‘Are you taking the piss?’ Fogarty frowned.
‘Indeed not, sir. Please go on.’
Fogarty relaxed his frown as the earlier enthusiasm flooded back. ‘Thing is, if you introduce a portal you solve the body problem. You don’t have to beam information any more, you can beam the actual atoms. With the portal in place, that doesn’t require any more energy.’
‘Mr Fogarty,’ said Pyrgus, who hadn’t understood a word, ‘what does this have to do with Henry?’
Fogarty nodded towards a small box on his workbench. ‘That thing there’s a prototype of a Mark II portable transporter. It doesn’t just open a portal like the ones I made before, it lets you lock in on a target and pull them through it.’
‘To here?’
Fogarty frowned. ‘In theory.’
‘Does it work?’
‘I haven’t tested it yet.’
After a moment, Pyrgus said, ‘You mean you could lock in on Henry and translate him to your ornither-to your shed? Here and now?’
‘Could give it a try,’ said Mr Fogarty.
Twenty-one
Henry’s legs were aching by the time he got to the end of his road, but his troubles didn’t really start until he reached home. His mother must have heard the sound of the key in the door, for she met him in the hall. She was dressed for work in one of her hideous tweedy suits, but her blouse was rumpled and there were dark circles under her eyes. She looked as if she hadn’t slept in months, but that did nothing to dampen her fury.
‘Where the hell have you been?’ she demanded. ‘We were worried sick. Anais rang round all the hospitals and I’ve just reported you missing to the police. For heaven’s sake, Henry, couldn’t you just have rung? Why on earth do you think we got you a mobile phone? Don’t you ever, for a minute, think about anybody else but yourself in your whole… selfish… life?’ Then, to his intense embarrassment, she threw her arms around him and burst into tears. ‘Oh, Henry, we thought you’d been killed!’
He’d never seen his mother cry before and he didn’t know how to cope with it. She was holding him so tightly he could hardly breathe and he could feel her tears dripping from his jaw to run down the side of his neck.
‘Where were you?’ she sobbed. ‘Where have you been?’
He couldn’t answer that one either. At least not any way that was going to satisfy her. Where had he been? Walking all night and most of the morning, by the look of it. She was going to ask him why and he didn’t know why. He might have been hit by a car, but he didn’t feel like he’d been hit by a car. No bones broken, no headache, not so much as a bruise. His mind went back to an earlier thought. Maybe this blank in his memory was all part of his nervous breakdown, the business about seeing fairies and visiting fairyland.
‘Mum…’ Henry said.
He’d been talking to Charlie about his nervous breakdown. And Charlie had said something about it, but he couldn’t remember what.
‘Mum…’ Henry said again, struggling a little.
Actually he didn’t know why she was going on like this. He’d stayed out overnight before. Usually at Charlie’s, where arrangements were often last-minute. He’d always rung, of course, but there’d been times when Mum and Dad had gone to bed – how worried could they be? – and he’d had to leave a message on the answerphone, for cripe’s sake!
Henry suddenly remembered he had left a message on the answerphone the night before. He hadn’t planned to stay out – he’d wanted a lift home. But nobody took his call, so he left a message. He could remember that quite clearly. Mum, I’ve missed my bus. Any chance you could come and get me? If you don’t pick up this message I’ll be walking home.
It suddenly occurred to him why she was so upset! She hadn’t picked up the message. Not until this morning. And then she’d checked his bed and found he still wasn’t home. She wasn’t worried, she was guilty! That was so typical. She could never admit anything was actually her fault. She hadn’t been worried about him at all. She’d gone to bed and didn’t even think of him until this morning. Now she was making a fuss to cover up.
‘Mum,’ Henry said. He took her arms firmly and pulled away. ‘Mum, you don’t give a damn where I was.’
Then, with his own welling tears, he ran upstairs to his room and locked the door.
In its own small way, Henry’s room looked much like Mr Fogarty’s shed, except that strewn clothes took the place of tools and models of one sort or another stood in for the machinery. Henry sat on the edge of the bed thinking how childish those models looked. More than half the ships he’d made were plastic, could you believe that? And then there was that stupid cardboard model of a flying pig. Incredible to think that was the last model he’d made, and just a few weeks ago. Incredible to think how proud he’d been of it.
She knocked on his door almost at once.
‘Go away, Mum,’ Henry said dully.
A voice said, ‘It’s not Martha, Henry – it’s Anais.’
After a long moment, Henry got up and unlocked the door.
Twenty-two
‘May I come in?’ Anais asked quietly. She was dressed in sweater and jeans and designer runners. Henry shrugged and turned away. He walked back to sit on the bed, not looking at her.
Anais closed the door and stood just inside the room. Out of the corner of his eye he could see she looked concerned, maybe even a bit frightened. But her voice was steady enough as she said, ‘Henry, we need to talk.’
He could imagine his mother saying the same thing. What it usually meant was Henry, you need to listen. After which his mother would tell what he’d done wrong, why he should never do it again and how he could do a lot better in the future. But, of course, this wasn’t his mum. This was the other woman in the house.
He shrugged again, staring at his feet, and said, ‘So talk.’
‘Do you think I might sit down?’ Anais asked lightly. She gave a little smile.
‘Nowhere to sit,’ Henry muttered. Which was true enough. The only chair in his room – an ancient sagging armchair – was so buried under junk it was scarcely visible.
‘I could sit beside you on the bed.’ Anais tilted her head to one side quizzically.
‘I don’t want you sitting beside me on the bed!’ Henry snapped. He suddenly felt furiously angry and fought to control it.
The smile disappeared. Anais said, ‘All right, I’ll stand. And I’ll talk. At least until you feel like it. I mostly wanted to say I’m sorry.’
It was the last thing he expected. He was so startled his anger disappeared and he actually looked at her.
She licked her lips and went on, ‘Henry, I know how difficult this must be for you -’
‘No, you don’t,’ Henry said quickly, his anger flaring again. ‘No you bloody, bloody don’t!’ He looked down at his feet again. If he wasn’t careful, he was going to cry.
‘No, I don’t,’ Anais agreed. Part of the trouble was she looked so pretty. And so young. And she was so nice. That was the real problem. He wanted to hate her. He really, really wanted to hate her and she was so nice he just couldn’t. Nicer than his mother, that was for sure. He couldn’t imagine what Anais saw in her.
‘Of course, I don’t,’ Anais was saying. ‘But I do know you must be feeling awful. I wish you weren’t, but there’s not much I can do about that. But, Henry, running away isn’t the answer.’
‘I didn’t run away,’ Henry said. ‘I just stayed over at Charlie’s.’ He glared at her defiantly. ‘I’ve done it before.’
‘Henry,’ Anais said patiently, ‘you didn’t stay at Charlie’s. It was the first place we checked. She said you wanted to stay, but they had cousins or something and there wasn’t a spare bed. She was worried about you too.’
Bet she was, Henry thought. He’d just told her he’d been seeing fairies. What he hated was the way Anais said we as if she and Mum were an item. Which they were, of course, but he didn’t need to have his nose rubbed in it.
‘Did you call Dad?’ he aske
d.
Anais blinked. ‘Not right away,’ she admitted reluctantly.
‘Why not?’ Henry demanded. ‘Didn’t you even think I might be staying with him?’
Anais said, ‘But you weren’t?’
‘No, I wasn’t, but that’s not the point. The point is you all got so worried and none of you, not Mum, not you, thought the first thing you should do was ring up Dad. Well, did you?’
Now Anais was looking down at her feet. ‘No.’ She looked up suddenly. ‘That was wrong. You’re right, Henry: that was very wrong. But sometimes people just… do the wrong things. We were worried. We didn’t know what had happened. You were gone for three days and we were frantic. Your mother loves you, Henry. I love you -’
‘Don’t you say you -’ Henry began furiously, then stopped. ‘I wasn’t away for three days.’
Anais moved across and sat beside him on the bed anyway. She looked into his eyes and reached over to take both his hands. ‘Yes, you were, Henry. That’s the whole point. We were out of our minds with worry – everybody was. Charlotte said you walked her home and then went off to go home yourself. She thought you caught the last bus. But that was Tuesday. Today’s Saturday.’
‘Today’s not Saturday,’ Henry whispered. For no reason he was suddenly feeling afraid.
‘What was it?’ Anais asked him quietly. ‘Were you doing drugs?’
‘I wasn’t doing drugs!’ Henry hissed. ‘I’ve never done drugs!’ He couldn’t have been away three days. It was just last night he’d missed the bus. Just last night.
There was something wrong. Not just confusion. Henry blinked several times and shook his head to clear it. He felt as if he really had been doing drugs. Something was happening to reality. The whole room was swimming around him. He looked at his hands to try to steady himself. They were clasped in Anais’s small, well-groomed hands with bright red varnish on her nails. But his hands in her hands were disappearing.
Henry watched with horrified fascination. His hands were crumbling into tiny sparkles like a special effect. He felt a growing nausea. He raised his eyes to look at Anais’s face. It was fading to white. And suddenly Henry was fading too.
He thought he must be dying.
Twenty-three
The Imperial Suite was spacious and luxurious and Blue hated it. The chairs were too large, the bed was too soft, the tapestries were too rich.
The memories were too painful.
Everything reminded her of her father. She kept thinking she could catch a hint of his smell, the sound of his movements. Once, in the night, she thought she heard the low gurgle of his laughter.
She could see the bloodstain on the carpet, even though the servants had scrubbed out every particle, then, at her insistence, replaced the floor covering completely. But tradition dictated the replacement was the same colour and pattern and the bloodstain was still there, spreading liquidly in her mind.
The Queen must live in the Imperial Suite: that was tradition too. But she needed to think. How could she be expected to think when she saw her father everywhere she turned? She had to get away.
On impulse she triggered the secret panel Comma discovered during the few days he played at being Emperor. It opened on to a passageway that had offered an emergency escape to Emperors down the generations. In the old days they’d been fleeing for their lives. She was running from a ghost. Blue stepped inside and the panel closed behind her.
The passageway emerged on the edge of the Imperial Island beside the broad sweep of the river. It was growing dark now and she sat on some rocks watching the lights come on across the city. Closer to hand, torchlit traffic was milling over Loman Bridge. There were tens of thousands of her subjects out there and she’d never felt so alone. A wrong decision could leave so many of them dead. What was she going to do? What was the right thing to do?
A large patch of moss slipped off the rock beside her and splatted on the ground with an audible thump. ‘Damn!’ it muttered crossly.
Blue was on her feet in an instant, one hand scrabbling in the folds of her dress for the lethal little stimlus she kept as her last line of defence. It was stupid, stupid, stupid not to have alerted the guards where she was going, but she still wasn’t accustomed to being Queen.
‘Is that you, Blue?’
She strained her eyes in the half-light. The voice was terribly familiar. ‘Flapwazzle?’ She blinked. ‘Flapwazzle?’
‘I cannot tell a lie,’ Flapwazzle said truthfully. He began to undulate across the ground towards her.
For some reason the burdens of State responsibility fell away and she felt a small bubble of delight welling in her stomach. ‘What are you doing out here?’
‘Gathering the omron.’ It was something endolgs did at sunset. Blue had never really understood it. Flapwazzle said, ‘When I was full, I fell asleep. Didn’t think I’d find you here. Or anybody, really.’
Her problems came flooding back. ‘I was trying to make up my mind about something.’
She thought he might ask her what – and wasn’t sure she could tell him – but he only said, ‘Must be tricky being Queen.’
It was almost funny. That was the very word for it – tricky. Not one of her courtiers or advisors would have used it, but that was the word exactly. For the first time in days she actually grinned.
‘That’s it, Flapwazzle. As tricky as it gets.’ How did you decide what your uncle was up to? Tricky. How did you choose between war and peace? Tricky.
A thought occurred to her and flared into a rising excitement. ‘Flapwazzle, would you do something for me?’ she blurted. She couldn’t order him – not that she would have anyway. Endolgs weren’t strictly speaking her subjects, which may have been why she hadn’t thought of something so obvious before.
‘Sure,’ Flapwazzle said at once.
Some of her initial excitement died, replaced at once by worry. ‘It could be dangerous.’
Flapwazzle had draped himself over one of her feet, keeping it so warm she wished he’d move on to the other one as well. ‘Danger is my middle name,’ he said. Then added quickly, ‘Just a metaphor, of course. Something I picked up somewhere. I don’t actually have a middle name and if I did it certainly wouldn’t be anything as pretentious as Danger.’ He wriggled slightly. Endolgs lacked the capacity to lie, so metaphors were difficult for them.
Blue said, ‘Would you pay a visit on my uncle?’
‘Lord Hairstreak?’
‘That uncle,’ Blue said sourly. ‘I want you to get close enough to use your truth-sense.’
‘He won’t like that,’ Flapwazzle said.
Which was the understatement of the century. Blue had started to feel guilty – this really was a dangerous assignment – but the more she talked, the more her idea felt like a solution to all her problems. And Flapwazzle could do it. In fact, Flapwazzle was the only endolg she could trust with the job. He’d already proven himself several times over.
She took a deep breath and told him everything.
‘You want me to find out if it’s a genuine offer?’ Flapwazzle asked.
Blue nodded. ‘Can you?’
‘If I can get close enough. I might have problems sneaking past his guards.’
‘I can get you into his mansion,’ Blue said, thinking furiously. She could make a State visit, except the formalities would put Hairstreak on his guard. If she turned up with her bodyguards, that might encourage him to increase his security precautions. But if she just turned up…
Blue liked the idea of just turning up. It was the sort of wild thing she used to do before becoming Queen. She’d have to put precautions in place, of course, do it by the book. She’d order a Countdown, the way the old Emperors did when there was a risk of war. And she’d carry her stimlus. Actually, no, she wouldn’t carry her stimlus – her uncle’s security spells would detect the weapon at once. Best to appear innocent and empty-handed. The Countdown would be all the security she’d need. But she had to find some way of hiding Flapwazzle.
<
br /> ‘He mustn’t know you’re with me. It’s important he doesn’t realise we’re checking him out.’
‘Besides which, he might kill me,’ Flapwazzle said.
Blue nodded. ‘Yes, he might.’ It was impossible to keep anything from an endolg.
But clearly this endolg was prepared to take the risk. ‘Whatever,’ he shrugged cheerfully. ‘When do we go?’
Now would be good, thought Blue. Once she instigated the Countdown and figured out a way of smuggling Flapwazzle.
As they walked together through the passage, Flapwazzle remarked conversationally, ‘You know when I was asleep back there? Before I fell off the rock?’
‘Yes,’ Blue nodded.
‘I was dreaming about Henry,’ Flapwazzle said. ‘He was in a lot of trouble.’
‘I do that sometimes,’ Blue told him.
Twenty-four
Henry was in a lot of trouble.
He seemed to be hallucinating. There was a figure bending over him. After a moment he recognised it as Mr Fogarty.
‘I thought you were in New Zealand,’ Henry said dreamily.
‘Don’t be stupid,’ said Mr Fogarty.
‘What’s the matter with him?’ The voice, from somewhere to the left, was Pyrgus’s.
‘Bit disoriented, that’s all. He’ll be fine in a minute.’
‘I want to talk to him. About Blue.’
‘In a minute. He’s had his atoms ripped apart and reassembled. You can’t expect him to come out fighting.’
Henry tried to stand up and fell down. The ceiling looked very nice. It was vaulted like a church, only lower. The wood floor smelt of vanilla. His body ached a bit. Or quite a lot, actually.
‘Perhaps I could be of assistance, sir…?’
A woman’s voice said, ‘He’s really quite good at first aid, deeah.’
‘Be my guest,’ said Mr Fogarty.
An orange thumb dug into Henry’s sternum. There was a sudden racking pain and everything snapped into focus. He jack-knifed into a sitting position, clutching his chest. The grinning face of Madame Cardui’s dwarf was beaming at him.
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