by Garth Nix
‘Don’t put it near your —’ Jack started to say. But he was too late. Jaide was already looking into it. ‘— eye.’
‘Oh, yeah. Anyway, it’s only a kind of kaleidoscope, but with letters.’ Jaide could see an endless stream of letters rather than random geometric patterns. ‘Just a whole lot of them, all mixed up . . . Hang on . . .’
‘What?’ asked Jack. He was eyeing a short, very highly polished silver sword that was thrust into a block of very dark, gnarly timber.
‘The letters spell something backward,’ said Jaide. ‘Write this down. Maybe it’s another message.’
‘Write with what?’
Jaide pointed to the desk on the mezzanine without looking away from the tube. Jack reluctantly left the sword and ran up the steps. There were lots of different kinds of paper on the desk, but most of the pens were the really ancient kind with nibs, and some were just cut feathers. Only after a quick hunt did he find a modern ballpoint pen.
‘Okay,’ he called out.
‘Write this down,’ instructed Jaide. ‘Ready? P-o-t-s-s-r-e-t-s- i-w-t-e-l-b-u-o-r-t- a-m-m-o-c-s-d-r- a-w-e-h-t-o-t-k-o-o-l.’
‘Okay, that says, “look to the wards comma troubletwisters stop,”’ said Jack, reading it backward. ‘Like an old telegraph. But what are the wards?’
‘Grandma X talked about wards,’ said Jaide thoughtfully. ‘Whatever they are, I think they’re meant to keep The Evil away. But she never said anything else about them.’
‘So what are these wards, Kleo?’ asked Jack. But the cat had disappeared again. Jack opened his mouth to repeat the question to Ari, just in time to see the ginger tom’s tail disappear under a leather chair.
Jack bent down to try to talk to the cat and accidentally knocked over a bronze cigarette lighter in the shape of an artillery shell that suddenly roared out a jet of fire four feet high. Jack dived out the way, and sheepishly emerged from under a table a second later, patting down his singed hair.
Jaide laughed, and backed into a globe of the world that spun around and discharged a ferocious spark of static electricity into her arm.
‘Ow!’
‘I told you. There are a lot of dangerous things in here,’ said Kleo’s voice from somewhere hidden. ‘You need to be careful.’
‘It’s not like we have any choice,’ said Jaide. ‘Grandma X could be dying up there! If you won’t tell us exactly what we can find to help us, then we’ll just have to keep looking.’
‘Kleo, I really think given the circumstances that the oath is flexible enough —’ Ari started to say from his position under the couch.
He didn’t finish. Eight of the dozen or more clocks in the room suddenly started to chime frantically, the needles on three barometers swung to Stormy, two flags unfurled, a mechanical drumming bear beat out a staccato alarm, and the crocodile skull chattered its teeth.
‘The Evil,’ warned Kleo, appearing from the inside of an ornate box with the lid on her head like a hat. Her back arched and she spat: ‘It’s got strong enough to pass the garden walls and gate!’
Jaide looked around, her heart pounding. They’d left the door open, and coming straight at them was Luger, the pit bull terrier that had chased them the day before. Its eyes were shining white, its jaws were foaming, and its skin was encrusted with cockroaches, which were somehow now joined to the beast, their heads buried under its skin.
‘Out of the way!’ Jack yelled. Jaide dodged aside as in one swift motion Jack picked up the cigarette lighter and pointed it at the dog. A jet of blue flame shot out at Luger, who fell back, his cockroach coat all writhing legs and flapping wings. Jaide dashed forward and slammed the door as Jack sent another blast of fire through the closing gap.
Jaide slammed the latch down. The clocks stopped their frantic chiming, but the mechanical bear kept up a slow, disturbing beat on his drum, and the barometers stayed set on Stormy.
‘Can The Evil get in here?’ asked Jaide. She looked around for the cats. ‘Come on – you really have to help us.’
Two cat heads appeared from under the couch. They both looked at Jaide, then Ari looked very intently at Kleo.
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake,’ said Ari. ‘The oath says “Wardens”, but these are very special circumstances, and these two are already more than your typical troubletwisters.’
‘I swore an oath, and I stand by it,’ Kleo said, then withdrew back under the couch. Her muffled voice continued from somewhere behind it. ‘I know you do not, Aristotle.’
‘Can you please just answer the question!’ snapped Jack.
‘Seeing as I have been cast as an oath-breaker already, I suppose I might as well,’ said Ari with a sharp look at Kleo. ‘Ultimately The Evil can get in here. But even withdrawn as she is, your grandmother’s power still inhabits this house. The Evil will not easily breach the defences.’
‘But if we’re stuck in this room, we can’t even check on Grandma!’
‘It is fortunate, then, that we’re not stuck here,’ said Ari. ‘Kleo, look out!’
Kleo poked her head out from under a rich tapestry depicting an elephant draped in robes and tassels, in the process revealing a hidden doorway.
‘What? Oh, Ari!’
‘Hey, thanks, Ari . . . and Kleo,’ said Jaide. The twins ran over to lift up the tapestry and looked at the steps behind it.
‘Where does this go?’ Jack asked. ‘We hunted all over the ground floor but we didn’t find the other door.’
‘That’s because the other end isn’t on the ground floor,’ said Kleo. She lifted her nose and haughtily stalked up the steps.
Jaide followed her up. The steps ended in a wooden panel. As Kleo trod on the third step below it, the panel slid silently back to reveal the third-floor landing of the house above them.
‘Uh, how can this come out on the third floor?’ Jaide asked cautiously. ‘It’s, like, thirty feet up, but there are only six normal steps.’
‘Architectural magic was one of your great-grandfather’s gifts,’ said Ari, who was coming up behind, careful to keep Jaide’s legs between him and Kleo. ‘It was enormously troublesome when he was a troubletwister himself. He kept losing his bedroom, I believe.’
Jaide stepped through the open panel, wondering what she’d feel as she did so. But it felt absolutely normal. She just emerged on the third floor next to Grandma X’s bedroom. However she had managed to cross the intervening space, it was no different from stepping across an ordinary threshold.
‘Wow,’ said Jack, jumping through and landing with a thud.
‘I’ll look in on Grandma,’ Jaide told him. ‘You check that the doors and windows on the ground floor are all closed and latched.’
‘I’ll help,’ said Ari with a cautious glance at Kleo, who ignored him.
Jack thundered down the stairs with Ari at his heels and the artillery shell cigarette lighter clutched tightly in one hand. Jaide and Kleo went into Grandma X’s room.
Kleo jumped up on the bed to sit at Grandma X’s feet. The old woman was lying on her side with her hands cupped under her head and her mouth parted. She looked almost childlike. Her worry lines and wrinkles had smoothed away, as though she was completely oblivious to the troubletwisters’ plight. Her eyes didn’t so much as flicker when Jaide touched her forehead to see if she had a fever. Her skin was as cool as marble. There was no way to tell how much longer she had before she couldn’t return. It might be hours, or minutes.
‘Maybe we should try to carry her to a doctor,’ Jaide said. ‘Or one of us could go —’
‘No mere human doctor can help her,’ Kleo said. ‘And if you leave the house now, The Evil will take you.’
‘So what can we do?’ asked Jaide. ‘We have to do something! Maybe we could —’
She stopped talking as the moonstone ring on Grandma X’s hand gave a tiny flash of light and the faint whistle of a breath came from between her lips.
‘Quiet!’ said Kleo urgently. The cat leaped to the bed board and leaned over Grandma X’s
face. ‘Listen.’
Jaide leaned in, too, till her head was touching Kleo’s ear.
‘Ward damaged,’ Grandma X whispered. ‘Root of problem . . . must . . . fix ward . . . Kleo . . . help them!’
Before Jaide could ask a question, the light in the moonstone ring faded. A soft breath came from Grandma X’s mouth, but if it carried any words, they were lost as Jack thundered back, out of breath.
‘There are hundreds of dogs outside! It’s horrible – they’re all white-eyed and they’ve got insects all over them and they’re completely quiet, just watching the windows and the doors. What are we going to do?!’
‘Grandma just told us a ward is broken,’ said Jaide. ‘She said we had to fix it.’
‘What?!’ Jack exploded. ‘We don’t even know what they are! How can we fix that?’
‘She also told Kleo to help us,’ said Jaide. She looked at Kleo very sternly. ‘You heard her, didn’t you?’
‘I’m not entirely sure that an oath made as a kitten, sworn in blood on a saucer, can be overturned by a mere instruction,’ Kleo said. She was about to go on when Ari suddenly stood up on his hind legs and gave a very nasty, hissing yowl. It gave Jaide and Jack a start, since Ari had always seemed so placid and under Kleo’s paw.
‘But then again,’ Kleo continued, both eyes warily on Ari, ‘I suppose that, taken with the circumstances, your heritage, her order . . . I have no choice but to obey.’
Ari backed down and made a playful strike at his own tail, which was curling toward his mouth.
Jaide never thought she could feel such relief simply from a cat actually doing what it was told.
‘So what are the wards?’ she asked. ‘And how do we fix a broken one?’
‘WE’D BEST GO BACK TO the blue room,’ said Kleo. ‘Everything you need is there, and there’s nothing more you can do here for your grandmother.’
Jaide took a look out the window before they left. As Jack had said, the house was surrounded by white-eyed dogs, whose shaggy coats writhed and crawled with the insects that were becoming part of them. But even worse than that, Jaide thought, was the way they all turned their heads at the same time and looked up at her window. The dogs weren’t just one breed – they were every breed. Hounds and poodles. Dobermans and dachshunds. German shepherds and pugs. It was as if every dog in town had been taken over by The Evil.
She couldn’t see any people at all, or hear any of the usual traffic noises. It was strangely quiet, save for the occasional patter of rain as a remnant squall from the storm blew over.
Grandma X didn’t move as Jaide brushed past the bed and headed for the door. She hated leaving her alone, but she felt a lot better knowing that her bedroom was little more than six steps away via the secret passage.
They went back down to the antique shop, where Kleo immediately started prowling around the room, diving over and under displays and peering into bookcases. ‘It’s here somewhere. Ari, can you help me?’
‘I would if you’d tell me what you’re looking for.’
‘That piece she bought last month – in the roll, remember? She said it would be for the troubletwisters’ room, when they were ready.’
‘Ah.’ The ginger head turned to consider the many alternatives. ‘Over here, I think.’ He disappeared into a half-open drawer and emerged a second later. ‘Yes. In here.’
Jack pulled open the drawer and found several long white fabric tubes, some as slender as wands, others as thick as a telescope. ‘Huh?’
‘That one,’ said Ari, tapping one of the smaller ones with an outstretched paw. ‘Unroll it.’
Jack did as he was told, revealing a square of embroidered tapestry that he held up to the light. Instead of Home SWEET HOME, it read:
SOMETHING GROWING
SOMETHING READ
SOMETHING LIVING
SOMEONE DEAD
‘What does that mean?’ Jack asked.
‘Every Warden knows this rhyme,’ said Kleo. ‘It’s one of the first things they learn.’
‘But what does it mean?’
‘The Evil comes from somewhere outside our world,’ explained Kleo. ‘But it can’t come through just anywhere. It needs to find weak points, where it is easier for it to reach out and find suitable hosts. Portland is one of those weak points and, as in other such places all around the globe, Wardens have made wards to reinforce its natural defences.’
‘Okay so far,’ said Jaide. ‘But what are these wards?’
‘The wards are magical barriers that hold back The Evil and prevent it coming through into our world. There are always four wards, one for each cardinal point of the compass. They come in many different shapes and guises, but the tapestry you hold describes their general type. There will always be “something growing, something read, something living, someone dead”.’
‘Fine,’ said Jaide. ‘So what are the four wards of Portland?’
Each cat looked at the other, waiting for an answer.
‘She never told me,’ said Ari. ‘What about you, Kleo?’
Kleo half-lidded her eyes. ‘She never told me, either.’
‘You don’t know?!’ exclaimed Jack. ‘That’s just great!’
‘If you can’t even tell us what the wards are,’ said Jaide, ‘how can we fix the broken one?’
‘I’m sure you can work it out,’ said Ari in an encouraging tone. His words were somewhat undermined by Kleo’s sniff. ‘That’s one of the things Wardens do. Very clever at finding things out, they are.’
‘We’re not Wardens . . . yet,’ said Jack. He didn’t say aloud that the odds were against their ever becoming proper Wardens. It was far more likely they were going to get absorbed by The Evil and lost forever.
‘But it’s true we’re good at working things out,’ said Jaide. ‘We got through the blue door, didn’t we?’
‘That is true,’ said Jack.
‘Are there any places Grandma X used to visit a lot?’ Jaide asked the cats. ‘I mean, more often than anywhere else? Any particular things she looked at?’
Kleo shook her head. ‘No.’
‘She usually inspected the wards in her spirit form,’ said Ari. ‘So no one could see where she went.’
‘You never followed her?’ asked Jaide. ‘Can’t you guys do that spirit-travelling thing, too?’
‘We could if we wanted to, I’m sure,’ said Kleo. ‘Not that we need spirit travelling to move about mysteriously.’
‘Your grandmother . . . ah . . . discouraged our perfectly natural curiosity,’ said Ari. ‘We had to eat dry food for a week the last . . . that is to say, we really, really don’t know where she went. You’ll have to find some other way to work out where the wards are.’
Jaide looked toward the door. The Evil was out there, in all those hideous dog-insect creatures. It could be spreading into more living things; it could be doing anything; maybe it was going to attack at any moment, and they were stuck and clueless and she could feel a terrible panic in her stomach, rising up to choke her —
‘She took us on a drive the day after we arrived, remember?’ Jack suddenly said. ‘She seemed distracted, like she felt something was up but didn’t know what it was. Maybe she was checking on the wards then, without us knowing.’
‘Yes!’ exclaimed Jaide. ‘Good thinking, Jack!’
‘We went to the cactus park,’ he said. ‘There was that really big, weird cactus there, the one she went right up to and looked at the top with her funny little binoculars.’
‘Yeah, I’d forgotten that,’ said Jaide thoughtfully. ‘I guess the cactus could be the “something living”?’
‘Or “something growing”. She also took us to Mermaid Point.’
‘That’s right. She said something about a giant —’
‘That it was a her, not a him.’
‘So maybe the rocks are the giant!’
‘Alive or dead?’
‘Either way, it fits.’
‘“Something read,”’ mused Jack, running a fing
er across the cable-stitched letters on the fabric before them. ‘What could that be?’
‘A sign?’
‘There are lots of those, even in Portland.’
‘A book?’
‘We didn’t go anywhere near the library.’
‘No, but Kleo’s owner has the bookshop around the corner from here.’
‘If the ward was one of his books, and he sold it, what would that mean for Portland?’
‘Okay, something else, then.’
‘It could be anywhere. We’ll never find it!’
‘Hang on! I wonder . . .’
Jaide was looking at a compass on the wall, an old brass compass with an internal card that had North, East, South and West written out in very large red letters, with all the lesser points in tiny black type.
‘I’ve just remembered,’ said Jaide slowly. ‘When I tried to help Grandma X with the storm, I could feel The Evil pressing in on us – but only from one direction, from the east. It was like we had walls around us on the other sides, so that east was the only direction it could attack us from.’
‘So it must be the East Ward that needs fixing,’ said Jack. ‘But east of what?’
‘This house,’ said Ari. ‘We know that much. The wards will be arranged around this central point.’
‘Where did she take us that’s east?’ asked Jaide.
‘The graveyard,’ said Jack. ‘And the lighthouse.’
As he said lighthouse, the crocodile skull started to chatter.
‘One brass plate, three inches by four, fixed by four two-eighth screws fashioned entirely from silver, the plate etched in acid, the words made clear.’
‘What does that mean?’ asked Jack.
‘Who knows?’ said Kleo. ‘That skull spouts off all the time.’
‘“The words made clear,”’ mused Jaide. ‘Words to be read, like the rhyme says? One of the wards?’
The crocodile skull laughed maniacally, its jaw moving so much that its vibration shuddered it off the table. It fell into a woven wastepaper basket, which muffled its cackling until it fell silent a few seconds later.
‘Words on a plate,’ said Jack. He bent down and very carefully retrieved the skull, making sure his fingers were not at risk. ‘Some of the stones in the cemetery had brass plates on them.’
