The Book of Dead Days (6 page)

“What will they do to us?” he asked Willow, but he knew the answer.

“Hang us, I expect.”

“Or drown us, maybe.”

They both fell silent again. The sun climbed higher over the City and shed a little light directly into their cell. Boy and Willow wasted no time in sitting in the patch of sunlight, and at last they began to feel warm.

Boy shoved his hands deep into his pockets and his left struck something solid. He pulled out the music box. He turned it over. The only other time he’d seen one was in Kepler’s house. He collected clockwork mechanisms of all kinds, and had once shown some to Boy.

Boy daydreamed, remembering the time a year or so ago when Kepler had come to stay in their house for a week while he installed the camera obscura. It had taken Kepler the whole week to fit it into the Tower room. There was a lot of banging and sawing and swearing, until finally Kepler had thrown open the door.

“Behold!” he cried dramatically, and Valerian, who had not been allowed into his own chamber during the construction, had entered. Boy had watched the door close behind them, and many months later he was still none the wiser about what the machine actually did. As the door had closed, however, he had heard Valerian exclaim, “You, Kepler, are the greatest Doctor of Natural Philosophies who has ever lived!”

“What’s that?” asked Willow.

Boy waved the music box at her and wound its handle a couple of times before putting it back in his pocket.

“I… found it,” he said. “At the Trumpet. Listen to the music, because it may be the last we hear!”

“Oh, Boy, don’t give up. It could be worse.”

“How could it be worse?”

Willow didn’t answer, because the figure lying in the straw suddenly rolled over and vomited across the floor.

“Please get me out of here,” wailed Boy.

The door rattled and opened, and Valerian entered the room.

Before Boy could open his mouth, Valerian put his finger to his lips. Pink-plume followed him.

“Two minutes,” he barked at Valerian, and then saw the mess on the floor. “Or less, if you prefer.” He pulled a face and locked them in again.

“Valerian!” Boy cried. “How did-?”

“How did I know you were here? You don’t think I’d trust you to get it right by yourself, do you? Something this important?”

Boy wished Valerian wouldn’t talk like that, especially in front of Willow, but he was too relieved to care.

“Well?” said Valerian.

Boy said nothing. Then:

“He wouldn’t tell me anything. I-”

Valerian lurched forward toward Boy, who flinched backward. But did not hit him.

“He’s dead,” Boy cried. “Someone murdered him. The Phantom!”

“What?” roared Valerian, then seemed to remember where they were and made an effort to calm himself.

“He’s dead. He-”

“Not that! Did he tell you anything? What did he say before…?”

“He wouldn’t,” Boy stammered. “He-”

“Be quiet! So he told you nothing before he died? Kepler sent him with information for me-the name of a grave. You’re sure?”

Boy nodded, and Valerian flung his arms out wide, failing to find words bad enough for Boy.

“I do have something,” Boy said. He fished in his pocket and pulled out the music box.

“Are you trying to be funny? I need a name, not trinkets!”

“Valerian?” asked Willow.

Only now did Valerian seem to notice her presence in the cell.

“Hmm?” he said, still staring at the music box.

“He said two minutes. Are you going to get us out of here?”

Boy cringed. This was not a good way to go about getting anything from his master. In fact, there was no good way to get anything from him, but Willow didn’t know that.

Valerian dragged his eyes away from the tiny mechanical object and shoved it in his pocket.

“I may as well leave you here,” he snarled. “You are no use to me.”

“Please, Valerian,” Boy begged. “It wasn’t my fault he wouldn’t talk to me.”

Valerian considered them both.

“All right then,” he said. “I suppose so.”

He looked at Boy.

“Well, Boy, it’s time you learnt the secret of the Fairyland Vanishing Illusion.”

“But that’s just a trick,” said Boy.

“Ah!” said Valerian. “No. In fact, the secret of the Fairyland Vanishing Illusion is that it is not an illusion at all.”

Boy stared at him. Willow stared at Boy.

Keys rattled in the lock again.

“Quick!” commanded Valerian. “Hold close to me.”

He grabbed them both and pressed them to his side.

Boy heard him muttering in some unknown language, and saw him pull something from one of his many pockets.

The door opened and Pink-plume stood in the doorway.

Valerian’s arm swung through the air, throwing something.

“Ho!” he cried. “Ho! And away to fairyland!”

There was a huge rush of smoke and Boy lost all sense of where he was. He felt himself lurch upward for a moment, as if flying.

Then the smoke began to clear.

“Run!” cried Valerian.

Boy ran, pulled along by his master. Valerian held Willow’s hand too.

They were in a stone corridor, somewhere in the Citadel. In a few seconds they burst out onto a roof high above the City.

“Come on!” Valerian hurtled to the edge, pulling them off after him.

“No!” screamed Boy as they flew into the air.

They fell for what seemed like ages-a heartbeat and a half-to hit the foul and freezing water of the river.

They surfaced, spluttering and coughing, quite near the bank.

“Come on!” Valerian clambered out of the water by a small wooden jetty to which ferryboats were moored. “Time we were gone. Besides,” he added, “I hate daylight.”

Rolling them both into a ferry, he climbed after them and pulled a dirty piece of canvas across them all. He set them adrift and they floated away downstream in the brisk current, heading for home.

“Are they following us?” Willow finally managed to splutter.

“No! They won’t even know we’re gone until the fool with the pink feather wakes up.”

Boy shook his head. He was used to not knowing what was going on, but this was worse than usual. “Valerian, was that really magic?”

Boy had never believed that Valerian could actually do magic. Real magic. He was not sure he had changed his mind.

“Well, I got you out of the Citadel, didn’t I? It must take real magic to do a thing like that, mustn’t it?”

Boy lay shivering under the canvas. If it was magic, couldn’t Valerian have got them straight home without having to swim in the freezing river?

He was soaked with stinking river water. At least he was back in a nice small dark space. He could cope with that. He decided to let the subject of magic drop. Let Valerian play his games. Boy had other things on his mind, like smoke. As they’d burst from the cell, there had been an awful lot of smoke. Purple smoke. It was the second time in a few hours that Boy had seen purple smoke, and the first time had left Green with his throat cut and his neck broken.

What had Valerian said?

Had Valerian been there all along, at the Trumpet? And Green-had Valerian seen to him too? No, he had wanted the precious information from Green. He wouldn’t have killed him.

And Korp? Korp must have been killed about the same time that Green was, but the Phantom couldn’t have been responsible for both. Unless… unless the Phantom was more powerful than any magician he’d ever heard of.

The boat drifted downriver, back toward the Old Quarter, toward Valerian’s magnificent crumbling mansion.

By the time they made it back to the Yellow House, it was nearly midday.

Valerian slammed the door behind them.

Immediately he took the music box out of his pocket and glared at it.

“Kepler, where are you?” he said to himself. “Where are you when I need you?”

Then he looked at Boy and Willow.

“Go and get cleaned up, Boy,” he said. “I seem to say that a lot at the moment, don’t I?”

“What are you doing here, girl?” he asked Willow. “You can get cleaned up too, and then leave.”

Valerian started up the stairs. “I think I had better get changed myself.”

Boy looked at Willow, then called after Valerian, “But where can she go? The theater will probably have to shut. Korp’s dead.”

“I know,” Valerian called back, “but this is not a doss-house.”

And he disappeared out of sight.

By the time Boy had washed his smelly clothes from the night before, and Willow’s, and scrubbed his coat and boots again, it was getting dark.

Boy made a fire in the kitchen to dry their wet things. They sat in front of it wrapped in blankets from Boy’s bed, and shivered.

All afternoon they had been listening to Valerian’s curses and threats come floating down through the house.

“You live here?” asked Willow, looking around her in wonder. The kitchen alone was vast, with unused implements and pots and pans hanging everywhere. It must once have fed at least a dozen people every single day. “Just you and him in this huge house?”

Boy nodded.

“But what are you? His slave?”

“No!” he said fiercely.

“Then he pays you?”

He hesitated. “No, but-”

“So you
are
his slave!”

“I am his famulus,” Boy cried.

Willow stopped. “His what?”

“Famulus,” said Boy. “His famulus. It means I attend him in his studies and investigations.”

“Is that what he told you?”

Boy said nothing.

“Isn’t there anyone else?” Willow pressed. “Who does the cooking? The cleaning?”

“I cook when he tells me to. No one does any cleaning.”

“But who taught you to wash clothes? To make fires? Someone must have shown you.”

“He teaches me things, but not everyday things. I worked those out for myself.”

“And before you came here? Who are your parents?”

“I don’t have any.”

“Neither do I, anymore.”

“What happened to them?” he asked, wondering as he did so why he was bothering.

“They were killed,” Willow said. “I was four.”

Boy was about to ask how they were killed, but Willow carried on, “My aunt put me in the orphanage.”

“That was nice of her.”

“She wasn’t really my aunt. She was some old relative. I’m not sure what, exactly. But she couldn’t look after me, and she died not long after that. I lived in an orphanage near the Palace walls until I got a job with the Liverymen. I was eleven then, four years ago. How old are you?”

“I don’t know,” Boy said.

Willow looked at him, cocking her head. She waited for some kind of explanation. Finally she went on with her own story.

“Then I came to the theater, but you know that,” she said. She looked hard at Boy. “What about you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Your
parents,
Boy, your parents.”

“I said, I haven’t got any.”

“I know that,” Willow said, “but who
were
they?”

Boy shrugged. He knew she was only interested, but really, he wished she’d shut up.

“Look, I don’t know. Since I can remember I just lived in the streets, freezing and starving in the winter, all right more or less in the summer. That’s all there’s ever been. Then he found me.”

“He treats you like rubbish,” she said.

“At least I have a room and food and something to do.”

“That’s not a room,” said Willow, remembering the boxlike space at the end of the tunnel where Boy had fetched the blankets.

“So who taught you to speak, then?” she asked.

Boy felt the clothes.

“They’re dry, more or less,” he said, and Willow gave up.

They turned their backs to each other and dressed quickly. The clothes were warm from the fire and Boy began to feel better than he had for what seemed like a very long time.

“I’m hungry,” said Willow. “Starving.”

“Let’s see if there’s some food here,” Boy said, but not very hopefully.

He was right to be pessimistic. He found some dried biscuits, and they ate them slowly.

“Boy,” said Willow suddenly, “what about me?”

“You’ll have to go back to the singer,” he said. “You’re not short of food there, at least.”

“But I can’t!” Willow cried. “I’m a wanted criminal! So are you, come to that.”

He stared at the fire. “I know,” he said, “I know. Look, I’ll try and talk to Valerian again and see if you can stay. Then maybe you’ll be safe from the Watch.”

“Would you?” asked Willow. “Would you really?”

Boy looked at the hope in her face and felt himself shiver. He wasn’t sure it was a good idea, for lots of reasons. And wasn’t it like admitting she was guilty if she didn’t return to Madame Beauchance? But something in him wanted her to stay.

“Look,” he said, “I’ll try. That’s all.”

“Why do you care?”

Boy hesitated. He didn’t know that he did.

He didn’t answer.

They sat and watched the fire for a while, warming themselves while it lasted. Boy felt exhausted, as much by Willow’s questions as anything. For the first time in years all sorts of thoughts crowded into his head. He pushed them away. He didn’t need to know who his parents were. It wasn’t important, no matter what Willow thought. Boy’s thoughts became hazier.

Before they knew it, they had fallen asleep on each other’s shoulders, and for a short time their weary bodies rested.

Darkness had fallen.

Boy and Willow woke up within moments of each other. They both got to their feet, avoiding each other’s eyes.