John Wright - Orphans of Chaos

I rose to my feet and stumbled away, shaking, in the moonlight. Quentin’s walking stick was still in my hand. As I came near the Manor House where our rooms were, I used it more and more to support my steps.

It was slow and painful walking through the snow, and it grew slower and more painful as I went.

I passed by the window of the boys’ dorm as I came around the corner to the Manor House. There was a rope hanging from an upper cornice, knotted with care.

I looked at that rope with infinite hatred. Hatred, because I ached in every limb, and had pains in my knees like someone suffering the bends. And because I knew Victor and Colin had been drugged, as had been Vanity. Even though one of us had been caught, we were still to hide any evidence of what we had done or how we had done it. It was one of Victor’s rules.

So I climbed the rope. Usually, a rope climb up thirty feet would have taken me thirty seconds. This time, it took me thirty minutes, or more. Maybe an hour. It was cold, it was dark, I was in pain, and it was so very late.

I finally got to the window. It was dark inside. And locked. I couldn’t open it.

It was only then that I realized that I could have picked up the sphere, the hypersphere in the locked cabinet, just before I jumped. I could have taken it with me. Had I taken it, I would have it now. I would be able to cast its hyperlight into the fourth dimension, see the objects around me as the flat things they really were, reach through walls, open locks, walk through windows…

I tapped on the window as loudly as I dared, and called softly to the boys to let me in. Now I was sure they had been drugged. Colin would not have passed up the chance to have me come into his bedroom at night, cold and in need of comfort.

Well, there was nothing else to do. I pulled that stupid walking stick out of my belt (it had been clattering and banging during my whole trip up the rope) and tucked it into the snow that had accumulated on the wide stone surface of the windowsill. As I did so, my fingers touched something.

I brushed the snow aside and found a tiny cup, made out of pink wax, or maybe hardened bubble gum. The cup was crudely made, with fingerprints still visible in the waxy surface. In the bowl of the cup there was a blue fluid, which had frozen into a little pebble of ice.

I was frankly too weary to wonder what it was.

Five or ten minutes of work with my cold and unresponsive fingers, and I pulled up the rope and slung it over the cornice, which was now my pulley. In the other end I made a sling (tied off with a proper bowline) to set my hips in. Now I could simply lower myself by letting out rope and, when I reached the bottom, one yank would bring the rest of the slack down with me.

That worked as planned. It was the only thing so far which had gone right that evening.

With the rope on my shoulder, I went over to our window. I called softly, and threw pebbles against the window. Nothing. Vanity did not answer.

So I walked (even more slowly, now that I no longer had the cane to lean on) over to the gardens behind the Manor House, and hid the coil in one of our agreed-upon spots.

As I walked, I thought: Why? Why did Quentin, who could levitate, need a rope to get out of his bedroom window?

And then I thought, in anger and disgust, why had I gone to such trouble to hide the rope, when I was about to be caught myself? I had no other way into the Manor House, unless I broke a window, except by the main door. Even if no one was there, and I made it upstairs unseen, whatever spell or alarm system Vanity had sensed Boggin lay down on the door to my room would reveal me once I opened the door to my room.

Well, there was nothing else to do. I was too cold to think of anything else. I marched quite boldly and bravely up to the main doors.

And, as I passed a copse of bushes, I saw a group of footprints in the snow. They were prints from a woman’s shoe, and from the kind of woman who would wear high heels in the snow. Miss Daw. She had been posted here, watching the front doors.

Well, that reminded me of the prints I was leaving all over the place. Maybe they would melt when the sun came up, maybe not. I tore a branch from the bush, and dragged it behind me as I came to the front door.

I stood on the steps with the branch in my hand, wondering where to hide the thing. Then I laughed and tucked it into the bushes to one side of the door, the same place Vanity and I had been hiding when Mr. Glum’s dog had passed us by.

The front door was unlocked. I stepped into the entrance hall.

And my eyes fell upon, yes, indeed, the old grandfather clock.

Because Vanity, earlier this evening (how long ago it seemed!) had not been able to work the secret latch in our room to open the door to the hidden passage, I was not sanguine about my chances. I was assuming she was actually doing something—manipulating reality, doing magic, something—to create the tunnels out of thin air.

But when I went over to the clock, and opened the glass door, I could see that the back panel of the clock was not true to the frame. There was a little crack around the edges. Vanity and I had never shut the panel closed behind us when we went back this way.

This time, I waited to time the swings of the pendulum, pushed the panel open with my hand, waited for the pendulum to swing back, stepped quickly in, waited a third time, darted a hand out past the hissing pendulum, yanked the outer glass door partway shut, waited, reached, pulled the door shut, waited, reached, secured the door, and then backed into the stairs, sliding the panel almost all the way shut. I wanted to leave the same crack I had found, in case I needed to use these passages some time again when Vanity was not around.

I was glad space was warped here, for now I had only to climb seven steps, duck my head, and crawl. Now I was on the same level as the third floor. At least, I did not have to climb two and three flights of stairs.

I crawled. I waved my hand in the air in front of me whenever it began to seem really heavy, for it had been heavy when I was doing quadradimensional effects, and I was trying to produce the red or blue sparks I had seen, in order to create a light to illuminate the black space I crawled through. Once or twice I thought I saw lights floating, but these were the same lights anyone will see who is tired, and in pain, in pitch darkness, with her eyes blurred with strain.

Pain has a funny way of focusing the mind. Only what hurts matters. Whatever else you used to think about before is as remote and unimportant as who won some argument you had as a child. You think about moving your right hand, and then you think about moving your left. You don’t think about moving your right knee until the time comes to do it; if you worried prematurely about such things, the burden and the despair would be too much, and you would slump down in the dust, and cry. You don’t think about how nice it would be just to lie down in this coffin of a corridor, or else you won’t get up. You don’t think about how to find the secret door to your room, which, unlike last time, is closed, and giving off no light, and you don’t think about the fact that you don’t know where the switch or latch is to open it from this side.

And you do not think about the fact that you took a wrong turn in the dark somewhere. That would make you cry, too.

You don’t want to cry because you are the strong one in the group, really, the mature one. Practically an adult. Heroines in books don’t cry.

But, despite the pain, you do keep one hand on the wall between crawls, to feel for the hinges where the door is. Those big, odd W-shaped hinges can’t be hidden.

Also, it is important to remember not to crawl through spiderwebs. You were only here yesterday, so no spider (which should not come out in winter anyway) would have had time to construct a new one. If you feel a spiderweb you are on the wrong path.