Arthur looked around, but could see only darkness beyond the circle of light from his own strange glow and Yan's lantern. But he could hear something off to his right. A kind of creaking, like the night wind in the trees at home.
"Cast a sunburst up about a thousand feet," said Yan hurriedly. "That is the first step, sir. You will remember to make us three?"
"Yes," said Arthur. "Uh, how? oh, never mind?"
He cupped his hands and concentrated on the gauntlets.
Sunburst, he thought. A sunburst to fly up to a thousand feet and explode like the one I saw before. Hot and glorious, a miniature sun to shed light on everything down here and send the Nothing back into its holes -
Something jetted out of his grasp, heading skyward at incredible speed. Arthur stared up after it, a shooting star that reached its thousand-foot-tall ceiling in a few seconds. He was still looking when it exploded into light. His star-hood saved him from the worst of it, but he still had to blink and cover his eyes with his arm.
He was just about to lift that arm and take a look around when Yan suddenly cried out. Arthur heard him fall and his lantern smash upon the stone.
Arthur instinctively jumped back. He saw Yan go sprawling, and he saw a tall, immaculately clad top-hatted Denizen step forward and stab the Grotesque through the heart with a swordcane that had a shining silver blade.
"He might have helped you repair the buttress," said the Denizen, his voice smooth and cultured, his handsome face unmoved by what he had just done.
"And we can't have that, can we?"
"You killed him!"
The Denizen gave a small shrug.
"Perhaps. He is one-seventh of a higher being. He might recover. It is all rather academic, with Nothing about to overwhelm the entirety of creation."
He pointed with his sword-cane. Arthur flicked his head to look, but only for an instant, keeping his attention on that silver blade. In that moment, he saw that they were standing only yards from the foot of a vast wall that stretched as far as he could see to the left and right and up towards the sunburst. It was made of deep red bricks set in yellow mortar, but there were many dark cracks and lines of leaking Nothing among the bricks.
"I should give up if I were you, Arthur," said the Denizen. His voice was quite hypnotic and Arthur found himself listening intently. He wanted the voice to go on and on. "This is all beyond you. Much easier to give in to fate. Let the buttress fail, let Nothing wash away the House, the Secondary Realms -"
He lunged at Arthur's throat on the last word, but the Key was ready for him even though the Key's wielder was not. The gauntlets caught the blade, twisted and broke it. Then Arthur found himself plunging the broken end of the blade deep into the Denizen's red silk waistcoat.
"Ah, proof against the voice," sighed the Denizen as he backed away. He looked down at the golden blood that was trickling down his waistcoat. "A hit! One is enough to end the bout, by any rules. Now others shall take their turn!"
With that, he slapped a button that appeared in the air. The elevator sprang into visibility, its door open. The Denizen staggered into it. The doors closed and a beam of light shot up towards the far distant ceiling, well beyond sight.
Arthur stared at the fading beam, totally confused. The Denizen was obviously not one of Grim Tuesday's servants. Nor was he a Nithling. Or was he? Why did he want Nothing to destroy the House?
Where were the Nithlings, for that matter? Grim Tuesday had said, "One up here, a thousand down below."
Arthur turned back to look up at the buttress and saw where the Nithlings were. They were hundreds of feet up the face of the buttress, clawing out bricks with their hands and claws and tentacles and talons. Thousands of them, swarming over the face of what Arthur now realized was effectively a dam wall.
A huge dam made of special bricks, holding back the great void of Nothing itself.
A leaking dam, getting weaker by the second.
A dam wall Arthur had to fix.
Bricks are no good, Arthur thought. The Nithlings can pull out bricks. Reinforced concrete, that's what we need. Magical reinforced concrete.
He raised his gauntleted hands and began to concentrate, muttering to himself.
"Bricks into reinforced concrete. Special reinforced concrete. Immaterial Concrete, like my boots but a thousand times stronger, a thousand times tougher." He felt the gloves vibrate with the power of the Key, but when he looked up at the dam, there was no change. The streaks of thick, dark Nothing were spreading as the Nithlings splintered the mortar and crumbled the bricks.
Someone croaked something behind Arthur. He whirled around, ready for another attack. But it was only Yan, raising himself up on one elbow.
"Touch the bricks," Yan whispered. "Touch the bricks to transform them!"
Arthur nodded and ran towards the buttress. A brick sailed past his ear, and then another one struck his misshapen leg. He screamed and fell, holding his hands over his head.
"Key, protect me!"
The green glow in Arthur's brightcoat spun itself into a sphere all around him. More and more bricks came raining down, but when they hit the green barrier, they splintered into dust. Coughing and partially blinded, Arthur staggered forward and got both his palms onto the wall.
He looked up for a second, to see Nithlings of all shapes and sizes coming down towards him. Some of them flew, some simply jumped, some scuttled, and some ran as if the wall were horizontal rather than vertical. But none could get to him for at least thirty seconds, Arthur judged.
He leaned into the wall, resting all his weight on his palms, and once again thought of the dams he had seen, either in person or in pictures.
The biggest, strongest dam anywhere. Reinforced concrete. Reinforced Immaterial Concrete. Dozens of yards thick, on top of the existing brickwork. Impenetrable. Impervious to Nothing. Too smooth for fingers, claws, talons, or tentacles, or teeth. A real dam wall. A mighty buttress! Built with the power of the Second Key!
Arthur felt that power flow from the gauntlets into his body and then out again. He was both a pool and a conduit. The power welled up inside him, then when he was full of it, it spilled over, back through his hands. He could feel the new dam wall building, the Immaterial Concrete spreading from his hands, expanding out like spilled ink upon a page.
"It's working!" he cried, just as a bullheaded Nithling landed heavily near him and rushed to the attack, its sharp horns aimed directly at his unprotected back.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The Nithling fared no better than the bricks, for the Key had continued to divert some small part of its power to fulfill Arthur's spoken command. The boy felt a spray of something against the back of his neck, but it was not enough to distract him from his task.
Other Nithlings landed and charged, only to meet the same fate. None could prevail against the power of the Second Key. Many realized it and, instead of attacking, they fled, hoping to find some way into other parts of the House or the Secondary Realms. Others climbed higher up the buttress as the new wall rose. They tried desperately to pull out just one more brick, to erode one more line of mortar. Many were caught, as reinforcing metal wove its way around and through them, and were drowned by the rising columns of Immaterial Concrete.
Only one Nithling neither attacked, tried to pry a few bricks away, nor fled. A strange Nithling that watched Arthur from a place of concealment behind a many-holed boiler that had rolled down to its final resting place, here at the lowest part of the Pit.
The lurker did not look like any normal Nithling. If seen from the left side, it looked just like a boy. In fact it looked just like Arthur in his school uniform. But from the right side, it was a skeleton, bare bones of red ochre bereft of skin. Front-on, it was a hideous split-faced thing, half smiling boy and half grinning skull.