“Maybe I will,” Annabel said. As with rather a lot of what Rorkin said, she felt that she hadn’t quite understood what he meant by it. “Maybe I won’t, though. You keep talking as though there are only two choices: what if I don’t want either of them?”
Rorkin smiled at her brightly. “Oh, that’s the easy bit. Make yourself a third choice.”
Annabel sat in the kitchen for rather a long time after she left Rorkin’s quarters. She knew what she had to do and she even knew how to start doing it. Even better, Peter and Blackfoot were safe, and Mordion wasn’t anywhere in sight. The problem, Annabel knew, was Rorkin. She could tell herself that he had brought everything on himself—and perhaps he had—but he had only been trying to set the kingdom in order, after all. And now she was going to erase him as thoroughly as she planned to erase Mordion, without even the certainty that she’d be able to bring him back. She would try, of course. Even if she hadn’t promised Rorkin, she would have tried. But she couldn’t even risk drawing back the castle if Mordion was still in there, and Annabel very much doubted that Rorkin would be able to come back without the castle. He was too much a part of it– or it of him, if it came to that.
So Annabel sat where she was, her eyes just a little bit glazed and her pencil nub that was really a staff pinched between her fingers. The smell of bread had faded over the days that they spent in the castle, but she could smell the cinnamon that had appeared on the table yesterday. It was a comforting smell. More comforting was the fact that little things were still appearing all over the castle. If Annabel had drawn in the basic framework of the castle, then it could be said that the castle had done a very good job of bringing itself the rest of the way back. That gave her a little bit of hope that no matter how much she erased, the castle might one day come back, bringing Rorkin with it: and that by then, there would be someone who could deal with Mordion, too.
At last, Annabel sucked in a deep breath and opened her sketchbook. The drawings of Rorkin and the mouthless man, she carefully removed and put neatly beside her on the table. She didn’t want to accidentally erase any of them: for all she knew, having pictures of Rorkin there might help him come back. Then she started at the back of the book, where all the higher rooms and outer architecture was drawn, and methodically began to erase.
Annabel didn’t notice a difference at first; and despite Peter, and Rorkin, and any number of bricks that had built up into that one, solid certainty, she felt a breath of insecurity. She ignored it and started erasing the lower levels, skirting around Rorkin’s quarters as if, hoping against hope, she might be able to avoid erasing him in the end. That was even more ridiculous than the faint fear, Annabel knew. She did it anyway.
It wasn’t until she began erasing the level directly above her that Annabel saw the difference. Beams in the kitchen roof grew transparent and vague, and the small changes she had unwittingly made to the kitchen when they first arrived vanished. She stopped to rotate her aching wrist, looking around at the vanishing room, and started to erase the ceiling.
If she had been previously unaware of the extent of the changes she had made, Annabel was now only too well aware of them. Above her in the roofless kitchen there was only empty, blue sky. Around the edges of that too-bright blue were teetering spires of brick, block, and mortar that had once been as familiar to Annabel as the completed castle now was. If she craned her neck she could even see the unstable remnants of Rorkin’s apartments, perched atop a few pylons that were too thin to bear their weight but bore it anyway.
Somewhere during the vanishing of the kitchen things, the table and chairs also disappeared. Annabel was deposited on the floor with a gentle bump that reminded her that Peter’s string spell around her wrist was still working very well, and scrabbled all her papers together around her. There wasn’t much more to do, now. She gave vent to one last, gusty sigh, and searched among the scattered papers—now so rumpled and blank—for the one that still contained the sketch of Rorkin in his doorless apartment. And then, because it still didn’t feel right, she said “Sorry,” again, even though Rorkin couldn’t possibly hear her.
Annabel had expected, by this stage, that she would see Mordion. She had preferred not to think about it, but the dread of it lingered in her mind, and with each drawing she erased without a sight of Mordion, there had been both a lightening of her heart and a tightening of her throat. As she continued to erase without a sign of him, the lightness grew greater, until at last there were only three sketches left to erase. By now, there was a hollow kind of feeling somewhere in her stomach, or maybe her heart: Mordion might be gone, but so was Rorkin, and she wasn’t sure what she could do about that.
It was something of a surprise when she found herself looking down at the drawing of the room in which she had trapped Blackfoot and Peter. Once she erased it, they would begin to scramble themselves out of the rubble and into the throne room again. That would take a little while, and they were both likely to be quite cross when they saw her. Still, it had been worth it to make sure Mordion couldn’t get to them while she was erasing the castle.
Annabel, resting her aching hand, left that drawing for last and gazed down at the other two sketches until a shadow flitted past the edges of her sight and made her jump.
“Where are the others?”
Annabel froze. That was Mordion’s voice. She didn’t look up: she reached for the next drawing and began to erase with a hand that shook slightly.
“Where,” said Mordion’s voice again, in an ice-laced parody of friendliness, “are the others?”
“None of your business,” said Annabel, shuffling her right foot over the drawing that held Peter and Blackfoot. “They’re safe, and that’s all you need to know.”
Mordion smiled at her. “Is that so, darling? How long will they stay safe, do you suppose?”
“Longer than you will, actually,” Annabel said, still busily erasing. There was a horrible sinking in the pit of her stomach: only two drawings remained to be erased, and the castle was almost exactly as it had been when she entered it with Blackfoot and Peter. She had expected by now that Mordion would have either disappeared with the castle, or that he would have died from the same kind of magical asphyxiation by which he had caused Grenna to die. “You shouldn’t have come here.”
She brushed the last crumbs of peeling eraser from the second-last drawing, leaving another rumpled sheet to throw down with the others, and puffed an automatic breath of air at the eraser end of the pencil even though she was knew the eraser hadn’t lost any of its surface.
“Oh, this is very interesting!” said Mordion. If his tone wasn’t as light as he pretended, and if his face was very carefully smiling, he still wasn’t disappearing.
Annabel dashed at the last of the drawings, scrubbing out the lines and shadows of the room in which she’d trapped Peter and Blackfoot.
Mordion’s soft laugh danced on the morning air as the very last scratching of pencil disappeared from the page.
“What now?” His expression was almost delighted, with none of the stiffness it had had just a moment ago. Annabel had the distinctly uncomfortable feeling that he was exulting, not so much in his own cleverness, as in the fact that while Annabel had been clever and he had been cleverer. He had expected something like this, and he had made preparations against it. “You’ve gotten rid of all those troublesome doorways for me, but I don’t see how that benefits you. You’ve never drawn me, have you? How will you erase me?”
In the swirling sickness of failure, Annabel found that she could still think. So she thought. What was it that Rorkin had said about the staff? What you think you see is more important than what you actually see. No, that’s not right. What you actually see isn’t what you necessarily think you see. No, that’s not right, either. People get so caught up with what they can see. It’s a limiting sort of attitude to have.
“That,” she said rather slowly, “is a limiting sort of attitude to have.”
Mordion’s eyes narrow
ed at her. “You’ve been spending too much time with that half-mad wizard,” he said. “Or perhaps not enough. Do you really think he’ll help you now?”
“No.” Annabel arranged her face in its blankest, most cowlike expression, and blinked at him. “He can’t. I’ve erased him.”
Mordion gave a short laugh. “Really? That was rather stupid of you! He’s the only thing that’s been keeping me from taking over the whole castle: there’s always just a tiny little bit of him hanging on when you think you’ve got rid of it all. Even with the castle thinking that I was him, he was still a sticky-burr in my ear.”
“He is a bit like that, isn’t he?” Annabel said. “Even when he’s not really there, he has a way of making things happen.”
“Not for you, I’m afraid,” Mordion said pleasantly. “You’ve reached the end of your tests, and it seems that you’ve failed.”
“That’s just what a sticky-burr does, though, isn’t it? It makes you think you’ve got all the pieces, then you try to move and it pricks you again. Well, something has been pricking me for the last few minutes.”
Mordion smiled that delighted smile again. “Is that so, darling? No, do please, enlighten me!”
“All right,” said Annabel. “But I don’t think you’re going to like it. What you think you see is more important than what you actually see: that’s what Rorkin says, anyway.”
“It sounds just like him.” Mordion smiled gently at her. “But I’m not sure how that applies in this case, darling. You’re still in a bad situation: you have no drawing of me to erase, and you have no magic to harm me in any other way. I may not have much magic left, but I can assure you that I have just enough to peg you out in a power-letting spell and drain both of your little friends right through your prone body.”
“You keep saying I have no drawing of you,” Annabel said, swallowing down the sick feeling that his words had brought up, “but that doesn’t matter. Maybe it would matter if the drawing was the thing doing the magic, but it’s not. It’s the staff. It’s only because I don’t really know about magic that it’s been communicating with me by drawings. It’s the only way I would understand.”
Mordion’s smile vanished entirely. “What are you talking about?”
“You already know, or you wouldn’t be so pale.” Annabel lifted her pencil from the paper and reversed it, closing one eye so that the eraser bit at the end had a Mordion-head on the end of a pencil body. “You’re a lot cleverer than me: you got it straight away. The drawings are how I consciously affect the castle with the staff, but it’s not magic itself. Actually, I don’t think I need to do this, either, but it makes it easier for me to visualise what I’m doing.”
“Stop!” said Mordion, but it was too late. As she said ‘this’, Annabel was already twitching the eraser end of the pencil that was a staff, swirling it in the air where she could see his feet. “You stupid child, stop playing– stop–!”
“You have no feet,” Annabel said. And Mordion didn’t have any feet: they had vanished as completely as the castle had vanished. She couldn’t see it, but Annabel knew that the black, squishy place still at the centre of the castle had just grown a little more. This time it didn’t leave Annabel with the horrible, creeping feeling she usually got from it. This time, she felt the bright, light knowing that Rorkin had once again been, in his own peculiarly round-about way, entirely accurate. And because she knew that, she found that she knew something else. “Pretty soon you’ll have no legs. Everything has its own shape, but some things are meant to be less shapey than other things. There’s no need to worry about it.”
“You stupid child!” snarled Mordion. He was writhing impossibly in the air, his legs entirely gone from the knee down and that lack of substance growing slowly but surely. “How do you think I’ll grow the castle if I’m a part of that shapeless powerhouse at the centre of the castle?”
“You won’t,” Annabel said. It was part of the knowing she had just realised. “That bit isn’t about making the castle anything: it’s just where the possibility of the castle comes from. Rorkin is the powerhouse, but it’s the Staff that does all the forming that needs to be done. If the staff doesn’t draw you back, that’s where the possibility of you will stay, too.”
“I suppose Rorkin told you that!”
“No, I think I figured that bit out for myself. Oh! Your legs are gone!”
Mordion thrashed helplessly until she could see the whites of his eyes, then stopped, panting, and glared at Annabel. By now he was only a torso, suspended in the air at just the right height, supported by an idea and nothing more.
“Want to know what’s funny?” Annabel asked that horrified torso. She was feeling more than slightly sick, and she was afraid that if she stopped talking, she would throw up. “If you hadn’t tricked your way into the castle, if you hadn’t tricked it into thinking that you were Rorkin– if you hadn’t bound yourself to it, I wouldn’t be able to do this. You bound yourself to the wrong power. I mean, the castle is strong, but the staff can still un-do it. And now that you’re bound to the castle, you’re losing power: you probably forgot about it because you were so excited to find me at last.”
Mordion’s mouth opened and closed, but didn’t make a sound. His eyes, wide with panic and fear, said everything that was necessary.
“Or maybe you thought it would only affect Rorkin,” Annabel said. “I don’t know. There’s still a lot I don’t know, actually. But if you hadn’t joined yourself to the castle and made yourself dependent on its strength, I wouldn’t be able to erase you now.”
“It doesn’t matter,” panted Mordion. His eyes were ablaze now with hatred and a manic kind of laughter that frightened Annabel even though he no longer had legs with which to approach her. “Do you think you’ll ever be safe? You won’t, I promise you! You’ll never be able to bring back the castle, or Rorkin, or rule New Civet, for that matter! Because every time you think about bringing all of this back, you’ll wonder just how soon you’ll see me again. And I promise you, I’ll only have grown in strength with the years! I always do.”
“Oh, that?” Annabel found that she was rocking back and forth slightly, but didn’t seem to be able to stop herself. “That’s funny, too. If you’d just disappeared with the castle without coming after me, I would never have been sure. I wouldn’t have been able to draw it back, or let anyone else draw it back, just in case you came back. But now that I’ve seen you like this, now that I know how powerless you really are, I’m not afraid anymore. You remember that squishy stuff, and the walls that went up around it?”
“It is shifted temporal remnant, you ignorant little cow!”
Annabel, rather quietly, said: “I am ignorant. That doesn’t matter, though. Maybe it would have mattered if I didn’t have Blackfoot to snip at me, and Peter to laugh at me, or if I couldn’t do anything about being ignorant. You might grow with strength through the years, but you never actually change, do you? I can change. That’s how I managed to beat you, even though you’re much cleverer than I am.”
“Someone will bring the castle back eventually,” panted Mordion. “Whether or not it’s drawn, slowly or quickly, it will eventually come back. And once it starts coming back, who can stop me?”
“Yes, but you’re not a part of the castle’s original spell,” Annabel said. That was another thing she had been far too slow to realise. “It won’t bring you back with it. Soon, you’ll only be a possibility in the temporal remnant. You won’t be able to come back. I don’t think you’ll even want to. Actually, I don’t know that you’ll have thoughts and wants at all.”
“Then I’ll make the most of those I have now,” said Mordion, with a twisted half-smile, and Annabel saw his hand rise. She couldn’t see the magic, but she knew it was there. She also knew that she couldn’t draw quickly enough to stop whatever he might throw at her. “If I’m to lose all my wants and thoughts, you can lose them with me.”
His other hand lifted, and although it was shaking, Annabel
ducked instinctively.
Mordion laughed bitterly. “I’ve not started yet, darling. But I’m curious: do you really think you can avoid this by ducking?”
“Probably not,” Annabel said. “But I’ll do it anyway. Can’t help it, actually.”
“You always did have good self-preservation instincts. They won’t save you this time.”
Annabel didn’t have time to duck. Mordion’s hands were shaking with effort, or fear, but they swept to the front more quickly than his torso could be erased, and something should have happened.
Something did happen: the ground fell away beneath Annabel. She tumbled head over heels into a darkness that was forgiving and familiar– and, thanks to Peter’s string spell, didn’t hurt when she hit the far side of it. As Mordion screamed above her head, and magic she could neither see nor feel raged overhead, Annabel curled safely at the bottom of her short tunnel, out of range of the storm above her.
She stayed where she was, in fact, until Peter’s voice called from somewhere above her: “It’s all right, Ann, you can come out now. He’s stopped throwing magic. Actually, he’s stopped throwing anything because he’s not here anymore.”
“Peter?”
“Of course. Think I was going to stay in that room you drew around us? Do you know that the cat is the one who’s been making tunnels around the castle?”
Annabel sat up, cautiously making sure she still had both arms and legs, and that they were each where they should be. Then she said: “I guessed. Can you get me out of here?”
“Don’t know,” said Peter. His face appeared at the top of the tunnel, rather paler than it usually was. “It’s probably something you should ask your cat. He’s not particularly strong, but he’s pretty tricky, and I think he’s a bit cross with you at the moment.”
“Oh,” said Annabel. “Are you cross, too?”
“Don’t know,” Peter said again. “Did you get hurt? I saw Mordion chucking that bit of magic, but I wasn’t quick enough to stop it. That’s what took us so long: I had to stop it running around before we could get to you. Lucky your cat dropped you down there when he did, or you’d be running around in bits and pieces, too.”
Blackfoot Page 23
