Keiro yelled. Finn looked up and what he saw made his fingers clutch on the Key, so that seconds before the image flicked off, Claudia saw it too.
A great solid metal wall. The Wall at the End of the World.
Rising from unknown depths it soared into the hidden reaches of the sky.
And they were heading straight for it.
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28
***
Entry is through the Portal, Only the Warden will
have a key, and this will be the only way to leave.
Though every prison has its chinks and crannies.
--Project report; Manor Sapiens
***
It was late; the bell in the Ebony Tower was chiming ten. In the summer dusk, moths flitted in the gardens and a distant peacock cried as Claudia hurried down the cloister. Servants passed her and struggled to bow, loaded down with chairs and tapestries and great haunches of venison. The whole bustle of the feast preparations had been under way for hours. She frowned, annoyed, not daring to ask one of them where Jared's room was.
But he was waiting.
As she turned a dank corner by a fountain of four stone swans, his hand came out and clutched her. Tugged through an archway she stood breathless as he closed the oaken door almost shut and put his eye to the slit.
A figure strode past. She thought she recognized her father's secretary.
"Medlicote. Is he following me?"
Jared put a finger to his lips. He looked paler and more drawn
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than usual, and there was a nervous energy about him that worried her. He led her down some stone steps, across a neglected courtyard, into a pathway overarched with yellow hanging laburnum. Halfway down he paused and whispered, "There's a folly down here I've been using. My room is bugged."
A great moon hung over the Palace. The scars of the Years of Rage pockmarked its face; its silvery sheen lit the orchard and glasshouses, reflected on diamond-paned casements that hung open in the heat. A small burst of music drifted from a room, with voices and laughter and the chink of plates. Jared's dark figure slipped between two pillars where stone bears danced, through bushes that smelled of lavender and lemon balm, to a small structure built into a wall, in the most neglected corner of the walled garden. Claudia glimpsed a turret, a ruined parapet overgrown with ivy.
He unlocked the door and ushered her in.
It was black, and stank of damp soil. Light flickered over her; Jared had a small torch; he pointed it at an inner door.
"Quickly."
The door was mildewed with age, the wood so soft it crumbled. Inside the dim room, the windows had been blocked with ivy; as Jared lit lamps, Claudia stared around. "Just like home." He had set up his electron microscope on a rickety table, unpacked a few boxes of instruments and books.
He turned; in the flame light his face was haggard. "Claudia, you must look at this. It changes everything. Everything."
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His anguish scared her. "Calm down," she said quietly. "Are you well?"
"Well enough." He leaned over the microscope, his long fingers adjusting it deftly. Then he stepped back. "You remember that scrap of metal I took from the study? Take a look at it."
Puzzled, she put her eye to the lens. The image was blurred; she refocused very slightly. And then she went very still, so rigid that Jared knew she had seen, and in that instant, had understood.
He went and sat wearily on the floor, among the ivy and nettles, the Sapient robe wrapped around him, its hem trailing in the dirt. And he watched her as she stared.
***
IT WAS the Wall at the End of the World.
If Sapphique had truly fallen down it from top to bottom, h must have taken years. As Finn gazed up he felt the wind rebound from its immensity, making a slipstream that roared before them. Debris from the heart of Incarceron was blasted upward and then plummeted in an endless maelstrom; once trapped in that wind nothing would escape.
"We need to turn!" Gildas was staggering to the wheel; Finn scrambled after him. Together they squeezed beside Keiro, hauling, trying to make the ship veer before she struck the updraft.
With the thunder, Lightsout came.
In the blackness Finn heard Keiro swear, felt Gildas
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struggle around him, holding on tight. "Finn. Pull the lever! In the deck."
His hand groped, found it, and he tugged.
Lights blinked on, two beams of light horizontal from the bow of the ship. He saw how close the Wall was. The discs of light played on huge rivets, bigger than houses, the bolted panels immense, battered by the impact of fragments, immeasurably cracked and scarred and corroded.
"Can we back out?" Keiro yelled.
Gildas threw him a glance of scorn. And in that instant they fell. Plunging down, spilling beams and spars and ropes, the ship dropped down the side of the Wall like a great silvery angel, the sails its flailing wings, shredding in seconds, until just as they thought she would break, the slipstream caught them. Mast snapping, the silver craft shot upward again, spinning uncontrollably, the headlights wheeling on the Wall, darkness, a rivet, darkness. Tangled in the ropes Finn clung on, grabbing an arm that might have been Keiro's. The raging wind hurtled them high, the up-current welling from a roaring darkness, and as they rose the air thinned, the clouds and storm left far below, the Wall a sheer nightmare that sucked them close. They were so near, Finn could see its pitted surface was webbed with cracks and tiny doors, openings where bats gusted out and navigated the gale with ease. Scoured by the collision of a billion atoms the metal gleamed in the headlights.
The ship rolled. For a long second Finn was sure it would
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roll right over; he held on to Keiro and closed his eyes, but when he opened them it had righted, and Keiro was crashing against him, flailing in the ropes.
The stern swung around. There was a great slither, a tremendous jerk.
Gildas roared. "Attia! She's let the anchor go!"
Attia must have gone below and pulled the pins from the capstan. The ascent slowed, the sails shredding. Gildas hauled himself up and pulled Finn close. "We have to get right into the Wall, and jump."
Finn stared, blank. The Sapient snapped, "It's the only way out! The ship will fall and rise and tumble forever! We have to drive her in there!"
He pointed. Finn saw a dark cube. It jutted out from the beaten metal, a hollow opening of darkness. It looked tiny; their chance of entering it remote.
"Sapphique landed on a cube." Gildas had to hold on to him. "That has to be it!"
Finn glanced at Keiro. Doubt dickered between them. As Attia came up the hatchway and slid toward them, Finn knew his oathbrother thought the old man was crazy, consumed with his quest. And yet what choice did they have?
Keiro shrugged. Reckless, he spun the wheel and headed the ship straight at the Wall. In the headlights the cube waited, a black enigma.
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***
CLAUDIA COULD not speak. Her astonishment, her dismay were too great. She saw animals.
Lions.
She counted them numbly; six, seven ... three cubs. A pride. That was the word, wasn't it...? "They can't possibly be real," she murmured.
Behind her, Jared sighed. "But they are."
Lions. Alive, prowling, one roaring, the rest snoozing in an enclosure of grass, a few trees, a lake where water birds waded.
She drew back, stared at the microscope, looked again.
One of the cubs scratched another; they rolled and fought. A lioness yawned and lay down, paws flat.
Claudia turned. She looked at Jared through the mothy lamplight and he looked back, and for a moment there was nothing to be said, only thoughts she didn't dare to think, implications she was too horrified to follow through.
Finally she said, "How small?"
"Incredibly small." He bit the ends of his long dark hair. "Miniaturized to about a millionth of a nanometer ... Infinitesimal."
"They don't...
How do they stay ...?"
"It's a gravity box. Self-adjusting. I thought the technique was lost. It seems to be an entire zoo. There are elephants, zebra ..." His voice trailed off; he shook his head. "Perhaps it
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was the prototype ... trying it first on animals. Who knows?"
"So this means ..." She struggled to say it. "That Incarceron ..."
"We've been looking for a huge building, an underground labyrinth. A world." He stared ahead into the darkness. "How blind we've been, Claudia! In the library of the Academy there are records that propose that such things--trans-dimensional changes--were once possible. All that knowledge was lost in the War. Or so we thought."
She got up; she couldn't sit still. The thought of the lions tinier than an atom of her skin, the grass they lay on even smaller, the minute ants they crushed with their paws, the fleas on their fur ... it was too difficult to take in. But for them the world was normal. And for Finn ...?
She walked in nettles, not noticing. Made herself say,
"Incarceron is tiny."
"I rear so."
"The Portal..."
"A process of entering. Every atom of the body collapsed." He glanced up and she saw how ill he looked. "Do you see? They made a Prison to hold everything they feared and diminished it so that its Warden could hold it in the palm of his hand. What an answer to the problems of an overcrowded system, Claudia. What a way to dismiss a world's troubles. And it explains much. The spatial anomaly. And there might be a time difference too, a very tiny one."
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She went back to the microscope and watched the lions roll and play. "So this is why no one can come out." She looked up. "Is it reversible, Master?"
"How do I know? Without examining every--" He stopped dead. "You realize we have seen the Portal, the gateway? In your father's study there was a chair."
She leaned back against the table. "The light fixture. The ceiling slots."
It was terrifying. She had to walk again, pace up and down, think about it hard. Then she said, "I have something to tell you too. He knows. He knows we have the Key."
Without looking at him, not wanting to see the fear in his eyes, she told him about her father's anger, his demands. By the time she had finished, she found herself crouched beside him in the lamplight, her voice down to a whisper. "I won't give the Key back. I have to get Finn out."
He was silent, the coat collar high around his neck. "It's not possible," he said bleakly.
"There must be some way ..."
"Oh, Claudia." Her tutor's voice was soft and bitter. "How can there be?"
Voices. Someone laughing, loud.
Instantly she leaped up, blew the lamps out. Jared seemed too dispirited to care. In the dark they waited, listening to the revelers' drunken shouts, a badly sung ballad fading away through the orchard. Claudia felt her heart thudding so loudly
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in the hush, it almost hurt. Faint bells chimed eleven in the clock towers and stables of the Palace. In one hour her wedding day would dawn. She would not give up. Not yet.
"Now that we know about the Portal and what it does ... could you operate it?"
"Possibly. But there's no way back."
"I could try." She said it quickly. "Go in and look for him. What have I got here? A lifetime with Caspar ..."
"No." He sat up and faced her. "Can you even begin to imagine life in there? A hell of violence and brutality? And here-- if the wedding doesn't happen, the Steel Wolves will strike at once. There will be a terrible bloodshed." He reached over and took her hands. "I hope I've taught you always to face facts."
"Master--"
"You have to go through with the wedding. That's all that's left. There is no way back for Giles."
She wanted to pull away, but he wouldn't let her. She hadn't known he was so strong. "Giles is lost to us. Even if he's alive."
She slid her hands down and held his, tight with misery. "I don't know if I can," she whispered.
"I know. But you're brave."
"I'll be so alone. They're sending you away."
His fingers were cool. "I told you. You have far too much to learn." In the darkness he smiled his rare smile. "I'm going nowhere, Claudia."
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***
THEY COULDN'Tdo it. The ship wouldn't hold steady, even with all of them hauling at the wheel. Her sails were rags, her rope trailed everywhere, her rails were smashed, and still she yawed and zigzagged, the anchor swinging and the bow oscillating toward the cube, away from it, above, below. "It's impossible," Keiro growled.
"No." Gildas seemed lit with joy. "We can do it. Keep strong." He gripped the wheel and stared ahead.
Suddenly the ship dropped. The headlights picked out the cube's opening; as they closed on it, Finn saw it was filmed across with a strange viscosity like the surface of a bubble. Rainbows of iridescence glimmered on it.
"Giant snails," Keiro muttered. Even now he was able to joke, Finn thought.
Nearer, nearer. Now the ship was so close, they could see the reflection of her lights, swollen and distorted. So close that the bowsprit touched the film, indented it, pierced it so that it popped with soft abruptness, vanishing into a faint puff of sweet air.
Gradually, fighting the upstream, the ship slewed into the dark cube. The buffeting slowed. Vast shadows overwhelmed the headlights.
Finn stared up at the square of blackness. As it opened as if to swallow him, he felt that he was very tiny, was an ant crawling into a fold of cloth, a picnic cloth laid on the grass far away
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and long ago, where a birthday cake with seven candles lay half eaten, and a little girl with brown curly hair was handing him a golden plate, so politely.
He smiled at her and took it.
The ship cracked. The mast splintered, toppled, wood showering around them. Attia fell against him, scrabbling after a crystal glitter that slid from his shirt. "Get the Key," she yelled.
But the ship hit the back of the cube and darkness crashed down on him. Like a finger crushing the ant. Like a main mast falling.
THE LOST PRINCE
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29
***
Despair is deep. An abyss that swallows dreams.
A wall at the worlds end. Behind it I await death. Because all our work has come to this.
--Lord Calliston's Diary
***
The morning of the wedding dawned hot and fine. Even the weather had been planned; the trees were in full blossom and the birds sang, the sky was a cloudless blue, the temperature perfect, the breeze gentle and sweetly scented.
From her window Claudia watched the sweating servants unloading the carriage-loads of gifts, saw even from up here the glint of diamonds, the dazzle of gold.
She put her chin on the stone sill, felt its gritty warmth. There was a nest just above, a swallow that dipped in and out regularly with beakfuls of flies. Invisible chicks cheeped urgently as the parents came and went.
She felt heavy-eyed and bone-weary. All night she had lain awake and looked up into the crimson hangings of the bed, listening to the silence of the room, her future hanging over her like a weighty curtain ready to fall. Her old life was finished--the freedom, the studying with Jared, the long rides
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and tree-climbing, the carelessness of doing as she liked. Today she would be Countess of Steen, would enter the war of scheming and treachery that was the life of the Palace. In an hour they would come to bathe her, do her hair, paint her nails, dress her like a doll.
She looked down.
There was a roof far below, the slope of some turret. For a dreamy moment she thought that if she tied all the sheets of the bedclothes together, she might let herself down, slowly, hand over hand till her bare feet touched the hot tiles. She might scramble down and steal a horse from the stables and ride away, escape just as she was, in her white nightdress, into the green forests on the far hills.
It was a warming thought.
The girl who disappeared. The lost Princess. It made her smile. But then a call from below jerked her back; she glanced down and saw Lord Evian, resplendent in blue and ermine, gazing up at her.
He called something; she was too high to hear what, but she smiled and nodded, and he bowed and walked away, his small heeled shoes clacking.
Watching him, she knew that all the Court was like him, that behind its perfumed and elaborate facade lurked a web of hatreds and secret murders, and her own part in that would begin very soon, and to survive it she must be as hard as they were. Finn could never be rescued. She had to accept that.
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She got up, sending the swallow off in panic, and walked to the dressing table.
It was laden with flowers, tussy-mussies, nosegays, and bouquets. They had been arriving all morning, so that the room smelled exquisite and sickly. Behind her, on the bed, the white gown lay spread in its finery. She looked at herself.
All right. She would marry Caspar and become Queen. If there was a plot, she would be part of it. If there were killings, she would survive them. She would rule. No one would tell her what to do ever again.
She opened the dressing table drawer, took out the Key, and placed it on the tabletop. It glimmered, its crystal facets catching the sunlight, its eagle splendid.
But first she would have to tell Finn. Break it to him that there was no escape.
Tell him their engagement was over.
She reached out to it, but just as she touched it, there was a low knock on the door and instantly she slid it smoothly into the drawer and picked up a brush. "Come in, Alys."
The door opened. "Not Alys," her father said.
He stood, dark and elegant, framed by the gilt lintel. "May I come in?"
"Yes," she said.
His coat was new, a deep black velvet, a white rose in the lapel, his knee breeches satin. He wore shoes with discreet buckles and his hair was caught in a black ribbon. He sat
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gracefully, flipping the tails of the coat. "All this finery is rather a bother. But one has to be perfect on such a day." Glancing at her plain dress, he took his watch out and opened it, so that the sun caught the silver cube that hung on the chain. "You have only two hours, Claudia. You should dress now."
She leaned her elbow on the table. "Is that what you came to tell me?"