To Visit the Queen (45 page)

"... among the leading churchmen I have found extreme distaste and dissatisfaction with the bill. It is said that the bishop, in the ninth clause, should appear 'in a fatherly character,' but before the canons came in, he must practically have pronounced that some offense had been committed which ought to be proceeded against. Thus the power of the bishop as arbitrator can never commence until he has pronounced and sanctioned the prosecution."

Urruah reared up and peered through the glass of the doors. His view was largely blocked by frock-coated men standing between him and the floor of the House, and talking nonstop.

Well,
vhai
'd if
I'm
going to stand
here
all night,
he thought. Very carefully Urruah slipped through the wood paneling of the lower half of the door, slowly, so as not to upset the grain of the wood, and, being careful not to become strictly solid again until he knew exactly where the legs of the
ehhif
on the other side were. Fortunately, none of them were too close.

Once in, Urruah stood there at the back of the House and listened for a few more minutes, finally wondering why in Iau's name anyone would come here late at night to hear this kind of thing... unless indeed they were all insomniacs in search of treatment. Up in the strangers' gallery, various visiting
ehhif
were either asleep or on their way to being so: on the other side, journalists were scribbling frantically in notebooks, trying to keep up with what the
ehhif
who spoke was saying. Urruah wondered why anyone would bother. The man had the most soporific style imaginable, and in this hot, still room, made hotter yet by the primitive electrical lights, the effect produced put the best sleep-spells Urruah knew to shame.

Urruah peered about him again, looking for any sign of McClaren. The
ehhif
was tall and had a big beard, but unfortunately that described about half the
ehhif
in here: this was a very hairy period for
ehhif
males in this part of the world. McClaren also had a long, hawkish nose and very blue eyes, but again Urruah's view was somewhat blocked.

He's probably not here,
Urruah thought.
Still, I'll take a look around.
And the impish impulse struck him.

He unsidled.

At first no one noticed him. It was late, and he was walking softly down the carpeted floor of the gangway on the Opposition side. He knew where he was headed: toward the center of the room, the "aisle," where he could get a good view of both front benches. McClaren was a Government minister, and would normally have been sitting there on the left-paw side of the Speaker as Urruah was facing the Speaker's Chair.

He looked around him at the weary, complacent faces as he came down the gangway... and they began to look at him. Urruah put his whiskers forward as the laughter started.
That'll wake them up,
he thought:
this'll probably make the papers tomorrow.
He came down to the aisle, took a long leisurely look across at the Government benches...

... and saw McClaren there.

Urruah stopped short, with the laughter scaling up all around him.

What's he doing here?

For he was not supposed to be here. He should have been up in his office, writing a letter.

Sa'Rráhh in a five-gallon bucket,
Urruah thought,
no —

He bolted toward the Government benches, ignoring the surprised or shocked faces turned toward him, and jumped up on the back of the first front bench, almost getting into the beard of the surprised minister sitting nearest. Urruah jumped with great speed from there to the first of the black benches, and to the next and the next, going up them like steps in a staircase and not particularly caring whose leg, shoulder, or head he stepped on in the process. The laughter became deafening. There was a door at the back of the last of the benches, at the very top. Urruah jumped down and went straight through it, this time without the slightest concern for the grain of the wood.

He raced out through the West Division lobby, through it into the little hallway at the corner of the lobby and up the staircase two floors. He knew well enough where McClaren's office was. Through that wooden door, too, he went, sidled again this time.

There was no one in the office.

Urruah stood very still for a moment and licked his nose three times in rapid succession. Then he glanced around him and looked up into the box on the bookcase.

No letter.

He jumped up onto the desk, covered with the same leather and paper blotter Arhu had Seen. There were no writings on it, but there were faint depressions, as of writing.

Urruah looked across to the small narrow fireplace at the other side of the office.
Perfect,
he thought.

He did a very small wizardry in his mind and put his paws down on the blotter, electrostatically charging it. Then he glanced over at the fireplace, and spoke courteously in the Speech to the soot up in the chimney.

Tidily, in a thin stream, it made its way across the room to him. Urruah guided it down onto the blotter, then levitated the blotter a little way up on its edge to let the soot slide down it.

It adhered here and there on the blotter, mostly to signatures. But one recent piece of writing showed up most clearly where the soot clung.

It's gone. It's gone already.
How can it be gone?

He ran out of the office again, through the door, his heart pounding and his mouth dry with terror.

Everybody! Everybody! Windsor, now, hurry —
now!

He unlatches the door with one gloved hand, slips in through it, shuts it gently behind him. Stands still in the darkness, and listens. A faint hiss from the hot-water boiler behind the coal stove, the tick of cinders shifting in the box: no other sound.

He takes his twelve steps across the kitchen, reaches out his hand, finds the shut door. He eases its latch open, slips through this door too, pulls it gently to behind him. Six stairs up to the hallway. Two steps out into the middle of the carpet in the hall: turn left. Sixty steps down to the second landing, and out onto the carpet. In the darkness he passes by the doorways he knows are there, to the Picture Gallery, the Queen's Ball Room, the Queen's Audience Chamber. Silently past the Guard Chamber: no guards are there anymore— the place is full of suits of armor, some of them those of children, and silken banners and old swords and shields, the gifts of kings.
No more kings after tonight,
he thinks, with the slightest smile in the dark.
No more queens...

Fifty-nine steps, and there is the change in the sound. Sixty. His toe bumps against the bottom step. Five stairs up to the landing: turn right: three steps. He puts his hand out, and feels the door.

Gently, gently he pulls it open. From up the winding stair comes a faint light: it seems astonishingly bright to him after the dead blackness. Softly he goes up the stairs, taking them near the outer side of the steps: the inner sides creak.

Something brushes against his leg. A gasp catches in his throat: he freezes in place. A minute, two minutes, he stands there.

Nothing. A cobweb. Even a place like this, with a hundred servants, can't keep all the stairwells free of the little toilers, the spinners of webs. Softly he goes on up again, one step at a time, at the edges, with care.

The remaining fifteen steps are steep, but he is careful. At the door at the top he halts and looks out of the crack in it where it has been left open. In the hallway onto which this stairway gives, next to a door with a gilded frame, is a chair under a single candle-sconce with a dim electric bulb burning in it. There should be a footman in it, but there's no sign of him. The chair is tilted back against the wall, and down by the foot of the chair is a stoneware mug: empty. The footman has gone to relieve himself. And the door in the gilded frame is slightly open.

Perfect. Down the hallway, now, in utmost silence.

Swiftly now, but also silently. Reach up and undo the bulb from its socket. No one will think a thing of it: these newfangled things burn out without warning all the time. Wait a few seconds for night vision to return. Then, silently, push the door open and step in.

The outer room is where the lady-in-waiting has a bed. She is not in it. Now the footman's absence suddenly completely makes sense, and in the darkness, he smiles. The nightwalker makes his way toward what he cannot see yet in this more total darkness, the inner door. He feels for the handle: finds it.

Turns the handle. The door swings inward.

Darkness and silence. Not
quite
silence: a faint rustle of bed linens, off to his left, and ahead. A little rasp of noise, soft. A snore? She will sleep more quietly in a moment....

Now, only now, the excitement strikes him, and his heart begins to pound. Ten steps, they told him. A rather wide bed. Her maids say she still favors the left side of it, leaving the right side open for someone who sleeps there no more.

Ten steps. He takes them. He listens for the sound of breathing...

... then reaches for the left side.

One muffled cry of surprise, as the knives pierce his hand, and other knives catch him from behind, on the neck and the back of the head, a flurry of abrupt, terrible, slicing pain. He staggers back, his arms windmilling, the knife trying to find a target in the darkness. Only the training of many years, the usual number of accidents— broken glass, banged shins— keeps him quiet now as he stumbles back to find his balance again. For just a moment his hand is free of the pain, but now the front of his neck is pierced by furious jaws that bite him in the throat, claws that seize and kick. He fumbles at his throat to grab something furry and throw it away with all his might—— and suddenly he simply can't move: he's frozen stiff, as if he were a stick of wood or one of the carved statues downstairs. Like a statue with its pedestal pulled out from under it, he topples, unable even to catch himself, or to turn so that he falls facedown and not on his back.

Yet at the last minute he doesn't fall. Some force far stronger than he is stops him, holds him suspended in air. He can't breathe, can't move, can only lie here gripped by something he can't begin to understand, and by the terror that follows.

The pain, at least, drops away from the back of his head. But suddenly there is a pressure on his chest. His eyes, wide already in the dark, go as wide as they can with shock as a face, grinning, like the face of a demon, becomes just barely visible before him.

It is the face of a black-and-white cat. From the very end of its tail, held up behind it, comes the faintest glimmer of light, like a will-o'-the-wisp. It looks at him with a face of unutterable evil, a devil come to claim him: and, impossibly, in a whisper, it speaks.

"Boy," it says, "have
you
ever picked the wrong bedroom."

It sits there on his chest while invisible hands lift him. A brief whirl of that ever-so-faint light surrounds him, going around the back of his field of vision, coming up to the front again, tying itself in a tidy bow-knot. For a second or so that light fills everything.

Then it is gone again, and he falls again, coming down on the floor with a thump. His head cracks down hard, and he almost swears but restrains himself.

But there's no carpet on this floor. This is hard stone. Slowly, when he discovers that he can sit up again, he feels the floor around him. Marble, and old smooth tile— hesitantly he gets to his feet, begins to feel his way around.

What he feels makes no sense. A stone figure, lying on its back, raised above the floor; much other carving reveals itself under his hands, but nothing else. He would swear out loud, except that he may still be able to get out, and someone might hear him.

It is a long while before the tarnished, waning Moon rises enough for its light to stream through the stained-glass windows surrounding him with their illustrations of biblical texts, and for him to realize whose the reclining figure is. There, entombed in marble, Prince Albert lies in the moonlight, hands folded, at rest, on his face a slight grave smile, which, in this lighting, takes on an unbearably sinister aspect.

The memory of the demon face comes back to him. He swallows, feels for his knife. It's gone. Dropped upstairs in the bedroom. There's nothing he can use on the locked, barred ornamental gate to get out. There's no way he can get rid of the silken rope. They will find it on him in the morning, when they call the police. There is a specific name for the charge of being found with tools that might be used for burglary: it's called "going forth equipped." It's good for about twenty years, these days.