Garth Nix - Lord Sunday

Arthur was afraid there were other changes too, changes inside him that removed him even further from humanity, things that went beyond his new size, strength and durability. But this was a distant, nagging fear that was currently overwhelmed by his current panic.

I have to stop, he thought. I have to get off the Stair!

He rolled on to his back, gasping as the front edge of each step smacked him in the backbone. He put the Sixth Key in his mouth, so he would have a hand free. Then he raised the mirror of the Fifth Key, held it in front of his face and tried to focus on it as he continued his juddering descent.

The mirror had been blocked by Saturday’s sorcerers inside the Upper House and it might not work inside the Stair either, but Arthur had to take any chance he could to get out. First, though, he had to find a way to hold the mirror steady and he had to keep the picture of Sir Thursday’s bedroom in his head. This was very hard to do. He tried to visualise it, but he kept thinking of places he didn’t want to go, like the plague-ridden London of Suzy Turquoise Blue’s time, or the island in the middle of a sun where he’d found Part Two of the Will. Even as a Denizen, Arthur knew he couldn’t survive if he came out of the Stair into the heart of a star.

He also wouldn’t survive an emergence into Nothing. Which meant he also had to stop thinking about Doorstop Hill or any parts of the House that he knew had already been consumed by Nothing. So much of it was gone already, as the Void spread into the House, destroying everything in its path. Arthur shivered inside as he remembered the great wave of Nothing that he had fled a moment before it destroyed Monday’s Dayroom—

No! Arthur yelled to himself. Think of somewhere safe. Somewhere easy. Home. But even home might not be safe – I’ve got to just stop and think —

But he couldn’t steady the mirror, or get his mind to focus on somewhere safe. Instead he rolled over again and grabbed at the next step with his free hand, his fingernails raking across the marble, down one…two…three steps. His arm almost came out of its shoulder socket as his slide was arrested, and he nearly dropped the Sixth Key when he couldn’t help but groan at this new and sudden pain.

But he stopped.

Arthur sighed and dropped the Sixth Key from his mouth to his bloodied hand. He slowly stood and set his foot on the next step. It was time to start climbing back up, while thinking hard about where to come out.

He was just about to start doing this when the Stair disappeared in a flash of bright white light. Arthur’s foot met no resistance. He fell forward into a hole full of evil-smelling mud. The Stair, as it always tried to do, had thrown him out on to some random Landing, which could be anywhere in the Secondary Realms, and could also be at any time in the past.

Arthur almost went face-first into the mud, but he recovered his balance in just enough time to stagger forward and crash into a sandbagged earth wall instead. He bounced off that, went back into the hole and windmilled his arms desperately for a second, before ending up planted backside-first in about a foot of yellow, stinking mud.

He sat there long enough to make a face, then slowly got back to his feet, the mud making a popping sound as he rose. There were other stranger noises too, distant high-pitched electronic squeals that hurt his ears.

Arthur looked around. For a moment he thought he’d come out in a World War One trench, back in the history of his own Earth. But that thought only lasted for a moment. He was in a trench all right, but the mud was a lurid, unearthly yellow and stank of sulphur. The sandbags, now that he looked at them properly, were pale blue.

He tapped one, and his knuckles sank in a little bit and then bounced back.

Foam, thought Arthur. The sandbags are filled with something like packing foam.

The zinging noises were getting closer. Arthur didn’t know what was making them, and he had no intention of hanging around to find out. The only question was whether the Fifth Key would work if the Improbable Stair had dumped him off somewhere back in time, as well as into the Secondary Realms. If he couldn’t use the mirror, he’d have to use the Stair, and that meant getting back on to it as quickly as possible. Theoretically, as he had two Keys, he could enter the Improbable Stair pretty much anywhere, but he knew in practice it was bound to be more difficult, and there was a very good chance that his next trip on the Stair would take him somewhere worse than this.

Quickly, he put the quill pen inside his silver bag, along with his yellow elephant and the medallion he’d been given by the Mariner. Then he replaced the bag safely inside the pouch of his utility belt. He kept the Sorcerous Supernumerary’s large coat on, over the top of his coveralls. Even though the yellow mud looked like it was boiling, it felt cold – and if Arthur felt it, that meant it was very cold indeed.

This was confirmed by his breath, which wasn’t just fogging out, it was freezing in the air. In only a few minutes, he developed a long, thin beard of ice crystals that sparkled from his chin down to his chest. The sunlight, though very bright, was more red than yellow, and he could feel no noticeable heat from it on his face or hands.

Wherever he was, it wasn’t Earth, and Arthur suspected it wasn’t somewhere a normal human could survive for a second. He was thankful that he could, but it also sent a pang through him, another reminder of what he had become and what he no longer was.

He raised the mirror and was about to visualise Sir Thursday’s chamber when he glimpsed a reflection from behind him. He spun round just as something jumped down from above the trench. It was a flash of movement and it took a moment for Arthur to process that at its heart was a seven-foot-tall armoured stick insect, holding a tube in its first lot of spiked forearms and pointing it at Arthur. Before he could react, he heard the squealing noise up close for the first time and felt a savage pain as golden blood suddenly boiled out of a hole that went straight through the bicep of his left arm.

Arthur turned the mirror and directed his will. The Fifth Key caught the red sunlight, gathered it up and concentrated it a millionfold before projecting it at Arthur’s enemy in a tightly focused beam.

The insect was cut cleanly in two. But the top half continued to scrabble towards Arthur, and the forearms tried to aim the tube again. Arthur, furious and in pain, directed his anger through the mirror. This time the Fifth Key conjured up a roaring column of fire that stretched from the ground up into the stratosphere and completely incinerated everything in the trench in front of Arthur for at least a hundred yards.

As the fiery column slowly sank back to the ground, Arthur spun around again, checking behind him. He listened for the squealing noises and, though he couldn’t hear them, he heard something else: a clicking noise, getting louder and closer. Arthur knew what it was – the sound the insect soldier’s limbs had made when it had moved, but magnified a thousand times.

He jumped up on the trench’s firing step and looked out on to the yellow mud no-man’s-land of this alien war. Thousands of stick-insect soldiers were marching towards him, all perfectly in step, all holding those squealing tubes.

I could kill them all from here, thought Arthur. He felt a feral grin begin to spread across his face, before he pushed it away. He had the power, it was true, but he knew he didn’t have the right. They weren’t even really enemies; they knew nothing of the struggles in the House. They might look like giant stick insects, but obviously they were sentient beings, as technologically advanced as humans, perhaps even more so.