Faerie Wars fw-1

by Herbie Brennan

  The stairs went down the full three storeys but didn't stop at ground level. If her calculation was correct, they continued for at least another twenty feet. When she reached the bottom, she found herself in a long, straight corridor where glowglobes were already lighting automatically at her presence. She had a good sense of direction and, so far as she could judge, the corridor ran underneath Seething Lane in the direction of Brimstone's glue factory. Which was probably exactly where it led. Heaven only knew what was brought from the factory to Brimstone's rooms and vice versa. Pyrgus himself might have been marched along this corridor for all she knew.

  Should she follow the passage? She didn't think so. If Brimstone had information about Pyrgus in the factory, that would have to be another day's work. She still had to find the attic room and search there. Blue headed back up the stairs. In minutes she was standing outside what she knew must be the door to Brimstone's secret attic.

  She pushed it open.

  A long, carpeted corridor stretched directly ahead, illuminated by elaborate crystal chandeliers.

  'Not the chapel,' murmured the Purple Emperor, 'but clearly still the palace.'

  'I believe this is the east wing, somewhere near the quarters of your daughter, sire,' Tithonus put in, looking around.

  'Yes, I think you may be right. So if we're here, Pyrgus must have made it home safely.'

  'Assuming this man Fogarty has been telling us the truth,' Tithonus said, his voice scarcely more than a whisper.

  'My instinct is to trust him,' the Emperor whispered back. 'For now.' He raised his voice. 'Are we all safely through?'

  'All accounted for, Your Majesty,' said Chief Portal Engineer Peacock briskly.

  'Mr Fogarty, is this the same place you saw when you came through before?'

  Fogarty sniffed. 'Looks like it,' he said.

  'It seems my son may have taken himself off somewhere. But at least he is back in his own world.' The Purple Emperor gathered his cloak around him. He felt reassured by events, but there was still the possibility Pyrgus had set the portal wrongly and translated several miles away. The boy had a genius for getting into trouble. 'Mr Fogarty, I should like you to go with Chief Portal Engineer Peacock. He will arrange to have you comfortably quartered. I appreciate it's late and you must be tired, but first thing in the morning I hope you will be able to assist our engineers.'

  'Do my best,' Fogarty said drily. He took a control from his pocket and switched off the portal.

  'Gatekeeper Tithonus, come with me,' the Emperor said and strode off briskly in the direction of the stairs. They were approaching his private quarters when a harassed servant caught up with the news that his daughter had now disappeared as well.

  The attic smelled of blood. Strips of animal pelt had been nailed to the floor to make a crude and nasty circle. There were weird bits of equipment at the far side of the room. She'd never seen anything like them before, but they had the look of machinery for trapping lightning. Some of them were lying on their sides and possibly broken. There was an ornate metal incense burner filled with ash. Several bowls were strewn around and somebody had inscribed a triangle on the floor at the far side of the circle. There was a bunch of asafoetida grass in one corner. The walls were decorated with banners displaying mystic sigils. The whole place reeked of magic of the most debased sort.

  Was it a trap?

  Nervous and impatient though she was, Blue took time to think. After careful consideration she decided traps were unlikely. This was Brimstone's demonic workspace. It was well protected from intruders and she could imagine the grotty old sorcerer wouldn't want protection or illusion spells interfering with his magic. If you had too many spells going in the same place, they set up peculiar resonances that could sometimes shake a whole building apart. Chances were the attic was the one room in the house that Brimstone would keep absolutely free of magic until he started calling up his demons. That's if she was right. The only way to find out for certain was to walk in.

  Blue walked in. Her heart was pounding, but nothing happened. She couldn't absolutely rule out an illusion, of course, but somehow she didn't think there was one in this room. The whole place was just too chaotic, as if some ghastly ritual of Brimstone's had gone badly wrong. She started to search.

  There was only one cupboard and it was locked with a simple protection charm, but she opened it easily with her pickspell -another sign that Brimstone considered his attic safe from intruders. The cupboard was packed with magical equipment – fire wands, blood chalices, pentacle discs, talismans, mandragores, air daggers and the like. A miniature humunculus began to crawl towards her, its sightless eyes turned towards the light, but what caught her attention were the books. There were two of them, pushed in towards the back of the cupboard and one looked suspiciously like a journal.

  She pushed the humunculus to one side and grabbed them. The smaller of the two had a blank cover, but when she flicked it open, the pages inside were filled with Brimstone's familiar ornate script. His magical diary! She'd found the sorcerer's magical diary! It would have details of every demon he had ever conjured, every act of necromancy he had ever undertaken. She turned a page and the name seemed to leap out at her:

  Pyrgus

  This was it! This was it! Her heart was pounding as she looked around for somewhere she could sit and read under better light. Then a piercing sound struck her ears so forcibly it was almost painful. For an instant she thought she'd been wrong about the attic and had somehow triggered one of Brimstone's protection spells. But then she realised the sound was coming from somewhere far below and suddenly her mind clicked into gear. It was Kitterick's warning whistle. Somebody was coming.

  Holly Blue tucked both books underneath her arm and fled.

  Twenty-five

  Henry went straight round the back. Even if Mr Fogarty was alive and well he wasn't likely to open the front door. The grass hadn't been cut and the flower beds hadn't been tended, so no change there. He glanced towards the buddleia bush for a portal – he knew that's where Mr Fogarty would try to open one -but there was nothing.

  He peered through the kitchen window, then the glass pane in the back door. There didn't seem to be anybody inside. He knocked loudly on the door and then the window. The noise echoed, but no one came. Somehow it sounded like an empty house.

  Henry fished in his pocket and pulled out a key on a long piece of string. Didn't know about that, did you, Mum? He opened the back door and slipped inside. 'It's me, Mr Fogarty!' he called reassuringly. 'It's Henry.' He waited. Once when he'd used the key and startled Mr Fogarty, the old boy'd come at him with a kitchen chopper.

  Nobody appeared, not Mr Fogarty, not Pyrgus. 'Hello…' Henry called. 'Hello…' He moved cautiously from the kitchen into the cluttered living room. 'Mr Fogarty? It's Henry, Mr Fogarty.' The room smelled musty and there was nobody in it.

  Ten minutes later, he'd been through every room in the house. The only living thing he found was mould on a half-eaten hamburger beside Mr Fogarty's rumpled bed.

  He came back to the kitchen and noticed something he'd missed earlier, a brown envelope held down by an empty salt cellar on the kitchen table. There was one word written on the outside in black Biro:

  Henry

  Henry grabbed the envelope and found a single sheet of paper inside, torn from a ruled notebook. On it were just four words in Mr Fogarty's neat handwriting:

  Npx uif gspou mbxo 6851

  Henry stared at them. You could always read Mr Fogarty's handwriting, so there was no doubt about the spelling, but the words themselves didn't make sense. He didn't think they were in a foreign language – they certainly weren't French, which he learned at school – although they might be something weird and East European like Serbo-Croat. Except that Mr Fogarty didn't speak Serbo-Croat, or anything but English as far as Henry knew. Anyway, didn't languages like Serbo-Croat have a different alphabet?

  It was code! All of a sudden, Henry knew it was code. It had to be! Mr Fogarty had never
left him a note in his life, but if he'd left one now, it would have to be in code. Especially if it was something important, maybe something to do with Pyrgus and the portal. Fogarty would never leave stuff lying around for others to read – he was far too suspicious. Suddenly Henry was excited.

  Then the excitement died abruptly. How was he going to crack the code?

  All sorts of stupid thoughts poured into his mind. Maybe Mr Fogarty kept a codebook… maybe this sort of thing dated back to his bank-robber days… maybe there were clues hidden about the house… maybe the numbers were the clue… maybe… maybe…

  Maybe he should stop flapping around like a headless chicken and see what he'd got here. It couldn't be too difficult. Mr Fogarty knew he wasn't Brain of Britain, so it would have to be fairly easy. Maybe a little like charades. Ignore the numbers for the moment and concentrate on the words. First word NPX. OK, first word, three consonants. But you didn't get words that were all consonants. So one of those consonants had to stand for a vowel. And it was a short word, just three letters, maybe 'the'. If the first word was 'the' that made 'X' stand for 'E'. Were there any more 'Xs' in the message? Yes, there was one in the fourth word. This was looking good.

  If 'X' stood for 'E' then 'N' had to be "T and 'P' must be 'H'. Any repeats there? No more 'Ns' but there was another 'P' in the third word. So the whole sentence read:

  THE /--/- -H- – /- – E- – Henry stared at it for a while, then ran out of steam. Four words, first word 'The', second word unknown, third something with an 'H', fourth something with an 'E'. The something something something…

  Suddenly, out of nowhere, Henry saw it. The first word wasn't 'the'. What you did was displace a letter of the alphabet. The simplest way was to displace by one: A became B, B became C, C became D and so on.

  Mr Fogarty's code was a straightforward, one-place displacement. So to decode, you just displaced one back again. N became M, P became O, X became W. He

  found a leaky ballpoint in his jacket pocket and jotted down the transpositions underneath the original message: NPX UIF GSPOU MBXO 6851 MOW THE FRONT LAWN 6851

  He stared at the message stupidly. He'd cracked the code. He knew he'd cracked the code because everything fell neatly into place. But the message didn't make any sense. Mow the front lawn? Why would Mr Fogarty leave him an instruction like that in code?

  The lawnmower! Mr Fogarty had always told him not to touch the lawnmower! Now he was telling him to mow the lawn. It had to be something to do with the lawnmower in the shed.

  Henry crumpled the paper and stuffed it in his pocket, then raced down the back path to the shed. Inside was the usual mess. (He'd never got round to cleaning it for Mr Fogarty that day Hodge caught Pyrgus in his fairy form.) There were cobwebs and dust coating the largest collection of junk, machine parts, garden tools and flower pots he'd ever seen. On his left was an ancient grow-bag for tomatoes, with the wizened brown remains of last year's plants emerging from it like a spider. The lawnmower was at the far end of the shed.

  Henry picked his way across. As he reached the mower, his heart began to pound. Mr Fogarty was up to something, definitely trying to send him some sort of message. He cautiously unwrapped the plastic covering the mower, looking for another envelope. There was none. He detached the grass box and looked inside that, but couldn't see because of the gloom of the shed. He stuck his hand in and fumbled around, then gave up and carried the box outside. When he tipped it to the light, there was nothing inside there either.

  He started to drag the mower from the shed so he could see a little better. There was a cavity underneath it in the concrete floor.

  The cavity had been covered by a thin sheet of plywood, but as Henry dragged the mower a loose fitting caught and moved it slightly. Even then he might not have noticed the cavity if he hadn't been so hyper. But he was watching out for clues and spotted the dark crack at once. He pushed the mower clear and lifted the plywood.

  The cavity was no accidental flaw. It was a three feet by two feet rectangle, three feet deep with neat, clean edges, obviously built in when the concrete was first laid. Inside was a metal strongbox with a combination lock.

  Mow the front lawn

  Henry's heart was thumping so loudly now it was making his whole body shake. That's what the numbers were for – the combination lock! His fingers were trembling as he dialled the combination and jerked the lid.

  The lid didn't move.

  Henry tried again, taking great care to do it right this time. 6

  … 8… 5… 1… But while he was certain he'd dialled exactly, the strongbox remained locked.

  What was going on here? The numbers had to be the combination -nothing else made sense. He frowned. The message wasn't Mow the front lawn 6851. The message was Npx uif gspou mbxo 6851. To get it right you had to shift the letters. Maybe you had to shift the numbers as well!

  Henry tried the new combination. 5… 7… 4… How did you shift one backwards? Zero, he supposed. He dialled in the final 0 and the strongbox opened easily. Inside was a brushed aluminium cube with two inlaid concave plastic buttons on the top. Lying beside it was another scrap of paper. He picked up the paper. There were eight words, but no code nonsense this time. Mr Fogarty's second message said simply, GONE ON AHEAD. FOLLOW SOON AS YOU CAN.

  Gingerly Henry picked up the cube.

  Twenty-six

  Pyrgus had the impression of an open trapdoor with stone steps leading downwards, but his mind was no longer working. He felt as if it had been pushed into a tight, dark corner of his skull and locked there like a small, furry animal in a cage. He could still see through his eyes, still hear through his ears, but everything was at a distance, as if he was looking through the wrong end of a telescope. Nothing was important any more, not where he was going, not getting back to the palace, not his father, not his sister, not his new friend Henry. His thoughts crawled through treacle and were blurred around the edges, slipping and sliding away from him every time he tried to use them. His memory had collapsed and his head ached. He was no longer sure where he was before he got here or even who he was exactly. If he concentrated really hard he could recall his name, but not much else.

  The demons led Pyrgus along a stone-flagged passageway that seemed to be illuminated only by a greenish fungus clinging to the walls. The light level was so low he stumbled constantly, although the demons themselves didn't seem to have much trouble. He could hear them oozing and chittering along the edges of his mind. The slime-mould had withdrawn a little, but he knew it was still there with the others, ready to pounce at the first hint of him trying to break free. Pyrgus couldn't fathom that. Why would he try to break free?

  The passageway led into a maze of galleries with corridors and tunnels branching off in all directions. Most of them looked the same to Pyrgus, but the demons never hesitated. The colour of the light began to change, sliding from the bilious fungus-green into a softer, rosy hue, but he couldn't understand where it was coming from. At the same time the temperature seemed to be rising, a little at a time, until he found himself sweating. There was an increasing smell of sulphur in the air that was vaguely familiar, although he couldn't remember why.

  They emerged from the maze after more than an hour. An odd thought occurred to Pyrgus. An invading army could wander for months in that labyrinth. Had it been built for just that purpose – as a protection for the place where the demons lived? Pyrgus didn't know and didn't really care.

  They were standing in a cavern so vast Pyrgus couldn't see the other side. Before them, stretched out across the cavern floor, was an underground city, laid out in a mirror image of the ruined city he'd seen above. But this city was made from gleaming metals, not stone, and in far better repair. The polished surfaces reflected the dim red light, yet the whole city was somehow in shadow. Pyrgus didn't care, any more than he cared about the heat. Pyrgus didn't care about anything much.

  The demons marched him through the gloomy streets towards the central plaza. In his drifting thoughts h
e mused about the demon world. Demons kidnapped people all the time and flew them off in metal ships. Somebody had told him that, although he couldn't quite remember who. Six million people called Americans were missing. He wondered why the demons wanted so many. Perhaps they were food. He wondered if an American would taste as good as a potato crisp.

  There were demons on the streets, but none stopped to look at him.

  In the centre of the plaza was an enormous dome-shaped building that extruded a metal ramp as they approached. It looked so friendly and inviting that Pyrgus almost broke into a run, but the slime-mould at the edges of his mind reached out and quickly pulled him back. His thoughts clicked into gear. They were all going to see somebody important. He stepped on to the ramp and forgot what he was thinking.

  As they entered the building he saw there was machinery in the walls. How weird was that?

  In the gently wafting thistledown that had replaced his mind, a new thought appeared. Nobody who was kidnapped by demons ever got back to their own world. The slime-mould seized the thought at once and threw it out. What a totally stupid thought that was! Demons only wanted to be friends.

  The demons led him through into a large, high-ceilinged chamber (throne room? Situation Room?) where a red-robed demon studied a large map spread across a metal table.

  The creature looked up as they entered. 'Crown Prince Pyrgus,' it said smoothly. 'How good of you to visit us.'

  The world snapped into sharp focus as Pyrgus's mind cleared. He was in Hael, the demon world. He had no idea how he'd got there, but it was the only thing that made sense. Somehow Mr Fogarty's portal must have sent him here. He remembered the smell of sulphur and the barren desolation, the sullen, stark, unmoving sun, the rosy light, the metal city – he had to be in Hael.

  Without the slightest hesitation, Pyrgus hurled himself at the demon in the scarlet robe… and found his body wouldn't move.