something like packing foam.
The zinging noises were getting closer. Arthur didn’t know what was making them, and he had no intention of hanging around to find out. The only question was whether the Fifth Key would work if the Improbable Stair had dumped him off somewhere back in time, as well as into the Secondary Realms. If he couldn’t use the mirror, he’d have to use the Stair, and that meant getting back on to it as quickly as possible. Theoretically, as he had two Keys, he could enter the Improbable Stair pretty much anywhere, but he knew in practice it was bound to be more difficult, and there was a very good chance that his next trip on the Stair would take him somewhere worse than this.
Quickly, he put the quill pen inside his silver bag, along with his yellow elephant and the medallion he’d been given by the Mariner. Then he replaced the bag safely inside the pouch of his utility belt. He kept the Sorcerous Supernumerary’s large coat on, over the top of his coveralls. Even though the yellow mud looked like it was boiling, it felt cold – and if Arthur felt it, that meant it was very cold indeed.
This was confirmed by his breath, which wasn’t just fogging out, it was freezing in the air. In only a few minutes, he developed a long, thin beard of ice crystals that sparkled from his chin down to his chest. The sunlight, though very bright, was more red than yellow, and he could feel no noticeable heat from it on his face or hands.
Wherever he was, it wasn’t Earth, and Arthur suspected it wasn’t somewhere a normal human could survive for a second. He was thankful that he could, but it also sent a pang through him, another reminder of what he had become and what he no longer was.
He raised the mirror and was about to visualise Sir Thursday’s chamber when he glimpsed a reflection from behind him. He spun round just as something jumped down from above the trench. It was a flash of movement and it took a moment for Arthur to process that at its heart was a seven-foot-tall armoured stick insect, holding a tube in its first lot of spiked forearms and pointing it at Arthur. Before he could react, he heard the squealing noise up close for the first time and felt a savage pain as golden blood suddenly boiled out of a hole that went straight through the bicep of his left arm.
Arthur turned the mirror and directed his will. The Fifth Key caught the red sunlight, gathered it up and concentrated it a millionfold before projecting it at Arthur’s enemy in a tightly focused beam.
The insect was cut cleanly in two. But the top half continued to scrabble towards Arthur, and the forearms tried to aim the tube again. Arthur, furious and in pain, directed his anger through the mirror. This time the Fifth Key conjured up a roaring column of fire that stretched from the ground up into the stratosphere and completely incinerated everything in the trench in front of Arthur for at least a hundred yards.
As the fiery column slowly sank back to the ground, Arthur spun around again, checking behind him. He listened for the squealing noises and, though he couldn’t hear them, he heard something else: a clicking noise, getting louder and closer. Arthur knew what it was – the sound the insect soldier’s limbs had made when it had moved, but magnified a thousand times.
He jumped up on the trench’s firing step and looked out on to the yellow mud no-man’s-land of this alien war. Thousands of stick-insect soldiers were marching towards him, all perfectly in step, all holding those squealing tubes.
I could kill them all from here, thought Arthur. He felt a feral grin begin to spread across his face, before he pushed it away. He had the power, it was true, but he knew he didn’t have the right. They weren’t even really enemies; they knew nothing of the struggles in the House. They might look like giant stick insects, but obviously they were sentient beings, as technologically advanced as humans, perhaps even more so.
So what? thought Arthur. I’m no longer human. I am Lord Arthur, Rightful Heir to the Architect. I could kill ten thousand humans as easily as ten thousand alien insects.
He began to raise the mirror, visualising an even bigger, more awesome column of fire, one that stretched from horizon to horizon, saving only him from the inferno.
“No,” whispered Arthur. He forced his self-righteous pride and anger back. “I am me…I’m not Lord Arthur and this is wrong. All I have to do is leave.”
He swung the mirror round and looked into it, trying to think of Sir Thursday’s chamber and not all the destructive things he could do to anyone or anything that opposed him.
But he couldn’t focus – it was all he could do to keep his rage in check. He really wanted to destroy the insect soldiers, and every time he almost had a mental picture of Thursday’s room, it was replaced by images of fire and destruction.
As Arthur struggled with his thoughts, the mirror remained constant. He saw only his reflection, the now all-too-perfect face, so handsome that even a beard of frost could not lessen his unearthly beauty.
Arthur groaned and put the mirror back in his pouch. The horde of insect warriors was approaching at a steady pace and had neither slowed nor speeded its advance. The forward ranks hadn’t aimed their weapons either, but he suspected he was probably in range. Arthur looked at the hole in his arm. It was neatly cauterised, but he could see right through from one side to the other. Only his sorcerously altered body allowed him to cope with such a wound. It felt about as painful as a paper cut to him now.
But he knew he could not survive a hundred – or a thousand – such wounds. He also knew that the rage he was barely keeping inside him would come out long before then, and that he would use the Keys to wreak destruction such as even these warring aliens had never imagined.
I have to get out of here, thought Arthur. Before I do something terrible…
He jumped back down and tried to visualise the Improbable Stair. That could be its first step there, the pale blue sandbag that was the firing step of the trench. It just had to turn white and luminous, and that would be the way in.
“White and luminous,” said Arthur. “The way into the Improbable Stair.”
Ahead of him, the clicking noise suddenly increased in volume and tempo. The soldier insects were beginning their charge.
“White! Luminous! Stair!” shouted Arthur.
A squealing zing went over his head, but he didn’t turn or look. All his attention was on that one pale blue sandbag, which was slowly, ever so slowly, beginning to turn white.
Suzy Turquoise Blue, sometime Ink-Filler Sixth Class, Monday’s Tierce and General of the Army of Lord Arthur, waggled her left foot just enough to start her spinning in an anticlockwise direction. She’d been slowly turning clockwise for the past hour and she felt like a change. She could introduce that motion with only a slight movement of her foot, which was fortunate since it was the only part of her that wasn’t tightly wrapped in the inch-thick scarlet rope that suspended her from a crane that had been swung out some 16,000 feet up on the eastern side of Superior Saturday’s tower.
“Stop that!” called a Sorcerous Supernumerary, who sat at the base of the crane. He was reading a large leatherbound book and dangling his legs over the edge of the tower. “Prisoners are not to spin anticlockwise!”
“Sez who?” asked Suzy.
“The manual says so,” replied the Supernumerary rather stiffly, tapping the book he held. “I just read that bit. Prisoners are not to spin anticlockwise, for the prevention of sorcerous eddies.”
“Better wind me in then,” said Suzy. “Else I’ll keep spinning.”
She had been hanging there for more than six hours, ever since being captured by the Artful Loungers near the Rain Reservoir, where Arthur had gone down the plughole in search of Part Six of the Will. Since being a prisoner was a definite improvement over being dead, which was what she thought was going to happen when the Loungers had attacked, Suzy was quite cheerful.