The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There (Fairyland 2)

QUESTING PHYSICKS

In Which September Hatches a Plan of Her Own, Sees a Girl About a Prince, Hears a Lecture Concerning a Most Unusual Science, and Learns What Everyone Knows

The crystal moon beamed a ghostly VII down onto the sleeping ramparts of Tain. Shadows slept in fountains and draped over statues of namelessly ancient Kings and Queens of the Fairyland-Below. In the Floatstone Pavilion stood a serene-looking man of green marble, holding a pair of scales in one hand, with a feather resting on one copper plate and the shadows of several hobgoblins and peris in the other. A centaur maid, her four legs tucked up underneath her, snoozed beneath the imploring alabaster gesture of a grieving young man with a lyre on his back. Balloons still floated ghostly through the streets, chasing their own exploits. The air smelled of spent fireworks, and bits of the marvelous feast dripped or slowly slid off the tables, pushed by the cool wind blowing from the twinned rivers.

September herself lay snugly in a marble basket held up by a statue of dark stone—a sly-eyed, canny lady with huge pomegranates tumbling through her thick hair. Saturday slept curled next to her; Aubergine roosted at the statue’s bare feet. A-Through-L had wrapped his body and tail about the whole business.

September woke before anyone. The whole city snored. She lay awake, looking up at the dim stars and the teetering tops of towers. Nothing had quite gone to plan. Perhaps if she hadn’t felt so sorry for her shadow, the Wanting Magic would have worked. But now…now she would have to do something else. Something slantways and sideways and upside down, like the Duke had said. September looked at Saturday as he slept, and at the great bulk of shadowy A-Through-L. Were they her friends, or Halloween’s? Her Saturday would stand between her and the world, but the shadows were strangers, really. New people with the same shapes and names. Her Saturday would never have stolen her first kiss without so much as a thank-you. Would never have turned her into a Fairy when she’d told him not to. But did she know that for certain? Some part of this Saturday must live in the other one, just as she saw flashes of her kind, gentle friend in the trickster child sleeping next to her.

September felt suddenly very secretive. The wine-colored coat approved. It closed in tight as if to say, Yes, tell no one anything. It isn’t safe out there. She must protect herself. There would be no one to do it for her. A plan started to prick up its ears inside her, slowly, but getting stronger.

September quietly pulled herself up out of the basket without waking the Marid. Careful not to wake anyone, she climbed up and out of the basket and scrambled down from the statue, stepping lightly on a hovering shard of frosted rosy-orange rock in the Floatstone Pavilion. Other shards floated here and there about her, making a very strange scene, as though the slabs were sleeping birds, waiting for sunrise to shake off their dreams. She knelt at the feet of the forest-green statue and in the cold morning of Tain and shook Aubergine awake.

The Night-Dodo yawned, showing pink at the back of her feathery throat. She started to squawk up at the day, but September shushed her.

“Hush! You mustn’t wake anyone else!”

Aubergine snapped her beak shut and looked up at September with large, soft eyes. Could she trust the bird any more than the others? Perhaps, because Aubergine had no one else, just like September. I will be right back, September thought, looking at the dear shadows of the Wyverary and the Marid. I will come back once I know what to do, and we will all go together.

“I’m going to go see the Physickists,” she said finally. “And I want you to come. You’re one of them, after all.”

Shearcoil Tower is a perfect shadow of Groangyre, its twin in Pandemonium. Where lumpy, bulbous Groangyre stitches up its heights in cracked leather, Shearcoil is hard and alive, a long, spiraling black narwhal’s horn filled with hundreds of clean white rooms in which Extremely Pleasant and Possibly Flammable Physicks might be practiced. At the very tip-top of the horn perches a peculiar library, a peculiar librarian, and a total devotion to the pursuit of Questing Physicks. Along with Queer Physicks and Quiet Physicks, this discipline completes the Three Q’s that make up the Noblest Study. When your parents remind you to mind your P’s and Q’s, these are the Q’s they mean, and the P’s, too! Children are natural practitioners of the Queer and the Questing, for childhood is nothing but a quest through a queer country. Of course, they often have a good deal of trouble with the Quiet.

When September and Aubergine finally got to the top of the horn, out of breath and aching with the effort of a thousand and more stairs, they saw the Questing Floor stretched out before them, bright lamps lit and a little lunch boiling over the hearth in a burnished pot. Books and scrolls and folios lined the walls in every direction, towering and tapering up to the tip of the horn. Little wisps of clouds played up near the highest shelves. Ladders chased each other lazily around the rotunda. And a little creature lay on her stomach on a stack of diagrams piled up upon a desk much too big for her, littered with papers and inkwells, waggling her feet back and forth while she read. She was quite tiny, little bigger than a footstool, wearing great wide-brimmed black straw hat and a little caramel-colored monk’s habit with ash-colored beads around her neck. She clicked them together idly. Her olive-colored hair was cropped short under her hat. She had a wide brown face and dark green lips to match her hair and fingernails and zebra-like stripes on her skin, peeking out from under her habit.

“Excuse me,” said September, when the creature did not look up at them. She cleared her throat.

The small monk arched her eyebrow at them and returned to her book.

“The sign at the bottom of the stairs said to look for Questing on the one hundred and forty-fourth floor,” she tried again, determined to appear as brave as she could. That was what was called for, she was sure of it. “And Ell said that this was where the Physickists lived, and he’s never been wrong about anything yet, so I do believe you must be a Questing Physickist. My name is September. I want to go on a Quest.”

The monk looked up again. “We discourage casual inquiries. You might try the Bards down on ninety-seven—they dabble in a little of everything, and they’ll sing whatever you like for a penny. I believe they’ve put the Second Law of Dragon Dynamics to some sort of tune. Goodness knows their bassoons keep me up late enough.”

Aubergine spoke softly—so awfully softly September could hardly hear her. “But you are a Physickist? A real one? You…you went to a university, and they put a laurel on your head, and you turned into a respected scholar, and from then on they let you speak up any time you wanted?”

The little monk slapped her hands down on her papers.

“What a gentle voice you have,” she said, her gaze calculating. “I can feel it wrap me up like a woolen scarf, rubbing my cheeks and insisting that it would hardly hurt me to help a poor young girl from out of town.” She hopped down from her papers and off the lip of the desk, using her wide black hat to float a little ways before landing before them. She poked her finger up at Aubergine. “You’re a Quiet Physickist if I ever heard one,” she accused, but she did not seem terribly upset. Indeed, when Aubergine inclined her head to admit that she was indeed, the tiny girl burst out in a brilliant smile. “Why didn’t you say so? How wonderful to meet a cousin in the Odd Arts! My name is Avogadra, and you…well, I’ll confess I haven’t seen you at any of the conferences. Are you registered with the union or are you a dabbler like those dilettantes down on ninety-seven? Forgive me, I’m just so excited. I’m the only one here, you see.”

“My name is Aubergine, and I have only just begun my Quiet Studies,” the Night-Dodo demurred.

“Nonsense, you’re quite advanced!” Avogadra enthused. “I nearly gave in before I caught myself. And I didn’t even hear you on the stairs! This one I heard clumping through the lobby, but you? Silent. Sublime.”

“Where are the other Physickists?” asked September, who thought she had stepped as softly as possible.

“Doing fieldwork, obviously,” Avogadra said, and hopped down from her book to finally greet them. “We are nearly all Monacielli—that’s what you call a beast who looks like me! We used to hide in the cellars of monasteries, waiting for the brothers to hurry up with the beer-brewing or the mushroom harvest. We’d upset their inkpots and build our houses out of their hymnals and tap their barrels when they had a nice chocolatey porter coming along. But if one of the brothers got lost in the catacombs or the woods beyond the abbey, or if something dreadful befell one—at sorest need, when they’d passed beyond all human aid—we’d come in the dark and show them the way out. The way home. It’s in our blood—we heard their distresses like a rung bell in our bones. We lived reasonably well, but before too long we’d learned a great deal about manuscripts and contemplation, and realized that we had got a fair sight better at it than the monks themselves! So we left. We came to the city, two by two and three by three, and Shearcoil took us in. We made our own rectory, our own cathedral up here. We kept our Complines and our Vespers. When the ink and the beer and the hymnals belong to you instead of to big folk who flap their arms ridiculously when they get upset, it’s not so much fun to spoil them as to use them well and put them away after. And no one else is quite as deft at the Third Q as we. We can’t cut out the part of ourselves that feels the ringing of the bell when our old brothers are lost or in despair. We learned to Quest by following them into all their black places.”

“Humans can quest, too. I’m certain of it. Lancelot and Galahad and Jason who had the Argonauts and those sorts,” September said shyly. She felt as she often did in class when she was nearly sure she had the right answer, but could not always make herself raise her hand.

The Monaciello put her hand over her small heart. “Of course, we owe a debt of gratitude to those early theorists! And any number of posthumous doctorates! But they were amateurs, really. They didn’t choose their Quests, the Quests chose them. They would have been happy to be done with them, from beginning to end. We seek out Quest-Dense Zones and hop in with both feet. We Experiment. We Prove. Mersenne has gone off into the Jargoon Mountains to work on his thesis, investigating the

spiritual connection between dragons and maidens. Candella last reported from the bottom of Blackdamp Lake, conducting experiments on free-range treasure. Red Newton wholly devoted himself to the study of magic apples, immortality causing and otherwise, and that means setting up a year-round camp in the Garden of Ascalaphus. Questing Physicks isn’t like the Quiet and Queer branches. You can’t do it at home in a comfortable chair—you have to be out in the thick of the business, with your tools on your belt and your heart on your sleeve! It’s my turn to stay home and keep the light on for the others, though. I only finished up my Grail Equations in the fall.” Avogadra clearly hoped that one or both of them had heard of her work, but finding no recognition on their faces, sighed a wistful weary sigh. “It is my dearest hope that one day I shall be the one to discover the GUT—the Grand Unified Tale, the one which will bind together all our Theorems and Laws, leaving out not one Orphan Girl or Youngest Son or Cup of Life and Death. Not one Descent or Ascent, not one Riddle or Puzzle or Trick. One perfect golden map that can guide any soul to its desire and back again. I will be the one to do it, I know it. I hope I know it. I know I hope it.”

“Well, I want to go on a Quest,” said September stubbornly. “Not for research but because it needs doing. Even if I am human, even if I fail. I have some experience, and I am good at sticking things out till the end. If I am good at anything, I am good at that. I wanted to consult with an expert, but I’ll do it myself if you don’t want to be bothered. And I’ll almost certainly muck it up, and it’ll be a mess, but I’ll keep going anyway.”

Avogadra scratched under her hat. “Well, what sort of thing did you have in mind? An Object Quest is a nice beginner’s run. Or a Damsel in Distress. The Conservation of Princesses Law figures in there, but the math isn’t hard.”

September did her best to fix Avogadra with a steely gaze. “I want to go down into Fairyland-Below and wake up the Sleeping Prince,” she said. Aubergine turned to her, surprised. She fluffed her feathers in distress.