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

September thought she ought to introduce herself and the Marquess and the Panther, but when she began to do it, the tapir snorted. A little cloud of dirt puffed up from the earth below that powerful snort.

“Oh, I know who you are! He dreams about you all the time. Not the cat, but then, I never paid much mind to cats. They don’t dream, so they’re of no interest to me. My name is Nod, if it matters.”

“Do you mean Prince Myrrh?” September asked.

“Who else?”

“How could he possibly dream about us?”

The tapir shrugged. “That’s what magical objects do. They dream of the day when heroes will come and claim them.”

“But he’s not an object at all, he’s a boy, even if he is a boy in a box.”

Nod jostled the trunk with his round flank. It rocked a little. “Nope. He’s an object. Never comes out, never wakes up, could be picked up, put into a wagon, and moved like luggage.”

“Don’t you think it’s a bit awful, you hiding down here and…well, eating him, bit by bit?”

The purple tapir widened his eyes. “Oh, no, you misunderstand. It’s not like that at all.”

September flushed. “Well, I do misunderstand sometimes, when folk are slow about explaining.”

Nod chuckled, a watery, snorty, pleasant sort of sound. “I guard him. Surely someone told you that all magical objects have guardians. It’s good work when you can get it—times being what they are. When I was a calf, I just wandered from town to town, munching on an innkeeper’s nightmare about an endless hall of empty rooms with his lost loves’ names on the doors, or a wizard’s worried dream of retaking the same examination over and over again. Occasionally, I would find others like me, and we’d go in a pack for a while. We’d head down to Baku-Town in Pandemonium and rollick about, go to a dream café and sample something really exotic, maybe a Pooka in her real, original shape lost in a forest of all the faces she’s ever worn—maybe a changeling child dreaming of home. But I wasn’t a serious fellow. I didn’t have a calling and I didn’t have a care.” September’s heart leaned in to listen, for she had hardly yet heard of someone in Fairyland without a calling, who didn’t know exactly who they were. “But one night, I had too much vintage leprechaun gold-fever to drink and fell asleep in a twisty old alleyway. I dreamed that I was a zebra instead of a tapir. A lion asked me to dance, and I did, the way you do inadvisable things in dreams. But, lo, what do you know? All of the sudden someone was eating one of my dreams, which I did not approve of at all. The lion turned into a fellow Baku, a big, green female with a golden rump. I squirmed under the press of her snout on my dream, but I could not shake her. So I bit back—and discovered that she was the guardian of the Widow’s Polearm, a weapon that once belonged to Myrmo the Striped. Some witch somewhere says it cannot be wielded again until the end of the world. The Baku had gotten quite fat on the dreams of the Polearm, which were interesting and quite unlike the dreams of creatures who walk and talk and fight on their own steam. I suppose it would be like you were the first person in the world to ever taste caviar. It’s a bit funny, but you could really get to like it, if you hold on tight and take it slow. So when I woke up, I joined the union, Local Number 333—Guardians, Sibyls, Junkyard Dogs, and Scarecrows. That was ages ago now.”

The Marquess paid no attention to Nod. She walked slowly around the box as he spoke, prodding the wooden pallets with the toes of her black boots. Suddenly, she knelt and slipped her fingers into the lock. The gap where a key might fit yawned quite big enough to fit her hand. But though it was a good idea to pick that monstrous lock with her own deft fingers—one does not get to rule much of anything without good ideas—nothing happened.

“Not so fast, young lady,” snapped the Baku.

“I am not young,” shot back the Marquess.

“And not a lady, either, I expect. But I can’t let you do that.”

September frowned at him. “We have to get the box open, and the Prince waking, and I don’t mind telling you that sometimes I do manage to get my way, and when I do, I leave a big mess behind, as often as not.”

“I’m a guardian, girl. It’s my whole job to make sure no one harms or bothers the lad. I eat his dreams, yes, but he’s been down here a good long while, and I have to keep living so I can keep guarding. You wouldn’t have me eat what’s in these jars would you? What if the folks who put up all this rot came back and expected a nice mature bottle? I’d be stomped on, you can bet on it. And I keep him company, in his dreams. I dance with him, when he wants to dance. I shoot dream-pheasants with him, when he wants to see something beautiful fall apart. We talk about our troubles, and I tell him about the world. He’s my friend, even though he’s never once opened his eyes. You don’t even know him at all.”

“There has to be a key,” September said, ignoring the argument of the Baku.

“Don’t you have ears? It’s an unopenable box. The whole idea is you can’t open it.” Nod sneered.

September grinned. “It’s a riddle then! I mean, it must be. Everyone keeps saying unopenable—they never say locked or closed or shut. I shall figure it out, presently. I must only think slantwise and backward, as a proper Bishop should. How do you get something out of a box without opening it?”

“You frighten it until it gets out of the box on its own if it knows what’s good for it,” purred Iago.

“You outlaw all closed boxes,” said the Marquess.

September looked around the cellar. She felt sure that she had all the pieces of the puzzle, if only she could think of the solution. When she’d stood in the terrible, wonderful room full of clocks with the other Marquess, the real one, as she could not help but think of that cruel queen, everything she’d needed to defeat her had been lying around her. She’d only needed to think hard enough, and want it enough. Her eyes fell on more jars, more sacks, old, broken wagon wheels and spools and butter churns. Nothing useful, nothing that even looked like a key or a wedge or a hammer. Anansi’s No-Weight Silk Yarn. Erishkegal’s Black Label Whiskey.

And then her eyes fell to the earthen floor, illuminated by the ashen light of the hurricane lamp.

The steamer trunk cast a long, deep, dark shadow.

“Oh!” said September. “Oh. Marq…Maud, come here. You must come here.” She could still hardly call the shadow-girl in her shadow-petticoats by her poor, small human name. Nevertheless, the Marquess came. Her black hat jingled softly. September pointed at the shadow on the floor. “Don’t you see? You’ve got to open the shadow! It’s not opening the box at all. Whatever a thing does, its shadow does; but perhaps, here in the undermost of the underneath and the furthest down of the Upside-Down, it could work the other way, too, and whatever a shadow does, its thing must do, too.”

“Why can’t you open the shadow?” said Maud. She seemed suddenly reluctant, as though something in the box might hurt her, though only a moment ago she had had her hand inside the lock.

“You understand I don’t know how anything works. I only think it might be that this isn’t a shadow like you’re a shadow. It’s not alive. So a shadow has to touch it and move it, because no person can move a shadow, only a shadow can even touch another one. If this is to happen, it must happen all in shadow, or it would count as opening the box. But I’ve gotten very good at thinking these things out! I’ve got you to thank for that in a slantwise way. I wonder if thinking can become muscular, like your magic, if you train it up enough. My thinking has become muscular, like your magic used to be.”

Nod furrowed his brow. The scarlet stripes on his neck bunched together as he frowned deeper than any tapir has ever frowned.