‘So,’ she said, ‘I’m going to drag you up the steps by your ears or your hair or whichever hurts more, then the Lofty Husks will punish you for tampering with the kingdom’s marvels and –’ she grinned ‘– reward me for being the hero to bring you in!’
Casper’s eyes bulged – not at her words, though they made no sense at all – but at the lump wriggling past the spanners and the screwdrivers in the pocket on the front of the girl’s dungarees. A blue-scaled, winged creature about the size of a fist poked its snout over the edge of the pocket and squinted at Casper.
The girl rapped the creature on the head. ‘Not now, Arlo. I’m extremely busy.’
The miniature dragon – for that, to Casper’s amazement, seemed to be what it was – let out a bored growl, then slunk back into the pocket.
The girl rubbed her hands together. ‘Now, where were we?’
Casper’s pulse was racing. Dungarees, dungeons and now dragons called Arlo . . . He needed to put a stop to all this now, so he rammed his shoulder into the door. It didn’t budge. He tried again, this time with his foot, but still the door wouldn’t move.
The girl sniggered. ‘Neverlate Trees only open again for you if you’re holding an excuse.’ She wiggled the note in the air. ‘Everyone knows that.’
Casper ignored her and pummelled at the door with his fists. ‘Er, Candida? If you’re still out there, and now is a good time for you, I’d love to take that beating.’
‘I don’t mind doing the beating myself,’ the girl in the clock said hopefully.
Casper flung himself at the door but still it held fast. And then the girl pushed the door gently, and to Casper’s surprise and relief, it swung open. Light flooded in, drowning the turquoise glow, but as Casper scrambled out of the clock after the girl he was surprised to find that his feet did not meet with carpet. They met with something cold and hard.
Stone.
Casper looked up and his stomach lurched. His sitting room was gone. Candida was gone. The grandfather clock was gone. In its place there stood a very old tree. And hanging from the twisted branches were – Casper gasped – not buds, not leaves, but dozens of small white envelopes.
Casper raised two shaking hands to his mouth. He was standing on a vast staircase that narrowed as it climbed upward. But what made his insides churn was the fact that the steps disappeared into a cloud and that either side of them there were clouds and that beyond the tree with the tangled roots that sprawled out over the steps, there were more clouds still.
Casper felt himself sway.
‘Best not to get too close to The Edge,’ the girl said, nodding towards the cloud the staircase seemed to be resting on. ‘It’s miles and miles down to the Boundless Seas and even though some of the most experienced Ballooners have launched off there in their hot air balloons, no one has ever tried to jump.’
Casper gave a shaky moan as the clouds around them shifted and he took in an unforgivably long drop down to the ocean. The water glinted in the afternoon sun and seagulls swung on the breeze and, had Casper not been hundreds of metres up in the sky, he could have almost imagined that the scene below was somewhere out in the North Sea. But then there was the staircase with the tree. And he felt perfectly certain that the trees in England, or indeed the trees in any other country on the world maps lining Mr Barge’s classroom, did not sprout stationery, and they most definitely did not grow out of staircases in the sky.
The girl turned to face Casper and he was surprised to see she was small, probably the same height as him. Somehow her attitude had made her seem bigger. ‘Right, then,’ she said. ‘Would you like to be dragged up the steps by your ear or your hair? Both, I imagine, will be equally distressing.’
Casper spun back towards the door leading out of the tree. But it snapped shut as he reached for it and no matter how many times he tried to prise the wood open, the way into the tree, or the clock, or whatever it was, had closed.
Heart galloping, Casper turned around.
The girl gave a wicked smile and the stars on her cheeks glittered. ‘I hope you’re better with heights than Arlo.’
Casper clung onto the trunk of the tree. ‘I’m not going anywhere until you tell me what on earth is going on. Where am I? Who are you? And on a scale of one to ten how dangerous is Arlo?’
The little dragon wriggled out of the girl’s pocket, fluttered upward, then blew hard through his nostrils. A puff of smoke trickled out.
Even so, Casper gulped.
Arlo flapped up to a branch on the tree and the girl pierced
Casper with a haughty stare. ‘He’s a ten when he needs to be but he’s got a bad chest so sometimes he finds breathing fire a bit of an ordeal.’ She grabbed Casper by the scruff of his blazer and dragged him up a step. ‘I’m Utterly Thankless and I’m a Bottler-in-training up at Rumblestar. I was supposed to be spending the afternoon in the castle but I got kicked out of class for flicking rain into my teacher’s face. Silly old Blustersnap should have seen it coming when she asked me to do group work – you’d think she and the rest of the Lofty Husks would know by now that I only ever work alone. Still, it meant I sneaked out here for some peace and quiet and when I realised I was late for dinner I grabbed an envelope from the tree and was given a top-notch excuse for being out past curfew – capturing a criminal is important business what with everything that’s been going on!’ Utterly paused on the step and looked at Casper. ‘I was a little bit surprised at how easy you were to capture though – just sitting there inside the tree looking hopeless – but perhaps you’ll come into your own in the dungeons.’
Casper yanked himself free and clutched his hair. ‘I’m not a criminal!’
Utterly rolled her eyes. ‘Do you think it’ll be quicker if I drag you or push you?’
‘N . . . neither,’ Casper stammered. ‘I’m staying right here because . . . well . . . I like rules too much to be a criminal, and I hate risks –’ he grimaced at the staircase ‘– so climbing that is completely out of the question.’
Utterly sighed. ‘You really are turning out to be a terrible disappointment, you know. I was expecting Morg’s followers to be knife-wielding, karate-kicking, fire-breathing demons.’
Casper tried to block Utterly’s ramblings out because they were bordering on madness now. This must be a dream, a voice in his head whimpered. You’ve seen the world maps in Mr Barge’s classroom and there’s not a single mention of magical kingdoms. Surely you’re just going to wake up any second and be back in Little Wallops, where— Suddenly, Casper thought of his parents. He imagined them coming back to the flat and finding him gone. They’d be worried sick!
Utterly shook Casper by the shoulders and he snapped out of his thoughts. ‘And how can you be scared to go up into Rumblestar when you’ve been nosing around and tampering with our marvels for the past few weeks?’ Her face darkened. ‘Do you have any idea how hard it is to catch marvels? They may look like ordinary old marbles but they’re flighty and fidgety – they’re the purest droplets of rain, snow and sunlight after all!’
‘I haven’t been nosing around anywhere!’ Casper cried. ‘I’ve been at school trying my best to hand in homework on time and avoid being hurled into a bin. I know absolutely nothing about this ridiculous-sounding Rumblestar.’
Utterly gasped at the insult, then her words tumbled out, hot and angry. ‘Ridiculous? RIDICULOUS? I’ll have you know that without Rumblestar, the Unmapped Kingdoms would crumble! And then who do you think would send sunlight to Crackledawn, rain to Jungledrop and snow to Silvercrag? The other kingdoms might write the weather scrolls for the Faraway but none of the continents there would exist without Rumblestar gathering the marvels in the first place! Imagine a Faraway without rain to nourish the land, sunlight to make the plants and trees grow and snow to –’ she paused ‘– cover Antarctica!’
Casper frowned at the mention of Antarctica. Why was this girl calling what sounded suspiciously like Earth the Faraway? He felt perfectly sure that Utterly was blu
rting out lies for one reason or another – magical kingdoms didn’t exist and the world’s weather did not rely on them – and yet he was realising that the angrier the girl got, the more information she gave away. So, if he could just keep baiting her, then maybe she’d come clean with what was really going on.
He took a deep breath and braced himself for the onslaught. ‘Magical kingdoms aren’t real and there are no such things as marvels of snow, sun or rain! Weather is based purely on scientific fact.’
‘AREN’T REAL?’ Utterly spluttered. ‘NO SUCH THING?’
Up on his branch, Arlo covered his face with his claws.
‘I suppose next you’ll be telling me that none of the recent hurricanes in Europe happened? That there were no huge tornados in America? And that the whirlwinds in Africa and the typhoons in Asia and Australia were just rumours?’ Utterly made a fist of Casper’s shirt. ‘When you swan into Rumblestar and start tampering with our marvels, it disrupts the entire weather system! How does it make you feel to know that because of you a hurricane flattened half of England earlier this week and –’ she hung her head ‘– killed hundreds of people?’
Casper was far from ready to accept that he had stumbled into a magical kingdom and that events there were behind the recent weather-related disasters, but his face lit up at the mention of home.
‘England!’ he exclaimed, untangling himself from Utterly’s grip. ‘That’s where I’m from! I go to a school there called Little Wallops—’
Utterly scowled. ‘I’ll wallop you if you’re not careful.’
‘Are you always this cross?’
‘Cross is what happens when you burn toast or forget an umbrella.’ Utterly paused. ‘I’m not cross; I’m just unbelievably fierce.’ She looked Casper up and down. ‘You can’t be from England. Everyone knows that those in the Faraway stay in the Faraway. They scurry around their continents doing non-magical things with non-magical people and non-magical creatures while those in the Unmapped Kingdoms stay in the Unmapped Kingdoms beavering away to make weather, because sharing the magic is what keeps the Faraway and the Unmapped Kingdoms turning!’
At this outburst, Casper glanced around hopefully for a grown-up but it was still just him and Utterly on the staircase, and Arlo in the tree. Clearly making Utterly even crosser was not the way to get her to speak logically. So, in a desperate bid to stamp some sense and order onto the situation, Casper lifted the crumpled timetable from his pocket and gazed at it longingly. What he would give to be doing his homework now, or even to be crouched inside the Lost Property basket or cornered in the library with Candida and Leopold. At least those situations made sense to him.
‘What’s that?’ Utterly snapped.
Casper sighed. ‘My timetable.’
‘What’s it for?’
‘It tells me what to do when.’
‘Doesn’t your temper tell you that?’
Casper sniffed. ‘I’d like to go home now, Utterly. To Little Wallops, where I’m from.’
Utterly hauled him up a few more steps. ‘Criminals don’t just go home. They get arrested, then tried, then fed to the dragons.’
‘WHAT?’ Casper shrieked.
‘Well, I’m not exactly sure that happens, but I’m pretty confident the Lofty Husks will want to put an end to you once they’ve tried you.’
Casper stood rooted to the step. ‘In that case, I’m staying right here. On this step. Until everything goes back to normal.’
‘I wouldn’t,’ Utterly smirked. ‘Things can get pretty dangerous outside the castle walls after sunset.’
Casper looked at the cloud-strewn sky around them – he could have sworn he could hear something rumbling, like thunder, only that didn’t make any sense because the clouds around them were wispy and white. Where on earth was he?
He brushed the strange noise aside and took a deep breath. Then, gripping the cuffs of his blazer so hard his knuckles turned white, he followed Utterly up the steps because the grandfather clock seemed to have disappeared completely and if all this was actually happening and he really was in some sort of strange place far away, then he was going to need help getting home, so he had to trust that maybe these Lofty Husks, whoever they were, would be more understanding than Utterly and listen to him when he explained that he wasn’t a criminal but a boy who had got hopelessly lost.
Casper tried to focus on Utterly’s feet, anything to avoid looking at the terrifying drop. After a while he glanced up and noticed that Arlo was perched on Utterly’s shoulder – and he was sobbing.
Utterly stroked his tiny blue wings. ‘Arlo’s extremely sensitive,’ she whispered to Casper. ‘He can’t bear unhappy endings, so if you’re going to go and get all stressed out about being eaten by a dragon I’d appreciate it if you could do it quietly so that Arlo doesn’t get even more upset.’ She carried on climbing, straight through the middle of a cloud. ‘Chop, chop! Nobody likes a lazy criminal.’
Casper inched through the cloud after her. It was wet and misty and so far removed from his timetable that he felt dangerously close to passing out, but before he could they emerged on the other side and Casper saw that the clouds around them now were suddenly very, very, very different from the ones he was used to. They were vast, like sky-high icebergs, and those to his left appeared to have soily roots and vines dangling from the bottom of them while those on his right showed glimpses of rocks. Casper squinted. He could only see the undersides of these clouds but the roots and the rocks seemed to hint at something bigger, something only partly glimpsed right now.
And then his gaze fell upon the towering stone wall in front of him. It curved away into the distance on both sides and from where he stood, Casper could just make out several arches carved into the stone in either direction and torrents of water gushing through them. So it wasn’t thunder I heard earlier, he thought. It was sky-tumbling waterfalls! He looked at the large door in front of him. It was domed and wooden and criss-crossed with gold metal. There can’t possibly be a kingdom beyond this door responsible for the weather in my world. Can there? He thought of his mum out buying the groceries. Had there been another hurricane while he’d been gone? And what if it had ripped through the village and the school and his mum had been caught in the middle of it? He felt suddenly very sick indeed.
In front of him, Utterly rummaged through her dungaree pocket, then pulled out what looked like a handful of Scrabble letters. ‘Since all the problems you’ve been causing with the marvels, Criminal, we’ve upgraded our security. Keys don’t work on this door any more; only passwords do.’ She threw Casper a smug look, then glanced at the letters in her palm, trying her best to shield them from Casper’s sight. ‘Hmmmmm,’ she said, as airily as she could. ‘This one I pinched from the porter’s tower is proving a little harder to work out than most.’
Casper stole a peek over her shoulder at the letters – I C P H U C – but couldn’t make head or tail of them.
Then Arlo hurtled out of a cloud and skidded to a halt in Utterly’s hand, accidentally jumbling up all the letters there. But when the little dragon settled himself on Utterly’s arm seconds later, Casper wondered whether his crash landing had been an accident after all. Because now the letters had been rearranged, a word stared back at them – H I C C U P – and though Utterly quickly tucked it from sight, Casper could have sworn he saw Arlo wink at Utterly as she passed each letter in the correct order through the keyhole.
For a few seconds nothing happened, then the door creaked open and Utterly bundled Casper through it. His jaw dropped at the scene before him. Nestled amongst the clouds, there was a castle, just as Utterly had said there would be, but this castle was more splendid than any of the ones Casper had seen back home. It was a vast silver-stone maze of turrets and domes twisting into the sky.
Stone dragons clutching burning torches lined the turrets, golden flags fluttered from the spires and a moat of crystal-clear water fanned out in front of the castle before cascading, on the left and right, through arches
in the walls. Casper glimpsed a river snaking through a forest on the left, then, on the right, what looked like mountain peaks in the distance. He shook his head in disbelief. The roots and the rocks he had seen from the bottom of the staircase earlier suddenly made sense. Was this really a secret kingdom tucked up in the sky? Surely there was some more reasonable explanation for all this . . .
Casper turned his attention back to the castle. Inside the walls a few clouds poked through the water in the moat and dozens of humpback bridges connected them. On each cloud sat a stone tower and while most of these were lit up and Casper could see the silhouettes of people moving around inside them, there was one tower lined with gargoyles holding black-flamed torches that none of the humpback bridges reached out to. And though Casper was in a castle in the sky that seemed a million miles from home, it didn’t take him long to figure out what that building was.
‘Excellent,’ Utterly said merrily. ‘I see you’ve spotted the dungeons.’
Utterly pointed to the humpback bridge in front of them. ‘Hold your breath when you cross the bridges, please. We try to avoid placing foundations on the backs of sleeping cloud giants because the slightest sound wakes them, but now and again it can’t be helped because, let’s face it, telling the difference between a cloud and a cloud giant is a tricky business.’ She shot Casper a daggered look. ‘Not that I need to explain that to you – you’ve probably worked out the castle’s quirks with all your snooping around.’
Casper chewed his nails. He wanted to dismiss Utterly’s talk of giants in the sky, but given everything else he’d seen so far, he thought it best to bite his lip and take Utterly at her worryingly accurate word. ‘What . . . what happens if the cloud giants wake?’ he asked.
‘Things move. People get squashed.’ Arlo gave a panicked squeak from Utterly’s shoulder and she lowered her voice. ‘Last year a boy sneezed on this bridge and the cloud giant beneath it rolled over in his sleep. The boy broke his leg and ever since the bell tower has been at such a steep angle you have to use a rope to rappel up the stairs inside it. But once we’re in the castle you can kick and scream all you like.’ She surveyed the scene ahead. ‘You’ll want to take the bridges at speed to maximise your chances of survival. A sort of running tiptoe is best.’
Rumblestar Page 3
