House of Many Ways (16 page)

Charmain felt that the floor would be doing her a favor if it opened under her soaking wet feet and dropped her into the cellars. She had clean forgotten the visit of Crown Prince Ludovic. Princess Hilda had obviously invited all the Best People of High Norland to meet the prince. And she, ordinary Charmain Baker, had gate-crashed the tea party.

“Pleased to meet you, Your Highness,” she tried to say. It came out as frightened whisper.

Prince Ludovic probably did not hear. He laughed and said, “Is Lady Charming some kind of nickname the King calls you, little girl?” He pointed with his cake fork at the lady in not-quite-evening-
dress. “I call my assistant Lady Moneybags. She costs me a fortune, you see.”

Charmain opened her mouth to explain what her name really was, but the lady in not-quite-evening-dress got in first. “You’d no call to say that!” she said angrily. “You spiteful thing, you!”

Prince Ludovic laughed and turned away to talk to the colorless gentleman, who was approaching in a colorless gray silk outfit. Charmain would have tiptoed away at once to find Calcifer, except that, as the prince turned, the light from the big chandelier overhead caught him in side face. The eye she could see glowed deep purple.

Charmain stood like a cold statue of horror. Prince Ludovic was a lubbockin. For a moment she could not move, knowing she was showing her horror, knowing that people would see how horrified she was and wonder why. The colorless gentleman was already looking at her, with curiosity in his mild mauve eyes. Oh, heavens!
He
was a lubbockin too. That was what had worried her before, when she met him near the kitchens.

Fortunately, the Lord Mayor moved away from beside the cake table just then, to bow deeply to the King, and gave Charmain a glimpse of a rocking horse—no, there were
many
rocking horses, Charmain saw. It quite distracted her from her horror. For some reason, rocking horses were lined up all round the walls of the grand room. Twinkle was sitting on the one nearest to the large marble fireplace, staring at her earnestly. Charmain could tell he knew she had had a shock of some kind and wanted her to tell him what had caused it.

She began edging her way across to the fireplace. This gave her a sight of Morgan, sitting by the marble fender playing with a box of bricks. Sophie was standing over him. In spite of Sophie’s peacock blue dress and her air of being part of the tea party, Charmain had a moment when she saw Sophie as a very large lioness with its teeth bared, standing guard on its small lion cub.

“Oh, hallo, Charming,” Princess Hilda said, more or less in Charmain’s ear. “Would you like some cake, since you’re here?”

Charmain shot a regretful look at the cake and inhaled its luscious smell instead. “No thank you, ma’am,” she said. “I only came with a message for…er…Mrs. Pendragon, you see.” Where
was
Calcifer?

“Well, there she is, just over there,” Princess Hilda said, pointing. “I must say the children are behaving beautifully at the moment. Long may it last!”

She swished away to offer another finely dressed person some cake. For all its swishing, her dress was nothing like as fine as the others in the room. It was faded almost white in places and reminded Charmain rather of the laundry after Peter had worked his bleaching spell. Oh,
please
don’t let Peter try any spells on those lubbock eggs! Charmain prayed as she walked over to Sophie.

“Hallo,” Sophie said, smiling rather tensely. Beyond her, Twinkle was rocking on the rocking horse, going
creak-creak-creeak
, quite irritatingly. The fat nursemaid was standing beside him going, “Master Twinkle, pray
do
get down from there.
You’re making such a noise, Master Twinkle. Master Twinkle, I don’t want to have to tell you twice!” Over and over. This was probably even more irritating.

Sophie knelt down and passed Morgan a red brick. Morgan held the brick out toward Charmain. “Boo bick,” he told her.

Charmain knelt down too. “No, it isn’t blue,” she said. “Try again.”

Sophie murmured out of the side of her mouth, “Glad to see you. I don’t care for this prince at all, do you? Nor for that overdressed floozie with him.”

“Urple?” Morgan guessed, holding the brick out again.

“I don’t blame you,” Charmain whispered to Sophie. “No, it’s not purple, it’s red. But the prince is purple, or his eyes are. He’s a lubbockin.”

“A
what
?” Sophie said, puzzled.

“Dead?” asked Morgan, looking at his brick disbelievingly.
Creak-creeak
, went the rocking horse.

“Yes. Red,” said Charmain. “I can’t explain here. Tell me where Calcifer is—I’ll explain to him and
he can tell you. I need Calcifer urgently.”

“Here I am,” Calcifer said. “What do you need me for?”

Charmain looked round. Calcifer was roosting among the flaming logs in the fireplace, mingling his blue flames with the orange ones from the logs and looking so peaceful that Charmain had quite failed to notice him until he spoke. “Oh, thank goodness!” she said. “Can you come with me
at once
to Wizard Norland’s house? We’ve got an emergency there that only a fire demon can deal with. Please!”

Calcifer’s orange eyes turned to Sophie. “Do you need me to keep guard here still?” he asked her. “Or can you manage with just the two of you?”

Sophie gazed worriedly out at the well-dressed, chattering crowd. “I don’t
think
anyone’s going to try anything just now,” she said. “But come back quickly. I have a horrible foreboding feeling. I don’t trust that mauve-eyed fellow an inch. Or that nasty prince either.”

“All right. Quick it is,” Calcifer crackled. “Stand up, young Charming. I’m going to sit on your hands.”

Charmain got to her feet, expecting to be burned—or at least singed—any moment. Morgan objected to her going by waving a yellow brick at her and raising a booming shout of “Geen, geen,
geen
!”

“Shush!” Sophie and Twinkle said together, and the fat nursemaid added, “Master Morgan, we don’t shout, not here in front of the
King.”

“It’s yellow,” Charmain said, waiting for all the staring faces to turn away. She was beginning to see that none of the fine guests knew that Calcifer was part of the fire, and that Calcifer wanted to keep it that way.

As soon as everyone lost interest and turned back to their chatter, Calcifer hopped up out of the fire and landed just slightly above Charmain’s nervous fingers in the exact likeness of a plate of cake. He did not hurt a bit. In fact, Charmain could scarcely feel him.

“Clever,” she said.

“Pretend to hold me,” Calcifer replied, “and walk out of the room with me.”

Charmain curled her fingers round the false plate
and walked toward the door. Prince Ludovic, to her relief, had moved away, but the King was coming toward her instead. He nodded and smiled at Charmain.

“Got yourself some cake, I see,” he said. “Good, isn’t it? Wish I knew why we have all these rocking horses. Don’t happen to know, do you?”

Charmain shook her head, and the King turned away, still smiling. “Why do we?” Charmain asked. “Have all these rocking horses?”

“Protection,” said the plate of cake. “Open the door and let’s get out of here.”

Charmain took one hand from the false plate, opened the door, and slipped out into the damp, echoing hallway. “But who’s being protected from what?” she asked, closing the door as quietly as possible.

“Morgan,” said the plate of cake. “Sophie got an anonymous note this morning. It said, ‘Stop your investigation and leave High Norland, or your child suffers.’ But we can’t leave, because Sophie’s promised the Princess she’ll stay until we find out where
all the money’s gone. Tomorrow we’re going to pretend to go—”

Calcifer was interrupted by shrill barking. Waif came dashing round the corner and hurled herself delightedly onto Charmain’s ankles. Calcifer jumped and floated free in his own shape, as a fiery blue teardrop hovering by Charmain’s shoulder. Charmain scooped Waif up. “How did you—?” she began, trying to keep her face out of the way of Waif’s eager tongue. Then she realized that Waif was not in the least wet. “Oh, Calcifer, she must have come the quick way through the house! Can you find me the Conference Room? I can get us back from there.”

“Easy.” Calcifer darted off like a blue comet, so fast that Charmain had trouble keeping up. He whirled round several corners and into the corridor where the kitchen smells were. In next to no time, Charmain was standing with her back to the door of the Conference Room with Waif in her arms and Calcifer floating by her shoulder, while she tried to remember just what you did from here. Calcifer
said, “It’s like
this
,” and zigzagged away in front of her. Charmain followed as best she could and found herself in the corridor where the bedrooms were. Sunlight was blazing in the window beyond Great-Uncle William’s study. Peter came dashing toward them, looking pale and urgent.

“Oh, good dog, Waif!” he said. “I sent her to fetch you. Just come and take a look at
this
!”

He turned and galloped back to the other end of the corridor, where he pointed, rather shakily, at the view out of the window.

Out in the mountain meadow, the rain was just passing away in big, melting, dark gray clouds that were obviously still raining below on the town. A rainbow arched across the mountains, lurid in front of the clouds and pale and misty across the meadow. The meadow grass blazed and twinkled so with sunlit wetness, that Charmain was dazzled for a moment and could not see what Peter was pointing at.

“That’s the lubbock,” Peter said, rather hoarsely. “Right?”

The lubbock was there, towering huge and purple
in the middle of the meadow. It was bending slightly to listen to a kobold, who was hopping up and down, pointing at the rainbow and evidently shouting at the lubbock.

“That’s the lubbock, all right,” Charmain said, shivering. “And that’s Rollo.”

As she said it, the lubbock laughed and rolled its bundles of insect eyes toward the rainbow. It stepped carefully backward until the misty rainbow stripes seemed to be right beside its insect feet. There it bent and dragged a small earthenware pot out of the turf. Rollo capered about.

“That must be the crock of gold at the end of the rainbow!” Peter said wonderingly.

They watched the lubbock pass the pot to Rollo, who took it in both arms. It was evidently heavy. Rollo stopped capering and staggered about with his head thrown back in greedy joy. He turned to stagger away. He did not see the lubbock slyly extend its long purple proboscis behind him. He did not seem to notice when the proboscis stabbed into his back. He just sank away into the meadow grass, still
clutching the pot and laughing. The lubbock laughed too, standing in the middle of the meadow and waving its insect arms.

“It’s just laid its eggs in Rollo,” Charmain whispered, “and he didn’t even notice!” She felt ill. The same thing had so nearly happened to her. Peter looked quite green, and Waif was shivering. “You know,” she said, “I think the lubbock may have promised Rollo a crock of gold for making trouble between the kobolds and Great-Uncle William.”

“I’m sure it did,” Peter said. “Before you got here, I could hear Rollo yelling that he needed to be paid.”

He opened the window to listen, Charmain thought. The silly fool.

“I have to declare war,” Calcifer said. He had gone rather wispy and pale. He added in a small hiss that trembled slightly, “I have to fight that lubbock or I won’t deserve the life that Sophie gave me. One moment.” He stopped speaking and hung in the air, long and stiff, with his orange eyes closed.

“Are you the fire demon?” Peter asked. “I’ve never seen one bef—”

“Quiet,” said Calcifer. “I’m concentrating. This has to be right.”

There was a slight rumbling from somewhere. Then, overhead and across the window from behind, came what Charmain at first took for a thundercloud. It threw a large, black, turreted shadow along the meadow, which very quickly reached the rejoicing lubbock. The lubbock looked round as the shadow fell across it and froze for an instant. Then it started to run. By this time the turreted shadow had been followed by the castle that was making it, a tall black castle built of huge blocks of dark stone, with turrets on all four corners. They could see the big stones it was made of shaking and grinding together as it moved. It came after the lubbock faster than the lubbock could run.

The lubbock dodged. The castle swerved after it. The lubbock spread its small fuzzy wings for more speed and went bounding in furious strides to the tall rocks at the end of the meadow. As soon as it reached the rocks, it turned round and came rushing the other way, toward the window. It must have
hoped that the castle would crash into the rocks. But the castle reversed itself with no trouble at all and came after it faster than ever. Big puffs of black smoke went belching from the castle’s turrets and floating away across the fading rainbow. The lubbock swiveled one of its multiple eyes as it ran, then put its insect head down and pelted, feelers flapping, wings beating, in a big curve that took it along the very edge of the cliff. Although its wings were now purple blurs, it seemed not to be able to fly with them at all. Charmain understood why it had not tried to follow her down from the cliff: it would not have been able to fly back up. Instead of jumping off the cliff to escape, the lubbock simply kept on running, tempting the castle to follow and fall off the edge.

The castle did follow. It came steaming and puffing and grinding at speed along the cliff, and seemed perfectly balanced in spite of the way half of it was hanging over the edge. The lubbock gave out a despairing hoot, changed direction again, and rushed out into the center of the meadow. There it
played its last trick and went small. It shrank into a tiny purple insect and plunged in among the grass and flowers.

The castle was on to that spot in instants. It shuddered to a stop over the place where the lubbock had vanished and floated there. Flames began to come out of its flat underside, yellow flames first, then orange, then angry red, and finally a white hotness that was too bright to look at. Flames and thick smoke licked up its sides and joined the dark smokes streaming from its turrets. The meadow filled with hot black fog. For what seemed hours but was probably only minutes, the castle was a dim hovering shape over smoky brightness, like the sun seen through clouds. They could hear the roar of burning even behind the magical window.

“Right,” Calcifer said. “I think that’s done it.” He turned to Charmain, and she noticed that his eyes were now a strange shining silver. “Will you open the window, please? I have to go and make sure.”

As Charmain turned the catch and swung the
window open, the castle rose up and moved sideways. All the smokes and fogs collected into one large dark puff, which rolled across the edge of the cliff and out into the valley, where it shredded away to nothing. When Calcifer floated forward into the meadow, the castle was standing demurely, with only a wisp of smoke coming from each turret, beside a big square patch of black earth. A perfectly horrible smell rolled in through the window.

“Ugh!” said Charmain. “What is that?”

“Roast lubbock, I hope,” Peter said.

They watched Calcifer float to the burned square. There he became a blue streak of action, whirling this way and that across the blackness until he had covered every tiny scrap of it.

He came floating back with his eyes a normal orange again. “That’s it,” he said cheerfully. “Gone.”

And so are a lot of flowers, Charmain thought, but it did not seem polite to say so. The important thing was that the lubbock was gone, truly gone.

“The flowers will grow again next year,” Calcifer
said to her. “What did you come and fetch me for? This lubbock?”

“No. The lubbock
eggs,
” Peter and Charmain said together. They explained about the elf and what the elf had said.

“Show me,” said Calcifer.

They went to the kitchen, all except Waif, who whined and refused to go in there. There Charmain had a fine sunlit view of the yard out of the window, full of dripping pink, white, and red laundry still on the clotheslines. Peter had obviously not bothered to fetch it in. She wondered what he
had
been doing.

The glass box was still on the table, still with the eggs in it, but it had sunk into the table somehow, so that only half of it was showing.

“What made it do that?” Charmain asked. “The magic in the eggs?”

Peter looked a little self-conscious. “Not exactly,” he said. “That happened when I put my safety spell on it. I was going back to the study to look up another spell when I saw Rollo talking to the lubbock.”

Isn’t that
typical
! Charmain thought. This fool always thinks he knows best!

“The elf spells would have been quite enough,” Calcifer said, floating above the embedded glass box.

“But he said it was
dangerous
!” Peter protested.

“You’ve made it more dangerous,” Calcifer said. “Don’t either of you come any nearer. No one can touch the box now. Does one of you know of a good stout layer of rock where I can go to destroy these eggs?”

Peter tried not to look chastened. Charmain remembered her fall from the cliff and how she had nearly landed on big rocks before she started to fly. She did her best to describe to Calcifer where those crags were.

“Under the cliff. I see,” Calcifer said. “One of you open the back door, please, and then stand back.”

Peter hurried to open the door. Charmain could see he was quite ashamed of what he had done to the glass box. But it won’t stop him doing something just as silly another time, she thought. I wish he’d
learn
!

Calcifer hovered over the glass box for a moment and then whirled to the open door. Halfway through the doorway, he seemed to stick, jerking and trembling, until he gave a mighty heave, doubling himself up like a large blue tadpole and then slamming himself straight again, and shot forward across the colorful washing. The glass box came loose with a scrape and a sound like someone throwing wooden planks about, and shot after him. It floated over the yard, eggs and all, following Calcifer’s small blue teardrop shape. Peter and Charmain went to the door and watched the glass box glinting its way up and across the green hillside toward the lubbock’s meadow, until it was out of sight.

“Oh!” Charmain said. “I forgot to tell him that Prince Ludovic is a lubbockin!”

“Is he? Really?” Peter said as he shut the door. “That must explain why my mother left this country, then.”

Charmain had never had much interest in Peter’s mother. She turned impatiently away and saw that the table was now flat again. That was a relief. She
had been wondering what you did with a table that had a square trench in the middle of it. “What safety spell did you use?” she said.

“I’ll show you,” Peter said. “I want to have another sight of that castle anyway. Do you think we dare open the window and climb out near to it?”

“No,” said Charmain.

“But the lubbock’s definitely dead,” Peter said. “There can’t be any harm in it.”

Charmain had a very strong feeling that Peter was asking for trouble. “How do you know there was only one lubbock?” she said.