by P. G. Bell
But it was too late. The newspaper seller saw them approaching and clapped a hand to his forehead. He seemed too astonished to speak, so just pointed a trembling finger at them. The Hydroboreans standing in the queue turned, and a ripple of disquiet ran through them.
“Hello,” said Wilmot, doffing his cap. “We’re very sorry to bother you all, but we’ve just arrived from the Impossible Places and—”
“Outworlders!” the newspaper seller screeched. “They’re here to steal our magic!”
Wilmot laughed nervously. “I promise you, we’re not going to steal anything. We’re just here to…” He trailed off as he saw the ribbons of ink rising from the newspapers on the stall and swirling into his satchel. “Oh, honestly!” he said, lifting the satchel’s flap and admonishing the book. “Is this really the time?”
“I must have words,” said the book. “And these words are … unexpected.” Its voice caused a few Hydroboreans to shuffle back in fear, but for the first time Suzy thought it sounded uncertain. “They speak of a golden age, but they are full of fear and anger.”
“You see?” shrieked the newspaper seller, brandishing a newly blank paper. “They’re stealing the words right off our pages!”
“Thieves!” someone shouted.
“They don’t want us to read the truth!” cried another.
The queue dissolved as the Hydroboreans advanced on Wilmot and Suzy.
“We don’t want you here,” said one of them. “Hydroborea’s closed.”
“That’s right. Why don’t you go back where you came from?”
“Please, if you’ll just listen to me…,” said Wilmot, but he and Suzy were already surrounded.
“We’ve been warned about your sort,” said an elderly female Hydroborean wearing a big floppy rain hat and a sour expression. “You’ve got no magic of your own, so you sneak in here to help yourselves to some of ours. Well, we’re not having it!”
There was a chorus of agreement from the others.
“That’s not true at all!” said Suzy, her face prickling with anger. “We’ve got plenty of magic. We’re actually here to give some of yours back.”
“So you’ve stolen some already!” said a Hydroborean man sheltering under a striped umbrella.
“No!” Suzy shot back. “Why won’t any of you listen?”
“Fear not, my dear,” said the Chief from inside his skull. “I’ve seen this sort of behavior before. It’s culture shock. The poor blighters just need putting at their ease.”
Before Suzy or Wilmot could stop him, the Chief unfurled like a glowing ribbon and hovered above the crowd. “Hello. There. Hydro. Borea!” he shouted, very slowly. “We. Come. In. Peace! We. Are. Looking. For. Your. Tower. Of. Magic!” He did an exaggerated mime of shielding his eyes with his hand and searching for something.
The mob, which had been stunned into silence by his sudden appearance, drew a collective breath. Then they scattered, pushing and shoving at one another as they fled the square and disappeared into the surrounding streets.
“Somebody call the Watch Frogs!” warbled the newspaper seller as he pulled down the shutters on the kiosk and sealed himself inside.
“Wait!” Wilmot called, but it was fruitless. The square was already empty.
“This happened to me once in the underground rain forests of Mychopia,” said the Chief. “If it’s anything like last time, they’ll be back in a minute with a sacrificial walrus and an offer to crown us all king.”
But as the sound of the Hydroboreans’ footsteps retreated, the glow of the streetlights guttered and faded from gold to bloodred, plunging the whole square into an eerie semidarkness. Then a new sound reached them through the rain—a deep, wailing scream that made Suzy’s skin crawl. It rose and fell like a lamentation, growing steadily louder. It was joined by a second wail, and a third. They were sirens of some sort, and they were getting closer.
“I don’t think they’re bringing us a walrus,” said Suzy.
“If they’re the authorities, maybe they’ll be able to help,” said Wilmot, looking almost as uncertain as he sounded.
“Or maybe they’ll think we’re here to steal their magic, too,” said Suzy. “Whoever’s in charge of this place, they don’t sound friendly, and we can’t deliver the book if we’re in prison. Or worse.”
Wilmot pressed his lips together into a thin line. “You’re right,” he said. “We’ll just have to reach the tower by ourselves. The delivery comes first.”
“Then let’s hurry up and get out of here,” said Suzy.
The sirens were getting louder by the second, approaching from a broad avenue that curled uphill from the square. Suzy and Wilmot set off at a run, diving into a much narrower, parallel street. Gothic townhouses loomed over them on either side, their carved stone porches and soaring gateways firmly shut. Every streetlight they passed turned bloodred, changing the street into a nightmarish jumble of shadows in which the Chief’s glow stood out like a beacon.
“Hide!” Suzy hissed at him.
The Chief nodded and spiraled like water down a drain back into his skull. An instant later, they heard something arrive in the square with a squeal of brakes. Its siren cut off abruptly, and there came a thud-thud-thud of boots hitting the ground.
Suzy and Wilmot pressed themselves into the meager cover of a doorway and looked back down the street to see the beams of flashlights sweeping the square.
“Fan out!” shouted a fat, wet belch of a voice. “They can’t have got far!”
The voice belonged to a short, squat frog-like creature wearing black leather armor over a chain-mail vest and carrying a three-pronged trident. His skin was smooth and shiny, and he had yellow eyes the size of tennis balls set in the top of his domed head. He wasn’t alone—half a dozen more Watch Frogs spread out across the square, crossing it in great bounding leaps.
“They look fast,” Wilmot whispered. “I don’t think we can outrun them.”
He and Suzy ducked back into the shadows as the Watch Frog shone his flashlight up the street.
“But they haven’t seen us yet,” Suzy whispered back. “We can still get away if we’re careful.” The flashlight beams played across the buildings, swept over their heads, and moved on. “Go!” Suzy hissed.
They slipped out of cover and stole uphill, keeping low and heading for the dark recess of an arched doorway.
They almost made it.
When they were barely three feet away, a glare of headlights cut through the rain in the street up ahead, accompanied by the scream of another siren. Suzy threw up her hands to shield her eyes, but Wilmot caught her by the arm and dragged her into the archway, which housed a pair of heavy wooden doors.
“I saw them!” a voice cried. “Two suspects heading uphill from Plankton Plaza. Block the street!”
“What do we do now?” said Wilmot. “We’re trapped!”
Suzy pressed her back against the doors as the Watch Frogs’ shadows advanced across the houses opposite, stretched and distorted by the headlights until they resembled figures in a nightmare. There were more shouts from the direction of the plaza now as well. Her heart crawled up into her throat. They were out of options.
Then the world tipped on its side as the door opened behind her and she toppled backward through it.
“Quick!” said a girl’s voice. “Get in and be quiet!” A webbed hand reached down and Suzy took it, allowing herself to be pulled to her feet. She saw a flash of big Hydroborean eyes in the gloom as her rescuer reached past her, pulled Wilmot inside, and eased the door shut a second before the sounds of pursuit arrived outside.
“I’m sure I saw someone, Commander!” a voice shouted. “They were here.”
Someone tested the door. Suzy held her breath as its big iron handle rattled, but their rescuer held it firm with both hands, trembling with the effort.
“Not unless they can walk through locked doors, they weren’t,” came the reply. “Continue the sweep, Check every door. His Greatness wants these
outworlders found, and quickly.”
“Yes, Commander!” There was the sound of several pairs of boots stamping to attention and then leaping away toward Plankton Plaza.
The mysterious rescuer waited until the noises had receded to a safe distance before releasing her grip on the handle and turning to Suzy and Wilmot with an enormous grin.
“Well!” she said. “That was close, wasn’t it?”
She was a Hydroborean girl, roughly Suzy’s height, with a round, youthful face that smiled at them. A simple smock was visible beneath it, and she wore large Wellington boots on her feet.
“Very close,” said Suzy, still fighting to regain control of her racing pulse. “Thank you.”
“Yes, indeed,” said Wilmot. “I don’t know what we would have done without you.”
The girl’s eyes darted back and forth between them, sparkling with excitement. “Wow,” she said. “Look at you two. Genuine outworlders! I knew something big must be happening when the red alert kicked in, but oh boy! This is going to make such a great front page.”
Suzy, who didn’t quite understand what the girl was talking about, wiped the soaking hair from her eyes and looked around. They were in the entrance to a tiny residential courtyard, overlooked by three stories of open-sided landings. Anemone-like flowers bloomed in an old stone planter in the middle, and fishbowl lanterns on the walls glowed the same ghastly red as the streetlights outside.
“Let’s get straight down to business,” said the girl. She produced a notepad and pen from her pocket and hunched over to shield them from the rain. “I want to know who you are, what you are, and what inspired you to risk everything and come to Hydroborea.” She poised her pen over the pad. “Assuming you’re happy to speak on the record, of course.”
“I’m sorry,” said Wilmot, “but would you mind telling us who you are first?”
The girl guffawed. “Sorry, I completely forgot. I’m Ina—founder, editor, lead reporter, and unpaid intern for the Daily Scuttle.”
“Is that the newspaper we saw being sold in the plaza?” asked Suzy.
“Ugh, please,” said Ina. “That’s the Snail, the mandatory propaganda rag. The Scuttle is totally independent, exposing the truths that Frogmaggog and his cronies don’t want people to hear.” She gave a sheepish chuckle. “Actually, it was just my school newsletter until a few months ago, but the headmaster shut it down when I broke the story about the kelp cakes in the school cafeteria actually being made from ground-up blobfish. Totally vegan unfriendly! That’s when I decided to go independent and cover the stories that really matter. Like the flooding, which doesn’t officially exist, and the magic shortage, which nobody’s supposed to know about even though everyone totally does. And now you!” She beamed at them again, but then her eyes widened. “Oh no! I’ve got to hold tonight’s front page. This story is way more important than the new rationing restrictions!” She bounded away across the courtyard. A door under a porch had the words WELCOME TO FLOUNDER HEIGHTS written on it, but Ina ignored it in favor of one of the ground-floor windows. “Keep up!” she called in a stage whisper. “I need you!” She slid the window open and hopped inside.
“Do you think we should go with her?” asked Wilmot.
“She sounds like a terribly enterprising young lady,” said the Chief from inside his skull.
“I don’t think we have much choice,” said Suzy. “It’s not safe on the streets, and someone’s bound to spot us if we stay out here much longer.”
Crouching low, they hurried to the window and followed Ina inside. They found themselves in a makeshift bedroom-cum-kitchen that, like the rest of Hydroborea, had clearly been very grand once upon a time. The high ceiling boasted a tarnished golden chandelier in the form of an octopus, but most of the fishbowls wrapped in its tentacles were missing, while the remainder gave out a weak, jaundiced glow.
They still offered enough light for Suzy to see the two beds standing against opposite walls, the dilapidated wardrobe overflowing with clothes, and the small writing desk. Someone had also marked a chalk line down the middle of the floor, dividing the room in two. The opposite half was scrupulously tidy, while the one in which they were standing was covered with discarded clothes, papers, and unwashed plates and mugs.
“Sorry it’s a bit cramped,” said Ina, kicking the worst of the mess under her bed. “I lived here by myself for a while after my parents died, but everyone’s had to double up since Frogmaggog closed down the Lowertwist district.”
Straddling the line in the middle of the room was a machine that looked like a treasure chest with an old clothes mangle attached to the front. It buzzed and shook and made wet bubbling noises, while the rollers of the mangle turned and ejected double pages of newsprint every few seconds. They dropped neatly into a pile on the tidy half of the floor and Suzy saw the banner of the Daily Scuttle above the headline FLOODS CONTINUE, and a smaller article, IS FROGMAGGOG LOSING HIS GRIP ON MAGIC?
Ina shut the bedroom window and drew the curtains, then crossed to the machine and thumped it on the side. The rollers stopped. Then she opened up the lid to reveal a bed set with hundreds of tiny metal blocks, each carved with a raised letter or punctuation mark. A jar labeled SQUINK!—BUDGET SQUID INK was screwed into a socket alongside them.
“Do you like my printing press?” she asked. “I built it myself.”
“It’s very impressive,” said Wilmot, walking around it to examine it from all sides. “My people are great builders, but I’ve never had a talent for it myself. I’ve always been slightly envious of anyone who does.”
Ina lowered the hood of her coat to reveal pink speckles across her cheeks, running to coral-pink fronds. She turned to the pile of printed news sheets. “I suppose I can still distribute these,” she said. “But I’ll need to start printing a new edition as quickly as possible. There have never been any confirmed sightings of outworlders in Hydroborea before. At least not officially.” She produced her notepad and pen again. “So, what are your names?”
“Suzy Smith,” said Suzy.
“And I’m Wilmot Grunt,” said Wilmot. “Pleased to meet you.”
Ina scribbled these down, but stared at her pad in amazement as her notes lifted clear of the paper and twisted toward Wilmot’s satchel.
“Oh no!” said Wilmot. “I should have thought about this.” He turned to the stack of papers, but the newsprint was already running like wet paint.
“My latest edition!” said Ina as the words spiraled through the air. Then, putting her hands to her face in horror, “My movable typeface!” The letters carved into the little metal blocks inside the printing press were dissolving, leaving the blocks smooth and featureless. She grabbed at the swirling trails as the book sucked them in, but they slipped right through her webbed fingers. “No!” she cried. “Your bag’s eating all my work!”
Suzy’s hand went reflexively to the blank shape of her Impossible Postal Service badge. “I’m so sorry, Ina,” she said. “We didn’t mean for this to happen.”
“Fascinating,” said the book from inside Wilmot’s satchel. “All this information directly contradicts that of my last meal. And yet both purport to be factual.”
Ina gawked at Wilmot. “Your bag ate my work and now it’s talking!”
“Again, we’re really, really sorry,” said Wilmot. “But it’s not my bag, it’s our delivery.” He pulled the book out to show her. “It keeps eating information and we can’t stop it.”
Ina approached it with hands outstretched but hesitated to actually touch it. “The Book of Power,” she said. “Is it magic?”
“Very magic,” said Wilmot. “In fact, we think it was written by this city’s founders.”
“Among others,” said the book. “Their ink is still on my pages.”
“Excuse me.” The Chief’s voice broke into the conversation. “But is anyone going to do me the courtesy of an introduction?”
Ina pointed at Suzy’s satchel. “That bag definitely talked,” she said. “Or have
you got two magic books?”
“Actually, it’s a friend of ours,” said Suzy. She patted her satchel. “Sorry, Chief. You can come out now.”
The Chief emerged from the satchel in an expanding cloud of ectoplasm. Ina gave a squeak, half-afraid, half-excited. Seeing her, the Chief doffed his hat.
“A pleasure to make your acquaintance, young lady,” he said. “They call me the Chief, and it is my great pleasure to announce that you are now officially discovered.”
“I’m what?” said Ina, cocking her head to one side.
“It’s a long story,” said Suzy. “And we’ll tell you everything you want to know, but the most important thing right now is the book. It’s drained almost all the vital information from our biggest library, and it won’t give it back until we return it to its rightful owners, and we’ve only got a handful of hours left to find them. Please.” She put her hands together. “Will you help us?”
Ina looked from her ruined printing press, to the ghostly figure of the Chief, to the book, and then to Suzy and Wilmot. “I will,” she said firmly. “But I’ve got some questions.”
Suzy sagged with relief. “Anything,” she said. “Ask away.”
“First of all, what’s a library?”
Suzy and Wilmot exchanged a look of surprise.
“It’s a collection of books and information,” said Wilmot. “You know. Stories, histories, poems, biographies. Things like that.”
“And it’s run by librarians, who know their way around it all and can help you find what you need,” said Suzy. “Don’t you have anything like that here?”
Ina shook her head, her eyes wide with astonishment. “No. Frogmaggog controls all the information in the city. We’re only allowed to read what he tells us to.”
“Then what about the Daily Scuttle?” asked Wilmot.
Ina’s smile returned, more sheepish than before. “Yeah. The Scuttle’s just a tiny bit illegal,” she said. “If anyone ever traces it back to me, I’m in big trouble.”
“Aren’t you afraid of getting caught?” said Suzy.
“Of course,” said Ina. “But someone needs to tell people the truth, and I always cover my tracks. Trust me, this operation is completely foolproof.”