The Lightning Key (5 page)

B
altinglass of Araby, white-caned and woolly-hatted, tapped the granite headstone gently with the end of his stick. “This is the one, Master Miles?” he asked, in a tone softer than his usual bellow.

“Yes,” said Miles.

“Read it out to me,” said Baltinglass.

Miles cleared his throat. “‘Celeste Mahnoosh Elham,'” he read. “‘What time has stolen, Let it be.'”

“That's a short epitaph,” said Baltinglass of Araby. He reached out again with his cane and swept it through the weeds that grew up around the headstone. “Watch your ankles,” he said. He slid the
swordstick from inside his cane and aimed a deft swipe at the weeds, cutting them to their roots and knocking sparks from the granite. The plants tumbled, and Miles could see more writing that had been hidden behind them. He knelt down and peered at the words, tracing them with his finger as he read them out in the dusk.

 

What time has stolen

Let it be

Power grows

From two to three

Embrace the fear

And set soul free

To drink the sun

In place of me

 

A stillness like a stopped clock filled the churchyard, softened only by the rasping of distant crows.

“Not your standard epitaph, is it?” said a doleful voice. Miles and Little spun around to look for the speaker, and Baltinglass brandished his swordstick. “Who said that?” he bellowed.

“I did,” said a thin man with a bald crown, emerging from the shadows behind the yew tree. He wore a brown robe with a rope knotted around his waist,
and he held up his hands, palms outward, obviously unaware that the old man could not see him. “Brother Runco is my name,” he said. “I look after the churchyard.”

Baltinglass of Araby sheathed his swordstick and snorted. “You certainly keep the weeds in fine condition,” he said.

“I do try to keep the place tidy,” said Brother Runco, whose voice sounded like it was being played at the wrong speed. “But I was asked by this young lady's cousins to leave her resting place to nature's care, and it's a request I have tried to honor.”

“Her cousins?” said Miles.

The monk nodded. “Three little gentlemen,” he said. “They brought her in the night and asked for a private funeral. I remember it like it was yesterday. One of them was very ill, poor little fellow, but he had insisted on coming along. Normally the priest does the funerals on weekday mornings, but these men were traveling with a circus and couldn't afford to wait.”

“Who made the writing on the stone?” asked Little.

A ghost of a smile lifted Brother Runco's face. “I did the engraving myself,” he said. “I've carved over half the headstones in this churchyard. Would you
like to see some more?”

“Love to,” interrupted Baltinglass of Araby, “but we have an urgent appointment with a villain, a fool and a boat. Where did you get the inscription?”

“The lady's cousins left it for me on a scrap of paper. It's a strange little verse, isn't it?”

“Do you still have the piece of paper?” asked Miles.

Brother Runco shook his head. “It fell apart eventually,” he said. His breath smelled of sardines.

Miles hunkered down by the gravestone. “We have to go,” he said. He took out Celeste's diary and the pencil with which he had written Baltinglass's reassuring note to Lady Partridge, and began to copy down the inscription in his best hand.

Brother Runco sidled up to him and leaned over his shoulder. “It's some sort of riddle, isn't it?” he said, his words gliding on seagull breath. “I've been trying to work it out for years. What power is she referring to, do you think? And what does she mean by drinking the sun?”

Miles gave no answer. He was concentrating on his handwriting, and on holding his breath.

The monk sighed deeply. “There's nothing else to think about in the long evenings,” he intoned. “Most epitaphs leave little to the imagination. Take
this one—‘Sadly missed by loving husband Frank and son Frank junior,' or this—‘He should have switched off the power before fixing the canning machine.'”

Miles closed the diary softly. There was no surface left inside the notebook that was not covered in writing, and nothing left to do now but chase the Great Cortado and his bumbling henchfool across hill and desert in pursuit of the Tiger's Egg. He opened his mouth to speak.

“You have to go,” interrupted the mournful monk, nodding slowly. He held out his hand, and Miles took it reluctantly. It felt like a fish that had swallowed a handful of bones. “Good luck,” said the monk.

“Thank you,” said Miles. He stepped away as quickly as he could and took a lungful of clean night air. Baltinglass raised his cane in salute, almost hooking the monk's nostril in the process, and Little left him with a smile that seemed to glow like a firefly before melting slowly into the night.

“Do you think . . .,” called Brother Runco as they made their way into the trees. “I mean, once you find . . .”

“We'll send the answer on a postcard,” said Baltinglass of Araby, and he hacked his way through the undergrowth, following the intoxicating aroma
that wafted on the night air from Morrigan's slowly cooling exhaust. The car glinted patiently in the clearing. “You'll be tired, Master Miles,” said Baltinglass. “We'll pitch camp here and make an early start in the morning.”

“I can drive some more,” said Miles. He could picture the morose Brother Runco materializing like a reproach from among the trees and watching over them as they slept, and he felt a little distance would do no harm.

“Onward it is, then!” barked Baltinglass. He paused with his hand on the passenger door. “I can always take a turn at the driving,” he said. “Makes no difference to me if it's day or night; I'm blind as a worm.”

“I think that's why you made Miles the driver,” Little reminded him.

“Ah, yes, so it was,” said Baltinglass of Araby.

Miles gave Little a boost into the spacious backseat. Though he had known her more than a year it still surprised him how light she was. He smiled, but something tiny shifted at the back of his mind, releasing a ripple of unease. He shook his head and climbed behind the wheel.

Before long they were speeding southward again. The countryside was iced with the light of a half-
moon, and the cold wind bit his ears. Baltinglass had sunk down into his coat until his woolly hat sat on his shoulders like a stranded jellyfish, wispy tentacles of white hair flapping from beneath it. He seemed to have fallen into a gloomy mood, and now and then Miles was sure that he could hear the old man reciting muffled snatches of Celeste's epitaph and sighing deeply.

There was silence from the backseat, and Miles pulled himself upright to check the mirror. The car veered and he sat down again quickly, but not before seeing Little curled up asleep in the corner of the enormous seat. She looked small and lost, as she had when first he found her in a locked wagon at the Circus Oscuro. He realized with a start that she hadn't grown a millimeter or changed a hair in the year since then. The uncomfortable thought at the back of his mind began to creep into the light, and this is the shape it took:

He pictured a small girl holding his hand as he grew older, looking less like his adopted sister and more like his daughter with each passing year. She had surrendered her name and ceded her wings to save his life, yet she seemed suspended between the world of her birth and the one she had chosen to live in. It began to dawn on him now that although
he had promised to make her new life magical, he would move on and leave her stranded in perpetual childhood instead.

Clouds loomed in the sky ahead, snuffing out the stars as they came, and still Miles drove relentlessly on. The car's headlights shone like a beacon for the angels who would come to take his soul. He was a small boy at the wheel of a big adventure, gaining hour by hour on the villain who wished him dead, and carrying with him an old man on his last journey and a girl to whom he had made a promise he could never hope to keep.

T
he port of Fuera, white-blind and sea-silent, slept inside a mist that was so dense, it made the world end at arm's length. There was not a soul about, for there was no business that could be carried on in such a fog. Seagulls perched, dripping, on bales and bollards, while silent ships stood at anchor out in the bay, their bored crews playing dice to the muffled
ding
of the buoy bells. Onshore the sailors, tailors, chandlers and fishermen who normally filled the streets and swarmed on the quays fidgeted instead in their narrow houses, waiting for the world to reappear.

Above a tavern by the docks was a small room con
taining two lumpy beds and a single armchair. The armchair in turn contained the Great Cortado, who chewed irritably on a cheap cigar. Pictures of water mills and sunsets hung on the yellowed walls. He was staring at one of these pictures with one watering eye, trying to ignore the muttering and sighing of his companion, Doctor Tau-Tau, who slouched on one of the beds like a narwhal in a fez.

Someone had arranged that fog, thought the Great Cortado darkly. It had risen from nowhere just as they had booked passage to leave this rank backwater, and there would be no departing until it had dispersed. Could Tau-Tau have done it? Only if he was trying to arrange a clear blue sky and a Girl Scout's picnic, the pop-eyed fool. There he sat, thought Cortado, muttering inanely over his stupid notebook while the walls drew closer minute by minute and the Tiger's Egg burned with untapped power.

The Great Cortado's skin crawled. The scar on his cheek pulled at his empty eye socket, and his mouth seemed filled with hundreds of tiny molars marching back into his skull. His bones were small and brittle, and his head pounded with the pressure of the chaos it contained, a universe of schemes shot through with vengeance and hot with bile. He was a
Great Man trapped in a little joke-shop body. Whose idea of a laugh had that been? He should have been broad and tall, or powerful and lean. The waterwheel in the picture turned insolently, and the fool of a fortune-teller said, “Huh!” as though he had just found a nugget of fascinating information in the scribbled drivel that filled his notebook.

“Stop babbling, man!” said the Great Cortado sharply.

Doctor Tau-Tau jumped, and the springs on the bed squeaked. “Sorry!” he said. “I'm studying the notes I made from Celeste's diaries before they were stolen from me. With luck I'll be able to reconstruct—”

“Luck doesn't enter into it,” said Cortado. “I'm going to find Celeste's sister, and she's going to teach you how to use that Egg.”

Doctor Tau-Tau gave a nervous smile. “That's if she agrees.”

“She'll agree once she has a tiger breathing down her neck,” said the Great Cortado. “All you have to do is learn to bring it to heel. I'll take care of the rest.”

Doctor Tau-Tau looked confused. “I'm on the verge of acquiring that knowledge,” he said. “But
when I have mastered the tiger, what exactly will we need Celeste's sister for?”

The Great Cortado snorted. He took out his lighter and lit the cigar he had been maiming. Doctor Tau-Tau stared at him expectantly, but the little ringmaster was concentrating on creating a fog inside the room to match the one that pressed against the window, and he said nothing. A cold, smooth plan had hatched itself in the center of his fractured mind, and had been growing for several weeks now. It was a perfect plan, he told himself; a work of uncanny genius, and he had no intention of revealing it to Tau-Tau until it was absolutely necessary.

Soon he would have no more need of this little body, and he could discard the hated thing like a broken toy. Soon he would be all muscle and teeth, all shaggy power and striped majesty. He would become the one thing that he feared, and then there would be nothing more that could stand in the face of his furious hunger. He pictured the fortune-teller roasted on a silver plate with an apple in his mouth, and gave a tinny snigger. Tau-Tau glanced nervously in his direction. “He'll make a good meal when the time comes,” thought Cortado, and somewhere in a
lost corner of his mind he wondered if that thought should disgust him more than it did.

 

Miles Wednesday, steam-goggled, flat-capped and dawn-hungry, slowed the car as the mist began to thicken around them. He had slept for a while, parked at the roadside and curled up under his overcoat, and the chill still sat in his bones. He switched on the headlights to see better, but they just lit up the fog and made it seem twice as dense.

“What's the matter?” said Baltinglass, stretching himself awake. “You're driving like a mollusk on flypaper.”

“It's getting foggy,” said Miles.

Baltinglass sniffed the air. “So it is. We're a stone's throw from the sea, if I'm any judge. Can you see anything?”

“Not much,” said Miles. He could smell the sea now too and feel the car rumbling over cobbles. The mist hid the whitewashed houses of Fuera, but he could picture them clustering invisibly around. It felt like coming home.

“Keep an eye out for the Mermaid's Boot, Master Miles. There's a big, rusty anchor standing outside the yard, if it's still there.”

Now, if you know anything at all about mermaids
you might feel there are better things you could do with your time than to be searching for their boots, but Miles knew that the Mermaid's Boot was a small inn that stood at the end of the road into Fuera, just where it met the quays. He didn't think they had come that far yet, but just at that moment a tilted shape loomed from the mist in front of them. Miles stood on the brakes, but Morrigan was a big car and would not be instantly stopped. Her bumper met the shape with a clang, lending the rusty anchor more of a tilt than it had previously had.

“Sorry!” said Miles.

“Think nothing of it,” said Baltinglass of Araby. “It's as good a way of stopping as any other. Now pull into the yard and park by the side wall. Tuck her in nice and close.”

Miles reversed the car under Baltinglass's instructions and parked it below a window at the side of the Mermaid's Boot. Little yawned from the backseat.

“Are we stopping for breakfast?” she asked sleepily.

“There are few things more important than a good breakfast,” said Baltinglass, “but unfortunately a visit to the harbormaster's office is one of them.” The car was parked so close to the wall that he could not open the passenger door. He seemed unaccountably
pleased about this, and instead clambered along the bench seat and got out of the driver's door after Miles. Together they tapped their way along the street and onto the quays, the blind explorer leading the boy and the angel through the fog in which he himself spent all his days.

The harbormaster's office was a round tower with small windows set into its thick walls. The inside was entirely papered with sea charts and tide tables, and contained a large desk behind which sat an even larger man in a thick woolen sweater. The desk was strewn with papers, and the harbormaster was making notes on them with a sharp pencil. He looked up in mild surprise. “Well?” he said.

“Well, indeed,” said Baltinglass. “We'd like to know the next vessel that's headed for Al Bab.”

The harbormaster looked back at his papers. “The
Albatross
is loaded and ready to sail since yesterday, but she won't be going anywhere till the fog lifts. You'd better cut along there quick to have any chance of getting aboard. She's already filled most of her berths, and there're no more ships bound that way for another week.”

“We're not going anywhere,” said Baltinglass of Araby. “I have a packet for my niece's cook's grand
mother's brother in Al Bab. Where's the
Albatross
docked?”

“Right here on the west pier,” said the harbormaster, and he resumed his pencil annotations without looking up.

They made their way along the quayside, the worn paving stones appearing before their feet and fading just as quickly behind them. Miles and Little knew the harbor well, but it seemed strange and unfamiliar in the ghostly mist. Baltinglass swiped sideways with his cane, counting the iron bollards as they went.

“Aren't we sailing to Al Bab after all?” asked Little.

“'Course we are,” said Baltinglass in a hoarse whisper.

“But you said—”

“Rumor spreads like mold in a seaport,” said Baltinglass, “and there's no sense in broadcasting our plans. The first thing we need to do is find out if those two villains have sailed yet. We don't want to find ourselves sharing a cabin with them, do we?”

They turned onto the west pier. Miles could faintly see the shape of a ship looming to their right. As they approached the gangplank the silhouette began to sharpen, and he thought he could
see on the deck the outlines of two men in conversation, though he could not make out their features. One of the men passed something to the other, and they shook hands. “That's settled, then,” said the first man.

Miles recognized Doctor Tau-Tau's voice straightaway. His stomach tightened and he grabbed Baltinglass's arm. “It's Tau-Tau,” he whispered. “Let's go before he spots us.”

“About-face, then,” hissed Baltinglass of Araby. “Set a course for breakfast at the Mermaid's Boot.”

They hurried back along the quays to the inn on the corner. The Mermaid's Boot was a rambling, smoky room with numerous nooks and crannies and a small mahogany bar in one corner. The lumpy plaster walls were festooned with every type of nautical knickknack it was possible to imagine. There were shark's jawbones, ship's compasses, shells, bells, starfish, sea urchins, shackles, bolts, cleats, blocks, lanterns, life belts, harpoons and nets, a brass diver's helmet and lead-soled boots, ropes, rattraps, pipes, pails, charts, darts, ship's wheels, ice chests, billhooks, and a skeleton in a tricorn hat, slumped in the corner like a forgotten date.

Behind the bar a colorless man sat on a stool. He looked as though he had been left out in the rain.
He was clouding glasses with a greasy cloth, and he paused to gaze at the new arrivals with watery eyes.

“Breakfast!” barked Baltinglass, and the handful of sailors and stevedores who populated the bar turned and stared at the sound of his voice.

“We don't serve breakfast here,” said the colorless man.

“Is that so?” said Baltinglass, slapping his cane on the bar. “Well, if you won't serve breakfast I'll come back there and cook it myself. Have you ever seen what a blind man can do to a stranger's kitchen?”

The barman thought for a moment. “How do you like your eggs?” he asked.

They sat themselves in a dim alcove, tucked away in the corner of the bar. The barman disappeared through a bead curtain and began to make a great deal of noise with some pots and pans. Miles felt in his pocket for Tangerine, as he did whenever arriving or leaving anywhere. The bear slept on, a crooked smile stitched on his grubby orange face, and Miles sighed quietly to himself.

“What do we do now?” he said. “There won't be another ship for a week, and we can't sail on the
Albatross
.”

“Who says we can't?” said Baltinglass.

Miles looked at him in surprise. “We can't sail
with Doctor Tau-Tau and the Great Cortado. You said so yourself.”

“I only said we wouldn't want to be sharing a cabin with them,” said Baltinglass of Araby. He leaned foward and dropped again into a hoarse whisper. “There's hardly a ship leaves port that isn't carrying an extra passenger or three that no one knows about except the purser or the ship's cook.”

“You mean we could stow away?” whispered Miles.

Baltinglass nodded. “Even the smallest schooner has a dozen hidey-holes,” he said. “And there's always a member of the crew who makes a few extra coins from filling those places with passengers who don't wish to be seen waltzing up the gangplank in a panama hat.”

“That sounds like fun!” said Little. “How do we know who to ask?”

“Simple.” Baltinglass chuckled. “The Mermaid's Boot has been the place to buy a berth in the bilges ever since I was a boy, and for many years before that. Anyone who's running a sideline in stowaways on the
Albatross
will be in here before long, looking for a last few coins in his pocket. All we have to do is sit back and enjoy our breakfast.”

As if on cue the barman appeared carrying three
plates of grease in which limp morsels of breakfast swam. A moment later he returned with a pot of tea and some chipped mugs. They had just started eating when the inn door burst open and a man with a graying beard and round spectacles entered like a dapper whirlwind, wearing an immaculate blue uniform and an officer's cap.

“Maurice, Maurice,” he piped, clapping his hands cheerfully and addressing the barman as though he were a long-lost friend. “A ball of malt, please, no ice.” He surveyed the occupants of the bar with a beaming smile. “Gentlemen, good morning!” he said. “A bit foggy, but it's lifting fast. Just the day for an unimaginable adventure, I'd imagine.” His eyes lit on Baltinglass and his two companions, sitting in a dim corner under a suspended fishing net full of crabs, and he gave a gasp of delight. He fairly pirouetted across the worn floorboards toward them, coming to rest by the bench where Miles and Little sat staring at him with curiosity.

“May I?” he asked, indicating the end of the bench with a sweeping gesture. Miles scooted along the bench to make room for the neat man and his enormous enthusiasm. “Well, well!” said the stranger in a loud stage whisper. “Baltinglass of Araby, isn't it? You've become a legend since we
last met. This is indeed a pleasure.”

Miles looked at Baltinglass in surprise. The old man put down his knife and fork and dabbed his wrinkled lips with a napkin. He frowned, and the other man beamed at him patiently. “Sounds like Barrett,” said Baltinglass at last. “The cabin boy on the
Admiral Tench
.”