Wormwood Gate (6 page)

‘Rent?' said Aisling. ‘We haven't even been here a whole night! I hardly think you can charge us rent for that.'

‘When you have a house with a lock on the door, you can charge me rent when I come and visit,' said the face, ‘but this is my house, and it runs by my rules.'

‘Charming,' muttered Aisling. She looked at Julie and shrugged, mouthing,
Any ideas?

‘What kind of rent do you want us to pay?' said Julie. ‘We have to get out of here quickly.'

The face eyed them both. ‘Would yous be on the run from the guards, by any chance?'

Julie glanced at Aisling, and Aisling nodded. ‘You could say that,' she said. ‘We're not from here, and we don't really understand what's going on, but we don't want to be locked away.'

The face grinned, which was a most uncanny sight: all of the wrinkles rearranged themselves in a different pattern, and the eyes grew bright and almost mischievous. ‘Foreigners!' it said, chuckling. ‘Doesn't that beat the band? Well, then, in that case you can pay your rent now: swear an oath to me that you'll leave the City with a better ruler than it had when you came here.'

Aisling and Julie exchanged dubious looks. ‘I'm not sure that's the kind of thing we can
promise
to do,' Aisling began. ‘I mean, with the best will in the world, humanitarian interventions have a way of backfiring.'

‘Yeah,' said Julie, ‘and it's not like we know who'd be the best ruler for this place. We're not even from here.'

‘There's things a foreigner can do in the City that none of us that are from here can do. And yous don't need to promise to give the City the best ruler it can have. Only to leave it with a better one than it has now.'

‘What do you think?' Julie murmured.

Aisling glanced around, avoiding looking straight down. ‘I don't think we have a choice, frankly. And this isn't a promise to actually do anything, so I think we'll be all right.'

‘Don't have a choice? It's a floating head. What can it do to us?'

‘It's a
disembodied head
that is
floating in mid-air
. What
can't
it do?'

‘Good point.' Julie turned back to the head. ‘So, we have to promise to –'

‘Leave the City of the Three Castles with a better ruler than it had when yous came.'

‘Fair enough,' said Julie, raising her right hand as if she were in court. ‘I swear that I will leave the City of the Three Castles with a better ruler than it had when I arrived.' She nudged Aisling to do the same, and Aisling repeated the words. As she said them, she felt a strange tightness settle down over her head, and then over the rest of her body. It vanished as suddenly as it had come, but she had an uneasy feeling that she had done more than say some words and raise her hand.

‘That's that sorted,' said the face. ‘Good night, so. And good luck.' The window closed, somehow, and the curtains closed behind it, leaving the two of them alone on the windowsill.

‘Well,' said Aisling, ‘that was strange.'

‘Oh,' said Julie, ‘“head of the house”. I get it now.'

Aisling laughed. ‘Me too! God, that's awful. Is this place run on puns or something?'

Julie grimaced. ‘I hope not. Like something out of a Piers Anthony novel.'

‘You've read Piers Anthony?'

‘Yes. Why, have you?'

‘Well … no. I'm just surprised that you have.'

‘You don't actually know me that well,' said Julie, a note of bitterness in her voice that gave Aisling a strange pang. ‘Anyway,' she said briskly, ‘let's get going.'

The rest of their climb was conducted in a silence punctuated only by grunts and pants and the occasional muttered swearword. When they got to the roof, Julie lay back against the sloping slate tiles and stared up at the sky. Aisling sat down beside her. From here, she could see the stars, and they looked different; she tried to pick out constellations, but she couldn't see them – not even Orion, which was always the easiest to see when it was in season. The stars seemed to have been sprinkled randomly on the sky, like hundreds-and-thousands on a cake. They were thickly and evenly spread – much more so than in the night sky she was used to – but they didn't seem to form any patterns. Nothing to navigate by, even for a migrating bird.

A discouraging thought occurred to her.

‘It's just struck me,' she said, panting, ‘if it turns out that the queen's guards
can
fly, this whole exercise will have been a wasted effort.'

Julie slapped Aisling's arm half-heartedly. ‘Don't be so negative! We'll never get back with that kind of attitude.'

‘I'm just pointing out possibilities. Give me my boots back.'

Julie handed her the boots, and Aisling set to untangling the laces.

‘Were you a Girl Guide or something, Julie? This knot is ridiculous.'

‘My dad sails,' said Julie. ‘He taught me how to tie knots when I was a kid. Proper knots that won't come undone with a tug.'

‘I wish this one
would
come undone with a tug. Or that I'd brought that candle up with me.'

‘Don't be stupid. How could you climb with a candlestick in your hand?'

‘How can I untie this knot when I can barely see the laces? Wait – hold on a second – aha! Victory is mine!'

The knot came undone and the boots fell to the roof with a thump.

‘Those things are so complicated,' said Julie as Aisling was putting them back on. ‘I don't know why you bother with them.'

‘And I suppose your hair just looks like that when you get out of bed in the morning, and your eyelids are naturally purple?'

‘Point.' Julie rolled over on her side, which looked uncomfortable. ‘But why go to so much effort to look weird? Do you like people staring at you?'

‘Depending on who I'm hanging out with, I can be the most normal person in the room.'

‘I doubt that.'

‘I know a guy who had his tongue split.'

Julie sat bolt upright. ‘Seriously?' She looked like she was about to vomit.

Aisling laughed. ‘No, but I know somebody who knows a guy who had his tongue split. I promise you, I may be the weirdest person you know, but I am not the weirdest person I know. Not by a long shot.'

‘I was right, then.'

‘About what?'

‘You
do
dress like that to fit in with your spookykid mates.'

Aisling could feel her cheeks warming up. ‘Maybe,' she muttered. ‘I mean, that's not all there is to it, but yeah, that's part of it.'

There was a silence, and Aisling was grateful for the buckles and Velcro on her boots that gave her something to do with her hands, an excuse for not talking.

‘I'm not sure about these leggings,' said Julie, the words coming out in a rush. ‘I mean, like you said, they were Tina's idea. I'm not really … they're not really … I'm not sure about them.'

‘Nah, they look good on you,' said Aisling.
You look good in them
, she thought,
but you look good in everything
.

There was a high, eerie cry from overhead. They both looked up to see a flock of seagulls swooping and turning in the sky.

‘I don't want to stay in one place for too long,' said Julie. ‘You might be right about the queen's guards. Maybe they
can
fly. Anyway, these slates aren't very comfortable.'

Aisling sighed, but pulled herself all the way upright. ‘All go around here, isn't it? Come on, let's go this way.' She scrambled up the slope of the roof and down to the valley between the roof's two peaks, Julie following. ‘This way,' she said, ‘we won't be visible from the street. At least, I don't think we will.'

The valley was too narrow to walk in, and the only way to make progress at all was to have one foot on the right-hand slope and one on the left-hand slope, which was tricky in thick-soled boots.

Even Julie, in her ballet flats, was having trouble with it. ‘This is awkward,' she muttered.

‘Yeah, a bit,' said Aisling, ‘but I'd rather go this way than try walking along the peaks, wouldn't you? Or the outside slopes. You could fall all the way down to the street.'

Julie shuddered. ‘Oh, don't!' She stopped walking.

‘What is it?' said Aisling.

‘They called us “mortals”. What do you think that means?'

Aisling shrugged. ‘By a process of elimination, if we're mortals and they're not, they must be immortals of some kind, I suppose. Probably not like in
Highlander
, but –'

‘But not dying. Or coming back after they die. They said that the queen … when one queen dies, another one takes her place, and then – did you follow that?'

‘They go round in a circle. The Queen-that-was, the Queen-that-is, the Queen-that-will-be. Taking turns to be alive, by the sound of it.'

‘And they said about your woman, Molly Red, that she'd died before. So it sounds like the people here do die, and when they do, they come back.'

Aisling considered this. ‘Instant reincarnation. Interesting. That would explain what they said about Molly Red having different forms. Maybe each time you die here, you come back in a different form.'

‘Well, maybe, but does that apply to us?'

Aisling looked at her, startled. ‘No,' she said slowly, ‘probably not. Though, really, who knows? But … no, I wouldn't think so.'

‘No, me neither.' Julie gave her a nudge, and they started walking again. ‘So we should be careful,' she said after a while, ‘because … because this isn't a dream.'

‘No,' said Aisling. ‘No, it's not.'

It was a weighty thought, and she was so busy digesting it that she had to stop one step before the end of the roof, so abruptly that Julie bumped into her and clutched at her arms to keep from falling.

‘Watch it! What're you stopping for?'

‘I ran out of roof,' said Aisling. ‘You did say we should be careful.'

‘Oh. That's, um …'

Aisling sighed. ‘Yeah.' She squatted down, squashed uncomfortably between the two slopes of the roof. ‘I have to admit that, um … that I didn't completely think this through,' she said in a rush. ‘I mean, I still think it was a good idea to get away from those three guys, and to go on the roof rather than the ground, but as to what would happen when we were up here … I sort of hoped it would be possible to improvise.'

‘Improvise what? A helicopter?'

Aisling glared at her. ‘If you have any ideas on how to improve our situation, I'm open to suggestions.'

‘Is there a fire escape?'

‘Where do you think we are, New York? No, there isn't a fire escape.'

‘A drainpipe, then. Or a window ledge? We climbed up. There must be a way to climb down.'

‘Stand back a bit and I'll look.'

Julie scuttled back crabwise, and Aisling crouched down and shifted her body back so that she could lie face-down in the valley and peer over the side of the roof. The wall was a plain gable-end, with no windows, no creeper, no drainpipes within reach, not even a bit of uneven brickwork to grab onto. She pushed herself back up into a sitting position and shook her head.

‘Nothing?' said Julie.

‘Nothing.'

Julie looked despondent, and then she started laughing.

‘What?' said Aisling.

‘I just realised … even though I'm trapped on the roof of a building with no phone service and no way of getting down, this is actually the most fun I've had in months.'

Aisling grinned, warmth rising in her cheeks and her belly. ‘Yeah,' she said, ‘me too,' and then, because that felt like giving away too much, she stood up and spread her arms. ‘Look at the view!'

From their vantage point on the roof, Aisling could see a ribbon of river snaking through the mostly-dark city, the darkness punctuated by many small white lights and three big red ones – the fires: the three burning castles. The city grew misty beyond the areas illuminated by the fires; there was a vague suggestion of mountains in one direction, something that might have been a bay in another, a wide strip that was probably a road stretching out towards a third.

Julie stood up beside her and looked. ‘Yeah,' she said. ‘It's amazing. Makes me wish my camera was working.'

‘Yours isn't working either?'

‘Nope. What do you think that's about?'

‘I don't know,' said Aisling, frowning. She took out her phone and fiddled with it a little, then put it back in her pocket. ‘I mean, I have a theory.'

‘Well, let's hear it, then.'

‘Well … Well, it's totally speculative and not exactly grounded in anything other than the observations I've been able to make since we arrived here, and it might be complete nonsense and disproved by the next thing we see, and in any case I'm not completely –'

‘Aisling!'

‘Right. Yes. Em. Well, you know what I said earlier, about this being a hallucination? What if it sort of is, only –'

There was a shriek and a cry from overhead. She broke off. There was another cry, then another, then a chorus of shrieks all at once, and a flock of seagulls descended to swoop around them in a circle. Julie ducked down into a crouch, and Aisling followed a second later, sweeping her arm around Julie to cover her with her coat and peering up at the birds. There were dozens of them, squealing and lamenting like lost souls, wheeling around and around so fast that the wind from their wings made her eyes water.

‘This isn't normal!' Aisling said, shouting to be heard over the gulls' cries. ‘Seagulls don't act like this!'

‘I don't think they are seagulls,' Julie shouted back. ‘I think they're –'

Whatever she thought they were, Aisling never heard it, because the gulls chose that moment to swoop in and grab hold of her by the epaulettes and belt of her coat. Aisling cried out and let go of Julie, but Julie grabbed Aisling's lapels and clung on for all she was worth.