But he couldn’t steady the mirror, or get his mind to focus on somewhere safe. Instead, he rolled over again and grabbed at the next step with his free hand, his fingernails raking across the marble, down one ... two ... three steps. His arm almost came out of its shoulder socket as his slide was arrested, and he nearly dropped the Sixth Key when he couldn’t help but groan at this new and sudden pain.
But he stopped.
Arthur sighed and dropped the Sixth Key from his mouth to his bloodied hand. He slowly stood and set his foot on the next step up. It was time to start climbing back up, while thinking hard about where to come out.
He was just about to start doing this when the Stair disappeared in a flash of bright, white light. Arthur’s foot met no resistance. He fell forward into a hole full of evil-smelling mud. The Stair, as it always tried to do, had thrown him out onto some random Landing, which could be anywhere in the Secondary Realms, and could also be at any time in the past.
Arthur almost went face-first into the mud, but he recovered his balance in just enough time to stagger forward and crash into a sandbagged earth wall instead. He bounced off that, went back into the hole, and windmilled his arms desperately for a second, before ending up planted backside-first in about a foot of yellow, stinking mud.
He sat there long enough to make a face, then slowly got back to his feet, the mud making a popping sound as he rose. There were other, stranger noises too, distant high-pitched electronic squeals that hurt his ears.
Arthur looked around. For a moment he thought he’d come out in a World War One trench, back in the history of his own Earth. But that thought only lasted for a moment. He was in a trench all right, but the mud was a lurid, unearthly yellow and stank of sulphur. The sandbags, now that he looked at them properly, were pale blue. He tapped one, and his knuckles sank in a little bit and then bounced back.
Foam, thought Arthur. The sandbags are filled with something like packing foam.
The zinging noises were getting closer. Arthur didn’t know what was making them, and he had no intention of hanging around to find out. The only question was whether the Fifth Key would work if the Improbable Stair had dumped him off somewhere back in time, as well as into the Secondary Realms. If he couldn’t use the mirror, he’d have to use the Stair, and that meant getting back onto it as quickly as possible. Theoretically, as he had two Keys, he could enter the Improbable Stair pretty much anywhere, but he knew in practice it was bound to be more difficult, and there was a very good chance that his next trip on the Stair would take him somewhere worse than this.
Quickly, he put the quill pen inside his silver bag, along with his yellow elephant and the medallion he’d been given by the Mariner. Then he replaced the bag safely inside the pouch of his utility belt. He kept the Sorcerous Supernumerary’s large coat on, over the top of his coveralls. Even though the yellow mud looked like it was boiling, it felt cold – and if Arthur felt it, that meant it was very cold indeed.
This was confirmed by his breath, which wasn’t just fogging out, it was freezing in the air. In only a few minutes, he developed a long, thin beard of ice crystals that sparkled from his chin down to his chest. The sunlight, though very bright, was more red than yellow, and he could feel no noticeable heat from it on his face or hands.
Wherever he was, it wasn’t Earth, and Arthur suspected it wasn’t somewhere a normal human could survive for a second. He was thankful that he could, but it also sent a pang through him, another reminder of what he had become, and what he no longer was.
He raised the mirror and was about to visualise Sir Thursday’s chamber when he glimpsed a reflection from behind him. He spun around just as something jumped down from above the trench. It was a flash of movement, and it took a moment for Arthur to process that at its heart was a seven-foot-tall, armoured stick insect, holding a tube in its first lot of spiked forearms and pointing it at Arthur. Before he could react, he heard the squealing noise up close for the first time, and felt a savage pain as golden blood suddenly boiled out of a hole that went straight through the bicep of his left arm.
Arthur turned the mirror and directed his will. The Fifth Key caught the red sunlight, gathered it up and concentrated it a millionfold before projecting it at Arthur’s enemy in a tightly focused beam.
The insect was cut cleanly in two. But the top half continued to scrabble towards Arthur, and the forearms tried to aim the tube again. Arthur, furious and in pain, directed his anger through the mirror. This time the Fifth Key conjured up a roaring column of fire that stretched from the ground up into the stratosphere, and completely incinerated everything in the trench in front of Arthur for at least a hundred yards.
As the fiery column slowly sank back to the ground, Arthur spun around again, checking behind him. He listened for the squealing noises, and though he couldn’t hear them, he heard something else: a clicking noise, getting louder and closer. Arthur knew what it was – the sound the insect soldier’s limbs had made when it had moved, but magnified a thousand times.
He jumped up on the trench’s firing step and looked out onto the yellow mud no-man’s-land of this alien war. Thousands of stick-insect soldiers were marching towards him, all perfectly in step, all holding those squealing tubes.
I could kill them all from here, thought Arthur. He felt a feral grin begin to spread across his face, before he pushed it away. He had the power, it was true, but he knew he didn’t have the right. They weren’t even really enemies; they knew nothing of the struggles in the House. They might look like giant stick insects, but obviously they were sentient beings, as technologically advanced as humans, perhaps even more so.
So what? thought Arthur. I’m no longer human. I am Lord Arthur, Rightful Heir to the Architect. I could kill ten thousand humans as easily as ten thousand alien insects.
He began to raise the mirror, visualising an even bigger, more awesome column of fire, one that stretched from horizon to horizon, saving only him from the inferno.
‘No,’ whispered Arthur. He forced his self-righteous pride and anger back. ‘I am me ... I’m not Lord Arthur, and this is wrong. All I have to do is leave.’
He swung the mirror around and looked into it, trying to think of Sir Thursday’s chamber and not all the destructive things he could do to anyone or anything that opposed him.
But he couldn’t focus – it was all he could do to keep his rage in check. He really wanted to destroy the insect soldiers, and every time he almost had a mental picture of Thursday’s room, it was replaced by images of fire and destruction.
As Arthur struggled with his thoughts, the mirror remained constant. He saw only his reflection, the now all-too-perfect face, so handsome that even a beard of frost could not lessen his unearthly beauty.
Arthur groaned and put the mirror back in his pouch. The horde of insect warriors was approaching at a steady pace, and had neither slowed nor speeded its advance. The forward ranks hadn’t aimed their weapons either, but he suspected he was probably in range. Arthur looked at the hole in his arm. It was neatly cauterised, but he could see right through from one side to the other. Only his sorcerously altered body allowed him to cope with such a wound. It felt about as painful as a paper cut to him now.
But he knew he could not survive a hundred – or a thousand – such wounds. He also knew that the rage he was barely keeping inside him would come out long before then, and that he would use the Keys to wreak destruction such as even these warring aliens had never imagined.
I have to get out of here, thought Arthur. Before I do something terrible ...
He jumped back down and tried to visualise the Improbable Stair. That could be its first step there, the pale blue sandbag that was the firing step of the trench. It just had to turn white and luminous, and that would be the way in.