Episode 09
The prince
"Anything that can be tracked will be," said Ilse, at the airport, "and I am not getting on that." So they came east the slow way.
Nine days. A train to Warsaw and a different train after it, a lorry with a cousin of Marguerite's at the wheel, two nights in a house that belonged to nobody. Ricky, Rose, Bob, Kappa, Marguerite, Ilse. Four kobolds in the underneath of the lorry who would not be talked out of it. Vovô, who had flown, which he does not do, and who said one sentence at the airport and nothing else for two days. And Charlie, up from Rome with a bag of photocopies and the face Ricky had last seen on her at fifteen, when somebody told her a thing was impossible.
"It's not a hillside," she said on the second night, over a 1902 map, a much older one, and a satellite print. "Everybody keeps saying hillside. It's a spoil heap. Somebody dug a hall out of a mountain eleven thousand years ago, piled the mountain back on top, planted trees, and has been maintaining the drainage ever since. There's a working eleven-thousand-year-old drainage system on nobody's map, and I found it by looking at where the water doesn't go."
"Maintained by who?" said Rose.
"By somebody. That's my whole finding. Somebody has been down there this century with a bucket."
Kappa changed on that journey. Everybody noticed and nobody said it.
Part of it was the obvious part. He'd buried his grandmother on a Thursday in Wedding with eleven people and a kobold, Ana holding his arm the whole way, then gone back to the flat, packed a bag in eleven minutes, and not been back since. That does things to a face.
The rest was the floor.
He had it now. Nobody taught him; there was nobody to. On the first night he went very white in the corridor of a moving train and sat down and said, "It's all of it. It's not under me, it's all of it."
Ricky sat down next to him and said the only true thing available. "Yes. Welcome to it. Feet flat. Breathe. Don't try to hold anything. You'll want to hold it, and if you hold it you'll squeeze."
"Squeeze what?"
"Everything."
By the fourth day he could stand up under it. By the sixth he'd stopped putting his hand on walls. On the seventh, in the empty house, he came into the kitchen at three in the morning, where Vovô was sitting up with a plate of nothing.
"There's a mine in Silesia with nine men in it who shouldn't be there tonight. I don't know how I know that."
"You know it because they're standing on you, menino," said Vovô. "Ring somebody and go back to bed."
That was the sentence at the airport, by the way. Vovô had put his hand on the back of Kappa's neck, which he does to exactly one person, and said: "You are not the first person in my kitchen to find out he is something. You are the first one to find out he is everything. So: same rules. Eat, sleep, don't set fire to the drapes."
The old woman was waiting at the bottom of the drainage.
Charlie went down first with a torch and came back up four minutes later with her face doing something Ricky had never seen it do, which turned out to be going completely blank. She'd worked out who it was on the ladder and needed the climb to get her face back.
"There's a woman," she said. "In the culvert. On a folding chair. She says she's been expecting us since Saturday and there's tea."
Small, round, about seventy to look at, in a padded coat and rubber boots, hair in a knot. And the hair was gold. Not blonde. Gold, the metal, in a way no dye has ever managed, and it stopped every person who came down that ladder on the last rung.
"Oh, good," she said. "There's a lot of you. I've only got the one flask, we'll share." She looked at Kappa for a long moment, and then, with no fuss at all, took his face in both hands. "There he is. There you are. I'm your sister Gucci, you were nine years old when I last held your head, I have been keeping the lamps in oil for eleven thousand years, and I would like to say first that I am extremely angry with you about the door."
"I—"
"Not that door. The dog door. The mice." She let go and patted his cheek. "The other one wasn't your fault at all, it was hers, and she'd say the same. Sit down. Everybody sit down, the water's boiled."
I have this from four people and Bob's version is best. It begins: she made us have tea. Eleven kobolds under a hill, a door out of the world over our heads, and she made us all have tea, and it was the right call, and I have never been more frightened of anyone.
She'd been there since the operation.
Eleven years silent, then back to the one place in the world she couldn't be, and she stayed. Not to guard it; she was clear about that. Somebody had to keep the lamps in oil and the drains running, and if you leave a place like that alone for four centuries it doesn't become a ruin. It becomes an opportunity.
"You knew they were down there," said Ilse.
"For nine days. I brought them blankets." Gucci poured. "They were extremely polite. They always are; that's how you know. The one with the arm asked if I minded and I said I minded enormously, and she said yes, we thought you would, and gave me the blankets back folded." She passed the cup along. "They've got the small one on a table in the middle of the ring. It won't point. Nine days and it hasn't pointed once, and I want somebody to tell me what it eats, because I have been very worried."
"It doesn't eat," said Ricky.
"Thank God," said Gucci, and burst into tears. Bob got up and stood next to her chair and said nothing, and after a while she stopped, blew her nose, and got on with it, which I'm told is exactly what she was like eleven thousand years ago.
"So," she said. "Here is the room and here is what will happen in it.
"The ring of old things is not a ward against spirits. My sister told everyone that for four hundred years and it was a lie she was proud of. It's a lid, and the lid is made of age: the oldest objects the world had, put in a circle, because a door out of a universe is held shut by the weight of things that have been here, and nothing is heavier than an old thing that stayed.
"Under the ring is the door. Two boys opened it once for nine seconds, and eleven of the pieces that came through are downstairs drinking my tea.
"Under the door is the colony. Four hundred and some, linked, eleven thousand years down the line. They're why the lid has held; the ring was never quite heavy enough on its own. Something has been standing under the whole arrangement holding still." She looked at Kappa. "Two somethings. One died on Saturday. I felt it go, and I've been sitting in a culvert since, working out how long we've got."
"How long?"
"About four days. It's day nine." She screwed the lid on the flask. "So: tonight."
"And what do they do?" said Rose. "Say it out loud. What actually happens if they get it open."
"They go home. That's all they want, poor things, and I have never once heard anyone say it kindly. They came through a hole, got stuck in a shape, and they've been in coats for eight thousand years and they'd like to stop. And when the door opens the room goes out with them, because a room whose house is gone is only held in place by the floor, and the floor is my brother, and my brother would be standing next to an open door being pulled through it." She looked round at all of them. "It isn't malice. It's plumbing. That's what makes it so awful."
"Then we don't open it," said Ricky.
"Then it opens anyway in four days when the lid gives out, with nobody in the right place, and everybody goes. I've had eleven thousand years to look for a third option, dragon. I found exactly one. It's worse than both and it's the only one that works."
She put the flask in her pocket.
"We open it on purpose," she said. "We let them go. And then somebody stands on the wrong side and closes it."