‘No,’ said Arthur. He could feel the frustrated anger rising inside him again, the temper that appeared when his will was thwarted by insignificant creatures. ‘I am Arthur! Give me—’
There was a loud thock, and the Denizen suddenly crumpled to the ground. The raven jumped off the back of his head and dropped the cobble it had just used to great effect.
‘What were you talking to him for?’ it asked. ‘Should have just bopped him one.’
‘I was going to,’ protested Arthur as he bent down to take off the unconscious Denizen’s coat. ‘He just looked so sad and pathetic.’
The coat and boots adjusted themselves as Arthur put them on, but they weren’t a bad fit to start with. Arthur looked down at himself and wondered if he’d grown even taller, possibly just in the last few minutes, because he needed to look like a Denizen. If the Will thought that he could pass for a Bathroom Attendant, he must be now almost six feet tall. Almost as tall as his basketball star older brother, Eric, he realised, a stab of melancholy passing through him.
Eric might already be dead; he’ll die when the hospital is bombed and the city goes with it. I shouldn’t be this tall, not for years yet. I feel like my old self is slipping away . . . faster and faster . . . and I can never be normal again.
He’d just finished dressing, had transferred his precious bag to his coat pocket, and was picking up the black umbrella when the door suddenly flung open. The Will, quick as a flash, transformed into a blanket and threw itself over the unconscious Denizen on the floor.
A sorcerer with a yellow umbrella looked in.
‘Hurry up, idiot!’ she shouted at Arthur. ‘We’re boarding the assault ram! Come on!’
She stood there, watching as Arthur pulled the brim of his hat lower to hide his face and eyes, and tried to think. When he didn’t move, she scowled and gestured with her umbrella.
‘We haven’t got all day! I’ll put you on report in a minute. Woxroth, isn’t it?’
‘Sorry,’ mumbled Arthur. He started over to her, thinking that he might drag the Denizen inside and shut the door, and the Will could konk her with its cobble. But there were more sorcerers looking in from behind her, their attention drawn by her shouting. So instead he just stumbled out the door. As he shut it behind him, he caught a flash of movement, and shuddered as he felt the Will run up his sleeve in the shape of something like a cockroach.
The waiting Denizens were no longer an unruly crowd, staring up at the bronze rocket. They were lining up in a long queue that zigzagged back and forth through the square. The head of the line was at the assault ram, and the Denizens there were climbing the external ladders on the solid bronze part and forming up in ranks on the different floors.
Arthur joined the line, the last in the long queue. The Denizen in front of him, another Sorcerous Supernumerary, looked back at him for a moment, but only gave a mournful sigh and trudged on. Arthur copied her pose, dragging his feet and keeping his chin tucked almost to his chest so his hat shielded his face.
It took quite a while to get to the rocket. Arthur had time to estimate the number of sorcerers climbing into the assault ram. By the time they all got on, he reckoned, there would be five thousand sorcerers on board. Most of them were full sorcerers too, some of them with umbrellas of gold and silver, which meant they were from higher levels he hadn’t even seen. And right at the top, where they might have been all along, there were dozens of Denizens wearing the shiny satin top hats of Internal Auditors, the same as the ones the Piper had killed in Friday’s eyrie in the Middle House. A contingent of Artful Loungers, in one of the middle levels, sat at the side of the rocket and kicked their legs through the bars.
As they approached the base of the ram, Arthur saw that there was a rainbow umbrella sorcerer checking everyone off a list. But even worse than that, there was also a very haughty-looking seven-foot-tall Denizen dressed in an immaculate silver tailcoat, night-black breeches, and super-reflective boots. He had a dove-grey greatcoat of seven capes draped over his shoulders, and any raindrops that got within a few feet of this sizzled themselves out of existence.
It’s got to be Saturday’s Dusk, thought Arthur. He’ll spot me for sure . . . and then there’s five thousand sorcerers here to finish me off.
Trying to act casual, Arthur raised his hand to his face and scratched his nose. With his mouth partially covered, he hissed, ‘Will!’
An albino cockroach with Will written on its back in red letters crawled up Arthur’s wrist and into the palm of his hand.
Think to me, said the Will, silently. You don’t need to talk.
Oh, yeah, replied Arthur. I forgot. That’s Saturday’s Dusk up ahead. I think I need you to distract him. Take the shape of a Raised Rat, maybe, and run away. Then you’d better go rescue Suzy, because I’m not going to get the chance—
You don’t know that, the Will replied. Also, I don’t think Saturday’s Dusk will know you. There’s too much sorcery around for him to sniff you out. That bronze thing there is reeking with it, not to mention the platform it’s on. They’ve got two hundred and fifty executive-level sorcerers preparing to lift that thing, you know. Just keep your head down.
I still want you to go and rescue Suzy! Arthur insisted. Go now, while there’s still a chance.
No, said the Will into Arthur’s head. My job is to find the Rightful Heir, and now that I have, I’m sticking with you. We might even get a chance at the Key. Anything can happen now, with the Piper’s Army below and Sunday’s insects above.
I want you to go and rescue Suzy! I order you to do so!
‘Name?’ asked the gold-umbrella sorcerer.
Arthur dropped his hand, and the Will ran up his sleeve.
‘Uh, Woxroth,’ muttered Arthur.
‘Last and least,’ said the sorcerer. ‘Get up the ladder and find your place.’
As Arthur scrambled up the ladder, the sorcerer turned to Saturday’s Dusk, who had fastened a monocle in his right eye and was staring at the paved floor.
‘Loading almost complete, sir.’
‘Not a moment too soon,’ replied Dusk. ‘The Piper’s forces have finished landing and are moving up. Well, they may have the Floor. They will not get far up the tower, and we will soon be in the Gardens.’
‘Are they as beautiful and wondrous as they say?’ asked the sorcerer as he started to climb, with Noon coming up after him. He was about fifteen feet behind Arthur, and the boy could hear every word.
‘We will soon see,’ said Dusk. ‘Time we began, I think.’
He held on to the ladder with one hand and cupped the other around his mouth, calling out to another gold-umbrella sorcerer who stood watching in the nearest corner cupola on the platform.
‘Take her up!’ shouted Dusk. ‘All the way to the top!’
TWENTY
THE SORCEROUS SUPERNUMERARIES were on the lowest level of the rocket, immediately above the solid brass case. In between the holes in the wicker floor, Arthur could see the metal. He didn’t want to think about what might be packed inside the lower half of the rocket. Some kind of propellant, he assumed. It was clear that the assault ram was going to be fired at the underside of the Incomparable Gardens, and the most likely place for that to happen was from the top of the tower.
Arthur was lucky to be one of the last aboard, because that meant his position was right up against the bars. The Denizens were packed in shoulder to shoulder, but he could turn around and see outside.
There was no talk among the sorcerers around Arthur. He looked out through the bars at the sorcerers in one of the corner cupolas on the platform below him. They were slotting their gold and silver umbrellas into holes in the ironwork. When the umbrellas were set, they turned the handles sideways to make them into something like music stands, and all together they placed open books upon the handles and, without any visible or audible signal, began to write with peacock-feather pens.
Arthur felt power in whatever they were writing. It made him feel slightly ill and it
chy all over. As they wrote, the platform silently rose off the floor and began to climb up the side of the tower.
As it climbed, the Sorcerous Supernumeraries began to whisper to one another.
‘We’re all going to die.’
‘I bet I die first.’
‘We’ll all die together.’
‘We might not. We might just be horribly injured and demoted again.’
‘You always look on the bright side, Athelbert.’
‘No, I don’t. I do expect to get killed.’
‘Surprised they put us down here. Thought we’d be first to the slaughter.’
‘Nah, waste of time putting us up front. Those big beetle-things’d cut the likes of us up in a trice.’
‘What beetle-things?’
‘Quiet!’ roared an authoritative voice from somewhere farther inside the packed Denizen ranks.
Arthur shivered as he felt a new surge of sorcery from the writing Denizens in the cupolas, and the platform rose faster. He was on the far side of the rocket from the tower, so he couldn’t see exactly how far they’d already risen, but looking down, he guessed they’d already gone up about two or three hundred levels.
‘How come you’ve got a bit shorter, Woxroth?’ asked a Denizen behind Arthur’s back.
‘Extra demotion,’ grunted Arthur.
Awed silence greeted this answer, followed by a muttered, ‘And I thought I had it bad. Demoted and then killed by a beetle, all in one day.’
Optimistic lot, aren’t they? said the Will into Arthur’s mind.
They might be realistic, thought Arthur. Do you have any suggestions about what I can do?
Bide your time and look for any opportunity. Then take it.
That’s really helpful.
‘Sorcerers with a clear view to the exterior, stand ready!’ ordered a voice from inside, the command echoed on the floors above.
The Denizens on either side of Arthur shuffled and pushed to get their folded umbrellas pointing out through the bars. Arthur copied them, though he didn’t know why they were doing it.
‘We’re approaching 61600, top-out’s at 61850. Be prepared for a counterattack. If it’s green and iridescent, shoot it!’
‘Woxroth,’ whispered the Denizen to Arthur’s left. ‘For the radiant eradication of matter, do we start by visualising a glowing ember or the tip of the flame on a candle? I can’t recall exactly . . .’
‘Uh, dunno,’ Arthur mumbled. He was trying to make his voice low and miserable, like the real Woxroth.
‘An ember, of course,’ said the Sorcerous Supernumerary to Arthur’s right. ‘Did you fail everything?’
‘Almost everything,’ replied the left-hand Supernumerary. ‘Hoo! What’s that? Glowing ember, glowing ember . . .’
‘Hold on,’ said the right-hand Denizen. ‘They’re our lot. On this side, anyway.’
Arthur stared out through the bars. The platform was lifting the rocket up at a faster rate than he’d thought, at least as fast as the moving chain he’d ridden. So it was hard to see, with the air rushing through the bars, the slight rocking motion of the rocket and the constant mild jostling of all the Denizens.
Several hundred feet above them, and closing rapidly, the sky was crisscrossed with smoky trails and sudden, sparking lights that blossomed like silent fireworks in brilliant colours, lasting only a few seconds. All Arthur could hear was the breathing of the Denizens around him, and the low hum of the moving platform.
The sparks were being fired up and out by thousands of flying Denizens who formed a circular perimeter several hundred yards out from the tower, surrounding it. At first Arthur couldn’t make out what they were casting their silent, sparking spells at, there was so much smoke and light in the sky. Then he saw a green tendril that had to be at least four hundred feet long and ten feet thick suddenly lash out of the cloud and strike a flier who had dared to climb too high. The tendril cracked like a whip, and Arthur and all the Denizens flinched at the sudden noise and the sight of the tendril smashing the Denizen’s wings. The lash must have terribly injured the sorcerer as well, for he or she fell like a lump, straight down.
‘Lashed to bits by a weed, that’d be right,’ said one of Arthur’s neighbours.
‘Nah,’ said someone else. ‘That’s a good fifteen hundred feet up. They’re going to fire this thing from the top, a bit short of weed range, and we’ll slice through those tendrils like a hot knife through a butter cake. ’Course, after that, we’ll be easy pickings for the beetles.’
‘I’ve never even seen a butter cake.’
Arthur only half-listened to the complaints behind and around him. He watched the tendril strike again, still flinching at the whip crack even though he knew it was coming. But the Denizen who’d said they wouldn’t get close was right. The platform had slowed down a lot and was now manoeuvring sideways. Arthur could feel less sorcerous energy being expended by the Denizens in the driving cupolas.
The platform was also rotating, Arthur saw as his view changed. The corner of the tower came into sight and then the entire side. They were level with the top now, the ground out of sight at least seventeen thousand feet below.
Here at its peak, the tower was much, much narrower than the levels Arthur had visited. The last fifteen levels were the narrowest, composed of only five offices a side. At the very top, right in the middle, there was a single, much larger office that was the size of four of the usual cubes. Though its frame was iron, it had clear crystal walls and a roof made of the same material.
Someone was inside this crystal office, watching the platform and the rocket slowly slide across toward . . . - toward her, Arthur saw.
Superior Saturday. It had to be her. She looked eight feet tall at least, and Arthur couldn’t tell if she had shining blonde hair or was wearing a metallic helmet. She was certainly wearing some kind of armour, a breastplate of red-gold that shone like the setting sun, and leg and arm armour made from plates in different shades of evening sunlight.
The platform was turning so that the door in the lowest level of the rocket was lined up with her office. The door that Arthur was standing next to. The door that Superior Saturday clearly intended to use . . .
‘Make way! Let’s have a path through!’ called the commanding voice. Denizens pushed at Arthur, driving him away from the door, packing him in even tighter against his comrades as a path was cleared from the doorway through to the interior ladder that led up to the next level of the rocket.
A Denizen pushed back right into Arthur’s face, but he didn’t complain. He shifted a little to his right and peered through the two-inch gap between two Sorcerers’ shoulders in front of him.
Superior Saturday touched the wall of her office and the crystal fell away, shattering into motes of light that spun around and wove themselves into a pair of shining wings that fell upon her shoulders and flapped twice as she launched herself across the empty air to the aperture between the bronze bars that served as a door for the rocket. She landed as if she were dancing in a ballet, and strode through the crowd without a sideways glance at the Denizens who bent their heads and tried to bow, despite the cramped space and many painful cranial collisions.
There, in her hand! called the Will. The Key. You could call to it. No, on second thought, best not yet –
Definitely not, thought Arthur. He stood on tiptoe and craned his neck to see what it was that Saturday held in her hand. It wasn’t an umbrella, or even anything as large as a knife, just something slim and short . . .
It’s a pen, thought Arthur. A quill pen.
He lost sight of it, and Saturday as well, as she climbed up the interior ladder. The platform rose up some twenty or thirty feet and drifted across to line up with the middle of the tower. Then, with a flourish of peacock-quill pens, the entire platform settled on top of the tower with the groan and shriek of iron upon iron. A minute later, dozens of automatons climbed up and grease monkeys flew up from below and started to fix the platform to the tower.
/> Arthur looked across and up. It was hard to estimate, but he thought the clouds were only eight or nine hundred feet above them, and the tendrils that were still snapping down could reach about three hundred feet. So they had a six-hundred-foot safety margin. Presumably the assault ram had to be this close in order to have a chance of breaking through the underside of the Incomparable Gardens.
Someone shouted far below. Arthur looked back down. The grease monkeys and the automatons were disappearing back under the platform.
‘Brace for launch!’ called out the commanding voice inside the rocket.
The Denizens around Arthur grabbed the bars, and the Denizens farther in grabbed one another. Arthur took a firm grip on the closest bar and bent his knees.
‘Light the blue touchpaper!’ called out the voice.
Arthur couldn’t see exactly what happened then, but somewhere over in the middle of the rocket, there was a sudden eruption, a vertical jet of white-hot sparks that reached the wicker floor above but somehow did not set it alight.
‘Five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one!’ called the voice. ‘Fire!’
There was a loud fizzling noise, and nothing happened.
‘Fire?’ repeated the voice, somewhat less commandingly.
‘What is going on down there?’ asked a clear, cold female voice that made Arthur shiver. ‘Must I do everything myself?’
‘No, milady,’ called the first voice, which was now beseeching. ‘There is a second touchpaper. I will light it myself.’
A minute later, there was another violent stream of sparks.
‘Five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . um . . .’
A violent force struck the rocket, sending every Denizen to his or her knees. Arthur was thrown from side to side, smacking into the sorcerers around him, their umbrella handles smashing into his ribs and thighs.
Huge clouds of smoke billowed up and out, and the rocket stormed up from the platform, accelerating faster than anything Arthur had ever experienced before.
Four seconds later, he heard the terrible crack of a tendril from above, closely followed by several more.