“What is that thing?” Bran asked. He could hardly take his eyes off it. The seething, venomous green danced deep in his pupils.
“None of your bloody business, Quentin Q. Questions! Hasn’t anyone taught you anything? The first rule of spying is Do Not Ask Plainly for What You Seek or Nobody Will Tell You Nothing. You’d get strangled on your first day. Oh, the Great Encyclopedia tests me so! He knows I hate children. What a better world we’d have if we were all born grown!”
“That’s a nasty thing to say and you’re a nasty man,” Anne said matter-of-factly.
“What’s the second rule?” Branwell piped up.
“Eh?”
“Of spying. You said the first rule already. What’s the second?”
“Ah. Er. Never Use Your Real Name.”
“Is Brunty not—”
“Third rule of spying is No Backtalk!” yelled the Magazine Man.
Anne glanced to her left. There really was a vicious cliff dropping down into mist and shadows. She hadn’t believed him at all, but the wind blew up from the depths of the chasm like the breath of the earth.
“You were little once, too,” she hissed. “And I’d bet anything I’ve got you bit somebody fierce and then went back for seconds and I know you backtalked everyone you ever met.”
Brunty tapped the vial of sand, licked his finger, and held it up to test the wind. “Well, that just shows what you know, Little Lady Whinebag! I never was little. Never. The Great Encyclopedia made me as I am, from page to spine. You don’t buy a book when it’s tiny and watch it grow on your shelf, do you? Nonsense. On my day of publication, I was every inch the Brunty you see before you. Childhood is ruddy inefficient, I tell you what. I don’t know why your lot bothers with it.”
“The Great Encyclopedia?” Bran asked, shuffling his feet away from the chasm’s edge, though he really desperately wanted to know what a wormshark looked like. “Do you mean . . . God?”
The Magazine Man grunted. He unstoppered the vial and poured it out in a neat little pool on the floor of the cavern. “Who else would I mean?”
Anne laughed. “God’s not an encyclopedia! That’s the funniest thing I’ve ever heard!”
Brunty’s eyes grew rounder and softer and gentler. The headlines on his waistcoat ran like water. Now they read things like CANDLELIGHT VIGIL HELD AT MIDNIGHT and MIRACLE IN LAVENDRY in modest type. “The Encyclopedia is the Son of the Gods, sent to redeem us from disorder.” Brunty lifted up his O-eyes. “In the beginning were the Genii, blessed be their crowns of lightning! The Genii dwelt together in the void and fashioned out of nothing Heaven and Earth and Participles and Fate and Gravy Without Lumps and the Great Encyclopedia. The Encyclopedia contains everything in the world, from first to last, top to bottom, A to Zed. He protects the world, and organizes it, and explains it to any with the patience to listen. We all begin in the Nest of Knowledge, and from thence we learn to fly. I am of strong Bookish stock. We are an ancient race, possessed of great secrets and great strength. No Bookman could exist without some sacred spark of the Encyclopedia inside him.” Brunty seemed to remember himself. His face snapped back into its usual irritated expression. He whacked his chest until the headlines went boldface and angry again. INFIDEL HORDES AFOOT IN OCHREOPOLIS! “Oh, I suppose you think God is shaped more or less like you, only bigger and burlier and beardier and boomier?”
“Well . . . yes?” Branwell ventured.
Brunty snorted. His ribbon nose fluttered up and down again. “Disgusting.”
The buzzing sound suddenly sharpened itself into a long, wet scream. A huge shape came barreling down the tunnel toward them, something black and massive and shrieking and humming, something that reflected the light of Brunty’s horrible acid-lantern and exploded it into green and blue fireworks.
It was a fly. A fly the size of a small whale.
The fly descended on the little pile of red sand and devoured it, raising its head every once in a bit to chortle and thrum with delight. Beneath a rich, carved onyx saddle, its body rippled with shimmering black muscles and veins and long gray wings. Its huge, faceted eyes drank up the dark. It flicked its proboscis and rubbed its feelers together, gloating over its feast.
“Oh!” shrieked Anne. “It’s hideous!”
“Oh!” breathed Bran. “It’s brilliant.”
Despite himself, Primarily Scurrilous Brunty felt rather proud. He puffed up his chest. “One of the little secrets of my trade. Didn’t you ever wonder how bad news travels so fast? Time Flies! Musca Tempus Fugicus, to be precise. I do so love to be precise! And only the bearers of bad news can command them.”
“With that stuff you poured on the ground?” asked Anne shyly. She supposed insects were animals and she ought to love them equally to a dog or a bird, but she couldn’t quite manage it.
Brunty grinned. “The Sands of Time, Duchess Disappointment! They can’t resist.”
Bran stuck his finger in what was left of the red sand and tasted it. The Time Fly hissed at him and hurried to suck up the rest before he could steal anymore.
“It’s sugar!” he said.
The fly buzzed, velvet and kind. “Time past is sweet, boy,” she said. “And time to come is sweeter still.” Her voice echoed like a little thin flute in the stone caves.
Brunty patted the jet-black, wrinkled hide of the beast. Her wings quivered. “They’re terrible gluttons, the Time Flies. Overeaters of time and space. No restraint at all. They gobble up all the time it would take us to get where we’re going and excrete the space between us and our destination. Not bad, wouldn’t you say?”
“Not bad,” agreed Bran and Anne. They were in such terrible trouble, yes, of course they were, but they could not help marveling at the creature.
And then the most peculiar thing happened. Brunty the Liar, Brunty the Spying Sack of Slime, Can’t-Take-Him-Anywhere Brunty gave the deepest, most graceful, humblest bow anyone has ever bowed.
“Madam,” he said, in the most elegant, courtly, grandest of accents, “might I, your lowly servant, inquire after your name?”
“It’s Ryecote, sir!” chirped the fly. “Ryecote, daughter of Applemeal, daughter of Spillwine, daughter of Horseye, daughter of Dunglace—”
Brunty interrupted her, but he did it so sleekly and smoothly that it seemed as though Ryecote had quite finished her sentence. “What a noble and august lineage! How fortunate I feel to have found myself in the care of the scion of such a queenly and ancient house!”
“Goodness, that’s perfectly all right,” the fly demurred, but anyone could tell she was pleased. “Very pleased to meet you and all.”
Brunty pressed on, his voice growing ever more adoring and kind. The headlines on his waistcoat shimmered and read: MERCY AND CHARITY RUN WILD IN THE STREETS and PRINCESS TRAVELS ABROAD TO HELP THE POOR. “And I, Lady Ryecote, am called Brunty Errata-Huntingdon, of the Elseraden Errata-Huntingdons, lately made Lord after the untimely death of my stepbrother. May I also present . . . these . . . people.” He gestured halfheartedly at Branwell and Anne. “Sir Rotter and Lady Rubbish.”
“Oh my! Of the Middenheap Rubbishes?” exclaimed Ryecote in insect awe.
Brunty bowed deeper. “Indubitably, your loveliness. Now, Lady Ryecote, if you will excuse the intolerable imposition, my companions and I have great and pressing need to journey swiftly to the Bastille in the fair and glittering city of the Lefthand Verdopolis, far and far from here. Will you, Princess among flies, Gloriana in her highest, consent to carry myself, my wards, and my excellent and entirely safe technological cargo upon your sublime back and bear us to the welcoming arms of Mother Gondal?”
“What is he on about?” whispered Bran. “It’s only a fly!”
The Time Fly rubbed her ashen wings together in joy. “Oh, Lord Brunty, I would just love to give you a lift! I don’t think I’d like anything in the world half so well, unless it was a bit more of that yummy sand you’ve got, but who can say no to a lick of time? Not me, and I’ve got the thorax to prove
it! That’s all right, Mr. Ryecote loves my thorax best of all the thoraxes that ever were! What a lucky bug I am! Just wait till I tell my sisters! Pithpip is always going on and on about how our grandmum snatched away the Jewel of Glass Town to Gondal so fast no one knew little Vickie’d gone! I’ll finally get to show her up, the old tailflicker. Said I’d never amount to much when we were larvae—well, look at plain little Ryecote now! And such a handsome, well-spoken man asking for me. My, my, Mr. Ryecote will be jealous! But I don’t care a bit. I’m pleased as a pony! A fine, powerful, beautiful pony that no one would ever call hideous.”
Anne blushed with shame. Now that she’d met the fly properly, she rather thought she’d like to take her home to Haworth with her and feed her through the kitchen window every night forever and ever. And yet, through her blushing, her clever, hungry ears caught a word that meant nothing and everything to her. Vickie?
“Can’t I take it back?” Anne begged shyly. “I think you’re wonderful. Just wonderful. The prettiest fly I ever saw.”
Ryecote lifted her huge cut-glass eyes and chortled gleefully. “Of course you can! I was only teasing. Teasing is the most fun you can have on the ground, I think. I don’t hold a grudge; it’s not in my nature! Got a heart like a sugar lump, me. Hop on, darlings! I can’t wait, I’m starving! It’s a long way to Gondal, a nice big tuck-in with dollops of dessert. Don’t mind the weight, now. I’m a strong girl; everyone says so. That Ryecote, she could carry the whole world on her back, our pa used to say!”
Branwell and Anne grabbed at each other’s hands. It was their last chance to run. Run to Charlotte, run to Emily, run to Bestminster, run to Crashey and Bravey and Gravey and Rogue, run back to the light. But before they could decide to brave the black labyrinth underneath Ochreopolis and cross their fingers that they’d not starve to death before finding the way in the shadows, Lord Brunty Errata-Huntingdon of the Elseraden Errata-Huntingdons seized them by the waists. He shoved them up onto Ryecote’s gleaming onyx saddle, a saddle so big it could have held a second Magazine Man, a second Bran, and a second Anne, even a second horrible acid machine, and still had room for a lunch basket.
Brunty punched his chest viciously a few times. “Come on, don’t go soft on me, lads, or we’ll never go a mile,” he mumbled.
The kindly headlines on his breast faded out and bled black until they read bad and worst once more. WAR! DEVASTATION! REVENGE! VICTORY AT ALL COSTS! The Magazine Man squeezed Anne and her brother painfully tight against his gut and held the Thing out before him like a ferryman’s lamp.
Ryecote trumpeted into the stony darkness ahead of them. Had the sun ever reached down this far? Anne thought it might have tried, but gotten scared and run back up to the sky and never told anyone about it. The Time Fly wiggled her hindquarters like a cat about to dash after a mouse. “Everyone safe? Everyone cozy? Everyone snug as a bug in a wine jug? I got caught in a wine jug once when I was wee. It was the best half-minute of my life—”
The caverns wobbled. The tunnels shuddered. The chasm full of wormsharks and at least one immortal three-eyed leviathan groaned. The underside of the city seemed to, somehow, and only once, tick. Like a minute hand juddering into place. And then, everything was buzzing and nothing was not buzzing and the buzzing was inside them and outside them and they had always been buzzing, their whole lives; they would never stop buzzing for buzz was the whole of the universe from star to moon to dust—
And
then
—they were tumbling out onto thick, sharp grass drenched in frost, into wintergreen and dead clover and a forest full of empty bare trees and high, tight clouds that promised snow by sundown, into a clearing that held nothing but an old road, a broad stone house with round windows, a fresh thatch roof, and rosy lights inside, a man shaped like a book, two children, and a giant fly lying motionless on the cold, cold earth.
“Ryecote!” screamed Anne, rushing to the creature’s side. She didn’t even notice the pool of ichor spreading into the grass until her knees were soaking with it.
“It’s no use blubbering,” Brunty sniffed. “She’s dead. Flies only live a day, and she ate up that and more getting us here. Thought you’d know that sort of thing, being such a Clever Cathy.”
“You knew all this while she’d die? And you used her anyway?” Bran’s voice shook, though even he couldn’t quite tell if it shook with anger or awe.
The Magazine Man patted Ryecote’s dull, lifeless eyes. “Why else would I treat her so nice? Poor bugger.”
Anne seethed. Her lips drew back from her teeth like a wild fox. Anne had never really hated anything before. She didn’t recognize it when it happened to her. Hatred felt like the terrible burning lye soap they used for laundry splashing up onto her heart instead of onto her hands. It tasted like hot dirt in her mouth. She wanted to tear out Brunty’s pages one by one and eat them. He’d taken them away from Charlotte and Emily. He’d called them names and dragged them around by their hair. They were going to miss the train home because of him. And he’d killed poor Ryecote and he wasn’t even sorry. He didn’t even care.
“THE END!” Anne cried hoarsely. “THE END THE END THE END!” It had worked when Charlotte had done it. She should have remembered sooner, but it had all happened so fast, and there had been the matter of the three-eyed leviathan and the chasm. . . .
But Brunty did not fold his covers up with a pop and plop to the ground as a neat and tidily shut book. He glanced back over his newsprint shoulder.
“Oh, no, no, no, my love,” he scolded silkily. “That won’t be working, not a bit. In the comfort of your own parlor, you may end a book and stop a tale anytime you don’t like where it’s headed, but we are in the wild now, I’m afraid. The story is quite, quite out of your hands.”
The Magazine Man looked up toward the thatched house. Voices tumbled out of the windows and doors like washing-water. The most marvelous smell Bran and Anne could imagine came puffing out of the place along with chimney smoke and candlelight: beef stew and brown beer. It was a pub! Branwell’s stomach growled. But Brunty rolled his great eyes and made a disgusted noise in his throat. “Fat lot of good it did, either. She didn’t even get us all the way to Gondal. Thanks for that, you old nag.” And he gave her a resentful little kick.
Ryecote wobbled and shuddered and groaned just as the black caverns had done. Her body vanished, back into the great trash heap of time that birthed her. Tears began to freeze on Anne’s flushed cheeks.
“Halloo!” came a deep, booming, oaky voice from a big round window in the public house. A handsome, finely carved face stuck itself out into the cold, still wearing a proud soldier’s helmet. “I say, is that you, Master Branwell? And Miss Anne! How extraordinary! What a bit of a thing this is! Come in, come in! This is my place, built it myself! And for my comrades, everything is on the house! Oh! Erm. Oh dear . . . who have you got there with you? No, you wouldn’t. You couldn’t. Oh, it is. Tsk, tsk, Brunty! Have you been a naughty little pupper again?”
It was Captain Bravey.
FOURTEEN
A Bath, a Bit of Paint, and a Pile of Cloth
Bestminster Abbey seemed very empty indeed without Branwell and Anne. It had turned itself back into a stallionocerosupine, hoping to make the girls smile, to share in a good memory. But Charlotte and Emily only sat together in the lounge, staring into nothing. Each wandered wild on the moors of their own thoughts as the gentle-hearted suitcase padded, as softly as it could, through the chic topaz streets of Ochreopolis, past the golden banks of Canary Wharf, beneath the shadows of a thousand amber spires. Bestminster crept so quietly, in fact, that they’d fallen fast asleep by the time it climbed up through the brilliant jeweled hardscrabble Kaleideslopes that separate the learned folk of Ochreopolis from the eternal wild party of Lavendry, where no one ever sleeps for fear of missing the next dance. They did not even wake when the suitcase re-un-packed itself into a slim town house. Nor when it settled down like a roosting hen on the fragrant purplish-pink ba
nks of the mighty Puce River, sandwiched between a hat shop and a perfume-maker’s studio. Bestminster steadfastly refused to disturb them. Emily and Charlotte had meant to finally hash it all out between their good brains—the why and the wherefore, the how and the what exactly, the which and the whether. The grog and the game. But it was all too much for a single day, the running and the shooting and the Brunty-ing and the screaming and the digging in a publishers’ floor with a letter-opener. Sleep ran them down like a gray tiger before one word could escape its claws.
When the knock came at Bestminster’s door, it startled them both awake so harshly they nearly fell off the long sofas onto the floor. For a moment, still sticky with afternoon dreams, Charlotte thought she was back at the Cowan Bridge School. She could not breathe; her heart rattled in her chest, and she reached out for her sisters—not Emily, but Maria and Elizabeth, who were so much older and wiser. Who would protect her from the Headmaster. Who could make everything all right so she didn’t have to all by herself. But then, Charlotte’s eyes scraped over the leather suitcase walls, the half-snail, half-turtle over the mantel, the petticoat windowpanes. Cowan Bridge School was very far away. Maria and Elizabeth were dead. Branwell and Anne had been kidnapped by a book. Charlotte was the oldest and the wisest one left. But she feared she was not at all old or wise enough.
The knock at the door rapped again.
“Charlotte, I dreamed we were back at School,” choked Emily, her mouth horribly dry.
“Don’t worry, Em,” Charlotte said, smiling as hard as she could while she smoothed her dress and tucked her hair back in place. “We’re only in an insane, upside-down world populated by our toys, our stories, and Napoleon riding a giant chicken on fire. Nothing so bad as School.”