by Garth Nix
‘More of an explosive burst of fire,’ said Dr Scamandros. ‘Nothing that would kill a Piper’s child. If you do hear the Piper, keeping away would be advisable in any case.’
‘Great,’ muttered Leaf. ‘Do you know if I even need them? I’m not a Piper’s child, and I certainly wouldn’t survive an explosion in my ear hole.’
Dr Scamandros peered at Leaf.
‘Hmmm. I believe the Piper’s music has considerable power over mortals in general, given that is how he brought the children here in the first place,’ he said. ‘But since you are the Lieutenant Keeper, it would perhaps be a greater risk to wear the earplugs.’
‘Right,’ said Leaf. She took the earplugs out and put them in the stupidly small, tight pocket at the top of her white breeches.
‘Is the elevator that’s taking us up ready?’ asked Suzy.
‘Ah, I’m not sure,’ said Dr Scamandros. ‘I prepared one earlier to go to the Upper House, but Dame Primus didn’t tell me who it was for, or how many. It will need a little expansion—’
‘Orright, you nip off and expand it,’ said Suzy. ‘Giac, you go with ’im, give ’im a ’and.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ asked Giac.
‘A hand,’ said Suzy, forcing herself to pronounce the h.
Giac looked at his hands.
‘It means help him,’ said Leaf.
‘Oh, I knew that,’ said Giac. ‘Forgot!’
He hurried off after Dr Scamandros.
‘Where did you get Giac?’ asked Leaf.
‘Upper House,’ said Suzy. ‘’E’s a good sort. Bit forgetful. Needs his self-confidence built up a bit.’
‘So, where is Arthur?’ asked Leaf. ‘Last time I saw him was on Earth, but he was going back to the House.’
‘Tell you on the way to the elevator,’ said Suzy. She raised her voice and addressed the gathered Raiders. ‘Orright! We’re going to zip up to the Upper House and help Doc Scamandros and Colonel Giac open some elevators for the Army to come through. Likely we’ll be fighting Saturday’s lot and the Piper’s Newniths, but if we can make them fight each other, that’ll be better. Any questions?’
A Piper’s child near the front raised his hand.
‘What do ye call a Denizen with a sore foot?’
‘I dunno,’ said Suzy. ‘What do you call a Denizen with a sore foot?’
‘Well, I dunno either,’ said the Piper’s child. ‘That’s why I asked; I heard someone tell the first half of the joke in the elevator on the way up here but never the rest.’
‘Anyone?’ asked Suzy as Leaf groaned and ran her hand through her hair, unable to believe she was about to go on an incredibly dangerous mission with a bunch of ancient lunatics who looked like children and who all had the same sense of humor as a seven-year-old.
No one knew the actual punch line, though there were several suggestions, including ‘whatever you like, because they won’t be able to run fast enough to catch you’ and ‘an angler,’ which provoked questions about what fish had to do with sore feet and not very well received explanations about double meanings and ‘not being able to walk straight’.
‘Best ask Doctor Scamandros,’ Suzy concluded. ‘Any other questions? About what we’re going to do, I mean?’
She waited for a few seconds, but there were no more questions.
‘Let’s go, then,’ said Suzy with a negligent wave of her hand. The watching sergeants scowled as Suzy’s Raiders ambled off after her, in no particular order and with no one purposefully in step with anyone else.
As the crowd opened up a little, Leaf saw that in addition to their many and varied personal armaments – and some of them were liberally festooned with weapons – a trio of hooded-and-cloaked Piper’s children who’d come out from the shadow of the inner wall were pushing a small cannon and a wheelbarrow loaded with small Nothing-powder kegs and cannonballs. Suzy saw them too, and looked at Fred, who winked.
‘Guess they didn’t stay arrested,’ he said quietly.
Nineteen
THE HOUR HAND of the clock moved to the two as the minute hand passed twelve. Two hours had gone by since Elephant had left to climb the hill in search of the silver net and the Fifth and Sixth Keys.
Arthur sat cross-legged near the nine on the clock. He had been trying to distract himself by thinking of nice things, but had only become alarmed at how much of his own life had become hard to remember. Important memories – of his family life, his friends, the schools he’d been to – they were fading, and he could only remember them with great effort, tracking down scant threads of memory and binding them together.
He was afraid, but not of the puppets and the blinding that might be waiting in ten hours. Arthur was afraid because he felt his human life slipping away from him. Unless he really concentrated, he had difficulty even bringing an image of all his brothers and sisters into his head. Apart from Michaeli and Eric, whom he had seen most recently, he could not easily visualise the others, or recall such simple things as the exact colour of their hair.
He was concentrating on remembering his room in the old house, the one he’d lived in longest, when a very faint and distant noise distracted him. He stood up, the chains at their maximum extension, and listened.
The sound came again, and Arthur clenched his fists and strained against the chains. It was the trumpet call of Elephant, coming from far, far away. He sounded distressed and in pain. It came again twice more, weaker each time, then there was silence, save for the ticking of the clock.
‘Elephant!’ Arthur screamed, throwing himself at the rim of the clock. Golden blood streamed from his wrists as he raged against the chains, the manacles cutting deep even into his toughened skin.
But it was no use. Arthur could not shift the manacles or the chains, and at last he fell down and lay sobbing in a pool of his own blood, oblivious to the pain.
‘Elephant . . .’ he whispered.
I never should have sent you, he thought bleakly. I never should have brought you to life.
Slowly he staggered to his feet and stared up at the next terrace, hoping against hope that he would see a small yellow elephant appear on the crest and come stomping down towards him.
Elephant did not appear. But Arthur heard a humming noise, like but not exactly the same as the sound of one of Sunday’s dragonflies. He looked around urgently, but there was no dragonfly in sight.
The humming grew louder and louder, as if whatever made it was coming straight for him. Arthur turned wildly, chains clanking, as he tried to work out where and what it was.
Then he saw it. The silver net that Sunday had used to trap his Keys was zooming towards him, only a foot above the grass. Like some demented hovercraft, it whooshed down the slope, jumped the number twelve on the clock, and smashed into Arthur, knocking him to the ground.
Arthur grabbed it as it hit, but it flopped around in his grasp until it disgorged its contents – a mirror and a quill pen that leaped into his hands.
As Arthur touched the Fifth and Sixth Keys, he felt power flow into him, and all his self-doubts and fears were washed away. He stood up and, holding both Keys above his head, spoke in a deep and commanding voice that was only slightly reminiscent of his own.
‘Release me!’
He felt resistance in the sorcerous steel, and from the clock under his feet. The manacles shrieked like train wheels locked and sliding on wet rails, and fought against him. Arthur focused all his will, concentrated all his power, and spoke again.
‘Release me!’
One manacle popped open and fell to the clock, but the other, though it spun around and writhed under his glare, did not open. Arthur howled in frustration and hit it with the Sixth Key, shouting for the third time.
‘Release me!
’ The manacle exploded into droplets of molten steel that sprayed the lawn beyond the clock. Arthur dropped to his knees, gasping for breath, totally exhausted by the struggle.
But he only had a second before the trapdoor suddenly sprang
open and the woodchopper puppet vaulted out, swinging his axe at the boy.
Without thinking, Arthur blocked the blow by grabbing the puppet’s forearm, in the process dropping the Fifth Key.
He tried to wrest the axe away, but the puppet was unnaturally strong, as strong as Arthur himself, and the axe was actually part of its arm. Its wooden teeth clattered in manic laughter as its mate came out of the trapdoor and lunged at Arthur with an oversize corkscrew. As always, it aimed for his eyes.
Arthur suddenly let go of the woodchopper and, as the creature stumbled forward, stabbed him in the head with the point of the Sixth Key.
‘Drop dead!’ he yelled, and he felt a savage pain flow through his body and out into the puppet.
The woodchopper didn’t drop dead, but it fell back. Arthur kicked it into the corkscrew puppet, and both fell over. Before they could get up, Arthur picked up the loose chain and whipped it around their legs, crossed it back on itself, and then quickly wrote on a link with the Sixth Key.
‘Join,’ Arthur said as he wrote the word.
The chain joined together as the puppets scrabbled desperately to get their entwined legs out of the loops of steel.
Tighten, wrote Arthur, and the chain shrank around the puppets’ legs so that no matter how they pulled and struggled they could not get free.
‘See how you like it,’ said Arthur wearily. He picked up the mirror and staggered off the clock. The puppets rattled the chain angrily and glared after him, their over-large eyeballs rolling in their sockets and their teeth grinding.
Arthur took no more than a minute to get his breath and think, then he raised his head and shouted, careless of whoever might hear him.
‘I’m coming, Elephant!’
Arthur broke into a run, taking great strides. He knew he had very little time before Lord Sunday found out his prisoner was free. He had to find Elephant and the Will.
Next time I meet Lord Sunday, things will be different, Arthur thought.
The next terrace was similar to the one below, a green expanse bordered by flowering shrubs and dotted here and there with stands of trees and other carefully arranged and unusually colourful plants. Arthur ran through a border of chest-high red and pink azaleas, and across the well-tended lawn towards another set of steps cut into the slope that led to the next terrace beyond. But he was only halfway across when he heard the buzzing hum of a dragonfly.
He slowed and looked behind him. Even as he turned his head, he cried out in pain as he was struck by several arrows. One went through his right arm, and another through his chest. The heads were glass, shattering as they went in, sending Nothing-poison into his bloodstream.
The archers were on the back of a dragonfly that was now hovering almost directly above him.
Arthur roared in anger and pain, and raised the Fifth Key.
‘Burn!’ he shrieked, and a beam of intense light shot from the mirror. It hit the dragonfly, setting it on fire as it fell to the ground, the legs and wings still twitching. The Denizens aboard were crushed beneath the burning body of the huge dragonfly, and though they would probably survive, they’d be badly hurt for a long, long time.
Arthur only just managed to stop himself from firing more blasts. Instead he checked his wounds, ready to direct the Fifth Key to heal him. But he didn’t need to do anything. Reinforced by the power of the two Keys in his hands, his own body was already fighting back against the poison. Arthur watched in fascination as the Nothing was expelled back out through the holes in his skin, falling to the ground and dissolving grass and earth as it sank out of sight. Then his bronzed skin closed over, leaving no scar or sign of any hurt.
Arthur scanned the sky, but saw no more dragonflies. Yet he felt something touch him, a sensation like a hand suddenly reaching out and lightly tapping the top of his head. It was Lord Sunday, he knew, using the Seventh Key to see what was happening.
This meant there was even less time than he’d hoped. Arthur started running again. As he leaped up the steps, he tried to remember how many terraces were cut into the hill, and which terrace the clock was on.
But he couldn’t remember, and when he crested the slope to the next terrace, he saw that there was at least one more, and maybe another after that. Arthur increased his speed, crossing the slightly less wide lawn of this terrace at a speed that would have won him an Olympic gold medal in any sprint back home.
He was halfway up the rough stone steps on the other side when he ran into another one of Sunday’s guards. Instead of his feet meeting a step, the step rose up to smash into him. As he fell back down the hill, Arthur saw that he’d been struck by a cunning, camouflaged worm or serpent, one that had been disguised as the row of steps that extended up the next fifty feet of hill. The huge rough stones were, in fact, segments of its body. Now great coils of wormsnake were rolling down towards him, threatening to crush him where he lay.
Arthur flipped himself upright and jumped fifteen feet in the air, over the nearest coil, just as it smashed down where he’d been. The moment he landed, he looked around wildly, looking for the thing’s head. He couldn’t see it, and that alarmed him more than the huge coils of its body. They were relatively slow, but the head might be quick, with fangs roughly the same size as Arthur’s body.
A coil rolled towards him. This time Arthur raised the Fifth Key and once more thought of fiery light. But when the focused light hit the wormsnake, it was reflected in all directions, the white-hot beam breaking into a scattering of rainbows. The creature was barely scathed.
‘It’s rock,’ Arthur said to himself as he once again had to jump away. ‘Or crystal!’
Whatever it was made of, the wormsnake was also clever. Though Arthur still couldn’t see its head or tail, the coils were gathering around him, penning him in to a section of the lawn, and doubling around so that even with his prodigal strength he would not be able to jump past them.
Crystal reflects light, thought Arthur. But it also shatters when frozen!
He raised the Fifth Key and concentrated on it again, imagining incredible, intense cold, projected as a ray of particles that would instantly freeze the wormsnake.
‘Freeze!’ commanded Arthur, and the Fifth Key obeyed, sending a stream of cold against the wormsnake’s flank. But this too splashed over the creature without doing any apparent harm.
For the first time since Arthur had regained his Keys, he suddenly felt afraid, even as he readied the Sixth Key to use against the creature. Surely that had to work!
The wormsnake is the Architect’s creature, interrupted a voice inside his head – a voice that he instinctively knew must belong to Part Seven of the Will. Even though it was a mental communication, it sounded loud and close. It is one of the first things she made, and it is immune to the powers of all but the Seventh Key. But it is slow and stupid, so you—
Twenty
THIS IS THE PLAN,’ Suzy announced as the elevator began to rise. ‘So pay attention.’
Twenty-one Piper’s children stopped playing seven very different games involving nine entirely different decks of cards. Four ceased juggling wax-sealed cheeses. Thirty-three looked up from checking their weapons. Five woke up. Three stopped arguing about the relative merits of tea from Earth versus that from other worlds, or the kind formerly made in the Far Reaches out of Nothing.
Leaf stopped scratching Daisy’s pineapple-skin hide for a moment, but quickly resumed. It seemed to calm the huge creature, and in the limited space of the elevator, it was best if the beastwort remained still.
‘You listening?’ asked Suzy.
Everyone nodded.
‘When the elevator goes ping and the doors open, we rush out.’
‘Sounds good,’ said someone. ‘Easy to remember.’
Leaf shut her eyes and tried to remain calm.
‘There’s more to it than that,’ said Suzy. ‘Idiot.’
She looked over to Fred. ‘You and everyone from Elame will be one lot,’ she continued. ‘When the elevator goe
s ping, you go right. Leaf . . . Leaf!’
‘Yes!’ said Leaf, opening her eyes. ‘I’m listening.’
‘You take charge of everyone from Gowzer to Abidge. You go left.’
‘Right,’ said Leaf. ‘I mean okay, we go left. But shouldn’t someone else be in charge?’
‘You’re an Admiral, aren’t you?’ said Suzy. ‘And you got Daisy and the special sword.’
Leaf looked down at the sword and grimaced. ‘Only until I can hand it over to someone better suited to being Lieutenant Keeper.’
‘Bren, Shan, and Athan, you take the cannon out and set it up wherever looks good. I’ll take everyone else and we’ll go straight ahead. Doc and Giac, you come behind us and the first desks you get at, you start opening up elevators. The sooner they work, the sooner Old Primey can send up reinforcements.’
‘That’s it?’ asked Leaf. ‘Do we know exactly what we’re up against? I don’t even know what Saturday’s tower is like!’
‘Like I said before, we’re facing Newniths wearing heavy armour and leather wings, and waving around big slow swords. Or if they’re still Saturday’s lot, there’ll be a bunch of mid-level sorcerers. If it’s sorcerers, get in close and go for their umbrellas. If it’s Newniths, keep your distance from those swords. As for the tower, it’s just a tower, made up of lots of little office cubes. There’s lots of desks on the floor we’re going to. That’s about it. Oh, except there’s no outside walls, so don’t fall out.’
Suzy stopped talking. There was an expectant silence for a few seconds.
‘That’s it,’ she concluded. ‘Carry on.’
The Piper’s children resumed their previous activities. Leaf touched Suzy’s elbow.
‘What I don’t understand,’ she said, ‘is why Dame Primus is sending us to capture the elevator controls. I mean, surely it would be better to send soldier Denizens. They’re bigger and stronger and harder to kill—’
‘We’re sneakier and a lot smarter,’ said Suzy. ‘But that ain’t the reason. Old Primey reckons we can do it, but if you ask me, she hopes most of us will get finished off as well.’