by Dave Butler
“Observe.” The dwarf grinned, and then crossed the line, standing next to Charlie; then he exited again, and nothing happened. “Now, Charlie…your turn.”
Charlie reached a tentative finger toward the space over the black line—
A force that felt like a steam train moving at speed knocked him to the floor and hurled him across the room. He landed in the bed, aching all over.
The dwarf handed the iron dagger to Thomas, who now held two of the three nails.
Thomas looked stricken.
“Trust Ollie,” Charlie groaned. “Ollie and Bob and the others. They’re your friends.”
“I’m sorry we can’t help you, mate.” Ollie’s voice trembled, but there was something flickering in his eyes, and it didn’t look like sorrow. “We’ll get the job done.”
“I…I’ll miss you,” Thomas said.
“Don’t worry.” Charlie smiled. “I’ll be fine.”
“Yes, yes.” The dwarf waved one hand, and Charlie’s friends vanished.
Charlie struggled to sit up. “Did you—where are they?”
“They are unharmed! They are in the Souk of Wonders, and will no doubt shortly find their way back to wherever you came from.” The dwarf walked a slow circle around Charlie’s cage, smiling and nodding. “Tell me, Charlie; do you play chess?”
Charlie shook his head.
“I shall teach you,” the dwarf said. “You and I are going to be in here together a very long time.”
Waving a hand again, the dwarf himself disappeared.
Charlie lay down and stared at the stone ceiling, waiting for darkness to come.
The sun set outside the wooden screens, and then the thrashing monsters in the water settled down. Not that that gave Charlie any opportunity to escape—he wasn’t about to test the invisible walls of his cage again.
He watched the streaks of gold and crimson and then the deep indigo of the night sky with sorrow. This would be his last sunset. He had thought for some time—since learning on Cader Idris that Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s plan involved the death of his son, Thomas—that he and Thomas had been designed to die. That doing what they’d been made for would result in their own death.
Or maybe death was the wrong word, but…Charlie would stop working.
Could he ever know what his own bap had thought? What Bap had planned for Charlie?
And not knowing his bap’s mind, what should Charlie do?
Now he was facing not only death, but likely failure. He’d left his friends alone, and however much he encouraged Thomas, he didn’t think his brother was as brave or persistent as Charlie himself.
He thought about Rabbi Rosenbaum’s speech: the rabbi had said that all folk had things in common and differences, and that that meant people could learn from each other. The Prussians, on the other hand, and the Iron Cog, wanted to tell everyone what to do—and they said it was for everyone’s good. And since people wouldn’t willingly join them, the Cog was going to war. Then there was Brunel’s view that the demon unleashed by the Romanovs empowered evil people, and his plan to stop the Iron Cog by traveling to Russia to end the very technology of which he was master and inventor. And now Charlie had the dwarf wizard’s rant in his head too—Suleiman loved technology, but only because he wanted to keep it all, like he wanted to keep everything else. Charlie was a museum exhibit to the dwarf, or maybe a toy.
What was the truth? Whom should Charlie follow? He found himself in a world of visions that overlapped and competed and sometimes even fought to the death.
Charlie loved adventure, but it was beginning to seem that adventure was just another word for people getting hurt. Bap had been killed, and Brunel. Now Charlie was going to die. Had his father made him to love adventure? Did that mean his father had done a bad thing?
Charlie wished he had been made instead to love peace and quiet.
But some part inside him protested. He wasn’t being entirely fair. Charlie liked having friends. He liked motion, and danger, but he didn’t want to hurt people.
And the world the rabbi had talked about—the world in which people could be different and still be friends—didn’t that world require defending sometimes?
It did. And Charlie had tried to be that defender.
Not that it mattered now. He was stuck in here, and would soon lose consciousness.
“Good luck, Thomas,” he whispered to the ceiling. “Good luck, Bob. Good luck, Ollie.”
Bamf! Charlie smelled the stink of rotten eggs.
“Thanks, mate. I reckon we’ll all need it, and you and me sooner than the others.”
Charlie rolled to sit, but a hand shot up from the floor and grabbed him, urging him to hold still.
“What is it?” Charlie asked.
“I don’t know who’s watching,” Ollie whispered. “I reckon it must be someone.”
“How did you get back here?” Charlie wanted to know.
“Mate, it was amazing.” Ollie’s whisper picked up speed. “Old Papa Wilhelm was waiting for us after all. We got back through his gate, and you’ll never guess how much time had passed.”
Charlie’s heart sank. “Years?”
“Not even seconds,” Ollie hissed. “Nothing, no time at all. I’d swear I saw my own boot heel disappearing into the Library Machine just as I was stepping out of it.”
“Is that because the Souk of Wonders is…What did you say? Outside time?”
“Or is it instead because—now bear with me here, mate—we ain’t in a real place at all?”
“That doesn’t make any sense, Ollie.”
“Doesn’t it? Papa Wilhelm said we could go anywhere that was in a story, right?”
“He said in a book. That’s different.”
“Okay, but what if the place you had in the book wasn’t a place in the real world? What if it was someplace made up, like the Isles of the Blessed, or Chichester?”
“Chichester isn’t made up, Ollie.”
“You ever been there, mate? No? Me neither. Anyway, what if it was a made-up place entirely? Would Papa Wilhelm say, ‘Oh no, you can’t go there; it ain’t real,’ or would he just sweep you on through?”
“I don’t know.”
“So I’m thinking maybe this ain’t real either. I mean, how many pyramids did you see when we were walking around the souk?”
Charlie thought back. He had seen pyramids in all directions, he thought. “A dozen?”
“Right. So I ain’t an expert, Charlie, but I’m pretty sure there ain’t a dozen pyramids standing all together like that anywhere in Egypt.”
“You did say we were out of space and time. And I thought the dwarf seemed to agree.”
“Yeah. But now I’m starting to think we ain’t in a real place, Charlie. Notwithstanding old Smythson put it in his Almanack.”
“Then what is it? It certainly feels real.”
“I think it’s a story. I think the Library Machine is a door that moves you into stories.”
Charlie lay still and tried to absorb that. “I don’t know. That’s…strange.”
“Right? But it gets stranger, mate. Consider this: If you can move into a story land…how do you know you weren’t in a story land to begin with?”
“That’s easy,” Charlie said. “I think. I feel. I get hurt.”
“How do you know characters in stories don’t do those things?”
Charlie shook his head. “That’s crazy, Ollie.”
“Maybe,” Ollie agreed, “but it got me thinking. Hey, how’s your mainspring?”
“I have no real way to tell,” Charlie said. “But a lot of time has passed.”
“Shall I wind you, mate?”
Ollie’s bizarre line of reasoning had him curious. And maybe, just maybe, Ollie could get him out. “Okay.”
Charlie rolled over onto his side, and Ollie climbed to his knees to wind Charlie’s spring.
“So it got me thinking,” Ollie continued, “about magic.”
“I know you want to be a magician,” Charlie said, “like Aunt Big Money, and like…Sayyid. But being a shape-changer is a great thing.”
“Sure it is,” Ollie said. “It’s a good start. But what exactly is holding me back from doing more?”
The winding was done, and Ollie sat back on the floor in the darkness. Charlie cautiously sat up. He half expected lights to come on and the dwarf wizard to leap out of hiding, but nothing happened. “I don’t know, Ollie,” he said.
“Just the story.” Ollie’s voice sounded as if he might be crying, a little. “I think just the story is holding me back.”
“Do you mean that you’re held back by the limitations inside your own head?” Charlie asked. “Or do you mean you really think you’re a character in a story?”
“Is there a difference?” Ollie replied.
“I don’t think I’m smart enough to follow you,” Charlie said. “But I’m very glad you came to visit me. It’s very dangerous, though, and you probably shouldn’t do it again. You should probably just leave me here to…just leave me here.”
“I didn’t come to visit you, mate,” Ollie said.
“No?”
“I came to get you out.”
Had Ollie become a full-fledged magician—was that what all his strange talk about stories and limitations meant? “How will you do that, then?”
Ollie sniffed. “Easy-peasy. I’ll carry you.”
“I don’t think you’re strong enough, Ollie. Remember how heavy I am? And even if you could lift me, what good would it do? Remember what happened when I touched the line myself?”
“Yeah.” Ollie chuckled. “But Bob and I have a theory.”
“Bob’s speaking to you?”
“Yeah.” The humor fell out of Ollie’s voice. “She’s still angry, scowls a lot. But she’s talking to me.” Ollie laughed suddenly. “And at least I can call her she now. Thomas was quite surprised, but I think he’s adjusting to the idea.”
“You have a theory.” Hope was unreasonable, Charlie told himself. Whatever insane idea Bob and Ollie had come up with, there was no way it would work.
But he had nothing to lose by trying.
“Remember how I carried the book?”
Charlie thought back. “What did you say…that you left it with the snake? In the snake’s pocket?”
“Yeah. So I’m going to try that with you. I’m going to try to leave you with the boy, like I do with my clothes, and slip on out of here. What’s the worst that could happen?”
Charlie tried to imagine. “Sayyid’s spell might tear you to bits, trying to push me back into the cage.”
“Yeah, Bob said the same thing. But I reckon, what have I got to lose?”
“Your life, Ollie.”
“I was afraid you might see it that way.” In the darkness, Ollie grabbed Charlie’s wrist.
Bamf! Ollie the boy was suddenly gone, replaced by Ollie the snake.
Only this time Charlie went with him.
Charlie had never experienced anything like it. He didn’t become the snake, but he was inside the snake. Ollie’s snake head was definitely out in front, so if Charlie had to assign himself to a part of the snake’s actual anatomy, he’d say he was in its belly. He couldn’t find his own body, but he was conscious that there were other things inside the snake with him: a bowler hat, a peacoat, rough-shod boots, and a book.
Charlie tried to will himself to be able to see the book and touch its pages, but he failed.
Was he just constrained by his own story?
But if he was in a story, then he had an author. And an author who would kill Charlie’s bap, and give him the Iron Cog for an enemy, and finally stick Charlie in a museum to rot forever…that author deserved a punch in the nose, and maybe worse.
Ollie slithered toward the edge of Charlie’s cage. Charlie felt the stone floor beneath him humming slightly, like the hum of tools operating in Bap’s shop, or the vibration of the washers and presses in Lucky Wu’s Earth Dragon Laundry, Whitechapel.
Then Ollie crossed the black line in the floor.
An invisible force suddenly pounded Charlie, as if a hammer had slammed him to the marble. He rolled, finding himself suddenly in his physical body and tumbling alongside Ollie, in boy form again.
They were both screaming in pain.
But they were outside the line.
They rolled to a stop, Charlie crouching and Ollie lying flat on his belly. The sweep groaned and whimpered.
“It worked, Ollie,” Charlie whispered. “Where’s the Library Machine? Where did you come through?”
“The dwarf’s throne,” Ollie moaned. “I found a reference to it in the Almanack.”
“Can you be a snake?”
“Probably. Only I’m tired, Charlie. Magic takes a toll. The bigger the magic, the more tired it makes you.”
“It’s my turn to carry you. You can stay a snake for a while, and rest.”
Ollie stopped arguing. Bamf! Charlie picked up the yellow-green garden snake and tucked it into his pocket, where it curled up and trembled.
Charlie tiptoed carefully across the floor. He left the machines behind and tried as best he could to stay away from the beasts, but he had to cut through the corner of their space to reach the stairs down. As he moved past the shaitans’ cage, all four of them raised their featureless faces and sang.
In the darkness, they were, if anything, more frightening.
A faint light came up from below. Charlie crept down the stairs and saw the throne. In the glow that still bathed it from above he now saw wisps of smoke, and as he moved closer, Papa Wilhelm stepped forward from the smoke and reached out a hand.
Then, to each side of the throne, a djinn rotated into view. From facing each other they turned to face Charlie, and they held their long, curved swords in their hands.
The djinns immediately rotated out of view again.
Were they advancing sideways toward Charlie? Were they watching him out of their peripheral vision, waiting for him to move forward?
He considered throwing Ollie into the Library Machine’s glow, so at least his friend could escape. But he didn’t know how good the djinns really were with their swords, and the mental image of one of them slicing Ollie the snake in half with his blade…
No.
He needed a way to know where the djinns were.
Charlie turned and ran back up the stairs to the collection. What would allow him to see djinns? What if he covered them in chalk dust—would that make them visible?
Or a mirror. If Charlie could surround the room with mirrors, he thought he’d be able to tell where the djinns were, by the reflection their faces made where they faced forward. Hearing heavy footsteps on the stairs behind him, Charlie ran faster. He was grateful Ollie had wound his mainspring, and he sprinted among the items of the collection in the shadows, looking for…what? A moving mirror? A wall of mirrors? A bag of chalk?
He found nothing that seemed to fit the bill.
Footsteps. Heavy footsteps.
Something wiggled in his consciousness as he ran past an enormous iron bed. It had no mattress, and each spring was as long as Charlie’s forearm. The bed was thirteen feet long and six feet wide—what enormous person had slept in that? What giant?
He heard a footfall again, at the top of the stairs.
Their feet. If the djinns moved by walking, mustn’t they disturb the ground?
Throwing chalk dust on the djinns might not reveal them, but if Charlie could cover the floor in chalk dust, that should reveal where the djinns were as they walked.
Charlie ran, looking for anything that would work. A
mill that ground out salt? He had read an old story about such a mill, and that would have been perfect, but he couldn’t find one here. A bottomless jar of jam?
What about the Foundation Stone? Charlie was quite strong. Was he stronger than Herakles and Samson put together? If he could flood the floor with water, that would show him where the djinns moved.
He turned in the dim light—
and a heavy sword slashed into his side.
A boy made of flesh and blood would not have survived. Charlie was knocked down and thrown across the floor to the Foundation Stone. “Clock me!” he cried.
Charlie squatted and reached to put his hands under the edge of the rock. It was a great flat boulder, dusty, and now that he saw it up close, he noticed grooves cut into its surface. He straightened his back, heaving with all his might—
he felt his springs wind down at an alarming rate—
and the rock didn’t move.
Charlie released the boulder, staggering away from it. How far from him were the djinns? And in which direction? He feared every shadow.
He heard a loud hissing, and then the strange wordless song of the shape-changers. The shaitans were awake. That in itself wasn’t so bad—he could probably avoid their cage—but their noise meant it was even harder to hear the djinns’ footsteps.
Then Charlie remembered the pair of dice. They rolled themselves, and at each bounce they scattered a shower of small objects. Where had they been?
Charlie raced around the exhibits, seeing the singing pillar, a sword with two hands of its own, the giant’s bed, a pair of boots with a snarling mouth in each toe, the boulder again, a glass bowl that contained a snowstorm inside, the animated armor—
The dice.
He grabbed them. They were larger in his hand than he’d expected, and pearls burst from them and rained down around Charlie’s feet.
It was getting lighter. The sun was coming up. That might mean the magician would wake soon.
Charlie needed to get out, and he needed to get out now.
A hand grabbed him, and suddenly Charlie saw one of the djinns, towering above him. The brute had a wide, toothy grin on his face, and raised his curved sword over his head—