Part 9 (1/2)
She hesitated, looking first at Deacon and then at Samuligan. They both nodded their encouragement. She turned the ball over.
A small window had been placed into the bottom of the ball, through which could be seen a cloud of liquidy mist. The words ASK AGAIN LATER appeared in the window.
”What?” Oona said, her voice ripe with irritation. She rolled the ball back over in her hands, reread the instructions, and then asked: ”Is my uncle dead?”
Again she turned the ball over, and again the words ASK AGAIN LATER appeared in the misty window.
Oona shook the ball violently, nearly shouting: ”Who attacked my uncle?” She peered into the window, and yet a third time the words appeared: ASK AGAIN LATER.
Oona raised a suspicious eyebrow at the ball before placing it back in the hidden compartment. ”Apparently, Uncle Alexander hasn't worked the kinks out of it yet.”
”Apparently so,” Deacon agreed.
Oona peered toward the back of the compartment and saw what they had been looking for. The book was pushed all the way to the back, and Oona was nearly forced to stick her head inside the compartment in order to reach it. The heavy leather binding felt old and coa.r.s.e, and as she slid it forward, a slim stack of papers fell to the floor at her feet. Samuligan bent to retrieve them as Oona hefted the book from the shelf to the dragon-bone desk. The book seemed much heavier than it ought to have been, and she let it fall to the desktop with a heavy thud. The steady breathing of the desk faltered for a moment, as if there were a hitch in its breath, and then once again settled into its habitual pattern.
”Okay, let's see what's inside.” She placed a finger on the corner of the front cover but found it much too heavy simply to flip open. It took both hands and nearly all of her strength to heave its cover back, and by the time she had finished this seemingly simple task, her brow was damp with sweat.
”It must be the magical binding that Samuligan had mentioned before,” Oona said, catching her breath.
Deacon seemed quite excited by this news. ”Yet even more proof that Natural Magicians have some active strain of faerie blood in them. But because you are human, the magical protection is weakened.”
”Tell that to my hands,” Oona said, flexing the soreness from her fingers. Yet it seemed that Deacon was right. She only hoped that the magical binding on the book was limited just to opening it, and did not extend to turning its pages; otherwise, this was going to take forever.
She flipped a page, and it turned as easily as any page in a normal book. Breathing a sigh of relief, Oona flipped to the back, where she hoped to find an index. Her luck held out. Listed in alphabetical order were row after row of all the topics to be found in the book. She ran her finger down the line of Bs. Binding Magic ... Birch Trees ... Birds ... Black Magic ... and there it was: Black Tower (see Goblin Tower), 413.
Deacon hopped to her shoulder as Oona found the page in a flurry of turns, and discovered ... not what she was expecting. On the entire page there was only one reference to the tower's entrance. One single line near the bottom of the page. It read: ”To enter the tower, you must first find it.”
This was followed by what appeared to be a poem.
Upon my head I have no face For your ease I come in a case And though I'm well and upon my way Upon my flight I'm here to stay I slow you down, and tire you out Yet getting you there is what I'm about.
Oona turned the page over to make sure she was not missing something. When she found nothing else, she turned back to page 413 and slammed her fist against the corner of the book.
”But this is just as helpful as that magic billiard ball,” she said. ”It tells us nothing!”
”It appears to be some sort of riddle,” Deacon said.
”What it says, Deacon, is that in order to enter the tower you must first find it. But we know where the tower is. It's in the cemetery.”
Deacon hopped from her shoulder to the desk so that he might get a better look at the book. ”But perhaps the *it' that the text is referring to is the entrance. And the riddle-”
Oona snapped her fingers. ”Yes, of course, Deacon. Answer the riddle and we will know where to look for the secret entrance!”
Oona grabbed a pen and paper, and quickly copied the riddle. ”Samuligan!” she said excitedly. ”Bring round the carriage, please. I want to get to the cemetery as quickly as possible.”
But at first the faerie servant did not seem to have heard. He was reading one of the pieces of paper that had fallen on the floor.
”Samuligan, did you hear me?” Oona asked. ”Please bring the carriage around front. And you really shouldn't be snooping about in Uncle Alexander's private letters.”
Samuligan tipped his hat back on his head and gave her a calculated look, as if to say that she was hardly the person to be giving lectures on snooping around.
”You will want to read this,” he said. ”I believe you will find its contents quite enlightening.”
The journey to the cemetery, which was located at the very south end of the street, took nearly forty-five minutes by carriage. Oona did not notice the time pa.s.s. It was early yet, the sun just having topped many of the buildings, and most of the street's varied inhabitants still slept. A few early risers and shady-looking characters wandered the mist-covered sidewalks, along with several sleepy-eyed police constables.
But Oona observed none of this, nor did she so much as glance out the carriage window as they rolled the six-mile stretch of empty street, with the exception of once, when the carriage b.u.mped over some missing cobblestones and she looked up to see the stone steps of the museum and the enormous carved stone top hat. She caught a glimpse of the girl-size dress in the window of Madame Iree's Boutique for Fine Ladies. The enchanted glinting cloth caught Oona's attention for the length of time it took the carriage to roll past, and then she was once again lost in thought.
It was solely the two sheets of paper in her hands that divided her attention. In her right hand she held the riddle that she had copied out of the Wizard's book. But it was the paper in her left hand that currently held her gaze: a doc.u.ment printed on crisp red paper and written in quite specific and legal terms. At the top of the doc.u.ment were the words CERTIFICATE OF DEBT, beneath which was a scramble of musical notes. Luckily for Oona, learning to read the musical language of magical law had been part of her training as an apprentice.
She sighed. ”From what I can make out-and I am not a lawyer, so I am not certain-but it appears that Uncle Alexander borrowed some money. According to this doc.u.ment, he has been borrowing money for quite some time ... a period of two years. But not from a bank. It would seem he has been borrowing from a company called Dupington Moneylenders.”
”Dupington?” said Deacon. ”Never heard of them.”
”Neither have I, Deacon. But this certificate of debt and the eviction notice we received this morning are both printed on the same thick red paper. It's my guess that if we look into it, Dupington and the Nightshade Corporation will be one and the same. That is why Red Martin has evicted us.”
”But what does that mean?” Deacon asked from the seat opposite Oona. His voice shook against the rattle of the carriage.
”If my suspicions are correct, then it means that, more than likely, Red Martin had a dirty red hand in the attack on Uncle Alexander,” Oona said. ”That's what I think.”
”But he was not in the room at the time of the attack,” Deacon pointed out.
Oona nodded. ”No doubt he put someone else up to it. It is too much of a coincidence that Red Martin should benefit so much from all of this. Clearly, he and one of the applicants are in cahoots. But which one?”
”Are you sure the doc.u.ment is authentic?” Deacon asked. ”Do we know for sure that the two companies are the same, and that Red Martin has the right to take owners.h.i.+p of the house?”
Oona frowned at the certificate, glancing over the musical notations. ”It appears so. But I do not know all that much about legal doc.u.ments. We will need to consult a lawyer.”
”Ravensmith does not open until after nine o'clock,” Deacon informed her.
Oona nodded. ”Until then, we have a riddle to solve.”
The carriage creaked to a halt, and a moment later Samuligan opened the door for her. Dressed in an auburn-colored dress, and with her long black hair worn down about her shoulders, Oona stepped to the sidewalk, leaving the Certificate of Debt behind in the carriage. She placed the paper with the riddle on it in her dress pocket. The arched stone gateway stood ominously before her, above which soared the mammoth Goblin Tower. The solid black structure rose up from the center of the cemetery to meet the sky-ending at a daunting, if not to say unnatural, height. She craned her neck all the way back to see the very top of the tower as it sc.r.a.ped against the bottom of a drifting cloud.
”It is over seven hundred feet tall,” Deacon announced as he alighted upon her shoulder. Oona gulped audibly. Suddenly, the thought of going into that bleak, windowless structure-not to mention somehow getting to the top, where the prison was supposedly located-did not seem like such a good idea. Oona turned to Samuligan.
”You are certain that your magic cannot penetrate it?” she asked.
Samuligan looked at the tower with an expression that Oona could not at first read, and then she realized that the reason she could not read it was because it was an expression she had never before seen on the faerie servant's face. Samuligan looked afraid. The realization sent a s.h.i.+ver running from the bottom of Oona's feet to the top of her head.
”I a.s.sure you,” Samuligan said. ”Not my magic, nor any that I know of, can penetrate that tower. That riddle you have is likely the only key to getting in ... and should you manage to find the entrance, then I cannot say what you will find inside. It is called the Goblin Tower, after all. I was blindfolded when Oswald took me out of the tower so that I would not be able to see its secrets. I never saw the goblins, but I believe that they are no laughing matter.”
Oona remembered the horrible little eyes and pointy ears of the beasts in the parlor tapestries. She nodded. But if there was even a chance that her uncle was in there, locked away and helpless, then she was determined to get him out. And if he wasn't in there ... well, then she would know which dagger had struck him, and she would hunt down whoever had murdered him and make him pay for it.
She took a deep breath and said: ”Let's do it.”
But the faerie servant did not move from his spot beside the carriage.
”Aren't you coming, Samuligan?” Oona asked.
”No faerie may approach the tower's walls,” he said. ”That is known. There is an invisible barrier around the perimeter. It was only in Oswald's presence that I was able to pa.s.s out of it. And besides, I have been inside of the black cell at the top of that tower before. I do not wish to see it again. No, I will await your return here.” He climbed back atop the carriage and thumbed back his hat, looking down at her with his intelligent faerie eyes. ”But don't forget that if you do manage to get to the top, your uncle may not be the same as you remember him. Oswald turned me into a lizard when he captured me with the dagger. There is no telling what form your uncle may have been transformed into. It will have been a form of his attacker's choosing.”