by Dave Butler
She pushed one rod and pulled the other.
Charlie smiled.
“Charlie, mate,” Bob said to him. “You can’t stand ’ere while I do this. You’re distraining me.”
“Distracting.”
“What’s distraining, then?”
Charlie shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“Right.” Bob jerked her thumb toward the wall of the bell. “Get out of ’ere. Go find something else to do, an’ if nothing else, go talk to the snake-ghosts. Tell ’em I’m working on it.”
Charlie dropped to all fours and crawled back outside the diving bell.
The circle of nāgas had tightened, and they looked at him with wide eyes and open mouths.
Charlie locked his hands behind his back; it made him feel official. “The helms…helmsman is at work raising the ship.”
“Heeeeeelmsmaaaaan,” the nāgas keened together.
“What is the bell?” the spokesnāga asked.
“It is the helmsman’s.” Charlie straightened his back to maximize his authority. “He is at work inside. If you touch the bell, or if you enter, or if you disturb the bell in any way—”
“Lord Ravana will destroy us!” the lead nāga shrieked.
“Destroooooooy uuuuuuuuus!” the others wailed.
“Yes,” Charlie said. “Destroy you. So move back, leave the helmsman to do her—that is, to do his work.”
To his surprise, the nāgas retreated. To his sorrow, they didn’t disappear entirely. How long would they wait before they attacked?
Not long enough, he feared.
And that thought gave him an idea. “How well do you know the workings of the Pushpaka vimāna?” he asked the head nāga.
“Workings?”
“I mean the machinery.”
The nāga stared.
“How it functions. The inside.”
“We know the inside,” the nāga said. “We sailed this vimāna on all twelve winds; we know it as a vessel.”
“Good. Tell me, then…” Charlie thought, and wished he had a better way to ask this question, but he didn’t. “Where is the nail of the intellectual world?”
The nāga stared.
Charlie had no idea what the nail looked like, but he’d seen the other two. “It’s as long as my arm,” he said. “And it belongs to the gods. The world of the gods, and the demons.” To protect himself, he added, “Probably. Did Lord Ravana leave a big nail behind somewhere?” He wished he’d asked Ollie for more of a hint before jumping into the stepwell.
The nāga blew bubbles of green vapor from its lips, a gesture that was picked up by the entire circle of nāgas. They drifted slowly inward, looks of suspicion on their faces.
“Back!” Charlie shouted, leaping forward.
The nāgas scattered, regrouping at the edge of the light, barely visible.
“I will consult the helmsman!” he announced.
Then he ducked into the water again and entered the diving bell.
Bob crouched in the water, working with her fingers at the bases of the long rods.
“How’s it going?” he asked.
“Testing ’ypotheses. It’d be easier if I could see the ’ole machine.” Bob shrugged. “ ’Ow’s it going with you?”
“The crew hasn’t eaten me yet,” Charlie said, “but that’s not for lacking of wanting to.” Then he heard his own words and had an idea. “Keep it up.”
He splashed back under the lip of the bell.
The nāgas had returned and were slowly circling the vimāna. The lead nāga drifted close to the pilot’s platform, if that was indeed what the space between the swans was, and stared at Charlie through slitted eyes.
“You were the crew!” Charlie called to her, enjoying the sound of his underwater voice. “What part of the vimāna were you not allowed in?”
The nāga blew green bubbles. “Lord Ravana’s chambers.”
“Very good,” Charlie said. Would the nāgas see his ignorance, and would that make them attack him? “Lord Ravana is pleased. Now lead me to those chambers.”
The nāga speaker bowed, and then swam down the outside of the vimāna.
Charlie followed, walking along one of the swan’s necks to its beak and then stepping off. He dropped, slower than the nāga swam, but fast enough to keep her in view.
They descended two levels, and then the nāga waited for him.
The walkway encircling the vimāna here bristled with metal poles pointing outward. They looked a bit like spears, only they weren’t sharp at the tip. Coiled gold wire connected them all. From here Charlie could see the white sand at the watery bottom, on which the vimāna rested.
Long, eyeless fish moved back and forth just above the sand. White crustaceans with multiple legs and eyes on long stalks scuttled beneath the bellies of the fish. Far enough away to be nearly invisible, something with tentacles retreated into darkness.
“This way,” the nāga hissed. Then she swam through an open window.
Charlie clambered in after.
To his surprise, much of the interior of the vimāna still held air. Or at least it wasn’t full of water—whether the air was breathable or not was a different question, and one Charlie had no ability to judge. When she led him through passages filled with water, the nāga swam; with equal facility, she slithered up onto dry floors to lead him across halls that were not submerged, dragging her human forepart forward by leaning on the palms of her hands.
Charlie also learned that the nāga smelled bad. Because of Ollie, he associated snakes with the smell of rotten eggs, even though he knew from his reading that snakes were very clean and didn’t really smell like much at all, to an ordinary person.
The nāga smelled like decayed flesh.
At one point, Charlie stopped. “I think you’re leading me in a very roundabout fashion,” he said to the nāga. He pointed to a submerged passage to his right. “We could have come directly here by cutting through that passage; I’m sure of it.”
“Yes,” the nāga hissed. “But I can’t go in that passage.”
“Because it belongs to Lord Ravana?” Charlie asked.
The nāga hung her head. “Because our bodies lie there, rotting.” Again her skull shone through her emerald-green flesh, and when Charlie looked again at the submerged hallway, he thought he now saw it full of rib cages and skeletal hands.
A dull thud resounded from the vimāna itself; something had struck the vessel.
“Is someone interrupting the helmsman?” Charlie asked.
The nāga shook her head.
“Lead on,” he told her.
“This door,” she told him. “Behind here are Lord Ravana’s chambers, and I may not go.”
The door was enormous, easily five times Charlie’s height. It was made of a dark, heavy wood that had been painted red. The antechamber in which Charlie and the nāga stood was not submerged, but sheer age had made all the paint on the door curl up into flakes that barely clung to the surface they had once covered entirely.
There was no apparent knob or knocker. A single hinge near the center of the door’s height, the length of Charlie’s arm, suggested that the door swung outward, but Charlie saw no way to grip the door.
A second thud, even louder. But the sounds seemed to come from the side of the vimāna, not its top. Probably Bob was still safe, and working.
Charlie was conscious of the nāga watching him. “Iftah, ya baabaain!” he shouted, imitating the dwarf magician Suleiman.
Nothing happened.
“Open sesame!” he tried next, partly as a joke for his own benefit, but partly because it worked in stories, so it might work in real life. Or, Charlie thought, he might be in a story, if Ollie was right.
The door stayed shut.
Charlie considered, and
saw only one option. He examined the single hinge—fortunately, it was simple, a long white spike, made of something that looked like chalk, connecting interlacing gold loops, which were affixed in alternation to the door and the wall. Remove the spike, and the door should simply fall forward. Hopefully.
“What are you doing?” the nāga asked him.
“Can I stand on you?” Charlie asked. “I mean, will I fall through?”
The nāga bared all her teeth, which turned out to be a lot. “You may not stand on me. Are you Lord Ravana’s servant at all?”
“You may stand on me,” said a voice. Thomas’s voice.
Thomas climbed out of the water, shedding streams of it from his black coat. His hands were in his pockets, which bulged—maybe from the unicorn horn and the cold-iron knife, Charlie thought, though those were long enough that they were probably hidden up his sleeves instead.
“You may climb on me, Charlie,” Thomas said again.
“What sort of name is Charlie?” the nāga asked.
“Come stand by this hinge,” Charlie said to Thomas. He shook a finger at the nāga. “As for you…do you wish to be freed, or don’t you?”
The nāga backed down, cowed.
Thomas waited beside the hinge and Charlie clambered up his brother like a ladder, stepping first on his knees and then dragging himself up onto his shoulders. “Hold on while I push.” Gripping the pointed tip of the spike holding the hinge together, Charlie groaned as he tugged it upward—
it resisted, and Thomas shuddered with the effort—
Charlie yanked, and the spike came free into his hands. It was pointed, as long as his arm and of a metal of strange color.
It looked just like a nail.
“Hey, Thomas,” Charlie began, and looked down at his brother.
Thomas wobbled, trying to catch his balance, and Charlie saw into the stuffed pocket of his brother’s coat. In the pocket, balled up, was Thomas’s scarf.
His scarf.
“You’re not Thomas!” Charlie shouted.
The shaitan shifted into its natural, black-eyed face, baring needlelike teeth and hissing. Adjusting its grip quickly, it dragged Charlie down and hurled him to the floor.
“Liar!” the nāga yowled, and pounced on Charlie also.
Charlie kicked, and his attack knocked the shaitan away. At the same moment, though, the nāga coiled her tail around Charlie’s waist and sank her teeth into his neck. Charlie flailed and pounded her with his arms—for a ghost, she turned out to be very solid—but all he got for his efforts was hurt hands.
Hissing like a wet fire, the shaitan kicked Charlie in the side of the head. When Charlie raised his arm to block a second kick, the shaitan grabbed his wrist and began to pull.
The nāga stuck two fingers into one of the holes in Charlie’s side and gripped his body. She, too, began to pull.
Charlie heard the groan of metal, and he felt himself beginning to be literally torn apart.
“De Minimis and Underthames!”
Gnat?
The pixie leaped past Charlie, holding a dagger high over her head. It wasn’t the cold-iron knife, but something the color of ivory—the tooth of the Hound that Gnat had killed in Wales, now wielded as a weapon.
The shaitan turned too late, and Gnat stabbed it in the chest. Bright green blood sprayed out, and the shaitan punched the fairy. Gnat flew in one direction, trailing drops of water, and the shaitan sprang back the other way, clutching at its wound.
Charlie felt his chest bend out of shape. He slammed his forehead into the nāga’s nose, but she didn’t flinch.
Then, suddenly, her smile fell flat.
“Leave my brother alone!”
The nāga’s tail was ripped from Charlie’s body. The action tossed Charlie himself aside, and he banged into the metal wall of the vimāna and lay in a crumpled heap.
Thomas had come to Charlie’s rescue with Gnat. His face looked as afraid as it was angry, but he had the nāga firmly by the tail and was swinging her in a circle over his head. The nāga gibbered and shrieked, and it swung its clawlike hands at Thomas, but it couldn’t reach him.
Thomas threw the nāga against the door of Lord Ravana’s chambers.
Bong!
The door shook on the impact. The nāga fell to the floor and lay stunned, shaking its head slowly. The door trembled, toppled slowly forward—BONG!—and landed on the nāga.
The door was so heavy it didn’t bounce, and when it hit the floor, whatever was left of the nāga was so thin, Charlie couldn’t see it—the door seemed to be lying perfectly flat.
The shaitan hissed and jumped at Charlie.
Charlie hurt, and his chest and arms felt weak, but his legs were strong. He kicked them against the wall and hurled himself out of the shaitan’s path.
Thomas’s face still looked terrified, but that didn’t stop him from leaping forward to butt the shaitan with his head and shoulders. Like an acrobat, the shaitan tumbled into the large, totally dark room behind the door.
Gnat leaped after him. She leaped, and didn’t fly, because her wings were soggy with water. As she jumped, one of them fell off. She had no weapons in her hand, but her face shone with concentrated fury.
“Shut the door!” she yelled to Thomas and Charlie.
Charlie stood. “But that will leave you alone with the shaitan!”
The room behind the door had no furniture. The shaitan pounced toward the pixie warrior and seized her by her remaining wing. When she squirmed out of its grip, the wing came off in its hand.
“Do it!” Thomas squealed.
The door was enormous, but the brothers were strong. Gripping the door by its two corners, they heaved it back up and into place. Charlie felt his mechanisms whine in protest, but he and Thomas got the job done.
Stuck to the underside of the door, like a single sock, was the only sign of the nāga: the squished body of a sea snake.
The door fell into its frame with a soft boom.
“I could stand to have my spring wound,” Thomas said.
“So could I,” Charlie agreed. “And maybe some repairs.”
Behind the closed door, they heard an ear-shattering howl, and then silence.
“Gnat?” Charlie called tentatively.
He heard a soft tapping on the door. “Aye, lads, ’tis I. You can open the door now.”
Charlie remembered that the shaitan had appeared to be Thomas, and had even spoken with Thomas’s voice. “How do we know you’re our friend Natalie and not the monster?”
“You’ll have forgotten this, but like all my kind, I see in complete darkness as well as I do in broad daylight. Blind, the shaitan was no match.”
Maybe…but Charlie wanted more confirmation, just in case. “Tell me something only Natalie would know,” he said.
“The day I met you, Charlie Pondicherry, Grim Grumblesson smashed his horns through your father’s ceiling.”
Charlie was convinced. He and Thomas wedged two of the nails between the door and its frame, one on each side, and they pulled the door forward again.
Gnat stood behind the door, on top of the shaitan’s body. She was wingless and no bigger than a doll, but Charlie thought she’d never seemed taller. In her right hand, she held the Hound’s tooth, green with the shaitan’s blood, and in her left she raised the scarf that had once been Thomas’s.
“I’ll be taking this as my token, Thomas,” the fairy warrior said. “If you don’t mind.”
“I’m proud that you’d take it,” Thomas said shyly. “Also, that will keep it out of the hands of any more shaitans.”
The mechanical boys wound each other’s springs, and Charlie looked inside Lord Ravana’s chambers while Thomas brought him up to full power. The ceiling was high and vaulted, and the hall was gigantic, but there was no art, and n
o furniture, and the walls were plain as could be.
“How did you get down here?” he asked Gnat.
She smiled. “When I saw that fellow grab a rock and jump in, I knew he must be the shaitan. So I picked up another stone and jumped in after him.”
“I didn’t need a weight,” Thomas said. “I just jumped in like you did, Charlie.”
“That was brave,” Charlie told his brother.
Thomas grinned.
“And you knew you’d lose your wings,” Charlie said to the pixie.
“Better than losing my friends.”
“That was a mighty deed,” Charlie said.
“Aye.” Gnat laughed. “That’s what I plan to tell the folk of Underthames.”
As Thomas finished giving Charlie’s mainspring the final crank, the entire vimāna shuddered.
“Bob!” Charlie shouted.
They rushed out. On foot, the boys were faster than Gnat, so the pixie rode on Charlie’s shoulders, both in the passages and chambers where there was air, and in the submerged sections. She took an extra-large breath before they exited the vessel.
A flurry of activity crowned the vimāna. The nāgas lunged, time and again, at a figure who stood in the center, defending the diving bell. The outnumbered warrior had a curved saber in each hand, and he dodged the nāgas’ attacks by disappearing repeatedly and then reappearing to slash at the snake-ghosts. He was nimble and quick, but his attacks were just awkward swings.
It was Ollie.
He wasn’t disappearing; he was dodging by turning himself into a snake and back into a human, over and over again.
That had to be exhausting.
“Ollie!” Thomas barreled into the fight, kicking one nāga like a ball and knocking it entirely off the top of the vimāna.
Charlie almost joined the attack, but he knew Gnat would need air.
Why didn’t Ollie need air?
Also, he wanted to see Bob.
The vimāna shook again as Charlie climbed under the lip of the diving bell. Gnat gasped and leaped into one of the bell’s seats, the wet scarf dripping like a rain-soaked cloak about her, the Hound’s tooth clutched in her hand, ready to strike.
Bob stood, holding the knobs atop the two rods and beaming. “I’ve almost got it, Charlie!” she cried.