Cabbage tossed the gun up and caught it by the barrel, handing it over grip first. September took it. It felt heavy and good in her hand. The pneumatic tube snaked up to her waist, tucking its loose end in her little bustle.
“See? You’ll be fast friends in no time. Be sure to keep good and copious notes, time and date stamped, and if at all possible, collect samples of anything it Rivets.” Belinda Cabbage took up a lightning rod and touched each of September’s shoulders with it. “I dub thee September, Temporary Mad Assistant.”
September holstered the Rivet Gun in a silken pocket that formed helpfully in the hip of her dress, just the right size for it. “Do you know which way I ought to go? To get to the bottom of the world, I mean. Where Prince Myrrh sleeps.”
Belinda Cabbage cocked her eyebrow skeptically at September. She turned to the Narrative Barometer and cracked open its glass bell. The Fairy flicked one of the hands to MUSICAL THRONES.
“There’s usually a door of some sort,” she shrugged. “I’m sure there’s one lying around.” Cabbage put both hands against a pile of machinery on her left-hand workbench and shoved it to the back wall of her shop. In the rough wood of the bench gleamed a safe-door. She spun the combination and hauled it open.
“Copious. Notes,” she said in a tone that no one, even in their wrong mind, would argue with.
September took Cabbage’s hand and climbed up onto the bench. “One last thing,” she said. “I wonder if…being a leader of the Scientifick community, I wonder if you ever knew a…a highly puissant Scientiste, who wore the biggest pair of spectacles ever built, and lived with a lady-Wyvern, and had a wonderful Library?”
Cabbage put on her own pair of spectacles, square industrial nickel-rimmed goggles. “Of course,” she said. “That’s my father you’re talking about.”
September shook her head and laughed. Then, holding her gun tight to her hip, she jumped feet first into the safe and disappeared from Belinda Cabbage’s workshop.
CHAPTER XVI
A PRACTICAL GIRL
In Which an Old Foe Returns, but Not as Expected
September fell out of the workbench, through the safe, and into a courtyard. She was alone, as she had not been since her first step in Fairyland-Below. The gray and black and muddy white cobblestones of the courtyard stretched out into alleys narrow and vast, cobbles upon cobbles, as far as she could see. A few bare birch trees stood with their wide branches leaning over empty benches and empty shop fronts where no one displayed their wares. Over one, an old painted wood sign read: ANYTHING IMPORTANT COMES IN THREES AND SIXES.
Snow began to fall, quiet and slow.
In the center of the courtyard stood a little garden with a low wall around it. Withered-up basil and sage and crushed mallow flowers tangled together around the black, broken roots of a fig tree. Husks of old fruit hung from the branches, and wrinkled dead toadstools ringed the roots. In the center of the garden sat a dry fountain-a high, dark marble bowl with a statue of a maiden sitting cross-legged in it, cradling a horn of plenty in her arms which must once have overflowed with clean, starry water. September had never been so tired, but still she knew that face.
It was a statue of Queen Mallow.
The wine-colored coat wrapped itself tight around September, its fur collar keeping out the soft, dry snow. She took a step forward-and saw a figure sitting on the far lip of the fountain. A young girl sat with her chin in her hands, kicking her feet in the air. September held her breath and walked a little ways around to get a better look. The girl was a shadow, violet and silver and blue lights flickering in the black depths of her skin. The shadow wore a lacy shadow-dress, with thick shadow-petticoats underneath it, along with elegant shadow-gloves and shadow-stockings and shadow-slippers.
And a very fine hat.
At her side, the shadow of a panther stood guard, quietly licking one massive dark paw.
September didn’t move. She wanted to laugh, and she wanted to run, and she wanted to take out her Rivet Gun and fire it straightaway. She didn’t do any of that. She just stood there and watched the girl who was the shadow of the Marquess. In the end, she waited too long and the Marquess saw her first.
“Oh!” said the Marquess, dropping her hands into her lap. “It’s you.”
“It’s me,” said September.
Iago, the Panther of Rough Storms, turned his great head to look at her. His gaze was as unreadable as any cat’s. Even his shadow would never leave her, September thought, and it awed her a little.
“I’m only passing through,” September said finally. “I don’t want any trouble with you. I don’t want anything at all to do with you, really. I’ve had a very bad day, and you are just the last thing I can bother with right this second. I know you must feel poorly about how things went when we saw each other last, but you’re just going to have to keep feeling poorly.”
The Marquess stood suddenly.
“Did you come all the way here in those shoes?” she asked slowly, as if remembering something from long ago.
September looked down at her shoes. They were her plain school shoes, and she had to admit they had gotten rather shabby with all the Reveling and dancing in onion forests and tromping through mines and diving through an entire sea. Still, at least this time she had brought both shoes along.
“That must have been just awfully painful. How brave of you,” the Marquess said in the same slow voice-but it held no bitterness or cruel jokes. Rather, the Marquess’s voice seemed entirely genuine in its pity and sympathy. She shook her head to clear it. The shadow-feathers and shadow-jewels on her hat jingled and quivered.
“You said that to me before,” said September curtly.
“I did,” the Marquess agreed, but she did not seem happy about it.
“Listen, Mallow, I don’t mean to be rude, but whatever game you want to play, I don’t know the rules, and I’d really rather sit this round out.”
The Marquess’s head snapped up. Her thick sausage curls flushed lilac. “Don’t call me that,” she said, and the old power bloomed in her voice. “It’s not my name. I’m Maud. I was Maud.”
“Yes, when you lived on your father’s farm in Ontario.”
Maud started as if she’d been slapped. “I hate my father. I will never go back. You can’t make me go back.”
“I know,” said September, softening a little despite herself. At least back at home, her own mother loved her, and her father did, too, wherever he was.
“I’m sleeping,” Maud whispered, her dark shadow eyes large and worried.
“What do you mean? You’re wide awake. You oughtn’t to be, but you are.”
Iago’s shadow finally spoke, his rumbly thundering voice rolling over September like a shiver. “She means that she is sleeping, the Marquess up Above, on a bed of tourmaline in the Springtime Parish, where the plum blossoms are always falling. I’m there, too, only I’m not sleeping. Well, really I am sleeping a lot of the time. Springtime has a surplus of sunbeams, and I am only feline. But I’m not sleeping in an occupational way, whereas she has been working on a good sleep for a couple of years now, and it’ll go on a good while yet. When our shadows got Siphoned down, we woke up-I’d been napping, and don’t you dare judge me, it was four in the afternoon, and all cats know four in the afternoon is Twelfthnap, right after Teanap. The trouble is, with her Topside self in such a powerful unnatural sleep, it’s addled her a little. Sometimes she thinks she’s her old self, sometimes she remembers she’s a shadow and doesn’t have to be a Marquess anymore.”