by Chris Ward
‘I have some concerns I need to put to rest, and I think I’ve found a way to do it.’
On the level below the library, the walls in the basements this far below sucked up any attempt at light, despite the fluttering of the reanimated candles affixed into the wall’s metal clasps. From everywhere around came a hum, as if from machinery, and while some of it was just that, a lot of the noise came from the creaks and groans of the old school itself. Built in stages over several centuries, the school was a collision of ancient and modern. Down this far, the corridors had been hewn out of solid rock, but on the higher levels, the school had sections of wood, stonework, and even prefabricated plastic and glass.
Up ahead and beside a closed door, a figure stepped out, pulling a sword from its belt.
‘Hail, Sin Keeper.’ Wilhelm lifted a hand toward the reanimated suit of Samurai armour that guarded the Locker Room. ‘May we go inside? We have a special request from Professor Loane himself to collect something that was wrongly sent for cleaning.’
The sin keeper said nothing, though he swung his sword across in front of him, then slid it smoothly back into the scabbard fitted to his belt. With a flourish of a chainmail glove that lacked a hand or fingers, the sin keeper stepped aside to bid them entry.
‘Lucky for you he’s so trusting,’ Benjamin said.
Wilhelm smirked. ‘I’ve been sent down here so many times, we’re practically brothers,’ he said. ‘If I ever get married, he can be my best man.’ He shrugged. ‘Or perhaps security.’
The Locker Room was a row of cubicles that opened onto a conveyor belt. Punished pupils had to sit in one of the cubicles to pick items off of the conveyor, then give them a polish with the deanimation fluid, then drop them into a basket. Every few minutes, cleaners lumbered through to collect the baskets and carry them into a back room for sorting. Anything cleaned properly was returned to its place; anything still reanimated was put back on the conveyor. In each cubicle was a counter, and when the number reached zero, the pupil was free to go back upstairs. The most cleans Benjamin had had so far was five hundred, after falling asleep in a math class. On a couple of occasions, Wilhelm had broken two thousand, which meant he’d had to stay overnight.
Wilhelm headed straight for the cleaners’ office. Three or four cubicles were currently occupied with pupils scrubbing away at a variety of items in the hope of getting back upstairs before breakfast. The grumbling of Derek Bates, one of Godfrey’s cronies, came from the middle cubicle. Benjamin had learned early on that if you got your choice of cubicle, you should take one near to the conveyor entrance, so you could select the easiest items to clean before anyone else got to them.
‘Surely, we can’t just march in there?’ Benjamin protested as Wilhelm pushed through the swinging doors and into a room that resembled an Aladdin’s Cave of junk. At one end, assorted objects backlogged a chute from some higher floor while at the other end, a conveyor swung in and out of the wall like an airport luggage system. Between the two were heaps of things all roughly sorted into types—books in one pile, electrical items in another, kitchen utensils in a third—monitored and arranged by the zombie-like cleaners who moved from one pile to another in a languid, syncronised dance.
‘Wow, it’s … alive.’
Wilhelm grinned. ‘Never been back here before? Quite a sight, eh?’
Everything appeared to be moving, as if the room was a giant termite mound, and a little queasiness rose up in Benjamin’s stomach at the sight of it.
‘I never realised so much stuff reanimated so quickly,’ he said.
‘This is a big school,’ Wilhelm answered. ‘There are rooms and rooms of just junk. Whoever built this place was clearly a massive hoarder.’
‘What are you looking for?’
Wilhelm dodged among a group of cleaners headed toward a large, shiny, silver pile of electronic items—mobile phones, fax machines, and all manner of other gadgets that had been invented far into the future from what Benjamin knew. Amazing how Endinfinium seemed to have no concept of time. While he had met several people from the future, he hadn’t yet met anyone from the distant past. Certain there had to be someone around here, somewhere, whose idea of technology was the printing press.
‘Okay!’ Wilhelm shouted, poking his hand into the pile and withdrawing a small, silver object that looked like a miniature camera. It was so small, though, he could balance it between his thumb and forefinger.
‘What is it?’
‘A spy cam,’ he said, ‘for getting juicy goss on celebrities, I imagine.’
‘What are you going to use it for?’
‘That very same thing. Only difference is that my celebrity is Miranda.’
Benjamin lifted an eyebrow. ‘She will literally kill you if she finds out,’ he said. ‘She thinks its amusing the way you spy on Dusty Eaves, but if you try the same thing on her, she’ll probably pull out your limbs, one by one.’
Wilhelm gave Benjamin a forlorn look. ‘You think?’ Then a massive grin beamed across his face. ‘A good job she has no chance of finding out, then, isn’t it? My plan is failproof.’
‘How on earth are you going to spy on her, anyway?’
Wilhelm lifted a finger. ‘That, my friend, is part two of my plan.’
‘Look, what I’m about to show you is top secret,’ Wilhelm said. ‘And I mean, top secret. As in, no pretending not to talk about it and then tell someone else behind my back. Like Snout, for example.’
‘Why would I tell Snout?’
‘Don’t pretend you haven’t started thinking about him as a mate now that Godfrey’s not around to lead him astray. I know you enjoyed working with him in natural science class until that punk new kid showed up.’
‘He’s all right, but I wouldn’t tell him anything important.’
‘Good. If Old Gubbledon finds out, I’ll not only get sent to the Locker Rooms, probably forever, but I’ll also lose my only chance to keep an eye on Miranda.’
Benjamin rolled his eyes. ‘Let’s talk about the secret and not what your plans are for it. I really don’t want to think about you spying on Miranda.’
‘It’s for her own good. That new kid is up to something, I’m sure of it, and I’m going to find out what.’
Wilhelm knelt and reached underneath his bed to pull out a cardboard box whose top was sealed shut with tape. From the way it hung loose over the edges, though, Benjamin could see Wilhelm had opened it and closed it many times.
‘Remember,’ Wilhelm said, ‘top secret.’
He opened the box.
‘What the—’
A near-transparent plastic bag crinkled and crunched into a shape resembling a butterfly and fluttered up out of the box. It did a circuit of the room then came to rest on top of Wilhelm’s head, where it sat with an air of contentedness, its wings slowly opening and closing.
Benjamin shook his own head. ‘Oh, my. When Gubbledon finds out about this, you’re a dead man.’
Wilhelm grinned and said, ‘His name’s Rick.’
10
Shifting Intentions
Somehow, not being in chains or confined to some dark cell with bars over the window was more terrifying. Left to roam the corridors of the vast mountaintop castle with its shifting rooms and corridors that left no route the same for more than a couple of minutes, Godfrey lived in constant terror that the floor beneath him would shift to send him plummeting to the ground far below. He knew from the way the Dark Man’s hideous minions were able to find him at will that there had to be a sense to it all. But even without any bonds, Godfrey was left as immobile as any shackled prisoner.
As always, when he woke in some deserted bedroom he had chosen to sleep in, during the night he had invariably descended several levels, the blocks of rock, wood, plastic, and even glass, seemingly unlocking and lowering like a monstrous game of connect. And as he always did, after eating his plate of whatever gruel was considered food here, he began the long and arduous journey up through the twisting, rising,
and falling corridors, up staircases that dipped in mid-climb, sending him back down as he endlessly tried to get to the top part of the castle where a handful of galleries and balconies remained stationary for the most part, at least in comparison to the rest of this place he had dubbed the Shifting Castle.
On a bad day, he would get one of the castle’s rear balconies, one that faced inland toward one of the few snowy ridgelines poking up out of the grey clouds, and then just grey cloud itself beyond. He wondered how many people had tried to find a way out by hiking off into those grim peaks. But the view was so uninspiring that, after a half-hour of wishing for something to change, he would curl up in the corner and do his best to fall asleep.
On a good day, however, he would randomly find himself on one of the balconies that faced back the way he had come, the sea and Endinfinium High School.
The Dark Man had chosen to make his base a safe distance back into the mountains, so in the immediate foreground stood a series of jagged peaks that looked nearly impossible to cross—all snowy gullies and grey rock crags. Beyond those, though, the world opened out into a patchwork blanket of green: rolling hills and forests, open meadows and high moorland.
Rivers and lakes were in there, some of them glacial or comprised of snowmelt, plus the Great Junk River that the Dark Man claimed was the beginning of all things.
And beyond that lay the accursed place that had tried to force an education into him: Endinfinium High.
Godfrey couldn’t help scowling through the battered telescopes that topped some of the largest galleries, as if the castle had once been open to tourists before being teleported into a strange new world. The resolution wasn’t strong enough to make out people, but the ugly cluster of towers and battlements that was the tamest of versions of the Dark Man’s mighty abode, were easy to pick out of the sea beyond. From here, it looked like a black speck of dirt, easy to condemn to the water forever with one flick of a giant’s finger.
When he wasn’t overcome with hatred—which happened far more often than he would like people to believe, though when you had nothing to do but hate your enemies, you tended to get bored after a while—he mused on how he could see so far, despite the distance being so vast.
After a few weeks of consideration, he had understood why.
Unlike the England he had come from—a wealthy country estate just outside of Shrewsbury in 2113, to be exact—Endinfinium, what there was of it, was entirely flat.
And it was still building itself.
He couldn’t be sure, of course—the Shifting Castle’s telescopes weren’t that good—but he suspected that the sea horizon was a fraction farther away than when he had begun his de facto imprisonment. The Great Junk River and its load were slowly filling up the sea.
Today, he had gotten lucky and found a nice, relaxing balcony near the very top of the castle, one with panoramic views to the south and the east. Clouds had rolled in across the south, but he could still see as far as the dark green strip of the Haunted Forest before the haze had begun to obscure the landscape. At a rough estimate, it was a couple of hundred miles from here in the Shifting Castle back to Endinfinium High School, and the mixture of different landscapes was elaborate. Who- or whatever had created this place had tried to fit in as much variety as possible.
A creak behind him nearly made him jump up and over the balcony’s edge. A door opened, and a squat, box-shaped creature stumbled in, all flaps of cardboard and loose, flickering tape, its marble-like eyes searching for him from the top of antennae made out of wire cord.
‘The Master will see you,’ it said in a strange, hollow voice that came from everywhere in the room at once. ‘He’s waiting.’
‘Where?’
‘Follow.’
Godfrey stood up, brushed down his clothes as though going to a job interview, and walked stiffly after the box-creature.
‘Do you have a name?’
The box swung from side to side. ‘No.’
‘Can I call you Boxy? You know, since you’re a box.’
‘You can call me what you like.’
Godfrey shrugged. As the creature waddled in front of him, its feet made by two lower flaps of cardboard folded and bent into pyramids, he had an urge to kick it, just to see if it was hollow or whether something was contained inside.
The corridors stayed quiet for Boxy as he led Godfrey to his waiting audience. Godfrey hadn’t seen the Dark Man since the army had returned in disarray to the valley below the Shifting Castle, having been routed by the little upstart Benjamin Forrest and his friends. In Godfrey’s own opinion, the Dark Man had been a little too obvious with his attack. But what did he know? He was only thirteen, and the only wars he knew about had been acted out in his vast back garden with one or two of the servants acting as mobile targets for his slingshot.
Boxy finally paused at a couple of wide, ornately decorated doors. ‘Enter, please,’ he said.
Godfrey took a deep breath. He didn’t really feel afraid. After all, if the Dark Man had wanted him dead, he would have been thrown over a balcony weeks ago. This felt like the start of something. Ideally, the revenge Godfrey so wanted on Benjamin Forrest and his idiot friends.
‘Thanks, Boxy,’ he said, patting the top of the box-creature’s head and shoving through the doors like he had done daily back on his parents’ estate. He was Godfrey Pendleton-Frarar, after all; he had half a mind to request the Dark Man kneel for him.
He had expected a bigger room, like an audience chamber off a television show, but the Dark Man stood with his back to Godfrey in a room so small, Godfrey had stepped on the edge of a billowing robe before he had a chance to stagger backward and correct himself.
‘Welcome, boy,’ said a low, growling voice. ‘At last I have a task for you and all of that anger you enjoy so greatly.’
Godfrey inched backward. The door had swung shut, but as his desperate fingers found the cold metal of the handle, he realised that either Boxy had locked it or the Dark Man had some other way of keeping him inside.
‘You are a powerful Summoner, Godfrey,’ the Dark Man whispered, still not turning around. He moved forward a few paces, seeming to grow in height. Only when steps appeared beneath his feet did Godfrey realise he was ascending a stone staircase toward an archway set high up into the wall.
Without another word, Godfrey followed as the Dark Man swept through the arch and out onto a freezing tower balcony at the very top of the Shifting Castle. Godfrey balked at the sight of the castle’s slowly shifting walls and buttresses; if you glanced away you would never look at the same exact design twice. He wondered how he had climbed so high along the flat corridors that Boxy had led him through until he realised they were in rising up into the air like a giant periscope on top of a submarine.
‘Tell me what you remember of your life before you came to Endinfinium,’ the Dark Man said, cloak billowing out behind him.
Godfrey opened his mouth to a flood of freezing air. He gasped for breath, then leaned back against the stonework to collect what little warmth he could find.
‘I lived mostly alone on a big, rambling estate,’ he said. ‘My parents were usually away. My father was a banker, my mother an actress. I had twenty servants to do my bidding.’
‘And you were cruel to them, were you not?’
Godfrey scowled. ‘I only punished them when they deserved it.’
‘Which was frequently?’
‘What use are servants when you can’t tell them what to do?’
The Dark Man nodded. ‘Quite. Remind me of a particular form of punishment.’
‘I could make the walls hold them.’ Godfrey grinned, remembering the poor cook he had suspended from a second-floor balcony and had left for two days, until the sun had practically baked her.
‘Explain to me how you could command the walls to move.’
Godfrey shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I could tell them what to do. I remember once being angry, and I demanded that the walls swallow up one of the butlers
. And they did. It took two stonemasons three days to set him free.’
‘And you went unpunished for this?’
‘No one knew it was me. With my mind, I could tell the walls what to do.’
The Dark Man nodded. ‘And your house? Did no one raise a suspicion?’
Again Godfrey shrugged. ‘Some staff quit, but my parents just hired more. People said the place was haunted, but my parents didn’t care.’ He grinned again. ‘It was haunted—by me. I guess some people will put up with anything if you offer them enough money. I learned how to scare them just enough to make them afraid, but not enough to make them leave. Oh, the games I used to play.’
‘I can imagine. And what happened when you used this power of yours?’
‘At first I thought nothing happened. Then I realised trees and flowers were beginning to die. The connection wasn’t obvious, but over time it seemed the only likely thing.’
‘And did this cause you to stop?’
‘Why would it? It was only a bunch of stupid trees and flowers. Who cares?’
The Dark Man spun around, and Godfrey gasped, shrank back. But beneath the hood came only the glimmering white of the Dark Man’s eyes and the vague outline of his face.
‘Most die,’ he mused. ‘Most Summoners die before they ever make it to Endinfinium. You were a lucky one. You had natural control of the power. You could be dangerous, Godfrey. A great asset.’
‘I want to punish Benjamin Forrest.’
The Dark Man laughed. ‘Do you, now? Well, I have news for you. I very much want to meet Master Forrest, but he is proving elusive. I have, however, found a way to bring him to me by his own accord. And in order to achieve that, I require your help.’
‘What? I’ll do anything.’
‘Good, good. Now come. We must make haste. Our window of opportunity swiftly swings closed.’
The Dark Man swept past him, pushing Godfrey back against the wall. The billowing cape snapped in the air, and then he was gone, headed back into the tower. Godfrey took a deep breath and, with one last glance at the distant sea, hurried after his new master.
