‘No! I told you, I haven’t seen it for years.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘But it’s the truth!’
‘Find it, and then we’ll talk.’
Orwell slammed the door, silently.
Echo stepped towards the thing-without-name. Raven was right, there was something deep and strange about it. Echo usually felt certain about something, completely sure if it would bring danger or pleasure. But this, he didn’t know. He took another step without looking properly at the ground. A skylark flew out of her nest and hovered above the moor. Her call began quite crossly, but then developed into the usual stream of news from the Cosmic Web. And one item on the list was of particular interest.
‘Did you hear that?’ Echo said to Raven.
‘Yes,’ said Raven, looking troubled.
‘The long-haired hero-child with the ring – that is your friend?’
‘Yes,’ said Raven sadly.
‘She is in deep danger, this friend.’
‘Yes. Oh dear, Echo. What shall we do?’
‘We can find this sparkling bog again tomorrow. For now we will go and help this friend. Let us vamos.’
Raven and Echo cantered home while a brace of meteors leapt unthinkingly through the black sky. As soon as she could, Raven would sat down at her desk and write a letter to the Luminiferous Ether. She just hoped it wasn’t too late.
4
It was not quite dawn when Maximilian let himself into the old caretaker’s cupboard in the basement of the Tusitala School for the Gifted, Troubled and Strange. The sun was barely a pink whisper in the sky, but Maximilian wanted plenty of time to go through all the books in Griffin’s Library until he found the one he most wanted. The one that he had started but not finished; the one he’d been trying to find for almost a month now: Beneath the Great Forest.
He imagined another item for Dr Green’s list: Neophytes are FORBIDDEN from trying to access the Underworld. But Maximilian didn’t care about anyone’s rules. He desperately wanted to get back to the dark, mysterious underground world that he had almost accessed through Beneath the Great Forest. He so very much wanted to know its secrets. Secrets that he patently was not going to learn from Dr Green on a Monday night.
So he searched for the book.
And, of course, he also searched for information on the Sterran Guandré, just as he had promised his friends. Since most of Griffin Truelove’s library was fiction, it was not usually the place to go for facts. But Maximilian thought that if only he could get back to the Underworld there would be libraries there that would answer every question he had about life. He didn’t know how he knew this, he just did. Of course, the dim web provided information too. But it was not like the old days of the internet. The dim web could not be searched. And lately the Guild was all over it, taking down any interesting pages that told anyone anything about magic.
Maximilian sighed. He knew he wasn’t the only person in the city looking for a lost book. Indeed, all over the world, people were trying to find their long-abandoned copies of The Chosen Ones so they could get their reward. It had got all the locals particularly excited. Albion Freake was actually coming here, to the city, to give away the grand prize. The Tusitala school was even closing for the day in honour of the event. The city had been chosen because this was where Laurel Wilde lived.
But Maximilian didn’t care about stupid children’s books. He only cared about Beneath the Great Forest. Where was it? He remembered it had been a hardback bound in cloth. Or had it been leather? He was almost certain it had been blue. When he got to the 499th book – not that he was counting, but he knew how many there were – for the second time, reading titles as well as looking at the colour of the binding, he sighed. It wasn’t here. There were all sorts of interesting volumes on the shelves, but not the one he wanted.
Maximilian ran his hand over the spines of a line of hardbacks. They felt so smooth, so inviting. Almost at random, he pulled out a book called The Initiation and idly started flicking through its pages. It was a medium-sized hardback bound in dark maroon leather. The colour, Maximilian thought, of blood. Inside was mostly dense text, broken with the odd line drawing. In one image a boy was sitting cross-legged on a patterned rug; in another the same boy was wielding something that looked like an athame, a small dagger used by mages. The boy looked oddly familiar.
Getting up before dawn had made Maximilian feel exhilarated. But now his lack of sleep was beginning to catch up with him. Maybe he just needed a cup of coffee? Most children didn’t like coffee, but Maximilian was not in the least bit like most children. He had his own special cafetière and a bag of extra-strong coffee beans over by the kettle next to the sink. He put a nice big handful of beans through his coffee grinder, then sat on one of the old paint-spattered chairs to have a proper look at this book while the kettle boiled. But he was just so sleepy.
He woke a few moments later to a tap-tapping on the door. It was the elderly headmaster of the school.
‘I thought I might find you here,’ said the headmaster. ‘There’s a man outside with a helicopter who says he has come for you. I do hope you have a note from your mother.’
‘I . . .’ said Maximilian, rubbing his eyes. His short sleep had left him feeling refreshed, but rather dozy. A helicopter? A note from his mother? What on earth was the headmaster talking about?
The headmaster was smiling his crinkly, off-centre smile.
‘Go, boy, before I change my mind,’ he said.
‘But I don’t have a note . . .’
‘I was joking, child. But not about the helicopter. Go.’
With an hour to go before the start of school, Effie was walking from the bus stop at the bottom of the Old Town up the quiet cobbled street towards Leonard Levar’s locked and shuttered Antiquarian Bookshop. A tiny faint light came from deep inside the bookshop, but Effie barely noticed it. There was a gentle pink mist that was very beautiful, but it meant there would be another heavy frost later. Beyond the mist, the troposphere, the Luminiferous Ether, and much else besides, impatient meteors danced around, waiting for it to be their turn to sparkle through the sky. But Effie’s mind was on other things.
Where would she find a copy of The Chosen Ones? Nowhere, it seemed. Neither of the main city bookshops had yet opened, but each had signs on the door saying that they were completely sold out of Laurel Wilde books. On the way from the bus stop Effie had seen a poster offering a hundred pounds for a single paperback. Then, crudely pasted on top of posters for a Beethoven concert featuring the Pathétique and Les Adieux, and a talk at the Astronomical Society about the upcoming Wandering Star meteor shower, there was a handbill offering two hundred pounds for a hardback copy of The Chosen Ones.
Why did everyone want a copy of Laurel Wilde’s first book all of a sudden? It was a mystery. But Effie knew that even if she could find a copy of the book, she could not afford it at those prices. Her purse contained £5.50, which was all the money she had in the world.
Or, at least, all the money she had in this world.
Effie pulled her bottle-green school cape around her as she walked on through the misty, silent morning. She had no idea whether copies of children’s books from this world would even exist in the Otherworld. Why would they? But she had a feeling that if one did, it might be for sale at the big book stall in the Edgelands Market on the other side of the Funtime Arcade. So that’s where she was going. She had plenty of M-currency