talking to you,” said the Clerk. He jerked his head at Glorious. “If your human causes trouble, you’ll be up on charges, you understand?”

  Summer’s jaw dropped.

  “I’ll try to keep her under control,” said the wolf drily. “Now tell me, is there a small village green or a lot? I require some space for the evening to transform.”

  “Transform?” The Clerk threw aside his pen, grabbed yet another, and began writing notes in a frenzy.

  “But don’t worry, he doesn’t turn into fruit,” said Reginald helpfully.

  “What does he turn into?” The Clerk’s voice rose hysterically.

  “Just a house!” said Summer hurriedly. “A nice house! A cottage! Nothing dangerous—”

  The Clerk’s face turned an ugly mottled gray. “You’re bringing in outside real estate?!”

  Summer wondered if this was better or worse than fruit.

  “I don’t intend to stay,” said Glorious. “Just for the night.”

  “It’s like pitching a tent,” said Reginald. “Only more civilized.”

  “Am I to understand that this is your house, Mister—Hoopoe?” asked the Clerk nastily.

  “If we’re being technical,” said Reginald, “it’s Viscount Hoopoe. And no, he isn’t mine.”

  The Clerk swung his gaze on Summer. “Is he yours?”

  “Uh—”

  “Yes,” said Glorious. “Legally. Not an abandoned house, not available to house-hunters, not on the real estate market.” He nudged Summer.

  Summer gulped. She could take a hint. “Um. Yes. That’s right. He’s mine.”

  “Do you have a title on file at the Registrar of Deeds?”

  You were definitely not supposed to lie to grown-ups. But she remembered Glorious’s fear of house-hunters, and if it meant protecting the were-house—

  “Yes,” she said. “Only not here. Back home. He’s—um—mobile. But we’re on file in my home town.”

  The Clerk scowled. “Do you have papers for him here, then?”

  “We weren’t told we’d need them,” said Summer staunchly. She had gone to the DMV with her mother last month. She’d finished her book early and spent two hours watching people talk to the clerks there, and they all seemed to say the same things.

  “How am I supposed to work under these conditions!?” he shouted at her, which the clerks at the DMV didn’t do. “Outside real estate! Do you want to crash the housing market? It’s all snails, you understand, snails and hammocks! And we had a woman come through last month on a stone salmon and not a license in sight!”

  He flung down his papers and put his face in his hands.

  Summer felt on suddenly firmer ground.

  She stepped forward and patted his arm. “It will be all right,” she said. And then, cautiously, “It wasn’t very nice of her to come through on a stone salmon like that.” (Privately she wondered what a salmon had to do with it, but never mind.)

  The Clerk sighed and dropped his hands. “No, it wasn’t. It did terrible damage around the foundations. And she didn’t pay for any of it!” Amazingly, his color seemed to be settling.

  Summer made a polite noise of horror and nudged Reginald, who said “Oh—err—I say—that’s not right at all!”

  “I’m sorry we’re making more work for you,” said Summer. “We didn’t mean to.”

  “Well,” said the Clerk. “You were supposed to bring papers, but if you haven’t got any, we can fill out a temporary house license for you. But it’s only good for thirty days, and you have to keep it in the window at all times.”

  “Thank you for your help,” said Summer. She’d noticed that the people who got out of the DMV the quickest usually said that.

  “Mmm,” said the Clerk, but the storm had clearly passed. Normally at this point she’d tell her mother that she loved her and it would be all right, but this did not seem quite appropriate. Instead she said, “We’re sorry to be so much trouble.”

  “Hmmph!” said the Clerk, but his heart wasn’t in it. He dug a form out of a stack and filled in a few blanks. “Now sign here.”

  Glorious nudged her. Summer took the leaky pen and signed her name in her best cursive writing.

  “There’s that, then. In the window at all times, you hear? And we’ll keep this other copy on file.”

  Summer presented the paper to Glorious, who swallowed it in one gulp.

  “Thank you again,” she said. Reginald bowed to the clerk. All three of them hurried out of the building.

  “Wow!” said Reginald, as soon as they were clear. “What a load of whoppers that was!” He slapped Summer on the shoulder with his wing and laughed. “I didn’t know you had it in you! ‘We’re on file in my home town’ indeed!”

  Summer giggled. You weren’t supposed to feel proud of yourself for lying, but she couldn’t help it.

  They made their way across the stone causeway into Fen-town.

  Everything was on poles and stilts and pilings. The village appeared to be made of at least a dozen layers. Birds the size of Reginald flew back and forth overhead, between birdhouses on tall poles.

  There were shops above the level of the road, accessible through folding staircases. There were also fruit-vendors and little carts, like the kind that sold hot dogs on the street in Summer’s world. (Her mother had never let her buy one of the hot dogs, because she said the carts were unsanitary and crawling with germs, but they always smelled delicious.)

  It was odd, though—unlike the carts back home, these didn’t have wheels. In fact, they seemed to be built on the backs of glistening carpets.

  Summer was trying to figure out why the carpets looked so familiar, when one moved.

  It stretched and rippled. Summer let out a squeak.

  “Hmmm?” Glorious rolled an eye up at his rider.

  “Oh,” said Reginald. “Snail-cart. Don’t they have them where you’re from?”

  “We don’t have snails that big where I’m from!”

  The carts were indeed built on the backs of snails. The counters were fitted around the spiral shells and boxes of produce were set out atop them. Awnings overhead shaded the fruit-sellers. Some of the snails were pulled all the way into their shells, but others had their necks stretched out and were sunning themselves. Each one was the size of a small car.

  “Aren’t they slow?” whispered Summer.

  “Well, sure,” said Reginald. “But they go under the city at night—upside down, you know—and you sling a perch or a hammock between the awnings and sleep dry all night.” He shrugged. “If you fly under the road, you’ll see ’em.”

  �
��Good eating on a snail,” said the weasel. “Easy to catch, too.” He eyed the nearest cart hungrily.

  “I don’t think they’d appreciate it if you ate their snail,” said Summer.

  “Don’t think a snail wouldn’t eat you if it got the chance!”

  The valet-birds dug into the packs and produced a few coins, then flew to the nearest fruit seller and began a round of vigorous chirping.

  “I thought you didn’t have any money,” said Summer.

  “I don’t have real money,” said Reginald. “Debts up to the ceiling!” He sounded almost proud of the fact. “But a few bits tucked away here or there, for an inn or a pint or a bit of a bite—of course I’ve got that.”

  Summer had eleven cents in her pocket. She didn’t think that it would be worth much in this world.

  The fruit-seller apparently came to an arrangement with the valet-birds. She was a tall black woman who would have looked perfectly at home in Summer’s world, except for the fact that she was wearing clothes made entirely of matchsticks and string. She took one of the coins and the valet-birds began ferrying a bunch of grapes—one grape per bird—back to the packs.

  They proceeded through Fen-town. The valet-birds stopped at three other snail-carts, buying biscuits and a number of small tins. Summer found the vendors that they didn’t visit much more fascinating—there was a creature like a haystack selling wind-chimes, and a hooded person with glowing green eyes whose cart was covered in dozens of hands.

  “Are those real hands?” whispered Summer. Many of them were dried and curled up, like dead spiders.

  “Hand-smith,” said Reginald. “Yes, of course they’re real. He’d soon be up on charges if they weren’t.”

  In the center of town, the road split into an enormous circular platform. In the center of the platform was a turtle.

  It was gigantic, as big as a parking lot. Its eyes were at least ten feet tall. Summer was glad they were closed. Its pupils might be bigger than she was.

  From its shell rose a grove of trees and a neatly manicured lawn. There were several park benches and picnic tables. A sign said, “Chelonia Park.”

  “Should be as good a place as any to spend the night,” said Glorious. “I don’t relish trying to balance my foundations on these poles, or having the tide come in through my windows.”