The Purple Emperor fw-2

by Herbie Brennan

  The weird thing was the way it had happened. One minute he was worrying about Pyrgus, listening to Blue, trying to figure what might be going on. The next, there was a claw gripping his guts, his heart was pounding and his brain had turned to mush. All because. Madame Cardui walked in.

  He'd heard about Madame Cardui, of course – she was one of Blue's agents – but nothing had prepared him for the reality. She was the most exotic creature he'd ever seen – tall for a woman, nearly as tall as he was, in fact. She dressed in shudderingly flamboyant gear – a matching gown and headdress in bright, ever-changing colours with jewelled floaters on her feet that held her an inch or more above the floor and made her even taller.

  They called her the Painted Lady, he seemed to recall, and he could see why. She was heavily, almost theatrically, made-up: had she once been on stage? He thought he'd heard that about her too. She was accompanied by an orange dwarf, who carried a fat, translucent Persian cat asleep in a gilded cage. But for all the trappings, the most striking thing about her was her eyes – dark, liquid and penetrating.

  Those eyes transfixed him like javelins as Blue made the introductions. Madame Cardui reached out a slim hand writhing with serpent rings, smiled to show fine scarlet teeth, gripped his hand firmly and said, 'It is such a pleasure to meet you, Gatekeeper Fogarty. Deeah Princess Blue has told me much about you. May I present my servant Kitterick?' She nodded benignly towards the orange dwarf.

  Fogarty, thunderstruck, said nothing. And continued to say nothing as she repeated the story she'd told Blue about the threat of assassination facing someone in the royal household. In fact, the only thing he did say before she swept out of the room at the end of the audience was, 'Madame Cardui, what is your given name?'

  She had fixed him again with those wonderful eyes and said in that wonderful voice, 'Cynthia, Gatekeeper Fogarty. My given name is Cynthia.'

  Then she was gone and Fogarty stood trembling in her wake. Thank God he'd hidden that from Blue and Pyrgus.

  It was ludicrous to have that sort of reaction to a woman at his age. It was ludicrous to have that sort of reaction to a woman at any age. He didn't recall having had it before. Not when he was a kid mooning over some pimply first love he couldn't even remember now. He didn't have it when he met Miriam, the woman he married in his twenties. Admittedly Miriam had been a bit of a moo, but still…

  The question was what was he going to do about it?

  He knew what he'd have done about it when he was really the age he felt right now. He'd have climbed on the hog and rode out after her like the Lone Bloody Ranger. He'd have grabbed her and kissed her till her ears dropped off. And if she was seeing someone else he'd have beaten him to a pulp.

  Wouldn't do now, of course. He was Gatekeeper now, the most respectable, responsible job he'd ever held. Couldn't just take off chasing skirt. More to the point, he was eighty-seven and his days of beating rivals to a pulp were long gone. Unless, of course, he used a cricket bat. Idly he wondered if she had anything going with the dwarf.

  He was coming out of the bathroom when somebody started hammering on his front door. Fogarty froze. Nobody was supposed to get anywhere near his home without triggering the security system. There were guards as well – Pyrgus had insisted on that – but even if somebody managed to slip past them, the devices he'd set up would have alerted him long ago. But somebody had got past his guards and his security and was at his door now, in the middle of the night.

  Fogarty walked to the bank of view screens he'd installed in his living quarters. The remote periphery looked clear, except for his cloaked guards who showed up as reassuring green shapes. The middle ground was clear as well – a few foxes and rabbits (or what passed for foxes and rabbits in the Realm) but nothing to worry about – so it wasn't any sort of mass attack.

  His eyes flickered to the screens that showed his front porch. A tall, hooded figure was reaching out a gloved hand to knock again. There was no obvious sign of weaponry (although the cloak could have hidden anything) but at least the figure was alone. All the same, not even a lone visitor should have passed the guards unnoticed. And nobody, but nobody, should have beaten his security devices. The expected assassination attempt? Blue thought the target must be Pyrgus, but word was the victim would be someone in the royal household. That could still be Pyrgus, but it could also be Blue herself or any one of a dozen senior servants and advisors, including himself.

  Would an assassin knock on your front door?

  Fogarty's eyes narrowed as he tried to think it through. Everybody knew assassins didn't just come calling at your door: they snuck in the back or through your window or down your chimney. Or they used a transformation spell to disguise their appearance, make them look like a friend or somebody harmless. The clown outside didn't look like a friend, he looked like an assassin. The hood hid the face, the cloak hid the weapons. But why would an assassin want to look like an assassin and walk right up to your front door? Unless he was an extremely cunning assassin who knew that nobody would believe somebody who looked like an assassin and came knocking at your door could possibly really be an assassin. Except that -

  Fogarty gave up the attempt and took a cricket bat from the cupboard beside the front door. He'd have preferred his old shotgun, but since he'd used it to kill the Purple Emperor, he thought it was undiplomatic to keep carrying it. What was he going to do – keep explaining he'd been possessed by a demon at the time? Besides, a cricket bat didn't often kill people if you knew what you were doing; and you could use it to break their fingers during the interrogation afterwards. The interrogation afterwards was important. You could find out who sent them and if there was anybody else after you. He hefted the bat and opened the door. 'Good evening, Alan,' said Madame Cardui. 'I thought at our age it might be best to dispense with the preliminaries.' She glanced at the bat as she swept past him. 'Oh, good – shall we be playing games?'

  Blue awoke sleepily to find someone was shaking her. Blearily she focused beyond the lamp he was carrying. 'Pyrgus, what are you doing?'

  'Hairstreak's sent the Duke of Burgundy to see me,' Pyrgus hissed urgently. 'I need you to tell me what to do.'

  CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

  Henry had an utterly, totally brilliant idea, one so obvious he wondered why he hadn't thought of it before. Since he couldn't find where Aisling had hidden his portal control, he could at least go and see if Mr Fogarty had another one! It was night now and his mother would have gone ballistic if she'd thought he was visiting Mr Fogarty's home after dark. But his mother could no more remember who he was than could his sister, so there didn't seem a lot to stop him.

  He pulled on a mac since it had started to rain and caught the last bus out. If he didn't find another control, he could always stay the night and catch the first bus home tomorrow. For all his problems with them, lethe cones had their advantages. And he still had four left.

  By the time he was walking down Mr Fogarty's road, a lot of his confidence had evaporated. The trouble was, all he could think about was Blue and how she had to be wondering why he wasn't with her now she needed him. With his luck, there would be no second control and it would be months before he got to the Faerie Realm.

  His luck turned out to be exactly as he has expected. He searched Mr Fogarty's house from top to bottom without finding so much as a hint of a portal control. He was wondering if he should bang his head against a wall when he had his second utterly, totally, wonderfully brilliant idea within three hours.

  He went straight to the desk in the bedroom and rooted till he found Mr Fogarty's notebook.

  The notebook was fascinating. There were technical sketches for all sorts of devices – including something called a Wishing Machine – all labelled in Mr Fogarty's small, neat hand. Many of them were clearly unfinished, some were jottings for machine parts and circuit boards, and quite a few made no sense to Henry whatsoever, although he tried to put that little discovery out of his head as soon as it occurred to him. If he couldn't make sense
of the plans he was looking for, he was in real trouble. And if he couldn't find the plans at all, he was in bigger trouble still.

  About a third of the way through the notebook, Henry found the plans he was looking for.

  The drawing wasn't labelled 'portal control'. It was headed 'psychotronic reality disruptor' with the 'disruptor' crossed out and replaced by the word 'realignment'. It was the psychotronic bit that caught Henry's attention. He remembered Mr Fogarty mentioning something about his portals using a psychotronic trigger and pumped electricity. There was nothing about pumped electricity on this page, but the psychotronic bit looked promising.

  So did the sketch. The exterior of the box was a lot like the portal control Henry used the first time he translated to the Realm. The drawing of the interior made no sense at all. There was provision for a battery, one of those expensive, long-life little efforts that powered digital watches, but beyond that Henry couldn't follow it at all. He stared for a long time, then decided he didn't have to follow it. All he had to do was make it. It was like a television set. You didn't have to know how it worked, you just had to know how to switch it on. If he followed Mr Fogarty's plans exactly, then the portal should open when he pressed the button.

  The problem was Henry had never made an electronic device before. He'd learned a bit about circuit diagrams and components at school, then promptly forgotten most of it and switched class before they got to putting things together. But he had built working model cardboard sculptures – how much more difficult could electronic stuff be?

  It turned out not to be difficult at all, but it took more time than Henry had expected. What made it easy was Mr Fogarty's habit of making little doodle sketches of every necessary component. The doodles crawled all over his notes so that even when Henry didn't understand terms like gate transformer, he had a picture of what he was looking for.

  A lot of the parts he needed were stored in the kitchen drawer, while others were out in Mr Fogarty's shed. Henry felt a twinge of guilt as he collected some of them – they were items he'd stolen from his school for Mr Fogarty when they had been trying to build a portal to get Pyrgus back to the Realm: they'd have to go back again before school opened after the summer break.

  It was only when he started to put the pieces together than he discovered there was a component missing. Henry went on a major search after that, but without result. What he was looking for was labelled 'biofilter' in the notebook: a small, flat disc apparently made by fusing two layers of metal to make a sandwich with a third, then attaching a tiny looped aerial. There was nothing like it in the kitchen drawer, nothing like it in the shed. Henry went on another search of the whole house again before deciding that whatever a biofilter was, Mr Fogarty didn't have one. He leafed through the notebook to see if there were any instructions for making one, but there weren't. What to do now?

  Henry pored over the design diagram trying to figure what the bio thing actually did. As far as he could see it did nothing – it didn't even seem to be attached to anything. But then again, a lot of the device was like that. There was even a circuit that wasn't a real circuit, but a drawing of a circuit. Mr Fogarty had labelled that one 'psychotronic pathways' and added a note saying, 'Insert right way up in relation to transistor 8'. Henry decided to leave the bio disc thing out altogether. He wasn't at all sure this was wise, but he didn't see what else he could do.

  He started to put the device together using an electric soldering iron he found at the back of the kitchen drawer. It was slow, absorbing work, very much like model-making, and it was dark outside before he realised he was very hungry. He left the half-finished device (which didn't look half as neat as the things Mr Fogarty made, but what the hell – it was his first attempt) and went in search of something to eat. The fridge was empty as usual, except for the familiar pint of curdled milk, but he found a Birds Eye shepherd's pie in the chest freezer in the laundry room. Cook from frozen in the microwave, Captain Birds Eye told him cheerfully by means of a cartoon bubble.

  Mr Fogarty's microwave was pristine. Somebody had given it to him and he had never used it because of something he called 'radiation leakage'. Henry removed the outer packaging, bunged the shepherd's pie inside and set the timer for seven minutes. Then he took a tin of baked beans from the cupboard (Mr Fogarty always had plenty of baked beans) and heated them in a saucepan on the gas stove. By the time the microwave pinged, the beans were bubbling merrily. He plogged the lot down on a willow-pattern plate and ate his meal with gusto.

  Since it was clear he wouldn't have the device finished in the next hour or so, he decided to stay the night. He felt a wonderful surge of pleasure at the decision. The sense of freedom was astonishing. He didn't have to answer to his mother. He didn't have to listen to his rotten sister. He could stay out all night if he damn well liked. They wouldn't even notice he was missing.

  Henry's sense of freedom was gone in the morning, replaced by something close to panic. He'd had the weirdest dream about Pyrgus. They were running from a small army of rotting zombies who loped along a city street with bits falling off them. Blue was in the dream as well. She followed after the zombies with a dustpan and brush, sweeping up the bits. As she worked, she kept calling after them, 'What kept you, Henry? What took you so long?'

  Whatever about the zombies, he could believe that was exactly what Blue must be saying now. There was trouble in the Realm, she'd asked Henry for his help and he'd promised to follow on as quickly as he could. She'd probably expected him within an hour or two at most. He grabbed the soldering iron without even bothering to have breakfast.

  He finished the portal control around lunchtime, with one break mid-morning to fry up two hamburgers he found in the deep freeze. It looked a real mess as it sat there on the kitchen table – a rat's nest of terminals and wires with an on/off switch too big for the rest of the components. The control Mr Fogarty made was smaller than a mobile phone. Henry's version would hardly fit into a shoebox. He wondered how he was going to carry it about with him, then decided he didn't have to. If he could open a portal to the Realm, Mr Fogarty could always get him back. Or Pyrgus, come to that – there was a portal in the Purple Palace.

  He bit his lip, stared at it for a little while, then decided it was time to try it out. Since he'd learned the hard way not to open portals indoors, he carried the device into the back garden and down to the little area of wasteland and rubbish beyond the buddleia bush. It struck him that if he hesitated he'd never have the courage to do anything, so he threw the monstrous switch right away.

  Nothing happened.

  It was that biofilter thing! It wouldn't work without the biofilter! He was finished. He'd have to go home and wait for Aisling to get back to normal all because of that stupid biofilter!

  Or possibly a battery…

  Henry felt like kicking himself. The famous biofilter might yet be a problem, but meanwhile it would be an excellent idea to put a battery in his device. He ran quickly back into the house and searched the drawer. There were several batteries pushed in at the back, but none was the lithium button he needed. He ran to the shed, but could find no batteries there at all.

  Where are you, Henry? Why didn't you follow on like you promised?

  He was so late! He was so long delayed! He glanced at his watch. One twenty-eight. That was nearly – there was a battery in his watch!

  Henry ripped the watch from his wrist. He needed a little screwdriver to get the back off, but there were little screwdrivers in the shed. In moments he was looking at a battery that would fit his makeshift portal control to perfection. He prised it out of the watch and carried it quickly outside.

  He discovered he was breathing heavily as he pushed the battery into place. He checked the contacts and decided everything was ready. Then he had a small heart-thumping panic: there was no way this thing was going to work without its biofilter. The biofilter just had to be the most important component in the entire thing. Dear heaven, what was a biofilter?

  One l
ast search, he thought. One last search. It was stupid risking everything for the sake of a biofilter. What happened if all his work went into meltdown?

  Henry ran back to the house – he seemed to be running everywhere these days – and began a search so thorough that at one point he found himself looking behind the bowl in the loo. The ridiculousness of his situation struck him then. Did he really think Mr Fogarty kept a biofilter in his toilet? It was ludicrous. He was letting his panic get the better of him. What was such a big deal about testing the device without one tiny little component? Worst-case scenario, the chances were it simply wouldn't work. He'd been willing enough to try it without its biofilter a few minutes ago before he remembered he hadn't put in the battery. Why was he making such a fuss about the damn thing now?

  He went back outside again. His electronic rat's nest lay where he'd left it on top of a broken-down old garden table Mr Fogarty had never got around to throwing out. Before he could panic again, Henry threw the switch.

  In the middle of the rat's nest, an LED glowed green.

  Henry looked around. There was no sign of a portal, no sign of anything at all. It hadn't worked. It was never going to work without a bio- Behind him, somewhere near the shed, there came an electronic hum. It was so low-pitched at first that he felt it through his feet as much as heard it with his ears. But then it rose higher and began to pulse like the siren of a cardiac ambulance. The volume rose to a painful level. This was nothing at all like what happened when he used the portal control Mr Fogarty made. Something was wrong. Something was badly wrong.

  The sounding siren stopped abruptly. There was an unfamiliar popping sound and a portal opened little more than six feet from where he stood. Henry stared at it in astonishment. He'd done it! He'd built a working portal control! What's more, it opened up directly into the Purple Palace – he recognised its corridors at once. How great was that?