by Darren Shan
Three paths lead into the tree, and three lead out. Foot traffic is sparse today, so I’m not standing in line very long. Guards and unravellers pat me down, then I enter the enormous lobby area.
There are six floors at the base of the tree, where the realm’s officials operate, then a huge gap to the levels at the top. You can see up through the tree, although the area’s crisscrossed with vines. Several of the larger vines have been turned into staircases, and there are two lift shafts, with hand-operated lifts.
I went up in one of the lifts when we first arrived, but didn’t like it. The lifts are raised and lowered by ropes. I’m sure they’re perfectly safe but I couldn’t shake the fear that they were going to snap. Since then I’ve taken the stairs.
Security’s tight inside Canadu and every staircase is closely guarded, but I’ve been given a pass, a little green mark on my left hand. It will be as permanent as a tattoo while I’m here, but will fade once I leave the kingdom.
I head for a staircase and present myself to the guards at the foot of it. One is a woman whose head has been shaped to look like a mushroom. Oddly shaped heads are a fashion craze in the Merge, but only a small number of people go in for such extreme makeovers, so she certainly stands out. I show my hand, and lift a leg to climb, but the remoulded guard stops me.
“No,” she says.
“Excuse me?” I reply, trying not to stare too obviously at the bizarre head — I wonder if it would taste like a mushroom if I took a bite?
“You’re required elsewhere,” the guard says, pointing to a different staircase. “Third floor, room 63B.”
“Who wants me?” I ask, but she only shrugs.
I head for the staircase, not nervous, just curious. Maybe it’s Inez. I haven’t seen much of her the last couple of days. She’s been exploring the city, catching up with old friends. Or perhaps Ghita wants to show me round the palace.
The guards give me directions when I ask how to find room 63B. I trot along, whistling tunelessly, looking into rooms as I pass, until I reach the right one. The door’s ajar, so I step through. It’s dimly lit and I see a figure sitting in a chair ahead of me. “Hello?” I call.
The figure doesn’t answer, so I take another step forward, feeling just a touch worried now. “Hello?” I say again.
The door slams shut behind me and someone grabs my arms. I start to struggle, but a hand clamps over my mouth, and the person in the chair says stiffly, “Will we draw straws to determine who gets to gut him?”
I was on the verge of panic, but I recognise the voice and relax. I even start whistling again, though it’s muted by the hand over my mouth. When the man holding me realises I’m onto their game, he lets go.
“Hello, Havel,” I smile, turning to face a young, hawk-faced guard in a black jacket with two red stripes on the right shoulder. “Hi, Dragoslav,” I say to the older, grey-haired guard in the chair. As he turns and stands, I count five red stripes on his jacket. They’ve both been promoted since I last saw them.
“I told you to disguise your voice,” Havel growls at Dragoslav.
“I tried my best,” Dragoslav scowls.
Havel tuts, then makes the greet by putting the fingertips of his right hand together, pressing them to the centre of his chest, then making a throwing gesture and spreading his fingers wide. Dragoslav makes the greet too. When someone does that, they’re offering you their soul. I return both gestures by pretending to catch the released souls and pressing my fingers to my chest, to join them with mine.
“It’s good to see you again,” Dragoslav says.
“You too,” I reply. “And in nicer circumstances than before.”
Havel and Dragoslav discovered Inez and me after we climbed the cliff into the Cuckoo’s Nest last year. They almost executed us, before Inez convinced them to escort us to the throne room, where the vote was taking place.
“I still think we should have chopped off their heads,” Havel murmurs.
“What are you talking about?” Dragoslav frowns. “We each got an extra stripe as a reward for the way we handled things.”
“I know,” Havel smirks, “but maybe Farkas would have given us two new stripes if we’d killed them.”
We all laugh.
“Why do you want to see me?” I ask, figuring they’d have knocked on the door of my room if they only wanted to catch up.
“Ghita sent us to do you a favour,” Havel says.
“She thought you might be bored,” Dragoslav explains. “There’s a room in the palace that might interest you, and she asked if we’d take you there.”
That sounds interesting, so I follow happily as Havel and Dragoslav lead me to a borehole of pink light at the end of a nearby corridor. It’s guarded, and once we’re cleared – even Havel and Dragoslav are searched – we step into the borehole and emerge at the top of the tree, at the entrance to the Cuckoo’s Nest.
“Cool,” I grin.
“There are a few boreholes like that,” Havel says. “We use them as often as we can.” He nods towards Dragoslav. “The old guy’s legs aren’t the steadiest.”
“You know I can take those stripes away from you any time I please?” Dragoslav rumbles.
The guards march with me through the palace, telling me what they’ve been up to since last year. They’re envious that I’m going to travel with the gropsters.
“The Tourney’s all anyone’s talking about,” Havel says.
“I’d give two of my stripes if I could go,” Dragoslav sighs.
“Can’t you take a leave of absence?” I ask.
“Every guard who wanted to go – which was practically everyone – drew straws, and I was one of the many losers,” Dragoslav says glumly.
We arrive at a door, where a woman called Ena is waiting for us. She’s small and thin, with dreadlocks that have been shaped to look like snakes, and tattoos on her arms. She introduces herself as a locksmith, then opens the door with a key hanging from a chain around her neck.
We enter a large room stuffed with dull-looking, inactive boreholes, but not the sort I’m familiar with. Boreholes are usually set in walls or buffers, doorways between zones, not solid objects. These, on the other hand, are like panels of plainly coloured glass, stacked in groups or hanging by hooks. There must be thousands of them.
“These are old boreholes,” Ena explains as we wander. “Their locks are antiques, radically different to the types we use today. Their devisers are long gone and the boreholes have been lying dormant for centuries, maybe even millennia. Loxes like us detached them and transported them here.”
“Why store them?” I ask, stopping before a dull, grey, circular panel. When I touch it, silver shimmers ripple across its face.
“They’re challenging,” Ena says. “The old ways have been forgotten, but we can learn from them. Some of these locks won’t open for us, no matter how skilled we are, but even if we can’t open a lock, we can find out things by toying with it. Lots of locksmiths used to come here to practise, but when the SubMerged threatened the royals of Sapphire a century ago, access to Canadu was limited, and this room was shut off. We meant to move the old boreholes elsewhere but never got round to it.”
“Ghita heard about this place and thought of you,” Dragoslav says. “She asked us to arrange access, so we asked around and that led us to Ena.”
“I’ll lock the door when I leave,” Ena says, “but you’ll easily be able to pick it, so feel free to return any time you please.”
“Thanks,” I smile. “This will be lots more fun than rattling round the palace.”
“Hey,” Havel says, “you can always come learn to be a guard if you’re bored.”
“I’ll stick with the boreholes,” I grin, then look around the room and take a deep, happy breath, feeling the same way here that I do when I visit Winston in Big Ben. It’s like I’ve come home.
14
I spend the next few nights, after training all day with Baba Jen and the team, locked away in the room, exper
imenting with locks and having a ball.
A lot of these haven’t been opened in recent centuries. I can swiftly spot those which have been cracked by Ena or other locksmiths. They have a certain shine, as clear to me as a faint watermark on a stamp would be to a philatelist. I ignore those, preferring to concentrate on the locks that have yet to be mastered, and drift around from one to another, choosing them at random.
Most of the locks resist my advances, but the failures don’t frustrate me. I love the alien feel of the forgotten locks, some of which seem to hail from a completely separate universe.
It almost disappoints me when I make headway every so often and a lock clicks open. I never step through, only close it again, leaving the lock for someone else to pick in the future.
I’m having so much fun that the sessions begin to blur, so I’m not sure if it’s the fourth or fifth night when I stumble across a lock that makes me forget all of the others. All I know for certain is that when I see it, everything stops, and I stare at it, transfixed, for a long, breathless time.
The lock’s in the centre of an otherwise ordinary-looking rectangular panel that was leaning against a wall, part of a stack. I’d been tipping them forward one at a time, idly glancing at the locks, none of which excited me. I was on the verge of moving to another stack when I tilted a green panel forward, revealing a dark maroon panel behind it, and that lock.
It’s shaped to look like a woman’s stretched face. Her eyes are open and her lips are closed. Her nose is flat, the nostrils just tiny holes above her upper lip. And at the sides of her head, only the outlines of her ears poke through.
It’s the same lock as the one in Seven Dials.
My spine’s tingling and my heart’s beating so hard that my head thrums with the sound. I doubt I’d hear anyone if they stepped up behind me. I probably wouldn’t even notice if the roof collapsed.
I stand frozen for ages, remembering that day when Orlan and Argate interrupted my work. If I hadn’t been so focused on the lock, they might never have found me in that city of millions. But my burning desire to unlock it brought me back to the same spot day after day, narrowing the odds in their favour. And what goes through my mind now is — if the lock got me into that much trouble in the Born, maybe it will land me in even worse trouble in the Merge.
I should walk away from it, let the other panels fall back into place, leave this room and never return.
But I’m a locksmith. Turning my back on an enigma isn’t in my DNA. So, with a sigh, I move the panels aside, kneel in front of the one with the face and murmur, “We meet again, old friend.”
As eager as I am to resume our duel, I can’t start until I lay my hands on a pick, having thrown my last one away when I made my break from Seven Dials. I do a quick scout of the room, in case any of the other Loxes left one behind. When that proves fruitless, I hurry out and down the nearest staircase, taking the steps a few at a time, planning to hit the streets and find a locksmith’s.
I’m halfway to the ground before I calm down and slow to a safer walking pace. There’s no need to rush. The panel has sat there undisturbed for decades or longer, so it’s not going to suddenly sprout legs and run away. Besides, I’ve nothing to trade for a pick.
I force myself to breathe calmly and think straight. Ena will be able to help me, and not just with a pick. The lock in Seven Dials had been damaged, and parts needed to be replaced or repaired. Even though I haven’t looked into this one, I’ve a feeling it’s in a similar sorry state.
I’d made up a list of parts that I was going to get from Winston’s. That list is still clear in my head and I mentally tick off the items on my way to find Ena, adding a few more picks, levers and solder to the mix, just to be safe.
A guard on the front gate directs me towards Ena’s workshop, which is a short stroll from Canadu. She’s resting outside when I get there, chatting with friends, and tells me to go in and help myself to whatever I like. I thank her, gather what I need, then head back, pausing along the way to pick some mushrooms, as I’ve a feeling it’s going to be a long night.
I search for Dragoslav and Havel in Canadu. Dragoslav isn’t working, but Havel is on duty, and I ask if one of them could check that I’ve turned up for breakfast in the morning, and every morning following, and to look for me in the room of panels if I haven’t — without a mobile phone, I can’t set an alarm to disturb me. It probably won’t be an issue – I never got lost in the lock in Seven Dials – but there’s no point taking any unnecessary risks.
Then, having gobbled a few of the mushrooms that I picked, I return to the room, close the door behind me, head for the panel and set to work. Wasting no time, I quickly reveal the ears and get to the point I was at in Seven Dials, then press on, moving further into the murky canals of the pair of locks. I make good progress over the next few hours, identifying areas where I need to make repairs, and finding ways to avoid sections where the damage is more substantial.
At one point the levers and pins start to tingle. It’s a gentle sensation, one I’d noted a few times before, when I was wrestling with the lock in Seven Dials. It’s as if something within the system – the world’s tiniest woodpecker, perhaps – has started tapping, and the vibrations softly run through all the different pieces of the lock. I’m not sure why this happens, but it never lasts very long. It unnerved me the first time, and I stopped working until the lock had returned to normal, but now I push on without pausing, and barely even notice when the tingling stops again.
It’s late and I’m tired, so I call it a night, return to my bedroom and undress. My school uniform dissolved after a few hours on my first night here, when I took it off to go to bed – Born clothes don’t last long in the Merge once they’re separated from their wearer – so I’ve been wearing Merged gear since, red trousers and a green tunic which Inez chose for me. She was also going to give me a green pair of shoes, but I drew the line at that, and asked for brown boots instead.
I feel certain that I’ll lie in bed for hours, thinking about the lock, unable to fall asleep, but I actually drift off in a matter of minutes and sleep soundly.
Waking refreshed, I head for the dining room and a quick breakfast – I nod at Havel when he sticks his head in, but he doesn’t stop to chat – then crack on. I decide to start the day with some repairs. This is a new challenge, but I’ve worked on the cuckoo clocks in Winston’s, so I’ve an idea of how to begin. Settling on a section where several levers have been snapped, I rub a string of solder between my fingertips.
Nothing happens at first, but as I keep visualising what I want, the metal melts and becomes liquid. In the Born it would be hot, but things work differently in the Merge and it remains cool to the touch. With a happy grunt, I start sticking levers back together.
The hours slip by unnoticed, and apart from a few breaks to eat, I don’t look up until someone kicks the door of the room and bellows my name. Startled, I go open the door, and find a furious Baba Jen outside.
“Have you been here all this time playing with locks?” she roars.
“Jen...” I start.
“No one skips a session with me without the mother of all excuses,” she cuts me off.
“Jen...” I try again.
“You didn’t even bother to tell me you weren’t coming,” she yells.
“Jen,” I say calmly, feeling no fear of her here, since we’re on my turf, “shut up.”
She gawps at me.
“This is important,” I tell her.
“More important than grop?” she huffs.
“Is that so hard to believe?” I smile.
“You’re crazy,” Baba Jen says. “Nothing’s more important than grop.”
“Maybe not to you,” I laugh, “but I’m working on a lock and it’s...” I stop, unable to explain why I’m obsessed with it.
“Has this got anything to do with why you’ve joined my team?” she asks. “I know you’re up to some sort of skulduggery — you suck at nursing, and you’re n
ot that interested in grop. If that’s why you can’t come, I’ll understand.”
I lick my lips, tempted to lie, but she’d see through it, and I don’t want to give her any extra reasons to be mad at me. “This isn’t related,” I admit. “It’s just a lock that I really, really need to work on.”
Baba Jen cackles. “You need to learn how to lie. Telling the truth is for suckers. But fair enough, I’ll leave you to your lock, and we’ll cover for you as best we can when we’re in Niffelheim, so you don’t look like a complete medical imbecile.”
With that she turns and exits, leaving me to the peace and quiet of the room, and the silent siren’s call of the mysterious lock.
15
I make huge strides over the next few days. Maybe it’s got something to do with the fact that I’m in the Merge, or maybe I’d reached a tipping point and would have gone at the same speed in London. Either way, I soon crack the code of the ears, allowing me to move back to the locks in the eyes.
I struggled with these when I first started work on the lock, but they’re a different proposition now that I’ve cleared the ears, and I breeze through them. By the time I’m set to crack the second layer of locks, I know there’s a third to come, so I don’t get too excited. Instead, as I roll the final tumbler, I sit back and watch with interest to see what happens.
For a few seconds — nothing. Then the mouth slowly opens and noises begin to roll out from between the lips, a mix of words and sounds. I listen for a while, trying to make sense of them, but it’s gibberish. I’m not sure why the deviser would have bothered with such a strange score – maybe this passed for music back in the day – but it’s irrelevant. Turning a deaf ear to the humming, I lean forward and peer into the open maw, fingers flexing, ready for level three.
But there’s nothing there.
I gaze into the mouth for a long time, not sure what to make of the void. There are teeth and a tongue – it moves slightly, giving the words their form, though I’ve no idea where the breath is coming from – but nothing else. No pins, no levers, no tumblers.