The White Fox (18 page)

They had been here for ten minutes, during which time Lucy, seated on the bed, had endured a lecture from Adâ about how to properly address a monarch. There was so far no evidence that any of it had been absorbed.

“Right then,” Adâ finished, adjusting how she was sitting, “there are a few things you should know before you really screw things up. It won’t have escaped your notice that you haven’t only come across humans in the last few days. I myself”—she scratched one of her pointed ears surreptitiously—”am an example of this. It probably hasn’t escaped your notice, either, that the people here are a little …
different
than what you’re used to.”

“Different how?” Lucy asked, being deliberately difficult.

Adâ made a “short” gesture.

Lucy raised her eyebrows.

Adâ sighed. “Shorter,” she said quietly.

“Sorry?” Lucy replied loudly.

Adâ clipped her around the head. “These people are dwarves. Ruth said Vincent explained this to you already!”

Jack muttered something about the patchiness of the explanation.

Adâ fixed him with a look that would have frozen open flames. “They are
dwarves—
an entirely different race to you. And, quite obviously, this is
not
your home world, and there are no humans here. It would not be wise to draw attention to any differences between them and yourselves. If you do, the king may be brought under pressure to answer some difficult questions about where you’re from, and we will be out of here more quickly than an egg poacher from a cockatrice nest, which,” she said as Jack opened his mouth, “is
extremely
fast.”

“What about you, then?” Jack asked.

Adâ sniffed. “I am an elf,” she said curtly but offered no further comment.

“So we’re
not
back in time?” Jack asked after a moment.

Adâ looked at him as if he had just asked whether the Pope was a Christian. “No, we’re not
back in time
. That’s impossible.”

“So this really
is
a different world,” Lucy murmured to no one in particular.

“Yes, and that’s something else. Up until now, you have only had the company of more
knowledgeable
people. The vast majority of this world’s people are as ignorant as you were only days ago about lands beyond their own boundaries. King Thorin is an Apollonian, as are, obviously, the crew of
The Golden Turtle
. There are precious few others who are aware of worlds beyond their own. It is of
paramount
importance that you keep what you know secret.”

“Why?”

“Has anyone mentioned Isaac to you?”

Both shook their heads.

“He was originally from your world. He founded the Apollonians about a quarter of a century ago; he was the first of us to travel between worlds. Incidentally, he was also the brother of Ruth’s adoptive father, Ishmael. He built an almanac of laws, observations he made about the nature of interworld travel. One major point is that each world is self-contained within its own time frame. This world is at a different stage of development to yours, and many more will be different still. This one happens to be in the equivalent of your past. Isaac placed it at roughly the ninth or tenth century. A crossover of time periods could have cataclysmic consequences beyond our understanding. For example, if we allowed guns from your time into this world, things would escalate out of our control. This means you must guard your origins vigilantly. For now, you will be Jack and Lucy Sharif, my nephew and niece.”

“But we look nothing like you,” Lucy exclaimed, half-indignant, half-relieved.

Jack looked again at Adâ. She
was
human shaped, remarkably so, he supposed, considering life could have evolved completely differently on her world. She was, however, at least six inches taller than Lucy, very slender—almost pinched looking—with pointed ears, darker skin, and a different shape to her face and features. It was quite a big difference.

“That’s why we need this,” Adâ said, producing from her cloak something that looked like a metal egg. It was dusty brown, held in the same bronzy clasps as their rings. She held it out to Jack and Lucy, who leaned back instinctively, unsure of what it was going to do.

Adâ whispered a single syllable, which neither Jack nor Lucy could make any sense of. The egg glowed bright luminous green and floated out of her hand. It hung in the air for a second, then spun around the room like a high-tech toy, humming slightly. When it had made two full circuits of both Lucy and Jack, it dropped into Adâ’s hand and dulled again.

Jack looked at Lucy and got a slight shock. The girl in front of him was still recognizably Lucy: she was still hazel eyed and reddish-brown haired, but she was different. Her ears were elongated and pointed at the end, just like Adâ’s. She was taller and slightly slimmer, and her face seemed to have become thinner. Her skin was a lot darker, and her head was more circularly shaped. She now definitely resembled an elf, if not a blood relative of Adâ’s.

He stood up and studied himself in the mirror. Exactly the same change had happened to him, but whereas Lucy’s slightly curvier figure looked squashed, he thought the look rather suited him. He stepped in front of the mirror, blocking Lucy’s view to it. Her shock, he reasoned, wouldn’t do any of them any good.

“How the fu—”

“Bedtime,” Adâ said loudly over him. “There are new clothes in your rooms. Good night.” She left the room, leaving the door open behind her.

“Night,” Jack called as she turned the corner. He waited for the slam of her door and then began talking. “So what do you think of this place?”

“I’m not sure,” she said, standing up to lean on the windowsill. “It’s just all so … alien. We’re on a different
planet
… Does that mean these are aliens? It’s not how I imagined them at all …” She stared out at the darkened sky.

Jack waited for her to say something more. This was the first chance that they’d had to talk since
The Golden Turtle
. Realistically, the first time they would have talked since before all this started, and now she didn’t seem to want to. “And the king?”

“Bastard. He’s just the same as Adâ. We’re nothing more than packages to them.”

“I thought he seemed nice. He did say we’d talk about it tomorrow …”

“Are you siding with them?” She looked at him sharply.

“No, of course not. It’s just … it could have been a lot worse, couldn’t it? The Cult could have got you …” Immediately he regretted saying it.

Lucy stared blankly out the window, not replying.

With a sudden, internal jolt, the full magnitude of what had happened to Alex hit him again. He could be being tortured. He could be dead, for all they knew, standing here in relative comfort in a warm, dry room … He felt slightly sick at the thought.

“I’m sure Alex is okay,” he said, though it didn’t sound convincing, even to him.

She didn’t reply but continued to stare out the window.

Jack decided to give her some space. On his way out he thought he heard a muffled sob, but he didn’t go back in. He got the impression he would be co-opted as the nearest and easiest target for blame.

Jack went to his room. It was exactly the same as Lucy’s but flipped so that the bathroom was on the right side. On the bed were a pile of sandy gold and blue tunics; wide, Arabian-like trousers; a pair of rough leather boots; and a belt. Looking down at his pirate gear, he realized that he hadn’t changed his clothes in four days. Shocked and slightly disgusted, he stripped off his top layer and headed into the bathroom.

The room was just as rocky as the previous one, but the entire floor was a basin-like bath full of steaming water. A pummelled crack in the center of the bath spurted the water upwards like a Jacuzzi or a hot spring, and chutes around the edge filtered some out again when it got too full.

Jack removed the last of his clothes and sunk into the water. It was luxuriously warm and a strong contrast to freezing seawater. Salt and dirt dislodged from his skin and hair and were sucked away down the chutes. He didn’t feel any taller, but he definitely was, and his new body, however it had come about, was quite a bit more muscular than his last.

He stepped out of the bathroom, scratching his wet hair, and froze.

There were several people Jack could think of whom he would gladly be discovered half-naked by, particularly with this body, but a glowing, vocally enabled fox wasn’t one of them. It took a minute for his brain to kick into gear.

“Don’t move,” he said through gritted teeth, holding his towel up whilst bending down to grab his new clothes. “You’ve got a lot of questions to answer.”

The fox said nothing, just inclined his head.

A moment later, Jack reemerged from the bathroom to find the creature still on his bed. Keeping his distance, he sat on the chair slowly. The new clothes were far more comfortable than Quentin’s nautical amalgamation had been.

“So what do you want to know?”
The creature sounded strangely like a well-spoken Englishman, with an impeccable BBC accent.

“Everything! What are you? Are you even a fox? How can you talk? Why is the Cult of Dionysus after us? Where’s Alex?” After the minimalist explanations from Vince and Adâ, he was keeping his expectations low for any answer to these.

“I’ll try my best.”
The fox stretched out, and Jack thought he saw him smile slightly.
“Firstly, I am—”
He sounded as if he wanted to carry on but looked as if he were choking on something.
“Damn this restricting form. As much as I would like to tell you
who
I am, I can’t say. I can tell you
what
I am, though. I think so, anyway.”

“That wasn’t a good start. So
what
are you?”

“Loosely speaking, an ancient elemental force, bound in corporeal form.”

Jack raised his eyebrows in annoyance, but then, he thought, talking to a glowing animal that could understand and talk back, he really wasn’t in a position to be making judgements about what was real or not.

“It’s not as grand as it sounds. I’m not like other spirits. You have to walk around looking like a miniature snowstorm, and the hair balls are horrendous.”

“I thought only cats got hair balls.”

“I thought so too, but something obviously went wrong in the transfer. It’s really not pleasant. Be thankful you mortals invented baths.”

“Right … Who put you in that body? Did you choose to be a fox?”

“Ah, now that would be telling,”
replied the fox slyly.

Jack got the distinct impression that the fox was enjoying himself.

“I believe your next question was why the Cult is after you. Actually, they weren’t. They tracked down what they were looking for—a Door to Darkness—and it just so happened that it was in your town. They needed Alex’s Shard, and so they targeted your friend Lucy on the expectation that he’d come running. They were right. Unfortunately, you saw too much, and you needed silencing. And your escape the first time has only made that a more urgent priority for them. Then there’s the matter of
your
Shard, though I doubt they know about that … yet.”

Somehow, Jack thought, this wasn’t much better. Being in the wrong place at the wrong time was just as bad as being actively searched out. He pulled out the Shard from under his tunic and let it hang in the lamplight. He’d almost forgotten about it on the journey.

“It’s not really mine, though, is it?” he asked, pondering its gleaming surface. “I mean, you gave it to me. I don’t own it.”

“Of course you do,”
the fox replied, hopping off the bed and coming to sit in front of him.
“Trust me. It would be a grave mistake to part with. Keep it on you at all times.”

Jack shrugged and replaced it under his top. It hadn’t proven itself to be of any particular significance yet, other than that it was a gift from a glowing animal spirit and that Alex had one just like it. “What about Alex? Did you give him his too?”

“No, I didn’t, but I believe it was an allied agent who did. I’m afraid I don’t know what happened to Mr. Steele,”
the fox said, and for the first time he sounded worried.
“I’m sorry,”
he added in response to the morose look on Jack’s face.

“I’d—
we’d
waited for him for over a year … and he’d only just come back …”

There was silence, in which the fox didn’t move but just stared at him.

“I’m tired,” Jack said finally. He took off his top and got into bed, pulling the covers up over him. It was extremely comfortable—some kind of stuffed mattress with about five sheets piled on top. He closed his eyes and left himself open for sleep to take him. The candles, flickering in the slight brush from the disturbed sheets, were still lit.

“Do you think you could turn those off?” he said to the fox, yawning. Before he had even realized that he had just asked an animal to put out the lights, the flames were extinguished. The weaving patterns of smoke faded away into the now dark room.

Well, it would have been dark, except that the fox was still glowing with the brightness of a firefly on ecstasy.

“Can’t you put your light out?”

“That’s one thing I can do.”
A moment later the light faded into complete darkness.
“You know, Jack, I like you. I was worried you’d be more pompous, just like everyone else involved in this mess of a war, but you’re not.”
The irony that this was said in what amounted to an upper-middle-class southern English accent did not escape Jack.

“You really think it’s going to come to war?”

“I know historians don’t like the word
inevitable,
but this pretty much is. And it doesn’t look like we’re well prepared. I’ve seen many wars, and this one looks like it’s going to be particularly nasty. And yet, statesmen who should be protecting their lands just sit in council rooms splitting grungles over the minutiae of fiscal policy, whilst their worlds fall apart around them.”

“The Apollonians have been around for hundreds of years?” Jack asked sleepily, the dates not adding up even in his state of sliding consciousness.