CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“Put me down!” ordered Leaf, pulling on the beastwort’s lead with all her strength. Either the creature didn’t hear the quaver in her voice, or it didn’t care as long as Leaf held the lead. The beastwort obeyed and its tentacles gently lowered the girl to the ground.

“Let me go,” said Leaf, and the tentacles withdrew.

“Good girl,” said Leaf. She lay on the ground, shut her eyes and felt her heart going at what seemed like a million beats a minute. She also clutched the lead with her left hand, as if the thin strap was the most precious thing in the world. Which at that moment it was, as far as Leaf was concerned. She tried not to think about the sword hilt that her right hand was stuck to, or the fact that the sword was stuck fast in the Front Door.

“Leaf!”

Leaf rolled over. Major Penhaligon was calling out to her from behind the armoured personnel carrier.

“Yeah, it’s me,” she answered weakly.

“Are you OK? I’ve got a flame-throwing tank en route, but it’s still an hour away and we couldn’t—”

“No, I…I think I’m all right.” Leaf slowly stood up and tried to work out a position where she didn’t feel so stupid with a sword stuck in one hand and a lead she couldn’t let go of in the other. “Only I’m kind of going to have to go back through into…the…um…other dimension.”

“What?” asked Major Penhaligon. Presumably they’d seen her go through the hospital door with the Reaper, not the House’s Front Door, because most mortals couldn’t see it. Though just going through the solid hospital door must have looked strange enough…

“It’s kind of hard to explain,” said Leaf. “Weird stuff, you know? I mean really weird—”

The sword suddenly interrupted her, dragging Leaf back till hilt and hand were inside the Front Door again. She felt the weapon buck and move around. It was fighting someone…or something…on the other side!

“I have to go!” said Leaf. “I’ll take…Daisy…with me. Get help to the sleepers inside!”

“Where are you going? What happened to your suit?” shouted Major Penhaligon. “Wait!”

His voice was cut off as Leaf went back through the Front Door. She had braced herself to be ready to fight, and expected the disorientation, but even so she was surprised to find herself fighting a Nithling that was directly above her head and “standing” perpendicular to her.

This Nithling was humanoid, looked like a badly smudged photocopy of an uglified Denizen, and was wielding an oversize meat cleaver.

The Lieutenant Keeper’s sword blocked a vicious chop, but was borne back, and Leaf felt the shock all the way from her wrist to her shoulder. The sword tried to come up again, but Leaf knew she was letting it down, that her muscles and reflexes simply weren’t good enough, even with the sorcerous blade doing most of the work.

So she did a backflip and hauled hard on the beastwort’s lead as the Nithling’s chopper whisked past her heels. Leaf stumbled as she landed, because of the yielding nature of the Front Door’s atmosphere, and spun down again. The Nithling gave out a grunting laugh and launched towards her, raising its chopper. Leaf lifted her sword to parry, even though she knew it wouldn’t work. At the same time she cried out, “Daisy! Help!”

A tentacle lashed around the Nithling’s wrist as the chopper fell, and arrested its descent six inches away from Leaf’s chest. Another tentacle wrapped around the Nithling’s neck and pulled its head off. But this had little effect, and Leaf shuddered as she saw that what she had thought were buttons on the thing’s ragged coat were in fact eyes, and the coat its own hairy hide. The head was just camouflage, to make it look more like a Denizen.

Daisy was not discouraged by the Nithling’s persistence. Leaf looked away as the tentacles, strong as a demolition machine, ripped the Nithling apart and threw the pieces far away. Somewhere in the recess of her mind she knew this was a tactical move, because in the right circumstances such pieces could grow into small vicious Nithlings, combine with other new-formed Nithlings, or be transformed rather than destroyed if they met with patches of raw Nothing.

When it was quiet, Leaf let the sword pull her up.

“Well done, Daisy,” she said. Overcoming her repugnance, she patted the thing’s dimpled hide, which felt like the rough skin of a pineapple.

Daisy let out a noise that could possibly be considered a purr, though it sounded more like a drain being progressively unblocked.

Leaf wrapped her left hand around the lead a couple more times, just to make sure she’d keep control of the thing. Then she shut her eyes and concentrated on what was going on inside the Front Door. As before, she could sense that there were groups of Nithlings and a few single monsters roaming around, apparently aimlessly. Leaf wondered if they were either unable to see the exits or prevented from going through them. Possibly they were so newly formed from Nothing that they needed time for their brains to grow and become operational.

There were also large areas of Nothing within the Front Door. As Leaf focused her new sense upon them, she noted that the Nothing was slowly expanding, spreading in several different directions and moving on several different planes. It took her another moment to work out that this was because the Nothing was coming in through fifty or sixty different portals, and that the interior of the Front Door was a hemisphere, or dome, several miles wide and high, intersected on all sides by portals into the House and out to the Secondary Realms.

Some of the portals provided their own unique sensations when Leaf concentrated on them. The ones for the Upper House gave her an unpleasant tingling sensation on the end of her tongue, which she supposed meant they were guarded or closed against any traffic. She was now familiar with the toothache from the dead-end ones that went into Nothing, but there were also some into the Middle House that, when she thought about them, made her smell baking bread, but it stopped as soon as she concentrated on a portal to somewhere else.

Someone’s trying to get me to come to the Middle House portals, thought Leaf. It has to be either Arthur, Dr Scamandros or an enemy.

Leaf looked over at the beastwort.

If it is an enemy, they’re going to get a very unpleasant surprise.

“We’re going to the Middle House, Daisy,” said Leaf. She jiggled the lead a couple of times, then launched herself in the direction of the closest Middle House portal, using the sword for propulsion. She’d been a bit worried that she’d have to somehow drag the beastwort after her, which would probably stretch her arms several inches longer, but its many feet adopted a swimming motion and it came along beside Leaf, so the lead was slack.

“You’re a good girl,” Leaf said absently. She was thinking ahead and wondering if she could leave the Front Door when it opened into the House. She’d only met the previous Lieutenant Keeper once before, but she clearly remembered him walking out on to Doorstop Hill in the Lower House.

Or did she? Now that she thought about it, Leaf couldn’t recall how far he’d come out and where his sword had been. She had a sneaking and somewhat fearful half memory that the Lieutenant Keeper’s sword had been in a scabbard, and the end of the scabbard had remained inside the Door.

Leaf frowned. She really couldn’t remember and she told herself it was not the time to try. She should be keeping track of where the Nithlings were, to make sure she didn’t get ambushed. So she concentrated on intruders and found that while there were still several hundred Nithlings within the Front Door, none of them were near her. In fact they were all moving away, to congregate around a particularly large pool of Nothing that was leaking in from what used to be a portal into the Great Maze.

I wonder what they’re doing, thought Leaf, and she felt a strong compulsion to go and have an actual look. But it was a bit like being told to do something by a parent. Leaf ignored the feeling. Instead it merely hardened her determination to get rid of the sword and stop being the Lieutenant Keeper. As she’d told Arthur quite some time ago, Leaf did not want any more adventures. As far as she was concerned, she’d had enough.

A small point of light appeared up ahead. Leaf thought about going faster and straightened her wrist so the sword pointed directly at the portal. She sped up, the beastwort easily keeping pace. Together they accelerated towards the portal, which grew larger and became defined as a rectangular door of harsh white light.

A dozen feet away Leaf belatedly thought it might be a good idea to slow down rather than crash through into the Middle House with a three-ton creature on her heels.

But it was too late. Frantically Leaf swung the sword to the right, but that just meant she hit the side of the portal and was flung through it, wrenching her arm. She rolled across a thick carpet and collided with something wooden and fragile that broke.

The beastwort came through a second later, right on top of Leaf. She screamed, but the creature simply danced across her, its hundreds of legs exerting no more pressure than a small child, though that was enough to temporarily knock the wind out of Leaf.

The beastwort crashed into a wall just beyond Leaf, making the floor shudder and a large amount of dust fall from the ceiling. Leaf coughed and sneezed while she made sure she still held the beastwort’s lead, then she slowly took stock of her surroundings. As she’d half expected, the sword was still stuck in the Door, though most of it was out.

The room she was in looked like a study or small library, as the walls were lined with book-laden shelves. The wooden thing she’d smashed was a chair, one of three that were standing in niches between the shelves. The portal from the Front Door was in the middle niche, which was why Leaf had landed right on top of it.

The beastwort had smashed a whole floor-to-ceiling shelf to pieces and was standing amid a pile of books, blocking Leaf’s view of most of the room. She got up and twitched its lead.

“Over here, Daisy,” she said, pointing to the opposite side of the room. The beastwort obeyed.

Now Leaf could see that there was a door at the other end – an extremely sturdy door for a library. It was studded with iron bolt-heads the size of small plates, and there was a heavily barred window near the top. As Leaf looked at it, she saw a hooded Denizen duck down and heard muffled shouting, quickly followed by the tolling of a bell and the clatter of armoured Denizens in the corridor outside, approaching at a run.

“Here we go again.” Leaf sighed and tugged at the sword, which obstinately refused to come free.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“How you been, Doc?” asked Suzy as she led Giac into Dr Scamandros’s temporary workroom, a former paper store. The sorcerer looked up from his bench, put down his peacock feather quill and doffed his latest hat to Suzy. It was an orange fez and when he took it off, several items fell out. Some of them scurried under the bench before Suzy could see what they were, but one rolled to her feet. She picked up the smooth metal ball cautiously and handed it back to Dr Scamandros. As he reached for it, it flicked out a dozen jointed metal legs and jumped clear, joining its brethren in the dark recesses under the furniture.

“I have been tolerably well,” said Dr Scamandros, but the moving tattoos on his face told another story, with small furry animals sticking their heads into piles of sand while others covered themselves under piles of small rocks. “Given the circumstances.”

“This ’ere’s Colonel Giac, my aide,” said Suzy. “He’s a sorcerer too.”

“Ah, I was a Sorcerous Supernumerary,” said Giac carefully.

Dr Scamandros beamed and shook his hand. “As I would have been if I had stayed,” he replied. “I expect it was political.”

“Political?”

“Failing your exams!” exclaimed Scamandros. “Ah, it’s a long time since I have spoken with a colleague. I wonder if you might give me your opinion on these spells I am preparing. They are reinforcing papers, to be pasted over small eruptions of Nothing, but I fear they are of such short duration that I doubt their worth. Of course, it is the Keys that are needed to properly contain the Nothing, so we can only hope—”

“Doc!” interrupted Suzy. “Dame Primus sent us over. We’ve got to go in the Front Door and get Leaf. She’s the new Lieutenant Keeper. Then we have to get into the Upper House and open up a lot of elevator shafts.”

“What? What!” said Dr Scamandros. The furry animal tattoos dug deeper, till only their feet were visible, waving furiously. “Leaf is the new Lieutenant Keeper?”

“That’s what Old Primey reckons,” said Suzy. Giac looked around nervously and crossed his fingers as Suzy said, “Primey.”

“Apparently Sunday’s Dusk went and got her from her world, but something ’appened in the Door and she ended up being the new Keeper.”

“Oh dear,” said Scamandros. “I fear this is another sign.”

“Sign of what?” asked Suzy.

“The House is dissolving too fast,” whispered Dr Scamandros. “We’ve lost the Far Reaches, the Lower House and the Great Maze, and the Border Sea is riddled with Nothing. If the old Lieutenant Keeper couldn’t hold the Door, then the Nothing can spread through it into all parts of the House!”

“Arthur’ll fix it up,” said Suzy confidently.

The furry creature tattoos poked their heads out of their holes.

“Lord Arthur has returned!” exclaimed Dr Scamandros. “Perhaps there is hope after—”

“Uh, he’s not exactly back,” interrupted Suzy.

“Oh,” said Dr Scamandros. The furry creatures turned into doors that shut themselves and dwindled into tiny squares.