The Palace of Laughter (21 page)

The crockery spun above Fabio's head with increasing speed. Umor had produced a harmonica and was playing a sad, soft tune. Gila lifted his mouse gently from his shoulder and dropped it into a trouser pocket.

“Ask him!” said Miles.

“None of them know where it is, I've already asked them,” said Silverpoint.

“Not the brothers, the mouse,” said Miles. He turned to Little. “You could ask the mouse if he knows where the antidote is kept. I'm sure he's done plenty of snooping about in places others can't get to.”

“Snooping?” said Gila.

“Investigating, I mean,” said Miles.

Gila shook his head. “Too dangerous,” he sniffed.

“Please, let me ask him,” said Little. “If we don't get some more antidote our brains will be turned to mush. What's his name?”

“Susan.”

“Oh! She's a girl. That's much better,” said Little.

Gila looked at her suspiciously from under his tufty eyebrows. “Why better?”

“Curiosity, of course,” said Little. “Girls like to know everything that's going on. I bet she knows this place inside out.”

“Well…,” said Gila, “you can ask.” He didn't seem to think it strange that Little would be able to speak to a mouse. Perhaps Silverpoint had already told them about her, thought Miles. Gila produced Susan from his pocket and held her out on the palm of his hand. She looked up at Little. Her whiskers twitched. Little leaned forward and squeaked something. Susan squeaked back. Miles tried to remember how he had managed to tune in to the voices of
the cats in the garden of Partridge Manor, but he was too worried and excited now to allow the meaning of the mouse's tiny voice to reach him. “What did she say?” he asked.

“Ssh,” said Little. She conversed with Susan for another minute, then smiled. Gila and his brothers were watching her intently with their glittering black eyes. “She's done plenty of exploring while you've been snoring, and she thinks she knows where the antidote is kept,” said Little. “She saw Genghis filling lots of little glass tubes from a giant bottle in a sort of laboratory. She says it's on the floor below this one.”

“I was afraid of that,” said Silverpoint. “This floor is the last stop on the lift. The only possible way down is through the iron door at the other side of this corridor, but it's always locked. I saw Genghis go through there once, but I didn't know where it led to.”

“Can you ask her how she got into the laboratory herself?” said Miles. “Maybe there's another way.”

Little and the mouse sqeaked back and forth for a minute. Unlike her conversation with the crow, the sentences were brief, as though mice did not have time in their short lives for wasting words.

“There's a chimney,” said Little. “It runs all the
way up from the laboratory, through one of the pillars, and comes out at the top of the hill. They have some kind of a fire in a box down there—I don't know the word for it.”

“A furnace,” said Miles, who had got as far as “N” in Lady Partridge's encyclopedia, and therefore knew more than most boys of his age about things whose initial letter fell in the first half of the alphabet. He scratched the itchy stubble of his half-shaved head. “How can we use a chimney that comes out at the top of the head,” he wondered. “To get into it, we'd first have to get out of the Palace of Laughter, and we can't do that, which is why we need to get into the laboratory in the first place.”

“Susan says there are little doors into the chimney every couple of floors. She doesn't know what they're for, as they're too small for most people and she's never come across anyone in a chimney anyhow.”

“I suppose they'll be hatches of some kind, so it can be cleaned out if it gets blocked,” said Miles.

“If there's one at this level I don't remember ever seeing it,” said Silverpoint. “There are dozens of dressing rooms and all the sleeping quarters on this floor, and even supposing we could get into them all, we're fast running out of time.”

“Don't worry,” said Fabio, who was still juggling
with the crockery. “Providence will step in when all else fails.”

“What's Providence?” asked Miles, who had not yet reached “P” in the encyclopedia.

“Not sure,” said Fabio. “But my mother always said that Providence looks after the foolish, and from the sound of your plan, you would qualify without difficulty.” He winked at Miles, taking his eye off the flying plates and the spinning bottle for an instant. An instant was enough. The plates glanced off each other in midair and wobbled in their orbits. The juggling Bolsillo brother said something that sounded like “Hup!” He caught a plate between his pointed teeth and the other under his left arm, but he was too late to catch the spinning bottle, which sailed right over his head and met its own reflection in the yellowed mirror with a splintering crash.

Now the sound of a bottle shattering a mirror can be a strangely satisfying thing, but to the boy, the clowns and the angels it just sounded like very bad timing. They stared, frozen, as the bottle exploded on the floor amid the crashing shards of glass. The sound seemed to go on forever, filling the room and echoing down the empty corridor outside. But it was not the splintered glass that made
them stare. Right in the center of the pale rectangle where the mirror had been, there was a small iron hatch set into the plaster. It stood slightly ajar from the impact of the bottle.

“Well, Master Miles,” said Fabio when the last glass splinter had fallen. “Now we know what Providence looks like.”

M
iles Wednesday, black-faced and burn-fingered, hung from a thin rope in a sooty chimney deep in a giant stone head. The fine black soot had been stirred up by the flapping of Little's wings, and it was making him cough like a seal. The sound echoed and boomed through the metal tube of the chimney, until he was sure that everyone in the Palace of Laughter could hear him. His shoulders felt bruised from squeezing his way through the small iron hatch, and his eyes were smarting from the soot. He managed to force a few words out between coughs. “Go down…making…me cough,” he barked.

“Oh, sorry,” said Little. She fluttered downward and vanished into the darkness. The soot began to settle, and Miles could dimly see Gila's head poking through the hatch above him.

“You all right?” asked Gila.

“Sort of,” said Miles.

“Rather you than me,” said Gila. “We have to go now. 'Bye!” His head disappeared like a jack going back into its box.

Miles began to inch his way down the rope. It was the one he had cut from Little's waist when he rescued her from the circus, and had been in his pocket ever since. He wondered if it was long enough to get him to the bottom of the chimney. He could get no foothold in the soot, and his fingers burned from sliding down the rope. In the darkness it was easy to imagine a variety of horrible fates awaiting them below. He pictured a huge set of metal jaws like a bear trap poised to bite them in half, or a pool of acid that would eat them from toe to crown with a loud hiss. “Little?” he whispered. “What's down there?”

“Just me,” said Little.

The end of the rope came without warning. One moment he was holding on with two hands, then with one, then his aching fingers gave way and he
dropped into blackness. The tunnel began to curve a short way down, and he found himself sliding on his backside until he tumbled into the filthy furnace at the chimney's end with a clatter.

“Shhhh!” said Little from the darkness beside him. “Not so loud!”

“I'll try and remember that next time I'm falling down a chimney,” said Miles.

They were in a small, dark iron box, crouched on a thick layer of crunchy ash, still slightly warm from the last time the fire had been lit. The furnace was just big enough to allow Little to sit upright, but Miles's head was pressed against the dusty ceiling. It made the dim dressing room they had come from seem like a room in a five-star hotel. In front of them was the thick glass plate of the furnace door. Miles shuffled forward and looked out through the glass.

The laboratory reminded him a little of the inside of Lady Partridge's tree house, but without the branches growing up through it. There were shelves from floor to ceiling, crammed with beakers, bell jars, boxes, calipers, tinctures, tonics, touchstones, brass scales, sulphur nuggets, rubber tubes, leather-bound books, dried herbs, candles, stirring rods, steam distillers, talismans, tusks,
quartz toning vessels, assorted bones, rolled charts, Bunsen burners, pipettes, gold and silver colloids, powdered roots, and on a high shelf, a shrunken head with its hair tied in a knot and a crescent of bone passed through its nose.

In the corner was a wooden cabinet with gargoyle faces carved on each corner, and on top a pile of dusty books and a bust of Hermes Trismegistos, the father of alchemy. A large solid table with a clean-scrubbed surface stood in the center of the room. Among the flagons and boxes and stoppered jars on the table, Miles spotted a wooden stand with a row of thirty-six identical vials, each one half filled with a colorless liquid.

“Look,” he whispered to Little. “That must be the antidote.”

He moved aside so that she could look out through the glass. “There on the table,” he said, “in the glass vials.”

“I see it,” she whispered. “How do we get out there?”

Miles fumbled with the catch on the furnace door. It was difficult to see in the semidarkness, but it was a simple catch and it did not take him long to open. The door swung outward. It was smaller than the hatch through which they had entered the
chimney. “I don't think I can get through there,” said Miles. “I'm not even sure you will.”

Little tucked her wings away and poked her head out into the laboratory. There was no one there. She squeezed through the tiny doorway like a cat through a drainpipe, and dropped to the floor. In a moment she was back with two of the glass vials.

“Well done,” said Miles. She smiled and passed one in to him, pulling the stopper from the other.

“Wait!” he said. “How do we know for sure that this is the antidote? It might be some deadly poison.”

“Or it might make us twenty feet tall, like Baumella,” said Little.

“You might grow a beard,” said Miles.

“You might grow wings and turn purple,” laughed Little.

“Well, here goes,” said Miles. He put the vial to his mouth and swallowed the contents in one gulp. He expected it to taste horrible, or to burn his throat or make his ears hot, but it did nothing of the sort. In fact it didn't taste of anything much, apart from being cooler than he expected in that stuffy room. He could feel it slipping down his throat, and all his muscles relaxed as it passed down through him. In some strange way he thought it
tasted blue, and he felt as though he had been holding his breath all his life without realizing it, and had only just let it go. Little was looking at him through the open door of the furnace.

“You have turned purple”—she giggled—“and you look a lot better!”

Miles looked down at his hands. They were the same color they had always been. He turned them over, but they were no different on the other side. “I suppose that was a joke,” he said to himself. Out loud he said, “It's safe to drink.”

As Little swallowed her dose, it occurred to him that it might have a completely different effect on her. He was not sure what was inside an angel, or whether their insides worked in the same way as his. It might be anything but safe for her. He shrugged. “It seems to work for Silverpoint,” he thought, “and anyway it's too late now.”

He handed his empty vial back out to Little. She was licking her lips and looking rather disappointed. “It doesn't taste of much,” she said.

“You'd better put the vials back quickly,” said Miles.

She held them up and looked at them. “But they're empty. They'll know someone has stolen them,” she said.

“I hadn't thought of that,” said Miles. He was annoyed with himself. It was an important detail to have overlooked. If two doses were missed, suspicion would be bound to fall on them, or more likely on Silverpoint himself. “Have a look around the room,” he said to Little, “and see if you can find the big bottle that he filled them from.”

Little placed the two empty vials back in their slots and began searching the clutter on the table, being careful to replace everything where she found it. “Nothing here,” she said. She did a slow circuit of the room, examining the items on the shelves. There were bottles and jars with liquids of all colors, and some with clear liquids in which a variety of snakes and lizards were suspended, but they were covered in dust and obviously seldom disturbed.

She came to the wooden cabinet in the corner and tried the doors. They were locked. She rattled them a couple of times to make sure, then moved on to the next set of shelves, wedged between the cabinet and a large porcelain sink. The rattling sound continued, as though someone inside the cabinet were trying to get out. Miles poked his head through the furnace door with difficulty. “Little!” he hissed urgently. “I think there's someone in the cabinet.”

Little was trying the brass tap on the sink. She looked over her shoulder at the cabinet and frowned. “Not there,” she whispered back. “It's the door.”

Miles looked at the dark wooden door in the far corner and realized she was right. A key was rattling in the lock, and now he could hear muffled voices from the other side. “It's too late,” he hissed. “Get back in here, quickly!” He shuffled back to make room for her, but instead of heading for the furnace she ran lightly back to the table and lifted the two empty vials from their rack. He heard the key turn in the lock. Little was back at the sink, holding the vials under the brass tap. The tap squeaked as she turned it on, but as luck would have it, the sound was masked by the creaky hinges of the door in the corner, which opened at the same moment. The voices were clearer now. “Is that really as far as your ambitions stretch?” said the Great Cortado's voice.

Little ran back to the table, her feet making no sound, and dropped the vials back into place. They were half full of water, and looked no different from the rest.

“That all depends,” came Genghis's reedy voice, sounding slightly defensive. Little ducked down behind the table. The Great Cortado stepped into
the room, holding the door open for his big-bellied companion. Miles held his breath. A condescending smirk lurked under Cortado's magnificent mustache. Little reached up from her hiding place and stoppered the second vial just as Genghis came through the door, and at the same moment Miles realized that the furnace door was still wide open. He inched backward, trying to hide himself in darkness without the thick layer of ash beneath him crunching loudly. As he retreated from the furnace hatch he caught a last glimpse of Little crawling into the tight space under the table, before his view of the room was reduced to a small square of cluttered shelving.

“So you would like to be Mayor Genghis of Smallville,” said the Great Cortado's voice.

“Oh no, not me,” said Genghis. “You'd be the mayor. I was thinking more of…well…chief of police.”

“I see,” said Cortado. “And what town do you feel would be a worthy candidate, Chief Genghis?”

“Well,” said Genghis enthusiastically, “I reckon somewhere like Larde would be ripe for the picking. With the money that's been pouring in from Tau-Tau's laugh juice, you could prob'ly buy the whole place, lock, stock and…whatever. We could
set ourselves up in that big mansion just outside the town. It's a lot fancier than that pokey little town hall, and I reckon nobody'd be sorry if we gave the old loony that lives there her marching orders.” He sniggered. “They wouldn't have no choice anyhow, not once you was mayor.”

“I'm intrigued,” said Cortado in a tone of mock sincerity that Genghis obviously took as genuine. “And what exactly would we do with this small population of peasant half-wits?”

“What would we do?” Genghis sounded a little confused. He began picking up the glass vials and placing them carefully in a worn leather doctor's bag. “Well…I could think of lots of things. For starters they would have to supply us all year round with the finest cigars and the best beers available. None of your yellow cat's pee, I mean real beer, with a big frothy head.”

The Great Cortado suddenly appeared just outside the doorway of the furnace. Miles froze, afraid that he would look inside, but the mustachioed man just muttered under his breath, “Not the only thing around here with a big frothy head,” and closed the furnace door. A momentary updraft lifted the fine ash from the floor and swirled it around the inside of the cramped iron box. Miles
pinched his nose to stifle a sneeze, which made his eyes water. The voices in the laboratory were more muffled now, and he had to strain his ears to catch the drift of the conversation.

“…bear baiting, for instance,” Genghis was saying. “They shouldn't never have banned that—it's just a bit of harmless fun. I used to go with me dad, God rest his soul, when I was no more than a kid. We had a dog ourselves. Snap, his name was. A good fighter, least he was until his back got broken. Eleven fights he made, and we always got ice cream afterward. And cockfights. Used to be two cockpits in Bunkrabble where I grew up. One at the canal dock, and the other in the priest's back garden. We could make 'em legal again, and have an arena built with a bear pit and cockpits, and fifty slot machines in each stand. That fancy church of theirs has a copper roof too, if you don't mind. That would pay for the whole lot if you stripped it down. And then we could have—”

“You'd have not much more than you've got now, but with the wheels taken off,” interrupted the Great Cortado. “Genghis, you're a useful fellow at times, I'll grant you that, but I think you should leave the broader picture to me. It's not exactly your forte.”

“I was just getting to the best bit…,” said Genghis, his voice trailing off. The itch in Miles's nose grew stronger. He could feel that sneeze hanging around, waiting for its chance. He pinched his nose again, wishing they would finish their conversation and leave.

“I can scarcely wait,” said the Great Cortado, “but I'm afraid I shall have to. The performance starts in less than an hour, and we have some antidote to distribute, among other things. Have you counted the doses?”

“Thirty-six, Mr. Cortado. Got 'em right here in the bag,” said Genghis.