“See that?” Rosemary pointed toward the flaming ship. “No one else in the worlds loves their ocean battles as much as Northerners.”
We reached the end of the pier and started walking toward the busier part of the shoreline, where there were shops and houses and crowds lined up waiting for steam ferries to transport them to other islands. “We’re on Omegos, I think,” Rosemary said. “It’s the island that’s farthest away from anything interesting. I’ve been here before, though; the old worldgate from Northeast was on Omegos, too. At least there’s a ferry that goes straight to Sigmos. We’ll have to get in line for tickets.”
“Hold on.” I caught her by the elbow. “Why are we going to another island? Shouldn’t we search this one for the gatekeepers first?”
“By knocking on doorways and asking if anyone’s seen sixteen people wandering around looking completely confused?” Rosemary shook her head. “North is huge, Lucy. There are twenty-four major islands and probably hundreds of minor ones. And we’ve got no guarantee that the gatekeepers are even in North! We can’t search every inch of all eight worlds; it’ll take us centuries.”
“I wasn’t planning to try that,” I said. “I’ve been thinking about where I might keep a group of gatekeepers hidden if I were Mrs. Bracknell. We know she was holding Henry Tallard at one of her own houses in West, but I don’t think the gatekeepers were there, too. She wouldn’t have risked keeping them so close together.”
“And she’d have needed more than two guards,” Arthur volunteered.
“Right. But what if Mrs. Bracknell owns more property? She might have other houses in other worlds. Maybe she’s keeping the gatekeepers at one of those houses.”
“Maybe.” Rosemary twisted a curl around her finger. “Assuming they’re still alive.”
“They are alive.” I was sure I was right; I had to be. I’d been to three new worlds in the past few hours, but I still couldn’t imagine any world where the Gatekeeper wasn’t stomping around, complaining about slugs in the radish beds and explorers in the begonias. Getting rid of the Gatekeeper would have been as impossible as trying to pull up a tangled mess of deep-rooted weeds, and I didn’t think Mrs. Bracknell was much of a gardener.
“We’ll look for Mrs. Bracknell’s property, then,” said Rosemary, “but we can’t go around asking if anyone knows her. She might have travel officers here, and if they’re anything like that awful secretary, I’d rather not run into them. We’ve got to be discreet—which is why we still need to get to Sigmos.” She paused, looking at us, waiting.
I nudged Arthur. “I think she wants one of us to ask what’s on Sigmos.”
“Ah. You’re right.” At least Arthur was game for it. “What’s on Sigmos, Rosemary?”
Rosemary grinned. “A smugglers’ den.”
From the otherworld coins jumbled in the pockets of Rosemary’s bag, we were able to scrape together enough Northern change to buy three return tickets on the Sigmos ferry. The ship was crowded; all the seats were taken by the time we got on board, so we found a patch of deck near the stern where we could sit without getting tripped over too often. A horn blew above us and the ferry pulled away from Omegos.
Off the port side, I could see the pier where we’d arrived. If anyone had followed us through the worldgate—Thomas or Mrs. Bracknell or a yellow-winged wailer—they weren’t there now. I should have been happy about that, I supposed, but I couldn’t help wondering. Thomas had seen us go to North. Why hadn’t he run after us? He hadn’t followed us into West, either. Maybe he agreed with Mrs. Bracknell’s guards that his little Goose wasn’t likely to do much damage, or maybe he didn’t think chasing us down was worth the effort. In any case, he must have known we’d have to go back through the worldgate eventually. I wasn’t looking forward to seeing him when we did.
The ferry trip took a few hours, and at first I tried to sleep. I was jolted awake more than once, though, by a bang from a nearby cannon or a whistle from a steamship’s horn. The bees, who seemed to be feeling better, had ventured out of their cardboard box and filled the air with low, anxious hums. WE’VE NEVER BEEN ON A SHIP BEFORE, they told me when I peeled one eye open to glare at them. WE’RE NOT SURE WE LIKE IT.
I gave up on sleep altogether and wandered over to the railing, where people were leaning into the wind to watch the battles taking place off our starboard side. “What’s going on?” I asked a fair-haired woman clutching a pair of binoculars.
“That’s Omegos’s fleet,” she told me. She lowered her binoculars and pointed to a few ships flying green and white flags. “They’re going up against Thetos—the ships with red flags. That battleship there, in the orange and gold, is from Alphos. It’s here to support the Omegans, who haven’t had a win in months. And the ships with black flags are privateers, of course. They’re fighting for Thetos at the moment, but you know how fickle they can be.”
I had no idea what the woman was talking about, but it seemed wiser not to mention that. “How about all those ships with blue flags?” I asked. “The ones straight ahead of us?”
“That’s the Northern worldwide navy,” the woman said. “They’re doing their military exercises. Didn’t you read about it in the paper?” She narrowed her eyes, as if she wasn’t sure what to make of me. “They’re preparing for war with the other worlds.”
The ferry lurched just then, and I grabbed on to the railing. “Which other worlds?”
“Any of them. All of them. Does it matter?” The woman raised her binoculars again. “The chief admiral says as soon as he finds out who’s closed our worldgates, he’ll blast their whole world off the map, and I say good riddance!”
“Good riddance!” the crowd around me cheered.
My stomach churned—whether it was from seasickness or nerves I wasn’t quite sure—and I made my way back to my companions. Arthur, I discovered, was that maddening sort of person who can fall asleep in any situation. He was leaning against the ferry railing, snoring softly, with his head tipped back and his glasses dangling dangerously off one ear. At least Rosemary wasn’t sleeping. She was sitting with her knees pulled up to her chest, typing furiously on her InterCom.
“Rosemary!” I whispered. “What are you doing?”
She didn’t look up. “Writing to Pa. Telling him I’m safe.” A cannon boomed off the starboard side, and Rosemary raised her eyebrows. “Relatively speaking.”
“I thought you could only write to me and Arthur with those things.”
“You can write to anyone,” said Rosemary. “I mean, you can’t, because I’m not going to show you how. But I can write to anyone. So I’m writing to Pa.”
“Have you told him what’s going on? With Mrs. Bracknell, I mean?”
She nodded.
“Well, what did he say? Is there something he can do?”
“I don’t know.” Rosemary finally looked up from the InterCom. “He hasn’t written back yet. It’s not even morning yet in Southeast.”
“I thought smugglers loved the dark of night.”
Rosemary laughed. “I’ll let you know if Pa has any idea where all the gatekeepers might be,” she said. “Meanwhile, though, we’ll ask around at the smugglers’ den. Someone there is bound to have noticed something unusual.”
23
The smugglers’ den on Sigmos wasn’t anything like I was expecting. When we got off the ferry, with Arthur still yawning and the bees saying WHAT A RELIEF!, Rosemary led us away from the docks and down twisty lanes of houses. The buildings looked similar to the ones I’d seen on Omegos: tall redbrick homes squeezed together side by side, some stately, some crumbling, and lots with marble columns flanking the doorways. The streets were all paved in brick, too. On Omegos, green and white flags had flown from windows and lampposts; here the flags were red and yellow. On the ferry, I remembered, I’d seen a few badly wounded ships with red and yellow flags limping by.
“Here we are!” said Rosemary. She stopped in front of a brick house with a tidy lawn in front. There was no flag flying from a windo
wsill, but over the doorway, between the marble columns, someone had hung a sign. Interworld Institute for the Study of Extralegal Commerce, it said in official type.
“The sign is a sort of joke,” Rosemary explained. She knocked on the door, rapping out a quick pattern I couldn’t quite follow. The door opened a crack, cautiously.
Then someone inside the house squealed, the door swung all the way open, and a girl with curls just as bouncy as Rosemary’s flew out of it. “You didn’t tell me you were coming!” the girl cried, wrapping Rosemary up in a hug. “I had no idea you were in North!”
“And I had no idea you were here!”
“I only came on the ferry last night. Thank goodness you made it here, too. I’ve been worried sick about everyone.” The girl looked up and caught sight of me and Arthur standing a few feet back, like unexpected houseguests. “Oh, Rosie,” she said, “have you made friends? I can’t believe it!”
Rosemary wriggled out of the girl’s arms. “This is Lucy,” she said, pointing to me. “She’s just gotten fired from Interworld Travel, so you know she’s all right. And this is Arthur, who says he’s a prince, and these are some bees.” She turned back to us. “This is my sister Sarah.”
We all shook Sarah’s hand, except for the bees, who buzzed around it as politely as they could. “I thought your pa said you were stuck in East,” I said.
“That’s our other sister, Tillie,” Sarah said cheerfully, showing us into the house. “Poor Till. She’s in a place called Iceland, apparently, and she just hates the cold. Rosie, I thought you were stuck in Southeast with Pa!”
“I was.” Rosemary slipped me and Arthur a hint of a smile. “We all were. But we found a door.”
Sarah stopped in her tracks. “A worldgate?” she asked. “What do you mean, you found one? No, wait, don’t tell me yet. The others will want to hear this.”
The others turned out to be a hodgepodge of about twenty people gathered in stairwells and perched on shabby-looking settees, talking together in low voices or hunched over InterComs. As Sarah led us through the house, they all looked up, and the talking stopped. In the large, bright kitchen, a woman in work gloves was fixing a pipe under the sink. When she saw us, she put down her tools, stood up, and pushed the hair out of her eyes. “Rosemary!” she said. “And company. Hello.” The smile she gave us was quick but friendly. “Sarah didn’t tell us to expect you.”
“I didn’t expect them, either,” said Sarah. “They say they found a worldgate.”
The woman in gloves looked wary. “One that works?”
“Yes,” I said, “a new one. We just got here a few hours ago from Southeast.”
All the people in the house were crowded into the kitchen now, and they all started talking at once. “Hold on, folks!” called the woman in gloves. “I’m Tam,” she said to us as the voices died to a low rumble. “I’m not a smuggler—not anymore. This is my home, and I let folks stop by when they need a place to stay in North. As you can see, we’re close to bursting at the moment. If you’re here to tell us there’s a way to get out of the world, I’m sure everyone in this house wants to hear what you’ve got to say.”
Arthur, Rosemary, and I told the smugglers everything we knew, starting with the day the Gatekeeper disappeared and going right up to the moment we’d knocked on their door. A lot of them smirked at the beginning, especially at me when they heard I’d used to work at the end of the world, but that changed when I told them about the doors Mrs. Bracknell was building.
“I don’t believe it,” a man in mud-crusted boots said. “Southeast isn’t next to North. You can’t build a door from here to there.”
“You can,” I said, “if you bunch up the fabric of time and space. That’s what Mrs. Bracknell’s done. At least, that’s what it looks like to me.”
“Is that really possible?” a redheaded woman asked. “Is that safe?”
“Can you prove the door exists?” the man in boots asked us. “If we all go down to Omegos right now and walk off the pier, will we end up in Southeast?”
“I’m not going anywhere,” said an older man. “If they’re right, we’ll end up in a nest of Interworld Travel officers, and if they’re wrong, we’ll end up in the sea. I’m not much of a swimmer, so I’d rather take their word for it.”
Some of the smugglers laughed, but Tam looked serious. “All the worldgates are in one place?” she wanted to know. “That seems dangerous. At any end of the world, there are bound to be side effects, but when you put seven ends of the world all in a row . . .” She shook her head. “To start with, I can’t imagine what the weather must be like.”
“It’s not as bad as you’d expect,” I said. “I think it’s getting worse, though, and the worldgates are still under construction.”
“Some of them are fraying at the edges,” Rosemary added.
“You’re sure?” Tam sat down at the kitchen table. “If your Mrs. Bracknell isn’t careful, she’s going to unravel the universe.”
As the smugglers talked, I began to realize that getting them all to agree on anything would be close to impossible. A few of them didn’t see much wrong with Mrs. Bracknell’s plan; they’d hated trekking hundreds of miles from one door to the next, and a central location would make traveling between the worlds much more convenient, even if that location was a complete pass-through. Others didn’t think it would be possible to smuggle anything at all through a building crawling with travel officers. And a third group—the people who’d been stuck in North the longest, I was willing to bet—just wanted to go home. “We’re trying to fix everything,” Rosemary told them, “but to do that, we need to find the gatekeepers, and we need your help. Do any of you know where they might have gone? We think Mrs. Bracknell might be keeping them at one of her houses; can someone find out where those are? The quicker the better.”
“Who put these kids in charge?” the man in boots muttered.
Tam shot him a look that closed his mouth. “This situation is serious,” she said. “All our worlds and our livelihoods have been thrown off balance, and I see only three people in this room who are doing anything about it. If you’re not willing to help them, you can find somewhere else to stay.” She looked around the kitchen. “That goes for everyone.”
As the smugglers tapped away on their InterComs to find out what they could from their friends in other worlds, Sarah pulled the three of us aside. “Tam’s sticking her neck out for you,” she murmured, “so you’d better be on your best behavior while you’re here. Especially you, Rosie.”
Rosemary straightened her spine. “What do you mean, especially me?”
“Remember what happened at the Northern embassy?” said Sarah. “With the chocolate cake? Remember what happened with the techsand supplier in Southwest?”
“That was all years ago,” Rosemary said, “or months ago, anyway.”
Sarah shrugged. “I don’t want you bringing any trouble here to Tam’s house. That’s all.”
“I like Tam. I would never—”
“I know you wouldn’t mean to,” said Sarah, “but, Rosie, maybe you could try not to be quite so much . . . yourself?”
Rosemary blinked hard and walked out of the kitchen without a word.
I’d never seen Rosemary leave without firing off a retort before, and I wasn’t sure what to do. Neither was Arthur. “Should we go after her, do you think?” he asked.
“Not yet,” I said. “Let’s wait a minute.”
“All right.” Arthur looked up at the clock on the kitchen wall, as though he intended to time every second of that minute. “I joined a running club once,” he said after a while. “A few years ago. In school.”
I wasn’t sure exactly what that had to do with Rosemary. “Oh?” I asked.
“I wasn’t a member very long. All my brothers had been champion racers, so I thought I might be one, too. I thought I might have a knack for running.” He laughed. “I didn’t, of course. In my very first race, I came in dead last, tripped over my own feet
at the finish line, and fell in the mud in front of everyone. My brothers still like to remind me of that. They’re always challenging me to footraces whenever we’re all at home. It puts them in an awfully good mood.” He shrugged. “What I mean to say is that families can be tricky things.”
In the warm air over our heads, the bees hummed. YOU’RE RIGHT ABOUT THAT.
A while later, we found Rosemary on the staircase. She was leaning against an old grandfather clock on the landing, staring hard at her InterCom. “Don’t ask me what happened with the techsand supplier,” she said without looking up. “And definitely don’t ask me about the chocolate cake.”
“We wouldn’t dream of it,” said Arthur.
“Promise,” I said.
“Good.” Rosemary waved her InterCom in our direction. “It must be morning at home, because I’ve heard back from Pa. He says the House of Governors has just announced it’s found a solution to the ‘terrible trouble of the broken worldgates,’ and Governor Clara Bracknell will be sharing more information with the people of Southeast in a statement soon.” Rosemary made a face at the InterCom. “I assume that means she wasn’t eaten by a yellow-winged wailer.”
“The House of Governors made the statement?” I asked. “Then they know what Mrs. Bracknell is planning?”
“Of course they do,” said Rosemary, “and I’m sure they’re all falling over themselves with excitement. But there’s more news, according to Pa, and I don’t think you’re going to like it. The announcement says that a team at Interworld Travel has identified the people responsible for sealing the worldgates and causing havoc across all eight worlds. ‘Those four people,’” Rosemary read grimly, “‘are the explorer Henry Tallard; the notorious lawbreaker Rosemary Silos; Lucy Eberslee, unemployed; and a criminal mastermind from East known to authorities only as Prince Arthur.’”
I sat right down on the stairs. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
DISGRACEFUL! said the bees. THEY DIDN’T MENTION US?
“A criminal mastermind,” said Arthur thoughtfully. “I like the sound of that.”
The Door at the End of the World Page 14