“Why?” asked Stupid.
Milka sighed. “Because counterclockwards around the circle from forty-three to eighteen is twenty-five segments and clockwards from forty-three to eighteen is thirty-five segments.”
“Oh, right, I wasn’t counting properly,” said Stupid. He pointed to his right. “That’s forward, isn’t it?”
“No, that’s backward,” said Milka. “You’re facing into the crater.”
She prodded Leaf. “Come on. The sooner you get delivered, the sooner you get to work.”
“Work?” asked Leaf. “What work?”
“You’ll find out,” said Milka. “Hurry up.”
Leaf started walking. Every step felt strange; she had to consciously take smaller, less forceful movements in order to keep her balance. It wasn’t like being on the moon-at least she wasn’t moving like the Chinese astronauts who’d landed there a few years ago. She guessed it was about eighty-five percent of what was normal on Earth. Enough to upset her balance, that was for sure.
The rough-hewn passage with its gaslights continued for several hundred yards, always curving gently to the left. Every now and then there were doors, sometimes on both sides. Very ordinary-looking wooden doors, all painted pale blue, with a wide variety of bronze knobs and handles that might or might not signify what lay behind them.
“Slow down!” Milka called out. “Take the stairs on the right.”
Leaf slowed down. There was an open archway up ahead, on the right. The number 42 was painted in white on the right of the arch-or rather, Leaf saw, the numeral was a mosaic made of small pieces of ivory or something similar. At the apex of the arch there was another white numeral, this time 2.
Through the arch was a landing that had the number 2 inlaid in the floor, again in small white stones or pieces of ivory. From the landing there was a broad stair that went up to the left and down to the right, the steps again carved straight out of the stone, this time faced with a smoother, pale stone with a bluish tint. The stairs were also lit by gas jets, smaller ones than before, which were shaped like crouching leopards and set into the wall rather than the ceiling.
“Up!” ordered Milka.
Leaf turned to the left and started up the steps. She climbed quite a long way before they came to another landing, which had the number 3 on it.
“Three more to go,” said Milka.
Even with the lower gravity, it was a long climb. Leaf counted three hundred steps between level three and level four and a similar number between four and five, though she lost count at one point, when her mind was distracted by worries, both for her family and for herself.
They met no one else on the way up and there was no one in evidence when they came out on level 6, or “circle six” as Milka called it. The corridor they entered looked almost exactly like the one the sleepers had taken, way down below, though Leaf did note there was some minor variation in the colour and texture of the rock.
“Now we walk around to segment eighteen,” said Milka.
“I hate this place,” said Stupid. “I wish we were back in the House.”
“Quiet!” snapped Milka. “You never know who might hear you!”
“I was just saying-”
“Well, don’t. What did I do to get lumbered with you anyway, Feorin?”
Leaf was a bit disappointed to hear Feorin’s real name. It made it hard to keep thinking of him as Stupid.
“I don’t know,” he said now. “Did you accidentally press someone?”
“No. I volunteered. Thought it would lead to promotion. Now be quiet. The sooner we drop off this child, the sooner we can have a cup of tea and put our feet up.”
“Tea? Have you got some?” asked Feorin. “Really?”
“Yes. I got a chest from those rats last time we were back home. Hurry up.”
They walked considerably faster after the mention of tea, with Feorin leading the way. Judging from the numbers they came across every few hundred yards and from her brief look at the map, Leaf worked out that she was in a circular passage that was divided into chapters-or segments-like a clock. The passage ran along the outer rim of the circle and all the rooms and presumably lesser corridors ran from the rim in towards the center, or at least until they hit whatever the big blue thing was on the map.
Leaf spent some of the time working out how big the circle was. If there were sixty segments and the distance between segments was about three hundred paces, and she knew her paces were about eighteen inches long, then the total circumference was 300 times 1.5 feet, or 450 feet or 150 yards, times 60, which was 9000 yards or about 5 miles. From that, using c=2nr she could calculate the diameter ....
Leaf was so intent on working this out in her head that she didn’t realize that Feorin had suddenly stopped. She ran into his back and bounced off, losing her balance and landing on her bottom.
Leaf started to get up but instantly decided to stay where she was as Feorin threw his arms back, his trench coat flew off, and his eggshell-blue wings exploded out, the trailing feathers brushing across her face. At the same time, he drew a short sword or a long dagger from a sheath at his side, a dagger whose mirrored blade sent bright reflections leaping across the walls.
Milka followed suit a fraction of a second later and actually leaped over Leaf, the gas flame in the ceiling whooshing as she passed through it. Like Feorin, her wings were pale blue, and she too had a mirror-surfaced dagger.
Leaf couldn’t see what they were attacking-or defending against-because the Denizens’ weapons were too bright. All she saw were the flicker of wings and a blur of light like the photon trails left in long-exposure photographs of nighttime traffic.
Then Feorin was hurled past her, thrown at least thirty feet back down the passage. He hit the floor and skidded along at least another twenty feet before hitting a curve of the wall.
Leaf saw the attacker then. Or part of it-a long, gray tendril or tentacle as thick as her leg and ten feet long, which was connected to a gray, mottled object the shape of an oval football but as big as a refrigerator. It was scuttling backwards like a huge rat, though she could see no legs. Leaf only got to see it for a second before Milka cut the tendril into several bits and then plunged her dagger into the football-shaped thing with a flash of light so intense that Leaf was not only blinded but felt a heat on her face as if she had been instantly sunburned.
It took several seconds for her vision to come back, seconds spent stunned as her mind and body began to work out that she should actually be seriously afraid and doing something, preferably running away.
But when her sight began to return, complete with floating dots and blotchy bits, Leaf quelled her fear. She was aided in this because Milka was kicking small blackened fragments of the thing she’d fought into a pile, in a manner that indicated it was no longer any sort of threat. And Feorin was walking back, seemingly unconcerned.
“What was that?” asked Leaf. Her voice sounded small and scared and distant, even to herself.
Chapter Five
“Open up!” repeated Arthur. “Or else I’ll blast this door off its hinges!”
He withdrew his rapier from the mail slot and it transformed back into a baton. Arthur hoped this meant that no immediate enemies were in the vicinity and that whoever was behind the door was friendly, or at least neutral. He figured he likely had only minutes before a whole lot more Nithlings showed up-probably with their boss. That could be anyone or anything, he guessed, ranging from Saturday’s Dusk to one of the Piper’s New Nithling officers. Whoever it was, Arthur wanted to be inside the tower before they arrived.
There was no immediate response to his shout. Arthur was just drawing breath to repeat his order for the third time, and wondering what he would actually do if they didn’t open up, when he heard the sound of several bolts being withdrawn on the other side of the door, followed by the door itself creaking open.