Lady Friday. Гарт Никс

“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 centre, 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=2?r she could calculate the diameter.

      Leaf was so intent on working this out in her head that she didn’t realise 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 grey tendril or tentacle as thick as her leg and ten feet long, which was connected to a grey, 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.

       CHAPTER FIVE

      “open up!” repeated Arthur. “Or else I’ll blast this door off its hinges!”

      He withdrew his rapier from the letterbox and it transformed back into a baton. Arthur hoped this meant that no immediate enemies were in the vicinity and that whoever was behind the door was friendly, or at least neutral. He figured he likely had only minutes before a whole lot more Nithlings showed up – probably with their boss. That could be anyone or anything, he guessed, ranging from Saturday’s Dusk to one of the Piper’s New Nithling officers. Whoever it was, Arthur wanted to be inside the tower before they arrived.

      There was no immediate response to his shout. Arthur was just drawing breath to repeat his order for the third time and wondering what he would actually do if they didn’t open up, when he heard the sound of several bolts being withdrawn on the other side of the door, followed by the door itself creaking open.

      A thin but very wiry Denizen poked his head around nervously and said, “Come in, sir, come in. You won’t slay us all, will you?”

      “I won’t slay anyone,” said Arthur.

      The Denizen stood aside as the boy came through; she pushed the foot-thick, iron-bound door closed with considerable effort and slid home several huge bolts, then lowered a bar that looked as if it would be more at home as the central prop for a very deep mine, where it could hold up tons and tons of rock.

      Arthur looked around at the small antechamber, but there was nothing of interest to see apart from slightly damp stone walls and another, closed door opposite of a less sturdy appearance. It was still very cold.

      “I just want to get warm,” said Arthur. “Who are you?”

      “Marek Flat Gold, sir. Leading Foilmaker, Second Class, 97,858^th in precedence within the House. You’re not going to slay us? Or destroy the mill?”

      “No,” said Arthur. He didn’t pause to wonder why a Denizen who towered over him could be so afraid of a young, mortal boy. Marek hesitated, then opened the inner door and gestured for Arthur to go ahead.

      The boy walked through, but recoiled as he passed the threshold and felt a wave of heat roll over him, accompanied by fierce yellow light.

      “Wow, it’s hot in here!”

      He felt like he’d walked from the snow into a sauna. Past the door was a huge open area, as big as a sports arena, far larger than was possible from the tower’s outer dimensions. Arthur was used to that; in the House many buildings were larger on the inside than they seemed on the outside. What he hadn’t been prepared for was the heat, the rich red and yellow light, and the source of both: a huge pool of molten gold in the middle of the chamber. It was as big as an Olympic-size swimming pool, but instead of being sunk into the ground, it was built up, its clear crystal sides at least six feet high.

      Red-hot liquid gold flowed from the big pool along an open gutter of crystal that was supported by stilts of dark iron, ending up in a series of six smaller pools. At each of these, Denizens scooped the gold up with tools that looked like big cups on the end of ten-foot-long metal poles. The gold-carriers then took their cups to another corner of the chamber, where it was cast into ingots. The still-hot ingots were carried away by yet more Denizens who wore huge, elbow-high padded gloves, a constantly moving line of them taking the gold to another corner, which looked like a brick yard, except with gold ingots instead of bricks stacked up everywhere. As soon as a Denizen unloaded his ingots he went back again in yet another line. Both moving lines of Denizens reminded Arthur very much of ants at work.

      In addition to the heat and light, there was also a dull, mechanical thumping noise that pervaded the room. That came from one end, where an axle powered by the waterwheel outside turned a slightly smaller interior wheel, which in turn drove a series of lesser wheels, belts and pistons that