This seemed to be enough to calm Michael down, or at least to distract him as the pod rolled out of the trees and turned a corner into a circular drive. It was light enough now for me to see we’d reached a tall, narrow house painted the same sleek black as the worldgate I’d opened, with stone steps at the front and two stone-faced men standing guard on either side of them. They were both dressed in white jumpsuits like Michael’s, but unlike Michael, they held otherworld devices that looked heavy and dangerous. I hadn’t seen anything like them when we’d gone to visit Mr. Silos.
Rosemary looked out at the house and narrowed her eyes at the guards. “Does this place belong to Interworld Travel?”
Michael made a small, exasperated noise through his nose. “Not officially,” he said. “This is Mrs. Bracknell’s personal residence, where she stays whenever she needs to do business in West. It’s extremely secure.”
The pod rolled to a stop, and the two guards stepped forward, as if they’d heard what Michael had said about security and decided to emphasize the point. “Stay here while I talk to them, please,” said Michael, pressing a button to open the pod door. “They’ve been told to blast any trespassers on sight, and they take their jobs seriously. I’m sure Mrs. Bracknell would be upset if you three were blasted.”
“I’m not so sure she would be,” Rosemary said once Michael was out of earshot. “She’s the one who planted that thrunt! And I’ll bet she poisoned the bees as well.”
“I don’t understand why,” said Arthur. “She must think we’re a danger somehow.” He eyed the guards’ weapons. “And now we’ve accidentally gotten ourselves into her extremely secure house.”
“She’s not going to like that,” I agreed. I was starting to wish I’d picked the door that led to the world full of cows. “Should we make a run for it?”
“And get blasted?” Rosemary gave her curls a shake. “I’d rather not, thanks.”
“Then we’ll have to keep pretending we know what’s going on.” I lowered my voice as Michael turned back to the pod. “If we can get in and out of this place without making anyone too suspicious, we might have a chance of escaping before Mrs. Bracknell finds out we were here.”
The others nodded, and Michael stuck his head through the open pod door. “Come on out,” he said. “I’ve told the guards you’re here on Mrs. B’s orders.” With his chin held so high that I wondered how he could move forward without tripping, he led us past the guards and up the stairs. “Open,” he said in imperious tones, and the front door of the tall black house obeyed. Even Rosemary looked impressed.
On the inside, everything was glossy white: the floors, the walls, the hovering globes that cast light on all of us as we stepped into the foyer. There weren’t any doors leading out of the little room, or any windows, and as soon as we were all inside, the front entrance slid shut behind us. I saw Arthur swallow; I hoped he wasn’t afraid of close quarters.
“Stairs,” said Michael briskly, and the room changed around us. On both sides of us, sections of wall slipped away to reveal narrow white staircases, one leading up, the other leading down. “Er, downstairs,” Michael amended. The upward-leading staircase disappeared again behind its wall. “The house recognizes my voice, and Mrs. Bracknell’s,” Michael told us, “but it won’t know yours, so you’ll have to give a shout for me when you’re done with the interrogation.”
Interrogation? Arthur mouthed at me. I didn’t like the sound of it, either, but all I could do was follow Michael down the stairs, trying not to notice my stomach sinking a little more with each step I took.
The staircase ended abruptly in a blank white wall. “Here’s where I leave you,” Michael said. “I’ve got work to do upstairs, but I’ll be here if you need me.” He sounded very much as if he hoped we would. “And this should be obvious, but please don’t get too close to the prisoner. It would be inconvenient if anyone got hurt. Open.”
This last command was directed to the wall in front of us, which slid away without a sound. Rosemary, Arthur, and I all looked at one another. Then Michael made his small, exasperated noise again, and the three of us filed through the doorway. I wasn’t eager to meet whoever Mrs. Bracknell had locked away in the underbelly of her house, but I couldn’t think what else to do. “Close,” said Michael behind us, and the wall slid back into place, cutting us off from him completely.
The room beyond us was as stark as the rest of the house: white walls, white ceiling, white tile floors, white globes of light illuminating our surroundings. Mrs. Bracknell clearly didn’t spend a lot of time here; the only furnishings were two straight-backed white chairs set at opposite ends of the room, and they didn’t look comfortable. One chair was empty. In the other sat a man—a tired-looking man who lifted his head as though his shoulders couldn’t quite stand the weight of it.
“You two again?” said Henry Tallard. His eyes moved from me to Arthur, and then on to Rosemary. “You’ve grown a third head since I saw you last. There aren’t enough chairs for all of us, I’m afraid, but you won’t need to sit down.” He let out a short bark of laughter. “I’ll tell you exactly what I told her: nothing at all.”
19
Henry Tallard was in a bad mood. Anyone who’d spent hours locked in a stark white room would have felt the same, I reasoned, but that didn’t make it any nicer to be in his company.
“She’s sent mere infants to question me,” he said, casting his eyes up to the ceiling. “She doesn’t even respect me enough to come herself.” Then he pulled his gaze downward and stared straight at the three of us. “Don’t waste my time, children. Go back to Clara Bracknell and tell her I’ve come up with thirty-seven new ways to make her miserable. I’m looking forward to trying them out one by one.”
“You think we work for Mrs. Bracknell?” Rosemary made a face. “I’d rather hop on one foot backward through all eight worlds. Trust me, we don’t work for her.”
“You’re here in her private residence,” said Tallard. “And I saw your two friends at Interworld Travel this morning, and at the end of the world a week before that, so I hope you can understand why I’m not inclined to trust you.” He leaned forward—there didn’t seem to be anything keeping him in the chair, I realized unhappily—and pointed straight at me. “That girl’s the Gatekeeper’s deputy.”
I couldn’t argue with that. “I do work for Interworld Travel,” I admitted, “but Rosemary’s telling the truth. We’re not here to interrogate you. We’re in trouble with Mrs. Bracknell ourselves, and we escaped through a door—”
“Doors, doors, doors!” Tallard shoved his chair back, making it squeak against the white tile. “I don’t want to hear about doors. I’ve seen enough doors for a dozen lifetimes. I knew she was opening them, but I didn’t dream she’d be bold enough to do it in her own building. If I’d guessed it earlier, I could have spared myself a lot of pain in the fire pits of Pitfire.”
Arthur edged closer to me. “Is he all right?” he whispered. “I’m not sure he’s all right.”
Tallard’s hearing, at least, was impeccable. “If you were the most renowned explorer in eight worlds,” he said to Arthur, “and you were confined to a room where the only thing worth exploring was your own navel, I’m not sure you’d be all right, either.” He paused and tilted his head slightly, as if he were listening for something. “Do I hear bees?”
I’d stowed the box of bees in my rucksack back in Southeast, and in all the excitement, I’d actually forgotten about them. They must have been feeling better, though, because even through the layers of cardboard and canvas, I could hear them buzzing with fury at the sound of Tallard’s voice. “I don’t like bees,” he was saying now.
“I’m sure they feel the same about you,” I told him, “but you’re just going to have to stand one another while we work things out.” Henry Tallard was the worst kind of explorer: the kind who’s so convinced of his own importance that he can’t be bothered to fill out his travel papers correctly, or to explain himself clearly to anyone. If
we wanted useful information from him, we’d have to extract it carefully. “I’m going to need you to start at the beginning,” I said in official tones. “I want to know what you’ve done to upset Mrs. Bracknell.”
“So you are here to interrogate me.” Tallard looked a little smug. “Though I’m sure you already know the answer to that question. Didn’t she give you anything more interesting to ask?”
I opened the top of my rucksack so Tallard could hear the bees more easily.
“All right, have it your way.” Tallard edged away from the rucksack. “I suppose it all started at that museum gala. The Explorers’ Ball. You’ve heard of it?”
We hadn’t.
“They hold it every year at the Southern Museum of Magic and Industry. It’s got all the usual trappings: champagne, canapés, self-playing violins, miniature fireworks you can hold in your palm, that sort of thing. And it’s always an awful bore, but all the most notable explorers from all the worlds are expected to be there, and it wouldn’t look nice if I dodged the invitation. This year, I stayed at the ball much longer than I’d intended. I’d been dragged into a conversation with a tedious little person who wanted to write a new biography about me. The staff was cleaning up all around us, and the other guests had left, but that man wouldn’t stop talking. He followed me out the door and into the street, which is where we both were when the alarm went up from the museum. Someone had stolen Aunt Arabella’s gatecutters.” He grinned, showing teeth that were yellower and more higgledy-piggledy than they looked in his official portraits. “Do you know who that person was?”
By now, I thought I did. “Mrs. Bracknell?” I asked.
“That’s always been my guess. She was at the museum that night, and it’s not a task she’d want to entrust to her underlings, though I’m sure she had their help.” He scanned our faces. “Were all of you there? Dressed as waitstaff, perhaps? Did she pass you the gatecutters once she’d taken them and waltzed off into the night? I’d really like to know. I’ve been wondering about it for months.”
“We weren’t there,” Rosemary told him. “Mere infants don’t generally attend museum galas. What happened next?”
“The Southern authorities promised to look into the theft, but I didn’t have an ounce of faith that they’d learn anything useful. I wanted to know who took the gatecutters and what they planned to do with them, so I decided to look into the matter myself—to avenge my aunt Arabella, you might say. I went from world to world, asking questions of anyone I could find. As I’ve already told your employer, I won’t breathe a word about my sources. I can tell you it’s not hard to find a few souls willing to share gossip with a worlds-famous explorer, though, especially if you ease it out of them over a few glasses of Northwestern triple-aged ale. It didn’t take me long to piece together the general shape of Mrs. Bracknell’s plan.”
“And what was that?”
“She wanted to seal up the worldgates.” Tallard sounded almost bored by this, as though it were a lesson he’d been asked to recite for the hundredth time at school. “She’d come up with a way to close them all. With the gatecutters missing, she knew no one would be able to open them again.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” I told him. “Mrs. Bracknell is the last person who’d want to close up the doors between the worlds. Helping people travel through the worldgates is her job; she’d have no good reason to close them.”
“Especially if she was just going to turn around and open them again,” Arthur pointed out. “Mrs. Bracknell wouldn’t go to all that trouble for nothing. No one would!”
At this point, something funny happened to Henry Tallard. Ever since we’d entered the room, he’d been wearing the same disdainful expression I’d seen on his face at Interworld Travel. Now, though, his eyes opened wider, his jaw relaxed, and his mouth came unstuck from its sneer. He looked at the three of us again, one at a time, slowly. “Either you’re the best pack of liars I’ve met in any world,” he said, “or you really don’t have the faintest idea what’s been happening.”
“I’m extremely bad at lying,” Arthur said helpfully. “Ask anyone.”
Tallard nodded. “I believe you. And yet here you are. You came through one of the doors at Interworld Travel?”
“It wasn’t entirely on purpose,” I admitted. “We meant to go through the door, of course, but we didn’t know where we’d end up.”
Tallard almost smiled at this. “You three are astoundingly ignorant,” he said cheerfully, “but at least you’ve got an explorer’s instinct. That will get you far—unless, of course, it gets you killed.” He shrugged, as if it didn’t really matter which way things went for any of us. “If you truly don’t know Mrs. Bracknell’s plans, then I’m not surprised you can barely tell which way is up.”
“It would be nice,” Rosemary said icily, “if you could direct us.”
Tallard scratched his beard while he thought this over. “All right,” he said. “I’ll tell you what I know, but I’m going to need a favor from you in exchange. Is that fair?”
“Absolutely,” said Arthur at once, before Rosemary or I could ask any questions. The more time I spent with Arthur, the less surprised I was that he’d managed to fall into another world by accident. I was beginning to wonder if everything that happened to him was more or less accidental.
“Excellent.” Henry Tallard leaned forward, resting his elbows on the singed patches of his canvas pants. He looked right at me. “When you said Mrs. Bracknell didn’t have a good reason to close all the worldgates, you were only half right. You’re from Southeast, aren’t you?”
“I am.” I couldn’t imagine why it mattered.
“And what can you tell me about Southeast?”
“Um . . . It’s small. It’s got meadows and mountains. Centerbury is pretty nice.” I thought hard, trying to come up with something else to say. “The weather’s usually clearest on Tuesdays.”
“In other words,” said Tallard, “it’s a pass-through.”
“It isn’t!” I said.
But Rosemary was nodding again. “He’s got a point, Lucy. Southeast hasn’t got any magic of its own, or any decent technology. It doesn’t have much industry, and it’s not a particularly interesting place to go on vacation. You’ve met a lot of travelers, haven’t you? When was the last time you met someone who was visiting Southeast because they wanted to?”
I shot her a glare. “It’s scenic.”
“Exactly.” Henry Tallard looked pleased with us. “Not many people come to Southeast to begin with, and the ones who do are usually trying to find their way out again. They’ll go to Northeast for crops, or to South for spell-casting tools, or even to Northwest for a week’s vacation in the Ungoverned Wilderness, but they’ve got no reason to spend their money in Southeast. Simply put, it’s bad for business. The House of Governors has been worrying about the whole situation for years, and now it seems Mrs. Bracknell has finally decided to do something about it.”
“By sealing all the worlds off from each other?” Arthur asked. “I don’t think it’s going to help Southeast attract any visitors. How would they get into the world in the first place?”
“If you saw all those doors Mrs. Bracknell’s been making with the gatecutters she stole,” said Tallard, “then you already know the answer to that. The original worldgates are closed now, and the leaders of the other seven worlds are certainly starting to worry. I imagine their local Interworld Travel offices are in a panic. Some won’t mind the change so much—East, for example, has always been obnoxiously independent—but others can’t survive on their own for long.” Tallard smirked. “Enter Mrs. Bracknell. She’s just happened to build a whole new row of worldgates, and they all happen to be located conveniently in the scenic little city of Centerbury. If you’re a Southern mage in need of a Northwestern night-blooming toadflower, you’ll have to travel into Southeast to get it. If you’re a Northeastern farmer selling eggs at a market in West, you’ll have to journey to Southeast first. And do you thi
nk Mrs. Bracknell will let visitors hop out of one world and into another? No, no; they’ll need to wait their turn, file their papers properly, and have their baggage inspected. Maybe they’ll spend some money at Mrs. Bracknell’s new Interworld Travel Hub while they’re waiting. Maybe they’ll even stay in Centerbury for a while.”
“She could sell rooms in the Travelers’ Wing,” I said, puzzling it out aloud. “And dinners in the café. She could charge people to use the worldgates.”
“She’ll have no trouble catching smugglers,” Rosemary said gloomily. “Silos and Daughters is doomed.”
“And if someone from another world upsets her,” said Henry Tallard, “she can shut that world off from the others as punishment. It’s a nice little racket, isn’t it?” If I hadn’t known how much Henry Tallard disliked Mrs. Bracknell, I would have thought he was genuinely impressed. “As soon as she throws those worldgates open to the public, Clara Bracknell is going to bring Southeast more wealth and power than it will know what to do with.”
“To be fair,” said Rosemary, “she’ll probably keep plenty of both for herself.” She glared at Henry Tallard. “If you’ve known all this for months, why haven’t you stopped her?”
“For worlds’ sake, I tried. I went to both ends of the world to try to catch her lackeys in the act of sealing up the doors, but both times I was too late. Then I searched every corner of Southeast for the new worldgates she was opening. I don’t mind telling you that was no picnic, especially once someone told Mrs. Bracknell what I was up to and she set fifty travel officers on my trail.”
That, I realized, had been my fault. It was probably best to change the subject. “Won’t the other worlds be angry with her?” I asked.
“I imagine they’ll be grateful, at least to start with,” Tallard said. “They don’t know Mrs. Bracknell is the one who caused all this trouble in the first place, and she’s going to great lengths to make sure they never find out. Which is why I’m here.” He gestured at the white walls all around him. “She’s kept me alive because she wants to know who else I’ve told about her little project, but she’ll find a creative way to dispatch me soon enough. If she suspects you three are getting close to the truth, she’ll do the same to you as well.”
The Door at the End of the World Page 12