“So you despise me, too?”
“Not at all! I meant that that was how it should be for you. You’re what our archangels call a natural. It’s a privilege to see you in action.”
“Flattery will get you nowhere,” Azzie said, and found to his annoyance that he rather liked Babriel. He’d do something about that! To Frike he said, “Show him up to the little room in the attic.”
Frike took an oil lamp, and bent nearly double, with his cane tapping ahead of him and his hump standing up like a whale surfacing, he walked to the stairs, followed by Babriel.
The stairs went up and up, past the polished corridors and rooms of the lower floors. As they went higher the stairs grew steeper and narrower, with here and there a tread missing. Frike stumped steadily along, and Babriel, tall and erect, his white cloak glimmering faintly in the candlelight, followed, bowing his head to avoid the low beams.
They came out at last on a landing near the top of the tall, high old mansion. At the end of the short dark hallway was a door. Frike opened it and entered with his lamp. By its flickering yellow light Babriel saw a small room with a ceiling so low he could not stand erect. There was a tiny leaded window high up, tilted at an angle to match the sloping roof. There was an iron cot and a small wooden nightstand. The room was just a little longer than the cot. The floor was thick with dust and the place smelled of cats in heat and ancient moths.
“Very nice,” Babriel said.
“A trifle small, perhaps,” Frike said. “Perhaps if you asked the master, he would let you have one of the third-floor suites.”
“No need,” Babriel said. “This will do nicely.”
Just then there was a knock at the door.
“Who’s there?” Frike asked.
“Supernal Delivery Service. Luggage for the angel Babriel.”
“Ah, thank you,” Babriel said. He opened the door. A man of medium height stood there wearing a deliveryman’s cap. He handed Babriel a piece of paper and a pen. Babriel signed and handed back the paper. The deliveryman tugged at his forelock and disappeared.
“It’s my luggage,” Babriel told Frike. “Where should I put it?”
Frike looked around doubtfully. “On your bed, maybe. But then you’d have no place to sleep.”
“It’ll work itself out,” Babriel said, and pulled his suitcase into the room. It was a very large suitcase and the only place there was room for it was on the bed, since he and Frike between them used up most of the available floor space.
Babriel looked at the room and said, “Do you think it’ll go into the corner?”
Frike looked at the acute angle formed where the room’s walls met. “You couldn’t push a mouse’s corpse into that corner, much less a big suitcase like that.”
“Let’s give it a try anyway,” Babriel said. He pushed the suitcase off the bed and toward the corner. Although it was only a few inches from the end of the bed to the corner, the trunk kept moving. The wall, instead of stopping it, bulged outward to make room for it, and the other walls bulged out to stay in proportion. The ceiling lifted, too, and Frike soon found that he was in quite a large room rather than the tiny room he had entered.
“How did you do that?” Frike asked.
“Just one of those things you pick up when you move around a lot,” Babriel said modestly.
Aside from growing larger, the room had also grown brighter, for reasons that didn’t make themselves immediately apparent. Frike’s eyes widened, then widened again as he heard a curious scuttling noise at his feet. He looked down and saw something small, about the size of a rat, scurrying out of sight. Frike blinked, and when his vision cleared he saw that the floor, which had been an inch deep in dust and cat droppings, had been freshly swept and polished. A certain panic gripped him.
“I’ll tell the master you’re settling in nicely,” Frike said, and departed.
* * *
Five minutes later Azzie came up to Babriel’s room. Azzie looked at it, twice as big as when he’d seen it last, brilliantly illuminated, nicely furnished, clean, fragrant with frankincense and myrrh, and with a small door at one side opened to reveal a fine tiled bathroom Azzie knew damned well hadn’t been there before.