The Purple Emperor

CHAPTER NINETY FIVE

Blue woke with a start.

There was someone in her room! She could hear the steady breathing. How had they passed the guards?

She scrabbled for a weapon and found instead an emergency moon cone. Pale light flooded her chamber as she cracked it.

Comma was standing at the bottom of her bed.

'What do you think you're doing?' Blue snapped angrily. He was always creeping around where he wasn't wanted, but this was something else.

'Couldn't sleep,' Comma said sulkily. 'I want to talk to you, Blue.'

'I don't care. You can talk to me in the morning. Late in the morning. Or dammit no, you can't. Just leave me alone and talk to somebody else. I'm going back to sleep.' She turned and pulled the blankets over her ear.

Comma moved to sit on the bed. 'They've locked Mummy up again.'

'Yes, I know. And I'm glad. She's -'

'Sometimes I can hear her screaming in the night.'

'No you can't – that's just dreams.'

'I'd have talked to her if they hadn't locked her up. She could tell me what to do about Pyrgus.'

There was something in his tone that stopped her at once. She sat up, caught Comma looking at her nightgown, and pulled the bedclothes up around her throat. 'What about Pyrgus?' she demanded angrily.

Comma said almost sleepily, 'He killed our father.'

'No he didn't. You know he didn't – it was the demon that possessed Mr Fogarty, you little creep. If you -'

'It was Pyrgus the second time,' Comma said in an oddly singsong voice. 'He thought I wasn't watching and he cut off father's head.'

'That's it!' Blue said. 'Get out!'

'All right, I'm going,' Comma told her hurriedly. He leaped from the bed and scuttled across the room, but paused at the door. 'You ask the other man,' he said. 'He saw it too.' Then he was gone.

Blue lay in bed, fuming. Whatever happened, however bad, you could always rely on Comma to make it worse somehow.

There was no question of sleep now, so she climbed out of bed and pulled on a dressing gown. Why did he do it? Why? Why make up stories at all, let alone in the middle of the night? Their father was already dead when they had reached that ghastly operating room. His stomach was open and his head – his head -

Actually she couldn't remember noticing his head was severed, but it must have been. There was certainly that hideous open wound on his stomach. Hairstreak must have – must have -

All the same, Comma was pure evil. Or mad like his mother. Why else would he make up a story about Pyrgus? The thing was, he always messed up on the detail. Ask the other man, he said. But there wasn't any other man. Nymphalis had killed everybody else in the room except Hairstreak, and Hairstreak had run. There was just Comma and Pyrgus and the bod- There was Chalkhill. They'd left him strapped to the other operating table. They'd walked out and left him hurling abuse, demanding they come back, threatening… Threatening what? Blue couldn't remember, but it had nothing to do with Pyrgus or her father. Just threatening, that's all – the sort of thing people like Chalkhill did when they couldn't have their own way.

She wondered what had happened to Chalkhill when the Forest Faerie had demolished Hairstreak's mansion.

If Mr Fogarty was surprised to see Blue in the middle of the night, he didn't show it. He stood, dressed in a weird nightcap and gown, looking, she thought, more like a wizard than the wizards of the Realm.

'Yes,' he said in answer to her question. 'The Forest Faerie found him. They released him to my custody and I sent him back to Asloght.'

'The jail?'

'He has the rest of his sentence to serve. Lord Hairstreak sprung him on a ruse.'

She'd never heard the term sprung him, but decided it must mean that Hairstreak had released Chalkhill illegally. 'I need to see him.'

'Now?'

'Yes.' She waited for him to point out it was the middle of the night.

'Let me get some clothes on and I'll take you,' Mr Fogarty said.