‘That’s okay,’ said Arthur. ‘I knew you were working for Suzy. What I want to know right now is what’s happened to my friend Leaf.’
The two Rats exchanged a surprised look.
‘We are expert searchers and finders of information as all else,’ said Monckton. ‘But clearly your sources are as good. It was only five days ago that I entered into an agreement with Miss Leaf.’
‘Five days,’ Arthur repeated, mystified. Yet again the weird time shifts between the House and the Secondary Realms were confusing him.
‘Yes, five days,’ Monckton confirmed.
‘That was for her court thing, right?’ said Arthur impatiently. ‘What happened?’
‘The court was held this morning, before Captain Swell chose to sail away. Miss Leaf was charged with being a stowaway —’ ‘I know! What happened to her?’
‘With the potential punishment being a death sentence for a mortal, I was acutely aware of the stakes. However —’ ‘What happened? Is she . . .?’
Sixteen
‘NO, NO, SHE’S NOT DEAD,’ replied Monckton. ‘But she has been pressed.’
‘Pressed!’ Arthur exclaimed. ‘What do you mean? Like crushed?’
He couldn’t believe it. Whipping was bad enough, but to be pressed flat —
‘No, no! Pressed, as in forcibly enlisted,’ said Monckton. ‘I was able to prove that she did not go aboard the Flying Mantis of her own free will, so she was not a stowaway. But she was not a passenger either, nor a distressed sailor. Ultimately the only thing she could be was one of the crew. So she was pressed into service as a ship’s boy.’
‘Ship’s girl,’ said Arthur.
‘Ship’s boy,’ said Monckton. ‘They’re always called ship’s boys, even when they’re girls. There are plenty of both aboard the ships of the Border Sea. Though apart from your friend Leaf, they’re all the Piper’s children, of course, and therefore our brethren. We help one another, where we may.’
‘But what will happen to her?’
‘It’s a hard life, but the Mantis is a well-found ship and a fair one,’ said Longtayle. ‘Your friend might work her way up, become an officer, even captain her own ship in time. Mortals learn much faster than Denizens, so there’s no knowing where she’ll end up.’
‘But she won’t want to be a ship’s boy! She has to get home! She has a family and friends!’
‘She signed the ship’s articles,’ Longtayle reported. ‘There’s no breaking them.’
‘Except by executive order from Drowned Wednesday,’ corrected Monckton.
‘So I could release her once I get the Will to make me Master of the Border Sea,’ said Arthur. ‘Or Duke, or whatever it is.’
Both Rats nodded in agreement. They didn’t seem surprised that Arthur was planning to assume control over the Border Sea.
‘I suppose Leaf will be safe enough on board the Mantis,’ Arthur said in a hopeful tone. She was probably better off than he was, being out of the trouble he was heading into, but still he wished he’d got to the Triangle earlier and could have helped Leaf get off the ship and go home.
I’ll have to check, he thought. With the mirror and the shell …
‘She’ll be safer than most at sea, for the Mantis is a good ship, but there’s always storm and wrack,’ said Monckton.
‘And pirates,’ added Longtayle. ‘The Shiver has been sighted too often in recent times for my liking, not to mention some of Feverfew’s lesser brethren, such as Captain Blooddreg of the Nightdream.’
‘That’s why I’m here,’ said Arthur. ‘Kind of. I need to find Feverfew’s secret harbour, and I need to go in there and get something. I must ask for your help.’
‘We are mercantile Rats,’ said Monckton. ‘That is to say, we do not do anything without payment of some kind.’
‘Do you actually know where Feverfew’s harbour is?’ Arthur asked. ‘Or can you find out fairly quickly? I mean, there’s no point talking about payment if you can’t do anything.’
‘We think we know where it is,’ said Longtayle. ‘That is to say we have deduced its location from some evidence, but we have not actually been there ourselves. As for getting you there . . . if we’re right then that’s an even more difficult proposition.’
‘Okay,’ said Arthur, ready to bargain. ‘What payment do you want for the location, to start with?’
‘We deal in information,’ said Monckton. ‘So if we answer your questions, we’d like you to answer an equivalent number of ours.’
Arthur had been expecting to pay a ransom in gold or treasure. This seemed too easy. . .
‘Is that all?’ he asked.
‘That may be more than it seems,’ Longtayle advised.
Arthur shrugged. ‘I don’t have anything to hide. At least I don’t think I do.’
‘Then you shall ask three questions of us,’ said Monckton. ‘And we shall ask three of you.’
‘There’s no trick to this, is there?’ Arthur asked suspiciously. ‘I mean, what I just asked doesn’t count as a question, does it? Because I’m not agreeing to that.’
‘Only significant questions count,’ said Monckton. ‘So, you want to know what we know about Feverfew’s secret harbour?’
‘Yes,’ said Arthur. ‘That’s my first question. Where is it?’
In response, Longtayle unrolled a very large map that took up most of the table. It was labelled THE BORDER SEA and was nearly all blue water, with occasional small flecks of land, each neatly marked in tiny cursive script.
Arthur looked over the map eagerly, taking in place names like Port Wednesday, the Triangle, Mount Last, and Swirleen Deep. At first glance, he couldn’t see anything labelled Feverfew’s Secret Harbour, so he went back to the top left corner to start a systematic search up and down, only to be interrupted as Longtayle carefully placed a small ivory carving of a white whale on the map and tapped it twice.
‘It’s there,’ he said. ‘We believe Feverfew’s secret harbour must actually be inside Drowned Wednesday.’
‘Inside her!’
‘More exactly, we believe the secret harbour is a miniature worldlet that is anchored inside Drowned Wednesday’s stomach. It can be accessed in only two ways. One is via a unique augury puzzle that Feverfew possesses, made for him by Grim Tuesday, like the worldlet itself. The other is directly from Wednesday’s stomach.’
‘But it can’t be inside her,’ said Arthur. ‘She returned to her normal human form. How could a whole secret harbour still be in her stomach?’
‘I am not a metamathic sorcerer,’ said Longtayle, ‘but I believe the explanation is something like this: The secret harbour is contained within a bubble of the Secondary Realm that has been brought into the House. The size of that bubble may change from minuscule to gigantic without affecting the world it contains. When Lady Wednesday used the Third Key to return to her former shape, the bubble shrank with her. When she grew again, it grew. But the world inside the bubble did not change.’
‘And you can get into it from Wednesday’s stomach?’
‘We believe so,’ said Longtayle. ‘Or out of it. We think Feverfew had the worldlet sorcerously placed inside Wednesday for two reasons. It would be the ideal hiding place, but also would provide unparalleled opportunities for recovering salvage. You are aware that anything lost always turns up eventually in the Border Sea?’
Arthur nodded. He’d been told that by Sunscorch.
‘A great part of what is lost lies in the very deeps and is unrecoverable, unless it floats up before it sinks to one of the places where the Sea now impinges upon Nothing and is dissolved. But there is still considerable salvage in shallower water, and it, along with everything else in Wednesday’s path, ends up in her stomach, at least for a time. Feverfew uses his slaves to harvest the salvage Wednesday has swallowed, adding greatly to the plunder he takes from the ships of the Border Sea.’
‘How do you know about this?’ asked Arthur.
‘One of the advantages granted us by the Piper is the ability to return to our former shape and size for a time,’ explained Monckton. ‘It is unpleasant and potentially dangerous, should we forget that we are Raised, but we are able to masquerade as normal rats. One of our number managed to infiltrate the Shiver in this fashion, and observe the transition to the secret harbour. While there, she also saw slaves being sent out somewhere, the survivors returning with salvage. Later, we deduced the location of that harbour and the nature of the slaves’ activities. Captain Longtayle, show Lord Arthur the map and the sketches.’
Longtayle took a leather case from under the table, opened it, and took out several rolled-up pages. He laid these out on the table.
The first one was a map, drawn in pencil and entitled in large uneven letters FEVERFEW’S ISLAND. It showed a body of land shaped like a skull. Under the title there was a note that read: The isle is roughly 4,500 double paces long and 3,200 double paces wide.
The left eye socket of the skull had LAKE LEFT written on it. The right eye socket was broken and open to the sea. This was labelled HARBOUR and there were some smaller notations indicating a jetty, a shipyard, eight warehouses, a dozen large buildings marked as slave quarters, and a star-shaped construction called Feverfew’s Fort.
The nose cavity was labelled as HOT MUD CRATER a note underneath that said Nothing?
Down by the skull’s jawbone, there were lots of squiggly lines described as TEETH MOUNTAINS and Followers of the Carp. Escaped Slaves.
There was sea around the island, but it only extended for about eight hundred and fifty double paces according to the indicated scale, till it met a line marked Extent of Bubble that circled the map. Not far from the harbour mouth, near this line, there was a narrow peninsula that thrust out into the sea, with a dot on the end of it and the inscription: Exit to salvage grounds.
The second page Longtayle unrolled showed several rough charcoal sketches. One drawing showed the harbour with half a dozen ships present, one of them easily recognizable as the Shiver. The other ships looked derelict, and were all piled up against one another in one corner of the harbour, while the pirate schooner was tied up to the jetty.
The second drawing showed a line of slaves wearing bizarre-looking diving helmets, each of them hobbled with a long chain and equipped with a sack and net.
The third drawing was incomplete, a partial scene captured over the shoulder of a pirate who was kneeling on the deck of a ship. He had the lid of a box next to him, the lid illustrated with something that looked like a cross between a squid and a man.
The fourth and final drawing showed a line of small mountains or large hills, which were covered in thick jungle. The caption under the drawing read Followers of the Carp must be escaped slaves. Potential here.
‘How did your spy get back out with these?’ asked Arthur.
Longtayle shook his head.
‘She didn’t. The map and the drawings came by simultaneous bottle.’
‘By what?’
‘Simultaneous bottles are a form of communication we developed ourselves, with some assistance from certain parties. Essentially, they are pairs of magical bottles. Anything put in one simultaneously appears in the other bottle as well. But they do not work outside the Border Sea, and are very expensive to construct, so only our most important agents are equipped with them. Our various vessels also use simultaneous bottles to keep in touch. We have over a hundred simultaneous bottles aboard.’
‘So these two papers were the last thing to come through from your agent with Feverfew?’
‘Not quite,’ said Monckton grimly. ‘The last thing to come through before the bottle shattered was a severed tail. So you see, one gallant Rat has already given up her life for this information.’
‘This drawing, is it of Feverfew himself?’ Arthur asked, indicating the sketch of the pirate kneeling on the deck. ‘And what’s on the lid of that puzzle box?’
‘We believe it’s Feverfew,’ said Longtayle. ‘He was once a mortal man, though greatly changed by sorcery and his long existence in the House, and this drawing shows a man of mortal dimensions. The augury puzzle he is using is not one that is listed anywhere we can find. The creature it portrays is a Gore-Draken, a rare form of Nithling that is very occasionally created when certain lost items within the Border Sea come in contact with Nothing. This suggests the augury puzzle was created from the intestines of a Gore-Draken specifically for Feverfew, which could only have been done by a very superior Sorcerer or one of the Morrow Days. Since Feverfew’s private bubble was made by Grim Tuesday, it’s likely the Grim made the augury puzzle to go with it. Who paid for it to be made is another question, which we do not know the answer to.’
‘Probably Superior Saturday,’ said Arthur. ‘That’s who Drowned Wednesday went to in the first place, to get his help to return the Keys to the Will.’
‘Her help,’ said Monckton. ‘Superior Saturday is female. Or she was, last we heard. Now, I think you will agree, we have answered your first question. So we shall ask one in return. Why do you want to go to Feverfew’s secret harbour?’
Arthur thought for a moment. There seemed to be nothing to be gained from trying to not answer the question, or fudging the answer. He liked the Rats. They seemed very straightforward, and he knew he would need more of their help.
‘I believe the Third Part of the Will is there. Drowned Wednesday doesn’t have it anymore, and she says Feverfew took it, with help from the Morrow Days. I want to get to the Will and release it. Then I can get the Third Key from Drowned Wednesday, fix her up, get Leaf back, and. . .’