Mystery of the Golden Card

by Garth Nix

  . . . the worried faces of Jack and Jaide . . .

  She sat bolt upright, startling the regal cat sleeping at her side, tucked under the sheet so a passing nurse wouldn’t see her. The feeling that had woken her from her artificial slumber was startlingly clear. It was also unexpected and urgent. She was needed, and needed badly.

  There was no phone by the bed, but she didn’t require one. She was awake now. Fully awake. Soon, her powers would return, and until then she was sure there was an ambulance she could borrow.

  ‘A mother,’ Grandma X whispered to Kleo as she swung her legs out of bed and began looking for her clothes, ‘never abandons her son.’

  ‘Run, kids!’ yelled Rodeo Dave. ‘Run!’

  ‘No!’ Jack protested. ‘His eyes are normal. He can’t be Evil. This can’t be happening!’

  Hector Shield bent forward and pulled down his bottom eyelid. Around what looked like perfectly normal brown eyes was a ring of white.

  ‘Contact lenses!’ gasped Jaide.

  ‘But you can’t be in here,’ said Jack, clinging to one last piece of hope. ‘The wards will drive you out.’

  ++You would like to believe so, troubletwister, wouldn’t you?++

  To Jack’s horror, the hideous parody of his father did another gleeful jig inside the wards’ invisible boundary. And only then did the twins realise what had changed when Hector Shield had used the card. The wards had failed.

  As though from very far away, they heard Rennie cry out in pain.

  ++Come to us now,++ said The Evil, raising the card and studying the symbols flashing once again across its face. ++This family reunion is long overdue.++

  ++Indeed it is,++ said a voice to their right. ++Put the card down and step away from the troubletwisters.++

  ‘Grandma!’ cried the twins. For it was her, as young and beautiful as she always looked in her spectral form, standing just yards away.

  ++You can’t tell us what to do,++ snarled The Evil. ++We are beyond your authority.++

  It thrust the card at Grandma X’s image, and a psychic whip lashed out at her, sending her reeling.

  ++Stop, H—!++

  With a cry of pain, she vanished.

  Aghast, the twins stared at The Evil as it turned, gloating, to face them again. It raised the card to attack them in turn.

  ‘Rourke!’ cried a voice from above. A blue-winged shape flashed in front of Hector Shield and snatched the gold card out of his grasp. ‘Repel boarders!’

  ++No!++

  ‘Cornelia!’ Jack cried in amazement. ‘Good bird!’

  ‘Everybody run!’ shouted Rodeo Dave. ‘Get back to the castle!’

  He turned to face Hector Shield, who was advancing upon the older man with his teeth bared in a furious expression the twins had never before seen on their father’s face. There were lines of white around his eyes, where he had dislodged the camouflage lenses.

  ++The wards are gone, and you are old and feeble, Warden. The castle will offer no protection to the children. Come to us! We don’t need the card to deal with you.++

  ‘Go!’ ordered Rodeo Dave before either twin could ask him about what The Evil meant about him being a Warden. ‘It can’t be very strong or it would have taken us already. Take Zebediah! Go!’

  Powerless and terrified by the defeat of their father and grandmother, the twins had no choice but to obey. Zebediah’s doors were open, and Jack ran to the passenger side, nearly treading on the two halves of Professor Olafsson where they lay in the mud. He scooped them up and jumped into Zebediah’s expansive front seat. The doors slammed shut behind them, the engine roared, and Jaide took the wheel as the mighty car leaped forward.

  The pieces of Professor Olafsson stared up at Jack from where they lay in his lap, frozen in shock, mirroring the exact way Jack felt.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ said Jack.

  ‘Dad being Evil or Rodeo Dave being a Warden?’ Jaide couldn’t believe either shocking revelation herself.

  ‘Everything!’ he exclaimed. ‘The wards are down, and it’s all our fault!’

  ‘If the card had only done what it was supposed to do . . .’ Jaide suppressed a sudden feeling of panic that her Gifts might be gone for good.

  Jack remembered Professor Olafsson asking them if they knew what translocate meant. He raised the two halves of the plaster mask and, figuring he had nothing to lose, pressed them firmly together.

  Professor Olafsson sprang back into life with a start.

  ‘Good grief,’ he said. ‘Where am I? What caused this terrible headache?’ His rolling eyes caught sight of Jack. ‘Oh, yes. I remember now. The Warden who found me in the castle and asked for my advice. He’s an old man now but I still recognised him . . . eventually. It must’ve been he who hid the card in the first place, set the booby traps and everything!’

  ‘What?’ asked Jack. ‘Rodeo Dave can’t be a Warden! And why would he hide the card? What does it do?’

  ‘To translocate something is indeed to move it somewhere else. Judging by the way the card affected you two, I’d say it moves not things, but Gifts.’

  ‘But The Evil said that it has our Gifts now, or will soon,’ said Jaide. ‘That they’re in the card!’

  ‘That sounds like a reasonable hypothesis. For the Divination of Potential Powers and Safekeeping Thereof . . . although it’s not usual for cards to hold more than one Gift at a time. Perhaps this one is special because it holds the Gift of Translocation, which gives the Warden who possesses it the power to take other Wardens’ Gifts.’

  ‘Who would want a gift like that?’ asked Jaide.

  ‘The Gift chooses the Warden, not the other way around.’ Professor Olafsson stared at her out of the corners of his eyes. ‘This card must not fall into The Evil’s hands again or it will have all the Gifts it contains, as well as the ability to steal more. That’s what makes it so valuable as a weapon.’

  Jaide brought the car around the estate. She had lost sight of Cornelia momentarily behind the castle. As they passed the menagerie, there was no sign of Tara or Kyle.

  ‘How can we get our Gifts back out of the card?’ asked Jaide.

  ‘I suppose you would do the same thing you did before, only backwards.’

  ‘Yes, but how exactly?’

  Professor Olafsson shrugged with his eyebrows.

  Zebediah bounced in and out of a deep rut. As they came up the other side, Jaide saw the golf buggy accelerating towards them, headlights burning with a cold, Evil light. There was no driver behind the steering wheel.

  ‘Look out!’ cried Jack.

  Jaide wrenched the wheel as hard as she could. The buggy turned in the same direction, and the vehicles collided head-on. Jack and Jaide were flung forward onto the floor. The two halves of the death mask flew apart. Zebediah’s engine coughed and died with a hiss, its radiator pierced by one of the steer horns on its grill.

  The twins picked themselves up and tried the doors. Jaide’s was stuck, but Jack opened his fine. The Evil buggy was a twisted mess of metal and plastic. As they stepped out of the car, the buggy twitched as though still trying to get at them.

  ++Come to us, troubletwisters. Be one with us!++

  They ran for the castle.

  ‘Cornelia?’ called Jack, scanning the skies. The torrential rain made it hard to see anything. ‘Cornelia, where are you?’

  They heard a faint ‘Rourke’ from up ahead.

  ‘Jack? Is that you?’

  ‘Over here!’ That didn’t sound like Cornelia, but it didn’t sound Evil, either.

  Tara and Kyle came running towards them out of the rain.

  ‘What are you doing?’ asked Jaide.

  ‘Trying to round up the menagerie animals,’ said Kyle. ‘Their eyes went really weird, and then Chippy opened his cage somehow and they all ran away—’

  ‘Chippy?’ asked Jack.

  ‘One of the monkeys. They all have names. I visit them sometimes, when Dad lets me.’

  ‘Which way did they run?’ Ja
ide asked.

  ‘That way,’ said Tara. ‘We were following when we heard you.’

  ‘Let’s go,’ said Jaide, leading the charge.

  They ran around the curving moat, and the drawbridge came into view. Next to it was the strangest thing Jack had ever seen: a giant creature made up of all the menagerie animals combined into one. The warthog and the zebra were at the bottom, holding up the lemurs and jackal, which in turn held up the wolves, on whose backs rode both chimpanzees, with all the forest creatures mixed in for good measure. It looked a bit like a gymnastic pyramid, but for the fact that it moved as one. Even through the rain, Jack could see how the fur mixed and mingled, creating a terrible hybrid of all of them at once.

  The chimps were at the tip of two reaching limbs that swayed and clutched at something in the sky, gibbering excitedly.

  ‘Cornelia!’ shouted Jack.

  ‘Rourke!’ The macaw was a blue speck staying just out of reach of the monster.

  Jaide was amazed. ‘Why is she still herself? Why hasn’t The Evil taken her over?’

  ‘The card must be protecting her,’ said Jack. ‘We have to help her!’

  Cornelia was struggling to stay out of reach of The Evil. With the gold card heavy in her claws and her feathers full of water, it was amazing she was flying at all. But without their Gifts, what could the twins do?

  ‘What’s happening?’ asked Kyle, his eyes wide with horror.

  ‘I remember,’ said Tara in an amazed voice. ‘How could I forget? These guys are like superheroes. Kyle, wait until you see what they can do!’

  ‘We’re not anything at the moment,’ said Jack, thinking furiously. They couldn’t attack The Evil directly, but there might be another way, by luring it to the cross-continuum conduit constructor. If they could get The Evil to touch it, it would be sucked into the painting and there might be a way to trap it.

  ‘Cornelia,’ he called, ‘go to the library! We’ll meet you there!’

  ‘Aye-aye,’ she squawked back, banking sharply towards the window they had left open on the second floor. The motley creature lunged for her, lost its balance, and toppled with a roar into the moat.

  ‘That’s our chance,’ said Jaide. ‘Let’s go!’

  They ran across the drawbridge, dodging mutated limbs that reached up for them from below. They passed under the portcullis, which Jaide briefly considered trying to close. It looked merely decorative, though, so she kept running. When they were through the front door, Jack slammed it behind him and locked it with the skeleton key.

  ‘What . . . what was that thing?’ asked Kyle, his face pale.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Jack. ‘Don’t worry about it.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it? If my dad was here, he’d go mental. So would the Peregrinators. They’d never stop talking about it! That’s if it didn’t kill everyone first.’

  ‘You can’t tell them,’ said Jaide. ‘It’s a secret.’

  ‘There’s this guy,’ said Tara. ‘Big beard . . . deep voice . . .’

  She was getting vague and sluggish again. Jaide tugged her down the corridor after Jack, with Kyle bringing up the rear.

  ‘Is this something to do with the treasure?’ he called after them. ‘Did you find it?’

  ‘We’ll tell you later,’ Jaide lied.

  As they ran for the library, they heard the distinctive tramp tramp of marching metal feet.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Jack. ‘That’s just a booby trap to stop people stealing the, uh, treasure. Rodeo Dave must’ve switched it back on again.’

  But as they rounded the last corner, it wasn’t the usual sort of armour they saw at the far end of the corridor. It was one of the leather suits from the hidden basement, covered with golden serpents. A ghostly white light shone from its eyepieces.

  ++Your father is ours,++ said The Evil. ++He has been all along. Join him now and give us the Card of Translocation, and we will spare your friends. If not, they will all die.++

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The Wrong Gifts

  ‘IT’S LYING,’ SAID JAIDE.

  ‘I know,’ said Jack.

  ‘That voice,’ said Tara with a shudder. ‘I dream about it sometimes . . .’

  Jack judged the distance to the library door. If they were quick they might just make it, and if they got there first they could retrieve the golden card from Cornelia and start fighting back. ‘Let’s go!’

  They sprinted for the door. Jack, normally the fastest runner, took the lead, but he was soon overtaken by Tara, thanks to her slightly longer legs. Once again Kyle fell behind, and Jaide slowed to help him along even though she could see the armour lumbering rapidly towards them, picking up speed with every step. Jack felt as though he was running right for the waiting armour, its arms opening wide to catch them, but when it was still some yards away he and Kyle took the turn through the doorway, feet skidding on the dusty floor, barely staying upright.

  Jack looked wildly around for Cornelia.

  The library was exactly as they had left it, with the two ordinary suits of armour standing on either side of the painting, the cross-continuum conduit constructor directly in front of it, and books scattered everywhere.

  ‘Cornelia!’ Jack shouted, struck by the sudden fear that someone – or something – had got her.

  His torch picked out a flash of blue wings fluttering towards him.

  ‘Mind the yardarm,’ she squawked, letting the gold card drop heavily into his hands, then flew to her usual perch on top of the statue of Mister Rourke.

  Jack caught the card with both hands and turned it over to examine it from all angles. Now what? He’d got this far, but what could he do next? He didn’t have a Gift anymore. Would the card even listen to him?

  There was more skidding behind him as the others followed in his footsteps. Tara and Kyle turned to look at the armour as it reached the doorway and came to a complete halt.

  Only Jaide didn’t stop. She kept running, following a wild guess, right up to the nearest of the booby-trapped suits of armour. Without hesitation, she rapped twice on its chest.

  ‘That thing’s Evil and it’s after us,’ she said, pointing, ‘and we’re troubletwisters so you have to help us!’

  The armour came grindingly to life. It looked at its neighbour and seemed to confer with it.

  ‘Don’t take too long. It’s right behind us!’

  The armour inclined its head, and the other nodded, too. Clenching their fists, they moved forward to tackle The Evil head-on.

  Armour clashed with a sound of metal meeting leather. Jaide stepped hurriedly away from them, leading the others to the base of the spiral staircase.

  ‘What did I tell you?’ said Tara to Kyle. ‘They can do anything!’

  Kyle was staring at the card. ‘Is that real gold?’

  Tara’s confidence washed away Jack’s uncertainty. Gift or no Gift, they were still troubletwisters. And now that they had the Card of Translocation, he could get their Gifts back.

  He raised the card. Symbols were flicking across its surface, almost too quickly to see.

  ‘Give me my Gift back,’ he told it.

  Something crackled through the skin of his fingers and rushed up his arms, making his hair stand on end and his legs go weak. He felt instantly complete, but weirdly, his eyesight didn’t change. The shadows were still impenetrable. Maybe it took time to settle back in, he told himself.

  ‘Did it work, Jack?’ asked Jaide.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. Things did look a little different, but not in the way he had expected. Everything around him seemed to be growing taller, including Jaide, Tara, and Kyle.

  ‘I think I’m shrinking,’ he said.

  ‘No, you’re not,’ said Tara. ‘You’re sinking!’

  He looked down at his shoes, which were already up to the laces in the library’s stone floor, as if he was being sucked into quicksand. He lifted one foot, and then put it down and lifted the other. All that happened was that he sa
nk even further, up to his shins.

  ‘You’ve got the wrong Gift,’ said Jaide.

  ‘What use is this?’ Jack gasped out in frustration. The floor was up to his knees now. If it continued, he would soon be in the basement – and what happened if he kept falling? Would he go right down to the centre of the Earth?

  With a weird, slippery sensation, the gold card fell through his fingers and clattered to the floor. Jaide snatched it before Kyle could.

  ‘Here,’ said Tara, offering Jack a hand. ‘I’ll pull you up.’

  But her hand went right through his without even slowing down.

  Panic was rising in Jack as fast as the floor. He told himself to keep calm and breathe slowly. This was a Gift like any other. He could presumably learn to control it. Someone must have, after all, before it had ended up in the card.

  He concentrated on making himself solid again, but a sudden pain warned him off that route. What would happen if flesh and stone tried to occupy the same place at the same time? Instead he thought about just his hands, and bent down and pushed against the floor. That worked. He could feel the stone distinctly against his skin. With an awkward push-up move, he brought his legs up out of the stone, concentrated on his feet, and managed to stand without slipping down again. It took constant focus, but he could do it.

  Jaide studied the symbols flashing by on the card.

  ‘You obviously have to pick the right one,’ she said.

  ‘Can I have a Gift, too?’ asked Tara. ‘I’d love to be able to walk through walls.’

  ‘I’d like to be invisible,’ said Kyle.

  ‘Hang on,’ said Jaide, concentrating on a symbol she recognised: two connected curves like a kid’s drawing of a bird, with squiggly lines underneath that might represent air. She had seen something like that the first time Grandma X had shown them the cards.

  That was the best lead she had to go on, so the next time she saw it, she tapped the card like The Evil had and cried ‘Give me that one!’ in a loud voice before it could flash away.