Mystery of the Golden Card

by Garth Nix

  Jaide launched a very different attack. The helmet of the second suit of armour was still partly open, thanks to a splinter that had wedged in the hinge of the visor. Moving her fists as though wringing out a tea-towel, she built a rapidly spinning rope of air that quickly took on solidity and form, like a spear. As the second suit of armour pushed past the first, which was still held back by shadows, she raised her right arm and threw the spear as hard as she could.

  It flew straight into its face. The air rushed through the open visor, down into the armour, and ricocheted loudly off the hollow metal. Jaide’s Gift made the wind steadily stronger and faster until, with a thunderous clatter, the staggering armour exploded. Its head went flying up and its arms went in opposite directions. The torso fell into halves like an exploded iron turtle. The legs stayed standing for a split second, then shivered into their component plates.

  Jack cheered, perhaps prematurely, for the collapse of the armour also freed the force that had destroyed it. Both twins staggered back as a whirlwind erupted in the middle of the library, sending books flying in a mad spiral up to the ceiling. Cornelia was swept up into it, and she flashed in and out of sight, screeching madly. When the wind hit Jack’s web of shadows, the two Gifts became entangled. Long, black streaks spread up through the funnel of air, threatening to snuff out all light with it.

  ‘Control yourselves, troubletwisters!’ The voice of Professor Olafsson was barely audible over the wind. He had been swept into the fireplace and was wedged there. ‘Don’t let your Gifts control you!’

  ‘What he said!’ added Ari from where he clung to Jack’s chest with all twenty claws digging in.

  ‘Stop it . . . please,’ said Jaide through gritted teeth. She clutched at the whistling air, trying to slow it down, but it slipped through her fingers with playful ease. ‘Stop it now!’

  The remaining suit of armour stumbled into the maelstrom and was lifted off its feet. It turned around in accelerating pirouettes with both arms extended, creating a propeller effect that threatened to chop the twins’ heads off when it came close to them. They clutched the fireplace to stop themselves being swept up as well. Between the two of them, they kept the painting safe.

  The spinning armour’s left glove hit a bookcase, sending slivers of wood and iron fingers flying like bullets. The armour ricocheted into a wall, which hastened its disintegration even further. Jaide ducked her head as bits of curved metal whizzed around her, screaming for the wind to be still before it killed them all.

  Finally, it listened. With a series of crashes and clatters, the whirlwind dropped its load of metal and books and shrank into a self-contained spiral. Cornelia flew out of the top and clung to the upper level’s balustrade, feathers in brilliant disarray. The cross-continuum conduit constructor dropped onto the ground at the twins’ feet. With a sigh of regret, the wind shrank down into a breeze and vanished.

  There was no time to relax. From the hallway outside came the clanking of more metal feet.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ asked Jack. ‘We can’t give up now.’

  ‘Why not?’ said Ari. ‘That’s what your father would want. If whatever’s in the painting is so important, he should be the one looking for it.’

  Jaide was pale, but she shook her head.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Our Gifts are too dangerous when he’s around, and besides, he’s needed outside the wards. We have to finish it ourselves.’

  Ari stared up at her with wide eyes. ‘Your Gifts are dangerous? What about those suits of armour?’

  More clanking metal shapes filled the doorway, pushing among themselves to get through first.

  ‘I urge a strategic retreat,’ said the death mask from the fireplace.

  ‘All right,’ said Jack. ‘We can go upstairs and watch from there.’

  Jaide nodded, even though it felt like running away from the problem rather than solving it. She picked up Professor Olafsson, and together with Jack and Ari, they hurried to the spiral staircase that led to the second tier of books in the library. Rodeo Dave hadn’t cleared out up there yet. The shelves were still full, thickly coated with dust and cobwebs that not even Jaide’s hurricane had disturbed.

  Cornelia greeted them with a weak croak from the balustrade. Some of her feathers had come loose and stuck out at weird angles, but apart from that she seemed unharmed.

  ‘Three sheets to the wind,’ she said, which didn’t make much sense to Jaide, but it made Professor Olafsson chuckle.

  ‘Look,’ said Jack, still holding Ari close to his chest with one arm. His free hand pointed into the room below.

  Three suits of armour burst through the doorway, knocking off chunks of wood and stone with their broad shoulders. None of them were carrying a sword, for which Jack was extremely grateful – particularly as one of them headed for the stairs while the other two stayed behind to protect the painting.

  ‘We’d better get out of here,’ said Jaide.

  There were no doors from the upper level, but there was a window that was just wide enough for the twins to fit through, which hopefully meant their armoured pursuer couldn’t pass. It was latched but not locked, and when Jaide tugged it open cool, fresh air rushed inside. The light was fading fast, but she could see out to the tiled roof beyond.

  ‘We could stay and fight,’ said Jaide, emboldened and energised by the breeze.

  ‘There are dozens of those suits of armour all over the castle,’ said Ari. ‘And what’s going to stop your Gifts blowing you up, too?’

  ‘There must be a way to switch the booby trap off,’ said Jack. ‘Maybe . . . maybe we can look in the Compendium.’

  ‘We can’t go back home!’ said Jaide. ‘If Mum’s there, she’ll never let us leave.’

  ‘Let’s worry about that later,’ said Jack nervously. ‘I think getting out of here is top priority.’

  He raised Ari so the cat could wriggle through the gap. Then he put his hands on the frame and hoisted himself up through it. Jaide pushed him from below, trying not to think of the heavy tread coming up the stairs behind her.

  Cornelia flapped through next, calling ‘Rourke’ softly until Jack put out his hand for her to climb onto. They were just behind one of the crenulated walls that ran around the outside of the castle. The sky above was as black as pitch and the air smelled of rain. Jack’s dark-sensitive eyes made out a way across the roof to another set of windows on the far side.

  ‘Come on, Jaide,’ he said, hearing the crunch of heavy footsteps on the stairs.

  Jaide started to climb out, then suddenly dropped back.

  ‘Jaide!’

  ‘There’s someone down there,’ she said. ‘What if it’s Kyle and Tara?’

  She ran to the railing. As one of the suits of armour was laboriously clanking up the circular stairs, down below, in the ruins of the doorway, stood Thomas Solomon. He was holding a torch limply in one hand and looking around in horror at the scattered books and wooden splinters that now filled the room.

  ‘Get out of there!’ Jaide shouted. ‘Run!’

  ‘What the blazes—’

  ‘Run!’ shrieked Jaide. The suit of armour that was after her had almost reached the top of the stairs, and there were two downstairs that were turning towards Solomon.

  ‘Why? What is going—’

  He stopped talking suddenly, his eyes widening. Jaide sensed movement behind her and ducked just in time. A heavy iron first whizzed over her, missing her head by inches. Her Gift came to life as she rolled away, whipping books off the shelves and flinging them at the armour. It batted them away like flies, following her with thunderous footsteps. She tried to stand, but the books slipped underfoot, and her crab-like backwards crawl was taking her away from the window, into a corner . . .

  Finally, she got to her feet and looked around for some kind of weapon. The suit of armour lumbered closer, drawing back its fist for another all-iron punch. She froze, unable for an instant to think or do anything but stare at the gauntlet that was raised to d
eliver a killing blow.

  ‘Jaide! Move!’

  Jaide moved, ducking under the blow and diving past the suit of armour. The wind gathered around her like a cloak, lifting her feet off the ground so it didn’t matter that they’d been slipping on books every time she tried to run. She wasn’t really running anymore. It was more like flying, except this was nothing like having wings. This felt like being caught up in a hurricane, moving with the wind wherever it wanted to take her.

  Luckily, it was taking her right for the window. Jack held out his arms, and then fell back as it became clear that she was coming like a rocket, right for him. For an instant it felt as if she was shooting down the cross-continuum conduit constructor again, except this time it was a window frame, not a picture frame, and what lay on the other side was freedom, not the golden card.

  Something cold and hard grabbed her ankle and yanked her back into the library.

  ‘Jaide!’ Jack gasped as his sister disappeared just as quickly as she’d emerged into the night. ‘Jaide!’

  He scrambled to the window and peered in. Horrified, he stared at the suit of armour looming over his sister.

  Neither of them believed their eyes when the armour let go of her and drew itself upright. Helmet scraping decades-old flakes of paint from the ceiling, it raised its right fist and saluted.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  To Translocate or Not to Translocate

  NOT VERY FAR AWAY, in Portland, the man best known to the twins as Rodeo Dave sat upright at his desk.

  ‘Oh my,’ he said, as a series of very strange and unlikely memories suddenly rushed back into his head at the instigation of a signal – a signal that had been prepared long ago in case certain events ever came to pass.

  He stayed still for a long moment, absorbing everything: the what, the where, and most especially the why. He had chosen to forget so much – his memories had been hidden for good reason. Now that the reason had come back to him, he wished he didn’t know again.

  Another signal came to him, hot on the heels of the first.

  ‘Oh my, oh my, oh my,’ he said, leaping to his feet and reaching for Zebediah’s keys.

  Jaide gaped up at the suit of armour that had gone from trying to kill her to saluting her, all in one second.

  ‘Jaide, get away from it!’ called Jack. ‘Now!’

  She slithered back a few feet. The armour didn’t move. It hadn’t reacted to Jack, and didn’t react now as she stood up and faced it again.

  ‘Jack?’

  She dashed forward and waved a hand in front of the armour’s face, jumping straight back in case it was a trap. But why would it need a trap? It had caught her just seconds ago.

  ‘Jack . . . I think they’ve been turned off.’

  He climbed through the window and hesitantly approached the armour. When it didn’t move, he tapped it on its cuirassed chest. The only thing this provoked was a deep, resonant bong.

  ‘I guess they have,’ he said. ‘But why? And by who?’

  ‘Let me see,’ said a muffled voice from his backpack. ‘Perhaps I can tell you.’

  Jack pulled out Professor Olafsson. He examined the armour with interest, squinting and pursing his lips until at last he nodded with satisfaction.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Quiescent. Very clever use of the Gift for animating inanimate objects, very tricky, too . . .’

  ‘So why are they suddenly quiescent?’ asked Jaide.

  ‘Again, I can only imagine that it was your doing.’

  ‘Mine? But I didn’t do anything.’

  ‘You must have. Did you make any unusual signs or gestures—?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Call it by any particular names—?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Touch it, by any chance?’

  Jaide opened her mouth to say No to that, too, but then she remembered otherwise.

  ‘It grabbed my ankle,’ she said. ‘It touched me then.’

  ‘There you have it,’ said Professor Olafsson. ‘I expect it was designed to recognise a Warden . . . even a junior troubletwister Warden. The moment you touched one of its agents, the booby trap realised you weren’t hostile and stood down.’

  ‘I’m glad it did,’ said Jaide. ‘But what about Thomas—’

  She peered over the balustrade. Two suits of armour were frozen in mid-motion, with the unconscious form of Thomas Solomon hanging between them, his shirt bunched up in their gauntlets.

  ‘Is he dead?’ whispered Jack.

  ‘I . . . I think I can see him breathing,’ said Jaide.

  ‘We’d better go and check,’ said Jack. He looked around to make sure there were no other moving suits of armour lurking anywhere and suddenly added, ‘Where’s Ari?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Jaide. There was no sign of him on either level of the library, or on the roof, when Jack stuck his head out the window to have a look.

  ‘Perhaps he ran away,’ said Professor Olafsson.

  ‘He would never do that,’ said Jaide.

  ‘Unless it was to get help.’ Jack groaned. ‘I hope he hasn’t gone to wake up Grandma.’

  They ran down the stairs, Cornelia zooming ahead of them and taking a perch on the picture frame.

  Together, the twins gently lowered Thomas Solomon to the ground, though they ripped his shirt in the process.

  ‘He is breathing,’ said Jaide. ‘But . . . I guess we’d better call an ambulance.’

  ‘What if Mum comes?’ asked Jack, gesturing at the destruction all around. ‘How do we explain all this? Shouldn’t we go and get the card first?’

  ‘The man is not hurt,’ pronounced the professor. ‘He has merely fainted. He will come around in his own time, probably an hour or two.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ asked Jaide.

  ‘I am sure,’ said the death mask.

  ‘Okay, let’s go get that card,’ said Jack, ‘before something else gets in the way.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Professor Olafsson. ‘I am curious to see the cross-continuum conduit constructor in action again. It was a little quick that last time.’

  The cross-continuum conduit constructor was undamaged, apart from a small dent near one end that Professor Olafsson assured them would not affect its working.

  As they lined it up again, Jack asked, ‘What’s it like in there? Did you see the card?’

  Jaide explained what she had experienced, then confessed that, no, she hadn’t actually found the Card of Translocation yet.

  ‘I’m going to come with you this time,’ Jack said. ‘Two sets of eyes are better than one.’

  ‘Who’s going to watch out for more booby traps and hold the rope?’

  ‘Cornelia and Professor Olafsson will yell if something happens. We can tie the rope to the column and pull ourselves back.’

  ‘Actually, I guess we don’t need the rope,’ said Jaide. ‘I’ve been through, and we know it isn’t straight down or anything. Come on. Let’s line it up and we’ll touch it together on three.’

  When the controller was aligned, Jaide counted.

  ‘One . . . two . . . three!’

  The twins pressed their hands to the cool, brassy surface. Once again, Jaide felt herself being whisked along from the normal universe of the castle to the one inside the painting. She blinked, momentarily dazzled. There was no visible sun, but everything was lit by a warm, yellow light. She hadn’t noticed how dark it was getting back in the real world.

  There was a rushing, tearing noise, and suddenly Jack was standing next to her, rocking faintly on his heels and blinking around him as she had done a moment earlier.

  ‘Wow,’ he said. ‘That was amazing!’

  There wasn’t time to gawp at the scenery.

  ‘I’m going that way,’ Jaide said, pointing along the yellow brick road to the horizon. ‘You look around here.’

  ‘Don’t go far,’ warned Jack. ‘There could be other guards or traps.’

  ‘I’ll be careful. I won’t go out of sight.’


  Jack stared up at the strange yellow sky, devoid of a sun, and across at the blurred horizon. Then he put aside his amazement at being inside a painting to concentrate on the task at hand. Where would he hide a gold card if he was the one doing so? There weren’t many places, or at least not many he could see close by.

  First he tried the tree, peering around its roots and branches and into every knothole. Then he tried the ground around it, looking for signs that it had been dug up, but the ground was undisturbed. It didn’t even look like real soil. When he poked at it, it dimpled like rubber instead of crumbling.

  Next he tried the table on which the young woman who looked a bit like Grandma X was playing cards. There was nothing taped underneath and there were no visible drawers. The cards themselves were all ordinary cards, much too small to hide something made of solid gold. The young woman was wearing a voluminous yellow dress that Jack was afraid he might have to look under, but it, too, was rubbery like the ground and seemed solid all the way through. Her hair also had the same texture, close up. There was no way to hide anything there.

  A gleam of light caught his eye as he was examining her hair. There was something around her neck, something real: a silver locket suspended from a crimson ribbon, studded with tiny jewels. He peered closer, irrationally afraid that she might come to life if he tried to touch it. But she remained exactly as she was, a facsimile of someone, not alive in her own right.

  His fingers lifted the locket. It was real, not part of the painting. Thinking there might be a clue inside it, he untied the ribbon and pulled the locket free. It rested lightly in his hand, and opened easily when he flicked the clasp with a thumbnail.

  Inside was a lock of hair and a photo. The photo had once been black-and-white, but was now mostly brown. It showed the woman in the painting standing on a jetty, looking out to sea. Next to her was a young man with a broad, infectious grin below a moustache so fine it might have been drawn on with a pencil. Both wore old-fashioned clothes, but not as old as the woman in the painting, maybe early twentieth century. Behind them and to one side was the Portland lighthouse.