Keli’s lips compressed into a thin smile. She wondered where her cloaks were kept, but cold reason told her it was going to be a damn sight easier to find them herself than try to make her presence felt to the maid. She waited, watching closely, as the woman stopped sobbing, looked around her in vague bewilderment, and hurried out of the room.
She’s forgotten me already, she thought. She looked at her hands. She seemed solid enough.
It had to be magic.
She wandered into her robing room and experimentally opened a few cupboards until she found a black cloak and hood. She slipped them on and darted out into the corridor and down the servants’ stairs.
She hadn’t been this way since she was little. This was the world of linen cupboards, bare floors and dumb-waiters. It smelled of slightly stale crusts.
Keli moved through it like an earthbound spook. She was aware of the servants’ quarters, of course, in the same way that people are aware at some level in their minds of the drains or the guttering, and she would be quite prepared to concede that although servants all looked pretty much alike they must have some distinguishing features by which their nearest and dearest could, presumably, identify them. But she was not prepared for sights like Moghedron the wine butler, whom she had hitherto seen only as a stately presence moving like a galleon under full sail, sitting in his pantry with his jacket undone and smoking a pipe.
A couple of maids ran past her without a second glance, giggling. She hurried on, aware that in some strange way she was trespassing in her own castle.
And that, she realised, was because it wasn’t her castle at all. The noisy world around her, with its steaming laundries and chilly stillrooms, was its own world. She couldn’t own it. Possibly it owned her.
She took a chicken leg from the table in the biggest kitchen, a cavern lined with so many pots that by the light of its fires it looked like an armoury for tortoises, and felt the unfamiliar thrill of theft. Theft! In her own kingdom! And the cook looked straight through her, eyes as glazed as jugged ham.
Keli ran across the stable yards and out of the back gate, past a couple of sentries whose stern gaze quite failed to notice her.
Out in the streets it wasn’t so creepy, but she still felt oddly naked. It was unnerving, being among people who were going about their own affairs and not bothering to look at one, when one’s entire experience of the world hitherto was that it revolved around one. Pedestrians bumped into one and rebounded away, wondering briefly what it was they had hit, and one several times had to scurry away out of the path of wagons.
The chicken leg hadn’t gone far to fill the hole left by the absence of lunch, and she filched a couple of apples from a stall, making a mental note to have the chamberlain find out how much apples cost and send some money down to the stallholder.
Dishevelled, rather grubby and smelling slightly of horse dung, she came at last to Cutwell’s door. The knocker gave her some trouble. In her experience doors opened for you; there were special people to arrange it.
She was so distraught she didn’t even notice that the knocker winked at her.
She tried again, and thought she heard a distant crash. After some time the door opened a few inches and she caught a glimpse of a round flustered face topped with curly hair. Her right foot surprised her by intelligently inserting itself in the crack.
“I demand to see the wizard,” she announced. “Pray admit me this instant.”
“He’s rather busy at present,” said the face. “Were you after a love potion?”
“A what?”
“I’ve—we’ve got a special on Cutwell’s Shield of Passion ointment,” said the face, and winked in a startling fashion. “Provides your wild oats while guaranteeing a crop failure, if you know what I mean.”
Keli bridled. “No,” she lied coldly, “I do not.”
“Ramrub? Maidens’ Longstop? Belladonna eyedrops?”
“I demand—”
“Sorry, we’re closed,” said the face, and shut the door. Keli withdrew her foot just in time.
She muttered some words that would have amazed and shocked her tutors, and thumped on the woodwork.
The tattoo of her hammering suddenly slowed as realisation dawned.
He’d seen her! He’d heard her!
She beat on the door with renewed vigour, yelling with all the power in her lungs.
A voice by her ear said, “It won’t work. He ’eef very fstubborn.”
She looked around slowly and met the impertinent gaze of the doorknocker. It waggled its metal eyebrows at her and spoke indistinctly through its wrought-iron ring.
“I am Princess Keli, heir to the throne of Sto Lat,” she said haughtily, holding down the lid on her terror. “And I don’t talk to door furniture.”
“Fwell, I’m just a doorknocker and I can talk to fwhoever I please,” said the gargoyle pleasantly. “And I can ftell you the fmaster iff having a trying day and duff fnot fwant to be disturbed. But you could ftry to use the magic word,” it added. “Coming from an attractiff fwoman it works nine times out of eight.”
“Magic word? What’s the magic word?”
The knocker perceptibly sneered. “Haff you been taught nothing, miss?”
She drew herself up to her full height, which wasn’t really worth the effort. She felt she’d had a trying day too. Her father had personally executed a hundred enemies in battle. She should be able to manage a doorknocker.
“I have been educated,” she informed it with icy precision, “by some of the finest scholars in the land.”
The doorknocker did not appear to be impressed.
“Iff they didn’t teach you the magic word,” it said calmly, “they couldn’t haff fbeen all that fine.”
Keli reached out, grabbed the heavy ring, and pounded it on the door. The knocker leered at her.
“Ftreat me rough,” it lisped. “That’f the way I like it!”
“You’re disgusting!”
“Yeff. Ooo, that waff nife, do it again…”
The door opened a crack. There was a shadowy glimpse of curly hair.
“Madam, I said we’re cl—”
Keli sagged.
“Please help me,” she said. “Please!”
“See?” said the doorknocker triumphantly. “Sooner or later everyone remembers the magic word!”
Keli had been to official functions in Ankh-Morpork and had met senior wizards from Unseen University, the Disc’s premier college of magic. Some of them had been tall, and most of them had been fat, and nearly all of them had been richly dressed, or at least thought they were richly dressed.
In fact there are fashions in wizardry as in more mundane arts, and this tendency to look like elderly aldermen was only temporary. Previous generations had gone in for looking pale and interesting, or druidical and grubby, or mysterious and saturnine. But Keli was used to wizards as a sort of fur-trimmed small mountain with a wheezy voice, and Igneous Cutwell didn’t quite fit the mage image.
He was young. Well, that couldn’t be helped; presumably even wizards had to start off young. He didn’t have a beard, and the only thing his rather grubby robe was trimmed with was frayed edges.
“Would you like a drink or something?” he said, surreptitiously kicking a discarded vest under the table.
Keli looked around for somewhere to sit that wasn’t occupied with laundry or used crockery, and shook her head. Cutwell noticed her expression.
“It’s a bit alfresco, I’m afraid,” he added hurriedly, elbowing the remains of a garlic sausage on to the floor. “Mrs Nugent usually comes in twice a week and does for me but she’s gone to see her sister who’s had one of her turns. Are you sure? It’s no trouble. I saw a spare cup here only yesterday.”