by Dave Butler
“What’s wrong, Gnat?”
“Nothing. Only don’t look at me.”
“Am I allowed to talk to you?”
“Aye, you are. Please finish telling me your story, only don’t look at me.”
Charlie sighed. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“No, really. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Only a pixie with no wings is no pixie at all. I’m nothing special; I’m just short.”
Would the wings grow back? Grim had never said, and it would be rude to ask. “Well, you still frighten me.”
She buffeted his ear playfully, and after that she didn’t object when he looked at her.
The climb up the side of the town hall only took a few minutes; the space between the main building and the tower at its corner formed a natural chimney, and Charlie just put his feet against one wall and his back against the other and pushed his way up. But it took a good long time to figure out, based on squinting past thumbs at the building across the street and counting its windows, when they were exactly over the gaol’s windows, on the third floor.
Charlie tied a bowline, one of the first knots he’d learned from Practical Sailing for Boys, in the end of the rope. The bowline made a loop that wouldn’t tighten when pulled, so it was good for lifting and lowering people; Charlie used it to let Gnat down. When she tugged on the line three times, Charlie anchored it to the battlement and shinnied down using his hands and knees.
The window to the gaol cell was barred. Inside, Charlie saw that the simple cell had only one other exit: a single door that was a solid slab of steel. So that was how Ollie had been kept in: other than the window, there was no exit big enough even to permit the passage of a snake, and from the window it was a three-story drop. The cell also had four pallets and four wool blankets, all illuminated by a candle on a high shelf.
Gnat, Ollie, and Bob stood in the middle of the cell, locked in a whispered conversation. Lloyd Shankin leaned against the wall, whistling softly like a boy pretending he didn’t want to be invited to dance.
“Pssst!” Charlie called.
Bob bounded to the window. “Charlie, mate!” she whispered. Ollie crowded in behind her. “What’s the plan?”
Charlie tied another bowline around his waist. “Plan A,” he said. “Lockpicks.” He produced the prongs and passed them to Bob.
Bob passed them right back. “No good. The door’s solid an’ I can’t reach the lock.”
“Plan B.” Charlie handed Bob the saw. “You start working on the bars from that side.”
“What will you do?”
Charlie produced the crowbar. “I’ll work on them from out here.”
Lloyd Shankin cleared his throat softly. “I’m sorry I don’t know any songs about escaping from prison.”
Bob didn’t spare him a glance. “As am I. An’ I’m also sorry you don’t know any songs about calming down angry judges or about recovering a stolen flyer.”
“Yes, well, in hindsight the absence of a good prison-escape song seems a glaring omission.” One of Lloyd’s eyes looked at Charlie and the other looked at the door, but the dewin’s split gaze no longer seemed ominous to Charlie. It was almost charming.
Charlie turned to Ollie. “Why didn’t you just, you know, sneak away?” He didn’t specifically ask why Ollie hadn’t turned into a snake, because he didn’t know how much Lloyd Shankin knew. Ollie was sensitive.
“I ain’t leaving my mate Bob, am I?”
The street below Charlie was lit by gas flames within tall iron poles. Those flames cast light upward, but only dimly, and Charlie found himself working within the long black shadow of a gargoyle beneath him. Perfect.
Bob filed and Charlie banged at the mortar around the tops and bottoms of the iron bars. Ollie sat on his pallet and pretended to snooze, and Gnat listened at the door. Bob and Lloyd were the ones they had to get through the window, of course. Gnat could already squeeze between the bars, and in a heartbeat Ollie could be a slender snake.
“You’re quite a brave boy, Charlie,” the dewin said.
“That’s Charlie.” Ollie beamed.
“How did you come to be with Bob and Ollie, Mr. Shankin?” Charlie asked.
“After meeting you, I looked for your friends.” Lloyd Shankin folded his hands behind his back and thrust his chest forward as if he were reciting. “Your words…touched me.”
Charlie paused. “What words?”
“I said I was the guardian at the gate, boyo, welcoming you to the fairy world on your adventure.”
“I remember. I thought maybe you were mad.”
“Ah, well, you weren’t the first one. I meant nothing by it; I was just being clever. But you said that you might be my guardian at the gate, and that got me thinking. I was on an adventure, so what kind of adventure did I want to have?”
“He decided he wanted to help us,” Ollie added. “Lucky us.”
“You got to Machine-Town ahead of me,” Charlie said. “I thought I took a fast road.”
Lloyd clapped his hands. “One of the love songs I know has this line about wearing a hat and going on a journey. I found I could make my step very light with it. So I did. And I ran.”
“You were looking for my friends.”
Lloyd nodded. “And when I got to town, there was a trial being held out on the square. I recognized Bob and Ollie from your description, so I tried to speak up for them.”
“Speaking up wasn’t the problem,” Ollie said. “The problem was you trying to cast a spell.”
“Yes. Well, I did sing a short englyn to try to grant me a silver tongue. Charisma. To be more persuasive.”
“What’s an englyn?” Charlie asked.
“ ’Tis a song-spell,” Gnat said. Charlie looked at her over Bob’s shoulder, and she shrugged. “Welsh and Pixie are related languages.”
“Are they?” Lloyd Shankin asked. “How interesting. Well, I’m afraid the judges heard my englyn and, ah, were not amused. They took me for a conspirator and threw me into the stocks with the lads.”
Charlie managed to work one bar out of its setting. He passed it through to Bob, who slid it under her pallet. Then he joined Bob in working on the second bar. Bob had cut most of the way through it at its lower end, and Charlie wedged the crowbar behind it.
“Let me try to lever this one,” he suggested.
Bob stood back.
Charlie braced himself with one hand on the remaining solid bar and pushed.
The bar budged, snapping through where Bob had sawed it, but only an inch, and then the crowbar slipped, jumped from Charlie’s grasp, and fell to the street below.
Clang!
Charlie looked down and couldn’t see the crowbar. At least it hadn’t hit anybody. On impulse he looked up.
A face looked over the edge of the roof and down at him. A boy’s face, with a thick scarf and a hat pulled low.
A ghost’s face?
“Voices!” Gnat called. “And footsteps, coming this way!”
“The ’eck,” Bob muttered.
Charlie looked at the window. There wasn’t enough room for Bob and Lloyd to get out yet, but there would be if he finished removing the second bar.
He made a decision. “Stay back.”
Bracing himself with the last bar, he grabbed the one that was partially out and yanked.
He felt energy burn within his chest, arms, and legs. He grunted. His grip threatened to slip, so he tightened his fist, pulled harder…and the bar bent up and out of the way.
Lloyd Shankin’s eyes grew very large.
“Ollie!” Bob threw herself out the window headfirst. Charlie barely had time to get out of her way, and then she was anxiously scrambling up the rope.
Gnat followed. She didn’t have wings, but she bounded from the floor right up to the window and tumbled out, and then she was up the side of the building after Bob. Lloyd Shankin took his coat off and hung it over his shoulder; without it, he turned out to be quite thin, an
d he slipped through the bars easily.
Ollie stood, hesitated, and snuffed out the candle with his fingers. With the cell plunged into blackness, Charlie heard muttering and a soft, familiar bamf! He smelled rotten eggs, and then a yellow snake slithered out of the window and up his arm and settled around his neck.
As fast as he could go, Charlie raced up the wall. He pulled himself arm over arm, and his feet scaled the slate almost at a run. If he’d had fingers of flesh and blood, the skin would be ripped from them by the pace he kept.
Bob made it over the lip of the roof, with Gnat and Lloyd Shankin right on her heels, and Charlie immediately behind the dewin. As he tumbled onto the roof and Ollie slithered away, Charlie hauled the rope up after him.
Would the cloak of not-being-noticed hide the rope hanging over the edge of the building if anyone looked? He doubted it.
Loud whistles from below confirmed his doubts.
“Come on.” He stood.
And there, on the gable of the roof thirty feet away, stood the boy in the scarf.
Charlie looked at him. Something was wrong with the boy. He was unnaturally still, like an acrobat or a statue.
There was something naggingly familiar about him, too.
The boy turned and disappeared down the far side of the roof.
“Come on.” Charlie ran for the tower at the corner of the building, dragging the rope behind him. His friends followed.
A parapet ran around the outside of the tower and, at its nearest, came within twenty feet of the town’s big airship mooring tower. That was too far for any of his friends to jump, but it wasn’t too far for Charlie. With one end of the rope still tied around his waist, he tied the other to the railing of the parapet.
Then he jumped.
He rolled to a stop on a landing twenty steps below one of the mooring platforms. After picking himself up, he retied his end of the rope to the staircase’s iron railing.
The rest was easy.
Bob crossed the rope upside down, holding on with her hands and knees. When she hit the ground, a yellow snake dropped from her pocket, and Ollie rolled away from her in a cloud of smoke.
By then, Gnat had joined them.
Lloyd Shankin came last. He crawled slowly but resolutely. Charlie thought he saw the dewin’s lips moving as he dragged himself along, and he wondered if the Welshman was singing a spell to help himself. An englyn.
After pulling the dewin over the railing by his shoulders, Charlie jumped back across the gap to the town hall. Below, in the yellow gaslights, he could see searchers running through the street. Having untied the rope from the parapet, he hopped across again to join his friends and pulled in the rope.
But his friends had disappeared.
“Psst!” he heard from above. Gnat’s tiny face peeped from the door of a zeppelin’s gondola, and Charlie climbed the stairs and entered the airship.
Inside, his friends were slapping each other on the back so much it made the zeppelin rock. This time Lloyd stood with the others, giving and accepting slaps with an uncertain smile on his face. He looked like the least mad person in the world, no matter what his eyes were doing.
Charlie’s hands trembled.
“Bob,” he said. “Could you wind my mainspring a little?”
As Bob wound Charlie, Ollie turned to the dewin. “So you was saying how you only recently learned to do magic.”
“Yes!” The Welshman was staring at Bob’s work on Charlie’s back, but he tore his gaze away. “I had had terrible dreams on that Saturday night, you see, and the next morning I was in chapel and we were singing. ‘Bread of Heaven,’ you know.”
Charlie shook his head. The chimney sweeps looked at each other and shrugged.
“We don’t know, mate,” Ollie said.
“Right.” The dewin cleared his throat. “ ‘Bread of he-eaven, bread of he-eaven,’ ” he sang. “And what do you think happened?”
“Somebody gave you bread,” Ollie guessed.
Lloyd laughed. “There was already bread there, on the table, and when I sang, it rose up off the board and floated.”
“You’ve got my intention now,” Bob said.
“Attention.” Ollie nudged his friend with an elbow. “And then?”
“Well, that was it,” Lloyd Shankin said. “Reverend Jones was inclined to see the event as annoying rather than miraculous, and I was out of the chapel.”
“ ’Ard luck, my china,” Bob said. “An’ so now you’ve come ’ome to lick your wounds?”
“No.” The dewin’s voice became quiet. “I came here to help you, as I said. And also to spend a night on the Cader.”
“Shh,” Charlie said. “Do you hear something?”
They waited two hours, until the east was beginning to grow light. Then they crept down the mooring tower to the ground. Bob wore Thassia’s cloak, with Ollie in snake form in her pocket and half the cloak draped over Lloyd Shankin. Charlie walked behind them, his hands in his pockets and with his eyes on the ground, with Gnat by his side.
They passed the gallows, and Charlie looked away.
They came to a line of miners, trooping along the highway in the direction of the mine. Charlie and his friends stood aside and let them by. Charlie caught a few curious stares, but none of the miners looked in the chimney sweeps’ direction; Thassia’s cloak was working.
No one gave any of them a second glance as they walked right down the main street past the town hall and then all the way to the dwarfs’ wagons. Even though he knew where they were, Charlie walked by the wagons three times before he could see them under Thassia’s warding.
Once inside the wagons, Bob, Ollie, and Gnat promptly fell asleep. Charlie sat outside with his back against a wagon wheel and the sheyala Atzick on his lap, rubbing the big cat behind the ears and enjoying the morning sunshine with Lloyd Shankin.
“You’re a very special boy, Charlie Pondicherry,” the dewin mumbled as he dozed off.
“We have to take the long way,” Syzigon explained. “This highway winds all around Cader Idris into the valleys between Idris and Snowdon—that’s the mountain to the north of it—and there’s our gate.”
“Is that the front door?” Charlie asked.
“The Old Man has no front door, not as you’re thinking of it. All his doors are hidden. That’s the door our wagons can reach, because the roads run to it. But that’s a lot of traveling on the highway for you, and the shorter road runs up the mountain.”
“Besides which, we’re wanted criminals and should stay off the main roads.” Lloyd Shankin looked up at the rocky ridges. “Charlie, before you leave this place, you must get a look at the sea.”
It seemed like a random comment. “The sea? Are you thinking of sailing away?”
“Thinking of buried houses.” Lloyd nodded toward the west. “They say that the waters out just beyond the shore here cover the Drowned Hundred. A hundred is a place, something like a county. There’s an old story, and songs, you know, about a flood that destroyed the entire hundred. I’ve heard that fishermen sometimes look down from their boats and see the houses.”
The three of them sat on stones beside the wagons in the morning sun. Syzigon peeled an orange, and Charlie accepted a pip. He slowly sucked at it, just to be able to share in the meal with Syzigon. Lloyd Shankin had his own orange and had nearly finished it.
“So I’ll take my friends up the straighter road?” Charlie asked.
Syzigon laughed. “It’s not straight by any means; it’s just short. And it’s steep, so you’d better watch your ankles. But it’s the most direct road. I’ve been watching, and no one’s gone up this morning.”
“So no police,” Lloyd said.
“Thank you,” Charlie said.
“Just shepherds and madmen.” Lloyd Shankin grinned, his eyes wandering apart. “Like your Caradog Pritchard.”
Charlie nodded.
“What’s more,” Syzigon continued, “we’ll stay here as long as we can, and misdirect any search
ers who come looking for you.”
“How do I find the Old Man’s…door?”
“If you’ve never been through it, I will tell you right now, you don’t find it. No, what will happen is this: The Old Man will send someone to look at you. If you pass his tests, if you seem right, the Old Man’s servants will bring you to him.”
That sounded fine to Charlie. He would tell the Old Man’s servants about his father, Rajesh Pondicherry, who had once been known as Dr. Singh and who’d been a friend of the Old Man. Caradog Pritchard. Even if they wouldn’t let him in, he could at least pass on the warning that the Iron Cog was coming.
Not just coming, if Gnat’s eyes were to be trusted—and her eyes were very, very sharp. The Iron Cog was already in Machine-Town, and more of its minions were on the way.
Once he passed on his warning, though, Charlie had no idea what he’d do. Sitting with Syzigon and eating an orange, he considered joining the dwarf caravan. He could travel and collect things.
Have a folk.
“Thank you for everything,” Charlie said to Syzigon. He and Lloyd each shook the dwarf’s hand.
“This isn’t good-bye,” the dwarf said. “I’ll see you in a couple of days.”
Before Charlie and the dwarfs parted company, Thassia gave him a compass. It was lodged in a battered brass case so thoroughly worn that the degree numbers around the outside had mostly been rubbed off.
“The needle looks strange,” Charlie said. “Is it a splinter of wood?”
“This will always lead you to a certain dwarf’s wagon,” Thassia told him. She pointed at Syzigon and Yellario’s wagon when she said it. “Though it won’t tell you how far, or what obstacles might lie in the way.”
“And why does it point at that wagon in particular?” he asked.
She looked surprised. “And here I thought you were beginning to understand us. It’s because a certain dwarf is a dwarf who can get things done. And it’s because that splinter of wood came from his wagon.”
Charlie led his friends up the Cader Idris road, which very quickly became a footpath. Charlie’s last glimpse of the dwarf wagons—Thassia had dropped the Wards of Distraction, and the carts were eye-catching with their red and gold paint—was from a track scant inches wide. As the wagons disappeared, so did Machynlleth, leaving Charlie with a view of more distant forests and pastures.
