by Jon Berkeley
“Where are you taking us?” asked Miles.
“Down,” said Silverpoint.
The tramp clown, who had been so talkative in the dark tunnel, seemed to have dried up in Silverpoint’s presence. It was not hard to see why. Silverpoint, even though he looked like a boy of eleven or twelve, had the air of a person whom you would not question lightly. He folded his arms and looked at Miles again, a slight frown on his face. He no longer seemed to notice Little at all.
The ornate brass roof of the elevator came into view, and the grinding stopped as the cage drew level with the floor. They entered and Silverpoint closed the doors after them. Now that they were jammed together in a confined space it became clear that the tramp clown took his disguise very seriously, right down to the smell. Standing close behind him, Miles was reminded of the smell that used to lurk behind the big dirty steam-cleaning machines in the Pinchbucket laundry, with a hint of old fish heads and a dash of ditch water thrown in. He wondered if the clown had been a Stinker when he was younger. Little nudged him. She was pinching her nose and squinting her eyes. Miles laughed before he could stop himself, and he saw Silverpoint glance at Little in surprise before turning his face away.
Floor after floor slid up past them, and sometimes coils of thick steel cable looped up outside the elevator like snakes seeking the higher branches of a tree, and still the elevator continued its descent.
Little stood on her toes and whispered in Miles’s ear, “Is this what you meant by getting to the bottom of this?”
“Not exactly,” said Miles.
Down and down they went, and still the tramp clown shuffled and stank, and Silverpoint’s dark eyes stared at something distant that only he could see.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
A BOX OF STARS
Miles Wednesday, underfed, underground and undeterred, sat beside his four-hundred-year-old friend on a wooden bench, deep beneath the Palace of Laughter. The room they were in had once been a dressing room of some sort. There were faded blue stars painted on the crumbling ceiling. On the wall opposite him was a cracked and fly-spotted mirror, surrounded by singed light sockets. All but three of the sockets were empty, and of the three remaining bulbs only one worked. The room had a sad, abandoned feel.
“You’ll get food and water later,” Silverpoint had said as he showed them into their makeshift cell.
“What will happen to us?” said Miles.
“Nothing at all, little mouses,” said the tramp clown, finding his tongue again. “You’ll just get front-row seats to a nice show. Maybe you’ll even get popcorn!” He sniggered and wiped his nose on his sleeve as he left the room. Silverpoint said nothing. Without another glance at his captives he locked the door, leaving them with the silence and the dim yellow light from the lone bulb.
They sat on the bench, listening to the fading footsteps of the tramp clown (only now did Miles notice that Silverpoint’s feet made no sound). Little stared at the painted stars on the ceiling.
“Why would people make a box underground, then paint the sky on it?” she asked. Looking away from the fading stars, she reached into her pocket and carefully took out the flower that she had picked beside the stream while the tiger was fishing for trout. It was still as bright and fresh as the moment it was picked, despite all it must have been through in the pocket of her jacket. She twirled the stem in her hands and looked thoughtfully into the heart of the flower. “I thought when we found Silverpoint everything would be okay,” she said.
Miles could think of nothing to say at that moment that would make their situation seem brighter. “We’ll just have to see what happens next,” he said. It did not sound like much of a plan. He began emptying his pockets onto the bench. This is what he found:
The end of a piece of sausage, soaked in slimy moat water
A brass lighter
A ticket to the Palace of Laughter, which seemed unharmed by its soaking
An empty bottle of Dr. Tau-Tau’s Restorative Tonic
The long coil of rope that he had cut from around Little’s waist when they reached his barrel
No Tangerine
It was not much of an escape kit. He had given away his pocketknife, and had long since lost the heavy bunch of keys he had stolen from the Great Cortado’s wagon. He pulled out an old hairpin that was wedged behind a corner of the mirror, and went to the door to see if he could pick the lock. A brass plate had been screwed over the keyhole on the inside, and without his pocketknife he had no way to try and loosen the screws. Under its flaking pink paint the wooden door was solid.
Little was looking at the bottle that he had fished from the stream. “What do the words say?” she asked. Miles read the label aloud, and Little shook her head sadly.
“This is not good,” she said. “Laughter is a strand of the One Song. It’s one of the strongest and brightest, but it lives in harmony with the others. If you tear it out and put it in a bottle, it becomes something else.”
She put the bottle down and stared up again at the bogus sky. “That can’t be the real Silverpoint.” She turned to look at Miles. “Silverpoint is a longfeather. He commands the clouds and drives the wind before him. How could he become a clownmaster’s lackey?”
“I don’t know,” said Miles. He searched for something he could say that would offer a glimmer of hope. “Perhaps he just couldn’t show that he knew you in front of the other clown.”
Little shook her head. “You were right, in the tunnel. He doesn’t even know me.”
Miles sat down beside her on the bench. There was nothing they could do, locked in a room far underground. He searched for something to distract her. “Tell me more about what it’s like where you come from,” he said.
Little closed her eyes again, and leaned back against the wall. “I don’t have the words to tell it,” she said. “But I’ll try.”
Miles began to clean the mixture of dirt and moat slime from under his fingernails with the hairpin. This is probably not the politest thing you can do when someone is about to tell you about a world of harsh beauty that is almost beyond your imagination, but Miles had never had much training in manners at Pinchbucket House. Little, at any rate, did not seem to mind. As Miles scraped and flicked, she spoke of her home in the sky.
“I come from a place called the Realm,” she began. “It’s a place that is never still. Our palaces and halls rise and fall, they grow and move and melt away with the turning of the Earth and with the flow of the wind. You could think of them as ships, but even ships don’t join together and break apart as they sail.”
“You’re talking about clouds!” said Miles. “Are your palaces clouds?”
“That’s how they appear to you,” said Little.
“If I could go up inside a cloud in a hot-air balloon, would I see more people like you?”
Little shook her head. “You would see nothing but gray mist and half-light.”
“Why wouldn’t I see them, if they’re there?”
Little leaned forward and put her chin in her hands. “Remember the water we saw on the road, walking out of Larde?”
“You mean the mirage?” said Miles.
“We saw water,” said Little firmly, “but when we reached it, we saw nothing. It’s the same thing with the cloud palaces. Some things are only seen when they want to be.”
Miles thought about this for a minute. He could see no point in discussing the nature of mirages again with Little. Besides, he had another question, one that had been lurking at the back of his mind for some time. He was almost reluctant to raise the subject, but the question would not go away.
“Little,” he said, “who was that…person who followed us in the city?”
“I don’t know, exactly,” said Little quietly.
“Was it the same person who we saw in the circus field?” asked Miles.
“Yes,” said Little. “I mean no.” She sighed. “It’s hard to explain.”
Miles tried a different tack. “Why did I feel so tired whe
n we saw him?” he asked.
Little looked about her, as though someone else might be listening in the tiny, bare room.
“What you saw,” she said, “was a Sleep Angel.”
“A Sleep Angel?” echoed Miles. “Is that bad?”
Little nodded. “Most people will meet a Sleep Angel only once, and that’s a meeting you shouldn’t be in a hurry to keep. It’s a Sleep Angel who will carry your last breath from you and release it on the wind.”
Miles was silent. The room seemed strangely still. He pulled his jacket around him, although the air was stuffy and warm.
“Why was he following us?” asked Miles. He was not sure he wanted to know.
“I don’t know why,” said Little. “I shouldn’t even speak of this—it’s not allowed. I’m in enough trouble already.” Their meeting with Silverpoint seemed to have washed away her confidence. She looked small and frightened again, as he had first seen her in the locked trailer. “He must be looking for Silverpoint.”
“Why did we run from him, then? Maybe he could have helped us.”
Little looked at him as though he were crazy.
“Sleep Angels are the highest caste there is. At least the highest I know of. Sleep Angels look after Life and Death. They don’t normally make up search parties.” She stared unseeingly at the floor between her feet. “If he’s looking for Silverpoint, something is wrong.”
“Maybe he’s a friend,” said Miles.
Little laughed. In the tiny room the shine seemed to have gone from her laughter, and somehow it just made Miles feel sad.
“Friendship is an idea that lives down here,” she said. “Where I come from there is duty and loyalty. I suppose loyalty is a friendship of sorts, but everyone knows their place in the Realm. It’s not a Sleep Angel’s place to concern himself with someone from a lower caste.”
Miles thought about this for a moment. “Are there many castes of Angels?” he asked.
“Of course! There are Wind Angels, Whitefire Angels, and many others.” She seemed glad to leave the topic of the Sleep Angel.
“Whitefire Angels?” said Miles. “What do they do?”
“They draw a map of the One Song on the dome of the night. The map grows and changes as each Song Angel’s part is sung. Without it, the Song Angels would lose their way, and the One Song would eventually come undone and all life would be scattered to the darkness. The stars are the crossing points of the Whitefire Map, where the strands of the One Song join each other.”
“But the stars are billions of miles away,” said Miles. “You couldn’t reach them in a hundred lifetimes!”
Little smiled. “The stars are a living map on the dome of the night. I know this because I have helped to sing them into place for as long as I can remember.”
Miles’s head was beginning to swim. He was not sure whether it was from hunger or the strange notions that Little was releasing in the dimness of the small room.
“I got all my schooling from Lady Partridge,” he said. “She has books full of the knowledge of men who have studied these things for centuries. Clouds are made of water vapor. The stars are suns like ours, so far away that their light is millions of years old when it reaches us. Are you telling me all these things are wrong?”
“No,” said Little. She twirled the flower she had taken from her pocket, then held it out for Miles to take a closer look. The petals were yellow at the center, merging to a deep scarlet at their pointed tips.
“Look at this,” she said. “What would you call it?”
“I don’t know the name of it,” said Miles. “It’s a yellow flower with red tips.”
“Isn’t it a red flower with a yellow center?” asked Little.
“I suppose so. You could call it either.”
“Then just because something is one thing doesn’t mean it can’t be another,” said Little.
Miles thought about this for a while. It was hard to get his head around it all. He closed his eyes, which made things a little easier. Fat galleons of cloud began to sail through the blue night of his mind’s eye. He could see stars winking between them, some closer than the clouds, some farther away. The picture gave him a feeling that everything was working as it should be in the universe, like a well-made clock with many parts. It made him smile.
He dozed fitfully on the hard bench. How long he slept he could not tell, but he was almost sorry when his dreams were interrupted by the muffled jingle of keys outside the door of their makeshift cell.
His stomach, however, was not a bit sorry. As far as he could tell, it was early morning by now, which made it nearly twenty-four hours since they had eaten. “I hope this is food,” he said to Little.
A key turned in the lock with a soft click, and before he had time to wonder who might be outside, the door began to swing open.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
THE ELECTRIC BOY
Silverpoint, pale-faced and long-feathered, stepped into the room in the early hours of the morning, his tall hat sweeping the faded stars. He closed the door softly behind him, took his hat off carefully and placed it behind the door. Little stared at the ground, as though she did not want to meet his eye again and see no sign of recognition. Miles looked at the hat in the corner, wondering if there might be food hidden inside it. Silverpoint walked across the room and stood in front of Little, his hands on his hips.
“And just where do you think you’ve been, little softwing?” he said sternly.
Little looked up at him, and her eyes widened. “Silverpoint?” she whispered. His cool face broke into a smile. Little jumped up onto the bench and threw her arms around him. Silverpoint squeezed Little tightly, and the lone bulb on the wall glowed brighter, as though extra power had surged through the crumbling wires.
He stepped back and held her face in his hands. “I am glad to see you,” he said. “How on earth did you get here?”
“Miles helped me. We came on a tiger. We slept up a tree. He stole the keys from under Cortado’s nose. Are you all right? A crow told us the way. Didn’t you recognize me? Why are you helping them?”
Silverpoint put his finger to his lips and glanced briefly at Miles. “I’m sorry, Little,” he said. “When you fell from the ceiling last night I had to pretend not to know you. If that sniveling clown had realized who you were he would have run straight to Cortado himself, and then we would really have had trouble. The Great Cortado has a redder soul than I first realized.”
Little laughed with delight and hugged him around the waist. Silverpoint looked at Miles over her blond head. His face was serious again, and his dark eyes searched into Miles’s face as before, but this time his gaze was more curious than unfriendly.
“I am in your debt,” he said. He looked at Miles a moment longer, then suddenly held out his hand, as though he had just remembered this was the right thing to do. Miles took his hand. Silverpoint’s skin was cool and smooth, but there was a strange tingle in his touch, like the tingle you feel if you are foolish or bored enough to put your tongue on the terminals of a battery. Silverpoint squeezed his hand. Miles squeezed back. It felt like an odd thing to do, particularly with someone who felt like a distant cousin of the electric eel.
Miles took his hand back. Enough was enough. “Actually neither of us could have got here alone,” he said.
For a moment they stared at each other silently, then Miles cleared his throat. “I don’t suppose you brought any food with you?” he asked hopefully.
“I’m sorry,” said Silverpoint. “You must be very hungry. Your breakfast is on its way, but I’m afraid the chefs are a little”—he searched for the right word—“disorganized,” he said finally. He disentangled himself gently from Little’s arms. “How did you get into the Palace of Laughter without being seen?” he asked.
“We came in through the ear,” said Little. “It was Miles’s idea. Then we crawled through tunnels for ages. We could hear people laughing, but we couldn’t find the show until it was almost over, and we couldn�
��t see properly even then.”
“Then you were very lucky. If you had seen the entire show you would have been lost for good. I have never seen anyone who can resist the power of Cortado’s show.”
“But you can,” said Little.
“That’s because I take the antidote. All of us who work here are given an antidote before every show. It makes you immune.”
“Immune from what?” asked Miles. “What exactly is the Great Cortado doing to all those people?”
“It’s a sort of hypnosis,” said Silverpoint. “He sucks the laughter out of their souls. After the show they are given a small bottle of liquid and sent on their way….”
Miles felt for the empty bottle of Dr. Tau-Tau’s Restorative Tonic and took it out of his pocket. “Like this one?” he said.
Silverpoint looked at him suspiciously. “Where did you get that?” he asked.
“I found it,” said Miles. “It was already empty.”
Silverpoint nodded. “The tonic brings people back to their normal selves after they’ve been ‘laughtered,’ as Genghis calls it, but it only lasts a few hours and people soon develop a craving for more. Only the Palace of Laughter produces the tonic, and it has made the Great Cortado a very wealthy man. The more demand he creates for the tonic, the richer he gets.”
“But why are you going along with it?” asked Little.
“I had no choice until now, Little. After we were given that sleeping potion at the Circus Oscuro I woke up in the back of a van. I was tied with ropes, bumping about for a day and a night and into the following day. I had no idea where you were. When we got here they said that I would have to do what they told me, or you would be killed.”