by Dave Butler
“Natalie?” All eight pixies stared. “Can you really be Natalie de Minimis? What are you doing in the company of such a galumphing herd of uplanders, then?”
“And who are you, Cousin Hezekiah, to question me about my choice of companions? And why in Oberon’s name are there so many of you, for just the one door? Open up, and let me and my friends in!” Gnat, who had seemed like a helpful and friendly girl in Pondicherry’s Clockwork Invention & Repair, now fluttered with a fierce arch to her back and fire flashing in her eyes.
“Aye.” Hezekiah sounded tired. “Aye, I’ve orders to take you to the baroness, and I suppose your friends will have to come, too.”
Hezekiah turned in midair and fluttered his wings in a twitchy pattern at the door. The gargoyle-tongue runes lit up all at once. The door swung open with a rush of air, and Charlie thought he heard the gargoyle heads whispering to each other.
“Goodness gracious,” said Henry Clockswain.
Hezekiah led the way. Charlie felt a sharp pang of remorse, realizing that he was likely getting farther from his father with every step. But once Gnat had met her mother the baroness again, Charlie reassured himself, he’d return to the surface with an army of flying pixies, and they’d find Mr. Pondicherry in no time.
And then he promptly lost his train of thought.
The gloom-moss disappeared beyond the doors. The walls of the vast caverns Charlie now entered were studded with jewels of every color. There was light—he couldn’t see where it came from, but it was there—and it spun and flashed in every gem, filling Charlie’s vision with rainbows and whorls and stars and streaks of joy.
In and among the dancing lights Charlie saw nests. They looked just like birds’ nests: piles of thatching woven together. Peeping up over the edges, he saw, were pixie faces. Pixies flew through the air, too, above the nests and high in the caverns and around the edges.
Every pixie dressed like Gnat. Shoe buckles, waistcoats, kilts, hose, and tricorn hats on the male pixies, with long hair in a braid; brocade shoes, close-bodied gowns, jacket bodices, panniers, and hoop skirts on the females, with long hair piled vertically upon their heads. It was like a fancy-dress party of winged insects.
“Goodness gracious!” exclaimed Mr. Clockswain.
Charlie and his party followed a stone-paved road that crawled beneath the teeming cloud, through several caverns, across a stream of water, and past a field of glittering green gemstones. At the peak of a small mound of stone beyond squatted a circle of pillars, half again as tall as Grim Grumblesson and broken off at the tops. It looked like a Greek temple that had lost its roof. At the far end stood a simple stone chair, pixie-sized. Here Hezekiah barred the company’s way with his spear.
In front of the chair hovered a strange cast of characters, posed in a scene. It took Charlie a moment to figure out what they were up to. “Tableau vivant,” he murmured. “They’re making living art.”
He’d heard his father mention tableau vivant, but he’d never understood quite what it was.
The pixies all posed together to look like a painting. A pixie in a pink cape, who strongly resembled Gnat, hovered above the others. She confronted a shy pixie who wore a blue toga and had sad eyes; he stood on the ground and turned his shoulder. Behind Pink Cape stretched a procession of revelers holding joints of meat and small snakes and tambourines. A stuffed dog and two purring leopard kits on chains completed the scene. They all held perfectly still, and Charlie wondered what painting they were imitating.
A crowd of pixies had gathered around. Some of them fluttered low to the ground and others higher, even directly overhead. Charlie was standing inside a living bubble formed entirely of pixies.
Almost all of them armed with spears.
The tableau actors held their pose.
Grim shuffled from one foot to the other.
Crack! A paving stone under the troll snapped in two.
“Agh!” Pink Cape threw her hands up in exasperation. She fluttered down and flung herself into the seat, and the other actors all relaxed. All except Blue Toga, who stayed on the ground and kept his back partly turned to Pink Cape.
“Cousin Elisabel,” Natalie said to Pink Cape. “You’re in my mother’s seat.”
“My old auntie’s dead, Cousin Natalie,” said the seated pixie, “and the seat is my own now. Have you returned to make a claim, then?”
Gnat’s wings fluttered a little faster, and Charlie thought he heard Grim Grumblesson mutter under his breath. Blue Toga looked at Gnat, and Charlie saw a glimmer of hope in his eyes.
“I’ve no wish but to come back to my own home in peace, Cousin Elisabel,” Gnat said, “and see my fine cousin Seamus. I’m no one you should worry about, no one special at all, just a pixie come home from her tithe. I’ve not come to make a claim today.”
“Good.” Elisabel gestured with her hand to the spear-wielding crowd. “Lock her up, her and all her uplander friends.”
“Sorry, Ollie. Sorry, Bob.” Charlie hung his head between his knees. “If you hadn’t tried to help me, you wouldn’t be in this mess.”
“Help you?” Ollie snorted and jerked his thumb at Bob. “Help him, more like! Wants to be famous, wants to be a big, fancy aeronaut! Ha!”
“Easy, Ollie,” Bob urged his friend. “You see the markings around the door?”
“Yeah.” Ollie slumped. “They’ve got a ward up. No magic in here.”
Charlie didn’t quite understand the other boys’ words, but Ollie sounded defeated.
A squad of pixies with spears had surrounded and searched them. The only thing they’d taken had been Ollie’s knife, and then the pixies had thrown the six of them into a cell.
The bare stone chamber was ten feet wide and twice that long. The single door was a heavy sheet of iron, with its hinges and knob on the outside. A canal of water gushed out of a clay pipe at one end of the room and flowed into a small pool at the other. Glow-moss covered the ceiling, barely above the tips of the hulder’s horns.
“Why did Elisabel throw us in here?” Charlie asked Gnat. “Why does she think you’re going to make some kind of claim?”
Natalie de Minimis shrugged. “My mother was loved. I suppose Elisabel is afraid that if I were to challenge her, I might get some support.”
“And would you have challenged her?” Charlie wanted to know.
“I have the right to; that’s what worries her. The baronesses of Underthames have been ladies of the de Minimis family, my grandmothers and great-grandmothers and so on, since Boudicca herself decided she’d had enough and it was time to start skewering Romans.”
“Boudicca was a pixie?” Charlie was surprised. “I thought she was a Celt.”
Gnat smiled. “Aye, don’t believe everything you read in books, Charlie.”
“They gone now?” Grim asked.
Gnat flitted to the door, looked through its slit window, and listened. “Gone.”
Grim grabbed the door with both hands and pushed. He pulled and he twisted; he slammed his big shoulder into it with a boom.
The door didn’t budge.
Charlie’s shoulders slumped when he saw that the enormous troll couldn’t shake the door, but the hulder wasted no time. He crossed the cell to the canal. Water entered the chamber through the clay pipe at one end, crossed the floor in a ditch into a pool at the other, and then exited through a grate in the wall. With a single pull, Grim ripped off the grate, sending splinters of stone and mortar and drops of water whizzing around the room. The chimney sweeps and the kobold rushed to look at the tunnel Grim had exposed, while Gnat stayed listening at the door.
Charlie squinted at the dark opening. It was the mouth of a narrow underwater passageway. He had read enough books to know that the way to get out of a prison cell was to dig a tunnel. It was quite lucky to be thrown into a cell that already came with a built-in escape route.
“It’s no good,” Henry Clockswain announced. He’d picked up the grate and was fidgeting with it, poking his fingers throug
h each of the grate’s holes in turn.
“What do you mean, no good?” Ollie demanded. “It’s a tunnel; there’s water flowing through it; it has to go somewhere!”
“Goodness gracious, yes!” the kobold agreed. “But it’s a tunnel full of water—there’s no air! And, er, look how tight it is! This might go twenty miles with nothing to breathe, all the way to the sea. You’d be out, and, ah…cold comfort that would be to you.”
“We could stop all the water coming in,” Charlie said. “That would leave the tunnel dry.”
“Stop it? What do you mean, with a dam?” Bob asked. “But the water’s got nowhere to go; it’d just spill around whatever we use to block it an’ keep going.”
“ ’Tis no twenty miles,” Gnat said. “It flows past the rest of the prison cells, which won’t be more than a few hundred feet. Then it joins up with other streams that all go out into London’s sewers. You’d be able to get out of the water there, for certain.”
“A few hundred feet!” Mr. Clockswain was almost yelling, his voice like a whistle. His long fingers twisted the buttons on his jacket with nervous energy. “It may as well be twenty miles! To use this tunnel, you’d have to be a fish, or…or something!”
“Or something,” Bob agreed. He looked at Charlie with furrowed eyebrows.
“Footsteps!” Gnat hissed from the door. Grim shoved the grate back, and they all scrambled away.
A hedge of spears sprang in through the door as it opened, with grim pixie faces behind it. The hedge parted, revealing the pixie youth who had worn the blue toga in the tableau vivant. Now he wore breeches, hose, buckled shoes, and a tricorn hat. The spearmen retreated, and the door shut.
Gnat listened at the door for a few moments before she said anything. “Cousin Seamus.” Her voice was sad and tired, but there was a faint trace in it of something else. She spoke quietly, almost in a whisper. “So you’ve not forgotten me completely, then.”
“I’ve not forgotten you at all, you silly girl,” he answered, his voice also very quiet. The way he said silly girl made Charlie think he meant something else, something much nicer. “I’d sooner forget my own eyes.”
“Did Elisabel kill my mother?”
Seamus shook his head. “ ’Twas the rats,” he said. “They attacked six months ago, killed your mother and a great many other warriors.”
“And did no one think to tell me, then?” Gnat asked.
“That’s the tithe, isn’t it? We couldn’t tell you.” Seamus shook his head. He looked at the door, then lowered his voice even further. “But maybe we did wrong. We’ve been at it against Scabies and his horde ever since. Elisabel fought like a wild woman when the rats attacked, and got chosen baroness for it when your mother died. She’s kept us safe since, but we’re in a state of war.”
“I’d noticed.”
“And besides, no one but your mother knew for certain where you were.”
Gnat looked around at her companions. “Am I a dead woman, then?” she asked. “And if Elisabel kills me, will that satisfy her, do you think? Will she let my friends go free?”
“I wouldn’t take my freedom from someone who killed my friend,” Grim Grumblesson snarled.
“I would,” Ollie said.
Seamus shook his head. “I don’t know, but I’m afraid she has plans for you, Natalie de Minimis. She only let me come down to see you because…because I’m her betrothed, and I’ve a soft spot for my cousin Natalie.”
Gnat was silent for a few moments. “A one-year betrothal?” she asked.
“Aye. Agreed today.”
“I’ve got to escape,” Gnat concluded.
“Aye.”
“And I’ve got to challenge her. I don’t like her sitting on my mother’s seat, and I’ll not let her marry you, Seamus. You’re my own true heart.”
“That I am.” Seamus smiled. “But you can’t challenge a living baroness just because you want to. Besides, Elisabel is loved, too. She keeps Underthames safe. You’d be mad to challenge her directly, just come back from your tithe as you are.”
“Aye,” Gnat agreed. “I’ll have to make something of myself, and fast.”
“Three mighty deeds,” Seamus said. “That’s what makes a hero; that’s what makes a warrior all of Underthames can love. A woman who had done three mighty deeds could challenge the baroness for her seat, and for her betrothed.”
“Can you give me any aid in escaping from this pit?” Gnat asked.
Seamus shook his head. “They watch me too closely. You’ve got my heart, Natalie de Minimis,” he said, “and my faith, and all my best wishes, but I’m afraid that’s all I’ve got to give you.”
Gnat grinned recklessly. “Not even a kiss, then?”
“Aye.” He smiled, but there were tears in his eyes. “I’ve got a kiss for you yet.”
Charlie turned his back, and heard the door shut when they were done.
“Rats,” Gnat said, deep in thought.
Ollie snorted. “That’s putting it mildly.”
“Next time they open the door, we attack,” Grim suggested.
“But there are too many of them,” Mr. Clockswain said. His hands shook as he twisted his buttons. “They’re tough fighters, and, er, they’re armed and we’re not. Besides, they know they’ve got a troll in the dungeon. They’re never going to send a force down here that’s small enough that we can overpower it. They may never send down any force at all. They could just leave us here to rot.” One of his jacket buttons popped right off, and he stared sadly at it in his palm.
“You have another idea?” The troll glared at the kobold.
“We could dig another tunnel,” Charlie suggested. He imagined himself scraping earth out with a spoon, or one of the big brass buttons on the front of the hulder’s coat. They could throw all the dirt into the stream, and it would be washed away. He wondered how far they could dig in a year, if they took turns and never stopped. Maybe they would tunnel into another cell, and find other prisoners they could join forces with.
His wildly galloping imagination pulled up short. Of course, he couldn’t wait a year. His father had been kidnapped.
“Naw, I think we should use the tunnel we’ve got,” Bob suggested. He had a sly grin on his face, and he looked at Charlie. “It’s a perfectly good tunnel. We’ve just got to figure out ’oo can ’old ’is breath the longest.”
“I’ll go,” Charlie volunteered.
“I’ll go,” the pixie contradicted him.
“No,” the hulder said. “I’m still dad here, and Pondicherry’s boy doesn’t go.” He climbed out of his long yellow coat and began tearing it into strips.
“Hey!” Charlie objected. “You don’t get to tell me what to do.”
“Nor the pixie,” Grim continued, ignoring him. “The water will ruin her wings, and she knows it. And whoever goes, we tie a rope around him, so we can pull him back if we need to.” He looked at Mr. Clockswain, as if he were daring the kobold to volunteer.
The kobold took several steps back.
“Fair enough,” Bob said, “but I’ve got a feeling that maybe Charlie ’ere can ’old ’is breath longer than any of us can. I’ve got a feeling ’e might be able to ’old ’is breath a surprisingly long time.”
“Yeah?” Ollie asked.
“ ’Ere’s what we do.” Bob smiled reassuringly at Charlie. “I’ll cover your mouth an’ nose with my ’ands, an’ Ollie will start counting. When it starts to feel unconditional, you just raise your arm an’ we’ll stop.”
“Uncomfortable,” Ollie corrected his friend.
“Right.” Bob covered Charlie’s mouth and nose with his hands.
“One…two…three…” Ollie started counting. Bob’s hands were tight on Charlie’s face. His fingers felt surprisingly delicate.
“One hundred…one hundred one…one hundred two…” Charlie felt fine.
“Two hundred fifty-three…two hundred fifty-four…” Charlie still felt fine. Grim Grumblesson had finished knotting
together a rough rope out of the strips of his coat; his jaw had dropped, and his mouth hung open. Ollie’s eyes bugged huge, and the pixie’s wings fluttered like a hurricane. Mr. Clockswain rubbed his thumb in a circular motion around his detached button so hard Charlie thought the button might snap.
“Three hundred…three hundred one…”
Bob took his hands away.
“ ’Ave I made my point?” he asked the others.
“I feel fine,” Charlie said. He’d never tried to hold his breath before. “Three hundred. Is that good?”
“How is that possible?” Grim looked bewildered.
“Charlie ’ere is a very special boy.”
“Do I get to do it now?” Charlie asked. “Or does anyone else want to see how long he can go?”
Gnat shook her head. “Nay, my boy,” she said, “no one here is going to hold his breath any longer than you’ve done.”
Grim handed the end of his rope to Charlie. “Very well. You are a special boy, Charlie Pondicherry, and a brave one. Tie this around you.”
Charlie fastened the rope around his waist in a neat bowline, tight against his body. He knew his knots; he’d learned them from one of his father’s books, Practical Sailing for Boys. “What do I do? What am I looking for?”
“As soon as you can get out of the water, do,” Gnat told him. “And then you’ll have to come back and let us out. Can you do that?”
“Aye, I can,” Charlie said, and this time he didn’t feel silly for saying aye.
“Just remember,” Gnat said, “you’re used to being the little one, around your father’s shop and his customers. Here you’re a giant.”
Grim Grumblesson harrumphed.
“Aye, and the hulder’s a giant’s giant. But look, Charlie, you’ll not be able to count on being small, so you’ll have to be clever…understood? Can you tell a good lie?”
“I’m not a liar!” Charlie protested, but then he nodded. “Yes, I know how to tell a good lie.”
“Good, because you’ll not be able to sneak about unseen. When anyone challenges you, tell them you’re about the business of the Baroness Elisabel de Minimis. If they interfere with you, they’ll have to answer to her. Be bold.”
