Curse of the Midions (5 page)

“Ow,” Jarvey said, rubbing his cheek. Then he realized he had dropped the Midion Grimoire. “Where's my book?”

“Got it here, cully,” another boy said. “Here, reach out. Where are you? Here it is, take it. Can't none of us read, no gates.”

The sharp corner of the book poked into Jarvey's chest, and he took it from the boy, feeling its weight almost with gratitude.

“Come on,” the girl said. “Mill Press will have runners out.”

They shoved him, led him, and grumbled at his slowness as they made their way through a maze of alleys and byways, under bridges beside a river that reeked of stagnant mud and dead fish, through open windows and into basements crowded with stacks of crates and what seemed to be rusted machinery. “Where are we going?” Jarvey asked three or four times, but he never got an answer. It was like some of his bad dreams, nightmares of endless running, to something or from something, in which he could make no progress.

However, this night's running found an end at last. From ahead of him, Jarvey heard a complicated rapping, answered by another series of taps, and then a dim opening appeared, a door. The kids behind him thrust him forward, down a steep incline, to the doorway, then through, hurriedly, and the shadowy figure of the girl held aside a hanging blanket and urgently beckoned to him. Jarvey ducked under it.

One dripping candle provided a faint light, but to his weary eyes it blazed bright enough to dazzle him. His head ached, and he felt every bruise he had collected. Jarvey had the impression of being in an immense room, something almost the size of a cathedral, but someone—the kids around him, Jarvey supposed—had walled off a portion of it. Splintered wooden crates, stacked more than head-high, made a hollow square about twelve feet on a side. A ragged gray curtain covered the only entrance. More pieces of gray cloth, roughly stitched together, made up a kind of drooping, sagging ceiling overhead.

Jarvey saw four boys and one girl, all of them staring at him silently. The youngest of them looked about eight years old. He squeaked, “Who've we brought home, then, Betsy?”

“A rum 'un,” the girl said with a grin. She was close to Jarvey's age, but incredibly dirty. Her hair might have been red, but it was hard to tell in the candlelight. She, or someone, had hacked it short. Bangs hung on her forehead, but the rest of her hair spiked away in all directions. Her eyes were green, her nose tilted up at the tip, and her mouth wide. Like the others, she wore a shirt and pants too big for her, the pants belted at the waist with a rope, and she was barefoot.

The youngest boy had been waiting in the tent-like enclosure, but the other three had been the ones shoving Jarvey along. One looked as if he might be Pakistani or Indian, with black hair and eyes. The second was a year or two younger than Jarvey, and he had blond hair that fell into a cap of curls. The last was a tall, lanky kid who was probably thirteen or fourteen. He had shaved his head down to stubble, and he was missing two front teeth.

“Lookin's free, cully,” Betsy said. “Strange clothes you have there.”

“Where are we?” Jarvey asked.

“Call it the Den,” Betsy said. “Where we live, when we're not runnin' from the tippers or the pressers. Only you got to pay rent, see? Got any brass on you?”

Jarvey furrowed his brow. “Brass? Money, you mean?”

“American, is that?” the Indian-looking boy said. “Sounds posh, dunnit?”

Jarvey fumbled in his jeans pockets. No money. Nothing. “I don't have any, uh, brass,” he said. “Look, if I could get to the police—”

The youngest kid, the one who had let them in, had flung himself on the floor. Now he sprang up, balling his fists. “Go to!” he yelled. “Want the tippers, do yer? What is he, Bets, some bloody spy?”

“Dunno what he is,” Betsy said, holding out an arm to keep the boy back. “Talked about the place, though. The one by the river. And he has that book.”

The boy stared. “Strike me! That ain't
the
Book, though. Is it?”

“Shut it, Puddler,” Betsy said softly. “Let's have some jaw work and see what we can learn. All right, American. Tell us your name to begin with.”

“It's Jarvey Midion,” he began, “but—”

Something exploded against him, and the next thing Jarvey knew, he lay flat on his back, with two of the boys pulling the youngest, the one Betsy had called Puddler, off him. Heaving for breath, Jarvey realized that the younger kid had plowed right into him, hitting him hard in the stomach. He groaned.

“Manners, Puds,” Betsy said, hunkering down close to Jarvey. “True word, American? You one of them? A Midion?”

“That's my name,” Jarvey muttered, picking up the book, which he had dropped. “But people call me Jarvey.”

Betsy nodded at the book. “And you use that, do you? You know the art?”

“What do you mean, ‘art'? Everyone keeps saying that. I don't know what it means.”

“Tell us what you do know,” Betsy suggested.

So he told them everything, from the arrival of the letter to his being shoved out of the carriage near the alley. None of them seemed to believe that he had flown over the ocean. One of the boys, the oldest one, tapped his head and rolled his eyes when Jarvey tried to explain the airplane trip.

When he had finished, Betsy looked troubled. “You lot, scarper till I call,” she said, and without a word, the boys left the improvised room, ducking one by one through the blanket-hung opening.

As soon as they were alone, Betsy sat beside Jarvey, who had pulled himself up to a sitting position, his back against a stack of crates. She said, “Look in my eyes, Jarvey.”

His own eyes felt hot with tears ready to begin, but he defiantly looked into Betsy's green gaze.

She stared deep into him. “Right,” she said. “Now, the question. Do you or do you not have the art?”

“I don't know what you mean,” Jarvey said.

Her lips barely moved. “Magic. Sorcery. The High Art. Can you do it or no?”

Jarvey snorted. “No, I can't. There's no such thing.”

Her eyes bored into him. “You sure of that?”

A window shattering. Overhead lights blazing too bright, then exploding in sparks. A baseball bat blowing itself to pieces
.

“I'm not sure of anything,” Jarvey said at last. “But I can't
do
magic, if that's what you mean. Stuff sometimes just sort of happens, that's all.”

“So you can't do magic, but you flew through the air, across the wide ocean.”

“Sure, on an airplane,” Jarvey said. “A jet? An airliner?”

She shook her head. “Never heard of such.”

Jarvey groaned. “Where's Hag's Court?” he asked.

“Never heard of that, neither.”

“It's not far from Kensington. Look, this is London, isn't it?”

To his surprise, Betsy's eyes glistened as if she were about to weep. “Nah, cully, wrong there. This ain't London Town. This here's Lunnon, and Nibs—that's Tantalus Midion, and I reckon he's a relative of yours—made it with his art.”

“That's what someone else told me. It doesn't make sense.”

“Nah, not by night tide, I s'pose not.” Betsy took a deep, thoughtful breath. “I can't make you out at all, cully. You tell the truth, but your truth is cracked and crazy. Any gate, we saved your skin from the Mill Press. And if that is the right, true Grimoire, then you might be of use to us after all.”

“Here,” Jarvey said, holding out the book. “If you want this, take it and call it my rent—”

Quick as a snake, Betsy pulled herself away from him. “Nah! Don't hold that thing towards me! If it is what you say it is, I wouldn't touch it for a thousand pound! They do say that whenever that thing opens in front of people, it transports them away.”

“T-transports them?”

“Grabs 'em body and soul, and pulls them from their life and their world into somethin' else. That book's a work of art, it is, and I've heard older people say that none but a Midion can use it.” Betsy crouched. “You keep it, but don't try to open it. Not for your life. You'd best grab yourself a corner and sleep if you can. Look, don't try to get away, see? We sleeps light, and we don't rightways trust you yet.”

She whistled, and a moment later the four boys came back in. Without looking away from Jarvey, Betsy said, “Right, then. He's true story, so far as he knows, and he's Artless. No brass on him, but he bears the Midion name, and that might just be worth somethin' to somebody. All sleep now, and in the morning we'll sort it out.”

Jarvey didn't have to do much to get ready for bed. The oldest boy, whose name seemed to be Plum, showed him where the toilet was. It wasn't much, just a trough of running water, but Jarvey wasn't picky by that time. He did see that they were in a vast basement room, with ancient, cobweb-strung beams high overhead and crumbling brick walls all around.

They went back to the improvised room, where the other three boys were already snoring. Betsy sat brooding in the corner closest to the curtain-hung doorway. Jarvey hesitated beside her, then said, “Look, I'm kind of hungry.”

“You too, cully?” She gave him a fierce grin. “We're all sharp set. Bed now, over there.” She jerked her head toward a kind of pad in the corner, made up of odds and ends of carpet and fabric. “We'll see about getting vittles for you in the morning, if we decide you're to be let live. Go on, go on, bed now.”

Jarvey knelt and arranged the carpet ends and bundles of cloth as well as he could. He stretched out on it. Across the room, Betsy blew out the candle, and darkness flooded in.

Jarvey turned this way and that, squirming, trying to make himself comfortable and reasonably warm. He dragged some of the rough cloth over himself as a makeshift blanket. His bruises and scrapes twinged dismally. All around him, the other kids snored, coughed, muttered in their dreams. Jarvey's neck began to cramp.

After a few minutes, Jarvey sat up in his improvised bed and wrapped the book in some scraps of cloth. He slipped it under his head. It was a hard pillow, but by that time exhaustion had caught up, and he was past caring. Right now, he would give anything to return to that dreary hotel with his mom and dad. Confused, worn out, and more than a little afraid, Jarvey did the impossible: He fell asleep.

The Cold Light of Day

From the depths of sleep Jarvey surfaced suddenly, thrashing and yelling. He opened his eyes and saw the crate-walled room in a thin gray light. He was alone. As he scrambled up, he remembered the book and unwrapped it. The hanging blanket that served as the door had been twitched aside, and a little light seeped through the opening.

He peeked out. The cavernous basement had a few high, small windows, and through these, dusty bars of daylight slanted in, buttresses against the dark wall. Jarvey could see nothing through the windows. They were fifteen feet above the floor, and their panes had been so bleared with grime that they were barely translucent.

The room stretched out for a hundred feet or more, and fifty feet from side to side. A double row of pillars helped to support the raftered ceiling. Six huge panels, heavily outlined in two-foot-thick timbers, looked like trapdoors that opened up to a floor somewhere above. Dust lay thick everywhere, and scuttling spiders had strung their webs over the bricks and every other surface. Corroded gear wheels the size of dinner plates littered the stone floor, and a few broken-down machines, bigger than automobiles, crouched against the far wall, some upright, some on their sides.

Where had everyone gone? Jarvey wandered until he found a single splintered door. It was unlocked, and it creaked open on rusty hinges when Jarvey tried it. A steep ramp led up into what looked like an alley, narrow and dark between featureless walls of sooty brick.

Jarvey fished in his pocket until he found the crumpled card that Zoroaster had forced on him. Did the man really know where his mom and dad might be? Zoroaster had admitted lying to him, but he seemed to be Jarvey's only hope. Jarvey studied the engraved script on the card: Lord P. Zoroaster, Ruling Council. Beneath that was what had to be an address: 3, Royal Crescent.

Stuffing the card back into his pocket, Jarvey crept up the incline, holding the book tight. The alley was narrow, only about three feet side to side. To his right, it ran for fifty feet and then bent around the corner of the huge building and vanished in darkness. To his left he saw light. When he reached the alley mouth, Jarvey paused, his jaw dropping.

Early-morning light made a cloudy sky milky-white. A ghastly throng of men, women, and children trudged past in the street, all of them wearing coarse, ragged gray clothing, most barefoot. Their heads drooped, and they all looked hopeless, helpless. In the washed-out light of morning, the soot-streaked buildings loomed like forbidding prison walls. A few heavyset, tough-looking men in black strode beside the crowd, brandishing six-foot-long staves. Now and then one of them yelled and struck out at a straggler, who would cower, cry out, or stumble.

Jarvey shrank back into the shadows. One of the guards jerked his head around, his eyes narrowing. Jarvey backed away as the man shouted to one of the other guards and then came toward him, brandishing his heavy staff.

Looking wildly around, Jarvey realized he had no choice—he had already retreated past the entrance to the basement. He hurried through the alley, away from the street and the man, took a sharp left turn and found himself in a dead-end passage between two crumbling brick walls, a passage no more than a yard wide.

Trapped! Jarvey whirled, but already he heard the crunch of the man's boots out in the main alley. He'd be caught, forced into that line of hopeless people—