“No.”
“Never came to the games and gawked at it through the glass?”
“No.” Dangerous ground here, because I had only a vague idea of what he might mean. Or if it was a trap.
“What about the Dark Well? Do they tell of that even in Ullum?”
“Well… yes.” I was sweating. If this interrogation went on much longer, I was going to step on one of those mines. I knew it.
“But you turned back after the sundial. Why was that, Charlie?”
“I wanted to get out before dark.” I straightened up and tried to put some defiance into my face and voice. “I almost made it.”
He smiled again. Beneath the illusion of his skin, his skull grinned. Had he—and the others—ever been human? I was guessing they had been. “There’s pain in that word, wouldn’t you agree? Such pain in every almost.” He tapped his colored lips with that hideously long nail, studying me. “I don’t care for you, Charlie, and I don’t believe you. No, not at all. I’m tempted to send you to the Belts, only Flight Killer wouldn’t approve. He wants thirty-two, and with you in Maleen, we’re but one short. So back to Maleen you go.”
He raised his voice to a shout so unnaturally loud it made me want to cover my ears, and for a moment there was only a skull wrapped in blue fire above the affectation of the red velvet smoking jacket. “AARON!”
The door opened and Aaron came back in. “Yes, my lord.”
“Take him back but show him the Belts on the way. I want Charlie to see that his lot in the Maleen isn’t the worst lot in the palace where King Jan, may his name be soon forgotten, once ruled. And Charlie?”
“Yes?”
“I hope you enjoyed your visit, and your tea with sugar.” This time the illusion of his face grinned along with the skull that was the reality. “Because you’ll never have such a treat again. You think you’re smart, but I see through you. You think you’re hard, but you’ll soften. Take him.”
Aaron raised his limber stick but stood aside so I didn’t have to touch his debilitating aura. When I reached the door, just as escape from this terrible room was at hand, Kellin said, “Oh dear, I almost forgot. Come back, please, Charlie.”
I had watched enough reruns of Columbo with my father on Sunday afternoons to know the “Just one more question” trick, but I still felt a sinking dread.
I came back and stood beside the chair I’d been sitting in. Kellin opened a small drawer in the tea table and brought something out. It was a wallet… but not my wallet. Mine was a cordovan Lord Buxton, given to me by my dad as a birthday present when I turned fourteen. This one was limp and black and scuffed.
“What is this? I’m curious.”
“I don’t know.”
But once my initial shock wore off, I realized I did. I remembered Dora giving me the leather shoe tokens, then gesturing for me to take off my pack so I didn’t have to carry it to Leah’s. I had opened the pack and put my wallet in my back pocket, just an automatic thing. Not thinking about it. Not looking, either. I had been looking at Radar, wondering if she would be okay if I left her with Dora, and instead of my wallet I’d been carrying Christopher Polley’s all this time.
“I found it and picked it up. Thought it might be something valuable. Stuck it in my pocket and forgot about it.”
He opened the billfold and pulled out the only money Polley had been carrying—a ten-dollar bill. “This could be money, but I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Alexander Hamilton looked like he could be one of the whole people from Empis, maybe even royalty, but there were no words on the bill, just tangled gibberish that almost hurt my eyes. And instead of the number 10 in the corners, there were symbols: . “Do you know what this is?”
I shook my head. The words and numbers on the bill were apparently not translatable into either English or Empisarian but had fallen into some linguistic wasteland.
Next he brought out Polley’s expired driver’s license. His name was readable; everything else was a mass of runes broken by an occasional recognizable letter.
“Who is this Polley, and what kind of picture is it? I’ve never seen one like it.”
“I don’t know.” Something I did know: throwing away my backpack so I could run faster had been fantastic luck. My own wallet was in it, and my phone—I’m sure he would have been interested in that—and the directions I’d jotted down at Claudia’s command. I doubted if the words on that sheet would have been runic gibberish, like those on the ten-dollar bill or Polley’s DL. No, those would have been written in Empisarian.