‘Yes,’ said Arthur. ‘I would.’

‘We will have to go a little way, to my . . . ahem . . . camp, I suppose you would call it,’ said Pravuil, with a bow and a sweep of his arm. ‘Fortunately, Dusk’s providence included a little box of the best Ceylon tea and some sugar biscuits. I haven’t had a cup of tea for . . . oh . . . a century at least.’

‘How long have you been down here?’

‘Ten thousand years, give or take a month,’ said Pravuil. ‘Very dull it’s been too, my lord.’

‘I don’t suppose you know anything about the Improbable Stair, do you?’ asked Arthur as they walked between coal pyramids. ‘Or the powers of my Key?’

‘I fear not, sir, I fear not,’ replied Pravuil. ‘I know of the Improbable Stair, at least by hearsay. It is supposed to be the Architect’s personal stair and was used by Her to reach all parts of Her creation, both in the House and beyond. But that is all I know. As to the powers of your Key, I was only a cataloguer of stars, and a relatively junior one at that. Such things as the Keys to the Kingdom were well beyond my purview. But the Old One will know, I’m sure, being as how he is the Old One, the oldest save the Architect Herself. A left turn here, sir, and then left again –’

He stopped talking as Arthur stopped walking. Both had heard the same thing. A stealthy step behind them, the soft zing of clockwork, and the faint swish of air, as if it had been disturbed by something moving up and down.

Something like an axe . . .

Seventeen

QUICK!’ PRAVUIL GASPED. ‘Up the pyramid!’

He leaped forward and was halfway up one of the pyramidal stacks of coal before Arthur could even move. But when the boy tried to follow the Coal-Collator, he went feetfirst into the pyramid and the whole thing collapsed, almost burying him.

Arthur struggled out from under the collapsed heap, his heart racing. There was coal dust everywhere, in his eyes and all over his face. He couldn’t see a thing, but he could hear the zinging clockwork and the chopping noise and then an axe blade suddenly chopped down right in front of him, heading straight at his wrist.

Somehow, Arthur managed to parry the blow with the Key. But he felt the shock of it all through his arm, and the Key didn’t do anything magical to defend him. In a flash of fear, Arthur realised that whatever magic it possessed was not strong enough to save him from these monsters. The Key might be the work of the Architect, but so were they, and they were made to gouge out the eyes and liver of someone much more powerful than Arthur.

‘They can’t climb!’ screamed Pravuil, who was teetering on top of another pyramid, his arms outstretched for balance. ‘Climb up!’

‘How?!’ screamed Arthur as he rolled out of the way of another blow and sprang to his feet. The woodsman was right in front of him, but where was the corkscrew woman?

Something flashed in the corner of his eye. Instinctively, Arthur jumped away, crashing into another pyramid. Coal cascaded around him as the vicious corkscrew drilled the air where he had been an instant before.

Arthur pushed through the coal and sprinted away. But the woodsman was moving impossibly fast on his right and once again he’d lost sight of the corkscrew woman. Arthur couldn’t believe the puppet monsters could move so fast. The woodsman’s legs stayed completely stiff and still, but he scuttled swifter than a rat across a kitchen floor. Too fast for Arthur to run away from him.

He jumped at another pyramid as the woodsman hacked at his legs. But once again the coal scattered everywhere and all it did was slow Arthur down. He turned and slashed back at the woodsman with the Key, but it didn’t do anything beside scrape across the puppet’s wooden skin.

Panic was overtaking Arthur’s brain. He ducked under the axe, almost fell as he feinted past the corkscrew woman, and ran again, this time for the biggest pyramid he could see. He had to do something to make it stay together, something to make the pieces of coal stick –

‘Coal! Stick together!’ screamed Arthur as he jumped, holding the Key out so it struck the coal before he did.

The coal did stick together. Arthur hit the pyramid and bounced off, right back into the path of the woodsman and the corkscrew woman. The axe fell as Arthur rolled aside, right into the path of the descending corkscrew.

Arthur just managed to get the Key in the way and shove the corkscrew aside. It bored into the stone floor with a shower of sparks, and the woman’s insane giggling became an angry shriek.

Arthur rolled again, got up on all fours, and speed-crawled up the now stable pyramid of coal like a lizard up a tree. When he was perched on top, he slowly stood up and looked down, his breath coming in sobs of relief.

The two puppets circled the pyramid. Not only could they not climb, they couldn’t look up either. Their necks were as stiff as their legs.

‘Well done, my lord!’ cried Pravuil, who was several pyramids away. He held a candle in his hand that shed far more light than any candle outside of a movie. Arthur noticed that the whole candle shone, and the flame didn’t move. ‘Now we just have to wait till they go back in.’

Arthur sighed and crouched back down, unable to trust his balance.

‘How long will that take?’

‘They will go in on the hour,’ said Pravuil. ‘Or faster, if they catch someone sooner.’

‘Are there many . . . um . . . people down here?’ asked Arthur.

Pravuil shrugged. ‘Perhaps a hundred Coal-Collators, and fifty Coal-Cutters. A few others who have ended up down here without any employment at all.’

‘We have to warn them,’ said Arthur. The woodsman and the woman had disappeared out of the circle of light from the Key. They were out there in the darkness now, creeping around. They could easily fall upon some unsuspecting Coal-Collator or Cutter who was intent on work. ‘We’ll have to shout. Sound should carry a long way down here.’

‘Oh, I shouldn’t worry,’ said Pravuil. ‘Even if they do run across someone, they’ll only gouge out their eyes. While not as robust as the Old One, most of us would grow eyes or a liver back in a month or two. And you forget the pain. They got me once, a long time ago. Of course, they were vultures then. Almost preferable to these clockwork horrors, though they were particularly nasty vultures –’

‘I think we should try at least,’ said Arthur. Judging from the speed with which Pravuil had jumped out of the way of the clockwork figures, he thought the other workers down here would be glad of a warning. ‘We can shout together. How about, ‘Look out! The clock things are loose!’ On the count of three. One . . . two . . . three!’

‘The tock lings are goose!’ shouted Pravuil, or something that sounded like it, and he was half a second behind Arthur’s shout. The boy frowned and tried again several times, but Pravuil never got it right, or didn’t want to. Still, Arthur thought, the noise at least might have warned somebody.

‘Do you have friends down here?’ he asked after they’d sat in silence for a few minutes. The cold was starting to bite into Arthur again, and he knew it was going to get worse.

‘Friends? I fear not,’ sighed Pravuil. ‘We’re forbidden to talk to one another, except upon business, and you never know who might be a spy or a visiting Inspector or such-like. That’s what I thought you were at first, my lord, though of course my superior intelligence soon penetrated your disguise.’

‘I thought Dusk told you who I was,’ said Arthur. Pravuil wasn’t getting any more likable.

‘Well, he did, but I already had more than an inkling as to what was what, what?’

‘Tell me about the Secondary Realms,’ said Arthur.

‘What are they exactly?’

‘Hmmm, very tricky, tough question,’ replied Pravuil. He took off his tattered hat and scratched his head. ‘There is the House, you see, which is here. Then there is Nothing, which is not here, but the House is built upon it. Then there are the Secondary Realms, which are out there, outside the House and not connected to Nothing. The Secondary Realms all started as a sort of Nothing that the Architect just threw out there, and this expanded into all kinds of things like stars and planets and so on, and then some of those planets kept developing and living things emerged and we in the House keep the records of them too, along with everything else, but that’s all. That’s the Original Law. No interference, none permissible! Watch and record only! Well, first of all the Old One went out there and interfered quite a lot, but he was chained up. Serves him right, I say. Then the Trustees interfered just a little bit when the Architect first went away and then a little bit more and I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve been up to all sorts of things, only I’ve been trapped down here, so I wouldn’t know, but I say if a mortal shows up with the Lesser Key of the Lower House then there must be a lot going on that shouldn’t.’

Pravuil stopped to draw breath. As he was about to start again, a scream sounded in the distance. A scream that made Arthur shiver and feel sick, for in the scream were two barely identifiable words.

‘My eyes!’

‘Oh, good,’ said Pravuil happily. ‘We can get down now. My camp isn’t too far away.’

Arthur climbed down reluctantly, though now that he knew how to make the coal stick, he could easily climb another pyramid if necessary. And he knew that whoever had lost eyes would grow them back, but he still couldn’t forget that terrible scream. Or the fact that Pravuil couldn’t care less what happened to anybody else. He considered that as he followed the Coal-Collator. Arthur thought he was pretty good at figuring out what people would do and what they were really like. Pravuil had refused to do something he wasn’t supposed to and had suffered for it. But then he appeared to have his own interests very much at heart. A strange contrast. Though perhaps it could be explained by the fact that Pravuil wasn’t really a person. Or he was a person, but he wasn’t really human. He was a Denizen. No one in the House was human, except maybe the children like Suzy who had once been mortals. But even they were changed. Arthur wasn’t sure exactly what the others were, let alone what the Old One was, or the Architect. He really didn’t want to dwell on it, particularly since his thoughts were heading in a direction that he was uncomfortable with. None of his family went to Church and he knew very little about any religion. Now he kind of wished he did and was also kind of glad that he didn’t.

Pravuil’s camp, when they finally got to it after traversing more freezing coal-strewn wasteland, consisted of a small wooden chest, a threadbare armchair, and a weird-looking metal urn about three feet high that had lots of taps, spigots, and little drawers. It glowed with a dull heat and Arthur was glad to put his hands near it.

Pravuil explained that the urn was called a samovar and that it was his most precious possession, bequeathed to him by a Coal-Collator who had been reprieved and returned upstairs. According to Pravuil, the samovar, if correctly supplied with raw ingredients, could provide hot tea, mulled wine, coffee, or cocoa.

This turned out to be almost true. Pravuil filled one of the drawers rather hesitantly with some of the tea Dusk had given him. But after some spouting of steam and considerable rattling, he was disconcerted to find that every tap and spigot dispensed a rather nasty blend of cocoa and wine. After several attempts to fix this, Pravuil finally ended up with something hot, pale, and amber that tasted faintly of apples. He served Arthur some of this in a pewter flagon that was a foot high and had a broken lid.

Arthur drank it gratefully. He was very cold, and whatever the fluid was, it warmed him up.

‘Why don’t you conjure up tea from Nothing?’ he asked after a few mouthfuls had revived him. ‘Like the Old One?’

‘If only I could,’ sighed Pravuil with an angry glare at the samovar. ‘But that is a great magic, to work with Nothing. The Old One is an adept, of course, though limited by his chains. Apart from him, there would be few in the House who can work with Nothing, particularly without assistance from some object of power, like your Key.’

‘I see,’ said Arthur. He wondered if he could use the Key himself to conjure something out of Nothing. But common sense told him it would be best not to try without some expert help. What if he called up a whole bunch of Nithlings like the ones who’d come up out of the cobbles in the Atrium?

Thinking of expert help reminded Arthur that he needed to talk to the Old One as soon as possible. He wondered if enough time had passed for the Old One’s eyes to grow back, and that led immediately to wondering how much time might have passed back home. Though the Will had said time between the House and the Secondary Realms was flexible, Arthur worried that he had been away too long. If he’d been missing for a day, then his parents would be terribly worried. Unless they had the Sleepy Plague already, in which case every minute was too long to delay to get back with a cure . . .

‘What time is it?’ asked Arthur. ‘Is it safe to approach the Old One?’

‘Mmmm, hard to say what time it is for the Old One,’ replied Pravuil. ‘Unless we look at his clock. Shall we go and see?’

Eighteen

PRAVUIL HUNG BACK as they approached the clock and then stopped altogether.

‘I’ll wait here if you don’t mind, my lord,’ he said. He kept his head bowed and he avoided Arthur’s gaze. ‘The Old One can be a little bit tetchy. Though of course he won’t be to you, Master.’

Arthur looked at him suspiciously. Pravuil hadn’t been afraid to go quite a bit closer before. What was he up to?

‘What does ‘a little bit tetchy’ mean?’ he asked. ‘What will he do?’

‘That’s really quite difficult to say . . .’