Inkspell (45 page)

“Is he dead?” she whispered.

“You can see he is,” said her brother.

“Will the White Women come to fetch him now?”

Fenoglio shook his head. “No, he’s going to them of his own accord,” he answered quietly.

“You can see that. He’s gone already. But they’ll welcome him to their White Castle. It’s built of bones but very beautiful. There’s a courtyard in that castle, full of fragrant flowers, with a tightrope made of moonlight stretched across it just for CloudDancer… ” The words came easily: beautiful, comforting words, but were they really true? Fenoglio didn’t know. He had never taken any interest in what came after death, either in this world or the other one.

Probably just silence, silence without a single word of comfort.

Minerva came stumbling back from the alley, a cut on her forehead. The physician who lived on the corner was with her, and two other women, their faces pale with fear. Despina ran to her mother, but Ivo stayed beside Fenoglio.

“No one would come.” Minerva sobbed as she fell to her knees beside the dead man. “They were all afraid. Every one of them!”

“CloudDancer,” murmured the physician. Bone-knitter, he was often called, Stonecutter, Piss-Prophet, and sometimes, when he had lost a patient, Angel of Death. “Only a week ago he was asking if I knew anything that would do the pain in his knee good.”

Fenoglio remembered seeing the physician with the Black Prince. Should he tell him what CloudDancer had said about the Secret Camp? Could he trust him? No, it was better to trust no one.

Nothing and no one. The Adderhead had many spies. Fenoglio straightened up. Never before had he felt so old, so very old that it seemed as if he couldn’t survive another single day. The mill that Meggie had mentioned in her letter, where the devil was it? The name had sounded familiar…

Well, of course it did; he himself had described it in one of the last chapters of Inkheart. The miller was no friend to the Adderhead, even though his mill stood near the Castle of Night, in a dark valley south of the Way less Wood.

“Minerva,” he asked, “how long does it take a mounted man to get from here to the Castle of Night?”

“Two days for sure, if he’s not going to ruin his horse,” replied Minerva quietly.

Two days, if not less, before Basta found out what was in Meggie’s letter. If he rode to the Castle of Night with it, that was.
But he’s sure to do that
, thought Fenoglio.
Basta can’t read, so he will
take the letter to Mortola, and the Magpie is sure to be at the Castle of Night. Yes, there were
probably two days to go before Mortola would read what Meggie had said and send Basta to the
mill. Where Meggie might already be waiting…
Fenoglio sighed. Two days. Perhaps that would be
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enough to get a warning to her, but not to write the words she hoped he would send – words to save her parents.

Write something, Fenoglio. Write ..

As if it were so simple! Meggie, Cosimo, they all wanted words from him. It was easy for them to talk. You needed time to find the right words, and enough time was exactly what he didn’t have!

“Minerva, tell Rosenquartz I have to go to the castle,” said Fenoglio. Suddenly, he felt dreadfully tired. “Tell him I’ll fetch him later.”

Minerva stroked Despina’s hair – the girl was sobbing into her skirt – and nodded. “Yes, you go to the castle!” she said huskily. “Go and tell Cosimo to send soldiers after those murderers. By God, I’ll be in the front row to watch them hang!”

“Hang? What are you talking about?” The physician ran a hand through his sparse hair and looked sadly down at the dead man. “CloudDancer was one of the strolling players. No one gets hanged for stabbing a strolling player. There’s a harsher penalty for killing a hare in the forest.”

Ivo looked incredulously at Fenoglio. “Will they really not punish them?”

What was he to tell the boy? No, it was a fact. No one would punish them. Perhaps the Black Prince might someday, or the man who had taken to wearing the Bluejay’s mask, but Cosimo wouldn’t send a single soldier after Basta. The Motley Folk were all outlaws, in Lombrica and Argenta alike. Subject to none, protected by none.
But Cosimo will give me a horseman if ask him
, thought Fenoglio,
a fast horseman who can warn Meggie of Basta. “Write something, Fenoglio.

Save them! Write something that will set them all free and kill the Adderhead.. .
“Yes, by God, he would. He’d write rousing songs for Cosimo and powerful words for Meggie. And then her voice could help this story to find a good ending at last.

Chapter 40 – No Hope

The mustard-pot got up and walked over to his plate on thin silver legs that waddled like
the owl’s… “Oh, I love the mustard-pot!” cried the Wart. “Wherever did you get it?”

– T. H. White,
The Sword in the Stone

Luckily, Darius was a good cook, or Orpheus would probably have locked up Elinor in the cellar again after the very first meal and read himself food to eat out of her books. Thanks to Darius’s cooking, however, they were able to spend time upstairs more often – although under the watchful eye of Sugar – for Orpheus liked his food, and plenty of it, and he enjoyed what Darius cooked.

Fearing that otherwise Orpheus might let only Darius upstairs, they pretended that Elinor had concocted all those delicacies with their appetizing aromas and Darius was just her assistant, tirelessly chopping, stirring, and tasting; but as soon as Sugar, getting bored, left the kitchen to stare at the bookshelves, Darius took over the wooden spoon and Elinor the chopping not that she was much better at chopping than cooking.

Now and then some bewildered figure, looking around as if lost, stumbled into the kitchen.

Sometimes the visitor was human, sometimes furry or feathered, once it was even a talking mustard-pot. Elinor could usually work out, from the appearance of each one, which of her poor books Orpheus had in his pale hands at that moment. Tiny men with old-fashioned hairstyles were presumably from Gulliver’s Travels. The mustard-pot was very probably from Merlin’s cottage, and the enchanting and extremely confused faun who tripped in one lunchtime on delicate goat’s hooves must have come from Narnia.

Naturally, Elinor wondered anxiously if all these creatures were in her library when they didn’t happen to be standing glassy-eyed in the kitchen, and finally she asked Darius to go and find out, on the pretext of asking what Orpheus wanted to eat. He came back with the reassuring news that her Holy of Holies was still in dreadful disorder, but apart from Orpheus, his horrible dog, and a rather pale gentleman who looked to Darius suspiciously like the Canterville Ghost, no one was pawing, soiling, sniffing, or otherwise damaging Elinor’s books.

“Thank God!” she sighed, relieved. “He obviously makes them all disappear again. I must say that appalling man really does know his trade. And it looks as if he can read them out of a book by now without making someone else disappear into it!”

“No doubt about that,” remarked Darius – and Elinor thought she heard a trace of envy in his gentle voice.

“He’s a monster all the same,” she said, in a clumsy attempt to console him. “It’s just a pity this house is so well stocked with provisions, or he’d have had to send the wardrobe-man shopping, and then he’d be alone facing the two of us.”

As it was, however, days passed by, and there was nothing they could do about either their own imprisonment or the fact that Mortimer and Resa were probably in deadly danger. Elinor tried not even to think of Meggie. And Orpheus, the one person who could obviously have put everything right with such ease, sat in her library like a pale, fat spider, playing with her books and the characters who populated them, as if they were toys to be taken out and put away again.

“How much longer is he planning to go on like this, I ask myself?” she said for about the hundredth time as Darius was putting rice in a serving dish – rice cooked just long enough, of course, so that it was soft but the grains were all separate. “Is he planning to keep us cooking and cleaning for him as unpaid servants for the rest of his life, while he amuses himself with my poor books?
In my house?
”

Darius did not reply. Instead, and without a word, he piled food onto four plates – this was a meal that certainly wasn’t going to send Orpheus out of the house.

“Darius!” whispered Elinor, putting a hand on his thin shoulder. “Won’t you just have a try? I know he always keeps the book close to him, but perhaps we can get our hands on it somehow.

You could put something in his food. . ”

“He gets Sugar to taste everything he’s going to eat.”

“Yes, I know. Right, so we must try something else, anything, and then you can read us into the book! If this repulsive creature won’t bring them out for us, then we’ll simply go after them!”

But Darius shook his head, as he had done every time Elinor had suggested the same thing, although in slightly different words. “I can’t do it, Elinor!” he whispered, and his glasses clouded over, whether with the steam of cooking or tears rising to his eyes she thought it better not to inquire. “I’ve never read anyone into a book, only out of it, and you know what happened then.”

“Oh, all right, then read someone here, someone strong and heroic who’ll chase those two out of my house! Who cares if his nose has been flattened or he’s lost his voice like Resa, just so long as he has plenty of muscles!”

As if on cue, Sugar put his head around the door. Elinor was constantly amazed to see that it was not much wider than his neck. “Orpheus wants to know where dinner is.”

“Just ready,” replied Darius, handing him one of the steaming plates. “Rice again?” growled Sugar.

“Yes, sorry about that,” said Darius, as he pushed past him with Orpheus’s plate.

“And you see about the dessert!” Sugar ordered Elinor as she was about to put the first forkful into her own mouth.

No, this just couldn’t go on. Acting the kitchen maid in her own house, with a horrible man in her library throwing her books on the floor, treating them like boxes of chocolates, nibbling something from one book here, another there.

There must be a way to do it
, she thought, spooning walnut ice cream into two dishes with a gloomy expression on her face.
There must. There must.
Why couldn’t her stupid brain work it out?

Chapter 41 – The Captives

“Then you don’t think he’s dead, then?”

He put on his hat. “Now I may be wrong, of course, but I think he’s very alive. Shows all the
symptoms of it. Go have a look at him, and when I come back we’ll get together and
decide.”

– Harper Lee,
To Kill a Mockingbird

Night had fallen long ago when Meggie and Farid set out to follow Dustfinger. Go south, keep going south, Cloud Dancer had told them, but how did you know you were going south when there was no sun to show you the way, no stars shining through the black leaves? The darkness seemed to have devoured everything: the trees, even the ground before their feet. Moths fluttered into their faces, attracted by the fire that Farid was nursing in his fingers like a little animal. The trees seemed to have eyes and hands, and the wind carried voices to their ears, soft voices whispering words to Meggie that she didn’t understand. On any other night a point would probably have come when she just stopped or ran back to where CloudDancer and Nettle might still be sitting by the fire; but tonight she knew only that she must find Dustfinger and her parents, for neither night nor the forest could hold any terrors for her greater than the fear that had taken root in her heart when she saw Mo’s blood on the straw.

At first, and with the fire to help him, Farid kept finding traces: a print left by one of Dustfinger’s boots, a broken twig, a marten’s trail. . but the time came when he stood there at a loss, not sure which way to go. Tree grew beside tree in the pale moonlight whichever way you looked, so close together that you couldn’t make out any path between their trunks, and Meggie saw eyes: eyes above her, behind her, beside her . . hungry eyes, angry eyes, so many of them that she wished the moon wouldn’t shine so brightly through the leaves.

“Farid!” she whispered. “Let’s climb a tree and wait for sunrise. We’ll never find Dustfinger’s trail again if we just go on like this.”

“My own opinion exactly!” Dustfinger appeared among the trees without a sound, as if he had been standing there for some time already. “I’ve been able to hear you plowing through the forest behind me like a herd of wild boar for the last hour,” he said, as Jink pushed past his legs.

“This is the Way less Wood, and not the safest part of it, either. You can think yourselves lucky I managed to convince the elves in the ash trees that you weren’t breaking their branches just for fun. And how about the Night-Mares? Do you think they don’t pick up your scent? If I hadn’t sent them packing you’d probably be lying stiff as dead wood among the trees by now, caught in bad dreams like two flies in a spider’s web.”

“Night-Mares?” whispered Farid, as the sparks at his fingertips went out. Night-Mares. Meggie came closer to him. She was remembering a story that Resa had told her. What a good thing it hadn’t come into her mind earlier…

“Yes, did I never tell you about them?” Jink ran to Dustfinger as he walked toward them and greeted Gwin with a delighted chatter. “They may not eat you alive like those desert ghosts you kept telling me about, but they’re not exactly friendly, either.”

“I’m not going back,” said Meggie, looking at him resolutely. “Whatever you say I’m not going
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back.”

Dustfinger looked at her. “No, I know,” he said. “Your mother all over.” That was all.

All night they followed the broad track left by the men-at-arms as they had marched through the forest – all night and the following day. Dustfinger let them stop for a brief rest only when he saw that Meggie was staggering with exhaustion. When the sun was once again so low in the sky that it touched the treetops they reached the crest of a hill, and Meggie saw the dark ribbon of a road running through the green of the forest down below. A collection of buildings stood beside it: a long, low house, with stables around a yard.