Inkspell (74 page)

“Oh, I can die all right,” he said. “Believe me, I have come very close. As for the Adderhead, however – yes, I have made him immortal. But not for long.”

“What do you mean by that?” The smile had long since frozen on Snapper’s coarse-featured face.

Mo was looking not at him but at the Black Prince when he answered. “I mean that at present nothing can kill the Adderhead. No sword, no knife, no disease. The book I have bound for him protects him. But the same book will be his undoing, for he will have only a few weeks to enjoy it.”

“Why’s that?” It was the boy again.

Mo lowered his voice when he replied, just as he did when he was sharing a secret with Meggie.

“Oh, it’s not particularly difficult to ensure that a book doesn’t live long, you know. Particularly not for a bookbinder. And that’s my trade, although so many people seem to think differently.

Normally, it’s not my job to kill a book – on the contrary, I’m usually called in to save the lives of books – but in this case I’m afraid I had to do it. After all, I didn’t want to be guilty of letting the Adderhead sit on his throne for all eternity, passing the time by hanging strolling players.”

“Then you
are
a wizard!” Snapper’s voice was hoarse.

“No, really, I’m not,” replied Mo. “Let me say it once again: I’m a bookbinder.”

They were staring at him again, and this time Mo wasn’t sure whether there might not be some fear mingled with the respect in their eyes.

“Off you all go now!” The Prince’s voice broke the silence. “Go and make litters for the injured.”

They obeyed, although every one of them cast a last glance at Mo before they walked away. Only the boy gave him a bashful smile, too.

As for the Black Prince, he signaled to Mo to go with him.

“A few weeks,” he repeated when they were in the gallery where he and the bear slept, away from the others. “How many exactly?”

How many? Even Mo couldn’t tell for sure. If they didn’t notice what he had done for the time being, it would all be quite quick. “Not very many,” he replied.

“And they won’t be able to save the book?”

“No.”

The Prince smiled. It was the first smile Mo had seen on his dark face. “That’s consoling news, Bluejay. It saps one’s courage to fight an immortal enemy. But you do know, don’t you, that he’ll only hunt you down all the more pitilessly when he realizes that you’ve tricked him?”

So he would, indeed. That was why Mo hadn’t told Meggie, had done what had to be done in secret, while she was asleep. He hadn’t wanted the Adderhead to see the fear in her face.

“I don’t intend to come back to this side of the forest,” he told the Prince. “Perhaps there’ll be a good hiding place for us somewhere near Ombra.”

The Prince smiled again. “I’m sure there will be,” he said and looked at Mo as intently as if he meant to see straight into his heart.
Go on, try it
, thought Mo.
Look into my heart and tell me what
you find there, because I don’t know myself anymore.
He remembered reading about the Black Prince for the first time.
What a fabulous character
, he had thought, but the man now standing before him was considerably more impressive than the image of him that the words had conjured up. Perhaps a little smaller, though. And a little sadder.

“Your wife says you’re not the man we take you for,” said the Prince. “Dustfinger said the same.

He told me that you come from the country where he spent all those years when we thought he was dead. Is it very different from here?”

Mo couldn’t help smiling. “Oh yes. I think so.”

“How? Are people happier there?”

“Perhaps.”

“Perhaps! Hmm.” The Prince bent and picked up something lying on the blanket under which he’d slept. “I’ve forgotten what your wife calls you. Dustfinger had a strange name for you: Silvertongue. But Dustfinger is dead, and to everyone else you will be the Bluejay now. Even I
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find it difficult to call you anything else, after seeing you fight in the forest. So this belongs to you here in the future. Unless you decide to go back after all . . back to the country where you came from, and where I suppose you have another name.”

Mo had never before seen the mask that the Prince was holding out to him. The leather was dark and damaged here and there, but the feathers shone brightly: white, black, yellowish brown, blue. The colors of a blue jay.

“This mask has been celebrated in many songs,” said the Black Prince. “I allowed myself to wear it for a while, and several of us have done so, too, but now it is yours.”

In silence, Mo turned the mask this way and that in his hands. For a strange moment he felt an urge to put it on, as if he had done so many times before. Oh yes, Fenoglio’s words were powerful, but words they were, nothing but words – even if they had been written for him. Any actor, surely, could choose the part he played?

“No,” he said, handing the mask back to the Prince. “Snapper is right; the Bluejay is a fantasy, an old man’s invention. Fighting, I assure you, is not my trade.”

The Prince looked at him thoughtfully, but he did not take the mask. “Keep it all the same,” he said. “It’s too dangerous for anyone to wear it now. And as for your trade – none of us here was born a robber.”

Mo said nothing to that. He just looked at his fingers. It had taken him a long time to wash off all the blood on them after the fight in the forest.

He was still standing there holding the mask, alone in the dark gallery that smelled of the long-forgotten dead, when he heard Meggie’s voice behind him.

“Mo?” She looked at his face with concern. “Where have you been? Roxane is setting out soon, and Resa wants to know if we’re going with her. What do you say?”

Yes, what did he say? Where did he want to go?
Back to my workshop
, he thought.
Back to
Elinor’s house.
Or did he?

What did Meggie want? He had only to look at her to know the answer. Of course. She wanted to stay because of the boy, but he was not the only reason. Resa wanted to stay, too, in spite of the dungeon where they had put her, in spite of all the pain and darkness. What was it about Fenoglio’s world that filled the heart with longing? Didn’t he feel it himself? Like sweet poison that worked on you only too quickly. .

“What do you say, Mo?” Meggie took his hand. How tall she had grown. And how pleadingly she looked at him!

“What do I say?” He listened as though, if he concentrated hard, he could hear the words whispering in the walls of the gallery or in the weave of the blanket under which the Black Prince slept. But all he heard was his own voice. “How would you like it if I said: Show me the fairies, Meggie? And the water-nymphs. And that illuminator in Ombra castle. Let’s find out how fine those brushes really are.”

Dangerous words. But Meggie hugged him harder than she had since she was a little girl.

Chapter 74 – Farid’s Hope

And now he was dead, his soul fled down to the Sunless Country and his body lying cold in
the cold mud, somewhere in the city’s wake.

– Philip Reeve,
Mortal Engines

When the men on guard raised the alarm for the second time, just before sunset, the Black Prince ordered everyone to climb deep down into the mine, where there was water in the narrow passages and you thought you could hear the earth breathing. But one man did not join them: Fenoglio. When the Prince gave the all clear, and Meggie climbed up again with the others, her feet wet and her heart still full of fear, Fenoglio came toward her and drew her aside.

Luckily, Mo happened to be talking to Resa and didn’t notice.

“Here you are. But I’m not guaranteeing anything,” Fenoglio whispered to her as he gave her back the notebook. “This is very likely another mistake in black and white just like the others, but I’m too tired to worry about it. Feed this damned story, feed it with new words, I’m not going to listen. I’m going to lie down and sleep. That was the last thing I will ever write in my life.”

Feed it.

Farid suggested that Meggie should read Fenoglio’s words in the place where he and Dustfinger had slept. Dustfinger’s backpack was still lying beside his blanket, and the two martens had curled up to the right and left of it. Farid crouched down between them and hugged the backpack to him as if Dustfinger’s heart were beating inside. He looked expectantly at Meggie, but she remained silent. She looked at the words and said nothing. Fenoglio’s writing swam before her eyes as if, for the first time, it did not want her to read it.

“Meggie?” Farid was still looking at her. There was such sadness in his eyes, such despair.
For
him
, she thought.
Just for him.
And she kneeled down on the blanket where Dustfinger used to sleep.

Even as she read the first few words, she sensed that Fenoglio had done his work well yet again.

She felt it like breath on her face. The letters on the page were alive, the story was alive. It wanted to take those words and grow. That was what it wanted. Had Fenoglio felt the same when he wrote them?

”
One day, when Death had taken much prey again,
” began Meggie, and it was almost as if she were reading a familiar book that she had only just laid aside, ”
Fenoglio the great poet decided to
write no more. He was tired of words and their seductive power. He had had enough of the way
they cheated and scorned him and kept silent when they should have spoken. So he called on
another, younger man, Orpheus by name – skilled in letters, even if he could not yet handle them
with the mastery of Fenoglio himself– and decided to instruct him in his art, as every master does
at some time. For a while Orpheus should play with words in his place, seduce and lie with them,
create and destroy, banish and restore – while Fenoglio waited for his weariness to pass, for his
pleasure in words to reawaken, and then he would send Orpheus back to the world from which he
had summoned him, to keep his story alive with new words never used before.
”

Meggie’s voice died away. It echoed underground as if it had a shadow. And just as silence was spreading around them, they heard footsteps.

Footsteps on the damp stone.

Chapter 75 – Alone Again

“Hope” is the thing with feathers.

– Emily Dickinson,
The Poems of Emily Dickinson

Orpheus disappeared right in front of Elinor’s eyes. She was standing only a few steps from him, holding the bottle of wine he had demanded, when he simply vanished into thin air into less than thin air, into nothing – as if he had never been there at all, as if she had only dreamed him. The bottle slipped from her hand, fell on the wooden floorboards of the library, and broke among the books that Orpheus had left open there.

The dog began to howl so horribly that Darius came racing out of the kitchen. The wardrobe-man didn’t bar his way. He was simply staring at the place where Orpheus had been standing a moment ago. His voice trembling, he had been reading from a sheet of paper lying on one of Elinor’s glass display cases right in front of him and clutching
Inkheart
to his breast, as if he could force the book to accept him at last in that way. Elinor had stopped as if turned to stone when she realized what he was trying to do for the hundredth, even the thousandth time.

Perhaps they’ll come back out of the book to replace him
, she had thought,
or at least one of them:
Meggie, Resa, Mortimer
. Each of the three names tasted so bitter on her tongue, as bitter as all that is lost. But now Orpheus had gone, and none of the three had come back. Only the damned dog refused to stop howling.

“He’s done it,” whispered Elinor. “Darius, he’s done it! He’s over there .. they’re all over there. All except for us!”

For a moment she felt infinitely sorry for herself. Here she was, Elinor Loredan, among all her books, and they wouldn’t let her in, not one of them would let her in. Closed doors enticing her, filling her heart with longing, and then letting her go no farther than the doorway. Accursed, blasted, heartless things! Full of empty promises, full of false lures, always making you hungry, never satisfying you, never!

But you once saw it quite differently, Elinor! she reminded herself, wiping the tears from her eyes. So what? Wasn’t she old enough to change her mind, to bury an old love that had betrayed her miserably? They had not let her in. All the others were between their pages now, but she wasn’t. Poor Elinor, poor, lonely Elinor! She sobbed so loudly that she had to put her hand over her mouth.

Darius cast her a sympathetic glance and hesitantly came to her side. Well, at least he was still with her, that was one good thing. And of course he could read her thoughts in her face, as always. But he couldn’t help her, either.

I want to be with them
, she thought despairingly.
They’re my family: Resa and Meggie and
Mortimer. I want to see the Wayless Wood and feel a fairy settle on my hand again, I want to meet
the Black Prince even if it means smelling his bear, I want to hear Dustfinger talking to fire even if I
still can’t stand the man! I want, I want, I want…

“Oh, Darius!” sobbed Elinor. “Why didn’t the wretched fellow take me, too?” But Darius just looked at her with his wise, owl-like eyes.

“Hey, where did he go? That bastard still owed me money!” Sugar went to the place where Orpheus had disappeared and looked all around him, as if Orpheus might be stuck among the bookshelves somewhere. “Damn it, what does he think he’s doing, just vanishing like that?” He bent down and picked up a sheet of paper.

The sheet of paper that Orpheus had been reading from! Had he taken the book with him but left behind the words that had opened the door for him? If so, then all was not lost after all. . With determination, Elinor snatched the sheet of paper from Sugar’s hand. “Give me that!” she demanded, clutching it to her breast just as Orpheus had clutched the book. The wardrobe-man’s face darkened.