Superior Saturday

‘Jackal,’ hissed Scamandros quietly.

‘Blowhard,’ retorted Skerrikim, not so quietly.

Arthur hesitated. He wanted to see what Marson had experienced, but he didn’t want the dismembered Denizen to suffer.

‘Scamandros, can you show us what we need to see, without hurting him?’

‘Indeed I can, sir,’ said Scamandros, puffing out his chest.

‘Skerrikim is an expert,’ said Dame Primus. ‘Far better to let him—’

‘No,’ Arthur said quietly. ‘Scamandros will do it. That will be all, thank you, Mister Skerrikim.’

Skerrikim looked at Dame Primus. She did not move or give any signal that Arthur could see, but the skullcapped Denizen bowed and withdrew.

Scamandros knelt by the side of the suitcase and used a red velvet cloth to wipe off whatever Skerrikim had written on Marson’s head. Then he took out his own bottle of activated ink and a peacock-plumed pen and wrote something else.

‘Move aside,’ Scamandros instructed several officers. ‘The vision will form where you’re standing. I trust you feel no pain, Marson?’

‘Not a thing,’ Marson reported. ‘’Cept an itch in the foot I don’t have anymore.’

‘Excellent,’ said Dr Scamandros. ‘Open your eyes a little wider, a touch more . . . very good . . . hold them open there . . . Let me get these matchsticks in place, and we will commence.’

The sorcerer stood back and spoke a word. Arthur could almost see the letters of it, see the way the air rippled away from Scamandros’s mouth as he spoke. He felt the power of the spell as a tingle in his joints, and some small part of him knew that once, long ago, he would have felt pain. Now, his body was accustomed to sorcery and used to power.

Two tiny pinpricks of light grew in Marson’s eyes, and then two fierce beams shot forth, splaying out and gaining colour, dancing around madly as if a crazed and manic artist were painting with streams of light.

An image formed in the air by the table, an image projected from Marson’s propped-open eyes. A broad, cinematic view some twelve feet wide and eight feet high, it showed a part of the floor of the Pit in the Far Reaches, the great, deep hole that Grim Tuesday had dug in order to mine more and more Nothing, no matter how dangerous it was, and no matter how much it weakened the very foundations of the House.

Arthur leaned forward, intent on the scene. Even though what he was to see had already happened, he felt very tense, as if he were actually there . . .

SIX

‘THE MEMORY IS blurred,’ said Dame Primus. ‘We should have had Skerrikim do it.’

‘Merely a matter of focus, milady,’ said Scamandros. He bent down and adjusted Marson’s eyelids, the shadows of his fingers walking across the lit scene like tall, dark walking trees. ‘There we are.’

The picture became sharp, and sound came in as well. They were seeing what Marson had seen. The Denizen was looking out through the door of his elevator, his finger ready to press one of the bronze buttons that would take it up. Beyond the door, there was a rubble-strewn plain, lit here and there by an oil lamp hanging from an iron post. Some fifty yards away, a group of Denizens had gathered at the base of a great wall, a vast expanse of light grey concrete that had rods of shimmering iron protruding from it at regular intervals.

‘Hey, that’s the part I fixed up!’ exclaimed Arthur. ‘With Immaterial-reinforced concrete.’

The Denizens were looking at something. All of a sudden they backed away, and one of them turned to call to someone out of sight.

‘Sir! There’s some sort of curious drill here! It’s boring a hole all by itself! It’s—’

Her words were cut off by a sudden, silent spray of Nothing that jetted out of the base of the wall. All the Denizens were cut down by it, instantly dissolved. Then more Nothing spewed out, and there was a terrible rumbling sound. Cracks suddenly ran from the ground up through the wall, cracks that began to bubble with dark Nothing.

A bell began to clang insistently and a steam whistle sounded a frantic scream.

Marson’s finger jabbed a button. The doors began to close, even as a rolling wave of Nothing came straight at the elevator. His voice came through, loud and strange, heard through his own ears.

‘No, no, no!’

He kept jabbing buttons. The doors shut and the elevator rocketed upward. Marson’s fingers fumbled in his coat pocket, withdrawing a key that he used to quickly open a small hatch under the button panel. Inside was a red handle marked EMERGENCY RISE. Marson pulled it, a silk thread and wax seal snapping. The elevator gained speed, and he fell to his knees, but even the emergency rise was not fast enough. The floor of the elevator suddenly became as holed as a piece of Swiss cheese, blots of darkness eating it away. Marson leaped up and grabbed the chandelier in the ceiling, hauling himself up even as the lower half of the elevator disappeared. He was screaming and shrieking now, looking down at himself, where his legs had just ceased to exist –

‘Stop!’ said Arthur. ‘We’ve seen enough.’

Scamandros snapped his fingers. The light from Marson’s eyes faded. As the sorcerer bent down and removed the matchsticks, the disembodied head spoke.

‘That weren’t so bad.’

‘Thank you, Marson,’ said Arthur. He looked at Dame Primus. ‘I am sure you will be well looked after.’

‘As you see, Lord Arthur,’ said Dame Primus, ‘some kind of sabotage device of considerable power was used to breach the dam wall. It is likely that many other devices were employed at the same time, because almost the entire length of the dam wall fell. This allowed entry to a titanic surge of Nothing, which annihilated the Far Reaches in four or five minutes.

‘Fortunately, the bulwark between the Far Reaches and the Lower House held for several hours, allowing enough time for the evacuation of important records and items, and a fair number of Denizens. Complete destruction of the Lower House followed, with the final remnants succumbing an hour ago. Nothing now presses directly against the lower bulwark of the Middle House.

‘In a possibly unrelated complication, when the Piper’s army withdrew, he covered his retreat with an explosion of Nothing that has weakened the barrier mountains here in the Great Maze, and, as always, there is Nothing leeching into the Border Sea. That is why we are both needed. We must use the power of the Keys to delay the destruction of the House.’

‘Delay the destruction?’ asked Arthur. ‘Can’t we stop it?’

‘I doubt it. But we must hold off the Void long enough for you to claim the last two Keys. Then matters can be arranged in an orderly fashion.’

‘You mean that no matter what we do, the House – and the whole Universe beyond – is doomed?’ asked Arthur. ‘It’s only a matter of time?’

‘I didn’t say that, Lord Arthur.’ Dame Primus glanced away as she spoke, as if something had caught her eye. ‘You misunderstood me. Once we have stabilised the House, you can gain the Keys, and then we will be in a position to assess the damage and see what can be done.’

‘But I thought you said—’

‘You misunderstood me,’ Dame Primus repeated smoothly. She looked back at Arthur again and met his gaze. Even more than usual, he felt like a small animal caught in the glare of the headlights of a rapidly approaching truck, but he didn’t look away. ‘Now, where do you wish to commence work? Here, with the mountains, or in the Middle House?’

‘Neither,’ said Arthur. ‘Someone put those drills to work, and that someone pretty much has to be Superior Saturday, doesn’t it? Or Lord Sunday, working with her, I suppose, though that bit of paper poor old Ugham had suggests otherwise.’

‘What paper?’ Dame Primus asked suspiciously.

‘The one signed just with an ‘S’ that said ‘I do not wish to intervene or interfere’ or whatever. It’s in my old coat, I think.’

‘Signed merely with a single “S”? That is Lord Sunday’s mark. Superior Saturday, as she calls herself, would not be so humble as to use a single letter.’

‘Okay, that just about confirms Sunday’s out of it – for now at least. So we need to make sure that Saturday can’t do anything else. I mean, it’s all very well shoring up the defences, but what if she’s undermining the House somewhere else we don’t even know about?’

The three Marshals nodded in approval. Attack was the best method of defence, as far as they were concerned.

‘I agree that Saturday must be dealt with,’ said Dame Primus. ‘But our first priority must be to reinforce the House! It is not supposed to fall like this. I cannot be in two places at once, so you have to do some of the work. When what we hold of the House is secure, then we can talk about freeing Part Six of myself and confronting Saturday. Not before!’

‘You can’t be in two places at once,’ said Arthur thoughtfully, almost to himself.

‘I beg your pardon?’ Dame Primus bent forward a little, as if to hear Arthur better.

‘You can’t be in two places at once,’ Arthur repeated loudly. ‘Yet we have five Keys between us, and once you were five separate beings. Is it possible for you to become two?’

Dame Primus frowned even more.

‘I mean two of you, with an equal mix of all parts of the Will,’ Arthur added hurriedly. Most of the individual parts of the Will were quite unbalanced, some of them dangerously so. He didn’t want the snaky, judgmental Part Four off on its own, for example.

‘It . . . is . . . possible,’ said Dame Primus. ‘But not at all recommended. We would do much better—’

‘And you can join back together again?’ Arthur was not giving up on the idea so easily.

Dame Primus nodded stiffly.

‘Okay, then you can split into two and each half of you can take two Keys and go fix up whatever needs fixing up,’ said Arthur. ‘Or, hey, you could split into four and take a Key each—’

‘I will not divide myself so much,’ said Dame Primus furiously. ‘It would merely offer a target for Saturday or even the Piper, who might well overcome such a fraction of myself and wrest the Keys from our control.’

‘Two, then,’ said Arthur. ‘Dame Primus and Dame . . . uh . . . Two?’

‘Secundus,’ whispered Scamandros.

‘This is not a good idea, Arthur,’ said Dame Primus. ‘To lessen my power by half is foolish in the extreme. And if you think this will allow you to return to your Secondary Realm, then you have failed to consider your own transformation, and the effect you will have—’

‘I’m not going back home,’ Arthur interrupted coldly. ‘At least not yet. Like I said, we need to deal with Superior Saturday. That means freeing Part Six of the Will to start with, so please tell me – do you know where it is? I know you can sense the other parts of yourself.’

Dame Primus straightened up.

‘Part Six of myself is definitely somewhere within the Upper House. I do not know where exactly, and I have no means of finding out. The Upper House has been closed to us by means of sorcery. No elevators go there now, there are no telephone connections, and the Front Door remains firmly shut. So once again, even if it was in our best interests for you to go there, it is not possible, and you would do better to help me and not make foolish – that is to say, naive – suggestions about me dividing myself.’

‘There’s no way there at all?’ asked Arthur. ‘What about the Improbable – no, I’d have to have visited there before. Same for the Fifth Key . . .’

‘As I said, there is no way,’ Dame Primus insisted. ‘Once again illustrating that I know best, Arthur. You must remember that although you are the Rightful Heir, you were just a mortal boy not so long ago. No one can expect you to have the wisdom—’

Arthur ignored her. Another plan had just occurred to him. ‘There might be a way,’ he said. ‘I’ll have to go and check it out.’

‘What?’ asked Dame Primus, indignant. ‘What way? Even if you could get to the Upper House, you must remember that Saturday has thousands of sorcerers, perhaps even tens of thousands. Acting in concert and directed by her, they could easily overcome you, take you prisoner—’

‘I’m not just going to charge in,’ said Arthur. He was getting increasingly tired of Dame Primus’s objections. ‘In fact, if I can get there the way I’m thinking, it will be a very sneaky approach. Anyway, we’re wasting time. You need to split into two, Dame Primus, and get to work. I have to head over to the Border Sea.’

‘This is all too hasty!’ protested Dame Primus. ‘What can you possibly want in the Border Sea?’

‘The Raised Rats.’

Dame Primus took in an outraged breath and her frown got so deep, her eyebrows almost met in a huddle above her nose.

‘The Raised Rats are agents of the Piper! Like the Piper’s children, they are not to be trusted! They are to be hunted down and exterminated!’

‘Old Primey got her undergarments in a twist again,’ said a voice behind him. He turned and smiled as he saw his friend Suzy Turquoise Blue expertly slide between two Denizens to stand next to him.

‘Suzy! What on earth are you wearing?’

‘M’uniform,’ said Suzy. She raised her battered top hat, which now had two oversize gold epaulettes sewn to the back like a sun-cape, and bowed. The half-dozen probably unearned medals on her red regimental coat (that had the sleeves cut off to show her yellow shirt) jangled as she made a bow, and the leg she thrust forward creaked, since she was also wearing the same kind of leather breeches as Arthur, which he had thought were exclusive to Sir Thursday. Her boots were red and did not resemble those in any uniform that Arthur had learnt about in his recruit training. Neither did the iridescent-green-scaled belt she wore, though the savage-sword at her side was in a regulation sheath.