“How close are you?” Leaf asked curiously. “Like, do you get to use the Key a hundred times or something and then wham, you’re suddenly seven feet tall and a lot better looking?”
“I don’t know,” said Arthur. “That’s part of the problem.”
Dr Scamandros gave a slight and rather fake-sounding cough and raised his hand. Dame Primus stopped tapping her Agenda for a moment and stared at him, then continued with her rearranging.
“You may care to know, Lord Arthur,” said Dr Scamandros, “that there is a little student project of mine that could be of use to you. It measures the sorcerous contamination of things, including, of course, persons.”
Scamandros started rummaging around inside his yellow greatcoat and pulled out a peacock feather fan, several enamelled snuff boxes, a scrimshaw letter opener and a brass piccolo, all of which he laid distractedly on the table.
“Here somewhere,” he said, and then triumphantly pulled out a two-inch square velvet box that was very worn on the edges. Opening it, he passed it to Sunscorch, who passed it to Leaf, who looked curiously at the item inside before she gave it to Arthur. It was a slim silver crocodile coiled into a ring, its tail in its jaws. It had bright pink diamonds for eyes, and its body was scored with lines that divided it into ten sections, each marked with a tiny engraved Roman numeral.
“Is this relevant?” asked Dame Primus impatiently. “I am ready to proceed with the reordered Agenda.”
Arthur ignored her and took the ring out of the box.
“What does this do?” he asked. “Do I put it on?”
“Yes, do put it on,” replied Dr Scamandros. “In essence, it will tell you the degree to which you have been… ah… tainted with sorcery. It is not exact, of course, and in the case of a mortal, the calibration is uncertain. I would say that if the ring turns more than six parts gold then you will have become irretrievably transformed into a—“
“Can we move on?” snapped Dame Primus, as Dr Scamandros said,
“Denizen.”
Arthur put on the ring and watched with fascination and growing horror as each silver segment of the crocodile slowly turned from silver to gold.
One… two… three…
If he was transformed into a Denizen, he could never go back home. But he needed to use the Keys and the Atlas against the Morrow Days, and that meant more sorcerous contamination.
Unless it was all too late already.
Arthur stared at the ring as the tide of gold continued on, flowing into the fourth segment without slowing at all.
Arthur kept staring at the ring with dread fascination. After the fourth segment the gold suddenly stopped spreading and then it slowly ebbed back a little.
“It’s almost up to the fourth line,” Arthur reported.
“It is not exact,” said Dr Scamandros, “but that would concur with my previous examination. Your flesh, blood and bone are some four-tenths contaminated with sorcery.”
“And past six-tenths I become a Denizen?”
“Irrevocably.”
“Can I get rid of the contamination?” Arthur tried to keep his voice calm. “Does it wear off?”
“It will reduce with time,” Scamandros replied. “Provided you don’t add to it. I would expect that degree of contamination to lessen in about a century.”
“A century! It might as well be permanent. But how much would using the Atlas add to the contamination?”
“Without careful experimentation and observation I should not like to say. Considerably less than the interventions to heal your ailments or to undo misdirected application of the Keys’ power. Anything not focused on your own body will be less harmful.”
“It is not harmful to become a Denizen,” said Dame Primus. “It is to become a higher order of being. I cannot understand your reluctance to shed your mortality, Arthur. After all, you are the Rightful Heir of the Architect of Everything. Now can we please return to the Agenda?”
“I was only chosen because I was about to die and happened to be handy,” said Arthur. “I bet you’ve got a stack of Rightful Heirs noted down somewhere if something happens to me.”
There was silence in the vast room for a few seconds, until Dame Primus cleared her throat. Before she could speak, Arthur raised his voice.
“We will go back to the Agenda! After we’ve worked out what to do about the Spirit-eater. I just wish I could remember what might have been taken.”
“Try to work your way back through everything you did,” Leaf suggested. “Did you drop your inhaler on the oval? Maybe they picked that up? Or did you have something at school when they burned the library?”
Arthur shook his head. “I don’t think so… Hey, wait a second!”
He turned to look at Monday’s Dusk. He was slightly shorter than he had been as Noon and looked rather less severe, though no less handsome. He wore the night-black, undertaker-like costume of Dusk, though he’d taken off his top hat with the long black silk scarf wound around its crown.
“You sent the Fetchers, when you were Noon. Did one of them bring something back or were they banished straight into Nothing?”
“They did not return to me,” said Dusk, his once-silver tongue now a shiny ebony and his voice much softer. “But then I did not raise them in the first place. Mister Monday assigned them to me. I presume he bought them from Grim Tuesday, for he would not have been energetic enough to create them himself. You may recall that I was forced to return to the House when the Fetchers and I cornered you at your school.”
“At the school,” Arthur said slowly, revisiting that scene in his memory. “They took the Atlas! I’d forgotten because the Atlas came back here and I just picked it up again. A Fetcher ripped the pocket off my shirt and it got the Atlas with it—”
“A pocket!” interrupted Scamandros, scattering the things he’d put on the table with an excited wave of his arms, and the tower tattoos on his cheeks grew sturdier and sprouted fancy battlements. “That must be it. That will be the source of this Spirit-eater. A scrap of material that has lain next to your heart, overlaid with charms and planted in Nothing to grow a Cocigrue! Find that and we might be able to do something about the Spirit-eater!”
“Right,” said Leaf. “That sounds really easy.”
“You don’t have to try,” said Arthur. “I… I understand if you want to stay out of all this.”
“I don’t think there’s much choice,” said Leaf. “I can’t just let an evil clone of you go around taking over people’s minds, can I?”
“You could,” said Arthur. Though Leaf was trying to make light of the situation, he could tell she was afraid. “I know people who wouldn’t do anything unless it directly affected them.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t want to be one of those people. And if Ed’s out of quarantine, he can help… though I guess if it’s still Wednesday when I get back he’ll be stuck in hospital…”
Leaf pulled a face at the thought of her brother Ed still being stuck in hospital. Her parents, aunt and brother had all suffered from the Sleepy Plague and been quarantined.
“Anyway, Doc, is there anything particular that I can do to this Spirit-eater, you know, like salt gets rid of Fetchers and silver