The Width of the World

by David Baldacci

  And it fit the Maladons perfectly, because that’s exactly what they were: cruel and heartless.

  Arnold began to dutifully polish the brass knocker.

  My blood began to boil because I knew he had had his magic and his life taken from him.

  Well, I meant to give it back.

  * * *

  WE WAITED UNDER our cloak of invisibility until it turned dark and the streets emptied of both motors and people. Then we waited some more.

  We quietly ate some of the provisions that Mrs. Jolly had so kindly given us.

  We spoke only in low tones because I had no reason to believe there weren’t spies throughout this horrible place.

  Finally, when we heard a tower clock chime the lateness of the hour, I pulled a tiny bottle of dust from my pocket. On the label was the name Amicus Arnold. I used my wand to return the bottle to its full size. Then I looked at the others.

  “Ready?” I said.

  They nodded.

  Petra had her wand out.

  And Delph’s hand hovered over the short-handled ax on his belt.

  Harry Two’s fangs were bared.

  The red door opened with a spell cast and we were inside.

  I assumed that the owners would sleep in the upstairs rooms.

  That left the downstairs to their slave.

  We passed through rooms that were lavishly furnished and past walls adorned with beautiful paintings. Our feet sank into thick rugs. Our eyes roamed over intricate wallpaper. As a former Finisher at Stacks, I had to marvel at the beauty I was seeing. But the foulness just underneath the surface quickly made all I was viewing remarkably ugly.

  We found the sleeping chamber of Amicus Arnold. It was just off the kitchen in what appeared to be a broom cupboard. He was curled up on the floor snoring softly, his beautiful, spotless livery hanging on hooks on the back of the door.

  I realized with a start that I had seen this bloke before. He was the one who had been trailing behind the couple and caught the item the woman had dropped. And gotten slapped for his troubles before I had blasted his “masters” with an Engulifiado spell.

  Harry Two had shown me the best way to accomplish our task tonight.

  I spun my ring around so that we became visible.

  Then I uncorked the bottle, turned it upside down and let the dust sprinkle over the sleeping man.

  It didn’t take long for each particle to be soaked right into him.

  A few seconds went by as Arnold glowed brightly.

  Then he sat bolt upright, blinked and his gaze fell upon us.

  And I truly meant that, because his eyes had come back. They were a lovely shade of green, as a matter of fact.

  “What the —”

  I held up my wand and said, “You’re Amicus Arnold.”

  “I know I am.” He looked around. “At least … at least now I do. It’s all so muddy. How did I get here? And who are you lot?”

  “My name is Vega Jane. This is Petra, Delph and my dog, Harry Two.”

  “What the blazes are you doing here?”

  I conveyed an enormous amount of information as efficiently as I possibly could. When I mentioned what I had done to his masters, he smiled. “I wondered about that. But I guess I was under their … their spell thing. The thing is, I don’t remember being … magical.”

  “But do you remember doing things that were inexplicable?”

  He rubbed his jaw. “Well, come to think, yeah. I could talk to my cat. My mum thought I had a fever or something. And I could make a coin spin as long as I wanted it to.”

  “There you have it.”

  “So you’re saying I was lured onto the train and my magic stolen and I was made a servant to the people who live here?”

  “Yes.” I held up the bottle with his name on it.

  He slowly traced the letters of his name with his finger.

  “Blimey,” he said, tears creeping to the corners of his eyes. “And you came here to save me?”

  “You and a great many others,” said Delph.

  I said, “But you must go on being enslaved. For now anyway. Until we send the signal that it’s time to go.”

  “The signal that you told me about?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you said we’re going to fight the … the Maladons?”

  “To the death, I expect.”

  His face fell and he shook his head sadly.

  “I don’t know how to fight. Not with magic.”

  I glanced at Petra and Delph before replying. “That’s where we come in. We’re going to train you. We’re going to train all of you.”

  He glanced at my wand. “But I don’t have one of those.”

  “You’ll have a wand,” I said.

  Petra and Delph looked at me in surprise. I had not told them about that part.

  Arnold’s face crumpled and he said in dismay, “But, Vega, I don’t know if I can pretend to be enslaved now. When I see their faces I might want to punch them or something. Then your plan will be ruined.”

  “You won’t have to pretend.”

  I raised my wand.

  “Do you trust me, Amicus?”

  He slowly nodded. “Yes, I do, Vega. After what you’ve done for me, I surely do.”

  I performed the spell and he lapsed back to the floor and fell asleep.

  There was one more obvious thing that needed doing. I knew no spell that could accomplish this directly, but I knew of one that might do so indirectly.

  I touched my wand to his eyes and said, “Eraisio.” Held firmly in my mind was what I wanted to happen. A spell of necessity, as Silenus would say.

  His eyes turned blank once more.

  Having to return Arnold to slavery was not easy, not after just freeing him. But I had a plan and I had to stick to it. Or else we would all end up as slaves to the Maladons.

  Or dead more likely.

  We left Amicus Arnold and moved on to the next one.

  That night we freed eight people in total, an equal number of men and women. Each was much like Amicus Arnold: grateful, bewildered, uncertain and angry. But in the end they all swore to do what would be asked of them.

  After that we retreated to the train station at Greater True. It was morning now but this place was not busy.

  I had to remind myself that the reason was odious.

  This town was for the elites, who, by definition, were far less numerous than the rabble.

  As Petra and Delph fell asleep safely hidden behind our invisibility shield, I opened the book that I had duplicated back at the church in True. Using an ink stick, I ticked off the names of the people we had visited and freed.

  Eight down.

  Quite a few still to go.

  I hoped we would survive to get to the last name.

  And then, though it was hard to fathom considering what we’d already been through, the real danger would begin.

  THE NEXT NIGHT did not go nearly as smoothly.

  We managed to successfully free a goodly number of people, including a bloke named Dennis O’Shaughnessy who wouldn’t stop kissing me. He just about cried when I had to put him back under a spell until the time was right.

  The next house after O’Shaughnessy’s held an unexpected surprise.

  The little girl with very dark skin whom I’d seen in the looking glass at Maladon Castle lay on her ragged bed in the bowels of a large house on Needles Court.

  I gasped when I saw her. I had not known her name before. Now I did.

  Miranda Weeks.

  I returned her magical dust to her and she awoke. She stretched out her long thin limbs and then sat bolt upright. I explained what had happened to her. She took this all in, in a way that impressed me. She was surely mature beyond her years. Then I told her what I had seen at the castle. Her mother and her in the looking glasses.

  I said, “We don’t have another person with the surname Weeks on the list. Do you know what happened to your mother? I have her magical dust.” I drew the bottle fr
om my pocket. “I took it when I was at Maladon Castle.”

  She leaned back against the wall and brushed a tear from her eye. “Now that you cleared my mind, I remember.” She paused, her face screwed up in pain. “I heard them talking, these … these Maladons.” She paused again, and I could see her chin tremble. “They said me mum died. They said that happens.” She fought back a sob. “They said it didn’t happen often enough. And then they laughed.”

  We all stared down at her, unable to speak in the face of this atrocity until Petra sat next to her and held her. Miranda wept into Petra’s shoulder as Petra whispered soothing things into her ear.

  Miranda finally stopped weeping, and Petra let her go and stood next to me. I held Petra’s gaze for a long moment. She was the most perplexing person I’d ever met.

  I said, “Miranda, I promise you that if you trust me, we will avenge your mum, okay?”

  She nodded. I cast my spell, crafted blank eyes and turned to leave.

  “Petra, what did you say to her?”

  She looked embarrassed. “I … I just told her that I was her friend. And that I would be there for her.”

  “Okay,” I said quietly. “That was very nice.”

  We headed off, my mind still awhirl at the conundrum of Petra Sonnet.

  In the fourth house we visited was a brown-skinned gent named Dedo Datt. I had seen a number of people back in True who looked like him. He was of medium height and skinny, with black hair swept back off his brow. He was, unlike the others, not asleep. He was sitting up in the corner of his little room next to the basement stairs.

  He made no movement when I twisted round my ring and became visible. He said nothing when we sprinkled the dust over him. But when the magic was readily absorbed into him and his eyes were no longer blank, they filled with tears.

  “I have waited so long,” he said, rising and holding out his hand.

  This stunned me.

  “You were waiting?”

  He nodded.

  “So you remember what happened to you?”

  “I remembered enough to know that I was not who I had become. But I was powerless to do anything about it.”

  “You’re magical.”

  He nodded. “I knew that. I realized that was why I had been taken.”

  “The Maladons.”

  “Yes, the Maladons. What is your plan?” he asked.

  “To beat them.”

  He smiled. “That is a very good plan.”

  As we left the house, I said to the others, “That shows the Maladons are not infallible.” And then I smiled. That was a very good thing to know.

  The next home was one of the largest we had yet seen. Indeed, so large was it that there were two people here who needed rescuing from their enslavement: Anna Dibble and Sara Bond.

  Like so many of the others, we found them in the bowels of the luxurious home wearing shabby nightdresses, their hair covered with ill-fitting bonnets.

  We sprinkled the dust, and they slowly came around to their stolen pasts, as had the others. All that was fine enough.

  Until I looked over to the doorway of the women’s bleak sleeping quarters and came face-to-face with who I presumed was the owner of the opulent place. He was wearing silk pajamas and had on an expensive-looking robe with a tassel waistband.

  And in one hand was a morta.

  He pointed it at me and shouted, “What the bloody —”

  He got no farther because Petra said firmly, “Paralycto.”

  He froze with the morta still pointed at me.

  “Thanks, Petra.” I studied him leisurely. “He’s your master?” I asked the pair.

  “Yes,” they both said.

  “Wrong. He was your master. He no longer is.”

  Sara and Anna looked at each other, and then tears slid down their faces.

  “Is he the only one who lives here with you?” I asked.

  “There’s his wife, but you can’t wake her, aye, even if you dropped every plate in the house,” said Anna.

  I walked around the frozen bloke and then pointed my wand at him once more.

  “Subservio.”

  His features relaxed, and I said, “Unparalycto.”

  He slumped to the floor, his back against the wall, his eyes staring off.

  “Your name?” I asked.

  “Cyril Dudgett,” he said in a lifeless tone.

  “All right, Dudgett, you will remember nothing of this. When we’re done, you will return to your bed as though you had never awoken, is that clear?”

  He dumbly nodded, his puckered eyes puckering even more.

  “You own this house?”

  He nodded.

  “Who are your masters?”

  “I have none,” he said sharply.

  I smiled at this. The Maladons had done a very complete job making this fool believe his life was his own, though he was as much under their power as he was under mine right now.

  “What do you do?” I asked.

  “Do?” he said.

  “In the way of work?”

  “I am rich. I don’t have to work.”

  “How very lucky you are,” I said drily. “And the source of your wealth?”

  His puckered eyes widened, as though he had never pondered such a question.

  “My wealth is … my wealth. I have always had it.”

  “Quite fortunate.”

  “I am one of the chosen.”

  “Chosen by whom?” I asked.

  Again, he faltered.

  “I … I am one of the chosen,” he said again. “Aren’t I?” he added feebly.

  “Blimey,” said Sara. “He’s off his noodle.”

  I turned to look at her. “His life is an empty one, not even his own. He lives in luxury and never questions anything. The perfect puppet.”

  I turned back to him. “Dudgett, do you know anything that would be useful to me?”

  “Like what?”

  “Anything of the Maladons.”

  “I do not know that term.”

  “Mr. Endemen, then?

  His mouth broadened to a smile. “A fine chap. A good man. He’s always visiting us in Greater True. He always makes us feel … feel …”

  “Feel so good about yourselves?” I finished for him.

  “Exactly. So very good about ourselves.”

  “Because you’re the chosen ones?” I thought of something and added, “Because you’ve earned the right to be … chosen?”

  “Precisely. You’ve put your finger right on it. Yes. We’ve earned it.”

  “And how did you earn it?”

  His smile collapsed along with his features. His mouth opened and closed but nothing came out.

  “All right, Dudgett, we’ll leave it at that. Before you go back to bed, I want you to tell Anna and Sara that you’re sorry for what you’ve done.”

  Dudgett turned to them and said, “I’m sorry.”

  I looked at Anna and Sara. “I don’t care if he didn’t mean it. I thought you just might want to hear it.”

  I ordered him back upstairs and he dutifully went off.

  I put Sara and Anna back to sleep and we set off for another house under cover of the invisibility ring.

  “Those blokes don’t know how good they have it,” said Petra. “I mean they really don’t know, do they?”

  I said forcefully, “They’ve been fed a pack of lies and given stuff so they’ll be nice little pets for the Maladons. Their minds have been taken over. Their lives are not their own. They’re really slaves like the others, only they don’t know it either. I wouldn’t call that having it good.” I stared over at her. “Would you?”

  “I … I guess not. But they have food and a roof over their heads and nice clothes and servants. And plenty of money. And they don’t have to work.”

  “Right, plenty of stuff,” I replied. “The only thing missing from their lives … is a life.”

  We fell silent until Delph said, “I wonder how the Maladons chose the bloke
s? I mean did they create Greater True and fill it with people and make them better off than everybody else?”

  “I think they might have, Delph.”

  “But what’s the point to it all?” asked Petra.

  Delph said, “Well, it’s sort of what we was talking about, how they play one off against the other like. Like Virgil said. Create a pretend enemy so they have something to hate. Plus, considering that the folks from Greater True can travel to True, but those from True can’t come here, I think it’s a way to show those from True, and through them, all others living about in the country, that people can live better. That things can improve for folks. Those in True, brainwashed though they might be, can look at the rich from here and say, ‘See, that could be me if I work hard and keep on the dutiful path. I can reach the promised land, so to speak.’ It makes life seem fair somehow.”

  “I think you’re exactly right, Delph,” I said. “When my grandfather said the most bitterly awful place of all was one that Wugs didn’t know was as wrong as wrong could be, he could have also been talking about this place.”

  We ventured to the next name on our list and did that one plus nine more.

  The following night we did ten more. And the next night the same.

  We had just returned to our hiding place in the bowels of the train station when we saw that the room we’d been using looked like it had been searched. We had left nothing here that was important, but it was still unnerving that someone had located this spot and gone through it.

  “We’ll have to move, I reckon,” I said dully, for it was quite late and I was knackered, as we all were.

  We packed up our few belongings and set off to find a new hiding place down there.

  It was eerily quiet and so very dark that I was tempted to use my wand to provide illumination.

  The second I did, a spell shot over our heads, barely missing us. It hit the wall instead and left a good-size, smoky hole.

  I cried out and instinctively ducked.

  The others tethered to me did the same.

  Another spell shot out, lower this time. Had we remained standing, we would have been goners.

  Flattened to the floor, I looked around to see where the spells were coming from. But all I could see was darkness.