Lady Friday (The Keys to the Kingdom 5)

It was slow enough, Arthur reckoned, though it would still be a dangerous path to the canal bank. But then the only other way would be to fight through the Fetchers and Saturday's Dusk, and Arthur was not confident about doing that. At least not without using the full powers of the Key.

"Ugham!" shouted Arthur. "Tell Saturday's Dusk you have to go inside to get me. Tell him to come back in half an hour. That should give us a reasonable head start."

"What are we going to do?" asked Fred.

Arthur pointed out the window.

"We're going to climb out onto a spoke of the wheel and get carried down, jumping off just before it hits the water. Then we'll head west along the canal to where the Paper Pushers are."

"Hmmph," said Suzy. "Back into the cold, in other words."

"Yes," confirmed Arthur. "Back into the cold." Chapter Nine

Leaf shivered as the sleepwalkers slid off their beds and formed a line in obedience to Harrison's orders. There was something awful and creepy about their unseeing, half-open eyes and their floppy movements. Almost as if they were like perfect string puppet representations of humans, only with invisible strings.

"Follow me!" called out Harrison, and he walked to the far door. Lowering the silver cone, he added in his own weak voice, "You too, Leaf! Bring up the rear."

"What if I don't?" Leaf asked rebelliously. She tried to project a more aggressive tone than she felt, but she sounded weak and childish, even to herself.

"I can make the sleepers bring you," said Harrison. "Though they would hurt themselves in the process. Please, it would be easier for everyone if you just come along."

"I'm not helping you take these people to get killed," said Leaf.

"They don't get killed," said Harrison, but he didn't look at Leaf when he spoke. "They'll still be alive at the end of the day. After She's finished with them. Come on! We'll both get punished if we're late."

"I'm not cooperating," said Leaf. "But I want to see what's outside, so I guess I'll come along."

"You'll learn," said Harrison sourly. He slid back the two bolts securing the outside door and then wrestled with the long handle, the sound of a large and stiff lock clicking back inside. Then he pushed the door open, using his shoulder and grunting with the effort, as the door was sev­eral inches thick and the outer face was lined with steel plate.

Purple light streamed in, casting an unattractive glow over the faces of Harrison and the sleepers. Leaf slitted her eyes, not because it was too bright, just that the color was too intense, and it made her feel slightly ill.

It was warmer out in the purple sunlight, and a light breeze ruffled Leaf's hair, bringing with it a strange, slightly earthy scent, reminiscent of forests she'd walked in previ­ously but overlaid with something like an exotic spice.

There was smooth gray rock underfoot, whorled in patterns to show it had once been lava, long cooled. The rock shelved down gently to the lake in the middle, which looked like normal water, though it too was tinged purple by the light.

Leaf looked around and saw that the crater wall reached up three or four hundred feet. It was dotted with windows of various sizes and there were some doors high up as well, with suspended walkways hugging the cliff between them. Farther around the crater, probably where the twelve would be on the notional clock-face scheme, there was a broad iron balcony just below where the dome began. A spiral stair of red wrought iron ran down from the bal­cony all the way to the crater floor.

"Hurry up!" called Harrison. He was leading the sleep­ers down to the lakeshore and they had gotten thirty or forty yards ahead while Leaf stared up at the crater walls and the dome.

Leaf ignored him and continued to look around. Apart from the door they had come out, there were at least a dozen crater-level doors spaced around the rim. But they would probably all lead back into Lady Friday's complex, and so offered nothing useful. Or worse, they might lead to the jungle beyond the mountain. After encountering the walking seedpod, Leaf totally believed Milka that she didn't want to go there.

She also didn't want to see what was going to happen to the sleepers, but there didn't appear to be any alterna­tive. The crater was all featureless gray stone, without an outcrop or anything to hide behind. Unless she could breathe underwater, the lake was out.

"Come on!" Harrison was down at the lakeshore now, ordering the sleepers to stand in a line facing the water. Or, as Leaf now saw, facing a slim pillar of darker stone that rose up in the very center of the lake, and so was also in the very center of the crater. It was about twenty feet wide at the water and ended in a flat top about four feet wide some fifteen feet above the level of the lake.

Leaf started heading over to Harrison, but she still kept looking for somewhere to hide. As she walked, she noticed movement up on the balcony at the twelve o'clock posi­tion. Several Denizens were flexing their wings-wings that were not discolored by the purple sunlight. They were bright yellow, the color of daisy heads. Leaf watched four of them launch from the balcony. They carried a chair sus­pended on ropes beneath them, a silver chair with a high, curving back that looked almost like a throne.

A picnic throne, Leaf thought. And no points for guess­ing who that's for .....

She slowed again and looked once more for a hiding spot. Harrison was fussing around with the last of his sleepers, tilting an old woman's head back so that, like the others, she was looking at the spire in the lake.

Leaf saw a crack in the stone, a shadow that might be just wide enough for her to climb into. She ran over to it and knelt down. It was a very narrow crevasse, but she thought it was a little wider than she was at the top, and it was broader below. It was also only four feet deep, but it looked like there was a hole in one corner that might lead deeper.

She took a breath and climbed down. It was a tight squeeze and she grazed her hip as she twisted around, but then she was in. Leaf sighed and crawled to the hole. As she'd hoped, it led farther into the stony ground-it was impossible to say how far, as the purple sunlight only lit up the first part of the hole and it clearly went much deeper. Deep into darkness.

She was about to crawl in anyway when she smelled something familiar. Familiar yet repulsive, an odor that made her instantly flinch, even though she didn't immedi­ately recognize it. It was a damp, rotten kind of smell and it made the gorge rise in her throat, and that was what made her remember when she'd smelled it before.

The mind-control mold she'd thrown up had smelled just like what she was smelling now ....

Leaf recoiled, this time scraping the skin off her elbows as she tried to squirm out of the narrow crack even faster than she'd gone in. As she hoisted herself up, a thin tendril of gray fungus came quivering out of the dark and slowly felt around the spot where her feet had been only a few seconds before.

Leaf threw herself back and landed badly, hurting her­self . But she didn't stop, scuttling back with a sobbing cry to find herself at the feet of Harrison. He helped her up as she cried out.

"Fungus! The mind-control fungus!"

"The gray creeper?" said Harrison. "The spores do get in occasionally and root in the cracks. It's not so bad, that one. It'll only give you nightmares. Still, I'll report it. One of the guards will burn it out. Come on-we have to get back a safe distance."

Leaf followed him meekly. The smell of the gray fungus was still everywhere in her nose and mouth. She could taste it and she could remember the terrible pressure in her head when it was establishing itself

She stopped to dry retch for a moment, but Harrison came back and pulled her along by her wrist.

"Come on! They've put the chair down. She'll fly down any minute and we have to be back almost to the door or we might get caught up too!"

The two of them scrambled back to the door and Leaf collapsed, coughing. Her legs ached and her mouth felt horrible, made no better by the loose threads that stuck to her tongue as she dragged the sleeve of her robe across her face. Leaf spat them out, in the process looking up and out across the lake.

The silver chair was on the pillar of dark stone. The four Denizens hovered in formation around it; the lake roiled underneath from the downbeat of their wings.

High on the balcony, a star flashed into being, or so it seemed to Leaf. A light too bright to look at, that leaped into the air and then slowly descended towards the pillar and the chair.

The light dimmed as the star fell, and through scrunched-up eyes Leaf saw that it was Lady Friday, her long, radiantly yellow wings stretched out for ten feet to either side, tip feathers ruffling as she glided down to alight on the silver chair. The radiance came from something she held in her hand, the same bright object she'd held before when lead­ing the sleepers to the hospital pool.

The twelve sleepers raised their arms as Lady Friday settled on the chair. Leaf heard Harrison suck in air and hold it with a kind of choking noise, and she felt her own breath catch. Lady Friday languidly lifted the shining object in her hand and the light from it dimmed, then sud­denly flashed, lighting up everything in the crater as if it were a giant camera flash. In that instant, the lake turned silver, like reflective glass, as did the dome above.

It felt like time stopped. Leaf was motionless, held in that light, as if caught in a still photograph. Nothing moved and she could hear no sound, not even her own beating heart. Then, very slowly, in the slowest of slow motions, she saw something coming out of the mouths and eyes of the sleepers. Tendrils of many colors, twining and twisting as they stretched across the water to the bright star in Friday's hand.

It was as if the Trustee was drawing colored threads out of their bodies. As the tendrils reached her, the light in her hand changed, the white giving way to a rainbow clus­ter of red, blue, green, and violet.

Then the tendrils snapped off at the sleepers' end and the trailing pieces whipped and curled as they crossed the lake into Friday's hand. The sleepers slowly crumpled to the ground, so slowly that Leaf felt as if it took seconds for them to fall.

Friday raised the glowing rainbow concoction to her mouth, tipped her head back, and drank it down. Most of the brilliant, multicolored threads went in, but she was a careless drinker and some short fragments fell and splashed on the rock before trickling down to the lake.

As Friday drank, the world returned to its normal state. Leaf heard her heartbeat come back, felt her breath rush in through nose and mouth, saw the purple sunlight wash down through the dome.

Lady Friday flexed her wings and launched into the air. Her cohorts descended to lift the chair by its straps.

"What did she do?" asked Leaf, very quietly. The sleep­ers were lying on the stone. Whether they still lived or not, they were still.

"She experienced them," said Harrison. His tone was flat and hollow as if he too was shocked by what he had seen, though he had seen it many times before. "Absorbed their lives, their memories and experience. The best parts, that's what she wants. To feel how they lived, how they loved, all their excitements, triumphs, and joys."

"What happens to the sleepers after ... afterward?"

"They never really wake up," whispered Harrison. "They used to be returned to Earth. Now, with so many, I don't know ... oh, no! She's coming over here ...."

Harrison bowed his head and knelt down. Leaf stood up and tried to look at the Trustee who was flying towards her, but once again the object in Lady Friday's hand was shining, and it was too bright. Leaf had to look down and then shield her eyes with her hand as Lady Friday landed in front of her, the rush of air from her wings cool on Leaf's face.

"So, you're the small troublemaker who foiled Saturday's Cocigrue," said Lady Friday. Her voice was soft but very penetrating, and it demanded attention. "Leaf, friend of the so-called Rightful Heir, this Arthur Penhaligon. How kind of you to visit." Chapter Ten

"TText Box: CChe wight looked askance at me," said Ugham, refer­ring to his brief conversation with Saturday's Dusk. "I hazard he feared some ploy or contrivance, and it is certain he is wary of your power. He has agreed to wait upon you, Lord Arthur, at the appointed half-hour-yet I misdoubt it is an honest answer. More likely he awaits the arrival of more doughty warriors before ordering the assault."

"Like more of whatever was making that noise before," said Fred with a shudder.

"I just hope the Fetchers-or something worse-aren't watching the canal side," said Arthur. He pushed the shutters open wide and shivered as the wind blew in, spray­ing him with wet snow. "Wait till I'm down safe, then follow me one at a time."

"Hey!" Suzy protested. "I should go first, so when you fall in the canal I can get you out."

"Or me," said Fred. "I should go first. You're too important."

"I'm going first," said Arthur. "Remember what Sergeant Helve said about leading. Follow me!"

With that shout, he leaped across the gap between the window and the huge wheel, timing it so he would land on the spoke as it was almost level with the building. But he was a second off, and the ice-sheathed spoke was already tilting down. Arthur landed on it but he immediately started to slide, his fingers clutching frantically at the fro­zen timber as his legs went over the far side. The canal side.

His fingers slipped, unable to get a hold. Arthur swung his legs as he fell and managed to get his knee back on the spoke. Then with an effort that felt as if he might have wrenched every muscle he possessed, he hurled himself up, slithering across the spoke to the other side just in time to half-roll and half-fall off onto the snowy bank of the canal. Behind him the lower end of the spoke he'd been on entered the water with the crackle of broken ice and a threatening gurgle.