Blackfoot

by W. R. Gingell

  “It’s not that it’s unusual, as such,” Peter said slowly. “It’s just that it’s a very pencilly sort of pencil. There’s no doubt about it.”

  “Isn’t that just what I said?”

  “Don’t be silly, Ann. Anything made of wood is tricky: there’s always a bit of magic running through it, not to mention the remnants of sap. Between the magic and the sap, and the fact that you can carve wood to be something else altogether, most wooden things think they should be something else. It’s why wizards use wooden wands when they can’t do magic without a conduit.”

  “What’s that got to do with my pencil?” demanded Annabel irritably. “If it’s a pencil, it should be allowed to be sure about it!”

  “Yes, but it’s awfully suspicious for a pencil to be so sure that it is a pencil.”

  “Then why didn’t you mention anything earlier? If it’s so awfully suspicious, shouldn’t you have noticed?”

  “I can’t notice everything, Ann.”

  “You mean that it wasn’t suspicious at all, and it’s only suspicious now because you know,” scoffed Annabel. “Stop trying to be so clever all the time.”

  Peter grinned suddenly. “Oh, well, maybe it wasn’t so suspicious! But now that I know something’s up, it is suspicious, Ann!”

  He’s not wrong, Blackfoot chimed in. For a pleasant change. For pity’s sake draw something, Nan, or you’ll have him lecturing us again.

  Making swift, sure strokes of the pencil, Annabel said, “Is it suspicious because it could be magic so strong you can’t see it?”

  “Mostly,” Peter agreed, craning his neck first to peer over Annabel’s shoulder, and then to gaze up at the castle. “Wait, why can’t I see anything happening?”

  “It might take a little while to start. It usually takes a minute or two before what I draw comes to be.”

  “I don’t mean that!” Peter said in disgust. “That’s already happening: look!”

  Very much surprised, Annabel followed his pointing finger and saw that the tower top she’d been sketching onto the castle was appearing as swiftly as she drew it. “Oh!” she said. “It’s getting quicker! What are you complaining about, then?”

  “But it’s– it can’t– why can’t I see anything happening here?” complained Peter. He sounded vaguely insulted, as if Annabel had done it to spite him.

  Didn’t I tell you, Nan? said Blackfoot irrepressibly.

  “Why would I know?” Annabel said, going back to her drawing. “I couldn’t see anything happening even if it was happening.”

  “That’s very annoying, Ann.”

  Annabel cheerfully shaded the last of her drawing and made sure the paper was covered right to the edges. “I suppose it is.”

  “And tell your cat to stop smirking at me.”

  Oh heavens. How dreadful. My face has betrayed me.

  “He’s getting better at reading your expressions,” remarked Annabel. “You’ll have to be more careful.”

  Wonders will never cease, Blackfoot said. Although, since he refuses to believe I’m capable of thought and speech, I suppose that’s about all the communication we’ll ever manage.

  “How awful for you.”

  There’s no need for sarcasm, Nan.

  “I can’t even tell which one of us you’re talking to any more,” Peter said. “I hope you know that you’re absolutely bonkers.”

  “Absolutely bonkers and able to draw back the royal castle at will,” Annabel said. “You’re sane, but what can you do?”

  “I can go back in time a minu– oh, never mind! You just wait, Ann!”

  “I will,” said Annabel. “I’ll wait a minute, and you wait a minute, too: then you’ll be right back where you started. What use is going one minute back in time?”

  Instead of being annoyed, Peter laughed. “All right, all right. But when I’m travelling through time, you’ll be stuck in the same boring old time. I won’t take you with me!”

  “Pft,” said Annabel. “I don’t want to go. One time is hard enough without having to wade through all of time. Do you want me to draw more, or have you seen enough?”

  “Enough?” spluttered Peter. “I haven’t seen anything! Fine, just draw a bit more over there, where it still looks a bit spindly, and if I can’t see anything by then we might as well stop and eat.”

  “All right,” Annabel agreed. “But I don’t think there’s much left to draw.”

  That should be the last of it. To Annabel’s mild curiosity, Blackfoot sounded almost anticipatory. Then things should get more interesting. I wonder if Mordion knows how close the castle is to being complete?

  Annabel made a face at the drawing she was working on. “Probably. What happens when the castle is complete? Mordion is already shifting things around, and he’s taken some of the doors, too.”

  That depends, Blackfoot said. I suspect that things will either get very much better or very much worse for us.

  “You said that before,” Peter said. “About Mordion, I mean. What do you mean that he’s taken some of the doors?”

  “Well, it’s like the Caliphan–” began Annabel, and added: “Wait, you don’t even believe I’ve seen someone in the reflections, so why should I tell you?”

  “Oh, that. No, I’ve seen him: I beg your pardon, Ann. He’s been watching us in the windows all around the castle. Did you draw him back in, too?”

  “Not exactly. I think I only partly drew him in.”

  “I see,” said Peter. “So you think he’s in the castle but not quite in this time yet. And Mordion is–”

  Annabel nodded. “Yes. I think he’s in the castle but not quite in this version of it. Or something. I don’t really understand, but I know he still can’t get through some of the doorways. He’s been shifting the castle around to try and get us to walk through the ones that lead to him. Blackfoot can tell which are which, but I can’t.”

  This time it was Peter who said: “Pft.” At Annabel’s nose-wrinkle, he said: “You and your mental constructs! All right, we’ll have to be more careful about going through the castle.”

  “Yes.” Annabel drew in a rather surprised-looking bird on top of the roof she’d just finished, and went back to shading roof tiles. “We also have to watch out for tunnels.”

  “Tunnels?”

  “Tunnels. They’re all over the castle.”

  “Wait, there weren’t tunnels all over the castle when I left!”

  How would you know? Blackfoot retorted. You don’t even see what’s under your own nose.

  “Blackfoot says you probably just didn’t see them.”

  “I don’t care what the cat says! I would have noticed tunnels all over the place. Are you sure that Mordion isn’t doing that too?”

  “Pretty sure,” Annabel said. “One of them was there just in time to get us away from him the first time he appeared in the castle.”

  Peter grinned. “Was it, though? Now that’s interesting!”

  “Don’t go getting all mysterious again,” begged Annabel. “And if you didn’t already notice, there’s also a lot of squishy black stuff in the middle of the castle, too.”

  “I saw that. It’s not squishy black stuff, though, Ann: I think it might be shifted temporal remnant.”

  Look what you’ve done, Blackfoot said accusingly. You’ve set him off again.

  “It looks squishy and black to me,” Annabel said obstinately.

  “Yes, but– oh, never mind. All right, if Mordion is making things difficult, you’d better not go wandering around the castle without me. And you’d better not go around without that pencil of yours, either.”

  “I always have my pencil with me,” retorted Annabel, adding the last few patches of cross-hatching to create some texture. She looked at the drawing for another thoughtful moment, then put both pencil and sketchbook back in her satchel. “It must be time for lunch. I don’t want to draw anymore. Mordion will only move it around anyway.”

  “All right,” Peter said reluctantly, “but we sh
ould really see what else you can do with that thing this afternoon.”

  Our time would perhaps be better spent in trying to get away from the castle before Mordion takes over more of its functions.

  “Blackfoot says we should be trying to get away instead.”

  “Well, maybe we can do that with the pencil, too. We’ll try that this afternoon, too.”

  “All right, but lunch first,” Annabel said.

  Blackfoot was gone when Annabel woke the next morning. She would have been worried if it wasn’t for the fact that she could still feel the peculiar Blackfoot-ness at the edges of her mind that meant he was still nearby. Blackfoot was inclined to be secretive and non-communicative, but Annabel was inclined, from long acquaintance, to trust him, so she only scrabbled quietly to her feet without wondering too much where he’d gone. It was probably easier without Blackfoot there, if it came to that: lately he had a habit of warning her not to do dangerous things that were necessary to do. Annabel had an idea that what she was about to do was something he would warn her very strenuously about, if he knew of it.

  She could have taken Peter with her, but she’d only just rescued him from the past, and as annoying as he was being, she wouldn’t like for him to disappear again. Besides, Peter was also knowing things and not telling them, and Annabel didn’t want him standing smugly in the background while she tried to find out a few bits of knowing for herself. So she left him sleeping and stepped carefully into the main castle through one of the throne-room doors that was now clear enough to open. As much as the outside of the castle was nearly complete, was the inside nearly complete: it was now possible to travel straight from the throne room and into the main castle without having to take the roundabout route through the laundry. They had discovered as much yesterday afternoon, when Peter dragged Annabel all over the castle, demanding that she draw this and that, and nodding every so often with a “thought as much!” that became steadily more annoying as the afternoon wore on.

  The only trouble was, thought Annabel, peering carefully at each archway and doorway as she passed through it, that she wasn’t likely to notice if a doorway was suspect, no matter how carefully she looked at it. Peter had recognised them straight away, and whatever he saw was enough to sober him completely from his heady, secret knowledge. Annabel, without any such knowledge or sight, still looked suspiciously at each of them as she passed, and it wasn’t until she was outside the castle wizard’s quarters that she felt as safe as it was possible for her to feel.

  “Inside or outside?” she wondered aloud. She would feel better about drawing the Caliphan back into a room that she could enter and exit easily, but she didn’t like the idea of the Caliphan being able to exit so easily. Annabel bit her lip anxiously, and muttered: “Inside.”

  Once she was in the room, she sat herself on the floor with her back to the wall and opened her sketchbook to a blank page. She didn’t dare to try and draw the Caliphan into the sketch she’d already made of the wizardly quarters, and since she wasn’t sure what would happen if she erased some of the drawing, Annabel also preferred to try and draw the room again without a door. It was easier to draw the room now that she knew what it should look like from sight and not from a nebulous idea in her mind, but she kept the drawing as simple as possible anyway. Nor, after some thought, did she draw all the way to the edges of the paper.

  When the room was fully drawn, with a carefully blank space left where she would draw the Caliphan back, Annabel stopped and looked around the room. She hadn’t drawn a door and now there wasn’t a door any longer, but she had the feeling that for herself at least, it was still there. Curious to test her theory, she crossed the room and felt the wall where the door should have been. It was exactly where it had always been. As Annabel found first the doorknob and then the door panels with her questing hands, it occurred to her that if this sense of satisfaction at being right was anything like Peter habitually felt, it was no wonder he loved to be right so often. She hugged herself as much in delight as in nervousness, and sat down again to draw in the Caliphan. Now that she was sitting by the door with her face to the window, she could see the reflected version of the Caliphan there: he was watching her without pretending otherwise, his eyes bright and interested.

  “Just you wait,” Annabel said, taking in the curve and brilliance of those eyes. “I’ll see you in a minute.”

  12

  It took a little longer than a minute. In fact, it took several minutes. By then, Annabel was so caught up in trying to make sure she exactly captured the expression of the Caliphan’s eyes, that she wasn’t sure exactly when she noticed that he was in the room.

  No, that wasn’t entirely accurate. She first noticed because she heard a snore, and she was quite certain it hadn’t come from her. Annabel looked up and found that the Caliphan was in the room with her. Unlike the sketch she had made of him, he was sitting in the wooden chair by the desk with his feet on the desk, his eyes closed and his mouth open to the ceiling above. That struck Annabel as dangerous, considering the amount of dirt and cobwebs coating the rafters above him. She hadn’t drawn those in, either: neither in the first drawing nor this second one. She climbed carefully to her feet and crept closer, placing each foot warily on the floorboards and wondering what else wouldn’t be quite as she’d drawn it. From further away, through the windows, the Caliphan had looked quite young. When she got closer, Annabel found that she’d been misled by his lankiness and the youthfully prominent adam’s apple: there were deep lines beside his eyes and his hair was more salt than pepper, something that also hadn’t shown through the reflections. He was rather older than she’d thought.

  Still, he didn’t look dangerous, as such, and Annabel didn’t think to have her pencil at the ready until the Caliphan, without moving or even seeming to wake, said: “If you’re going to keep drawing the castle back bit by bit, do you think you could draw me some socks? Being drawn back into existence gives you a bit of a shiver. There were some here, but someone took them.”

  Annabel froze into her habitual, blobby facade of stupidity just as the Caliphan opened his eyes and sat up. He stared at her for quite some time, his head twitching from side to side.

  “Oh, that’s good,” he said at last. “I can do an impression of a stork. Want to see?”

  “All right,” said Annabel, letting her eyes glaze a little bit. Perhaps the Caliphan had seen too much of her in the reflection. It was very rare for her facade to fail: the eyes were usually the clincher.

  The Caliphan lunged forward in his seat to peer at her. “You’re really scaring me. How do you do that with your eyes?”

  “You said you were going to do an impression of a stork,” said Annabel sulkily. Most of it was just for show, but she did feel a little bit aggrieved: the Caliphan was acting as if he didn’t believe her.

  He lunged to his feet just as quickly and awkwardly as he’d sat forward, one leg drawn up high, almost to his chin, and both arms extended in hooked wings to the side. “It’s the nose that really makes it,” he said, thrusting forward with his nose as if it were a beak.

  “No, it’s not,” said Annabel, looking at those stick-like legs with fascination.

  He gave her a narrow-eyed look and said calmly, “It’s all a matter of perspective. Compared with a sparrow, my legs are elephantine: compared with an elephant, now…”

  “Have you been here long?” asked Annabel, looking around again at the general messiness of the room. None of the other rooms she’d drawn back looked like this: they looked as though they’d just been cleaned. But then, she had very carefully not drawn in too much. Was it possible that the Caliphan had been living in this version of the room all the time, and that she had merely made it accessible to herself by drawing it?

  “The mess, you mean?” said the man, still in his stork position. He added conversationally: “I have a brilliant mind, you see. Means I’m fated to live in squalor. And if there’s no squalor, it has to be created.”

  Annabe
l stared at him, forgetting to hold her blank expression. “You made it like this?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” he said. “Well. I mean. You didn’t draw this in.”

  “I know. How did it get here?”

  “That’s too hard,” said the Caliphan. “My name is Rorkin. What’s yours?”

  “Then explain slowly,” Annabel said coldly. “I’m sure you’ll manage.”

  Rorkin looked slightly offended. “Not too hard for me: too hard for you.”

  “Then explain slowly,” said Annabel again. “Use small words.”

  “Touchy little thing, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” said Annabel. “Actually, I’m very touchy right now. The castle has been playing games with us, and now Mordion is playing games with us, and I’d like to know who you are and why you keep looking at me through the windows.”

  “Well, you didn’t specify, did you? You just drew me, and the room, and left the edges empty. Probably didn’t even draw right to the edges of the paper.”

  “Do you mean you used the space to draw in things that you wanted?”

  “I told you that you wouldn’t understand,” said Rorkin, with a faint air of triumph.

  “Well, I do! Mordion did the same thing to Blackfoot and me when we were in one of the rooms.”

  “Then you should have known better by now, shouldn’t you?”

  “I do,” Annabel said. “That’s why I did it. I wanted to make sure I’d left a buffer around this room.”

  Rorkin gave her another of those brilliant, narrow looks. “A lot cleverer than you look, aren’t you?”

  Annabel said simply: “Yes. Why have you been watching me through the windows? Don’t think I didn’t notice that you didn’t answer the question.”

  “It wasn’t just you. You’re not as important as you think you are.”

  “I’m not important at all. That’s why I want to know, and you still haven’t answered.”