Inkdeath (9 page)

Meggie saw the pity in Mo’s face. He didn’t believe Dustfinger would ever come back, any more than she did. "N6nsense," he said as his hand instinctively went to the place where Mortola had wounded him. "I don’t know anything. Anything more than everyone knows."

The guards had let the butcher pass, and one of them was staring at Mo again. The basilisk painted by Farid on the stones was still burning on the castle walls.

Mo turned his back on the soldier. "Listen!" he whispered to Meggie. "I ought not to have brought you here. Suppose you stay with Farid while I go to see Balbulus? He can take you to Roxane’s, and I’ll meet you and Resa there."

Farid put his arm around Meggie’s shoulders. "Yes, you go. I’ll look after her."

But Meggie pushed his arm roughly away. She didn’t like the idea of Mo leaving her behind — although she had to admit she’d have been only too happy to stay with Farid. She’d missed his face so much.

"Look after me? You don’t have to look after me!" she snapped at him, more sharply than she had intended. Being in love made you so stupid!

"She’s right about that. No one has to look after Meggie." Mo gently took the horse’s reins from her hand. "Now that I come to think of it, she’s looked after me more often than the other way around. I’ll soon be back," he told her. "I promise. And not a word to your mother, all right?"

Meggie just nodded.

"Stop looking at me so anxiously!" Mo whispered in a conspiratorial tone. "Don’t the songs say the Bluejay hardly ever does anything without his beautiful daughter? So I’m much less of a suspicious character without you!"

"Yes, but the songs are lying," Meggie whispered back. "The Bluejay doesn’t have a daughter at all. He’s not my father, he’s a robber."

Mo looked at her for a long moment. Then he kissed her on the forehead as if obliterating what she had said and went slowly toward the castle with Fenoglio.

Meggie never took her eyes off him as he reached the guards and stopped. In his black clothes he really did look like a stranger — the bookbinder from a foreign land who had come all this way to see the famous Balbulus’s pictures and give them proper clothes to wear at last. Who cared that he’d also become a robber on his long journey?

Farid took Meggie’s hand as soon as Mo had turned his back to them. "Your father’s as brave as a lion," he whispered to her, "but a little crazy, too, if you ask me. If I were the Bluejay I’d never go through that gate, certainly not to see a few books!"

"You don’t understand," replied Meggie quietly. "He wouldn’t do it for anything except the books."

She was wrong about that, but she wouldn’t know it until later.

The soldiers let the writer and the bookbinder pass. Mo looked back at Meggie once more before he disappeared through the great gateway with its pointed iron portcullis. Ever since the Milksop had come to the castle, it was lowered as soon as darkness fell, or whenever an alarm bell rang inside the building. Meggie had heard the sound once, and she instinctively expected to hear it again as Mo disappeared inside those mighty walls: the ringing of bells, the rattle of chains as the portcullis dropped, the sound of the iron spikes meeting the ground. . . .

"Meggie?" Farid put one hand under her chin and turned her face to his. "You must believe me — I’d have come to see you ages ago, but Orpheus makes me work hard all day, and at night I steal out to Roxane’s farm. I know she goes to the place where she’s hidden Dustfinger almost every night! But she always catches me before I can follow her. Her stupid goose lets me bribe it with raisin bread, but if the linchetto in her stable doesn’t bite me, then Gwin gives me away. Roxane even lets him into the house now, though she always used to throw stones at him before!"

What was he going on about? She didn’t want to talk about Dustfinger or Gwin. If you really missed me, she kept thinking, then why didn’t you come to see me at least once instead of going to Roxane’s? Just once. There was only one answer: because he hadn’t been missing her half as much as she’d missed him. He loved Dustfinger more than her. He would always love Dustfinger, even now, when he was dead. All the same, she let him kiss her, only a few paces from where the boy was still in the pillory with fire-elves on his skin. Don’t tell me you can get used to such sights.

Meggie didn’t see Sootbird until he had reached the guards.

"What is it?" Farid asked as she stared over his shoulder. "Ah, Sootbird. Yes. He’s always going in and out of the castle. Whenever I see him I feel I could slit his throat!"

"We must warn Mo!"

The guards let the fire-eater pass through like an old acquaintance. Meggie took a step toward them, but Farid kept her back. "Where do you think you’re going? Don’t worry, he won’t see your father! The castle is large, and Silvertongue is going to see Balbulus. Sootbird won’t lose his way and end up there, too, you can bet! He has three lovers among the court ladies; he’s off to see them — if Jacopo doesn’t nab him first. He has to perform for the boy twice a day, and he’s still a terrible fire-eater in spite of all they say about him. Miserable informer! I really wonder why the Black Prince hasn’t killed him yet or your father. Why are you looking at me like that?" he added, seeing Meggie’s horrified expression. "Silvertongue killed Basta, didn’t he?

Not that I saw it." Farid glanced quickly down, as he always did in speaking of the hours when he had been dead.

Meggie stared at the castle gates. She thought she could hear Mo’s voice talking about Sootbird. And if he does. . . last time he saw me I was half-dead. And another encounter will be the worse for him.

The Bluejay. Stop thinking of him by that name, Meggie thought. Stop it!

"Come on!" Farid took her hand. "Silvertongue said I was to take you to Roxane.

Won’t she just be glad to see me! But I expect she’ll put on a friendly act if you’re there, too."

"No." Meggie freed her hand from his, good as it felt to be holding hands with him again at last. "I’m staying here. I’m staying right here until Mo comes out again."

Farid sighed and rolled his eyes, but he knew her well enough not to argue with her.

"Oh, wonderful!" he said, lowering his voice. "If I know Silvertongue, he’s sure to spend forever looking at those wretched books, So at least let me kiss you, or the guards will soon be Wondering why we’re still standing around."

Humble. Humility and servility. He wasn’t good at it. Did you ever notice that in the other world, Mortimer? he asked himself. Bow your head, don’t stand too straight, let them look down on you even if you’re taller than they are. Act as if you think it perfectly natural for them to rule and everyone else to work.

It was so hard.

"Ah, you’re the bookbinder Balbulus is expecting," one of the guards had said, glancing at his black clothes. "What was all that with the boy just now? Don’t you like our pillory?"

Head lower, Mortimer! Go on. Pretend to be afraid. Forget your anger, forget the boy and his whimpering. "It won’t happen again."

"Exactly! He. . . he comes from far away," Fenoglio was quick to add. "He has yet to get used to our new governor’s rule. But if you’ll allow us. . . Balbulus can be very impatient." Then he had bowed and hastily drew Mo on with him.

Qmbra Castle. . . It was difficult not to forget everything else when he stepped into the great courtyard. He remembered so many of the scenes from Fenoglio’s book set here.

"Heavens above, that was a close thing!" whispered Fenoglio as they led the horse to the stables. "I don’t want to have to remind you again: You’re here as a bookbinder!

Play the Bluejay just once more and you’re a dead man! Damn it, Mortimer, I ought never to have agreed to bring you here. Look at all those soldiers. It’s like being in the Castle of Night!"

"Oh no, I assure you there’s a difference," Mo replied quietly, trying not to look up at the heads impaled on pikes that adorned the walls. Two belonged to a couple of the Black Prince’s men although he wouldn’t have recognized them if the Strong Man hadn’t told him about their fate. ‘Although I didn’t imagine the castle quite like this from your original description in Inkheart," he whispered to Fenoglio.

"You’re telling me?" Fenoglio murmured. "First Cosimo had it all rebuilt, now the Milksop’s leaving his mark on the place. He’s had the gold-mockers’ nests torn down, and look at all the shacks they’ve put up to hoard their loot! I wonder if the Adderhead’s noticed yet how little of it ever reaches the Castle of Night. If he has, his brother-in-law will soon be in trouble."

"Yes, the Milksop is pretty brazen about it." Mo lowered his head as a couple of grooms came toward them. Even they were armed His knife wouldn’t be much use if anyone actually did recogize him. "We stopped a few convoys intended for the Castle of Night," he continued quietly when they had passed, "and the Contents of the chests always proved rather disappointing."

Fenoglio stared at him. "You’re really doing it?"

"Doing what?"

The old man looked nervously around, but no one seemed to be taking any notice of them. "Well, all the things they sing about!" he whispered. "I mean . . . most of the songs are poor stuff, badly written, but the Bluejay is still my character, so what does it feel like? What does it feel like, playing him?"

A maid carried two slaughtered geese past them, The birds’ blood dripped onto the courtyard paving stones. Mo turned his head away. "Playing? Is that what it still feels like to you some kind of game?" His reply sounded touchier than he had intended.

Sometimes he’d really have given anything to read the thoughts in Fenoglio’s head.

And, who knew, maybe he would indeed read them some day in black and white, and find himself there on the page with words spun around him, like a fly caught in an old spider’s web.

"I admit it’s turned into a dangerous game, but I’m really glad you took the part!

Because wasn’t I right? This world needs the Blue —"

Mo interrupted Fenoglio and put his fingers to his lips. A troop of soldiers passed them, and Fenoglio bit back the name he had first written down on a piece of parchment not so long ago. But the smile with which he watched the soldiers pass was the smile of a man who had hid an explosive device in his enemies’ house and was enjoying mingling with them knowing they had no idea he had planted that bomb.

Wicked old man.

Mo realized that the Inner Castle didn’t look as Fenoglio had described it anymore, either. He quietly repeated the words he had once read: "The Laughing Prince's wife had laid out the garden because she was tired of the gray stones all around her. She planted flowers from foreign lands, and when they came into bloom they made her dream of distant seas, strange cities, and mountains where dragons lived. She allowed gold-breasted birds to breed, birds that perched in the trees like feathered fruits, and planted a seedling from the Way less Wood, a tree with leaves that could talk to the moon."

Fenoglio looked at him in surprise.

"Oh, I know your book by heart," said Mo. "Have you forgotten how often I read aloud from it after your words had swallowed up my wife?"

The gold-breasted birds had left the Inner Courtyard, too. The Milksop’s statue was reflected in a stone basin, and if the tree that talked to the moon ever existed, then it had been felled. Dog pens stood where there had once been a garden, and the new lord of Ombra’s hounds pressed their noses to the silvered wire fencing. It’s a long time since this was your story, old man, thought Mo as he and Fenoglio walked toward the Inner Castle. But, then, who was telling it now? Orpheus, maybe? Or had the Adderhead taken over as narrator, using blood and iron instead of pen and ink?

Tulli0 took them to Balbulus; Tullio the furry-faced servant said in Fenoglio’s book to be the offspring of a brownie father and a moss woman mother.

"How are you?" Fenoglio asked him as Tullio led them down the corridors As if it had ever interested him how his creations Were doing.

Tullio answered with a shrug of his shoulders. "They hunt me," he said his voice barely audible. "Our new master’s friends and he has a lot of them. They chase me along the passages and shut me in with the hounds, but Violante protects me. She protects me even though her son is one of the worst of them."

"Her son?" Mo asked.

"Yes, didn’t Meggie tell you about him?" Fenoglio whispered back. "Jacopo, a real little devil. His grandfather in miniature, although he’s getting to look more like his father every day. Not that he ever shed a tear for Cosimo. Far from it. They say he daubed Cosimo’s bust in the crypt with Balbulus’s paints, and in the evenings he sits beside the Milksop or on Sootbird’s lap instead of keeping his mother company. It’s said he even spies on her for his grandfather, the Adderhead."

Mo had read nothing in Fenoglio’s book about the door outside which Tullio finally stopped, rather breathless after climbing so many steep flights of stairs. He instinctively put out his hand to stroke the letters that covered it. "They’re so beautiful, Mo," Meggie had murmured as the two of them sat high in their prison in the Castle of Night. "Intertwined as if someone had written them on the wood in liquid silver."

Tullio raised his small, furry fist and knocked. The voice calling them in could belong to no one but Balbulus. Cold, self-satisfied, arrogant. . . The words Meggie had used to describe the best illuminator in this world were not nice ones. Tullio stood on tiptoe, took hold of the door handle — and then let go of it again in alarm.

"Tullio!" The voice echoing up the staircase sounded very young, but it seemed used to giving orders. "Where are you, Tullio? You must come and hold the torches for Sootbird."

"Jacopo!" Tullio breathed the word as if it were the name of an infectious illness. He ducked and instinctively tried to shelter behind Mo’s back.

A boy of perhaps six or seven came running upstairs. MO had never seen Cosimo the Fair. The Milksop had had all his statues smashed, but Battista still had a few coins with his picture on them. A face almost too beautiful to be real, that was how everyone described him. His son had obviously inherited that beauty, although as yet it was only developing on his still round, childish face. But it was not an endearing face. The boy’s eyes were watchful, and his mouth was as sullen as an old man’s. His black tunic had an embroidered pattern showing his grandfather’s emblematic adder with its flickering tongue, and even his belt was set with silver snakes, but around his neck dangled a silver nose — the Piper’s trademark.