Lord Sunday

Nine

THE ELEVATOR FELL faster than was usual, and the ride was far less smooth. Suzy and Giac were thrown against the walls, and Part Six of the Will had to constantly flap its wings to keep its balance, finally just latching on to Suzy’s shoulder. It continued to flap there too, as Suzy tried to wedge herself into one corner to keep steady, with Giac in the opposite corner.

Even more alarming, every now and then a tiny globule of Nothing would explode through the floor and exit through the ceiling. This mostly happened near the back of the elevator, and the three passengers kept well away. If the Nothing actually hit anyone, it would dissolve everything in its upward path. Even a glancing pass might destroy a hand or foot.

It was also a frightening indication that Nothing was continuing to impinge on the House. If there were globules and particles of Nothing loose in the elevator shafts, it was likely the Void had breached more defences.

‘Are you sure you pressed the right button?’ asked Suzy. ‘Cos you know half the House is just Nothing now, and if we’re dropping into it-’

‘The corroded buttons indicate high contamination by Nothing,’ said the Will, who had been studying the rows of bronze or formerly bronze buttons. ‘Those that are entirely black and crumbled show lost portions of the House.’

‘So the one for the Great Maze was still bright?’ asked Suzy. ‘That’s good.’

‘Not entirely,’ said the Will. ‘There are several elevator positions within the Maze. Some of them are black. The one I chose is a little tarnished, and the verdigris is spreading, even in this short time.’

‘The Maze is dissolving?’ asked Suzy. ‘Nothing is spreading there as well?’

‘It appears so,’ said the Will. ‘I think we had better hurry this elevator up.’

It flew from Suzy’s shoulder, up to the ceiling above the buttons, and, using its beak like an ice pick, smashed through a small walnut-and-ivory veneered panel that was set into the plainer wood. There was a gold ring behind the panel.

The Will glanced back down and said, ‘Crouch and brace yourselves.’

Suzy and Giac obeyed. The raven grabbed the ring, folded its wings, and dropped back down to Suzy’s shoulder, pulling a slender golden chain out of the ceiling by the ring. As the chain grew longer, the elevator’s speed increased. By the time the Will arrived on Suzy’s shoulder, she felt herself rising into the air, suddenly weightless as the elevator accelerated down.

‘I’m floating!’ she cried. ‘This is great!’

‘Is it?’ asked Giac worriedly. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Hold on!’ warned the Will. ‘We’ll slow down just as fast. Or hit very hard. One, two, three, four, five, six-’

The raven released the ring on ‘six,’ and the chain shot back into the ceiling. As it did so, the elevator slowed suddenly, slamming Suzy and Giac to the floor. A few seconds later, there was a terrible impact. The elevator exploded around them, throwing them into the air again in a storm of splinters and broken floorboards. Before they could fall back down, everything tilted over on a sharp incline and all three of them slid down the wall and ended up in a confused tangle in the dangerous corner where the Nothing globules had turned the elevator into a sieve.

Finally a bell went ping and the inner door slid open to reveal a bent and buckled grille door that was hanging off its hinges. Beyond it lay a guardroom, where a dozen somewhat surprised Denizens uniformed in the buff coats and grey trousers of the Moderately Honourable Artillery Company were snatching up and readying their musketoons, pistols, sparkizan halberds, and swords.

‘Guess we’re here,’ said Suzy as she crawled across Giac’s legs and brushed the Will’s wings away from her face, since it was perched on her head. ‘Wherever here is.’

She stood up, brushed off the splinters and dust, and held up her hands, which seemed a wise precaution given the number of Nothing-powder weapons that were now aimed at her, including a small, wheeled artillery piece that was being pushed over by another half dozen artillerists, its bronze barrel coming into alignment with the door of the elevator.

‘I’m General Suzy Turquoise Blue, personal aide-decamp to Lord Arthur,’ she called out. ‘Who’s in command here?’

The weapons were not lowered, and no one answered. Suzy had a moment of doubt, which was unusual for her, as she wondered whether the artillerists had gone from being moderately honourable to dishonourable, joining the Piper or Saturday. Then a Gun-Sergeant, his sleeves resplendent with gold stripes and crossed cannons, gestured to the other Denizens, who lowered their weapons a little, though not so much that anyone in the elevator would have a chance to break out. The gunner with the slow match near the cannon also lifted this burning fuse away from the touchhole, but not enough for anyone to get comfortable.

‘Stay there, ma’am, and you others,’ the Gun-Sergeant called out. ‘Marshal Dusk commands here, and we are under orders to take no chances. I saw you at the Citadel fight, ma’am, but seeing ain’t always believing, so if you’ve no objection, we’ll send word to the Marshal.’

He made a sign with his hand, and one of the artillerists towards the rear slid out around the heavy ironbound door on the opposite side from the elevator.

‘Good idea,’ said Suzy. ‘Um, where is here? We’re not at the Citadel?’

‘This here’s the Cannon Arsenal,’ said the Gun-Sergeant. He was about to add something else when he was interrupted by three distant horn blasts from somewhere outside.

‘You might want to block your ears,’ said the Gun-Sergeant, though neither he nor any of the other gunners made any move to do so.

Giac promptly obeyed, and the Will thrust its head under its wing. Suzy, however, was about to ask why when there was a sudden titanic blast outside. The stone walls of the guardroom shook, and the elevator canted over even more, till it was almost horizontal, and Suzy was sitting on what used to be the wall.

The Gun-Sergeant said something, but Suzy couldn’t hear it over the ringing in her ears. As the tinnitus subsided, the Gun-Sergeant spoke again, and though Suzy couldn’t really hear it she could work out what he was saying by watching his lips.

‘Told you so,’ he said.

Suzy grinned and mimed cleaning her ears out with her fingers. It actually helped, so she kept at it, and looked in surprise at her blackened fingertips.

‘Must be quite a while since the Bathroom Attendants washed between my ears,’ she said proudly. ‘I don’t reckon they’ll get another chance.’

‘I think it very unlikely,’ said Part Six of the Will. It hopped onto Suzy’s shoulder and peered at the artillerists. ‘Tell me, Sergeant, why are you all wearing black armbands? And what was that explosion?’

The Gun-Sergeant narrowed his eyes.

‘I’m not answering questions from a bird of dubious background,’ he said. ‘You look like some kind of Nithling.’

‘I beg your pardon,’ said the Will. ‘I’ll have you know that I am Part-’

‘Shush,’ said Suzy, clasping the raven’s beak shut. ‘The bird’s all right. Marshal Dusk will vouch for it, as well as for me.’

‘What about him?’ asked one of the other gunners, pointing at Giac. ‘He’s one of Saturday’s, isn’t he?’

‘Well, he was,’ said Suzy. ‘Only now ’e’s not, orright? He works for Lord Arthur, same as the rest of us.’

‘If you say so,’ sniffed the gunner, but he maintained a ready stance with his sparkizan, and kept a thin blue spark sidling along the blade of the halberd-like weapon.

‘So why the black armbands, then?’ asked Suzy, repeating the Will’s question. ‘And what was that boom? Someone smoking in the Nothing-powder store again?’

A chorus of irritated voices answered the last question first. It was a commonly held belief in the rest of the Army that the Moderately Honourable Artillery Company’s artillerists and engineers were always on the verge of blowing themselves up by accident and that only good luck spared them. It was a completely unfounded belief, but that didn’t make it any less irritating.

‘Quiet!’ roared the Gun-Sergeant. The ruckus died down, and the burly Denizen turned back to Suzy. ‘Now, General, presuming you is who you say you are, you know that there ain’t no artillerist who smokes, even if we could get the makings, which we can’t since the fall of the Far Reaches. Likewise we don’t play games with matches or fire-starters or flame-sprays or sparkizans or any of the things that them other units says we do. So we don’t take kindly to jokes about our Nothing-powder stores blowing up or-’

He paused suddenly, and with the sixth sense of a long-serving sergeant, suddenly braced to attention and shouted, ‘Stand fast!’

The artillerists jerked fully upright to become frozen statues as the heavy door creaked fully open and a tall Denizen in a dark grey uniform with black epaulets entered.

‘Marshal Dusk!’ Suzy called out.

‘General Suzy Blue,’ Dusk answered gravely. He paused to offer an elegant salute, which Suzy returned with less elegance but considerable gusto.

‘Your arrival is unlooked for,’ Dusk continued, with just the hint of a question. ‘As are your companions. Am I right in presuming that I address a Part of the Will?’

‘You are,’ said the raven, preening. It liked to be recognised.

‘And one of Saturday’s sorcerers?’

‘Oh, no, sir,’ said Giac. ‘Just a Sorcerous Supernumerary, as I was, sir. But now I serve Lord Arthur.’

‘I am pleased to hear it,’ said Dusk. ‘I am sure there is much more to hear, but there is very little time to hear it. We must all be on the adjacent tile before it moves at sundown.’

‘Where are we going to go?’ asked Suzy. She was familiar with the way the Great Maze was divided into thousands of mile-square tiles that moved at the end of every day, often travelling great distances in a single minute. But she did not possess one of the almanacs that officers used to work out which tile to get on in order to move to their required destination.

She stepped out of the wreckage of the elevator as she spoke, and walked closer to Dusk, turning to one side for a moment so she could look out the narrow window in the thick stone wall.

‘Too much of the Maze has been broken through by Nothing,’ said Dusk. ‘We are evacuating to the Middle House. Most of the Army has already gone over the course of the day. I command a rearguard that has been destroying our siege train and larger guns, since we cannot take them with us, and there is the slight chance the Piper or some other enemy might swoop in and retrieve some for later use against us, before Nothing completely destroys the Maze.’

‘That explains the explosion,’ said the Will. It flew to the window and peered out with its sharp black eyes. ‘Perhaps you might tell me why you wear funereal armbands?’

‘For Sir Thursday,’ said Dusk after a moment’s hesitation. ‘He was our commander in chief for millennia, after all, though he broke his trust to the Architect.’

‘You mean he’s dead too?’ asked Suzy.

‘Yes,’ said Dusk. ‘This morning, in his cell. The guards outside were also slain, and only Sir Thursday’s boots remained.’

‘Sounds more like he escaped,’ Suzy said.

‘His feet were still in the boots,’ said Dusk. ‘The rest of him had been dissolved by Nothing.’

Suzy raised an eyebrow and scratched her head.

‘So they’re all dead,’ she said. ‘Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday ... but who killed them?’

‘What of Lady Friday?’ asked the Will. ‘I understand she was also imprisoned in the Citadel?’

‘She lives yet, for all I know,’ said Dusk. ‘But she was taken with the advance party to the Middle House some hours ago.’

The Will mulled this over for a moment before cocking its head to ask, ‘And the other Parts of the Will? Where are they? Have they remade themselves as Dame Primus, or are they still divided?’

‘I believe they ... ah ... she ... that is, Dame Primus has rejoined ... herself ... and is now at the Middle House, where she has established a command post,’ said Dusk. ‘In preparation for Lord Arthur, of course. You do not happen to know where Lord Arthur is, by the by?’

‘We do not,’ said the Will with a look at Suzy. ‘But he gave me orders to prepare a force to assault the Upper House. If the Army has retreated to the Middle-’

Dusk interrupted him.

‘Not “retreated”, please,’ he said. ‘We have merely taken up an alternate position, in preparation for further offensive action.’

‘If the Army and Dame Primus are in the Middle House, we must go there,’ said the Will. ‘But we cannot do so from this elevator.’

‘Indeed,’ said Dusk. ‘I am surprised you arrived in it. Doctor Scamandros judged that shaft to be too compromised by Nothing, or we would have used it ourselves.’

‘Trust you to call a rotten elevator,’ said Suzy to the Will. It clacked its beak at her and flew to Giac’s shoulder. He stiffened in alarm and looked away, as if he could ignore the presence of the sorcerous bird.

Marshal Dusk took a silver pocket watch out of his sleeve and flipped it open.

‘Come! We have less than an hour. We must march to the next tile at once. It moves to the Citadel, and our last working elevator is at the Citadel.’

‘So the tiles are moving?’ asked Suzy. ‘They haven’t broken down?’

‘Some still move,’ replied Dusk. ‘We must hope the one we need will take us. If it doesn’t ...’

‘If it doesn’t ...’ prompted Suzy when Marshal Dusk did not finish.

‘We will be consumed by Nothing,’ concluded the Denizen.