Grim Tuesday didn’t answer.
‘I don’t want to do anything nasty to you,’ said Arthur. ‘But I will use the Key on you if I have to. Is there an elevator to the Pit?’
‘Do your worst,’ said Grim Tuesday. ‘I care not.’
Arthur shook his head, then raised his right hand and pointed his index finger at Grim Tuesday.
‘By the power of the Second Key, I command you to answer my questions truthfully.’
Once again Arthur felt the static electric shock. This time he saw sparkling ultra-fine tendrils of light extend from his finger to Grim Tuesday’s head, winding into his ears and nose.
Grim Tuesday grimaced and shook himself like a dog coming out of water, but did not speak.
‘Is there an elevator from here to the bottom of the Pit?’
‘Yes,’ growled the Grim through clenched teeth. ‘Emergency elevator. Small. Only for me.’
‘Where is it?’
Grim Tuesday clenched his teeth still tighter, but his right arm rose up and one finger uncurled. A bronze button appeared out of nowhere. The Grim tried not to press it, but his hand lunged forward. As the button depressed, an electric bell rang and a second later a narrow elevator, no larger than a phone box, erupted out of the ground.
Only Grim Tuesday was ready for it. He toppled forward, but the elevator door was not quite open. Rebounding from it, the Denizen was seized again by Tom and theWill. He did not struggle.
Arthur looked at the elevator. As well as being very narrow, it looked a lot worse for wear. There were many tiny holes like acid burns all over the plush leather interior, and the wooden panelling in the ceiling was blackened and burned.
‘Let’s go!’ said Suzy. She stepped shakily inside, still partially stunned by her encounter with the palm tree. Once in, she took up more than half the space. The elevator was clearly made to just fit the lean body of Grim Tuesday.
‘No,’ said Arthur. ‘I think I have to go alone.’
‘We’ll fit,’ said Suzy. ‘I’ll breathe in.’
Arthur shook his head and pulled her sleeve. His gauntlet tingled against his skin and a surprised Suzy found herself unable to resist. Before she could jump back in, Arthur jumped in himself and slid the door closed.
‘Wait, Arthur! You might need my –’
Her voice was cut off as Arthur pressed the button with the down arrow clearly marked upon it. The elevator lurched, knocking Arthur off his feet. He bounced off both walls, then managed to wedge himself into the corner.
‘All the way down again?’ asked a disembodied voice. ‘You know this elevator’s only good for a few trips down there.’
‘All the way to the bottom,’ instructed Arthur. The elevator increased its downwards velocity, and Arthur felt himself rising up towards the ceiling, as if he were in free fall. While he was wedging himself even more firmly into the corner, he added, ‘What do you mean again?When was this elevator last used?’
‘Half an hour ago,’ said the voice. ‘Fair gave me a turn. Haven’t had to run this elevator for more than twenty years. Beautifully mothballed it was, everything sealed up, waxed, and greased. Look at it now!’
‘Who was the passenger?’ asked Arthur. Who could possibly have gone to the bottom of the Pit half an hour ago?
‘Dunno,’ said the voice. ‘He had the proper authority, though. From on high.’
‘You didn’t ask me for any authority.’
‘You got the Second Key, haven’t you, sir? Hold on, we’re almost there.’
The elevator slowed dramatically. Arthur slid down the wall and onto the floor, his stomach attempting to run out through his Immaterial Boots. Then after a series of frightening bangs and lurches, the elevator came to a stop and the door slid open.
‘Bottom of the Pit, thank you!’ said the voice. Arthur stepped out into darkness. The door slid shut, and the elevator vanished.
For a frightening second it seemed like Arthur was trapped in total darkness. But as his eyes adjusted, he saw lanterns some small distance away. Then his gauntlets began to glow with a cool green light that slowly spread up his arms and all over his brightcoat and boots.
One of the lanterns bobbed nearer. Arthur hurried to meet it. As he got closer, he saw that the bearer was very short and broad. One of Grim Tuesday’s Grotesques.
‘You’re only just in time, sir!’ called the Grotesque hoarsely. ‘It’s fair oozing Nothing –’
The Grotesque stopped as he realised that Arthur was not Grim Tuesday. A peculiar expression crossed his face – one of relief, sorrow, and a twist of anger.
‘You’re not the Master!’
‘I am the Master of the Far Reaches now,’ said Arthur, holding up one clenched fist.
‘The Grim . . . that would explain the indentured workers . . . I thought it to do with all the Nothing . . .’ muttered the Grotesque. He appeared confused and kept shaking his head. Then he looked at Arthur and said plaintively, ‘I am Yan. Will you remake us as we were? As three, instead of seven?’
‘I guess . . . I’ll try,’ said Arthur. ‘Only first, you need to take me to this buttress that’s about to break.’
Yan shook his head again. ‘The buttress?We need not go anywhere.We are at its foot.’
Arthur looked around, but could see only darkness beyond the circle of light from his own strange glow and Yan’s lantern. But he could hear something off to his right. Akind of creaking, like the night wind in the trees at home.
‘Cast a sunburst up about a thousand feet,’ said Yan hurriedly. ‘That is the first step, sir. You will remember to make us three?’
‘Yes,’ said Arthur. ‘Uh, how . . . oh, never mind . . .’
He cupped his hands and concentrated on the gauntlets.
Sunburst, he thought. A sunburst to fly up to a thousand feet and explode like the one I saw before. Hot and glorious, a miniature sun to shed light on everything down here and send the Nothing back into its holes –
Something jetted out of his grasp, heading skyward at incredible speed. Arthur stared up after it, a shooting star that reached its thousand-foot-tall ceiling in a few seconds. He was still looking when it exploded into light. His star-hood saved him from the worst of it, but he still had to blink and cover his eyes with his arm.
He was just about to lift that arm and take a look around when Yan suddenly cried out. Arthur heard him fall and his lantern smash upon the stone.
Arthur instinctively jumped back. He saw Yan go sprawling, and he saw a tall, immaculately clad top-hatted Denizen step forward and stab the Grotesque through the heart with a sword-cane that had a shining silver blade.
‘He might have helped you repair the buttress,’ said the Denizen, his voice smooth and cultured, his handsome face unmoved by what he had just done. ‘And we can’t have that, can we?’
‘You killed him!’
The Denizen gave a small shrug.
‘Perhaps. He is one-seventh of a higher being. He might recover. It is all rather academic, with Nothing about to overwhelm the entirety of creation.’
He pointed with his sword-cane. Arthur flicked his head to look, but only for an instant, keeping his attention on that silver blade. In that moment, he saw that they were standing only yards from the foot of a vast wall that stretched as far as he could see to the left and right and up towards the sunburst. It was made of deep red bricks set in yellow mortar, but there were many dark cracks and lines of leaking Nothing among the bricks.
‘I should give up if I were you, Arthur,’ said the Denizen. His voice was quite hypnotic and Arthur found himself listening intently. He wanted the voice to go on and on. ‘This is all beyond you. Much easier to give in to fate. Let the buttress fall, let Nothing wash away the House, the Secondary Realms –’
He lunged at Arthur’s throat on the last word, but the Key was ready for him even though the Key’s wielder was not. The gauntlets caught the blade, twisted and broke it. Then Arthur found himself plunging the broken end of the blade deep into the Denizen’s red silk waistcoat.
‘Ah, proof against the voice,’ sighed the Denizen as he backed away. He looked down at the golden blood that was trickling down his waistcoat. ‘A hit! One is enough to end the bout, by any rules. Now others shall take their turn!’
With that, he slapped a button that appeared in the air. The elevator sprang into visibility, its door open. The Denizen staggered into it. The doors closed and a beam of light shot up towards the far distant ceiling, well beyond sight.
Arthur stared at the fading beam, totally confused. The Denizen was obviously not one of Grim Tuesday’s servants. Nor was he a Nithling. Or was he? Why did he want Nothing to destroy the House?
Where were the Nithlings, for that matter? Grim Tuesday had said, ‘One up here, a thousand down below.’
Arthur turned back to look up at the buttress and saw where the Nithlings were. They were hundreds of feet up the face of the buttress, clawing out bricks with their hands and claws and tentacles and talons. Thousands of them, swarming over the face of what Arthur now realised was effectively a dam wall.
A huge dam made of special bricks, holding back the great void of Nothing itself.
A leaking dam, getting weaker by the second.
A dam wall Arthur had to fix.
Bricks are no good, Arthur thought. The Nithlings can pull out bricks. Reinforced concrete, that’s what we need. Magical reinforced concrete.
He raised his gauntleted hands and began to concentrate, muttering to himself.
‘Bricks into reinforced concrete. Special reinforced concrete. Immaterial Concrete, like my boots but a thousand times stronger, a thousand times tougher.’
He felt the gloves vibrate with the power of the Key, but when he looked up at the dam, there was no change. The streaks of thick, dark Nothing were spreading as the Nithlings splintered the mortar and crumbled the bricks.
Someone croaked something behind Arthur. He whirled around, ready for another attack. But it was only Yan, raising himself up on one elbow.
‘Touch the bricks,’ Yan whispered. ‘Touch the bricks to transform them!’
Arthur nodded and ran towards the buttress. A brick sailed past his ear, and then another one struck his misshapen leg. He screamed and fell, holding his hands over his head.
‘Key, protect me!’
The green glow in Arthur’s brightcoat spun itself into a sphere all around him. More and more bricks came raining down, but when they hit the green barrier, they splintered into dust. Coughing and partially blinded, Arthur staggered forward and got both his palms onto the wall.
He looked up for a second, to see Nithlings of all shapes and sizes coming down towards him. Some of them flew, some simply jumped, some scuttled, and some ran as if the wall were horizontal rather than vertical. But none could get to him for at least thirty seconds, Arthur judged.
He leaned into the wall, resting all his weight on his palms, and once again thought of the dams he had seen, either in person or in pictures.
The biggest, strongest dam anywhere. Reinforced concrete. Reinforced Immaterial Concrete. Dozens of yards thick, on top of the existing brickwork. Impenetrable. Impervious to Nothing. Too smooth for fingers, claws, talons, or tentacles, or teeth. A real dam wall. A mighty buttress! Built with the power of the Second Key!
Arthur felt that power flow from the gauntlets into his body and then out again. He was both a pool and a conduit. The power welled up inside him, then when he was full of it, it spilled over, back through his hands. He could feel the new dam wall building, the Immaterial Concrete spreading from his hands, expanding out like spilled ink upon a page.
‘It’s working!’ he cried, just as a bull-headed Nithling landed heavily near him and rushed to the attack, its sharp horns aimed directly at his unprotected back.
TWENTY-TWO
THE NITHLING FARED no better than the bricks, for the Key had continued to divert some small part of its power to fulfill Arthur’s spoken command. The boy felt a spray of something against the back of his neck, but it was not enough to distract him from his task.
Other Nithlings landed and charged, only to meet the same fate. None could prevail against the power of the Second Key. Many realised it and, instead of attacking, they fled, hoping to find some way into other parts of the House or the Secondary Realms. Others climbed higher up the buttress as the new wall rose. They tried desperately to pull out just one more brick, to erode one more line of mortar. Many were caught, as reinforcing metal wove its way around and through them, and were drowned by the rising columns of Immaterial Concrete.
Only one Nithling neither attacked, tried to pry a few bricks away, nor fled. A strange Nithling that watched Arthur from a place of concealment behind a many-holed boiler that had rolled down to its final resting place, here at the lowest part of the Pit.
The lurker did not look like any normal Nithling. If seen from the left side, it looked just like a boy. In fact it looked just like Arthur in his school uniform. But from the right side, it was a skeleton, bare bones of red ochre bereft of skin. Front-on, it was a hideous split-faced thing, half smiling boy and half grinning skull.
When it was clear that the buttress was going to be rebuilt and there was no chance of Nothing breaking through in the immediate future, the Skinless Boy laid himself down completely in the boiler and folded one fleshy hand and one bony one across his chest. He was in no hurry. The messenger who had come to watch his unusual birth had presented several interesting possibilities and opportunities, depending on what happened with the buttress. Arthur’s success had not been considered likely by the messenger, but he had prepared for it and told the Skinless Boy what to do.
Arthur, unaware of his strange watcher, felt his fingers twitch. He looked up and saw his sunburst fading, but the concrete wall that he had made sparkled with starlight, and that was enough to see that it was complete. There was no sign of any leaking Nothing. No Nithlings. Only Yan, no longer propped up on one elbow, but sprawled in a heap.