As though in response to the nids’ arrival, the door to the castle groaned open, and Liza came face-to-face, or face-to-snout, with a large mole very much like the one that had been in charge of the orchestra. This one, however, was wearing a floppy, faded nightcap, which looked as though it had been fashioned from a used coffee filter. In fact, it most certainly was a used coffee filter; Liza caught a whiff of hazelnut as the nids prodded her forward. She bet he had gotten it at the troglod market.
“Come along, come along,” the mole said, turning on one furry heel and leading the way into the dark palace. “We heard you coming from a mile away—could have woken a slothbart with your screaming! The court is already assembled. Had to wake up the judge, and I’ll have you know he was not pleased, not pleased in the slightest....”
“The judge is known to be very strict,” Mirabella whispered to Liza, and Liza’s stomach turned.
The corridor opened up into a vast, semicircular amphitheater chiseled from dark stone. It looked like the baseball stadium at Fenway Park, but thousands and thousands of years old. Hundreds of tiers of blackened stone seats were arranged in a semi-circle, stretching endlessly upward, and Liza saw a smattering of sleepy-looking troglods and other creatures—including a skunk, still wearing a tattered bedsheet around its shoulders—which had apparently gathered to watch the trial.
Beyond the open amphitheater, Liza saw a river, which swirled with strange colors, opals and blues and deep purples, and emitted a vivid blue light. The river, Liza thought, must also be causing the strange shadows that flickered and floated and flew all around her.
“Sit!” the nid with her broom commanded, pointing Liza toward a rickety wooden bench. She regretted having brought the broom with her at all. It was getting very tedious to be poked and prodded by the bristles, and she began to sympathize with Mirabella’s great fear of the things.
Liza took a seat on the bench. Mirabella sat down beside her. They were sitting directly in front of a wooden podium; Liza guessed this was where the judge would sit, when he—or she, or it—arrived.
Mirabella was very nervous. She was worrying her tail between her paws, muttering, “Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.”
“Stop that,” Liza whispered. “You’ll make us seem guilty.”
The rat moaned.
“Shhh,” Liza hushed her. “Pull yourself together. Everything will be okay. I’m sure the judge will understand that this is all a big mistake.” Liza wished she felt as confident as she was pretending to be. She cursed herself for listening to the nids’ music, for getting close to the palace at all. It must have been hours since she’d descended Below; and if what Mirabella had said was true, the spindlers’ Feast would soon begin.
The nids filed into the stone seats that encircled the court, buzzing and chattering excitedly. Almost as soon as the nids were seated, the mole cried out, “All rise for the Honorable Judge Gobbington IV!” Instantly there was shuffling and rustling, and murmurs of excitement, as the nids climbed again to their feet.
Liza stood along with everybody else. Mirabella was practically white with fear, and Liza’s throat was dry and chalky, as though she had inhaled sawdust.
She heard a scuffling sound, the noise of slapping footsteps along the dark, dank hall through which the mole had led them, then a dry, rattling cough. Finally the judge stepped into the amphitheater.
At least, Liza thought he must be the judge. He certainly looked wise. Although he was probably no taller than she, his head was four times the size of hers and incredibly wrinkled, like an enormous, shriveled pea. His face, in contrast, seemed ridiculously small: just a bare twig of a nose, and two squinty eyes, and a pinched mouth floating in the middle of that humongous head. Liza felt the wild urge to laugh, as she did sometimes when she got very nervous, and fought desperately to quell it.
Judge Gobbington IV had a large gavel tucked under one arm. He was wearing thick glasses and an elaborate black gown that reached almost all the way to the ground. His bare feet protruded from underneath its hem, however, and Liza saw that they were large and slightly webbed, like a duck’s. When he walked, his feet made a wet, slapping sound against the stone.
Still, despite his faintly absurd appearance, the judge moved with solemn confidence, like someone supremely aware of his own importance. As he mounted the podium, Liza whispered to Mirabella, “What—what is it?”
Before the rat could respond, the judge shot Liza a withering look. “I see you are a stranger to the world Below,” he said in a reedy voice. “Otherwise you would surely be familiar with the Gobbingtons. We were the first family of hobgoblins to settle this region, back when the lumpen were still young and the nids were no more than nobs in the ground—when flowers had not yet learned to grow, and water and land did not know that they were separate.” Judge Gobbington IV frowned. “You would also be familiar with the fact that hobgoblins have excellent hearing. I trust you will not make that mistake again.”
“N-no, sir,” Liza sputtered. She sank back down onto the bench, and her heart sank with her. Obviously, she was not off to a very good start. The nids began tittering again, whispering to one another as they reseated themselves.
The hobgoblin judge banged loudly with his gavel on the podium to restore order. “Now, then,” he said. “What’s all the fuss about?”
The nid with Liza’s broom stepped forward. “Your Honor!” he cried. “The rat and the human child were snooping and spying! They were lurking and leering, and peering and prodding—”
“You’ve made your point quite clear,” the judge snapped, with another thunderous bang of his gavel. The nid shrank back, picking nervously at the broom’s bristles.
Judge Gobbington turned his attention back toward the bench. He slid his glasses down on his small, pinched nose and stared at Liza over the top of them, as though she was an expired piece of deli meat in a refrigerator and he was trying to determine whether eating her would give him a stomachache. It was, she thought, very unpleasant to feel like a slice of spoiled turkey. “Let’s hear what the defendants have to say for themselves.”
Liza swallowed, and opened her mouth. But before she could speak, Mirabella burst out, “Your Honor, this is all a terrible mistake!” The rat sprang to her feet, frantically trying to smooth down a few curls of her dirty skirt. She looked even more pathetic than usual. Thick gobs of mascara streaked her cheeks, and her whiskered chin was trembling. “We got lost, you see, on our way to the troglod market—”
“Don’t listen to the rat!” came the shrill voice of another nid in the audience. “Everyone knows that rats are liars!”
“And fools!”
“And foolish liars!”
The courtroom exploded into sound, as the nids began babbling and firing accusations at Mirabella and Liza in turn. Mirabella sank to the bench with a little squeak of misery. Her ears burned bright pink.
“Order!” Judge Gobbington banged his gavel against the podium, trying to quiet the ruckus. “I said, order in the court!” But if anything, the nids only got louder.
“Please!” Liza burst out. She was struggling to be heard over the chaos of voices. “Please!” she tried again, with no effect. She took a deep breath, stood up, and tried a third time. “Please! Listen to me. I’m running out of time. I’m only here to rescue my brother. His soul has been stolen by the spindlers.”
As soon as she said the word spindlers, complete and total silence fell on the court, except for a few stifled gasps from the audience.
Judge Gobbington IV put down his gavel. He stared hard at Liza for several seconds, and she forced herself to remain standing, and balled her hands tightly so he wouldn’t see they were shaking.
“What do you know about the spindlers?” the judge asked in a hoarse whisper.
“I—I don’t know anything about them,” Liza said. The sudden silence was even more nerve-racking than the eruption of noise. “I know that they’re bad. I know that they have my brother—and, and, that they’re planning
to take over everything Below. And I know I have to stop them.”
“And you came Below all by yourself?” the judge asked incredulously.
“I was by myself,” Liza corrected him. “Mirabella agreed to help me. She agreed to take me to the spindlers’ nests.” There were more gasps. Liza turned and gave Mirabella a small smile, but Mirabella was once again working her tail between her paws, muttering, “Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.”
The judge removed his glasses. Without them, his eyes were no larger than two small raisins set in the vast floating balloon of his head. And yet, Liza felt she could see herself reflected endlessly inside them.
“And you will risk your life in the nests,” the hobgoblin said, “and pit yourself against the queen of the spindlers, to save your brother?”
Liza swallowed. The way Judge Gobbington IV said it made her plan sound both foolish and hopeless. “Yes,” she croaked out.
The judge leaned forward. “Why?”
Liza had not expected the question. She opened her mouth and then closed it again. It was, she realized, a difficult thing to explain. Images of Patrick swirled in her head: Patrick toddling behind her through drifts of snow on their way to skate across Gedney Pond; Patrick all sneezy and sleepy with allergies, dozing next to her in the car on long trips to the Adirondack Mountains; Patrick elbow-deep in mud, trying to gross her out by finding worms; Patrick scanning the yard for gnomes or standing lookout at the riverbed for Sarah Wilkins and her group of snotty, snooty friends.
“Because …” She couldn’t put any of her feelings into words. Because he’s my brother, she thought of saying. Or, Because he would do it for me. What came out was: “Because I have to.”
“A likely story!” a nid erupted from the audience.
“‘Because I have to!’ What kind of a defense is that?” cried another nid.
“She’s a spy, I tell you! Both of them are slippery, nippery, nasty little spies!”
Liza balled her fists again. She felt anger rising in her chest, pushing at her throat. Next to her, Mirabella had begun to rock back and forth. She was clutching her head so tightly, it made her cheeks bulge out from between her paws. If Liza hadn’t been so upset, it would have been comical.
“I’m not a spy,” Liza said loudly over the din. “And I’m not a liar.”
“Order, order!” The judge was pounding his gavel once again. “In the name of the authority vested in me by the Court of Stones, I declare the defendants guilty by reason of insufficient proof! And proven inefficiency!”
On the word guilty, Liza’s heart stuttered. For one second, time seemed to stop, and stretch, so that she could think of her mother and father, and Mrs. Costenblatt in her rocking chair on her porch, and feel sorry that she would never see them again.
And poor Patrick …
Liza was filled with regret. She had forgotten to tell the real Patrick, her baby brother, so many important things. For example, she had forgotten to tell him that when you reached third grade the cafeteria would try and give you celery and peanut butter with raisins on top and pass it off as dessert, and how important it was not to be fooled, and instead stuff your pockets with gummy bears before school. She had forgotten to tell him too that the last time they had played Chesteropoly she didn’t let him win, as she said she had, but had in fact been beaten by him fair and square.
Then time jumped forward again, and everything was uproar and chaos.
“To the dungeons!” the nids squealed as they poured from their stone seats and flowed down to the courtroom floor. “Throw them in the dungeons and leave them to rot!”
Liza found herself surrounded by the jabbing, chattering creatures. She realized she must fight, or be left to rot in the world Below forever. The nid with the broom poked at her again, and she managed to snatch it from his grip.
“Stay away from me!” She turned in a circle, jabbing threateningly at the nids that came too close. “Or I’ll bonk you over the head, and sweep you out the—oof!”
A nid jumped on her back and brought her tumbling to her knees. Mirabella was engaged in her own struggle, fighting and snapping and using her tail as a whiplash to try and keep the nids away. But there were too many of them.
“To the dungeons!” The nids’ voices swelled to a roar. “Lock the spies in the dungeons!”
Then suddenly there was a rushing, fluttering sound, like the first pitter-patter of rain falling onto pavement, swelling quickly into a downpour. Instantly the nids fell silent. Liza managed to wrench her arm away from the nid that had been holding her. Even Judge Gobbington IV had gone ghostly white.
“Wonderful,” Mirabella squeaked in a tone of deep sarcasm. “Now see what you’ve done? You’ve gone and upset the nocturni.”
Chapter 10
THE NOCTURNI
Thousands of shadows were swooping and flitting through the air above their heads, until the court was dark with them.
But they were not shadows, Liza realized as she looked at them more closely. That is, they were like shadows—they had the bare, thin, flickering, insubstantial quality of shadows—but unlike shadows, they were all the same shape. There were hundreds of thousands—no, millions—of them, and they were all about the size of Liza’s palm. They looked like butterflies, except that they had the long, pointed beaks of hummingbirds, and they seemed to be made out of darkness and air.
There was a rustling, as thousands of quiet voices spoke in unison.
“Release the rat and the human child,” the nocturni said, and their voices sounded like dry leaves tumbling over one another.
“You heard them,” the judge croaked out. “Release the defendants at once.”
Liza found herself released. Instantly the nids began to withdraw. As they backed slowly and cautiously out of the court, they tittered anxiously, scanning the air above their heads and muttering various apologies at the floating, flitting shapes.
“A mistake! A mistake! Happens to the best of us.”
“No intention to offend …”
“A harmless little prank …”
“Very sorry, of course, won’t happen again …”
Soon Liza and Mirabella were left alone with the swirling black nocturni.
“Well,” Mirabella sniffed. “Well.” She patted her wig, parts of which had become hopelessly tangled. “I hope you’re happy. I told you to stay away from the nids. And now they’ve taken my purse.... If it hadn’t been for the nocturni …”
“The what?” Liza turned a full circle, stunned, all the while keeping her eyes on the drifting shapes above their heads, like a dark snow.
Mirabella muttered something that sounded to Liza like useless and humans and heads as empty as a beggar’s purse. At a normal volume, the rat said, “The nocturni.” She shot another reproachful glance over her shoulder at Liza. “Lucky they decided to speak up, or we’d no doubt be rotting to a pulp in the dungeons by now! Like forgotten bananas. Like turned cheese!”
“Are they—are they dangerous?” Liza swallowed hard, thinking of the fearful way the nids had fled from them.
Mirabella dropped her voice to a whisper. “Very bad luck to displease the dream-bringers,” she murmured. “Very bad luck. I once knew a badger … oh, but we won’t speak of him. Terrible, terrible. Spends his days counting socks at the troglod market … convinced that the nocturni are sending messages to him through the color patterns …”
“Dream-bringers …” Liza repeated. She didn’t know exactly what Mirabella meant, but she liked the sound of it. “There are so many of them.”
“One for every person in the world,” the rat replied.
“No.” This stopped Liza short. “It’s not possible.”
The rat whirled around, clearly growing impatient. “Of course it’s possible,” Mirabella said. “It’s necessary. You didn’t think the nocturni would share, did you? There is a nocturna for every single person in the world! And each night the nocturni sip dreams from the River of Knowledge, and fly out into th
e world, and deliver them to their humans.”
“So …” Liza struggled to understand what Mirabella had just said. “So I have a nocturna of my own?”
“You, the bus driver, the grocery store clerk … The nocturni mate for eternity. Even after you die”—the rat’s voice dropped to a hush—“your nocturna will never take another human, not for all the length of time in the universe and beyond. Your nocturna is wedded to your soul. Some even say”—the rat paused again, chewing on her lower lip with her pointed front teeth, and coating them with lipstick in the process—“that it is the nocturni who carry souls into the Shadow World when we die, where they will watch over them and keep them safe forever. Some say that is nocturni’s ultimate purpose.”
Liza shivered. The cavern was cold, and full of shifting light. The underworld, she thought, was strange and beautiful and frightening, like the nocturni themselves.
As she looked at them more closely, she realized it was not true that they were all shaped identically. They were all roughly the same size, true, and all possessed that same insubstantial dark quality, but she noticed that the wings of every nocturna were slightly differently, with ragged tips that formed special individual patterns, almost like snowflakes. And for the first time, what the rat had said—a nocturna for every single person in the world—struck her, and made her feel temporarily breathless. It was unimaginable.
Patrick had a nocturna. That was not so strange, actually. His dreams were crazy and full of weirdness, and she was not surprised to learn that he had had help coming up with him—where else had that dream about the chickens running a marathon come from?
But her father, too, and her mother! That they dreamed at all was a revelation. She had always assumed, in some way, that they powered off at night, like computers, and booted up again in the morning, with a whole new series of downloaded complaints and annoyances and problems and irritations. She could not begin to imagine what they would dream about. Taxes, perhaps …?