I rode through puddles in places. In others, the streets had flooded completely, and the trike’s big wheels ran through the murk almost hubcap deep. The rain diminished to a drizzle, then stopped. I had no clue as to how far I was from Hana’s yellow house; with no phone to consult and no sun in the sky, my sense of time was completely fucked. I kept expecting the two midday bells to ring out.
Lost, I thought. I am lost, I have no GPS, and I’ll never get there in time. I’ll be lucky to get out of this crazy place before dark.
Then I crossed a little square with a statue in the middle—it was of a woman with her head swatted off—and realized I could see the three spires again. Only now I was looking at them from the side. I had an idea then, and it came to me—absurd but true—in the voice of Coach Harkness, who coached basketball as well as baseball. Coach Harkness striding up and down the sidelines, red in the face and with big patches of sweat showing at the armpits of the white shirt he always wore on game nights, following the flow of his team and screaming “Back door, back door, dammit!”
Back door.
That was where Mr. Bowditch’s trail of initials was leading me. Not to the front of that enormous central building, where Gallien Road no doubt ended, but behind it. I crossed the square to the left, expecting to find his initials on one of the three streets leading away from it, and so I did, painted on the side of a shattered glass building that might once have been a greenhouse of some kind. Now the side of the palace was on my right, and yes—the marks led me further and further around. I began to see a high curving shoulder of stonework behind the sprawl of the main buildings.
I pedaled faster. The next mark pointed me to the right, along what must have been, in better days, a wide boulevard. Back then it might have been fancy-shmancy, but now the pavement was cracked and crumbled away to gravel in some places. An overgrown median ran down the center. Among the weeds were enormous flowers with yellow petals and deep green centers. I slowed long enough to look at one that overhung the street on its long stem, but when I reached toward it, the petals closed with a snap inches from my fingers. Some white sappy fluid drooled out. I could feel heat. I pulled my hand back in a hurry.
Further along, maybe a quarter of a mile, I saw three looming roofpeaks, one on either side of the boulevard I was now traveling and one that appeared to be right over it. They were the same yellow as the hungry flowers. Directly ahead of me, the boulevard debouched into another square with a dry fountain in the center of it. It was huge and green, with random obsidian cracks running through its bowl. WRITE IT DOWN, PRINCE SHARLIE had been Claudia’s constant scripture, and I checked the notes I’d taken just to be sure. Dry fountain, check. Huge yellow house straddling the road, check. Hide, double-check. I stuffed the sheet of paper into the side pocket of my pack to keep it from getting wet. Didn’t even think about it at the time, but later on I had reason to be grateful it was in there instead of my pocket. Ditto my phone.
I rode slowly to the square, then more quickly to the fountain. Its pedestal was easily eight feet high and as thick as a tree trunk. Good cover. I dismounted and peeked around the pedestal. Ahead of me, no more than fifty yards from the fountain, was Hana’s house… or houses. They were connected by a yellow-painted corridor over the central passageway, sort of like the skyways you see all over Minneapolis. Quite the abode, all in all.
And Hana was outside.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Hana. Pinwheel Paths. The Horror in the Pool. The Sundial at Last. An Unwelcome Encounter.
1
Hana must have come out when the rain stopped, perhaps to savor the brightening day. She was sitting on an enormous golden throne below a striped awning of red and blue. I didn’t think the gold was just plating, and I very much doubted that the jewels crusting the throne’s back and arms were paste. I thought the king and/or queen of Empis would have looked ridiculously small when perched upon it, but Hana not only filled it, her enormous bottom squeezed out on the sides between the golden arms and the royal purple cushions.
The woman on that stolen （I had no doubt of it） throne was nightmarishly ugly. From where I had taken cover behind the dry fountain, it was impossible to tell how big she really was, but I’m six-four and it looked to me as if she’d tower over me by another five feet even sitting down. If so, that meant Hana would be at least twenty feet tall when standing.
An authentic giant, in other words.
She was wearing a circus-tent of a dress the same royal purple as the cushions she was sitting on. It came down to her tree-trunk calves. Her fingers （each looked nearly as big as my hand） were dressed in many rings. They glimmered in the subdued daylight; if the day brightened more, they’d flash fire. Dark brown hair fell to her shoulders and onto the tidal wave of her bosom in clumpy snarls.