Prologue

THEY HAD TRIED to destroy the Will, but that proved to be beyond their power. So they broke it, in two ways. It was broken physically, torn apart, with the fragments of heavy parchment scattered across both space and time. It was broken in spirit because not one clause of it had been fulfilled.

If the treacherous Trustees had their way, no clause of the Will would ever be executed. To make sure of this, all seven fragments of the Will had been hidden with great care.

The first and least of the fragments was fused inside a single clear crystal, harder than diamond. Then the crystal was encased in a box of unbreakable glass. The box was locked inside a cage of silver and malachite, and the cage was fixed in place on the surface of a dead sun at the very end of Time.

Around the cage, twelve metal Sentinels stood guard, each taking post upon one of the numbers of a clock face that had been carved with permanent light in the dark matter of the defunct star.

The Sentinels had been specially created as guardians of the fragment. They were vaguely human in appearance, though twice as tall, and their skins were luminous steel. Quick and flexible as cats, they had no hands, but single blades sprang from each wrist. Each Sentinel was responsible for the space between its own hour and the next, and their leader ruled them from the position between twelve and one.

The metal Sentinels were overseen by a carefully chosen corps of Inspectors, lesser beings who would not dare question the breakers of the Will. Once every hundred years one of these Inspectors would appear to make sure that all was well and that the fragment was safely locked away.

In recent aeons, the Inspectors had become lax, rarely doing more than appear, squint at the cage, box, and crystal, salute the Sentinels, and disappear again. The Sentinels, who had spent ten thousand years in faithful service marching between the chapters of the clock, did not approve of this slipshod attention to duty. But it was not in their nature to complain, nor was there any means to do so. They could raise the alarm if necessary, but no more than that.

The Sentinels had seen many Inspectors come and go. No one else had ever visited. No one had tried to steal or rescue the fragment of the Will. In short, nothing had happened for all of that ten thousand years.

Then, on a day that was no different from any of the more than three and a half million days that had gone before, an Inspector arrived who took his duties more seriously. He arrived normally enough, simply appearing outside the clock face, his hat askew from the transfer, his official warrant clutched firmly in one hand so the bright gold seal was clearly visible. The Sentinels twitched at the arrival and their blades shivered in anticipation. The warrant and the seal were only half of the permission required to be there. There was always a chance the watchwords delivered by the previous Inspector would not be uttered and the Sentinels' blades would at last see blurring, slicing action.

Of course, the Sentinels were required to allow the Inspector a minute's grace. It was not unknown for a transfer between both time and space to briefly addle the wits of anyone, immortal or otherwise.

This Inspector did seem a bit the worse for wear. He wore a fairly standard human shape, that of a middle-aged man of rapidly thickening girth. This human body was clad in a blue frock coat, shiny at the elbows and ink-stained on the right cuff. His white shirt was not really very white, and the badly tied green necktie did not adequately disguise the fact that his collar had come adrift. His top hat had seen much service and was both squashed and leaning to the left. When he raised it to acknowledge the Sentinels, a sandwich wrapped in newspaper fell out. He caught it and slipped it into an inside pocket of his coat before speaking the watchwords.

'Incense, sulfur, and rue, I am an Inspector, honest and true,' he recited carefully, holding up the warrant again to show the seal.

The Twelve O'Clock Sentinel swivelled in place in answer to the watchwords and the seal. It crossed its blades with a knife-sharpening noise that made the Inspector tremble and waved a salute in the air.

'Approach, Inspector,' intoned the Sentinel. That was half of everything it ever said.

The Inspector nodded and cautiously stepped from the transfer plate to the curdled darkness of the dead star. He had taken the precaution of wearing Immaterial Boots (disguised as carpet slippers) to counteract the warping nature of the dead star's dark matter, though his superior had assured him that the warrant and the seal would be sufficient protection. He paused to pick up the transfer plate because it was a personal favourite, a large serving plate of delicate bone china with a fruit pattern, rather than the more usual disc of burnished electrum. It was a risk using a china plate because it could be easily broken, but it looked nice and that was important to the Inspector.

Even the Inspectors were not allowed to pass the inner rim of the clock face, where the feet of the numerals were bordered by a golden line. So this Inspector gingerly trod past the Twelve O'Clock Sentinel and stopped short of the line. The silver cage looked as solid as it should, and the glass box was quite intact and beautifully transparent. He could easily see the crystal inside, just where it was supposed to be.

'All, ah, seems to be in order,' he muttered. Relieved, he took a small box out of his coat pocket, flicked it open, and with a practiced movement transferred a small pinch of snuff to his right nostril. It was a new snuff, a present from a higher authority.

'All, ahhh, ahhh, in order,' he repeated, then let out an enormous sneeze that rocked his whole body and for a moment threatened to overbalance him over the gold line. The Sentinels leaped and twisted from their regular positions, and the Twelve O'Clock Sentinel's blades came whisking down within an inch of the Inspector's face as he desperately windmilled his arms to regain his balance.

Finally he managed it, and teetered back on the right side of the line.

'Awfully sorry, terrible habit!' he squeaked as he thrust his snuff box securely away. 'I'm an Inspector, remember. Here's the warrant! Look at the seal!'

The Sentinels subsided into their usual pacing. The Twelve O'Clock Sentinel's arms went back to its sides, the blades no longer threatening.

The Inspector took out a huge patched handkerchief from his sleeve and mopped his face. But as he wiped the sweat away, he thought he saw something move across the surface of the clock face. Something small and thin and dark. When he blinked and removed his handkerchief, he couldn't see anything.

'I don't suppose there is anything to report?' he asked nervously. He hadn't been an Inspector long. A decade short of four centuries, and he was only an Inspector of the Fourth Order. He'd been a Third Back Hall Porter for most of his career, almost since the Beginning of Time. Before that – 'Nothing to report,' said the Twelve O'Clock Sentinel, using up the rest of its standard vocabulary.

The Inspector politely tipped his hat to the Sentinel, but he was concerned . He could feel something here. Something not quite right. But the penalty for a false alarm was too horrible to contemplate. He might be demoted back to being a Hall Porter or, even worse, be made corporeal – stripped of his powers and memory and sent somewhere in the Secondary Realms as a living, breathing baby.

Of course, the penalty for missing something important was even worse. He might be made corporeal for that, but it would not be as anything even vaguely human, or on a world where there was intelligent life. And even that was not the worst that could happen. There were far more terrible fates, but he refused to contemplate them.

The Inspector looked across at the cage, the glass box, and the crystal. Then he got a pair of opera glasses out of an inner pocket and looked through those. He could still see nothing out of order. Surely, he told himself, the Sentinels would know if something had gone amiss?

He stepped back outside the clock face and cleared his throat.

'All in order, well done, you Sentinels,' he said. 'The watchwords for the next Inspector will be 'Thistle, palm, oak and yew, I'm an Inspector, honest and true.' Got that? – excellent – well, I'll be off.'

The Twelve O'Clock Sentinel saluted. The Inspector doffed his hat once more, swivelled on one heel, and set down his transfer plate, chanting the words that would take him to the House. According to regulations, he was supposed to go via the Office of Unusual Activities on the forty-fifteenth floor and report, but he was unsettled and wanted to get straight back to the twenty-tenth floor, his own comfortable study, and a nice cup of tea.

'From dead star's gloom to bright lamp's light, back to my rooms and away from night!'

Before he could step on the plate, something small, skinny, and very black shot across the golden line, between the legs of the Twelve O'Clock Sentinel, across the Inspector's left Immaterial Boot, and onto the plate. The blue and green fruit glazed on the plate flashed and the plate, black streak and all, vanished in a puff of rather rubbery and nasty-smelling smoke.

'Alarm! Alarm!' cried the Sentinels, leaving the clock face to swarm around the vanished plate, their blades snickering in all directions as the sound of twelve impossibly loud alarm clocks rang and rang from somewhere inside their metal bodies. The Inspector shrank down before the Sentinels and started to chew on the corner of his handkerchief and sob. He knew what that black streak was. He had recognised it in a flash of terror as it sped past.

It was a line of handwritten text. The text from the fragment that was supposedly still fused in crystal, locked in the unbreakable box, inside the silver and malachite cage, glued to the surface of a dead sun and guarded by metal Sentinels.

Only now none of those things was true.

One of the fragments of the Will had escaped – and it was all his fault.

Even worse, it had touched him, striking his flesh straight through the Immaterial Boot. So he knew what it said, and he was not allowed to know. Even more shockingly, the Will had recalled him to his real duty. For the first time in millennia he was conscious of just how badly things had gone wrong.

'Into the trust of my good Monday, I place the administration of the Lower House,' the Inspector whispered. 'Until such a time as the Heir or the Heir's representatives call upon Monday to relinquish any such offices, properties, rights, and appurtenances as Monday holds in trust.'

The Sentinels did not understand him, or perhaps they could not even hear him over the clamouring of their internal alarms. They had spread out, uselessly searching the surface of the dead star, beams of intense light streaming from their eyes into the darkness. The star was not large – no more than a thousand yards in diameter – but the fragment was long gone. The Inspector knew it would already have left his rooms and got into the House proper.

'I have to get back,' the Inspector said to himself. 'The Will will need help. Transfer plate's gone, so it will have to be the long way.'

He reached into his coat and pulled out a grimy and bedraggled pair of wings that were almost as tall as he was. The Inspector hadn't used them for a very long time and was surprised at the state they were in. The feathers were all yellow and askew and the pinions didn't look at all reliable. He clipped them into place on his back and took a few tentative flaps to make sure they still worked.

Distracted by his wings, the Inspector didn't notice a sudden flash of light upon the surface of the clock, or the two figures who appeared with that flash. They wore human shapes too, as was the fashion in the House. But these two were taller, thinner, and more handsome. They had on neat black frock coats over crisp white shirts with high-pointed collars and very neat neckties of sombre red, a shade lighter than their dark silk waistcoats. Their top hats were sleekly black, and they carried ornate ebony sticks topped with silver knobs.

'Where do you think you're going, Inspector?' asked the taller of the two new arrivals.

The Inspector turned in shock, and his wings drooped still further.

'To report, sir!' he said weakly. 'As you can see. To . . . to my immediate superiors . . . and to . . . to Monday's Dawn, or even Mister Monday, if he wants . . .'

'Mister Monday will know soon enough,' said the tall gentleman. 'You know who we are?'

The Inspector shook his head. They were very high up in the Firm, that was obvious from their clothes and the power he could sense. But he didn't know them, either by name or by rank.

'Are you from the sixty-hundredth floor? Mister Monday's executive office?'

The taller gentleman smiled and drew a paper from his waistcoat pocket. It unfolded itself as he held it up, and the seal upon it shone so brightly that the Inspector had to shield his face with his arm and duck his head.

'As you see, we serve a higher Master than Monday,' said the gentleman. 'You will come with us.'

The Inspector gulped and shambled forward. One of the gentlemen swiftly pulled on a pair of snowy white gloves and snapped off the Inspector's wings. They shrank till they were no larger than a dove's wings and he put them in a buff envelope that came from nowhere. He sealed this shut with a sizzling press of his thumb. Then he handed the envelope to the Inspector. The word EVIDENCE appeared on it as the Inspector clutched it to his chest and cast nervous glances at his escorts.

Working together, the two gentlemen drew a doorway in the air with their sticks. When they'd finished, the space shimmered for a moment and then solidified into an elevator doorway, with a sliding metal grille and a bronze call button. One of the gentlemen pressed the button, and an elevator car suddenly appeared out of nowhere behind the grille.

'I'm not authorised to go in an executive elevator, not up past Records by any means, stair or lift or weirdway,' gabbled the Inspector. 'And I'm definitely not . . . not authorised to go down below the Inking Cellars.'

Tags: Garth Nix The Keys to the Kingdom Fantasy
Source: readsnovelonline.net