A thought seemed to strike Howl. He coughed. “Why not go to another world?” he suggested. “There are many hundreds of other worlds, you know.”
Hasruel’s wings rose and beat with excitement, whirling the hair and dresses of every princess in the hall. “There are? Where? Show me how I may get to another world.”
Howl put Morgan into Sophie’s awkward arms and bounded up the steps of the throne. What he showed Hasruel was a matter of a few strange gestures and a nod or so. Hasruel seemed to understand perfectly. He nodded in return. Then he rose from the throne and simply walked away, without another word, across the hall and through the wall as if it were so much mist. The huge hall suddenly felt empty.
“Good riddance!” said Howl.
“Did you send him to your world?” Sophie asked.
“No way!” said Howl. “They’ve got enough to worry about there. I sent him in the opposite direction. I took a risk that the castle wouldn’t just disappear.” He turned around slowly, staring out at the cloudy reaches of the hall. “It’s all still here,” he said. “That means Calcifer must be here somewhere. He’s the one who keeps it going.” He gave out a ringing shout. “Calcifer!Where are you?”
The Paragon’s petticoat once more seemed to take on a life of its own. This time it bowled away sideways on its hoops to let the magic carpet float free of it. The carpet shook itself, in rather the same way as Jamal’s dog was now doing. Then, to everyone’s surprise, it flopped to the floor and began to unravel. Abdullah nearly cried out at the waste. The long thread whirling free was blue and curiously bright, as if the carpet were not made of the usual wool at all. The free thread, darting back and forth across the carpet, rose higher and higher as it grew longer, until it was stretched between the high cloudy ceiling and the almost bare canvas it had been woven into. At last, with an impatient flip, the other end tore free from the canvas and shrank upward into the rest, where it spread in a flickering sort of way, and shrank again, and finally spread into a new shape like an upside-down teardrop or maybe a flame. This shape came drifting downward, steadily and purposefully. When it was near, Abdullah could see a face on the front of it composed of little purple or green or orange flames. Abdullah shrugged fatalistically. It seemed that he had parted with all those gold pieces to buy a fire demon and not a magic carpet at all.
The fire demon spoke, with a purple, flickering mouth. “Thank goodness!” it said. “Why didn’t someone call my name before? I hurt.”
“Oh, poor Calcifer!” said Sophie. “I didn’t know!”
“I’m not speaking to you,” retorted the strange flame-shaped being. “You stuck your claws into me. Nor,” it said as it floated past Howl, “to you, either. You let me in for this. It wasn’t me that wanted to help the King’s army. I’m only speaking to him,” it said, bobbing up beside Abdullah’s shoulder. He heard his hair frizzle gently. The flame was hot. “He’s the only person who ever tried to flatter me.”
“Since when,” Howl asked acidly, “have you needed flattery?”
“Since I discovered how nice it is to be told I’m nice,” said Calcifer.
“But I don’t think you are nice,” said Howl. “Be like that, then!” He turned his back on Calcifer with a fling of mauve satin sleeves.
“Do you want to be a toad?” Calcifer asked. “You’re not the only one who can do toads, you know!”
Howl tapped angrily with one mauve-booted foot. “Perhaps,” he said, “your new friend might ask you to get this castle down where it belongs then.”
Abdullah felt a little sad. Howl seemed to be making it plain that he and Abdullah did not know each other. But he took the hint. He bowed. “O sapphire among sorcerous beings,” he said, “flame of festivity and candle among carpets, magnificent more by a hundred times in your true form than ever you were as treasured tapestry—”
“Get on with it!” muttered Howl.
“—would you graciously consent to re-place this castle on earth?” Abdullah finished.
“With pleasure,” said Calcifer.
They all felt the castle going down. It went so fast at first that Sophie clutched Howl’s arm and a number of princesses cried out. For as Valeria loudly said, a person’s stomach got left behind in the sky. It was possible that Calcifer was out of practice after being in the wrong shape for so long. Whatever the reason was, the descent slowed after a minute and became so gentle that everyone hardly noticed it. This was just as well, because as it descended, the castle became noticeably smaller. Everyone was jostled toward everyone else and had to fight for room in which to balance. The walls moved inward, turning from cloudy porphyry to plain plaster as they came. The ceiling moved down, and its vaulting turned to large black beams, and a window appeared behind the place where the throne had been. It was shadowy at first. Abdullah turned toward it eagerly, hoping for one more glimpse of the transparent sea with its sunset islands, but by the time the window was a real solid window, there was only sky outside, flooding the cottage-sized room with clear yellow dawn. By this time princess was crowded against princess, Sophie was squashed in a corner, grasping Howl in one arm and Morgan with the other, and Abdullah found himself squeezed between Flower-in-the-Night and the soldier.
The soldier, Abdullah realized, had not said a word in a very long time. In fact, he was behaving decidedly oddly. He had pulled his borrowed veils back over his head and was sitting bowed over on a small stool which had appeared beside the hearth as the castle shrank.
“Are you quite well?” Abdullah asked him.
“Perfectly,” said the soldier. Even his voice sounded odd.
Princess Beatrice pushed her way through to him. “Oh, there you are!” she said. “Whatever is the matter with you? Afraid I’m going to go back on my promise now we’re getting back to normal? Is that it?”
“No,” said the soldier. “Or rather, yes. It’ll bother you.”
“It will bother me not at all!” snapped Princess Beatrice. “When I make a promise, I keep it. Prince Justin can just go to… whistle.”
“But I am Prince Justin,” said the soldier.
“What?” said Princess Beatrice.
Very slowly and sheepishly the soldier put away his veils and looked up. It was still the same face, with the same blue eyes that were either utterly innocent or deeply dishonest, or both, but it was a smoother and more educated face. A different sort of soldierliness looked out of it. “That damned djinn enchanted me, too,” he said. “I remember it now. I was waiting in a wood for the search parties to report back.” He looked rather apologetic. “We were hunting for Princess Beatrice—er, you, you know—without much luck, and suddenly my tent blew away and there was the djinn, squeezing himself in among the trees. ‘I’m taking the Princess,’ he said. ‘And since you defeated her country by unfair use of magic, you can be one of the defeated soldiers and see how you like it.’ And next thing I knew, I was wandering about on the battlefield, thinking I was a Strangian soldier.”
“And did you hate it?” asked Princess Beatrice.
“Well,” said the Prince, “it was hard. But I sort of got on with it and picked up everything useful I could and made a few plans. I see I shall have to do something for all those defeated soldiers. But”— a grin that was purely that of the old soldier spread across his face— “to tell the truth, I enjoyed myself rather a lot, wandering through Ingary. I had fun being wicked. I’m like that djinn, really. It’s getting back to ruling again that’s depressing me.”