Lady Friday

Chapter Four

Leaf felt her stomach do a weird flip-flop as she opened her eyes. The line of sleepers still marched on, wandering along a wide corridor roughly hewn out of a dull pink stone, lit every few yards by dragon-headed gas jets of tarnished bronze that spat out long blue flames across the slightly curved ceiling. Leaf tried to keep her place in the line of sleepers, but as she took a step she almost lost her balance, her arms windmilling in a most wide-awake fashion.

For several seconds Leaf staggered forward, trying to regain her balance and act asleep at the same time. It took her several more steps to realize that it wasn’t some sort of inner ear problem. Experimenting, she pushed off a little harder-harder than she intended, overcompensating for her bed-weakened legs. She shot up several feet and almost collided with one of the gas jets in the ceiling, even though it was at least nine feet from the floor. Avoiding the flame, she pushed the sleeper ahead of her.

While this confirmed her hypothesis that she was somewhere with lower gravity than Earth, it unfortunately also attracted the attention of the Denizen guards behind her. Two of the final four guards rushed at her, while the others continued on with the few sleepers who were at the end of the line behind her.

Leaf didn’t have time to do more than stand up and look back before the duo gripped her arms and hauled her out of the line to stand on one side of the passage. She let her arms go slack, shut her eyes, and let her head hang, as if she had gone back to sleep, but the Denizens weren’t fooled this time.

“She’s awake,” said one. Though she was dressed in the same gray business suit and trench coat as all the others, Leaf could tell from her voice that she was female.

“Maybe,” said the other, male Denizen. “What do we do with her if she is?”

“Look it up. Have you got a copy of Orders and

Procedures?”

“I was working on the binding last night and I put it under a rock to press it, and then I forgot which rock it was under. Can I borrow yours?”

“I’ve been gilding the initial capitals,” answered the female Denizen. “It’s on my worktable.”

“I suppose we could ask Her ....”

Leaf couldn’t help but shiver; from the way the Denizen said “Her,” it was clear he was talking about Lady Friday.

“Don’t be stupid! She doesn’t want to be bothered. We had one wake up once before. What did we do with her?”

“I’ve never had one wake up, Milka.”

“It was only twenty years ago, local time. Where were you?”

“Where I wish I still was, Sixth Standby Hand on the Big Press. I only got sent here when Jakem took over the binding line. He never liked me, and all because I accidentally wound one of the lesser presses when his head was in it-and that was more than a thousand years ago-”

“I remember!” said Milka.

“You remember? You weren’t there-”

“No, idiot! Not whatever you did. I remember that accidental wake-ups get handed over to the bed turner!”

“Who?”

“The bed turner. You know, the mortal in charge of looking after the sleepers. I forget her name. Or maybe I only knew the name of the one before this one ... or the one before that. They just don’t last long enough to remember.”

“Where do we find this bed turner, then?” asked the male Denizen. Leaf decided that she would call him “Stupid” until she heard his actual name. It seemed to be appropriate.

“She’s got an office somewhere. Look it up on your map. You have got your map, haven’t you? I’ll keep hold of this mortal.”

Leaf felt Stupid let go of her and she started to tense her muscles, ready to try to escape if Milka let go as well. But the female Denizen tightened her grip on Leaf’s upper arm, her fingers digging in hard.

“No you don’t!” said Milka. “I’ve worked enough with Piper’s children to know what you mortals are like. Tricksters, all of you. There’s no point in pretending to be asleep. No point running away from us, neither, because there’s nowhere to go.”

Leaf lifted her head, opened her eyes, and took a long, slow look around. Stupid was clumsily opening up a map that kept on unfolding, growing larger and larger till he had the full eight-by-eight-foot square of thick, linen-rich paper against the wall. Unfortunately, it was the back of the map he was looking at, so he had to turn it over and got rather caught up in it in the process.

Milka sighed, but again did not relax her fierce hold on Leaf’s arm.

“What do you mean, there’s nowhere to go?” Leaf asked as Stupid continued to struggle with the map. He’d gotten it the right way around but part of it had folded back on itself. From the parts Leaf could see, it looked more like the plan of a building than a map. It was all rooms and corridors, arranged in a large circle around some sort of central lake in the middle. Or something round that was colored blue anyway.

“Oh, given up on the tricksy pretending-to-sleep act, have you?” said Milka. She sounded friendly enough. Or at least not actively hostile. “I meant what I said. This here is Lady Friday’s Mountain Retreat. She had the mountain built special back at the House and then shifted it here. That’s when the middle bit sank in-it got dropped a bit. Beyond the mountain there’s one of the wildest, meanest worlds in all the Secondary Realms. She likes her privacy, she does.”

“Found it!” exclaimed Stupid. He put a finger on the map, letting go of one edge in the process. The whole thing collapsed again, folding itself over his head.

“There really is nowhere to run,” Milka repeated, with a sharp dig of her fingers. “You just stand against the wall and in a minute we’ll take you to the bed turner. Give us trouble and you’ll be punished.”

She released Leaf and took the map off Stupid, easily refolding it to show the area that he’d indicated earlier.

For a moment Leaf did think of running. But her legs were still weak, her balance was off, and most of all she believed Milka. There probably was nowhere to run to, or at least nowhere immediately obvious. It would be best to go along for now and learn as much as possible about where she was. Then she could work out a plan not just to get away herself but to rescue Aunt Mango-and everyone else, if it was possible.

“Circle Six, Eighteen Past,” said Milka. “And we’re on Circle Two at Forty-three Past. So we have to go up four circles and either back around or forward. Back would be a bit quicker.”

“Why?” asked Stupid.

Milka sighed. “Because counterclockwards around the circle from forty-three to eighteen is twenty-five segments and clockwards from forty-three to eighteen is thirty-five segments.”

“Oh, right, I wasn’t counting properly,” said Stupid. He pointed to his right. “That’s forward, isn’t it?”

“No, that’s backward,” said Milka. “You’re facing into the crater.”

She prodded Leaf. “Come on. The sooner you get delivered, the sooner you get to work.”

“Work?” asked Leaf. “What work?”

“You’ll find out,” said Milka. “Hurry up.”

Leaf started walking. Every step felt strange; she had to consciously take smaller, less forceful movements in order to keep her balance. It wasn’t like being on the moon-at least she wasn’t moving like the Chinese astronauts who’d landed there a few years ago. She guessed it was about eighty-five percent of what was normal on Earth. Enough to upset her balance, that was for sure.

The rough-hewn passage with its gaslights continued for several hundred yards, always curving gently to the left. Every now and then there were doors, sometimes on both sides. Very ordinary-looking wooden doors, all painted pale blue, with a wide variety of bronze knobs and handles that might or might not signify what lay behind them.

“Slow down!” Milka called out. “Take the stairs on the right.”

Leaf slowed down. There was an open archway up ahead, on the right. The number 42 was painted in white on the right of the arch-or rather, Leaf saw, the numeral was a mosaic made of small pieces of ivory or something similar. At the apex of the arch there was another white numeral, this time 2.

Through the arch was a landing that had the number 2 inlaid in the floor, again in small white stones or pieces of ivory. From the landing there was a broad stair that went up to the left and down to the right, the steps again carved straight out of the stone, this time faced with a smoother, pale stone with a bluish tint. The stairs were also lit by gas jets, smaller ones than before, which were shaped like crouching leopards and set into the wall rather than the ceiling.

“Up!” ordered Milka.

Leaf turned to the left and started up the steps. She climbed quite a long way before they came to another landing, which had the number 3 on it.

“Three more to go,” said Milka.

Even with the lower gravity, it was a long climb. Leaf counted three hundred steps between level three and level four and a similar number between four and five, though she lost count at one point, when her mind was distracted by worries, both for her family and for herself.

They met no one else on the way up and there was no one in evidence when they came out on level 6, or “circle six” as Milka called it. The corridor they entered looked almost exactly like the one the sleepers had taken, way down below, though Leaf did note there was some minor variation in the colour and texture of the rock.

“Now we walk around to segment eighteen,” said Milka.

“I hate this place,” said Stupid. “I wish we were back in the House.”

“Quiet!” snapped Milka. “You never know who might hear you!”

“I was just saying-”

“Well, don’t. What did I do to get lumbered with you anyway, Feorin?”

Leaf was a bit disappointed to hear Feorin’s real name. It made it hard to keep thinking of him as Stupid.

“I don’t know,” he said now. “Did you accidentally press someone?”

“No. I volunteered. Thought it would lead to promotion. Now be quiet. The sooner we drop off this child, the sooner we can have a cup of tea and put our feet up.”

“Tea? Have you got some?” asked Feorin. “Really?”

“Yes. I got a chest from those rats last time we were back home. Hurry up.”

They walked considerably faster after the mention of tea, with Feorin leading the way. Judging from the numbers they came across every few hundred yards and from her brief look at the map, Leaf worked out that she was in a circular passage that was divided into chapters-or segments-like a clock. The passage ran along the outer rim of the circle and all the rooms and presumably lesser corridors ran from the rim in towards the center, or at least until they hit whatever the big blue thing was on the map.

Leaf spent some of the time working out how big the circle was. If there were sixty segments and the distance between segments was about three hundred paces, and she knew her paces were about eighteen inches long, then the total circumference was 300 times 1.5 feet, or 450 feet or 150 yards, times 60, which was 9000 yards or about 5 miles. From that, using c=2nr she could calculate the diameter ....

Leaf was so intent on working this out in her head that she didn’t realize that Feorin had suddenly stopped. She ran into his back and bounced off, losing her balance and landing on her bottom.

Leaf started to get up but instantly decided to stay where she was as Feorin threw his arms back, his trench coat flew off, and his eggshell-blue wings exploded out, the trailing feathers brushing across her face. At the same time, he drew a short sword or a long dagger from a sheath at his side, a dagger whose mirrored blade sent bright reflections leaping across the walls.

Milka followed suit a fraction of a second later and actually leaped over Leaf, the gas flame in the ceiling whooshing as she passed through it. Like Feorin, her wings were pale blue, and she too had a mirror-surfaced dagger.

Leaf couldn’t see what they were attacking-or defending against-because the Denizens’ weapons were too bright. All she saw were the flicker of wings and a blur of light like the photon trails left in long-exposure photographs of nighttime traffic.

Then Feorin was hurled past her, thrown at least thirty feet back down the passage. He hit the floor and skidded along at least another twenty feet before hitting a curve of the wall.

Leaf saw the attacker then. Or part of it-a long, gray tendril or tentacle as thick as her leg and ten feet long, which was connected to a gray, mottled object the shape of an oval football but as big as a refrigerator. It was scuttling backwards like a huge rat, though she could see no legs. Leaf only got to see it for a second before Milka cut the tendril into several bits and then plunged her dagger into the football-shaped thing with a flash of light so intense that Leaf was not only blinded but felt a heat on her face as if she had been instantly sunburned.

It took several seconds for her vision to come back, seconds spent stunned as her mind and body began to work out that she should actually be seriously afraid and doing something, preferably running away.

But when her sight began to return, complete with floating dots and blotchy bits, Leaf quelled her fear. She was aided in this because Milka was kicking small blackened fragments of the thing she’d fought into a pile, in a manner that indicated it was no longer any sort of threat. And Feorin was walking back, seemingly unconcerned.

“What was that?” asked Leaf. Her voice sounded small and scared and distant, even to herself.