Garth Nix - Mister Monday

Finally he managed it, and teetered back on the right side of the line.

“Awfully sorry, terrible habit!” he squeaked as he thrust his snuff box securely away. “I’m an Inspector, remember. Here’s the warrant! Look at the seal!”

The Sentinels subsided into their usual pacing. The Twelve O’Clock Sentinel’s arms went back to its sides, the blades no longer threatening.

The Inspector took out a huge patched handkerchief from his sleeve and mopped his face. But as he wiped the sweat away, he thought he saw something move across the surface of the clock face. Something small and thin and dark. When he blinked and removed his handkerchief, he couldn’t see anything.

“I don’t suppose there is anything to report?” he asked nervously. He hadn’t been an Inspector long. A decade short of four centuries, and he was only an Inspector of the Fourth Order. He’d been a Third Back Hall Porter for most of his career, almost since the Beginning of Time. Before that—

“Nothing to report,” said the Twelve O’Clock Sentinel, using up the rest of its standard vocabulary.

The Inspector politely tipped his hat to the Sentinel, but he was concerned. He could feel something here. Something not quite right. But the penalty for a false alarm was too horrible to contemplate. He might be demoted back to being a Hall Porter or, even worse, be made corporeal – stripped of his powers and memory and sent somewhere in the Secondary Realms as a living, breathing baby.

Of course, the penalty for missing something important was even worse. He might be made corporeal for that, but it would not be as anything even vaguely human, or on a world where there was intelligent life. And even that was not the worst that could happen. There were far more terrible fates, but he refused to contemplate them.

The Inspector looked across at the cage, the glass box and the crystal. Then he got a pair of opera glasses out of an inner pocket and looked through those. He could still see nothing out of order. Surely, he told himself, the Sentinels would know if something had gone amiss?

He stepped back outside the clock face and cleared his throat.

“All in order, well done, you Sentinels,” he said. “The watchwords for the next Inspector will be ‘Thistle, palm, oak and yew, I’m an Inspector, honest and true.’ Got that? – excellent – well, I’ll be off.”

The Twelve O’Clock Sentinel saluted. The Inspector doffed his hat once more, swivelled on one heel and set down his transfer plate, chanting the words that would take him to the House. According to regulations, he was supposed to go via the Office of Unusual Activities on the forty-fifteenth floor and report, but he was unsettled and wanted to get straight back to the twenty-tenth floor, his own comfortable study, and a nice cup of tea.

“From dead star’s gloom to bright lamp’s light, back to my rooms and away from night!”

Before he could step on the plate, something small, skinny and very black shot across the golden line, between the legs of the Twelve O’Clock Sentinel, across the Inspector’s left Immaterial Boot and on to the plate. The blue and green fruit glazed on the plate flashed and the plate, black streak and all, vanished in a puff of rather rubbery and nasty-smelling smoke.

“Alarm! Alarm!” cried the Sentinels, leaving the clock face to swarm around the vanished plate, their blades snickering in all directions as the sound of twelve impossibly loud alarm clocks rang and rang from somewhere inside their metal bodies. The Inspector shrank down before the Sentinels and started to chew on the corner of his handkerchief and sob. He knew what that black streak was. He had recognised it in a flash of terror as it sped past.

It was a line of handwritten text. The text from the fragment that was supposedly still fused in crystal, locked in the unbreakable box, inside the silver and malachite cage, glued to the surface of a dead sun and guarded by metal Sentinels.

Only now none of those things was true.

One of the fragments of the Will had escaped – and it was all his fault.

Even worse, it had touched him, striking his flesh straight through the Immaterial Boot. So he knew what it said, and he was not allowed to know. Even more shockingly, the Will had recalled him to his real duty. For the first time in millennia he was conscious of just how badly things had gone wrong.

“Into the trust of my good Monday, I place the administration of the Lower House,” the Inspector whispered. “Until such a time as the Heir or the Heir’s representatives call upon Monday to relinquish any such offices, properties, rights and appurtenances as Monday holds in trust.”

The Sentinels did not understand him, or perhaps they could not even hear him over the clamouring of their internal alarms. They had spread out, uselessly searching the surface of the dead star, beams of intense light streaming from their eyes into the darkness. The star was not large – no more than a thousand yards in diameter – but the fragment was long gone. The Inspector knew it would already have left his rooms and got into the House proper.

“I have to get back,” the Inspector said to himself. “The Will will need help. Transfer plate’s gone, so it will have to be the long way.”

He reached into his coat and pulled out a grimy and bedraggled pair of wings that were almost as tall as he was. The Inspector hadn’t used them for a very long time and was surprised at the state they were in. The feathers were all yellow and askew and the pinions didn’t look at all reliable. He clipped them into place on his back and took a few tentative flaps to make sure they still worked.

Distracted by his wings, the Inspector didn’t notice a sudden flash of light upon the surface of the clock, or the two figures who appeared with that flash. They wore human shapes too, as was the fashion in the House. But these two were taller, thinner and more handsome. They had on neat black frock coats over crisp white shirts with high-pointed collars and very neat neckties of sombre red, a shade lighter than their dark silk waistcoats. Their top hats were sleekly black, and they carried ornate ebony sticks topped with silver knobs.

“Where do you think you’re going, Inspector?” asked the taller of the two new arrivals.

The Inspector turned in shock, and his wings drooped still further.

“To report, sir!” he said weakly. “As you can see. To… to my immediate superiors… and to… to Monday’s Dawn, or even Mister Monday, if he wants…”

“Mister Monday will know soon enough,” said the tall gentleman. “You know who we are?”

The Inspector shook his head. They were very high up in the Firm, that was obvious from their clothes and the power he could sense. But he didn’t know them, either by name or by rank.

“Are you from the sixty-hundredth floor? Mister Monday’s executive office?”

The taller gentleman smiled and drew a paper from his waistcoat pocket. It unfolded itself as he held it up, and the seal upon it shone so brightly that the Inspector had to shield his face with his arm and duck his head.

“As you see, we serve a higher Master than Monday,” said the gentleman. “You will come with us.”

The Inspector gulped and shambled forward. One of the gentlemen swiftly pulled on a pair of snowy white gloves and snapped off the Inspector’s wings. They shrank till they were no larger than a dove’s wings and he put them in a buff envelope that came from nowhere. He sealed this shut with a sizzling press of his thumb. Then he handed the envelope to the Inspector. The word EVIDENCE appeared on it as the Inspector clutched it to his chest and cast nervous glances at his escorts.

Working together, the two gentlemen drew a doorway in the air with their sticks. When they’d finished, the space shimmered for a moment and then solidified into an elevator doorway, with a sliding metal grille and a bronze call button. One of the gentlemen pressed the button and an elevator car suddenly appeared out of nowhere behind the grille.