Delivery to the Lost City

by P. G. Bell

  Oh, I don’t think we’ve seen the last of Suzy, Frederick thought. He filled the kettle and had just succeeded in manhandling it over to the fireplace, when the door to the stairs burst open and Suzy’s parents almost fell into the room.

  “She’s gone!” said Suzy’s mom.

  “I beg your pardon?” said Stonker.

  “Suzy,” said Suzy’s dad. “She’s not there. We looked everywhere.”

  “And there’s a window open!” said Suzy’s dad.

  Stonker’s eyebrows shot up his forehead, and the tips of his mustache bristled. “You don’t think…,” he began.

  “That she fell overboard!” said Suzy’s mom. “We have to go back and look for her. She could be drowning!”

  “Or what if she fell over the edge of the world?” said Suzy’s dad.

  Stonker threw himself at the brake lever, and the Belle’s drive wheels let out a pained screech. The sudden deceleration almost threw them all to the floor.

  “Frrrrowlf!” said Ursel.

  “Yes, we’ll go back,” said Stonker. “If Suzy’s gone overboard, we’ll find her. Ursel here’s an excellent swimmer.”

  “Fromf.” Ursel nodded.

  Frederick watched them busy themselves with the controls, while Suzy’s parents clung to one another helplessly. He had been ready to enjoy watching them panic, but now that it was actually happening, he realized it was just making him feel guilty. Suzy’s parents both looked scared and pale, and their eyes shimmered with tears. Stonker and Ursel, meanwhile, were stony-faced and grimly determined. This wasn’t half as much fun as he had imagined it would be, and reluctantly, he realized he was going to have to do something about it.

  “Call off the search,” he said. “Suzy’s not drowning, and she hasn’t gone over the edge of the world. At least, not in the way you’re thinking.”

  The others all looked at him sharply.

  “What are you talking about?” said Stonker.

  “She’s not on the train,” said Suzy’s dad.

  “I know,” said Frederick. His resolve was beginning to crumble under their hard stares, and he backed unconsciously away from them. “I never said she was still on the train.”

  “Then where is she?” demanded Suzy’s mom, her voice pinched.

  Frederick backed into the wall. “I’ll tell you,” he said. “But you’re not going to like it.”

  10

  THE COLOR OF NOTHING

  Suzy stared out of the H.E.C.’s window into the void. She was captivated. Its darkness wasn’t that of outer space or of the tunnels between the Impossible Places. It felt deeper somehow, more endless. And it had edges.

  Suzy had no idea how such a thing could be possible, but she could see them—a jagged web of sharp angles bisecting the darkness, as though the void were an enormous three-dimensional puzzle made up of interlocking tiles. And perhaps it was just her perspective shifting as the H.E.C. sailed through them, but the tiles seemed to tilt and slide against one another until they formed new shapes through which she glimpsed flashes of reality—snowcapped mountains, a forest of walking trees, thunder dragons dueling in the skies above Cloud Forge … Each shape was a window into a different world, but as quickly as they formed, they broke up again, and the images vanished.

  After a while, she found it quite hard to look at and turned instead to the small folding table on which the Chief had unrolled the phantom map. Wilmot was trying to take some measurements from it with a pair of compasses, but they kept passing straight through it.

  “Even if you could make any marks on it,” said Suzy, “the book would just suck them straight up.”

  Wilmot sighed and put his compasses away. “Good point,” he said. “Chief? Have you got any suggestions?”

  The Chief laughed. “The best way through the void is to navigate by sight.”

  “How?” said Suzy. “Everything out there keeps moving.”

  “So it does, my dear. But it’s not entirely random, and there are patterns to be found, if you know how to look for them. Excuse me a moment while I check the stern.” He rose up until his head and shoulders passed through the ceiling. Suzy scrambled by Wilmot and peered out of the rear window. The kaleidoscope of the void aligned into a fractured vision of blue waters and golden sands for a few seconds before the Chief descended again.

  “As I thought, the Topaz Narrows are still visible behind us,” he said. “We can use them as a reference to chart our heading.”

  Wilmot hunkered down over the map. “We blasted off from this point here,” he said, jabbing a fingertip through the spectral fabric. “And we need to be heading for this.” He jabbed a second finger down through the dark stain of the void storm. The Chief peered over his shoulder, then bobbed back up through the roof. They watched his body turn this way and that for a minute before he rejoined them.

  “Take us three degrees starboard, Postmaster,” he said. “And lower our angle of descent a little. That should get us there.”

  With a grin, Wilmot turned to the controls and began altering their course. “I’ll take us up to maximum speed,” he said. “We’ve no time to waste.”

  The engines throbbed beneath the floor, and the Chief drifted to Wilmot’s side. “Thundering typhoons, is that our speed?” he exclaimed, watching the speedometer’s needle creep around the dial. “Why, that’s twenty times faster than LA ROUQUINE’S best effort.”

  “The H.E.C. is top of the range,” said Wilmot proudly. “It should only take us an hour to reach the void storm. From there, we’ll have a little less than seven hours left to find Hydroborea.”

  “The wonders of technology,” said the Chief. “I’ve got so much to catch up on, but may I say what a pleasure it is to be voyaging again.” He glowed a little brighter as the warmth of his smile spread through his body. “We’re alone out here now, but in my day, you could look out from the helm and see the void speckled with hundreds of lights, like tiny stars. All the ships and flotillas making their way along the trade routes.” His glow flickered. “How I miss it.”

  Suzy looked out into the void again and tried to picture it. In her imagination, at least, it looked very beautiful. “Do you think we’ll actually make it?” she asked.

  Wilmot raised his eyebrows. “To the center of the void storm?” He thought for a moment. “Yes,” he said. “We have to. The future of the Express and the Ivory Tower both depend on it.”

  “And what do you think we’ll actually find there?”

  “That,” he said, “is a really good question.”

  * * *

  Time passed slowly. Seven hours hardly felt long enough to find a city that had been lost for thousands of years, and Suzy quickly grew restless. She began to wish she’d brought a book with her but then remembered that, even if she had, its pages would all be blank by now, and she’d still be left with nothing to distract her. Plus, she’d have ruined a perfectly good book.

  Wilmot, meanwhile, had removed The Book of Power from his satchel and, along with the Chief, was plying it with questions. The book wasn’t being especially cooperative.

  “So, who wrote you?” asked Wilmot.

  “I have many authors,” the book replied.

  “Are you a work of fiction or nonfiction?” the Chief asked.

  “I am both,” said the book. “And more.”

  Wilmot cupped his chin in his hand. “And what exactly do you do with all these words you suck up? Are they your food?”

  “They add to my power,” said the book. “It is the stuff of which I am made.”

  “Magical power, I’ll wager,” said the Chief. “Forged in the Gilded Tower by the great magicians of old.” When the book didn’t answer, he said, “Tell us, were you really there in the first days of Hydroborea, before the Union was formed?”

  “I was,” said the book.

  Wilmot gasped and sat forward. “And are all the legends true?”

  “Some of them,” said the book.

  “Are the buildings really made
of gold?” Wilmot asked. “Is the sky a thousand different colors? Does it never rain?” His eagerness was contagious, and Suzy slid into the seat behind him, not wanting to miss a word. A moment passed in silence.

  “Well, don’t leave us in suspense,” said the Chief. “A good book is supposed to be entertaining, y’know.”

  “I am a good book,” the book replied, somewhat testily. “But I cannot share my contents until I am unbound.”

  The Chief puffed his cheeks out. “Well,” he said. “I look forward to discovering your fine city and its people.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Suzy. “How can you discover a city if there are already people living there?”

  “Why, because it’s completely unknown, of course. Uncharted.”

  “But not to the people who live there,” she pointed out. “They know exactly where it is.”

  “Well, of course they do,” said the Chief. “But are they actually looking for it?”

  Suzy thought about this for a moment. “I suppose not.”

  “Which means they can’t very well discover it, can they?” said the Chief.

  Suzy shook her head. “Are you sure this is how discovery works?”

  “My dear young thing, if we explorers weren’t allowed to discover things that people already knew about, we’d never discover anything at all. And then who would explain all the far-flung corners of reality to you?”

  Suzy frowned. “The people who live there?”

  The Chief chuckled. “Such a quaint idea.”

  Suzy still wasn’t convinced and was about to say so when she spotted the winking light on the console. She nudged Wilmot. “Is that a good or bad light?” she asked.

  Wilmot handed her the book and bustled over to the console. He frowned. “I’m not sure,” he said. “It’s either the proximity alert, which means we’re approaching the void storm, or it’s a reminder to change the windshield wiper fluid.”

  At that moment, the H.E.C. was rocked by a powerful shudder that sent them all reeling.

  “We’re approaching the void storm,” he said.

  They all rushed to the front window, and Suzy gasped—the storm was a blizzard of black glass shards. Razor-sharp fragments of nothingness swirled together in a furious maelstrom so gargantuan, she couldn’t see the edges of it. Black lightning flared where the shards crashed together, imprinting broken pictures of a hundred different worlds on Suzy’s eyes.

  Another blow struck the H.E.C. and she felt a rush of excitement, followed quickly by one of fear. They had made it this far, but the storm looked every bit as fearsome as the Chief had predicted. The H.E.C. suddenly felt very small and vulnerable.

  Wilmot’s hands danced over the controls. “I’ll do my best to hold us steady,” he said. “Chief? What do we do now?”

  The H.E.C. lurched to one side, throwing Suzy and Wilmot to the floor. Only the Chief, floating freely in the air, remained upright. Suzy’s stomach plunged, and she realized they were caught in the storm’s grip. They were being spun helplessly out of control.

  The Chief rubbed his hands together in anticipation. “Stand ready, crew. Man the tiller and lower the topsail.”

  “We don’t have a topsail!” said Wilmot, fighting to regain his feet as the H.E.C. pitched and yawed beneath them.

  “Oh.” The Chief stroked his beard. “Well, point us into the wind at any rate. We won’t get far as long as it’s broadsiding us like this.”

  Wilmot adjusted the controls and brought the nose of the H.E.C. around. Their dreadful rolling motion evened out and was replaced by a violent shaking that made Suzy’s vision blur.

  “Is this better or worse?” she shouted over the noise.

  “Possibly both,” the Chief replied. “We’re pushing back at last, but we’ll have to hope this vessel can hold together long enough to get us through. The storm’s hitting us with everything it’s got.”

  Indeed it was. Suzy could hear the H.E.C. creak and groan all around her, and the ceiling light flared and dimmed.

  At the same moment, something big flashed outside the window, so close they almost collided with it. It went by too quickly for Suzy to get more than a glimpse, but she got a fleeting impression of broken timbers and ragged canvas.

  “What was that?” she cried.

  “What was what?” said Wilmot, his attention still fixed on the controls.

  Before Suzy could formulate an answer, another shape tumbled past outside, spinning like a pinwheel, but this time she saw it clearly. It was an old-fashioned sailing ship, its mast broken and its wooden ribs exposed. Suzy pressed her face to the window and watched the storm sweep it away. “They’re old void ships,” she said. “Like La Rouquine.”

  “Old wrecks like La Rouquine,” the Chief said, joining her at the window. More shipwrecks appeared in the maelstrom, tossed and tumbled like broken toys. “These are the last resting places of all the brave explorers who came before us. And we need to push harder unless we want to share their fate.”

  “We’re at full power already!” said Wilmot. “I don’t want to overload the engines.”

  Sparks burst from the wiring on the walls, and a gout of steam erupted from between the cushions of the pullout sofa.

  I’m so glad I wasn’t sitting there, thought Suzy. She cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted to Wilmot, “I don’t think we can last much longer! Just do it!”

  Wilmot steeled himself and twisted a dial all the way over into the red. The H.E.C. bucked like a mule, and the groaning sounds increased. It sounded as though a rain of sledge hammers was striking the hull. The Chief shot up and stuck his head through the ceiling.

  “That’s it, Wilmot,” he said, returning a moment later. “Keep nudging us to port and batten down the hatches. It’s about to get really bad.”

  Wilmot’s mouth dropped open. “You mean this isn’t really bad?” he said.

  “Oh, my dear boy, you’ve seen nothing yet!” the Chief replied. “We’re in the teeth of the monster. We either beat it, or it devours us. There’s no backing out now.”

  A look of fear flitted over Wilmot’s face, but it was gone in an instant. “Right,” he said. “Hold tight, everyone.” He set his jaw and made another small adjustment to the controls. A second later, the H.E.C. suffered a blow that sent it tumbling end over end. Suzy didn’t have time to process what was happening before she hit the ceiling. Then she was rolling away again, across the back wall, the floor, the front window. She collided with Wilmot, and something hard struck her shoulder. It was the Chief’s skull, and she grabbed it out of the air.

  “Wilmot, what’s happening?” she shouted. If he replied, she didn’t hear him, as the H.E.C. flipped again and she fell the full length of the caravan, landing on her back on the rear window and striking her head. Everything went dark, and for a terrifying moment, she thought the end had come, until she realized the light fitting had blown. The caravan was now lit only by bursts of sparks, the madly blinking lights of the console panel, and the glow of the Chief.

  “We’re almost there,” the Chief shouted. “Just a little farther!”

  “All our systems are critical!” Wilmot shouted back. “They won’t take much more!”

  As if in confirmation, smoke began issuing from the cabinet beneath the control console, filling the H.E.C. with the stink of burning plastic. It caught in the back of Suzy’s throat, making her retch, and Wilmot doubled over, his eyes streaming.

  Suzy lurched to his side, trying to help, when a piercing white light cut through the blur of tears and smoke. It came from outside the H.E.C., and the Chief raised his voice in triumph.

  “We’ve done it!” he cried. “We’re at the eye of the storm. Well done, shipmates!”

  Suzy wiped the tears from her eyes and saw that he was right. They had entered a pocket of stable void at the heart of the tempest, and running through it, like the twist of color in the middle of a marble, was a jagged fork of frozen lightning that pulsed and flared like a living thing.


  Wilmot relaxed his grip on the console as the H.E.C. stabilized. “What is that?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” said Suzy. “But it’s beautiful.”

  “It is a fracture in reality,” said the Chief. “A tear in the fabric of existence itself. They’re extremely rare. They can only happen in the void, and I’ve never seen one anywhere near this size before.” He put his hands on his hips as he admired the phenomenon. “Why, it’s big enough to swallow an armada. Or a city! Or—”

  “Or a world?” Suzy said. She picked the book up with both hands and held it at eye level. “We’ve come all this way, so you might as well tell us,” she said. “Is this where Hydroborea used to be?”

  The book was silent.

  “Come on!” she said, shaking it in frustration. “We’re risking our lives to help you, so why not help us for once? Are we in the right place?”

  The book gave a long, weary sigh that sounded like the rustling of pages. “Yes,” it said. “This is where my world once stood.”

  Despite the smoke and the stench, Suzy smiled. “Thank you,” she said. “Now we know where to go next.”

  “We do?” said Wilmot.

  “Yes,” she replied. “Through there.” She pointed out the front window at the fracture. “Whatever happened to Hydroborea, I bet we’ll find it wherever that thing leads.”

  Wilmot reviewed the console’s warning lights uneasily. “I don’t know if we can,” he said. “The H.E.C.’s already taken as much punishment as it can handle.”

  “Can it survive the trip back out through the storm?” asked the Chief.

  Wilmot’s ears drooped. He shook his head.

  “Then we don’t have any choice,” said Suzy. “We take our chances in the fracture.”

  Wilmot took a moment to straighten his lapels and brush a few flecks of smut from the peak of his cap. “All right,” he said. “Hold tight and keep everything crossed. We’re going in.” He flicked a few switches, there was another belch of smoke from beneath the console, and the H.E.C. leaped forward again, rushing toward the fracture.