‘But you could get killed!’ said Ludmilla.
Windle clapped his hands together, and rubbed them thoughtfully.
‘Ah,’ he said, ‘that’s where we’re ahead of the game.’
He walked into the glow.
He’d never seen such bright light. It seemed to emanate from everywhere, hunting down every last shadow and eradicating it ruthlessly. It was much brighter than daylight without being anything like it – there was a blue edge to it that cut vision like a knife.
‘You all right, Count?’ he said.
‘Fine, fine,’ said Arthur.
Lupine growled.
Ludmilla pulled at a tangle of metal.
‘There’s something under this, you know. It looks like … marble. Orange-coloured marble.’ She ran her hand over it. ‘But warm. Marble shouldn’t be warm, should it?’
‘It can’t be marble. There can’t be this much marble in the whole world … vorld, ‘ said Doreen. ‘We tried to get marble for the vault,’ she tasted the sound of the word and nodded to herself, ‘the vault, yes. Those dwarfs should be shot, the prices they charge. It’s a disgrace.’
‘I don’t think dwarfs built this,’ said Windle. He knelt down awkwardly to examine the floor.
‘I shouldn’t think so, the lazy little buggers. They wanted nearly seventy dollars to do our vault. Didn’t they, Arthur?’
‘Nearly seventy dollars,’ said Arthur.
‘I don’t think anyone built it,’ said Windle quietly.
Cracks. There should be cracks, he thought. Edges and things, where one slab joins another. It shouldn’t be all one piece. And slightly sticky.
‘So Arthur did it himself.’
‘I did it myself.’
Ah. Here was an edge. Well, not exactly an edge.
The marble became clear, like a window, looking into another brightly lit space. There were things in there, indistinct and melted-looking, but no way in to them.
The chatter of the Winkings flowed over him as he crepe forward.
‘- more of a vaultette, really. But he got a dungeon in, even if you have to go out into the hall to shut the door properly -‘
Gentility meant all sorts of things, Windle thought.
To some people it was not being a vampire. To others it was a matched set of flying plaster bats on the wall.
He ran his fingers over the clear substance. The world here was all rectangles. There were corners, and the corridor was lined on both sides with the clear panels. And the non-music played all the time.
It couldn’t be alive, could it? Life was … more rounded.
‘What do you think, Lupine?’ he said.
Lupine barked.
‘Hmm. Not a lot of help.’
Ludmilla knelt down and put her hand on Windle’s shoulder.
‘What did you mean, no-one built it?’ she said.
Windle scratched his head.
‘I’m not sure … but I think maybe it was … secreted.’
‘Secreted? From what? By what?’
They looked up. A trolley whirred out of the mouth of a side corridor and skidded away down another on the opposite side of the passage.
‘Them?’ said Ludmilla.
‘I shouldn’t think so. I think they’re more like servants. Like ants. Bees in a hive, maybe.’
‘What’s the honey?’
‘Not sure. But it’s not ripe yet. I don’t think things are quite finished. No-one touch anything.’
They walked onward. The passage opened up into a wide, bright, domed area. Stairways led up and down
to different floors, and there was a fountain and a grove of potted plants that looked too healthy to be real.
‘Isn’t it nice?’ said Doreen.
‘You keep thinking there should be people,’ said Ludmilla. ‘Lots of people.’
‘There should at least be wizards,’ muttered Windle Poons. ‘Half a dozen wizards don’t just disappear.’
The five of them moved closer. Passages the size of the one they’d just walked down could have accommodated a couple of elephants walking abreast.
‘Do you think it might be a good idea to go back outside?’ said Doreen.
‘What good would that do?’ said Windle.
‘Well, it’d get us out of here.’
Windle turned, counting. Five of the passages radiated equidistantly-out of the domed area.
‘And presumably it’s the same above and below, ‘ he said aloud.
‘It’s very clean here, ‘ Doreen said nervously. ‘Isn’t it clean, Arthur?’
‘It’s very clean.’
‘What’s that noise?’ said Ludmilla.
‘What noise?’
‘That noise. Like someone sucking something.’
Arthur looked around with a certain amount of interest.
‘It’s not me.’
‘It’s the stairs,’ said Windle.
‘Don’t be silly, Mr Poons. Stairs don’t suck.’
Windle looked down.
‘These do.’
They were black, like a sloping river. As the dark substance flowed out from under the floor it humped itself into something resembling steps, which travelled up the slope until they disappeared under the floor again, somewhere above. When the steps emerged they made a slow, rhythmic shlup-shlup noise, like someone investigating a particularly annoying dental cavity.
‘Do you know,’ said Ludmilla, ‘that’s quite possibly the most unpleasant thing I’ve ever seen?’
‘I’ve seen worse,’ said Windle. ‘But it’s pretty bad.
Shall we go up or down?’
‘You want to stand on them?’
‘No. But the wizards aren’t on this floor and it’s that or slide down the handrail. Have you looked closely at the handrail?’
They looked at the handrail.
‘I think,’ said Doreen nervously, ‘that down is more us.’
They went down in silence. Arthur fell over at the point where the travelling stairs were sucked into the floor again.
‘I had this horrible feeling it was going to drag me under,’ he said apologetically, and then looked around him.
‘It’s big,’ he concluded.‘Roomy. I could do wonders down here with some stone-effect wallpaper.’
Ludmilla wandered over to the nearest wall.
‘You know,’ she said, ‘there’s more glass than I’ve seen before, but these clear bits look a bit like shops. Does that make sense? A great big shop full of shops?’
‘And not ripe yet,’ said Windle.
‘Sorry?’
‘Just thinking aloud. Can you see what the merchandise is?’
Ludmilla shaded her eyes.
‘It just looks like a lot of colour and glitter.’
‘Let me know if you see a wizard.’
Someone screamed.
‘Or hear one, for example,’ Windle added. Lupine bounded off down a passageway. Windle lurched swiftly after him.
Someone was on their back, trying desperately to fight off a couple of the trolleys. They were bigger than the ones Windle had seen before, with a golden sheen to them.
‘Hey!’ he yelled.
They stopped trying to gore the prone figure and three-point-turned towards him.
‘Oh, ‘ he said, as they got up speed.
The first one dodged Lupine’s jaws and butted Windle full in the knees, knocking him over. As the second passed over him he reached up wildly, grabbed randomly at the metal, and pulled hard. A wheel spun off and the trolley cartwheeled into the wall.
He scrambled up in time to see Arthur hanging grimly on to the handle of the other trolley as the two of them whirred around in a mad centrifugal waltz.
‘Let go! Let go!’ Doreen screamed.
‘I can’t! I can’t!’
‘Well, do something!’
There was a pop of inrushing air. The trolley was suddenly not straining against the weight of a middle-aged wholesale, fruit and vegetable entrepreneur but only against a small terrified bat. It rocketed into a marble pillar, bounced off, hit a wall and landed on its back, wheels spinning.
‘The wheels!’ shouted Ludmilla.‘Pull the wheels off!’
‘I’ll do that,’ said Windle.‘You help Reg.’
‘Is that Reg down there?’ said Doreen.
Windle jerked his thumb towards the distant wall. The words “Better late than nev” ended in a desperate streak of paint.
‘Show him a wall and a paint pot and he doesn’t know what world he’s in,’ said Doreen.
‘He’s only got a choice of two,’ said Windle, throwing the trolley wheels across the floor. ‘Lupine, keep a look-out in case there’s any more.’
The wheels had been sharp, like ice skates. He was definitely feeling tattered around the legs. Now, how did healing go?
Reg Shoe was helped into a sitting position.
‘What’s happening?’ he said.‘No-one else was
coming in, and I came down here to see where the music was coming from, and the next thing, there’s these wheels -‘
Count Arthur returned to his approximately human form, looked around proudly, realised that no-one was paying him any attention, and sagged.
‘They looked a lot tougher than the others,’ said Ludmilla.‘Bigger and nastier and covered in sharp edges.’
‘Soldiers,’ said Windle. ‘We’ve seen the workers. And now there’s soldiers. Just like ants.’
‘I had an ant farm when I was a lad,’ said Arthur, who had hit the floor rather heavily and was having temporary trouble with the nature of reality.
‘Hang on,’ said Ludmilla. ‘I know about ants. We have ants in the back yard. If you have workers and soldiers, then you must also have a -‘
‘I know. I know,’ said Windle.
‘- mind you, they called it a farm, I never saw them doing any farming -‘
Ludmilla leaned against the wall.
‘It’ll be somewhere close,’ she said.