‘I, Arthur, Lord Monday, Master of the Lower House, call upon the power of the First Key to destroy this register! Turn every page to dust and . . . and break its binding into fragments!’
Arthur’s hands got hot and smoke billowed out from under his palms. But the book didn’t turn to dust or explode into fragments. When Arthur stepped back, it looked just the same.
‘Made with the Second Key,’ said Suzy. ‘ ’Spect you need that to destroy it.’
Arthur didn’t reply. He stared down at the register, watching the OWING figure increase for some poor Denizen who had the former name Sargarol and was now just a thirteen-digit number and Driller Fifth Class.
As he stared, a yellow form fluttered out of the air and landed next to the book. Arthur picked it up, expecting to see the record of a newly indentured worker.
But this was a telegram, just five lines of uneven capital letters from some really old typewriter that said:
CAPTAIN STOP THIEVES IN TOWER
STOP SLAY ALL INTRUDERS STOP
NO EXCEPTIONS STOP REPORT ANY
INCIDENT IMMEDIATELY STOP
GRIM TUESDAY END
FIFTEEN
ARTHUR GLANCED ACROSS at Tom. The old mariner was rearranging the bottles, intent on his task. Without looking directly at the telegram, Arthur slowly dropped his hand over it and then slid it across the table towards his waist. He coughed as he crumpled the paper to disguise the noise, and thrust the balled-up telegram deep into the pocket of his brightcoat.
‘How do we get inside?’ Suzy asked as she bent over to look inside the bottle Tom had carefully placed in front of her. ‘Is that the sunship?’
‘The Helios. A fine vessel, one of the finest in my fleet. Though she sails with the solar winds of space rather than on the seas I love, I rate her as my third most favourite ship, after the sloop Polly Parbuckle and my Ophiran quinquereme.’
‘Looks like a metal turtle,’ said Suzy. She looked at Tom and quickly added, ‘No insult meant, Your Honour.’
‘None taken, young miss,’ Tom replied. ‘She does look like a metal turtle, and that’s a fine shape for sunfaring. Now, I’ll ask you to place your left hand upon the bottle and look deep at my Helios while I ready the spell to take us in. Mind you – stare at the ship and not at one of the planets or the sun itself. Are you ready, Arthur?’
Arthur hesitated. Having experienced the awfulness of the Pit firsthand, he really wanted to destroy the register and free the indentured workers before he headed into the sunship.
‘What if you helped me take the register?’ he asked Tom, struck by a sudden idea. ‘You’re the son of the Old One. I’ve got some of the power of the First Key. Maybe together we’d be strong enough to remove it?’
‘Remove it together? Perchance we could,’ said Tom. ‘But what then?’
‘Could we drop it into the sun we’re going to visit?’ asked Arthur. ‘Out of the sunship?’
‘Aye, we could. But that might not destroy it. It depends upon the protections Grim Tuesday wove into its making.’
‘Oh . . . and I guess if we drop it in the sun it would just keep on working and we couldn’t even get it back to try and destroy it some other way.’
Tom shook his head. ‘If it was not destroyed, it would find its way back here. That is the nature of such artefacts.’
‘Maybe we could drop it into the Pit and it would be destroyed by Nothing,’ Arthur offered. He reached up and felt the outline of theAtlas in his pocket. ‘I’ll ask theAtlas.’
‘The Atlas? The Compleat Atlas of the House?’ asked Tom, with obvious surprise. ‘You have it?’
‘Yes,’ answered Arthur. ‘Why?’
‘It disappeared at the same time as Mother, ten thousand years ago,’ replied Tom. ‘It is one of her greatest works, after the House itself and the Secondary Realms.’
Arthur took out the little green notebook and looked at it. It was certainly useful sometimes, but he hadn’t really thought of it as anything much more than a faintly annoying and difficult-to-use database. Though it had helped him to escape the Scoucher . . . and had shown him the direction to the Treasure Tower . . .
‘I guess it is kind of amazing,’ he said without conviction. Then, in case the book had feelings and might be offended, he continued, ‘I mean really amazing. And helpful. I’ll ask it if the register of indentured workers can be destroyed by dropping it into the sun.’
Arthur held the Atlas out and focused upon it, concentrating all his willpower upon the question. The book shivered under his hands, but didn’t open or grow to its full size. Arthur tried again, mentally repeating his question. But the Atlas did not respond.
‘It’s not working,’ Arthur admitted. He tried to open it like a normal book, but just as when he’d first tried it in the hospital, it felt like all the pages were solidly glued together.
‘You need to be Mother, or have a Key to use the Atlas,’ said Tom. ‘Many’s the time I tried myself, an Atlas being in my line of work.’
‘I opened it before,’ Arthur insisted. ‘After I gave the First Key to the Will . . . Dame Primus. She said it would answer some of my questions even without the Key.’
‘That would be because the First Key’s power lingered in you.’ Tom’s piercing blue eyes fixed on Arthur. ‘There is some scant residue of that power left. But very little, a mere sip in the bottom of the glass. You must have used it without stint. Even a mortal vessel will hold a great deal of the Key’s power.’
‘I guess I . . . I healed my leg . . . not very well,’ said Arthur, wincing as he looked down at his twisted, foreshortened leg. ‘And I opened your door, and I tried to remove the register. Before that I pushed one of the Grotesques . . . and I used the power to get to the Front Door. I didn’t know I could use it up.’
He had very mixed feelings about losing the power he had gained from the First Key. If he’d been back home and all was well, he would have been pleased to return to normal. Right now, in the House, with danger on every side, it would be comforting to have just a little magic.
‘You might be the better for it,’ said Tom. He looked away from Arthur, towards his bottles, and spoke as much to them as to the two children. ‘The power of the Architect, in her person, or from her Keys, is perilous to mortals.’
‘Do you think I have enough power left for us to take the register?’ asked Arthur.
Tom shrugged and started to say something. But his words were lost in a deep booming thud that echoed through the room and made the floor and walls vibrate with a dull buzz, and the bottles hum a high-pitched note.
‘The pyramid,’ said Tom. ‘Grim Tuesday has lifted the western side to gain entry. He will come straight here. Let us try the register!’
Arthur didn’t hesitate. He grabbed one side of the bronze-bound book with both hands as Tom grabbed the other side.
‘One, two, three . . . heave!’ Arthur called out.
The register groaned like a man in pain, then shrieked like a cat whose tail is trodden on, and came away from the table with a sound like a car screeching to an emergency stop.
The book was so heavy that Arthur’s end dropped almost to the floor, even though Tom was taking most of the weight. Together he and Arthur staggered over to the sunship bottle.
‘Arthur, touch the bottle with your nose and stare at the sunship!’ Tom gasped as he leaned forward and planted his beaklike nose on the glass. ‘Miss Blue, your hand will do.’
It was extremely difficult for Arthur to get his nose against the glass, but fortunately the bottle was quite big.
‘I can’t see past your head!’ exclaimed Suzy. Arthur slid his nose back a bit and Suzy leaned over his shoulder.
‘Look at the ship!’ Tom commanded again. Then he roared out something that sounded like a poem, in a language that was nothing like any Arthur had ever heard. It was all roars and deep, husky noises, and it made him shiver all over.
His eyes slid away from the ship, drawn to a planet with many feathery rings, like Saturn but much brighter. Desperately Arthur forced his dizzy eyes back to the sunship. It did look like a huge metal turtle, as Suzy had said. A metal turtle eighty feet long made of beaten gold, with hundred-foot-long front flippers of glowing red-tinged light. Its head had two big eyes that were obviously windows, made of a deep blue material the colour of an old-fashioned glass fishing float.
Arthur stared at those windows. They seemed to get closer and closer, until he could see blurry figures moving behind them. When he was closer still, he could see the figures were Tom and Suzy and – even more strangely – Arthur himself.
Tom roared a final, deafening word and all of a sudden Arthur was looking out through the blue glass windows at a distant, feathery-ringed planet. Tom and Suzy were by his side, and the register was on the deck between them. A deck of golden metal planks, fixed with silver nails.
‘Welcome aboard the Helios,’ Tom said, but his blue gaze looked past the two children, and he drew the silver saltshaker from his pocket.
Arthur looked around too. They were on the bridge of the Helios, an oval-shaped chamber about twenty feet in diameter. There was a wheel, lashed in position with a bright white rope. There were several strange-looking gauges around the wheel and a map box of mirrored metal that showed the planets and the sun in three dimensions, like shining fish in a deep, clear aquarium. There were the two huge blue glass windows at the front, and a gangway at the back going down, through an open hatch.
‘Here,’ said Tom, handing the saltshaker to Arthur. ‘Go below and clear away any Fetchers or suchlike that may be lurking. I’ll get us under way.’
‘What about the register? And Grim Tuesday? Can he get us out of the bottle?’
‘The register can stay where it is, but we’ll need to watch it for any tricks. As for Grim Tuesday, we should return a scant minute after our embarkation. Time flows slowly here.’
Tom began to unlash the wheel. Arthur hefted the saltshaker and looked at Suzy.
‘Lead on,’ she said. ‘I want to see the rest of the ship.’
Arthur climbed down the gangway, grimacing as his left leg lurched down the steps. Like the rest of the Helios, the gangway and the passage below were made of golden metal that shone with a soft light, so there was no need for lanterns. Or maybe, Arthur thought, it was a very bright light, lessened by his protective gear. He felt the faint presence of the star-hood over his face, but he didn’t dare take it off to test his theory.
There were two decks below the bridge. Arthur and Suzy searched every cabin, space and store methodically, but found no Fetchers. They did find a bronze bottle, sealed with a lead stopper, but as far as Arthur could see it was secure. If it held Nothing, none had leaked out.
They found many other things of interest, since the Helios was well stocked with equipment and food, for venturing on planets as well as deep in space or inside a sun. Many things baffled both of them, but others, like the cutlasses they discovered in the armoury, they admired and immediately acquired. When they climbed back up to the bridge, both had broad-bladed but short cutlasses thrust through their belts, the edges of the blades shimmering with curdled moonlight. Suzy had also acquired a diamond-set gold earring, one much more resplendent than the indentured tag in Arthur’s ear, and a bright red bandanna she’d tied around her head, over the top of the star-hood.
The view through the blue portholes had changed considerably. The two long flippers of the Helios were extended even farther out the front, so they now looked more like matching spinnakers of insubstantial red light. There was no sign of the many-ringed planet; instead, the stars were moving with considerable speed past the portholes, and the sun had grown much larger, filling half the view.
‘We didn’t find any Nithlings,’ Arthur reported.
‘Call me “sir” or “Captain” aboard ship,’ said Tom, but not unkindly.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And “aye, aye” or “aye” rather than “yes,”’ Tom continued. ‘I’ll make sailors of the pair of ye before we’re through.’
‘Is everything working properly, uh, Captain?’ asked Arthur, with a glance at the rapidly enlarging sun.
‘Indeed it is.We’re set fair for the star’s fiery heart, and the Helios dances light as she ever did.’
‘And we definitely won’t burn up?’ Suzy asked. ‘Captain, I mean, sir.’
‘Not unless we stay too long,’ replied Tom. ‘But a quick visitation should prove no problem for the Helios or for ourselves. Now I should bend my attention to the ship, for we must beat against the solar wind, and I need to trim the sails.’
Arthur and Suzy watched for more than an hour as Tom turned the wheel this way and that. He occasionally pulled or pushed upon one of the levers that were mounted against the wall ahead of the wheel or tapped the glass of an oscillating gauge to steady it. The sun grew larger and larger, until it filled all the portholes. There was nothing else to see but blazing white light.
Arthur was very grateful for the shining metal of the sunship hull and the blue portholes. He knew that without them his whole body would have been burnt to ash many millions of miles out from the sun. He was grateful for his star-hood too, for saving him from instant blindness.
Tom spun the wheel a half-turn in anticipation of a shift of the solar winds and pointed to a circular ring on the floor near his foot.
‘Arthur, you see that ring?’
‘Yes . . . I mean, aye, aye, Captain.’
‘Take hold of it.When I say “heave,” pull it up and out as far as you can. Then when I say “let go,” release it.’