Brunty’s inky eyes gleamed. He wiggled his ribbon nose. Then he drew something out of his newsprint waistcoat. It was just the most curious object Emily had ever seen. It looked as though someone had poked out all the glass in a fancy copper hourglass, dumped out the sand, filled it up again with a great stack of milk saucers wrapped in linen, and hung two clock pendulums off it on copper ribbons. The whole business oozed with greenish acid and crackled with tiny, bluish white arcs of lightning. Wet, sickly gunk bubbled out between the saucers, oozed down the ribbons, and crusted up the metal rods holding it all together like salt brine on a ship’s hull. It smelled vile, like rotting pennies. Brunty the Liar, Brunty the Godforsaken Gondalier, Primarily Scurrilous Brunty gave his contraption a good shake. The thing sprayed glittering, boiling, green-gray acid in a neat circle on the floor before him, that lovely floor so carefully painted with the words of The Canterbury Tales. Charlotte and Emily jumped and scrambled backward into the nearest printing press, barely missing having their toes sizzled off by the spreading muck.
Branwell and Anne were left on their own, on the other side of the puddle of poison, with a furious book-man brandishing his alien weapon.
“Change my tune, will you? Take my youth in the slums of Spleenpool, on the shores of Lake Elderna? Will you take my sisters, too? Stanza and Strophie huddling under the eaves in gloves with no fingers and only their brother to protect them?” Bran’s heart lurched toward the savage spy. “Is that too dark and cruel a first chapter to make a good man in the end? You want to look inside me and erase my pain, cross out our father casting us away in favor of our stepmother’s handsomer, merrier, uglier, and stupider children? And then I suppose you’ll cut my education with the Spyglaziers’ Guild? What about my doomed love affair with Indica, my beautiful Thesaurus, back in snowy Almadore where I dueled my usurping brother to the death with an icicle? You want to take her memory, her ghost? Will you redact everything, everything Brunty and replace it with your neat and tidy Glass Town daisy-man idea of goodness? You won’t! I AM FOREVER BRUNTY AND YOU CAN’T STOP ME.”
With a gurgling groan, the golden floor sagged, and rippled, and crumbled in wherever Brunty’s slime touched it. A sudden, yawning hole opened up at their feet, its edges hissing and smoking and crackling with that bluish lightning, and nothing inside but darkness. Brunty whooped joyfully and lunged like a terrible lion. He seized Anne’s arm in one newspaper-hand and Branwell’s neck in the other, the crook of the arm still hanging on to that monstrous acid-fountain. Everyone began screaming at once. Mr. Bud and Mr. Tree bellowed in rage and made ready to jump the gap. Emily and Charlotte started inching round the seething edge, cursing and hollering and calling their brother and sister’s names.
Brunty’s burning glare bored into Branwell and Anne. His grip on their bones crushed down, as unstoppable as stone. He smelled like new books, and the perfect capital O’s of his eyes narrowed until they were shaped like bitter, bitter almonds.
“Are you mad?” he snarled. He stared like he could blow open their skulls if he only looked hard and hateful enough. “Are you? Can four together catch the same madness?”
“Are you?” snapped Bran defiantly. “Go set yourself on fire.”
“No,” whispered Anne, who could not convince her chest to breathe.
The hulking book nodded, the way a man nods when he is looking over a job nearly done. He squeezed Bran and Anne to his massive chest and bellowed: “You filth of Glass Town! You deserve this! You deserve every single thing that is about to happen! You have killed yourselves!”
“Now, that’s just uncalled for,” Mr. Tree sputtered, deeply hurt.
Emily was so close. She was almost there. She could almost touch Anne’s sleeve.
But Brunty just grinned. He grinned, and laughed, and howled, and with Branwell, Anne, and his dread machine firmly in hand, hopped straight down into the poisonous pit he’d made and vanished. Inside half a second, the acid had writhed and wriggled and seared itself back together, leaving nothing but a long, ugly, green scar down the middle of The Governess’s Tale.
Charlotte and Emily stood horribly still, stunned silent and quite alone, apart from two very furious-looking editors, in the lobby of Bud & Tree Publishing House.
PART III
I Am No Bird
TWELVE
Gone, Gone, Gone
Not us! Not our fault!” cried Mr. Bud, holding out his leather arms in the air. “Don’t you go blaming us—I can see you want to! Stop that right now, right this instant. Stop looking like that! It’s distressing Mr. Tree, can’t you see?”
Emily had gone white as paper. She pressed her hands over her mouth, digging her fingernails into her jaw, trying to shove a scream back inside. But it was no good. The scream wanted out. Tears tumbled down her cheeks, soaking her knuckles, dripping off her wrists. She could feel the weight of the lemon in her dress-pocket, suddenly as heavy as her heart. Their ticket home. They’re gone. Gone, gone, gone. Two more of us gone. And no grog can help ‘gone.’ How could they ever go home again without Branwell and Anne? What would they tell Papa?
“We’re only editors!” Mr. Tree shouted, far too loudly. The pair of them stood pressed together, trembling, like two flamingos who have sighted an alligator. “We don’t make things happen; we just clean up the mess when it’s done! You brought that book in here. We’re innocent! And if you’ll follow me, I’ve got some papers for you to sign saying just that. And a few other unimportant little clauses. Be a good girl and we’ll have no trouble here.”
Charlotte stared at the mangled, ropy, yellow scar on the floor where her brother and sister had been standing only a moment ago. It looked like a century’s worth of candle wax. She knew she ought to cry. She wanted to cry. If there was ever a time to cry, now was surely it. But when she reached into herself, into the place where her most terrible fears hung up their coats, she found only a bright, tidy room with dry white walls, furnished with her own sturdy Will. And quite a bit of righteous indignation. She turned her dark gaze on Mr. Bud and Mr. Tree. The pair of them tried valiantly, but they could not meet the eyes of a twelve-year-old girl.
“Open that floor up at once,” Charlotte demanded.
“You can’t mean to go after them, miss.” Mr. Bud tugged fretfully at the leather cords that made up his beard. “Be reasonable, now!”
“They’ll be long gone by now, my dear,” tutted Mr. Tree mournfully. “Best take it on the chin, eh?”
Charlotte rolled her eyes. She marched up to Mr. Bud so forcefully that the poor editor truly thought, for a moment, that this breather child meant to hit him, which would leave him with the severe moral dilemma of whether to hit her back. Instead, she snatched his page-cutter saber from its sheath, glared at him so hard that it felt every bit as painful as a slap, and began trying her hardest to wedge the blade into the twisted, waxy ruin of the floor.
“They’ll only be long gone if you two keep standing there doing nothing like a couple of bricks in a silly old wall! What’s the matter with you? They might be killed! Crashey might spend his grog on us, but Brunty never would spare a drop, and you know it.”
“Oh, no,” Mr. Tree assured them. “Don’t say that. They wouldn’t kill them. Not even Can’t-Take-Him-Anywhere Brunty.”
Mr. Bud nodded. “They’re very good about that sort of thing over in Gondal. Sensitive, don’t you know.”
Charlotte wanted to feel relieved, but she’d no real reason to believe the editors. So she ignored them. She softened her voice a little. “Come on, Em, help me.”
Emily’s tears dried up at once. Charlotte always knew what to do when the worst thing possible actually happened. It was like a magic spell only her sister could cast. If Charlotte started bossing her about, then all was still right with the world. She fell to her knees and began trying to wedge her nails into the golden wound Brunty had left behind.
“You don’t understand!” Mr. Bud wailed. “They are gone. Remaindered! Departed. Decamped! Skipped t
own! Flown the nest! Hit the road! They’ve taken their leave! They’ve exited, stage left! Not at all due to any action or inaction by myself or good Mr. Tree, I’ll remind you. But their print run has been well and truly pulped.”
“You’ll never catch them, even if you could get that bit of our floor open again,” sighed Mr. Tree pointedly. “It is our floor you’re vandalizing, you know. I don’t know who you think you are. If they couldn’t get Victoria back with the whole limey army, I daresay you won’t find more than half a bootlace.”
“And she was the Crown Princess of Glass Town and Angria plus heir to the throne,” Mr. Bud whined. “If one of those can up and vanish like my office keys of a morning, you won’t find a couple of nobodies stuck down the cushions.”
Charlotte pushed her hair back away from her face. It had become quite a situation, after everything. She locked eyes with her sister. Victoria? she mouthed. Anne’s Victoria? Emily shook her head. She didn’t know. Anne never shared her secret Princess with the rest of them. She played the Victoria game after they’d all fallen asleep, whispering under the blankets to herself so that Branwell could not hear and drag her perfect girl into the bigger story and murder her for the drama of seeing Anne cry.
“Well, of course we will!” Emily said, breaking off curls of the horrid tallowy stuff with both hands. Then, she had the marvelous idea of going at it with the toffee hammer she’d swiped from Bestminster’s tea service. The melted parquet did look rather like toffee. But her hammer had no more effect than asking the wreckage nicely to let her through, thank you kindly. Still, the problem, the puzzle of it, put Emily in a much brighter mood. What couldn’t they sort out together? Nothing, that’s what. “I don’t think Brunty’s much of a runner, you know. And Anne’s only little; she’ll slow them up. She always makes us late to wherever we’re going.”
Mr. Bud and Mr. Tree shook their heads.
“Nothing travels faster than bad news,” Mr. Tree said. His silver muttonchops quivered in sympathy. “And Brunty’s is the baddest news there is. Bad news hasn’t got to obey the usual laws of velocity and inertia and traffic police. It just . . . phewwwt! Arrives. Before you do. Might as well try to catch up to the sunrise.”
Mr. Bud patted Emily’s head awkwardly. He meant to be comforting, but it came out more like tapping a bell at a bank desk. “Gondal’s got tunnels and vaults and all sorts of wormy passages running under the city. It’s like old cheese down there, pet.”
“And he had that . . . that thing . . . the . . . the Thingy!” Mr. Tree shuddered, his bookend-shoulders rattling.
Charlotte stopped stabbing at the floor with Mr. Bud’s saber. “What was it? Don’t you know?”
The editors stared at their shoes, quite unaccustomed to not knowing. “I’ve never seen anything like it! It’s dash good at wrecking floors, that’s clear! Who knows what else it does? P’raps Brunts can just give it a tap and they’ll all come tumbling out into Old Boney’s privy in Regina!”
“Boney!” cried Charlotte and Emily.
“What’s Regina?” Emily added in after.
Mr. Bud and Mr. Tree frowned into their chests. “Well . . . yes?” Mr. Tree shrugged. “The capital of Gondal. That’s where old Brunty will be headed. Unless he beelines it to Verdopolis. It would be faster, I suppose.”
“But Verdopolis is in Glass Town,” Emily protested. Verdopolis was their greatest city. The one they’d planned out over and over. Anything wonderful they read about from any other city they put into Verdopolis. The pyramids of Egypt, Balmoral Castle in Edinburgh, the Alhambra in Spain, the Great Wall of China, even the Colosseum in Rome. Branwell had drawn them over and over until they really did almost look like the real ones. She knew exactly where Verdopolis lay on the map and it wasn’t in Gondal. “It’s our . . . your capital!”
“Verdopolis is . . . disputed,” Mr. Tree said darkly. “After he overran Northangerland and Zamorna and besieged the Isle of Dreams, Napoleon claimed the new border between Glass Town and Gondal ran right through Ascension Island. Right through the city of cities, the jewel in Glass Town’s glass crown!”
Mr. Bud clenched his braided jaw. “Then Wellington said: It inkin’ well does not, it runs right where it always ran, through the Calabar Wood down the Mountains of the Moon to the sea. Kindly stay on your side of it, yeah? Old Boney stuck his nose in the air and nobly replied: nuh uh. Then Wellington stuck his up there and said: does so. So then that sack of kneecaps took half the city by force, right up to the river and the Great Wall. Started building fortresses and fashionable housing down the left bank and sticking his tongue out at our limey boys on the other side, hollering: I’m building on it, aren’t I? That means c’est mine according to the ancient law entitled: You Can’t Stop Me, Ha Ha!”
“Glass Town still holds half of Verdopolis. Napoleon lords it over the other half. It’s much closer than Regina. And they’ve just finished turning the airy ancient corridors of our most sacred palace into some hulking brute of a dungeon called the Bastille. Now we’ve put our thoughts in the pot, it seems the likeliest place for Brunty to stash the little ones.”
“Caught himself some plump fishes, hasn’t he?” Mr. Bud nodded. “He’ll want to get them weighed and gutted and sold. Oh! Sorry. Not really gutted. Gutted for information, see? There’s a war on, you know!”
“But we’ve only just arrived. We don’t know anything useful. So they’ll have to let Bran and Annie go. Right, Charlotte?”
Charlotte looked as though she might be sick. Of course they did know quite a lot. They probably knew just about everything. If they could only figure out which game, which campaign, which rainy day in the room at the top of the stairs was happening on this day in Glass Town, there really was nothing Branwell and Anne couldn’t tell Brunty or Bonaparte or that demonic screaming chicken about the war. And what did men at war do to get the information they wanted? Hadn’t Branwell loved to play interrogation with the wooden soldiers?
Mr. Bud groaned. “Stop looking at me like that! I’ve told you! It’s no use trying to shame us! Nothing travels faster than bad news. It’s best if you just forget you ever had a brother or a sister and get on with whatever it is you’re doing with your lives. If they turn up—fantastic! Cake and gin all round. If not? Well, more cake for you, yes?”
Charlotte clenched her teeth. “This is your fault, Mr. Bud.”
“Isn’t!” cried the men at once.
“Is,” Emily hissed. “And yours, Mr. Tree. You were showing off, punishing Brunty right away so we could see it and tell you how brave and clever and excellent you are. You might have waited till we’d gone and all was safe, but then you wouldn’t get to hear the tourists ooh and ahh.”
The proprietors of Bud & Tree Publishing House blushed and found several rather fascinating things to stare at on the ceiling.
“You’re editors,” said Charlotte carefully, narrowing her eyes as she thought it all through. “You clean up the mess. So, the way I see it, you’ve got to clean up this mess. Take us to Gondal. Fix the story. It’s all gone wrong now; you must see that. Branwell and Anne were meant to be home on the evening express. It was a nice little fairy tale wrapped up with a bow and now you’ve got loose children running all over it and a fat spy with some kind of hideous acid-and-lightning machine and the government’s involved. It won’t do at all. So . . . so . . . make it right! Cut something or add something or move it all round until it’s a nice, tidy story again. Take us to Gondal, load us up with grog in case the worst has happened, and we’ll call it good.”
“Not us.” Mr. Bud held up his leather-braided hands again. “We’re a specialty press, lovey. Strictly criminals and criminality, in small batches. Spies and machines and Gondal? That’s too big for our blood. And we haven’t even got any grog. They don’t let just anyone handle the strong stuff. You gotta put in a request. There’s forms. Signatures.”
Mr. Tree fiddled shamefacedly with the buttons on his waistcoat. “We can’t just totter on over to enemy te
rritory and say: So sorry for the trouble, lads, but would you mind if we just popped off with a couple of prisoners of war? Perhaps a biscuit or two for the road? Won’t be a moment! My dear girls, you may think we’re powerful, glorified men, and who could blame you? Look at us! But we’re not anybody! We’re just working class Angrians! Salt of the earth and . . . that. We’d be shot!”
Mr. Bud tugged on the Coptic bindings of his jacket. “No, we can’t do a thing for you, I’m afraid. We feel terrible about it, of course. Miserable. Desolate.”
“Of course!” Mr. Tree gushed. “Just tormented.”
“You need better friends than us. Braver friends. Grander friends. More . . . more famous friends.”
“What’s famous got to do with anything?” Emily asked.
“Fame means money, money means power, power means getting to do whatever you want. A couple of poor editors can’t mount a rescue mission to Gondal in dead of night. But the Duke of Wellington can. The Marquis of Douro can. Lord Byron can.”
“We don’t know any of those people,” protested Charlotte.
“Lord Byron?” Emily gasped.
A great sigh of relief rippled through the bookends and bindings of Mr. Bud and Mr. Tree.
“Well, I suppose I can do you a decent turn, then.” Mr. Bud smiled and reached behind the reception desk to fiddle with something. “I’ll send word to our Ginny right away. She’s dressing maid to Miss Mary Percy—the missus and me are terrifically proud! It’ll be no trouble at all. Ochreopolis has the fastest ghost in Glass Town.”
The Glass Town Game Page 13