“You know I don’t want to use the Key,” said Arthur sharply. “We’d better get inside and ask if there’s another way out.”
He turned the handle and opened the door-but instead of opening onto the main gold pool chamber it opened onto the gloomy interior of the tower.
“I must have done it wrong,” said Arthur. He shut the door, turned the handle the other way, and opened the door again, but once more there was only the tower interior beyond.
“Were you expecting something else?” asked Suzy.
“Yes,” snapped Arthur. “The inner chamber! Elibazeth said they had other defences. I guess this is one. I’ll ask my sentries.”
He started up the steps with Suzy and Fred following, but by the time they reached the first landing, he knew from the silence above that Jugguth and the other two Denizens had probably gone back inside the main chamber-and Elibazeth had then closed it off. Running up to the next two landings proved this to be the case. The tower was deserted and the only way out was back down and through the front door.
The only obvious way out, thought Arthur. But perhaps there is another exit after all ....
“What are the Fetchers doing?” he shouted downstairs, at the same time as he opened one of the shutters on the north side of the tower.
“They still stand like the cattle they are,” reported Ugham. “But the silver-wing’d Denizen comes forward, bearing aloft a white cloth. He seeks a parley, methinks. Doubtless he fears they have not the strength to carry the day against Lord Arthur’s Key.”
Arthur looked out the window, onto the groaning, ice-edged waterwheel, a huge and menacing machine made somehow scarier by the gathering darkness beyond. He watched it turn. If it was slow enough, he thought it would be possible to climb out onto one of the flat spokes and be carried and slide down to the ground, out of sight of the Fetchers on the southern and eastern side. Or he’d fall into the canal and drown or get frozen to death.
It was slow enough, Arthur reckoned, though it would still be a dangerous path to the canal bank. But then the only other way would be to fight through the Fetchers and Saturday’s Dusk, and Arthur was not confident about doing that. At least not without using the full powers of the Key.
“Ugham!” shouted Arthur. “Tell Saturday’s Dusk you have to go inside to get me. Tell him to come back in half an hour. That should give us a reasonable head start.”
“What are we going to do?” asked Fred.
Arthur pointed out the window.
“We’re going to climb out onto a spoke of the wheel and get carried down, jumping off just before it hits the water. Then we’ll head west along the canal to where the Paper Pushers are.”
“Hmmph,” said Suzy. “Back into the cold, in other words.”
“Yes,” confirmed Arthur. “Back into the cold.”
Chapter Nine
Leaf shivered as the sleepwalkers slid off their beds and formed a line in obedience to Harrison’s orders. There was something awful and creepy about their unseeing, half-open eyes and their floppy movements. Almost as if they were like perfect string puppet representations of humans, only with invisible strings.
“Follow me!” called out Harrison, and he walked to the far door. Lowering the silver cone, he added in his own weak voice, “You too, Leaf! Bring up the rear.”
“What if I don’t?” Leaf asked rebelliously. She tried to project a more aggressive tone than she felt, but she sounded weak and childish, even to herself.
“I can make the sleepers bring you,” said Harrison. “Though they would hurt themselves in the process. Please, it would be easier for everyone if you just come along.”
“I’m not helping you take these people to get killed,” said Leaf.
“They don’t get killed,” said Harrison, but he didn’t look at Leaf when he spoke. “They’ll still be alive at the end of the day. After She’s finished with them. Come on! We’ll both get punished if we’re late.”
“I’m not cooperating,” said Leaf. “But I want to see what’s outside, so I guess I’ll come along.”
“You’ll learn,” said Harrison sourly. He slid back the two bolts securing the outside door and then wrestled with the long handle, the sound of a large and stiff lock clicking back inside. Then he pushed the door open, using his shoulder and grunting with the effort, as the door was several inches thick and the outer face was lined with steel plate.
Purple light streamed in, casting an unattractive glow over the faces of Harrison and the sleepers. Leaf slitted her eyes, not because it was too bright, just that the colour was too intense, and it made her feel slightly ill.
It was warmer out in the purple sunlight, and a light breeze ruffled Leaf’s hair, bringing with it a strange, slightly earthy scent, reminiscent of forests she’d walked in previously but overlaid with something like an exotic spice.
There was smooth gray rock underfoot, whorled in patterns to show it had once been lava, long cooled. The rock shelved down gently to the lake in the middle, which looked like normal water, though it too was tinged purple by the light.
Leaf looked around and saw that the crater wall reached up three or four hundred feet. It was dotted with windows of various sizes and there were some doors high up as well, with suspended walkways hugging the cliff between them. Farther around the crater, probably where the twelve would be on the notional clock-face scheme, there was a broad iron balcony just below where the dome began. A spiral stair of red wrought iron ran down from the balcony all the way to the crater floor.
“Hurry up!” called Harrison. He was leading the sleepers down to the lakeshore and they had gotten thirty or forty yards ahead while Leaf stared up at the crater walls and the dome.
Leaf ignored him and continued to look around. Apart from the door they had come out, there were at least a dozen crater-level doors spaced around the rim. But they would probably all lead back into Lady Friday’s complex, and so offered nothing useful. Or worse, they might lead to the jungle beyond the mountain. After encountering the walking seedpod, Leaf totally believed Milka that she didn’t want to go there.
She also didn’t want to see what was going to happen to the sleepers, but there didn’t appear to be any alternative. The crater was all featureless gray stone, without an outcrop or anything to hide behind. Unless she could breathe underwater, the lake was out.
“Come on!” Harrison was down at the lakeshore now, ordering the sleepers to stand in a line facing the water. Or, as Leaf now saw, facing a slim pillar of darker stone that rose up in the very center of the lake, and so was also in the very center of the crater. It was about twenty feet wide at the water and ended in a flat top about four feet wide some fifteen feet above the level of the lake.
Leaf started heading over to Harrison, but she still kept looking for somewhere to hide. As she walked, she noticed movement up on the balcony at the twelve o’clock position. Several Denizens were flexing their wings-wings that were not discolored by the purple sunlight. They were bright yellow, the color of daisy heads. Leaf watched four of them launch from the balcony. They carried a chair suspended on ropes beneath them, a silver chair with a high, curving back that looked almost like a throne.
A picnic throne, Leaf thought. And no points for guessing who that’s for .....
She slowed again and looked once more for a hiding spot. Harrison was fussing around with the last of his sleepers, tilting an old woman’s head back so that, like the others, she was looking at the spire in the lake.
Leaf saw a crack in the stone, a shadow that might be just wide enough for her to climb into. She ran over to it and knelt down. It was a very narrow crevasse, but she thought it was a little wider than she was at the top, and it was broader below. It was also only four feet deep, but it looked like there was a hole in one corner that might lead deeper.