The Wizard Of Dark Street Part 9

She hesitated, looking first at Deacon and then at Samuligan. They both nodded their encouragement. She turned the ball over.

A small window had been placed into the bottom of the ball, through which could be seen a cloud of liquidy mist. The words ASK AGAIN LATER appeared in the window.

"What?" Oona said, her voice ripe with irritation. She rolled the ball back over in her hands, reread the instructions, and then asked: "Is my uncle dead?"

Again she turned the ball over, and again the words ASK AGAIN LATER appeared in the misty window.

Oona shook the ball violently, nearly shouting: "Who attacked my uncle?" She peered into the window, and yet a third time the words appeared: ASK AGAIN LATER.

Oona raised a suspicious eyebrow at the ball before placing it back in the hidden compartment. "Apparently, Uncle Alexander hasn't worked the kinks out of it yet."

"Apparently so," Deacon agreed.

Oona peered toward the back of the compartment and saw what they had been looking for. The book was pushed all the way to the back, and Oona was nearly forced to stick her head inside the compartment in order to reach it. The heavy leather binding felt old and coa.r.s.e, and as she slid it forward, a slim stack of papers fell to the floor at her feet. Samuligan bent to retrieve them as Oona hefted the book from the shelf to the dragon-bone desk. The book seemed much heavier than it ought to have been, and she let it fall to the desktop with a heavy thud. The steady breathing of the desk faltered for a moment, as if there were a hitch in its breath, and then once again settled into its habitual pattern.

"Okay, let's see what's inside." She placed a finger on the corner of the front cover but found it much too heavy simply to flip open. It took both hands and nearly all of her strength to heave its cover back, and by the time she had finished this seemingly simple task, her brow was damp with sweat.

"It must be the magical binding that Samuligan had mentioned before," Oona said, catching her breath.

Deacon seemed quite excited by this news. "Yet even more proof that Natural Magicians have some active strain of faerie blood in them. But because you are human, the magical protection is weakened."

"Tell that to my hands," Oona said, flexing the soreness from her fingers. Yet it seemed that Deacon was right. She only hoped that the magical binding on the book was limited just to opening it, and did not extend to turning its pages; otherwise, this was going to take forever.

She flipped a page, and it turned as easily as any page in a normal book. Breathing a sigh of relief, Oona flipped to the back, where she hoped to find an index. Her luck held out. Listed in alphabetical order were row after row of all the topics to be found in the book. She ran her finger down the line of Bs. Binding Magic ... Birch Trees ... Birds ... Black Magic ... and there it was: Black Tower (see Goblin Tower), 413.

Deacon hopped to her shoulder as Oona found the page in a flurry of turns, and discovered ... not what she was expecting. On the entire page there was only one reference to the tower's entrance. One single line near the bottom of the page. It read: "To enter the tower, you must first find it."

This was followed by what appeared to be a poem.

Upon my head I have no face For your ease I come in a case And though I'm well and upon my way Upon my flight I'm here to stay I slow you down, and tire you out Yet getting you there is what I'm about.

Oona turned the page over to make sure she was not missing something. When she found nothing else, she turned back to page 413 and slammed her fist against the corner of the book.

"But this is just as helpful as that magic billiard ball," she said. "It tells us nothing!"

"It appears to be some sort of riddle," Deacon said.

"What it says, Deacon, is that in order to enter the tower you must first find it. But we know where the tower is. It's in the cemetery."

Deacon hopped from her shoulder to the desk so that he might get a better look at the book. "But perhaps the *it' that the text is referring to is the entrance. And the riddle-"

Oona snapped her fingers. "Yes, of course, Deacon. Answer the riddle and we will know where to look for the secret entrance!"

Oona grabbed a pen and paper, and quickly copied the riddle. "Samuligan!" she said excitedly. "Bring round the carriage, please. I want to get to the cemetery as quickly as possible."

But at first the faerie servant did not seem to have heard. He was reading one of the pieces of paper that had fallen on the floor.

"Samuligan, did you hear me?" Oona asked. "Please bring the carriage around front. And you really shouldn't be snooping about in Uncle Alexander's private letters."

Samuligan tipped his hat back on his head and gave her a calculated look, as if to say that she was hardly the person to be giving lectures on snooping around.

"You will want to read this," he said. "I believe you will find its contents quite enlightening."

The journey to the cemetery, which was located at the very south end of the street, took nearly forty-five minutes by carriage. Oona did not notice the time pa.s.s. It was early yet, the sun just having topped many of the buildings, and most of the street's varied inhabitants still slept. A few early risers and shady-looking characters wandered the mist-covered sidewalks, along with several sleepy-eyed police constables.

But Oona observed none of this, nor did she so much as glance out the carriage window as they rolled the six-mile stretch of empty street, with the exception of once, when the carriage b.u.mped over some missing cobblestones and she looked up to see the stone steps of the museum and the enormous carved stone top hat. She caught a glimpse of the girl-size dress in the window of Madame Iree's Boutique for Fine Ladies. The enchanted glinting cloth caught Oona's attention for the length of time it took the carriage to roll past, and then she was once again lost in thought.

It was solely the two sheets of paper in her hands that divided her attention. In her right hand she held the riddle that she had copied out of the Wizard's book. But it was the paper in her left hand that currently held her gaze: a doc.u.ment printed on crisp red paper and written in quite specific and legal terms. At the top of the doc.u.ment were the words CERTIFICATE OF DEBT, beneath which was a scramble of musical notes. Luckily for Oona, learning to read the musical language of magical law had been part of her training as an apprentice.

She sighed. "From what I can make out-and I am not a lawyer, so I am not certain-but it appears that Uncle Alexander borrowed some money. According to this doc.u.ment, he has been borrowing money for quite some time ... a period of two years. But not from a bank. It would seem he has been borrowing from a company called Dupington Moneylenders."

"Dupington?" said Deacon. "Never heard of them."

"Neither have I, Deacon. But this certificate of debt and the eviction notice we received this morning are both printed on the same thick red paper. It's my guess that if we look into it, Dupington and the Nightshade Corporation will be one and the same. That is why Red Martin has evicted us."

"But what does that mean?" Deacon asked from the seat opposite Oona. His voice shook against the rattle of the carriage.

"If my suspicions are correct, then it means that, more than likely, Red Martin had a dirty red hand in the attack on Uncle Alexander," Oona said. "That's what I think."

"But he was not in the room at the time of the attack," Deacon pointed out.

Oona nodded. "No doubt he put someone else up to it. It is too much of a coincidence that Red Martin should benefit so much from all of this. Clearly, he and one of the applicants are in cahoots. But which one?"

"Are you sure the doc.u.ment is authentic?" Deacon asked. "Do we know for sure that the two companies are the same, and that Red Martin has the right to take owners.h.i.+p of the house?"

Oona frowned at the certificate, glancing over the musical notations. "It appears so. But I do not know all that much about legal doc.u.ments. We will need to consult a lawyer."

"Ravensmith does not open until after nine o'clock," Deacon informed her.

Oona nodded. "Until then, we have a riddle to solve."

The carriage creaked to a halt, and a moment later Samuligan opened the door for her. Dressed in an auburn-colored dress, and with her long black hair worn down about her shoulders, Oona stepped to the sidewalk, leaving the Certificate of Debt behind in the carriage. She placed the paper with the riddle on it in her dress pocket. The arched stone gateway stood ominously before her, above which soared the mammoth Goblin Tower. The solid black structure rose up from the center of the cemetery to meet the sky-ending at a daunting, if not to say unnatural, height. She craned her neck all the way back to see the very top of the tower as it sc.r.a.ped against the bottom of a drifting cloud.

"It is over seven hundred feet tall," Deacon announced as he alighted upon her shoulder. Oona gulped audibly. Suddenly, the thought of going into that bleak, windowless structure-not to mention somehow getting to the top, where the prison was supposedly located-did not seem like such a good idea. Oona turned to Samuligan.

"You are certain that your magic cannot penetrate it?" she asked.

Samuligan looked at the tower with an expression that Oona could not at first read, and then she realized that the reason she could not read it was because it was an expression she had never before seen on the faerie servant's face. Samuligan looked afraid. The realization sent a s.h.i.+ver running from the bottom of Oona's feet to the top of her head.

"I a.s.sure you," Samuligan said. "Not my magic, nor any that I know of, can penetrate that tower. That riddle you have is likely the only key to getting in ... and should you manage to find the entrance, then I cannot say what you will find inside. It is called the Goblin Tower, after all. I was blindfolded when Oswald took me out of the tower so that I would not be able to see its secrets. I never saw the goblins, but I believe that they are no laughing matter."

Oona remembered the horrible little eyes and pointy ears of the beasts in the parlor tapestries. She nodded. But if there was even a chance that her uncle was in there, locked away and helpless, then she was determined to get him out. And if he wasn't in there ... well, then she would know which dagger had struck him, and she would hunt down whoever had murdered him and make him pay for it.

She took a deep breath and said: "Let's do it."

But the faerie servant did not move from his spot beside the carriage.

"Aren't you coming, Samuligan?" Oona asked.

"No faerie may approach the tower's walls," he said. "That is known. There is an invisible barrier around the perimeter. It was only in Oswald's presence that I was able to pa.s.s out of it. And besides, I have been inside of the black cell at the top of that tower before. I do not wish to see it again. No, I will await your return here." He climbed back atop the carriage and thumbed back his hat, looking down at her with his intelligent faerie eyes. "But don't forget that if you do manage to get to the top, your uncle may not be the same as you remember him. Oswald turned me into a lizard when he captured me with the dagger. There is no telling what form your uncle may have been transformed into. It will have been a form of his attacker's choosing."

Oona had forgotten all about that little detail. "How do we change him back if he has been transformed?" she asked. "Clearly, it can be done. You are no longer a lizard."

It was Deacon who answered. "According to the Encyclopedia Arcanna, there is a single phrase that may transform the victim back into their original form."

"And what is the phrase?" Oona asked.

"Unfortunately," Deacon replied, "the dagger communicates the phrase to the attacker the moment the dagger is thrown with the mind."

"You mean that only the attacker would know how to transform him back?" Oona rolled her eyes. "Oh, I do detest magic."

She walked through the arched stone gate into the cemetery. Crumbling gray headstones emerged from a sea of mist-covered hills like ragged, broken teeth. The cemetery was immense, seeming to go on forever, and Oona felt a sting of sadness as she set foot inside. It had been a long time since she had visited the so-called City of the Dead. Her parents' and her sister's graves were located on the far side of the tower, and she had not visited them since the day each of them had been placed in the ground. Certainly there was no time to do so today, and so she shoved the sadness aside the best she could and began to pick her way toward the base of the tower. The cemetery was vast, but getting lost on her way would have been nothing short of impossible. All she had to do was walk toward the seven-hundred-foot tombstone.

She circ.u.mvented several small mausoleums on her way, some of which had crumbled completely in on themselves. This was an old place, the kind of place only a ghost could call home. And of course, Oona knew that they did call it home, every night after sunset. It was a disquieting thought, and she quickened her steps.

At last she crested a low hill and got her first glimpse of the tower's huge foundation, which stood about forty feet in front of her. She'd never been so close. The ground seemed to bowl around it, as if the weight of the ma.s.sive structure were causing the very earth to sink in. It was there, on the crest of the hill, that Oona felt a strange kind of resistance. It felt like the air around the tower had suddenly grown thick. Her stride slowed, and for a moment she didn't think she was going to be able to walk any farther.

"Is there a problem?" Deacon asked from her shoulder.

"Don't you feel it?" Oona asked, her legs all at once beginning to ache from the force it took just to move one foot in front of the other. "There's something strange with the air."

Deacon fluttered into the air and flew in a wide circle around her head before returning to her shoulder. "I don't notice anything."

Oona considered this new puzzle before realizing that what she was coming up against was likely the magical barrier Samuligan had mentioned. The barrier was detecting her active faerie blood and attempting to keep her from pa.s.sing through, but because she was a human it could not block her out completely. At least that was what she thought, until she actually did come up against something that stopped her altogether.

It felt like there was an invisible brick wall in front of her. Oona put her shoulder into it and pushed, but to no avail. She gritted her teeth and once again shoved as hard as she could. This time something s.h.i.+fted. She slid forward ... and then she was actually inside the invisible wall. It was a strange and uncomfortable sensation, to say the least. A trapped feeling. It felt as if the barrier were closing in around her on all sides, and she was suddenly reminded of being locked inside the broom closet the day before-remembering how the door had stuck, and how she'd needed to turn around in the cramped s.p.a.ce and squeeze down on the k.n.o.b as hard as she could-but at least then the closet hadn't been getting smaller.

Here it felt very much like the barrier was trying to crush her. But the feeling only made Oona push harder, the tips of her shoes digging into the soft, gra.s.sy hill. She grunted, a low guttural sound from the back of her throat. The muscles in her legs began to burn, and her shoes started to slip beneath her where the gra.s.s had been gouged away. For one horrible moment it seemed as if she might be stuck there, unable to move forward or backward. Unable to move at all. The thought terrified her so much that she let out a sharp cry, heaving her body forward with one last wild burst of energy ... and then it was over. She was through. The air gave way, and she tumbled helter-skelter down the hill to the base of the tower.

"Umph." She collided with the smooth, gla.s.sy wall-its surface so deep and black that it seemed more like an emptiness where a tower should have been. But it was not emptiness at all. The walls were as solid as stone. Oona rubbed at her shoulder and pushed herself to her feet. About ten feet from the tower, a circle of stones sat in the low gra.s.s. It was slightly smaller than the size of a wagon wheel, and Deacon fluttered down beside it.

"Are you all right?" he asked.

She glanced down at herself. "I have a gra.s.s stain on my elbow, but I'm fine." She did a quick circle of the tower, looking for any sign of a door. It was a perfect square, each wall running approximately seventy feet across, and when she came back to where she had started, she was no wiser as to where the entrance might be. The only irregularity she could find at all was the circle of stones in the gra.s.s, which, so far as she could tell, appeared on only one side of the tower.

Finally, she removed the riddle from her pocket and read aloud: "Upon my head I have no face For your ease I come in a case And though I'm well and upon my way Upon my flight I'm here to stay I slow you down, and tire you out Yet getting you there is what I'm about."

She glanced around for any sign of what this might mean.

"*Upon my head I have no face,'" she said aloud. "Well, there certainly are a lot of headstones around here. And they don't have faces."

"But have you ever seen a headstone in a case?" Deacon asked.

She ignored him, running the riddle over in her mind. Upon my flight I'm here to stay, she considered. What can fly but stays in the same place? It doesn't make any sense.

Deacon, who seemed to be stuck on the second part of the riddle, said: "If it comes in a case, then it must be something small."

Oona didn't know if that was right, but she did not argue aloud. There were many sorts of cases. There were instrument cases and traveling cases, and both could certainly be well upon their way, but neither of those had a head. There were bookcases, but Oona didn't see any books lying around anywhere. There were legal cases that took place in courtrooms, and yet none of those things had anything to do with getting you to some place. And certainly none of them could fly.

"Many riddles contain a play on words," Deacon suggested. "For instance, the line *I slow you down, and tire you out' could be referring to going down to the bottom of the hill, where we'll find the way out of the tower. And of course, the way out would also be the way in."

Oona shook her head. There was an element of truth to what Deacon was saying-there could indeed be a play on words happening-but she thought Deacon's attempt had been too complicated. He was adding an element to the riddle that wasn't there. Good riddles were usually quite simple. All of the clues were there already, and you didn't need to add anything. She was simply missing it, and it was right in front of them, she could sense it.

"*I slow you down, and tire you out,'" she said, walking around the circle of stones. "*Yet getting you there is what I'm about.'"

Again it did not make any sense. Why would something that is meant to get you someplace slow you down and tire you out? It was simply counterproductive. Unless ... unless ...

Oona felt a kind of buzzing in her head, though it was not the same sort of buzzy feeling she got whenever she performed magic. No, this was quite different. It was the buzz of her thoughts slowing down, of turning a puzzle around in her mind, looking at it from different angles, poking at it with an imaginary finger, feeling its texture, pulling it apart and clicking it back together in new and different ways. To Oona, this was the best feeling in all of the world, and yet the feeling did not get in the way of the process. It simply buzzed in the background, a growing energy, urging her forward, a.s.suring her that the answer was there. Inside.

A breeze rolled up the hill to play with the folds of Oona's dress. She didn't notice. Nor did she feel the warmth of the rising sun, or the smell of the blooming dandelions in the gra.s.s. The buzz was all consuming, everywhere inside of her. The words danced around the riddle, and the riddle danced around the meaning. Her mind moved from one possibility to the next, stepping gingerly upon the cryptic clues, pressing down upon each one the way that someone might test their weight upon a set of rickety stairs.

And then suddenly there it was. The buzzing dropped away as swiftly as it had come ... and in its place was the answer. She had it! And of course it was so obvious. Deacon had been right about the play on words, except he'd been looking at the wrong part of the riddle. And like most riddles, once she had the answer, it became painfully clear. She laughed.

"What?" Deacon asked.

Oona beamed triumphantly at him. "Stairs, Deacon! Don't you see? A set of stairs has a head but has no face. They also come in a stair case. The phrase *And though I'm well and upon my way' is indeed a play on words. What it is actually saying is: *I am a well and also a way.' A stair well and a stair way. They also can come in a flight of stairs, which of course do not move. And lastly, perhaps the most obvious part of the riddle, they slow you down when you are walking up them, yet they get you to where you are going."

"Yes, yes! I see!" Deacon said, and the two of them looked excitedly around. Just as quickly as the excitement had come it seemed to disappear. "Ah, yes. A stairway," Deacon said wearily. "Do you see one?"

"Ah ... well ... not exactly," Oona said, the skin above her nose crinkling up as the confusion set in.

"Not exactly?" Deacon questioned.

"Well, all right, not at all," she said. "What else could it be?"

The two of them stood in silence for what seemed like a very long time. The sun had grown higher since they'd arrived at the tower, and its shadow, which cut across the face of the cemetery like a dark scar, had begun to shrink. Oona chewed on her lip. An idea came to her, and she had no idea if it would work or not. At this point anything was worth trying. She stepped into the circle of stones in the gra.s.s and faced the tower. It seemed as if the tower itself were staring down on her, like some huge black pupil in an enormous eye. She became very nervous, not because she thought her idea might not work but because she thought that it would. She locked her gaze upon the blackness before her, and said: "The pa.s.sword is: stairs."

In the blink of an eye, a set of smooth black steps appeared in front of her. They rose up nearly a full story high, to where a heavy iron door appeared in the side of the tower. And something else. A black iron key had appeared at her feet in the stone circle.

Deacon took in a startled breath. "You did it! You found the entrance."

"Yes. The riddle was a pa.s.sword, Deacon!" She s.n.a.t.c.hed up the key. "Come along. Let's hurry up the steps before they disappear."

And before I lose my nerve, she thought.

Oona had only just unlocked the heavy iron door in the side of the tower, pus.h.i.+ng it inward on creaking hinges, when the goblin nearly startled her off her feet.

"Beg your pardon, miss," it said as it stepped out of the darkness and into the light that streamed through the door. Dressed in a yellow medieval tunic and a pair of woolen breeches, the goblin peered at Oona and Deacon through tiny, malicious-looking eyes. Its pointy ears twitched on either side of its greenish bald head. "Oh my, did you ever give me a fright!" the goblin said, its voice low and gruff. The malevolent-looking creature placed its hand to its heart, as if it had indeed been frightened by her sudden appearance. Considering the fact that the goblin was nearly a foot taller than Oona, she came very close to saying: "I gave you a fright?"

But what she did say, the moment her wits had returned to her, was: "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to frighten you."

The goblin considered her, the green skin around its squashed-looking nose wrinkling up into a distorted snarl. Oona stiffened, ready to bolt back through the door. Deacon did the same on her shoulder.

At last the goblin let out a loud sneeze, and its face relaxed. "Oh, dear me, I do apologize. It must be all that fresh air coming through the door. It's making my allergies act up. Anyway, enough about my problems. I suppose you've come to see the prisoner."

Oona's eyes widened. "You mean there is a prisoner?" She couldn't believe it. It was almost too good to be true. Her uncle was alive after all.

But the goblin only shrugged. "I don't know. I mean, why else would you be here if there wasn't a prisoner?" He pointed to the key in her hand.