The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There (17 page)

Halloween cocked her head to one side. Secrets sparkled in her eyes. “You know, he’s really kind, and gentle, when you get to know him. You’d never believe how gentle.”

“To you, perhaps.”

“But that’s what matters.”

Their hands were still joined. September had held out a dim, dismal hope that if they touched, they would simply join together again. She hadn’t thought it likely, mind you, but she had hoped. Nothing could be quite that easy in Fairyland. It could be a Rule:
Nothing is easy here. All traffic travels in the direction of most difficulty.
Still, she held on tight.

“You’re not like me at all,” September whispered. “If you were good and true, the Green Wind would be down here with you, dancing at your party. And he isn’t. You can’t yell that away.”

“Oh?” said Halloween archly. “I thought he was on the side of the ill-tempered and the irascible. Good and true is Fairy gold. It looks lovely, but it turns to junk when you aren’t looking.” But Halloween’s voice shook a little, and she did not deny that the Green Wind was not here, had not set his banner beside hers. The Queen let go of her hands. For a moment, a wild hope leapt up in September’s breast, that they would not pull apart, that it really would have happened simply by their touching. She tried to want that as hard as she could, the way Saturday had wanted to turn her into a Fairy or Ell wanted to turn her into a Wyvern. She held her breath, she wanted it so much.

Their skin stuck together for a moment, like two magnets held terribly close to each other, and for the briefest second, September thought it would work. But finally, they slid apart.

“I will not go with you, and you can’t make me,” the Hollow Queen said. “And don’t you try that Wanting Magic on me. You’re not a magician of any kind, and I am. It’s completely hopeless. I Want things more than anyone. You can’t possibly Want harder than I do. You might as well stay, because your beloved Upsider Fairyland is going to be an awfully dull place to have your holidays. It’s over before it began. But please, enjoy my food and my friends and my hospitality—naturally, my house is your house.”

Halloween whistled, high and piercing, and a shadow fell over the tower-tips of Tain. Down swooped a huge creature, graceful and noble and ridiculous and beautiful: an orange parrot the size of a house, its round beak black and shining, its feathers soft and fiery. The very parrot September had seen in the pet store, oh, a hundred years ago now, it seemed. The one she had wanted so badly to take home and love and name Halloween. Oh.
Oh
. September’s throat got thick and hard. She did get everything she wanted. Everything they both wanted. The parrot had a saddle of dark wood and furs, spangled with golden tinsel and nuggets of some raw green gem. He cawed lovingly at September’s shadow, who climbed up onto his back and lifted her shadowy arms in the air.

“Let the Revel begin!” the Hollow Queen cried.

Behind her, fireworks exploded, pinwheels of orange and red and blue and purple, green rockets and golden pastilles, starry fountains raining light down on them all. The Queen rose up on her parrot and wheeled around the Revelers as they began their great parade. The wild folk of the underworld danced madly, singing a thousand songs that somehow became one, harmonizing and tying their melodies together, turning somersaults and bouncing high into the air, snapping their fingers until spells and sparks flew from them like rice at a wedding. An Ouphe juggled Pixies; Mermen spat streams of colored water in arcs over the heads of Dryads who drank it hungrily with their rough brown hands. Many folk kissed passionately, which made September try to look away politely, only to see others, an Ifrit embracing a shadow-Lamia, a Goblin courting a young Strega. Bells rang; drums thundered; fiddles sizzled through a million notes and more. September was lost in the crowd, looking up at her shadow disappearing into the night toward the crystal moon. The Revelers buffeted her; some tried to pull her into dancing or simply touch her, their bodies crackling with magic. Their masks swirled; their songs grew louder and louder until the bright cobblestones of the street shook.

And when September could no longer bear the crush of it all, she saw the wildest and most abandoned dancers stamping their feet together up on a steep rooftop: Ell and Saturday, their shadows burning with magic and an untamed, uncaring joy.

CHAPTER XI

Q
UESTING
P
HYSICKS

In Which September Hatches a Plan of Her Own, Sees a Girl About a Prince, Hears a Lecture Concerning a Most Unusual Science, and Learns What Everyone Knows

The crystal moon beamed a ghostly
VII
down onto the sleeping ramparts of Tain. Shadows slept in fountains and draped over statues of namelessly ancient Kings and Queens of the Fairyland-Below. In the Floatstone Pavilion stood a serene-looking man of green marble, holding a pair of scales in one hand, with a feather resting on one copper plate and the shadows of several hobgoblins and peris in the other. A centaur maid, her four legs tucked up underneath her, snoozed beneath the imploring alabaster gesture of a grieving young man with a lyre on his back. Balloons still floated ghostly through the streets, chasing their own exploits. The air smelled of spent fireworks, and bits of the marvelous feast dripped or slowly slid off the tables, pushed by the cool wind blowing from the twinned rivers.

September herself lay snugly in a marble basket held up by a statue of dark stone—a sly-eyed, canny lady with huge pomegranates tumbling through her thick hair. Saturday slept curled next to her; Aubergine roosted at the statue’s bare feet. A-Through-L had wrapped his body and tail about the whole business.

September woke before anyone. The whole city snored. She lay awake, looking up at the dim stars and the teetering tops of towers. Nothing had quite gone to plan. Perhaps if she hadn’t felt so sorry for her shadow, the Wanting Magic would have worked. But now … now she would have to do something else. Something slantways and sideways and upside down, like the Duke had said. September looked at Saturday as he slept, and at the great bulk of shadowy A-Through-L. Were they her friends, or Halloween’s? Her Saturday would stand between her and the world, but the shadows were strangers, really. New people with the same shapes and names. Her Saturday would never have stolen her first kiss without so much as a thank-you. Would never have turned her into a Fairy when she’d told him not to. But did she know that for certain? Some part of this Saturday must live in the other one, just as she saw flashes of her kind, gentle friend in the trickster child sleeping next to her.

September felt suddenly very secretive. The wine-colored coat approved. It closed in tight as if to say,
Yes, tell no one anything. It isn’t safe out there
. She must protect herself. There would be no one to do it for her. A plan started to prick up its ears inside her, slowly, but getting stronger.

September quietly pulled herself up out of the basket without waking the Marid. Careful not to wake anyone, she climbed up and out of the basket and scrambled down from the statue, stepping lightly on a hovering shard of frosted rosy-orange rock in the Floatstone Pavilion. Other shards floated here and there about her, making a very strange scene, as though the slabs were sleeping birds, waiting for sunrise to shake off their dreams. She knelt at the feet of the forest-green statue and in the cold morning of Tain and shook Aubergine awake.

The Night-Dodo yawned, showing pink at the back of her feathery throat. She started to squawk up at the day, but September shushed her.

“Hush! You mustn’t wake anyone else!”

Aubergine snapped her beak shut and looked up at September with large, soft eyes. Could she trust the bird any more than the others? Perhaps, because Aubergine had no one else, just like September.
I will be right back
, September thought, looking at the dear shadows of the Wyverary and the Marid.
I will come back once I know what to do, and we will all go together.

“I’m going to go see the Physickists,” she said finally. “And I want you to come. You’re one of them, after all.”

Shearcoil Tower is a perfect shadow of Groangyre, its twin in Pandemonium. Where lumpy, bulbous Groangyre stitches up its heights in cracked leather, Shearcoil is hard and alive, a long, spiraling black narwhal’s horn filled with hundreds of clean white rooms in which Extremely Pleasant and Possibly Flammable Physicks might be practiced. At the very tip-top of the horn perches a peculiar library, a peculiar librarian, and a total devotion to the pursuit of Questing Physicks. Along with Queer Physicks and Quiet Physicks, this discipline completes the Three Q’s that make up the Noblest Study. When your parents remind you to mind your P’s and Q’s, these are the Q’s they mean, and the P’s, too! Children are natural practitioners of the Queer and the Questing, for childhood is nothing but a quest through a queer country. Of course, they often have a good deal of trouble with the Quiet.

When September and Aubergine finally got to the top of the horn, out of breath and aching with the effort of a thousand and more stairs, they saw the Questing Floor stretched out before them, bright lamps lit and a little lunch boiling over the hearth in a burnished pot. Books and scrolls and folios lined the walls in every direction, towering and tapering up to the tip of the horn. Little wisps of clouds played up near the highest shelves. Ladders chased each other lazily around the rotunda. And a little creature lay on her stomach on a stack of diagrams piled up upon a desk much too big for her, littered with papers and inkwells, waggling her feet back and forth while she read. She was quite tiny, little bigger than a footstool, wearing great wide-brimmed black straw hat and a little caramel-colored monk’s habit with ash-colored beads around her neck. She clicked them together idly. Her olive-colored hair was cropped short under her hat. She had a wide brown face and dark green lips to match her hair and fingernails and zebra-like stripes on her skin, peeking out from under her habit.

“Excuse me,” said September, when the creature did not look up at them. She cleared her throat.

The small monk arched her eyebrow at them and returned to her book.

“The sign at the bottom of the stairs said to look for Questing on the one hundred and forty-fourth floor,” she tried again, determined to appear as brave as she could. That was what was called for, she was sure of it. “And Ell said that this was where the Physickists lived, and he’s never been wrong about anything yet, so I do believe you must be a Questing Physickist. My name is September. I want to go on a Quest.”

The monk looked up again. “We discourage casual inquiries. You might try the Bards down on ninety-seven—they dabble in a little of everything, and they’ll sing whatever you like for a penny. I believe they’ve put the Second Law of Dragon Dynamics to some sort of tune. Goodness knows their bassoons keep me up late enough.”

Aubergine spoke softly—so awfully softly September could hardly hear her. “But you are a Physickist? A real one? You … you went to a university, and they put a laurel on your head, and you turned into a respected scholar, and from then on they let you speak up any time you wanted?”

The little monk slapped her hands down on her papers.

“What a gentle voice you have,” she said, her gaze calculating. “I can feel it wrap me up like a woolen scarf, rubbing my cheeks and insisting that it would hardly hurt me to help a poor young girl from out of town.” She hopped down from her papers and off the lip of the desk, using her wide black hat to float a little ways before landing before them. She poked her finger up at Aubgerine. “You’re a Quiet Physickist if I ever heard one,” she accused, but she did not seem terribly upset. Indeed, when Aubergine inclined her head to admit that she was indeed, the tiny girl burst out in a brilliant smile. “Why didn’t you say so? How wonderful to meet a cousin in the Odd Arts! My name is Avogadra, and you … well, I’ll confess I haven’t seen you at any of the conferences. Are you registered with the union or are you a dabbler like those dilettantes down on ninety-seven? Forgive me, I’m just so excited. I’m the only one here, you see.”

“My name is Aubergine, and I have only just begun my Quiet Studies,” the Night-Dodo demurred.

“Nonsense, you’re
quite
advanced!” Avogadra enthused. “I nearly gave in before I caught myself. And I didn’t even hear you on the stairs!
This
one I heard clumping through the lobby, but you?
Silent
. Sublime.”

“Where are the other Physickists?” asked September, who thought she had stepped as softly as possible.

“Doing fieldwork, obviously,” Avogadra said, and hopped down from her book to finally greet them. “We are nearly all Monacielli—that’s what you call a beast who looks like me! We used to hide in the cellars of monasteries, waiting for the brothers to hurry up with the beer-brewing or the mushroom harvest. We’d upset their inkpots and build our houses out of their hymnals and tap their barrels when they had a nice chocolatey porter coming along. But if one of the brothers got lost in the catacombs or the woods beyond the abbey, or if something dreadful befell one—at sorest need, when they’d passed beyond all human aid—we’d come in the dark and show them the way out. The way home. It’s in our blood—we heard their distresses like a rung bell in our bones. We lived reasonably well, but before too long we’d learned a great deal about manuscripts and contemplation, and realized that we had got a fair sight better at it than the monks themselves! So we left. We came to the city, two by two and three by three, and Shearcoil took us in. We made our own rectory, our own cathedral up here. We kept our Complines and our Vespers. When the ink and the beer and the hymnals belong to you instead of to big folk who flap their arms ridiculously when they get upset, it’s not so much fun to spoil them as to use them well and put them away after. And no one else is quite as deft at the Third Q as we. We can’t cut out the part of ourselves that feels the ringing of the bell when our old brothers are lost or in despair. We learned to Quest by following them into all their black places.”