Inkdeath (Inkworld 3)

"So? You sleep enough as it is!"

The Chunk hit him in the face. "Less of your cheek! Go on, your master’s waiting for you."

One of the maids came toward them on the stairs. She blushed as she made her way past Farid. What was her name? Dana? A nice girl, she’d often slipped him a delicious piece of meat when Oss had stolen his food, and Farid had kissed her in the kitchen a few times for that. But she wasn’t half as beautiful as Meggie. Or Brianna.

"I just hope he’ll let me give you a good hiding!" Oss whispered before knocking on the door of Orpheus’s study.

That was what Orpheus called the room, although he spent far less time studying in it than groping under one of the maids’ skirts, or stuffing himself with the lavish dishes his cook had to prepare for him at any time of day or night. Tonight, however, he really was sitting at his desk, head bent over a sheet of paper, while his two glass men were arguing under their breath over whether it was better to stir ink to the left or the right. They were brothers called Jasper and Ironstone, and as different as day and night.

Ironstone, the elder, loved lecturing his younger brother and ordering him about.

Farid often wanted to wring his glass neck. He himself had two older brothers; they’d been one of the reasons why he had run away from home and joined a band of robbers.

"Shut up!" Orpheus snapped at the quarreling glass men. "What ridiculous creatures you are! Stir to the left, stir to the right —just make sure you don’t spatter my whole desk with ink again while you’re stirring."

Ironstone looked accusingly at Jasper — of course! If anyone had spattered Orpheus’s desk with ink, it had to be his little brother. But he preserved a grim silence as Orpheus put pen to paper again.

"Farid, you really must learn to read!" How often had Meggie told him that? And, with some difficulty, she had taught him a few letters of the alphabet. B for bear, R

for robber ("Look, Farid, there’s a letter R in your name, too"), M for Meggie, F for fire (wasn’t it wonderful that his name began with the same letter?), and D . . . D for Dustfinger. He always got the rest mixed up. How were you supposed to remember those funny little things with their scrawled lines stretching every which way?

AOUIMTNP. . . it gave him a headache just to look at them. But yes, he must learn to read, he must. How else was he ever to find out whether Orpheus was really trying to write Dustfinger back?

"Snippets, nothing but snippets!" Orpheus pushed Jasper aside with a curse as the glass man came up to sprinkle sand over the fresh ink. Grimly, he tore the sheet of paper he had been writing on into tiny scraps. Farid was used to that sight. Orpheus was seldom satisfied with what he put down on paper. He crumpled up what he had written, tore it in pieces, threw it on the fire with a curse, bullied the glass men, and drank too much. But when he succeeded he was even more unbearable. He puffed himself up like a bullfrog, stalked proudly through Ombra like a newly crowned king, kissed the maids with his moist, complacent lips, and let everyone know he had no equal. "Let them call the old man Inkweaver!" he shouted, loudly enough to be heard all over the house. "It suits him. He’s nothing but a craftsman, while f. . . I am an enchanter! Ink-Enchanter, that’s what they ought to call me. That’s what they will call me someday!"

But tonight, yet again, the enchantment didn’t seem to be working. "Toad-twaddle!

Goose-cackle! Leaden words!" he said angrily without raising his head. "Just a mush of words, that s what you re smearing the paper with today, Orpheus: a watery, unseasoned, tasteless, slimy mush of words!"

The two glass men hastily scrambled down the legs of the desk and began picking up the shreds of paper.

"My lord, the boy is back." No one could sound more servile than Oss. His voice bowed to Orpheus as readily as his massive body, but his fingers held the nape of Farid’s neck in a steely grip.

Orpheus turned, his face like thunder, and stared at Farid as if he had finally pinpointed the reason for his failure. "Where the devil have you been? With Fenoglio all this time? Or helping your girlfriend’s father to steal into the castle and out again?

Oh yes, I’ve heard about his latest exploit. Presumably they’ll be singing the first bad songs about it tomorrow. That fool of a bookbinder really does play the ridiculous part the old man wrote him with touching enthusiasm." Envy and contempt mingled in Orpheus's voice, as they so often did when he spoke of Silvertongue.

"He’s not playing a part. He is the Bluejay." Farid trod on Oss’s foot hard enough to make him let go of his neck, and when the man tried to grab it again he pushed him away. With a grunt, the Chunk raised his big fist, but a glance from Orpheus halted him.

"Oh, really? Have you joined the ranks of his admirers, too?" He put a clean sheet of paper on his desk and stared at it, as though that could fill it with the right words.

"Jasper, what are you doing down there?" he snapped at the glass man. "How often do I have to tell you two that the maids can sweep up scraps of paper. Sharpen me another pen!"

Farid picked up Jasper, put him on the desk, and earned a grateful smile. The younger glass man had to do all the unpleasant jobs — that was how his brother had fixed it — and sharpening pens was the most unpleasant of all, because the tiny blade they used slipped very easily. Only a few days ago it had cut deeply into Jasper’s matchstick-thin arm, and Farid had discovered that glass men bleed like humans.

Jasper’s blood was transparent, of course. It had dripped onto Orpheus’s paper like liquid glass, and Ironstone had slapped his little brother’s face and called him a clumsy fool. For that, Farid had mixed some beer with the sand Ironstone ate. Since then Ironstone’s limbs, usually clear as water (and he had been very proud of that), had been as yellow as horse’s piss.

Orpheus went to the window. "If you stay out and about so long again," he said to Farid over his shoulder, "I’ll tell Oss to beat you like a dog."

The Chunk smiled, and Farid cursed silently as he contemplated them both. But Orpheus was still looking up at the black night sky with a morose expression.

"Would you believe it?" he said. "That old fool Fenoglio didn’t even go to the trouble of naming the stars in this world. No wonder I keep running out of words! What’s the moon called here? You’d think his senile old brain might at least have bothered about that, but no! He just called it ‘the moon,’ as if it were the same moon we saw from our windows in the other world."

"Perhaps it really is the same moon. It was in my story, too, said Farid.

"Rubbish, of course it was different!" Orpheus turned to the window again, as if he had to explain to the entire world out there how badly made it was. " ‘Fenogli,’ I ask him,,’ he went on in the self-satisfied voice that Ironstone always listened to devoutly, as if it were announcing truths never heard before, "‘is Death a woman or a man in this world? Or is it perhaps just a door through which you pass into quite a different story, one that you yourself unfortunately omitted to write?’ ‘How do I know? he says. How does he know? Who else knows if he doesn’t? He doesn’t tell us in his book, anyway.

In his book . . . Ironstone, who had climbed up onto the windowsill to join Orpheus, cast a reverent glance at the desk where the last copy of Inkheart lay beside the sheet of paper on which Orpheus had been writing. Farid wasn’t sure whether the glass man really understood that his entire world, himself included, had presumably slipped out of that same book. It usually lay there open, for when Orpheus was writing he kept leafing through it with restless fingers in search of the right words.