The Magician's Tower (20 page)

“Get the carriage!” she said.

“No breakfast?” Samuligan inquired through the closed door. “I could whip up a nice crispy waffle, or some eggs, or perhaps a spot of coffee and some—”

Oona struggled with the buttons on the vest of her dress. “There's no time! She's managed to do it again, I'm sure of it.”

“Who?” Samuligan asked.

“Isadora Iree!” Oona cried, throwing open the door and staring up at the faerie servant.

Samuligan grinned at her, showing more teeth than would have been humanly possible. “You look marvelous.”

About to push past Samuligan, Oona suddenly stopped, realizing that the faerie servant had never complimented her in such a way. “Why, thank you,” she said dubiously.

Behind her, Deacon burst into a caw of laughter.

Spinning around to see just what was so funny, Oona saw Deacon perched on the back of her dressing table chair. It took several seconds to see that, draped over the back of that same chair was her dress skirt. Looking down, Oona realized that she was wearing nothing but her petticoats.

“I understand it is the latest in modern fashion,” said Samuligan. “It is all the rave in Europe.”

Oona's face went beet red.

Thirty nail-biting minutes later, Oona stood fully dressed and slightly out of breath within the walls of the Dark Street Clock Shop.

“Yes indeed,” said Mr. Altonburry, the master clockmaker, a thin, elderly gentleman with long gray hair and delicate hands nearly the same size as Oona's. Despite his age, he spoke with a hearty, youthful voice. “A young
lady was in here before you. In fact, she was waiting at the door the moment I opened.”

Oona glanced at the wall. Clocks of every shape and size ticked away the minutes and seconds, all of them running in perfect sync. Indeed, one of the benefits of living on Dark Street was the fact that all clocks ran in perfect syncopation with Pendulum House. From the clock towers at Dark Street Town Hall and Bradbury Church, to every pocket watch in every lapel pocket, they all moved together, without the slightest variance.

Oona sighed. “That means Isadora's already got a half-hour lead.”

The clockmaker shrugged apologetically before handing Oona a bronze pendulum, about the size of her own hand. “That's true,” he agreed, “but if you get a move on, you could catch up to the other young fellow.”

The back of Oona's neck felt suddenly very cold. “You mean Roderick Rutherford was already here as well?”

“Left about five minutes before you came in,” the clockmaker informed her.

Oona was out the door and sprinting toward the carriage before she heard Mr. Altonburry call after her. “Good luck!”

“Faster than you've ever driven!” Oona shouted to Samuligan, hurdling into her seat.

The whip cracked overhead, and ten harrowing
minutes later Oona could still hear the shouts of “Look out!” and “Watch where you're driving!” echoing through her head as she made her way up the stage steps in front of the tower, breathlessly handing the pendulum to the architect.

The crowd had dwindled to half of what had been there the day before. Her uncle was nowhere to be seen, but she could see Sir Baltimore at the front of the stage, running his hand nervously through his thick head of hair. Penelope sat at the edge of the stage, looking rather bored. Oona realized that, in her haste, she had forgotten to bring the book of faerie tales to return to the girl.

Deacon fluttered to the far end of the stage where he started up a conversation with Adler Iree, who, after finishing in fourth place the day before, would today be playing the part of a simple observer in the crowd. Oona met his gaze, and that same jittery feeling she'd experienced the day before filled her chest.

“Am I the last to arrive?” Oona asked the architect.

The architect nodded. “You'd better get a move on.” He examined the pendulum before handing it back. “You'll want to hold on to that. You'll need it.”

He gestured to a cage connected to a rope. “This will take you to the starting level,” the architect said.

Oona stepped inside the cage, holding on to the frame and feeling quite unsafe as the rope pulled tight
and began to lift her into the air. The higher she went, the more the wind began to play with the rickety elevator. The rope creaked unnervingly, along with the tower itself as the entire structure rocked slowly back and forth. Down below, the spectators began to look more and more like ants than people.

At last the elevator stopped, and Oona stepped gingerly from the box to a kind of ramshackle landing. She felt the wood dip significantly as she placed her weight upon it, and for one horrifying second she was certain the entire landing would tear away from the side of the building and she would go hurtling toward the ground. But the slight dip was as much as the landing moved, and Oona made her way briskly to the doorway in the side of the tower. With one last glance downward, she stepped into a large, high-ceilinged room filled with clocks.

The clocks sat upon bookshelves, countless levels of shelves that covered nearly every surface of the five-story-tall space. There were hundreds of shelves holding thousands of timepieces. It was like a library of clocks, with five levels of railed balconies skirting the outer walls. And yet upon entering the room, Oona immediately understood that something was wrong. Unlike every clock she had ever seen on Dark Street, each of these timepieces showed the incorrect time, the hour and minute hands pointing in all different directions.

A sign posted on an easel read:

Isadora Iree and Roderick Rutherford could be seen on the second-level balcony attempting to attach their pendulums to various clocks, and it quickly occurred to Oona that having arrived late was not such a bad thing after all. Assuming that Isadora and Roderick had started on the bottom floor, and were working their way up, then Oona could no doubt skip the entire first floor altogether, as all of those clocks had already been checked by the others.

Oona took to the ladder on the nearest wall and climbed past the second level, up to the third. She was just beginning to wonder about the part of the sign that had read, “There are some surprises to be found along the way,” when a bell rang, and Isadora cried out from across the room.

Oona whirled around to discover that Isadora was no longer where she had been only a moment ago, but was shooting down a slide that had appeared beneath the second-story balcony. She came to a stop in a heap of skirts on the bottom floor, where she pounded her fist against the floorboards.

“That's the third trap I've hit!” she shouted in frustration.

“You should be more careful,” Roderick called over his shoulder as he hooked his own pendulum onto the clock in front of him and attempted to give it a swing. He had hardly finished speaking his last word, however, when a bell rang and the clock popped open. A spring with a boxing glove mounted on the end uncoiled from inside and pounded Roderick twice in the head, driving him back against the balcony rail.

“Bloody hell!” Roderick cursed.

“Perhaps
you
should be more careful,” Isadora said, her voice oozing with sarcasm as she pushed herself back to her feet on the bottom floor and quickly made her way back to the ladder. “This is all your fault, anyway! I should be done with this by now.”

“And perhaps you should keep your mouth shut,” Roderick said, shaking his head as if to clear it from seeing stars.

Trouble in paradise
, Oona thought, and turned her
attention to the towering shelf of clocks before her, intent on blocking out Roderick and Isadora's squabble.

And yet, something that Isadora had said needled at her. Why was it Roderick's fault that Isadora was not finished with the challenge already? Looking at the task before them all—the enormity of the room, along with the sheer number of shelves, each groaning under the weight of all those clocks—it could take hours to find a working clock.

Especially with those traps
, she thought nervously.

Why was it Roderick's fault that Isadora had not finished yet? … Unless …

Oona peered across the open room at Roderick, who was straightening himself against the handrail on the second floor and preparing to try another clock.

“It was you!” Oona shouted.

Both Roderick and Isadora froze. Roderick slowly turned around and peered back up at Oona, a quizzical expression on his handsome face.

“What was who?” he asked, though Oona thought she detected a hint of guilt in his voice.

Oona placed a hand on her hip. “It was you, Roderick, who stole the Punchbowl Oracle!”

“The punchbowl what?” Roderick asked. “Why would I steal a punchbowl?”

“You've been finding out the answers to the clues
ahead of time,” Oona said. “You've been giving them to Isadora so she could gain the lead each day and win the challenges.”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” said Roderick.

“She's just a sore loser,” Isadora said, now back on the second level. “And she wants to blame her own incompetence on my BOYFRIEND!”

“That's not true,” Oona said. “You, Isadora, have been cheating.”

Isadora smirked, then very coolly said: “Prove it.”

“Is that a challenge?” Oona asked.

“It's whatever silly game you make of it,” said Isadora.

Oona's resolve to win the competition suddenly burned inside of her. Isadora was right. Presently, there was no way to prove Isadora's guilt, but it
was
possible for Oona to beat her in the challenge today. That Oona could do.

She opened the clock in front of her, placed the pendulum on the hook, and then attempted to give it a swing. It didn't move. Clearly this was a nonworking clock. She did the same on the next three clocks. Nothing.

On the forth clock, the moment she placed the pendulum on the hook, a bell rang overhead. A spring beneath the floor released and sent Oona tumbling sideways down the balcony. She yelped in surprise, rolling to a stop some fifteen feet from where she had been standing.

Pushing herself back to her feet, she returned cautiously to the bookshelf she'd been working on and tried the next clock, hands shaking now, ready for something to happen. Nothing did. Just as she was preparing to place the pendulum on the next one, a loud gong rang from high above, and Oona cringed.

Isadora shouted.
“Yes!
I've got it. I've got a working one.”

Oona turned. Sure enough, Isadora had found one of the three working clocks. Her pendulum was now swinging. The front door of the clock opened and a cuckoo bird popped out holding a key and a note in its mechanical mouth. Isadora unrolled the note and read aloud.

“Take this key to the top floor. The first one to unlock the door is the winner of today's challenge.” She grinned maliciously up at Oona before snatching the key from the bird's mouth and running toward the ladder.

Oona could only shake her head. Isadora was going to win again, and there was nothing she could do to change it. She watched silently as Isadora climbed the ladder to the top of the room and disappeared from view. A moment later there was a click, followed by the sound of a door opening and closing.

Oona and Roderick locked eyes like a pair of gun-fighters on a deserted town street. Something passed between them: a kind of frantic energy that Oona realized
was something close to desperation. It was down to just the two of them. Only one of them would move on to the final challenge the following day with Isadora, and the race was truly on.

Oona hooked the pendulum onto the clocks, one after the other, moving relentlessly down the bookshelf along the third level. She could hear Roderick doing the same on the second floor below, and, with a feeling of sinking dread, Oona understood that it was now simply down to luck just as much as it was to how fast they could move.

Several minutes later, Oona was nearly done with the entire bookshelf she had started with, getting ready to begin the next one, when she placed the pendulum in the last clock on the bottom shelf.

The bell rang overhead and a second later she heard a click. She looked up just in time to find an entire bucket of water spill out of a hidden hatch and drench her from head to foot in icy cold water. Oona gasped for air, the chill biting into her skin as her dress absorbed the liquid like a sponge.

She blinked the water from her eyes, quickly rung out the bottom of her dress, and then moved on. It was just as she reached for the next clock that a bell rang out. Oona's heart skipped several beats, but it was Roderick who cried out in surprise. Oona spun around, only to discover Roderick hanging upside down, his ankles cinched
together by a rope. Several seconds later the rope released him and he hit the ground hard enough to echo across the room.