Gustav Gloom and the Inn of Shadows

by Adam-Troy Castro

There was a thud from up above as Gustav leaped from one part of the roof to another in order to evade one of Olaf’s attacks.

  Fernie met Not-Roger’s eyes. “See? It’s getting noisier already. Somebody has to go up there to help Gustav . . . and we’re lighter than you, so our footsteps won’t be as loud.”

  Looking like there were about a million places in and out of the Dark Country that he would rather be, Not-Roger finally told her, “There’s a ladder! I’ll show you.”

  Fernie hated taking her eyes off the battle, but she had to in order to follow Not-Roger down the narrow patch of dirt between the inn and the barn and around the corner to the rear, where the innkeeper proudly pointed out what he had meant by ladder.

  It turned out to be a collection of ramshackle boards of different sizes and shapes, nailed directly to the barn at varying angles in a manner that she supposed qualified as a ladder in the same way that the wreck of an inn qualified as a house. Fernie couldn’t trust any of the boards not to pull free as soon as she rested any of her weight on them, and she knew that being one-handed because of the rapier would make the climb even more clumsy and treacherous than it already was. But it wasn’t like she had any other choice. It was the only way to get to Gustav.

  She was about to reach for the ladder when Pearlie gently pushed her aside.

  “Just this once,” Pearlie said, “let me be the big sister and go first.”

  There was no particular reason why Fernie should have been surprised by this. But right now, Pearlie’s brave offer threw her off so much that she didn’t argue. She just stepped back and let Pearlie climb first.

  Pearlie raced up the ladder one-handed and clambered up onto the barn roof in less time than would have taken some people to cross the street. Fernie was just a few rungs behind her and saw one of the highest rungs bend under Pearlie’s sneaker, but there was no time to be careful, not with her sister and best friend under attack by a crazy shadow swordsman, so she just pushed on.

  She made the mistake of grabbing the loose rung with her one free hand.

  It pulled free, and she started to fall . . .

  CHAPTER TEN

  Never Get Pearlie What Mad

  Fernie felt the terrible bone-shattering fall about to happen and knew not just that she was about to be terribly hurt, but that her absence in the battle would mean a fate worse than death for everybody whose future absolutely depended on her not doing anything stupid like falling off a barn.

  But then a sour muttering wind blew against her back, pushing her upright and giving her a chance to grab hold of the next board higher up.

  “This is why I don’t like people,” muttered Cousin Cyrus’s head as it released her and sailed past her, trailing a puffy black tail that made him look like the negative image of a comet. “They’re just so much trouble all the time.”

  Fernie refrained from pointing out that her introduction to the world of shadows hadn’t made her life all that easy. Instead she scrambled up and over the edge of the barn roof and saw the rapier she’d given Pearlie now firmly clutched in the hand of Gustav Gloom.

  Pearlie, who must have tossed him the weapon as soon as she reached the top, now hugged the roof to stay out of his way while he did what needed to be done.

  As it happened, swordplay seemed to be yet another skill Gustav had managed to pick up in his long years of living in a house with no other people and only indifferent shadows for company. Even as Fernie spotted him, he parried a thrust aimed at his heart and used his own weapon to drive the shadow swordsman back, away from the bell tower and toward the gap between the two buildings.

  As much as she ached to help Gustav herself, Fernie managed to resist entering the fray. She just cheered, “Get ’im, Gustav!”

  Down below, Not-Roger’s shadow cried, “Your enthusiasm will be the death of you, girl! Keep the noise down!”

  Elsewhere on the roof, Cousin Cyrus’s head reunited with his body. He immediately collapsed into a clumsy snit because he’d been in such a terrible hurry to put himself together that he’d foolishly attached his head backward. He grabbed himself by the ears and tried to wrench it back into its proper attitude, but it seemed to be jammed in its current location. He aaarrrghed as he tugged louder.

  Backed up against the gap, the suddenly villainous Olaf lowered his sword in what amounted to a respectful salute. “You’re good, boy. You’re very good. But you may have noticed I’m smiling. Don’t you want to know why?”

  Gustav touched the tip of his rapier to Olaf’s neck. “Are you about to tell me you’re not really left-handed?”

  Confusion flickered over Olaf’s features. After a moment, he recovered and said, “No! It’s because I’m a shadow and nothing you do with your sword can really hurt me! All you’ve managed to do is make this fight interesting for a few minutes. I can take a break from destroying you all just long enough to amuse myself by telling you exactly why you’ll never be anything but a stupid and gullible boy.”

  Gustav blinked. “Oh good. I love stories.”

  “Nothing I told you about my past was true! I was plotting to betray you all along, and you never even had a clue!”

  Gustav did something that Fernie had only seen him do a few times: He smiled. It was as always an odd smile, in that it indicated genuine amusement without ever affecting his sad and lonely eyes. “Don’t be silly. I knew it from the very first moment I saw you.”

  Olaf snarled like a cat confronted by an intruder in his territory. “You lie. You want me to think you can’t be fooled!”

  “Oh, I can be fooled,” Gustav said without much concern. “I’ve been fooled a number of times. I just can’t be fooled by anybody who does such a terrible job of fooling me.”

  Olaf lunged. “You lie!”

  Gustav parried the strike without any difficulty at all and left Olaf teetering on the edge again. “Think about it. I always knew that when I asked those refugees for help, I was almost certainly going to get at least one shadow out of that crowd less interested in helping us than in making friends with the side that seems to be winning. That wasn’t hard to figure out. In any fight, there’s always somebody only interested in helping himself. All I had to do was figure out who it was and keep an eye on that one.”

  “You still haven’t said why you expect me to believe you suspected me and not any of the others.”

  “I don’t care what you believe,” Gustav said, “but I might as well explain it to you, because it’s really very simple. You see, any halfway decent spy does whatever he can to make sure that the people he’s spying on trust him. That’s the very definition of a spy’s job.”

  “So?”

  “So Anemone, Caliban, and the three without names didn’t do that at all. They didn’t care whether I trusted them or not. They didn’t claim to be on our side or agree to take our orders. Instead, they all said that they expected us to get killed or captured before long, and that they might change their minds and help us if we didn’t. By offering me absolutely no reason to trust them, they gave me every possible reason to trust them.

  “You, on the other hand? You offered us your help, made sure we considered you the harmless shadow of some ancient knight who was only dangerous because he smelled bad, and did everything you possibly could to make friends. You cared whether we trusted you. So I knew it was only a matter of time before you gave us a reason to stop trusting you. If a betrayal was coming, it was always coming from you.”

  Olaf’s face flickered. It wasn’t the flicker of somebody making an important decision, but the flicker of a mask faltering, a true face deciding whether to come out. For a second his features seemed to melt at the edges. “Why not Cousin Cyrus? He’s not exactly shy about how much he despises you.”

  Elsewhere on the roof, Cousin Cyrus was busy trying to twist his head in the right direction, but it was firmly stuck in place, like the cap on a brand-new b
ottle of ketchup. He grumbled, “At least somebody’s paying attention. I was worried I wasn’t being clear enough.”

  Gustav’s lips twitched. “I don’t like Cousin Cyrus any more than he likes me. Nobody who knows him likes him. But I understand him. I know that if he says he’s here paying off a debt to my great-aunt Mellifluous, he’s paying off a debt to Great-Aunt Mellifluous, because debts are the only thing he’s ever taken seriously. Besides, he’s not exactly about to betray me to Lord Obsidian, even if he does hate me, because if he ever does that, then he’ll have to keep working for Lord Obsidian . . . and you only have to listen to him for five minutes to know that it’s more work than he’s ever been interested in doing. So I trusted him from the very beginning.”

  Cousin Cyrus was now on his hands and knees, banging his off-kilter head against the roof in the apparent hopes that a good knock would loosen it. “You know, I really could use some help here.”

  Olaf lowered his sword to his side and turned his poisonous gaze on Fernie and Pearlie. “Well, at least I fooled the girls. I always fool the girls. Those ninnies still don’t know who I am.”

  Fernie had in fact only deduced who Olaf really was a few seconds ago, but figured it wouldn’t hurt to pretend she’d known longer. “Not true. You didn’t fool me for long the first time we met, when you pretended to be the shadow of a lonely little girl. You didn’t fool me for long the second time we met, when you pretended to be Gustav. He’s right about you. You talk big, but you really aren’t very good at this.”

  The corners of Olaf’s snarl turned up until they had almost reached his ears, at which point they connected and formed a seam that went all the way around his head. Everything above those lips popped off in a puff of smoke and a new face emerged, this one the visage of a five-year-old girl wearing ringlets and bows. It was the kind of face that should have been angelic and adorable, but failed both measurements because it was impossible to look at it without knowing that it belonged to the kind of child who was just plain rotten.

  This couldn’t be considered Olaf’s true face, because the shadow he really was changed shapes so often that it was impossible to consider any of his many faces more true than any other. But even as he shrunk two feet and grew a puffy, ankle-length dress in place of his previous chain-mail armor, the transformation itself marked him as a shadow criminal Fernie had encountered twice. The last time Fernie had seen him, the leader of the vicious shadow gang known as the Four Terrors had been fleeing into the Pit to avoid being captured alongside his three partners.

  She lifted her own rapier in salute. “Hello, Nebuchadnezzar.”

  Pearlie stared at the sneering little girl with the fiercest expression Fernie had ever seen on her face. “That’s Nebuchadnezzar? That’s the shadow who got us all into this mess?”

  Now strictly speaking, it wasn’t quite Nebuchadnezzar’s fault that Fernie’s father and sister had fallen into the Pit by accident a few minutes after his hasty departure, but he was still responsible for threatening their lives in the first place.

  “Yes,” Gustav said. “This is Nebuchadnezzar.”

  Pearlie leaped to her feet in fury. The adventure hadn’t been easy on any of them, but unlike Gustav and Fernie, she hadn’t started it with a week of mostly quiet journeying aboard the Cryptic Carousel or with the comfort of friends to share the dangers with her. Until being reunited with Gustav and her sister, she’d had little but fear and loss in a dark and unpleasant place, and all of it burned in her eyes now as she faced down the shadow who had done so much to cause it. She gestured at Fernie’s rapier. “Gimme that.”

  Fernie said, “You don’t have to. Gustav’s already—”

  “I’m not asking. Give it to me.”

  Fernie handed the rapier over with no further argument.

  Pearlie whipped the blade through the air before her to test its weight and make it sing. A couple of vicious test swings and she satisfied herself that she was ready. “You think it’s funny to kidnap good men and little girls? You think it’s nice to hand them to guys who take people, or threaten to drop them into bottomless pits? You think that’s enjoyable? Would your life be boring otherwise?”

  “Yes,” said Nebuchadnezzar. “Thanks for asking.”

  Pearlie took a single angry step, her grip on the rapier’s handle turning her knuckles white. “Did you really think you could just go around doing that kind of thing without ever being punished for it?”

  Nebuchadnezzar’s rotten little girl face split open, revealing yet another face beneath it. This one was a cruel caricature of Pearlie that made her eyes look moronic, her freckles look like disgusting blotches, and her mouth look like a gaping, toothless hole that could only hang open in idiocy. “What do you think you’re going to do about it? I’m a shadow, and that’s just a rapier! You can use it to keep me at bay for a few minutes, or even slice me up like I sliced up Cyrus, but there’s no way you’ll ever be able to use it to hurt me!”

  Gustav still held his own rapier’s point at Nebuchadnezzar’s neck. Without turning around, he said, “He has a point, Pearlie. I’m better at this than you are, but you can’t mistake what I’ve done for defeating him. This fight begins again the second he decides he wants it to begin again.”

  Pearlie’s eyes narrowed with an even deeper fury. “Don’t make the same mistake he’s made, Gustav. I’m not stupid. I’ve seen what this weapon can and can’t do to shadows. But I never planned to use it on him.”

  She drew the rapier back over her shoulder and swung it with all her might.

  What she’d decided to do might not have required all her might, given her target, but putting everything she had into it must have made the result just a little bit more satisfying.

  Her target wasn’t Nebuchadnezzar, who she hadn’t even bothered to approach.

  It was Cousin Cyrus.

  Once again his head popped off, the same way a flesh-and-blood head would have. But this time, instead of sailing over the edge of the roof, it just spun three times to orient itself and then sank down upon his neck, this time facing the proper direction.

  Cousin Cyrus tilted his restored head one way and then the other to test it, his neck providing an audible crack even though it didn’t contain the bones normally required to make that noise. “Ahhh. That’s much better.”

  “I’m glad,” said Pearlie, who didn’t sound like she was very glad at all. “But I didn’t do it because I consider us friends. I did it because now you owe me one.”

  Cousin Cyrus froze in dismay, because he hadn’t considered that. “I don’t owe you anything, girlie. I’ve already done more than enough for you.”

  Pearlie’s reply was as cold as anything Fernie had ever heard her say. “That’s not the way I figure it. Everything you’ve ever done for me you did for Great-Aunt Mellifluous. I know you’re still paying off that debt and can’t just put it down like you want to, but now this small part of it belongs only to me. You want to pay me back?” She whipped around and pointed the tip of the rapier at Nebuchadnezzar. “Make this piece of garbage sorry for a long, long time.”

  Nebuchadnezzar looked startled. “What?”

  Cousin Cyrus moaned the same moan Fernie had once heard from an old man whose bag of groceries had just split open and spilled all over the sidewalk, obliging him to bend over and clean up the mess. “That’s unfair. I was fighting him already before I lost my head.”

  “Well, now,” Pearlie said, without any sympathy at all, “I’ve fixed your head, and now you can fight him some more. And this time, you can fight him as if your own life depended on it. Fight him the way you would if you loved us. Fight him the way you would if you hated nothing in the world more than you hated him. Fight him until he’s something none of us have to worry about, ever again. Do that, Cousin Cyrus, and then the two of us will be even.”

  “Oh boy,” said Gustav.

  Cousin Cyrus mutter
ed under his breath, because this really was the worst of all the infernal impositions he’d had to deal with so far. But a debt was a debt, and so he hauled himself to his feet, moaning with every stretch as if it were the worst trouble anybody had ever put him to.

  He then became a gray blur.

  It was the fastest any of them had ever seen him move, faster than any of them had ever imagined he could move.

  Gustav dove out of the way just before the impact, which was a good thing, because the tackle was downright explosive. The edge of the barn roof shattered into a small cloud of tiny splinters, and a second later the nearest wall of the inn did as well, as Cousin Cyrus’s tackle sent both shadow bodies smashing into its side. A further wave of dust and debris erupted out of the hole, followed by the kind of sounds that would not have been out of place coming from a building whose owners had decided to shatter all their crockery with sledgehammers.

  A distant cry cut through the air. It was Anemone, still standing with her companions at the safe distance she’d insisted upon, reacting with horror at the noise she’d warned Gustav and the Whats to avoid at all cost.

  Fernie was impressed. “Remind me to never get you mad,” she said to her sister.

  Pearlie handed back the rapier. “You’re my little sister. You learned that lesson long ago.”

  Part of the inn’s roof collapsed and then exploded, bits and pieces of the junk it was made of erupting upward like a geyser made of scrap. But it wasn’t the only building in trouble. The damage done to the barn roof, which was already rattling the bell in its tower, caused tremors that Fernie could feel up and down her legs. She fell to her knees as, below her, something that didn’t sound very nice at all protested this disturbance with the kind of snarl that promised very large and very painful bites to anybody responsible.

  This was not a sound Fernie ever wanted to be near, particularly on occasions when she was also near a pair of crazy shadows furiously battling over the right to ring mysterious bells. “What was that?”