‘No,’ said Arthur. ‘You start, and I’ll say them after you.’
‘Very well. “I, Arthur, Duke of the Border Sea, Lord of the Far Reaches, Master of the Lower House, Wielder of the First, Second, and Third Keys to the Kingdom, do grant my faithful servant, the combined First, Second, and Third Parts of the Great Will of the Architect, all my powers … ’’ Arthur repeated the words mechanically, his mind elsewhere. He was afraid of what the Skinless Boy was going to do, and whether Leaf was just going into danger without any hope of success. He was also afraid of what was going to happen to him. After all, he was only a boy. He shouldn’t be a recruit in any army, let alone one full of immortal Denizens who were much tougher and stronger than he was.
Dame Primus took the trident, and for the first time Arthur realised that the gloves she was wearing were in fact the gauntlets of the Second Key, transformed to be more ladylike. And the sword made of clock hands that was the First Key was thrust through her belt, mostly concealed by the outer train of her long dress, which flowed around her like a cloak.
‘Thank you, Arthur,’ said Dame Primus. ‘I had best take the Atlas too.’
‘I suppose it’s not much good to me without a Key,’ said Arthur. He pulled the small green book out and slowly handed it over. He felt like he was losing everything that might help him.
‘Excellent! I will begin to work on the Border Sea immediately,’ announced Dame Primus. ‘We will also spare no effort in trying to find the Fourth Part of ourself, and will keep you informed of our progress.’
‘Mail call only happens twice a year at recruit school,’ said Monday’s Noon. ‘And the recruits are not permitted to telegraph or telephone.’
‘We will find some means,’ said Dame Primus. ‘Now, we had best let the recruiting officer in. Good luck, Arthur.’
‘I still don’t like this,’ said Arthur. ‘I want you to find out any way I can be released from the Army.’
‘As you command, Lord Arthur,’ said Dame Primus. She inclined her head but didn’t bow, and Arthur once more had the feeling that it would suit the Will to have him trapped in the House for ages, and with the Skinless Boy taking his place back home … he might have nowhere to go after he got out of the Army, except to become a Denizen.
‘I’ll be back,’ Arthur said fiercely. ‘As myself, not as a Denizen. If I have to find Part Four of the Will myself and get the Fourth Key from Sir Thursday, I’ll do it. And I expect everyone here to help Leaf however they can, particularly if … when … she gets back with the pocket.’
‘Ah, Lord Arthur,’ Dr Scamandros said nervously, with a sideways glance at Dame Primus. ‘Expect is such a … shall we say … inexact word –’
‘Here is the recruiting officer!’ interrupted Dame Primus. ‘Welcome to Monday’s Dayroom, Lieutenant.’
The officer in question stood at attention just inside the door and snapped a salute. To Arthur he looked like someone out of a history book. He wore a scarlet tunic with white lapels and white facings laden with many gold buttons. His legs were covered by black trousers with a broad gold stripe down each leg, his feet by black boots with spurs, and he was made at least a foot taller by a towering black fur hat with blue and white plumes. He also had a hand-sized crescent of bronze hanging around his neck, which was engraved with curlicues and numbers.
He looked around the room and saw Dame Primus, clearly the tallest and most important Denizen in the room.
‘I do beg your pardon, ma’am,’ said the lieutenant. ‘Crosshaw is my name, recruiting officer. I have a draft requisition for one Arthur Penhaligon, only I think there must be a mistake, as it gives this Arthur a precedence within the House of … well … six. I thought perhaps there might be a large number of zeroes missing. Perhaps if there is someone among Mister Monday’s staff called Arthur Penhaligon, I might test the draft document?’
‘There is no mistake,’ said Dame Primus. She indicated Arthur with a lofty wave of her hand. ‘The person in question is Lord Arthur Penhaligon, Master of the Lower House, Lord of the Far Reaches, Duke of the Border Sea, sixth in precedence within the House. I am Dame Primus, Parts One, Two, and Three of the Will of the Architect.’
Crosshaw gulped loudly, opened his mouth, shut it again, then looked at the papers in his hand. He seemed to find strength there, for he looked straight at Arthur and marched over, coming to a heel-stamping stop right in front of him.
‘I do beg your pardon, ah … Lord Arthur. Having been at a remote outpost in the Great Maze up until yesterday when I assumed my new duties, I did not know that there had been changes, um, among the Trustees. The thing is … I don’t quite know how to put it … as far as I know, if your name’s on the draft form, then you’ve been drafted. I have to give it to you.’
The lieutenant held out a large square of parchment, which had a lot of small type with Arthur’s name written clearly in a space in the middle.
‘What happens if I don’t take it?’ Arthur asked.
‘I’m not entirely sure,’ said Crosshaw. ‘If you do take it, I escort you via elevator to the Great Maze, to the Recruit Camp. If you don’t take it, I think the powers within the draft form take you to the Recruit Camp anyway, by more … unpleasant means.’
‘If I might glance at the document?’ asked Dr Scamandros, who had moved to stand at Arthur’s shoulder. He set his crystal-lensed glasses on his forehead, not on his eyes, and peered at the document. ‘Ah, yes, here we are. Most interesting. If you do not go willingly, Arthur, then you will be transformed into a shape, generally a small package of brown paper tied up with string, able to pass through the House’s postal system … which, given the problems still current in the Lower House, would not be an … ah … efficient means of travel.’
‘Okay, I’ll take it,’ said Arthur. He reached out and took the paper, then cried out in horror as it wrapped itself around his hand and started to shrug itself up his arm like a horrid slug consuming his flesh – though it didn’t hurt.
‘Don’t be alarmed!’ cried Crosshaw. ‘It’s just turning into a recruit uniform!’
Arthur looked away and tried to relax. The paper continued to move over him, rustling and billowing. When he looked down, his clothes had been transformed into a simple blue tunic with black buttons, blue breeches, and short black boots. A white canvas belt with a brass buckle carried a white ammunition pouch and an empty bayonet loop (known as a frog) on his hip.
But the draft notice wasn’t entirely finished. Arthur flinched as he felt it come out from under his tunic and swarm up the back of his neck. It climbed onto his head and transformed itself into a blue pillbox hat, with a tight and uncomfortable chinstrap that buckled on under Arthur’s lip instead of under his chin.
‘Very good, Recruit,’ said Crosshaw. He was no longer nervous, and Arthur felt immediately smaller and more insignificant. ‘Follow me.’
The lieutenant saluted Dame Primus, then spun on his heel and took a step towards the door.
‘Hang on!’ said Suzy. ‘I’m coming too!’
Crosshaw turned in surprise. ‘I beg your pardon!’
‘I’m volunteering,’ said Suzy. ‘I want to go along with Arthur.’
‘We don’t take volunteers,’ said Crosshaw. ‘Never know who we might get.’
‘But I think I might have served before – I’m probably in some kind of Reserve.’
‘We’re not calling up reservists either,’ Crosshaw sniffed. ‘Particularly Piper’s children who’ve had everything they ever knew washed out from between their ears.’
‘I’ve got a piece of paper somewhere,’ said Suzy as she rummaged through her pockets.
‘I can’t help you, miss,’ Crosshaw dismissed her with finality. ‘Come along, Recruit Penhaligon. Hold yourself a bit straighter. What’s that on your leg?’
‘Crab-armour,’ said Arthur. Unlike the rest of his clothes, the crab-armour had remained, his new blue breeches forming under it. ‘For a broken leg.’
‘As prescribed by me
,’ said Dr Scamandros. ‘Dr Scamandros, at your service. Major Scamandros, Army Sorcerer, retired. I did my draft service about three thousand years ago, before going on to advanced study in the Upper House.’
‘Very good, sir,’ said Crosshaw, with another snappy salute. ‘If it’s a prescribed medical necessity, it can remain.’
‘Lord Arthur is a mortal,’ added Scamandros. He got out a small notepad and hastily scrawled something on it with a peacock-feather quill that dripped silver ink. ‘He needs the crab-armour and the ring on his finger for medical reasons. He should be given special consideration.’
Crosshaw took the proffered note, folded it, and tucked it under his cuff.
‘I’m still coming along,’ said Suzy.
‘No room for you in our elevator,’ snapped Crosshaw. ‘I suppose there’s nothing to stop you from petitioning Sir Thursday to re-enlist, if you actually are a reservist. Not something I’d do. But there’s nothing to stop you. Come along, Recruit Penhaligon. By the left, quick march!’
Crosshaw led off with his left foot, boot heels crashing on the marble floor as he marched towards the door. Arthur followed, doing his best to imitate the lieutenant’s marching style and keep in step.
He suddenly felt incredibly alone, abandoned by everyone and extremely uncertain about what the future held.
Was he really going to disappear into the Army for a hundred years?
Six
‘ARE THE CLOTHES satisfactory, Miss Leaf?’ Sneezer asked Leaf as she came out from getting changed behind the central bookshelf in the middle of the library.
‘I guess so,’ she answered. She looked down at the band T-shirt that featured a group she’d never heard of. From the tie-dyed swirl of mythological creatures, she guessed it was from about 1970. She had jeans on below that, but they were not exactly denim, though they looked like it, and the patch on the back pocket was a very sharply focused and impressive hologram featuring an animal that she was sure did not exist on Earth.
‘If you would like to do so, we can try to take a look at your destination before you go through,’ said Sneezer. He walked over to a row of bookshelves and pulled on the hanging rope at the end. A bell rang somewhere above Leaf’s head and the entire wall of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves rolled back and then slid away to show a seven-sided room of dark walnut paneling. In the centre of the room, seven tall grandfather clocks were arranged in a circle, facing one another.
‘What’s that noise?’ asked Leaf. She could feel as much as hear a weird low humming noise, but there was no ticking sound coming from the clocks.
‘The pendulums of the clocks,’ said Sneezer. ‘The heartbeat of Time. These are the Seven Dials, miss.’
‘I would like to have a look first,’ said Leaf. ‘Can you show me where the Skinless Boy is?’
‘We can but try,’ Sneezer replied. He tapped one long finger against his nose and smiled. In Monday’s service that would have been a ghastly gesture made with a dirty, long-nailed hand against a nose covered in boils, but now Sneezer’s hand was clean and manicured and his nose, though long and hooked, was healthy. Even the long white hair that grew from the back of his head was neat and tied back with a dark-blue velvet bow, matching his long, tailed coat. ‘Please stay out of the circle of clocks until I tell you otherwise, Miss Leaf.’
The butler took a deep breath, then quickly strode in and started moving the hands of the nearest clock. That done, he raced to the next, and then the next, adjusting the time on each face. After changing the seventh clock, he quickly left the circle.
‘We should see something in a moment,’ Sneezer explained. ‘Then I shall tweak the setting a little and send you back. I’m afraid it is clear that I am unable to return you any earlier than twenty-one minutes past ten on the Thursday after the Wednesday you left. Ah – it is beginning.’
A slowly spinning tornado of white fog began to swirl up out of the floor, getting slower and spreading wider as it rose. In a few seconds, it had completely filled the circle between the grandfather clocks. As Leaf watched, a silver sheen spread through the cloud, becoming so bright that she had to squint.
Then the silver paled and the cloud became transparent. Leaf found herself looking down on a hospital room, as if she were a fly on the ceiling. It was a typical hospital room with a single bed. Arthur was in the bed – or rather, Leaf reminded herself hastily, the Skinless Boy was in the bed. It looked exactly like Arthur, and she shivered, thinking that if she hadn’t been told, she would never have known it wasn’t her friend.
The next thing she saw was the clock on the wall. It read 10:25, which was comforting. If it was still only Thursday … The door opened and a doctor came in. Leaf started, because she hadn’t expected to hear anything. But the sound of the door opening and the doctor’s footsteps were as clear as if she really were looking down from the ceiling.
‘Hello, Arthur,’ said the doctor. ‘Remember me? Doctor Naihan. I just need to take a look at your cast.’
‘Help yourself,’ said the Skinless Boy. Leaf shivered again, for the Nithling’s voice was exactly the same as Arthur’s.
The doctor smiled and folded back the bedclothes to take a look at the high-tech cast on the Skinless Boy’s leg. He had hardly looked for more than a few seconds when he straightened up and scratched his head in surprise.
‘This is … I don’t understand … the cast appears to have merged with your leg … but that’s impossible. I’d better call Professor Arden.’
‘What’s wrong with the cast?’ asked the Skinless Boy. It sat up and slid off the bed as Dr Naihan picked up the bedside phone.
‘No, you mustn’t get up, Arthur,’ exclaimed Naihan. ‘I’ll just call –’
Before the doctor could say anything else, the Skinless Boy struck him in the throat so hard that the man was propelled against the oxygen outlets on the wall. He slid down the wall and lay on the floor, not moving.
The Skinless Boy laughed, a strange mixture of Arthur’s laugh overlaid with something else, something inhuman. It bent down and laid one finger against Naihan’s neck, clearly checking to see if he was dead. Then it picked up the body with one hand, something Arthur could never have managed, and casually slung the dead doctor in the closet.
Next it went to the door, opened it, and looked out for a second, before it went through. The door slowly swung shut behind the Nithling, closing with a final click that made Leaf shudder.
She had not realised just how awful it would be to see a monster that looked and sounded exactly like Arthur. A monster that killed people with careless ease.
‘Now, Miss Leaf, it is time for you to return,’ said Sneezer, making Leaf jump. As he spoke, the hospital scene vanished, and Leaf saw again only the wooden panelling of the walls and floor, and the humming clocks.
The butler stepped in and quickly changed the hands of just three of the clocks.
‘Stand in the circle, quickly, before the clocks strike!’
He jumped out and Leaf stepped in. A second later, the clocks all began to strike at the same time, ringing out as the room shimmered around Leaf. She felt dizzy as everything went hazy and indistinct, and then a wave of nausea hit her as a white glow began to spread across the walls, floor, and ceiling. Soon she could see nothing but white around her.
She was just about to scream or vomit – or both – when the light receded on one side, and she could see a kind of corridor, bordered by white light but more comfortably dim in the middle.
Leaf staggered out and along this corridor, holding her stomach. She felt totally disoriented, with the white light pressing behind her and close to the sides. She couldn’t hear her own footsteps, or her breath, or anything else.
Then, without warning, sound came back, a kind of roaring like wind in her ears, which quickly faded and was gone. A moment later, the white light vanished. Leaf, her eyes still screwed up, took a few loud steps on a hard floor and fell over, rolling onto her back. It took her disturbed mind a while to realise that
the lights she was now staring at, though white, were simply fluorescent panels in a pale-blue ceiling.
She sat up and looked around. She was in a hospital corridor. East Area Hospital. She recognised the pale-blue and ghastly brown colour scheme. There was no one in the corridor, but there were lots of doors all the way along.
And there was a clock above the swing doors at the end of the corridor. According to it, the time was ten past twelve, which made her worry, because when she’d been a fly on the wall looking down at the Skinless Boy it had only been 10:25. If it remained Thursday then it was only a little more than an hour and a half lost, but still …
She got up, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and checked the nearest doors. They were all storerooms of some kind, which indicated that she was on one of the lower, nonpublic areas of the hospital. Which meant her first priority had to be to get out before she was picked up by hospital security and had to explain what she was doing there or how she’d got in.
A few minutes later, leaving a shrieking exit door alarm behind her, Leaf stepped out of an elevator onto the quarantine reception floor. But it wasn’t like when she’d left it. Then, the waiting area had been full of people who’d come to see their relatives in quarantine, who were still being kept in case the Sleepy Plague wasn’t really gone. Now the waiting room was empty, and there were huge sheets of plastic draped all over the chairs, and the telltale smell of recently sprayed disinfectant. Worse, from Leaf’s point of view, instead of just the two usual security guards by the secure reception area, there were four hospital security guards, half-a-dozen police in full biohazard gear, and a couple of soldiers in camouflage biosuits.
Before she could get back in the elevator, they all noticed her.
‘Don’t step forward!’ boomed one of the hospital guards. ‘This whole level is Q-zoned. How did you get here?’
‘I just got in the elevator,’ said Leaf, acting younger than she was and much more stupid.
‘It’s supposed to be locked off from the ground,’ grumbled the guard. ‘Just get back in and go down to Level One.’