"Thanks for the clothes, Ichabod!"
Ichabod bowed deeply. Arthur waved again and ran back to the sea.
"Take a deep breath and peg your nose," said Doctor Scamandros. He leaned close again and Arthur felt him drop something in the pocket of his coat. "And if I may be of service, do not hesitate to send word. I should like to serve the Rightful Heir."
Arthur felt in his pocket as he stepped back. The object was round, heavy, and metallic. Before he could investigate further, Dawn spread her wings and gestured for Arthur to approach.
"I shall have to take you under my arm," she said with a fleeting look of distaste. "We shall achieve the best speed if you remain still and don't squirm. Please also ensure your sword stays at your side."
Arthur nodded and stood next to Dawn. Before she picked him up under the arms like a parcel, he took a deep breath, as deep as he was able, and put the peg on his nose. It hurt, but not enough for Arthur to need to take it off.
Dawn spread her wings and, with one mighty flap, launched into the air. As she rose, she began to change. She grew larger and longer, skin and clothing transforming into rough sharkskin with a golden sheen. Her arm changed too, becoming a thick tentacle, its many suckers sticking on to Arthur with nasty pops of displaced air.
Arthur shut his eyes. He didn't want to see the tentacle.
He kept them closed as they dived into the sea, the cold shock of the water smashing into his chest. For a moment he was scared that the peg spell had failed and he would drown. But he felt no need to draw breath, and as long as he kept his eyes closed, he could almost kid himself that he was just in the bath, or mucking around in a swimming pool.
Almost. The water was rushing past too quickly, and the tentacle felt too strange. Arthur suddenly thought of something he should have asked.
How long is it going to take to get back to the House? How long will I be underwater? How long will my thousand breaths last?
Fourteen
IT WAS A TERRIBLE journey, one that seemed to Arthur to last for days, though he knew it was merely hours. At intervals, Dawn would erupt from the water for a long gliding flight, at the same time calling out to Arthur, "Breathe!"
He would take a breath, then down they would plunge, back into water of varying temperature, though always more cold than warm. The light changed too, often quite radically, from total darkness to daylight of different hues. Arthur realised that Dawn was taking them through several different Secondary Realms. How, he didn't know, since there were no obvious portals and they didn't go through the Front Door. He supposed it was something to do with the nature of the Border Sea and of Wednesday's Dawn. Perhaps she could go wherever there was a sea of some kind.
Arthur survived the experience by going into a state where he was neither awake nor asleep. He kept his eyes closed most of the time, and his mind retreated into semiconsciousness, so he had almost no coherent thoughts or memory of any particular time within the journey. It all felt like one ghastly, overtired waking nightmare.
Finally, Dawn leapt up from the sea. Arthur heard the crack and boom of thunder and saw lightning bolts scrawl jagged paths across the entire horizon. He screwed his eyes shut and tucked his chin in tight, holding like that as the thunder got louder and louder and the white light broke through his eyelids. All of it was just too much to bear and then... it was gone.
They were through the Line of Storms and in the House, spiralling up and up as Dawn climbed higher into the sky, till they were many thousands of feet up. Arthur started to get worried about hitting the ceiling, then realised it was much higher here than the parts of the House he'd been in before.
Fortunately it wasn't cold. In fact, it seemed to be warmer, which was strange, until Arthur figured out that while there was no sun, the ceiling, no matter how distant, must provide heat as well as light. And he couldn't tell whether the air pressure was decreasing, because he wasn't breathing. The peg was still securely on his nose and his last breath had been only twenty minutes before.
"Nearly there," said Dawn, her voice strange and horrible from her shark-toothed maw. "Look to the left."
Arthur looked down. All he could see for miles and miles was the sea, a blue expanse flecked here and there with white. Then as his eyes blurred from the rush of the wind, he saw something long and white, reaching up to the horizon. A mountain chain. No, a mountainous island. It was long and narrow, and the snow-covered central ridge looked like it rose higher than Arthur and Dawn were flying.
"We're going to an island?" he shouted, his words almost smothered by the constant flapping of Dawn's wings.
Dawn laughed, a scornful laugh that made Arthur shudder. There was something intrinsically wrong with a laugh coming from a winged shark.
But there was reason for her scorn, Arthur saw as he looked again. What he'd thought was an island was moving. He could see the vast white wash behind it, which he'd mistaken for surf breaking on a very long reef. And the size and shape of the island changed, as it rose and fell in the water.
It wasn't an island. It was a gigantic white whale. A Leviathan. One hundred and twenty-six miles long. A Behemoth. Thirty-two miles wide. A mouth ten miles wide and two miles high — Dawn stopped flapping her wings and began to glide slowly down.
Down towards Drowned Wednesday.
"Hey!" Arthur shouted. "You said Wednesday was going to be in human form!"
"She will be. She eats tons of fish and krill until the last moment, to satisfy her hunger. You see the ship in front of her?"
Arthur peered down. He could see a tiny brown fleck at least a hundred miles ahead of the vast white whale. It was like a speck of dust on the floor, with a commercial cleaner's mop heading straight for it.
"Yes!"
"Milady has already begun to reduce, and will be fully in human form by the time she reaches it."
"What happens when she needs to change back?" asked Arthur.
Wednesday's Dawn did not answer, instead diving more sharply, her wingtips lifting and angling to control their descent.
"I said, “What happens when she needs to change back?”" Arthur repeated, knowing it was important.
"We flee," said Dawn.
"What about the people... the Denizens on the ship?"
"There are none," said Dawn. "The ship was readied at my orders and the crew taken off. It is not an important vessel."
"Right," muttered Arthur. More loudly he said, "Don't forget your promise."
"I will not forget," said Dawn. "In any case, you are probably milady's only hope."
"What?"
This time Dawn did not answer at all. As they glided steadily down, Arthur watched the approach of the Leviathan. Maybe she was getting smaller, but she still looked like a mountainous island, with enormously high cliffs of chalk at the front. Something too big to be mobile.
Then she raised her tail. Even though they were still twenty miles away or more, Arthur flinched in Dawn's tentacular grasp. The tail rose up at least a mile and came crashing down with a rumbling explosion that Arthur could feel through the air as much as hear. He could see the wave it generated too, and was surprised that by the time the wave got to the ship it was just a slightly higher crest in the swell.
"She's changing," said Dawn confidently. "Already only half her normal size."
Arthur found that hard to believe, but he supposed Dawn would know. They were circling above the ship now, still a long way up, but disturbingly no higher than Wednesday's mighty white brow. It loomed closer and closer, and Arthur started to use his hand as a measure, holding five fingers out at arm's length and counting the number of fingers from sea level to the top of the whale's head. It wasn't very scientific but Arthur was somewhat relieved to see that by this crude measure, the whale was reducing in size.