I thought of the big cockroaches and rabbits. I thought of a red cricket almost the size of Catriona. I thought of Dora with her disappearing face and Leah with a scar for a mouth.
“Yes,” I said. “I believe it all.”
“Good. Remember to show Claudia what I put in your packsack.”
I hoisted Radar into the cart and opened my pack. On top, gleaming mellowly in the light of another cloudy day, was a gilt fist. I looked at the door to the brick house and saw the knocker was gone. I lifted it and was surprised by its weight.
“My God, Woody! Is this solid gold?”
“It is. In case you feel any temptation to push on past the sundial and into the treasury, remember you have this to add to whatever Adrian may have gleaned in the palace on his last visit. Fare you well, Prince Charlie. I hope you don’t need to use Adrian’s weapon, but if you have to, don’t hesitate.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN Kingdom Road. Claudia. Instructions. The Noisemaker. The Monarchs.
1
Radar and I approached the fork, which was marked by a signpost that pointed to Kingdom Road on the right. The one marking the Seafront Road had come loose and pointed straight down, as if Seafront resided underground. Radar gave a rusty bark, and I saw a man and a boy coming from the Seafront direction. The man was hopping along on a crutch, his left foot wrapped in a dirty bandage and barely touching the ground every few steps. I wondered how far he’d be able to go on just one good leg. The boy wasn’t going to be much help; he was small and carrying their goods in a burlap sack which he switched from hand to hand and sometimes dragged along the road. They stopped at the fork and watched me as I bore right, past the signpost.
“Not that way, sir!” the boy called. “That’s the way to the haunted city!” He was gray, but not as gray as the man with him. They might have been father and son, but it was impossible to see a resemblance because the man’s face had begun to blur and his eyes to pull up.
The man swatted him on the shoulder and would have gone sprawling if the boy hadn’t steadied him.
“Leave him be, leave him be,” the man said. His voice was understandable but muffled, as if his vocal cords had been wrapped in Kleenex. I thought that before long he’d be huzzing and buzzing like Dora.
He shouted to me across the widening gap between the two roads, and it obviously hurt him. His grimace of pain made his dissolving features even more horrible, but he meant to have his say. “Hello, whole man! Which of em did your mother flip her skirts for to leave you fair of face?”
I had no idea what he was talking about, so I said nothing. Radar gave another feeble bark.
“Is that a dog, Pa? Or a tame wolf?”
The man’s answer was another whack on the boy’s shoulder. Then he sneered at me and made a hand gesture I understood perfectly. Some things don’t change, apparently, no matter what world you’re in. I was tempted to give him back the American version but didn’t. Dissing disabled people is crap behavior, even if the disabled person in question happens to be an asshole who whacks his son and casts aspersions on your mother.
“Walk well, whole man!” he screamed in his muffled voice. “May today be your last!”
Always nice to meet pleasant people along the way, I thought, and walked on. Soon they were lost to sight.
2
I had Kingdom Road to myself, which gave me plenty of time to think… and to wonder.
The whole people, for example—what were they? Who were they? There was me, of course, but I thought if there was a whole-people record book, I’d be in it with an asterisk by my name, because I wasn’t from Empis （at least this part of the world was called that; Woody had told me Hana the giant came from a place called Cratchy）。 It was nice to have Woody assure me—and he had—that I wouldn’t start to turn gray and lose my face because, he said, whole people were immune to the gray. That had been this morning at breakfast, and he had refused to discuss it further because he said I had a long way to go and had to make a start. When I asked about Flight Killer, he only frowned and shook his head. He reiterated that his cousin Claudia could tell me more, and I had to be satisfied with that. Still, what the man on the crutch said was suggestive: Which of em did your mother flip her skirts for to leave you fair of face?
I also wondered about the constantly gray skies. At least in the daytime they were constantly gray, but at night the clouds sometimes parted to allow the moonlight to shine through. Which in turn seemed to activate the wolves. Not a single moon up there but two, one chasing the other, and that made me wonder exactly where I was. I’d read enough science fiction to know about the idea of parallel worlds and multiple earths, but I had an idea that when I passed through that place in the underground corridor where my mind and body seemed to separate, I might have arrived on a different plane of existence altogether. The possibility that I was on a planet in a galaxy far, far away made a degree of sense because of the two moons, but these weren’t alien life forms; these were people.