“Chopping people’s . . . ,” Prue hiccuped, echoing the words back in disbelief. “That’s not what this was all about! I mean, when we came and freed the birds from the prison.”
“But weren’t they the enemies, the Svikists?”
A Svikist—someone who supported the old regime, she figured. “No,” she said. “And yes. I mean, I didn’t think they’d be treated that way.”
“What were we supposed to do with them?” shouted someone.
“How did we know they weren’t going to just come and oppress us all over again?” shouted another.
“How about we just cut off their hands?” suggested another voice, and his neighbors nodded, as if understanding the wisdom of such a proposal.
“Or maybe just their little toes? The pinkie ones?”
“NO!” shouted Prue. “Don’t cut off anything!” She took a deep breath, commanding all her inner strength. “As Bicycle Maiden, I order that you—”
“Oh, order, huh?” said one of the onlookers. He was human, but he did not wear the uniform of the Spokes—the bicycle cap and knickers. “What are you, an empress now?”
“Careful!” shouted one of his neighbors, a Spoke. “That’s the Bicycle Maiden you’re talking to!” He gestured to some of his pals, who were dressed in the requisite riding gear, and they began to sidle toward the naysayer.
“No, I’m not a queen or an empress or anything,” said Prue. “And I don’t really mean to order you to do anything. No one should order you around. But I’m just saying, I mean, the spirit of the, you know, time that we, like, did all that stuff. Last fall. I just don’t think . . .” She found she was losing her audience. Indeed, she felt like she was losing herself.
Meanwhile, the immediate neighbors of the man who’d made the snide comment were now pointing frantically at the perpetrator while the Spokes made their way to his position. “That’s him,” said one of the Spokes. “He’s not even wearing a sprocket.”
“Svikist!” someone shouted, and suddenly the man was tackled and hauled away toward the door.
“Please!” Prue yelled, her voice now growing hoarse. “Just listen for a second. I’ve got something really important to tell everyone.”
The room hushed again; the Spokes halted their movement toward the door, their captive squirming in their arms.
Prue took a deep breath. “I’ve been instructed. By the Council Tree. To bring together the two makers who made Alexei, the heir apparent. The tree wants Alexei brought back to life.”
A great pause followed as the members of Prue’s audience looked at one another, perplexed. Prue heard someone clear their throat; it was the possum, to her right. She shifted her feet a little and continued in the quiet:
“I’ll need your help,” she said, “in finding one of his makers. The man’s name is Carol Grod. He’s a blind man, an old man.”
One of the older members of the crowd spoke up. “Alexei. You mean Alexandra and Grigor’s son, the young Svik? The one that the Governess brought back with the black magic?”
“I do,” said Prue.
They all stood and stared at her, and the air in the building began to collect and build upon itself like the air in a balloon stretched to its very limits. The following shout, coming from a man in the back of the room, acted as the pin for this balloon:
“SHE’S A SVIKIST!” it came.
At that very moment, the crowd descended into absolute chaos. Which is not to say it hadn’t been chaotic before; it had. It was just that now all of that chaotic energy, which had been, up to that point, directed toward a very particular subject, began to suddenly turn in on itself as every closely held belief of those present flipped inside out and became as unclear to those who held them as a ship navigating a foggy sea. It began in ripples: little exclamations of confusion, followed by rebuttals of those very exclamations, which led to recriminations, which led to someone getting hit squarely in the nose. The man the Spokes had been roughly escorting to the door, presumably to his death, was just as roughly dropped as his captors began sparring angrily with one another, arguing over whether the Bicycle Maiden was truly who she said she was, considering the sort of antipatriotic, Svikist, antirevolution thing she’d just said. The entire scene soon escalated to an out-and-out brawl, easily two hundred humans and animals in the giant, collective scrape.
“Oh boy,” was all Prue could say.
“Ms. McKeel,” came a voice, managing to cut through the din: It was being spoken directly into her right ear. She looked over and saw that the voice was coming from the small, furry frame of the possum she’d seen earlier, held to a human’s height by the attaché. “I’d say you should come with me, immediately.”
The battle raged below the balcony; the combatants on the staircase seemed to flow like a wave upward, flattening all in its path. They had crested the second floor; the riot seemed to be making its way toward Prue. Judging from the curses coming from within the scrum, Prue could tell she had as many defenders as detractors, but still: She blathered something to the possum and then wordlessly followed him and the attaché toward the double doors in a crouched run with her hands over her head.
When they’d arrived at the safety of the Interim Governor-Regent’s office, the attaché slammed the door behind him as the battle waged loudly without.
“So that couldn’t have gone worse,” said the possum.
“I didn’t know it would be taken so badly,” said Prue, still reeling. Her entire body felt like one of those plastic horse puppets, the ones with the elastic in the joints, atop their plastic pedestals with the button underneath that makes the thing collapse.
“Then you don’t know this crowd,” said the attaché.
Promptly, some celestial being pushed in the button on Prue’s pedestal, and her elastic joints gave way and she slid down the wainscoting of the wall until she was a crumpled mass on the floor.
“Easy, easy,” said the possum, walking to her side. “It’ll pass. They get fired up fairly easily. They’ll likely simmer down in a short matter of time.”
“Who are you?” asked Prue blearily.
“I’m Ambrose Pupkin, Interim Governor-Regent-elect,” said the possum, bowing a little. He, too, wore a brass sprocket brooch on his vest. “Now you see what I’ve had to deal with.”
“What happened out there? Why’d they react that way?” asked Prue.
“I could’ve warned you,” said Ambrose. “Had you taken a moment.”
“I thought I knew. I thought they worshipped me.”
“They do, to a degree,” said the possum. “But you don’t understand what we’ve gone through, over the last many months, since you were here.”
Prue rubbed her eyes a little. The animal wavered in her vision. “Have we met before?” she asked.
“No,” said Ambrose. “Though I’ve watched you. I was around when you first arrived here at the Mansion. I was a lowly janitor then. And look what the revolution’s done for me. Me, the Interim Governor-Regent-elect.”
“Why not just Governor-Regent?” asked Prue, wiping a strand of hair from her brow. “Why the long title?”
“Better to stay this way,” he said. “The last Governor-Regent-elect lost his head.”
“Oh,” said Prue, thinking she understood what Ambrose had said, but then realized she hadn’t, not entirely. “Oh!” she said again, with a renewed understanding.
The possum went on, “Interim doesn’t quite suggest accountability, if you get my meaning. The buck doesn’t stop here, not yet. I’m just passing through.” He scissored his little fingers in the air, miming a walking figure.
“I see why they gave the job to the janitor,” said Prue.
The possum winked at her. “You catch on fast,” he said. “Now what’s all this business about Alexei? The boy’s been dead five years. Not only that, but his tomb is graffitied with anti-Svik slogans.”
Prue shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s what the tree told me.”
“You see?” said Ambrose, snapping his little fingers. “That’s one place you went wrong. You’re a tree-talker, aren’t you? North Wood mysticism. Doesn’t necessarily fly in the South.”
“But still . . .”
“But still nothing. You’d have been better off saying you received it from a vision in your dreams. A dappled goddess, or some such nonsense, bearing a crystal staff et cetera, et cetera. You start talking the Council Tree to a bunch of red-blooded South Wooders, you’re sunk.”
“Okay,” was Prue’s only reply.
“And more importantly: What the devil do you intend to do with a reanimated mechanical boy?”
“The tree said it would bring peace. To the Wood.”
The possum exchanged a glance with the attaché. “Oh, did it? It’ll erase the infighting? The strife among the lower classes? The ruined harvest? It’ll refill the empty coffers of the Mansion?”
“The tree didn’t really go into detail,” said Prue.
“I suppose trees rarely do,” added the attaché snidely.
“It’s madness,” said Ambrose. “But I’ve got too much on my plate to run interference for an Outsider on an inane quest. One thing: When you decided to announce your intentions to that bloodthirsty rabble, did you take a moment to consider that these were the very people who exiled the old Governess to begin with—for the precise thing that you’re trying to reenact?”
“I had, I mean I did. I just didn’t think . . .”
The possum shook his head. “That’s the trouble with you Outsiders. So impetuous. Well, you’ve cooked yourself up a real stew, haven’t you, Bicycle Maiden?”
“What do I do?”
“Oh, they’ll calm down,” said the attaché. “Riots are a weekly occasion. Surprising, this happening on a Wednesday. Typically, they only riot on Thursdays and occasionally Monday afternoons. Extenuating circumstances, I suppose.” He had picked up a stack of papers from the desk and was busy thumbing through it. “Svikists, Spokes, Caliphs. It’s the new world here. This is what revolution looks like.”
“Can you send in guards?” asked Prue. “To, you know, get things under control?”
“We tried that,” said the attaché. “Only gets them more riled up. They start getting oppressed when you do that.”
“So how do you keep order?”
“We wait for them to move on, after they’ve done whatever damage they plan on doing.” This was Ambrose, who’d moved to the office’s window and was carefully pushing the curtain away to see the outside. “These days, the Synod has been nice enough to handle the crowd control.” He paused. “See? They’re already starting to disperse.”
Prue crawled her way to the window, a captive wary of a sniper shot, and peeked her head above the sill. Sure enough, the crowd was scattering away from the Mansion across the deep-green pitch of the grounds. Several figures, wearing long gray hooded robes, seemed to be guiding the figures away.
“Who needs to pay for security when you’ve got a religious sect keeping things organized?” Ambrose said. “Certainly makes things easier for us.”
“So that’s the Synod? The Caliphs?” asked Prue, watching as the robed figures seemed to wordlessly corral the agitated crowd away from the Mansion. They wore masks over their faces, shiny human masks that caught and reflected the sun when they turned their covered heads. A few of them swung pendulum-like things on chains that puffed smoke with every swing.
“Basically, these are the Mystics of the South Wood, just like the North Wood has theirs,” explained Ambrose. “They’d been outlawed by the old regimes. Decades ago it was a crime to have any kind of Caliphate iconography around. Once the sect had been routed, folks in the Mansion started getting lax about enforcing the laws. And once the revolution hit, and the old Svik dynasty was torn down for good, it made a window for a revival. The Blighted Revival, they called it.”
“After the Blighted Tree,” explained the attaché, “the first living tree of the Wood.”
“I thought the Council Tree was the first living tree of the Wood,” said Prue.
“And that’s how you’re going to run into problems,” said Ambrose. “The North Wood’s just a bunch of cultists and bumpkins. According to the Southerners.”
The attaché had moved to the desk and was sorting through the massive pile of papers that lay heaped there. “Now if you wouldn’t mind, Ms. McKeel,” he said. “We have a lot of work to do here. Those Svikist collaborators’ heads are not going to chop themselves off.”
Prue blanched. “But is it safe?” she asked, bewildered. “For me to go out there?”
“Oh, I’m sure you’ll still find support,” Ambrose said. “You are the Bicycle Maiden, after all. Go out there and show them what you’re made of.”
“But they called me a Savi-, a Svikist!” She had some difficulty pronouncing the word. It was a silly thing. She qualified: “Which I’m not.”
“Oh, I’m sure you’re not. And it’s unlikely that you’ll be beheaded, anyway. You’ll have enough defenders to save you that fate.” Ambrose had moved over to the attaché’s side and was helping him sort through the stack of papers on the desk. Prue had paused by the door, thinking.
“Please,” she said. “Can you help me? I just need to find out what happened to the other maker,” she said.
The possum glared at Prue. “If you take my advice, you’d drop the whole affair. Grave robbing is a capital offense, you know. You’re on your own, Bicycle Maiden. We’ve got enough trouble as it is. We’ve got executions to decree, censures to sign. An angry, violent people to appease. Don’t drag us into your little quest.”
“What about, like, a paper trail?” asked Prue desperately. “There’s got to be some record, somewhere. Of the exile.”
The attaché pushed a stack of papers in front of Ambrose, who’d taken his seat behind the desk. The Interim Governor-Regent-elect began signing the papers as the attaché slid them under his pen, like a practiced casino card dealer laying out a blackjack hand.
“I suppose,” said the attaché in the midst of this action, “you could go to the archives.”
“The archives,” repeated Ambrose, his arm a blur above the pages he was gracing with his scribble. “Oh yes, the archives.”
“The archives?” asked Prue.
“I suppose,” said the attaché, “there might be a record in the archives.”
Prue waited for more information, but the two figures were silent, lost in their work. “So . . . ,” she prompted.
“What?” asked Ambrose, looking up from the papers.
“Where are the archives?” asked Prue.
“Oh,” said Ambrose. “Here, in the Mansion. Ask one of the staff; they can direct you. But first you’ll need a request, signed, dated, and notarized by the Interim Governor-Regent-elect.” He said that as if it were an obstacle too high to hurdle.
“That’s you,” said Prue.
“Oh,” said the possum, seemingly surprised by the suggestion. “Right. Sorry. Fairly new to the job.” He continued signing papers.
“I’d like to do that,” said Prue. “Get access to the archives.”
“Very well,” said Ambrose. “Mr. Secretary, if you wouldn’t mind getting the girl a . . . what’s the bloody name of the form?”
“A 651-C-5, I believe, sir,” said the attaché. “I have one right here.” He reached into a filing cabinet off to one side of the desk and retrieved the document. Setting it down on the only clear space on the desk, he spun it around so that it was facing Prue. “You’ll need to sign here,” he said, pointing to a series of empty blanks on the page. “Here. And here. And initial here. And sign here. And fill in your intent here, e.g., looking for a record of two exiled toy makers.”
“Only one,” said Prue. “I need to find only one. Carol Grod.”
Ambrose looked up from his signing. “But you’ll need both makers,” he said. “Isn’t that what you said?”
“No. Just the one. I’ve found one. I just need
to find the other.” She said this as she scanned the very small print on the piece of paper she was presently signing and initialing, distracted by its very complicated layout. “Only the two of them can make the thing, the cog that will bring him back to life.”
“Oh,” said Ambrose. She didn’t see that he’d stopped in his labors and was making eye contact with the attaché. “Where is he, this other maker—the one that you’ve found?”
Prue, in her distracted state, had quite forgotten the plan, that Esben’s location remain secret until she found Carol and could reunite them. “He’s safe,” she said. And that was all.
The Interim Governor-Regent-elect shrugged and continued scribbling away at the pages that the attaché slid in front of him in a shushed conveyor-belt-like activity. Prue finished signing the form she’d been given and handed it back to the attaché, who promptly slid it in front of the possum.
“For the girl, sir,” said the attaché.
Ambrose signed it and handed it back to Prue, saying, “Good luck with this one, Bicycle Maiden. May the Blighted Tree light your way.”
“Thank you,” said Prue hesitantly. She took the piece of paper and wheeled about, heading for the double doors on the opposite side of the room. Halfway across the carpet, she paused. “Okay. Wish me luck.”
The possum looked up from his paperwork to say, “If you stood up to the SWORD and stormed the South Wood Prison, I suppose a few harmless revolutionaries could hardly stand in your way.”
“Right,” said Prue, taking a deep breath. “Here we go.”
And she stepped out of the office and back into the heart of the Mansion.
CHAPTER 9
Where the Air Comes From;
The Second Thing
They cleared the table in the center of the room with a flourish; a heavyset man who’d been introduced as “Le Poignard” unfurled a large blueprint map and stretched it out on the table’s wooden surface. A host of Chapeaux Noirs gathered there like priests unveiling a holy writ. The glow of a single lightbulb, from above, illuminated the blue ink on the waxy paper: an incredibly detailed architectural diagram of what appeared to be a very tall and very fortified building. On the bottom of the sheet was written TITAN TOWER in the perfect symmetry of architectural script. The Unadoptables all crowded around one edge of the table and peered down at the blueprint, their eyes wide. Jacques Chruschiel loomed over them, his hand tracing little imaginary lines on the paper.