‘Ah, perhaps I have been a little too rigorous in applying the principles laid down at my creation,’ the sun bear said with a couple of delicate coughs. ‘If I might make a closer examination of –’ ‘Arthur! Take a look at this!’
Arthur pushed through the bushes. Suzy was standing on a long stone bench, looking out over a well-manicured hedge towards the eastern side of the glass pyramid.
‘Get down!’ Arthur called nervously. ‘He’ll see us.’
‘Come and have a look!’ answered Suzy.
Arthur glanced around, then jumped up, knowing from past experience that Suzy wouldn’t get down until he took a look at whatever it was she wanted him to see.
‘I think Grim Tuesday has got a whole lot of new problems,’ said Suzy, pointing to the border between the windswept clean air and the ceiling-high wall of smog.
Arthur stared. Through the swirling edge of the smog, he saw the fringe of a great crowd. Hundreds and hundreds, maybe even thousands, of Denizens were marching north, towards the station and the elevators. They were waving their leather aprons as they marched, throwing them in the air and trampling upon them.
Closer to the pyramid, a few dozen Overseers were running in all directions. A few ran towards the glass wall. Arthur could see they were shouting, probably to Grim Tuesday, for help, though he could only hear the ringing bells and the deeper, rough noise of the crowd.
‘The register of indentured workers,’ he said. ‘It was destroyed by the sun!’
‘Sure was.’ Suzy took out the indenture ticket from around her neck and looked at it. All the columns had reset to zero. Suzy took it off, bit it with her teeth to start a tear, then ripped it to pieces.
‘I can make another register,’ said a harsh voice behind them. ‘The other Days will sell me more workers. It is merely an annoyance.’
Arthur spun around. Even though the boy was standing on a bench, Grim Tuesday was taller. A hard-faced man with no eyebrows, his arms were corded with muscle, and his leather jerkin was torn near the heart with the telltale marks of a Nothing burn upon his chest. He wore gloves of flexible silver metal, bound with golden bands.
‘I . . . I am the Rightful Heir,’ said Arthur, though his mouth was suddenly dry. ‘I claim the Second Key and Mastery of the Far Reaches.’
Grim Tuesday’s eyes narrowed. ‘You are the boy Penhaligon.’
‘Yes. I am Arthur Penhaligon. Give me the Second Key and . . . and I will be merciful.’
‘I do not recognise your claim,’ said Grim Tuesday with finality. He raised his right hand and made a chopping motion. Though he didn’t come any closer, Arthur felt a savage blow strike his chest. He was knocked backwards over the bench, and crashed down to the grass behind.
Arthur lay there, stunned and wheezing.
I have to get up. I have to get up and get away. I have to – Before he could get up, Grim Tuesday stood above him. This time he raised his left hand and made a claw.
Arthur covered his eyes with his arm and cried out.
I hope it’s quick. I hope Dad and Mum will be okay and they keep the house and everything. I hope Michaeli gets to university. The plague had better not come back. Suzy should run right now, she might make it. If Nothing bursts out, everyone will die anyway. The Will should do what it’s supposed to do. I tried my best. I tried to do the right thing and sometimes evil does win anyway no matter what you do . . .
‘Before I extract your heart and gild it for my . . . depleted store of treasures,’ Grim Tuesday said, ‘I want you to give me the Atlas. Take it from your pocket and hand it to me.’
Arthur moved his arm and opened his eyes. His mind was racing furiously again, but his thoughts were more concentrated.
‘No,’ he said.
The Atlas must be like the Key. Grim Tuesday can’t take it, even from my dead body. It has to be given freely.
‘Give it to me,’ Grim Tuesday ordered, without inflection. He might not have even heard Arthur. He clawed the air with his hand, and Arthur felt his heart stabbed all around by a thousand needles.
‘No, I won’t.’ Arthur raised his voice and half-shouted and half-sobbed out, ‘Will! I call upon you as the Bearer of the Atlas and the Rightful Heir to do your . . . do your job. Just do . . . do what you’re supposed to do . . .’ he finished in a whisper.
‘Give me the Atlas!’ roared Grim Tuesday. ‘Why am I thwarted at every turn?!’
‘Cos you’re a rotten bastard,’ said Suzy as she popped out from the hedge and swung a large paving stone at the back of his head. But she would have done better not to speak. Grim Tuesday spun like a top, a blur of motion, and smashed the stone to powder with his fist. Suzy was also caught by the blow, flying through the air to smack into a palm tree. She struck with enough force to snap its trunk, and fell down with it.
‘Now, Penhaligon, the Atlas!’
‘No,’ whispered Arthur. ‘You give me the Key.’
‘You shall know pain,’ threatened the Grim. ‘Unspeakable pain, until you give me the Atlas.’
‘Ahem!’
Grim Tuesday looked surprised by the interruption. He glanced around at normal head height, but it wasn’t until the second ‘ahem!’ that he saw the Will near his feet. His eyes narrowed and he clenched his fists.
‘What?!’ Grim Tuesday raged. ‘You, here! I shall soon fix that!’
‘I think not,’ said the Will, and for once Arthur was glad to hear its stuffy, self-satisfied tone. ‘You tricked me once, but not again. And I have taken the precaution of enlisting assistance.’
The bushes parted and Tom strode out, his harpoon in his hand. He nodded curtly at Grim Tuesday and reached down to help Arthur up.
‘You are bound to me, Captain,’ snarled Grim Tuesday, raising both his hands. ‘By the power of the Second Key –’
‘Which I now officially place in dispute,’ announced the Will. ‘I revoke your status of Trustee, pending further inquiry.’
Grim Tuesday shook his head. ‘You cannot. I will not allow it! I do not allow anyone to take things away from me!What is mine is mine forever.’
‘Your sooty old eyebrow proved that one wrong when it ate up a bunch of stuff,’ said Suzy, staggering over. Her nose was bleeding but otherwise she seemed to be all right. Grim Tuesday took a step towards her and raised his hand, but did not persist when Tom made a slight motion with his harpoon.
‘Your wishes are immaterial, Lord Tuesday,’ declared the Will. ‘I have spoken. While I am not ready to pronounce on the matter of a Rightful Heir, it is clear that you cannot continue to wield the power of the Second Key.’
‘You must allow it,’ said Grim Tuesday with cold satisfaction. He pointed at the bursting rockets up in the smoggy regions. ‘Those are distress signals from the depths of my Pit. The bells confirm it, as will the screams of my former workers. Nothing is breaking out. Only I can stem it, and I must have the power of the Key to do so. But I know when to cut my losses. You may all leave my domain. I shall not prevent you.’
‘The outbreak of Nothing is not my concern,’ continued the Will. ‘I shall establish an inquiry into the Rightful Heir, and once I have examined all the relevant documents and heard from material witnesses, whoever is granted the Second Key, whether it is returned to your trust or not, shall deal with the Nothing. We must not be too hasty. Prudence is a virtue, as I always say.’
This speech was somewhat lost as everyone else was staring up at the distress rockets and the gobbets of Nothing that were already beginning to fall down upon the pyramid, despite the cleansing winds.
‘There’s no time for an inquiry,’ said Tom. ‘Declare Arthur the heir. He must go down and repel the Nothing. Grim Tuesday’s day is done.’
The sun bear sighed and seemed about to launch into another speech when a particularly large gobbet plummeted onto the glass a few hundred feet above. It ran down the side and joined several other gobbets, which writhed and coiled together until they became a Nithling. A large Nithling, with a sort of human head and torso upon a cricket’s body, all of it covered in stiff, rodlike red hair. It fiddled its back legs together, then set about punching holes in the glass with the spikes on its elbows.
‘One here, a thousand down below,’ said Grim Tuesday. ‘And raw Nothing everywhere, eating away at the foundations of this House. Confirm me in my power, Most Excellent Testament, and I shall secure those foundations as I have always done.’
‘You dug into them for your own greedy purposes, using Denizens as slaves!’ Arthur pointed out with indignation. He took a deep breath, the deepest he’d ever managed, and looked down at theWill. ‘I don’t want to be the Heir,’ he continued. ‘I don’t want the Second Key. I really don’t want to go and deal with the Nothing. But I have to, because I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. When Dame Primus picked me, I had to do the right thing – and I have to try to keep on doing it. You don’t want to confirm me as the Heir, but I think you have to do the right thing too, so I can at least attempt to put things right.’
‘I don’t want to make a mistake,’ said the Will softly. ‘Better not to make a decision than to make a mistake.’
‘The whole House is going to fall down if you don’t make a decision!’ Arthur argued. ‘Everything the Architect made will return to Nothing. You have to choose me . . . or Grim Tuesday, and Grim Tuesday has already gone against the Architect’sWill.’
The Nithling above stopped making holes and started punching the side of the pyramid. The glass didn’t shatter, but cracks began to appear.
TheWill stood up on its hind legs. The sun blaze upon its chest grew brighter and brighter, and its fur became less furlike and more full of words. It grew larger, the words spreading out, weaving a larger body. It changed shape, continuing to grow, though it still remained a bear.
‘I will be strong,’ it said. The blaze on its chest turned black and the words that made it up darkened and became furlike once more. It now stood almost as tall as Grim Tuesday, and was twice his bulk. No longer a sun bear, but an imperial grizzly of forbidding aspect. ‘I will stand by my decision with tooth and claw. I am the Second Part of the Will of the Architect, and I say the Second Key must be –’
Just then, a huge square of glass exploded, and the half-insect Nithling leaped down with a chittering scream.
TWENTY
HUGE SHARDS OF GLASS came falling down, shining in the artificial sunlight from the panels in the ceiling high above. The Nithling fell between the shards, screaming its strange insectoid scream.
For an instant, everyone stood still, staring up. Then Arthur dived under the stone bench just as Suzy dived from the opposite direction. TheWill grabbed a palm tree and uprooted it, holding it over its head like an umbrella.
Grim Tuesday stood his ground, raised his hands, and shouted . . . but nothing happened. His mouth gaped in surprise, for he had forgotten that theWill had revoked his power over the Second Key.
Tom spun his harpoon above his head and shouted a word in the strange rasping language he used for his magic. Arthur and Suzy clapped their hands over their ears, but it was no good. The pain struck them, eating into their jawbones as the harpoon shone with its arctic glow. The light caught the falling glass, and suddenly it wasn’t glass anymore, but a great wave of freezing seawater.
The wave crashed down, sweeping Arthur and Suzy out from under the bench. It carried them about ten yards away, depositing them all tossed together against a stand of trees.
Both Grim Tuesday and Tom had managed to stand against the wave. Now they faced the Nithling, which jumped at Tuesday, gripping his jerkin with its spiky insectoid legs as it raised its elbows to spike into his head.
Tom raised his harpoon, but could not strike without spearing Grim Tuesday as well. But his intervention was not needed. Even without the power of the Second Key, Grim Tuesday was a mighty Denizen. He gripped the Nithling’s arms and with a sound like a lobster being cracked open, he split the thing completely in half. He threw the remains into an ornamental pool, where the thing’s Nothing-rich blood bubbled away.
Grim Tuesday snorted, bent down, and wiped his gauntlets clean on the grass. Arthur and Suzy straightened themselves out, and theWill thrust its tree umbrella back into the ground.
‘As I was saying,’ it boomed, ‘the Second Key will go to the winner of an appropriate contest, the two contestants being Arthur Penhaligon and Grim Tuesday.’
‘What?!’ exclaimed Arthur. He looked up at the mass of gobbets floating around above the pyramid and the distant flare of the distress rockets coming out of the Pit. ‘We haven’t got time –’
‘I am ready for any competition,’ declared Grim Tuesday, clapping his gloves together. They sounded like crashing cymbals and didn’t do anything for Arthur’s confidence. ‘What is it to be? Mortal combat?’
‘Naturally not,’ said the Will. ‘In keeping with the powers of the Second Key, it shall be a contest of making. In light of the urgency of the Nothing situation, it shall be an expedited competition. Each of you shall be allowed three minutes with the Second Key to create a work of art. The creator of the greater work will win the competition and be declared either the Trustee or the Rightful Heir to the SecondKey and shall assume theMastery of the FarReaches.’
‘But I’ve never even used the Second Key!’ protested Arthur.
‘Wot a swizzle!’ said Suzy. ‘I’ve played fairer games of Uncle Jack.’
‘I have made my decision!’ roared the Will. Arthur opened his mouth to protest again, but didn’t. As a huge grizzly, the Will was considerably harder to take lightly. ‘All that remains is to appoint a judge. Naturally it must be someone of appropriate rank –’