‘I guess I’ve done something,’ Arthur said to himself. ‘I just don’t know exactly what...’
He walked a little farther, out into the car park. Something caught his eye, up in the sky, a small silhouette. He peered at it for a few seconds before he worked out that it was a helicopter gunship. But it wasn’t moving. It was like a model stuck on a piece of wire in a diorama, just hanging there in the red-washed sky.
Stuck in a moment of time.
That’s why everyone is frozen in place, Arthur thought. I’ve stopped time... that’s how the Key is keeping everyone in the city safe...
If time was only frozen or slowed inside a bubble around the city, it could start again, or be started again by some other power. Which meant that the nuclear strike on East Area Hospital would still happen. He hadn’t saved the city from the attack. He’d just postponed it...
‘If it isn’t one thing, it’s another,’ whispered Arthur. He looked along the empty street, all strange and red-hued, and wondered if he should run over to his home and see if his family was all right. Maybe he could carry them down into the cellar... but if he did that, he might be wasting time better spent learning how to protect everyone else. He couldn’t carry everyone in danger to safety.
He’d gained a breathing space for the city, and he could extend it by going back to the House. If he left now, he should be able to return to almost exactly the same time, even if he spent days or even weeks in the House.
Should is not the same as definitely, thought Arthur grimly. I wish I understood the time relativities better. I wish I knew more about how to use the Keys. I wish I’d never, ever got involved in all –
Arthur stopped himself.
‘If I wasn’t involved, I’d be dead,’ he said aloud. ‘I just have to get on with it.’
Getting on with it, Arthur thought, included facing up to things. He held his hand up close to his face and looked at the crocodile ring. Even in the weird red light, he could see it clearly. The diamond eyes of the crocodile looked baleful, as dark as dried black blood rather than their usual pink. The ten marked sections of its body, each inscribed with a Roman numeral, recorded the degree of sorcerous contamination in his blood and bone. If more than six sections had turned from silver to gold, Arthur would be permanently tainted with sorcery and irretrievably destined to become a Denizen.
Arthur slowly turned the ring around, to see how far the gold transformation had progressed, counting in his head. One, two, three, four, five... he knew it had gone that far already. He turned the ring again, and saw the gold had completely filled the fifth segment, and had flooded over, almost completely across the sixth segment.
I am... I am going to be a Denizen.
Arthur took a deep, shuddering breath and looked again, but there was no change in the ring. It was six parts gold. He was sixty per cent immortal.
‘No turning back now,’ said Arthur to the red world around him. ‘Time to get back to work.’
He looked away from the ring and lowered his hand. Bending his head for a moment, he drew out the Fifth Key from his pocket and raised it high. According to Dame Primus, the mirror of Lady Friday could take him to anywhere he had previously seen within the House, if there was a reflective surface there.
Arthur pictured the throne room in the Lower House, the big audience chamber where he had met with Dame Primus and everyone before he was drafted into the Army of the Architect. It was the place he could most easily visualise in Monday’s Dayroom, because it didn’t have much detail and was so over the top in decoration – including floors of reflective marble.
‘Fifth Key, take me to the throne room in Monday’s Dayroom.’
The Fifth Key shivered in Arthur’s hand and a beam of white light sprang from it, banishing the red. The light formed a perfect, upright rectangle, exactly like a door.
Arthur walked into the rectangle of light and disappeared from his own city, from his Earth, perhaps never to return.
THREE
THE THRONE ROOM was empty. Otherwise it looked the same as it had when Arthur had last been there: like one enormous, ritzy, poorly conceived hotel bathroom. It was about as large as a big city theatre, and the walls, floor and ceiling were all lined with gold-veined white marble that was polished to a highly reflective sheen.
The vast, red-iron round table was still in the middle of the chamber, with the hundred tall-backed white chairs around it. On the other side, Arthur’s own high throne of gilded iron sat next to the rainbow chair of Dame Primus.
‘Hello!’ Arthur called out. ‘Anyone here?’
His voice filled the empty space, and the echoes were the only answer. Arthur sighed and strode over to the door, his footsteps setting up another echo behind him, so it sounded like he was being followed by many small, close companions.
The corridor outside was still crowded with thousands of bundles of paper, each tied with a red ribbon and stacked like bricks. Unlike last time, there were no Commissionaire Sergeants standing at attention in the gaps between the piles of paperwork.
‘Hello!’ Arthur shouted again. He ran down the corridor, pausing several times to see if there were doors leading out. Eventually he came to the end of the corridor, where he found a door propped half open and partially covered in bundles of paper. He could only see it because one of the piles had collapsed.
There were still no Denizens. Arthur rushed through the half-open door and along another empty corridor, pushing doors open as he passed them without encountering anyone else.
‘Hello! Anyone here?’ he shouted every few yards, but no answer came.
Finally he came to a pair of tall, arched doors of dark oak. They were barred, but he easily lifted the bar – not even pausing to marvel that he had grown so strong that he could move a piece of timber that must weigh several hundred pounds. Once the bar was up, the door was easily pushed open.
This particular door led outside. Arthur had expected to see the lake and the rim of the crater that surrounded the Dayroom, and the ceiling of the Lower House above. Instead he saw a vast, arching wave of Nothing that rose way above him, a wave that had already eaten up everything but the small villa behind him. He felt like he was on a small hilltop, the last piece of dry land ahead of a tsunami – but the wave was coming, climbing high, and it would soon crash down to destroy even this last refuge.
Arthur turned to run, his heart suddenly hammering in fear, his mouth dry as dust. But after that first panicked step, he stopped and turned back. The wave of Nothing was coming down, and he didn’t have time to run. He doubted the Fifth Key could protect him from such a vast influx of Nothing. At least not unless he actively directed its power.
I have to do something, thought Arthur, and he acted with the speed of that thought.
Even as the wave of Nothing crashed down upon him, he raised the mirror and held it high, pushing it toward the dark, falling sky.
‘Stop!’ he shouted, his voice raw with power, every part of his mind focussed on stopping the tsunami of Nothing. ‘Stop! By the Keys I hold, I order the Nothing to stop! House, you must hold against the Void!’
Blinding light shone from the mirror, hot white beams that set the air on fire as they shot out and up, striking the onrush of Nothing, splashing across the face of the darkness, small marks of brilliance upon the void.
Arthur felt a terrible pain blossom in his heart. The pain spread, racing down his arms and legs. Awful cracking sounds came from his joints, and he had to screw his eyes shut and scream as his teeth rearranged themselves into a more perfect order in his jaw. Then his jaw itself moved and he felt the plates of bone in his skull shift and change.