No letter.
He jumped up onto the desk, covered with the same leather and paper blotter that Arhu had seen. There were no writings on it, but there were faint depressions as of writing.
Urruah looked across to the small narrow fireplace at the other side of the office.Perfect,he thought.
He did a very small wizardry in his mind and put his paws down on the blotter, electrostatically charging it. Then he glanced over at the fireplace, and spoke courteously in the Speech to the soot up in the chimney.
Tidily, in a thin stream, it made its way across the room to him. Urruah guided it down onto the blotter, then levitated the blotter a little way up on its edge to let the soot slide down it.
It adhered here and there on the blotter, mostly to signatures. But one recent piece of writing showed up most clearly where the soot clung.
MR JAMES FLEMING
14 KENNISHEAD AVENUE
EDINBURGH
Dear Mr. Fleming,
Thank you for yours inst. the 6th of July regarding passes to the Speaker’s gallery. Such may only be granted by the Speaker after introduction by the applicant’s own member of Parliament. In your case this would—
Oh, no,Urruah thought.
It’s gone. It’s gone already.How can it be gone?
He ran out of the office again, through the door, his heart pounding and his mouth dry with terror.
Everybody! Everybody! Windsor, now, hurry,now!
…He unlatches the door with one gloved hand, slips in through it, shuts it gently behind him. Stands still in the darkness, and listens. A faint hiss from the hot-water boiler behind the coal stove: the tick of cinders shifting in the box: no other sound.
He takes his twelve steps across the kitchen, reaches out his hand … finds the shut door. He eases its latch open, slips through this door too, pulls it gently to behind him. Six stairs up to the hallway. Two steps out into the middle of the carpet in the hall; turn left. Sixty steps down to the second landing, and out onto the carpet. In the darkness he passes by the doorways he knows are there, to the Picture Gallery, the Queen’s Ball Room, the Queen’s Audience Chamber. Silently past the Guard Chamber: no guards are there any more—the place is full of suits of armor, some of them those of children, and silken banners and old swords and shields, the gifts of kings. Nomore kings after tonight,he thinks, with the slightest smile in the dark. Nomore queens…
Fifty-nine steps, and there is the change in the sound. Sixty. His toe bumps against the bottom step. Five stairs up to the landing: turn right: three steps. He puts his hand out, and feels the door.
Gently, gently he pulls it open. From up the winding stair comes a faint light: it seems astonishingly bright to him after the dead blackness. Softly he goes up the stairs, taking them near the outer side of the steps: the inner sides creak.
Something brushes against his leg. A gasp catches in his throat: he freezes in place. A minute, two minutes, he stands there.
Nothing. A cobweb. Even a place like this, with a hundred servants, can’t keep all the stairwells free of the little toilers, the spinners of webs. Softly he goes on up again, one step at a time, at the edges, with care.
The remaining fifteen steps are steep, but he is careful. At the door at the top he halts and looks out of the crack in it where it has been left open. In the hallway onto which this stairway gives, next to a door with a gilded frame, is a chair under a single candle sconce with a dim electric bulb burning in it. There should be a footman in it, but there’s no sign of him. The chair is tilted back against the wall, and down by the foot of the chair is a stoneware mug: empty. The footman has gone to relieve himself. And the door in the gilded frame is slightly open.
Perfect. Down the hallway, now, in utmost silence.
Swiftly now, but also silently. Reach up and undo the bulb from its socket. No one will think a thing of it: these newfangled things burn out without warning all the time. Wait a few seconds for night vision to return. Then, silently, push the door open and step in.
The outer room is where the lady-in-waiting has a bed. She is not in it. Now the footman’s absence suddenly completely makes sense, and in the darkness, he smiles. The nightwalker makes his way toward what he cannot see yet in this more total darkness, the inner door. He feels for the handle: finds it.
Turns the handle. The door swings inward.
Darkness and silence. Notquitesilence: a faint rustle of bedlinens, off to his left, and ahead. A little rasp of noise, soft. A snore? She will sleep more quietly in a moment…
Now, only now, the excitement strikes him, and his heart begins to pound. Ten steps, they told him. A rather wide bed. Her maids say she still favors the left side of it, leaving the right side open for someone who sleeps there no more.
Ten steps. He takes them. He listens for the sound of breathing…
…then reaches for the left side.
One muffled cry of surprise, as the knives pierce his hand, and other knives catch him from behind, on the neck and the back of the head, a flurry of abrupt, terrible, slicing pain. He staggers back, his arms windmilling, the knife trying to find a target in the darkness. Only the training of many years, the usual number of accidents—broken glass, banged shins—keeps him quiet now as he stumbles back to find his balance again. For just a moment his hand is free of the pain, but now the front of his neck is pierced by furious jaws that bite him in the throat, claws that seize and kick. He fumbles at his throat to grab something furry and throw it away with all his might—
—and suddenly he simply can’t move: he’s frozen, as if he were a stick of wood or one of the carved statues downstairs. Like a statue with its pedestal pulled out from under it, he topples, unable even to catch himself, or to turn so that he falls face down and not on his back.
Yet at the last minute he doesn’t fall. Some force far stronger than he is stops him, holds him suspended in air. He can’t breathe, can’t move, can only lie here gripped by something he can’t begin to understand, and by the terror that follows.
The pain, at least, drops away from the back of his head. But suddenly there is a pressure on his chest. His eyes, wide already in the dark, go as wide as they can with shock as a face, grinning, like the face of a demon, becomes just barely visible before him.
It is the face of a black-and-white cat. From the very end of its tail, held up behind it, comes the faintest glimmer of light, like a will-’o’-the-wisp. It looks at him with a face of unutterable evil, a devil come to claim him: and, impossibly, in a whisper, it speaks.
“Boy,” it says, “haveyouever picked the wrong bedroom.”
It sits there on his chest while invisible hands lift him. A brief whirl of that ever-so-faint light surrounds him, going around the back of his field of vision, coming up to the front again, tying itself in a tidy bow-knot. For a second or so that light fills everything.
Then it is gone again, and he falls again, coming down on the floor with a thump. His head cracks down hard, and he almost swears, but restrains himself.
But there’s no carpet on this floor. This is hard stone. Slowly, when he discovers that he can sit up again, he feels the floor around him. Marble, and old smooth tile—Hesitantly he gets to his feet, begins to feel his way around.
What he feels makes no sense. A stone figure, lying on its back, raised above the floor—Much other carving reveals itself under his hands, but nothing else. He would swear out loud, except that he may still be able to get out, and someone might hear him.
It is a long while before the tarnished, waning Moon rises enough for its light to stream through the stained-glass windows surrounding him with their illustrations of Biblical texts, and for him to realize whose the reclining figure is. There, entombed in marble, Prince Albert lies in the moonlight, hands folded, at rest, on his face a slight grave smile which, in this lighting, takes on an unbearably sinister aspect.