CHAPTER 24
Listen up, everybody. I got a letter from Eliot.”
Janet felt comfortable in Eliot’s chair in the meeting room in Castle Whitespire. She could have conducted business from her own official chair, but she liked Eliot’s. It didn’t look different from the other thrones, but there was something about it that felt more . . . pleasant. Accommodating.
Power, she supposed it was. It suits me.
“Point of order,” Josh said. “Are you, like, High Queen now? Like with Eliot gone?”
Was she?
“Sure. Why not.”
“It’s just—”
“Your constitutional arguments are kind of de trop at this exact moment, Josh. Also I wrote most of the constitution, so you will definitely lose them. All of them.” Josh opened his mouth. “Bup bup bup! Do you want to hear the letter or not?”
“Yes,” Josh and Poppy said together. Then they gave each other a loathsome little miniature married smile.
“Sure,” Poppy added.
Their deaths would be awesome—I mean the balcony was right there—but hard to justify politically. Janet moved on. For now.
“It goes like this.” She held up the little paper tape, like a ticker tape, or a fortune-cookie fortune. “THICK PLOTTENS STOP UMBER WAS SLASH IS EVIL AND MAYBE ALIVE STOP WHO KNEW RIGHT STOP FIND HIM ASAP STOP MIGHT SAVE WORLD STOP TRY UNDER NORTHERN MARSH MAYBE STOP BACK SOONEST KISS STOP.”
There was silence in the room.
“That’s it?” Poppy said.
“You were expecting . . . ?”
“I don’t know. Something a bit more formal maybe.”
“He doesn’t even say hi to us?” Josh said.
“No. Other questions?”
“Does he really have to do it like that? Like a telegram?”
“No, not really. I think he just enjoys it. Any questions of a more substantive nature?”
Josh and Poppy shared another marital glance.
“I don’t know how to phrase this exactly but what the fuck?” Josh said. “Umber’s not evil. Or wasn’t evil. He was Ember’s brother. Plus He’s been dead for like a million years or something. Martin Chatwin killed Him.”
“Or,” Janet said, “maybe he didn’t. Or He came back to life or something.”
“Why hasn’t Eliot come back?” Poppy said.
“That I don’t know. I’m a little peeved about it myself. A little worried too. I’ve become quite attached to our High King. Maybe there’s something more interesting going on on Earth, but I can’t imagine what. Josh?”
“How does Eliot send you letters?”
“Oh. We rigged it up before he left. They sort of float to the surface in that little gazing pool in the courtyard outside my bedroom, on these strips of paper. It’s very picturesque. Then you dry them out, and the words develop like a Polaroid. Poppy?”
“Should we do it? Should we try to find Ember? I mean, Umber? Sorry, I get Them mixed up. Baby brain, it’s started already. Seriously, we have to get moving with this because I’m almost in the second trimester here. We’ve got six months.”
One thing about Poppy, she had a can-do attitude. It was one of the things Janet liked about her. Maybe the only thing. Or she guessed Poppy’s hair was all right too.
“But hang on,” Josh said. “What if we do find Umber? What do we do with Him? I mean, you gotta figure He’s pretty far up the power scale. It’s not like we’re going to intimidate Him.”
“Well, I’ve been thinking about that,” Janet said. “Maybe we stick Him in Ember’s Tomb. Martin managed to trap Ember in there once, and He couldn’t get out. Seems to me that thing is like a ready-made purpose-built ram-god-containment facility.”
“But it’s risky,” Poppy said. “Could we even get Him in there? Maybe this is all a little precipitous?”
Just then Janet was overcome by the strangest sensation. She felt herself pulled ever so slightly to one side, her whole body, like she was starting to lose her balance. Then the room gave a little bump and jostle, and the feeling was gone again. It affected the others, too, she could see it.
Josh figured it out first.
“The room’s stopped moving,” he said.
Castle Whitespire was built on clockwork foundations that rotated its towers very slowly in a stately, never-ending dance, like the teacups in a really slow, boring carnival ride. They were driven by windmills. Ordinarily you hardly noticed it, but they noticed now, because it had just stopped. As far as she knew Whitespire’s towers had never stood still before, even in the dark times, the worst times.
“Does that answer your question?” Janet said. “This world is falling apart. We have to do something, and this is the only lead we’ve got. I think we’d better use it.”
“I’m just saying, we’re talking about hunting a god here,” Poppy said. “It’s not going to be easy.”
“If it were easy everybody would do it.”
As soon as the tower stopped moving Josh had gone out on the balcony and leaned on the stone railing, looking down. Now Janet and Poppy followed him. Far below tiny people were spilling out of doorways, into the streets and courtyards, staring around them uncertainly, blinking in the late-afternoon sunlight. One by one they stopped and looked up, looked to the three of them, shading their eyes, as if their kings and queens could possibly have any answers.
“Idiots,” Janet said, softly, but just for form’s sake. Maybe the great ever-spinning towers of Whitespire had ground to a halt, mayhap even the heavenly spheres themselves no longer danced to the music of time. Who the fuck knew. Maybe the only place she’d ever been happy was about to fall apart. But not even the end of the world was going to stop Janet from being a bitch. It was the principle of the thing.
—
They all went, all three of them. Four counting the baby. Josh and Poppy had bickered—it didn’t quite rise to the level of a fight—about whether Poppy should come, but Poppy came out on top.
“You’re worrying too much,” she said. “I’ll take good care of the baby. You just take good care of me.”
The trip to the Northern Marsh went more quickly this time. No need for gallant-but-aimless diagnostic wandering in the wilderness. This time they could take the direct route, the express train: hippogriffs, the fastest fliers in the fleet.
You couldn’t use them all the time. They were independent bastards, valued their freedom, practically libertarians, and they were very fussy about their feathers too, which you always ended up pulling out a few, it was impossible not to. But desperate times, etc. They were better than the pureblood griffins anyway—those things were just anarchists. Chaotic neutral all the way.
Janet’s particular hippogriff had a funny red crest between its ears, a feature she’d never seen before. It made a show of ignoring her as she mounted, with the help of a boost from a loyal retainer. Just once before the end of the world she wouldn’t have minded a little gesture of respect from one of these things. Ah well.
It was good to get a hippogriff’s-eye view of Fillory, anyway, because it at least confirmed that the halting of Whitespire wasn’t an isolated phenomenon. There were signs all over that things were seriously out of joint. It was nothing like when she and Eliot had been traveling, just a few days ago, and thinking about that she already felt nostalgia for it. Now the grass in open fields waved and bent in strange, regular patterns, expanding circles and moving lines—from high overhead they looked like old-fashioned analog TVs on the blink, their vertical hold shot.
Then the eclipse that was a daily event in Fillory simply failed to happen. At first Janet couldn’t put her finger on what was missing, but then she looked up and saw it: the moon and the sun were out of true. Where they should have lined up at midday, they missed each other, the horn of the moon just grazing the sun’s corona and moving on, like a doomed aerialist who’d missed the catch.
“Shit!” Josh called out. “The Chalk Man’s down!”
It was true: he had dropped to his hands and knees on his hillside, his featureless head drooping as if overcome by gravity, or just despair. His staff had fallen from his blobby hands. It floated beside him, in mid-hill. It was an incredibly pathetic sight.
And there was this endless goddamned summer. She had had enough of heat. Josh and Poppy were if anything even more shocked by all this than she was. They’d been snug in Castle Whitespire this whole time, breeding. They’d seen even less of it than Janet had.
The hippogriffs wouldn’t set them down right in the swamp, because sure the world was ending, but that was no reason why they should get their precious talons and hooves muddy. But they found a reasonably clear, solid helipad-type spot on the perimeter and came in for an admittedly supernaturally graceful landing.
“Wait here,” she told them. “Give us twenty-four hours. If we’re not back by then you can go.”
The hippogriffs stared at her with their angry yellow eyes and gave absolutely no sign as to whether they would or would not give her twenty-four hours. Janet struck out into the mud with Poppy and Josh trailing behind her.
“Not being critical at all,” Josh said, “but if I were High King or High Queen or whatever, I would have brought maybe a detachment of soldiers with us? Like in a support capacity? Maybe that elite Whitespire regiment thing that’s so hard to get into. You ever seen those guys drilling? It’s nuts the stuff they can do.”
Janet took a deep breath. Patience.
“We’re hunting a god, Josh. You know how that movie goes. You send the shock troops in first, the really bad-ass ones, the definitely undefeatable guys, and what happens? They get slaughtered like instantly. And it’s like ooo, scary, nuh-uh, those guys were supposed to be undefeatable! Then the heroes go in and do the real work. It’s all just to build dramatic tension. I thought maybe we’d skip that part and cut to the chase.”
“But I love that movie,” Josh said, a little forlornly.
“That raises a good point though, Janet,” Poppy said. “Since we’re cutting to the chase. How are we supposed to go about fighting a god?”
“Not fighting,” Janet said. “Hunting.”
Even she wasn’t that clear on the distinction she was making, but she thought it might shut them up for a few minutes so she could think. Somebody had to.
“And not we,” Josh said. “You’re not fighting. You’re taking care of the baby.”
“I’ll take care of the baby,” Poppy said, “by fighting.”
It was warm and muggy, but the mud-water that kept oozing up through the sodden grass they were walking on was bitter cold. There were depths to this place that the sun couldn’t touch. Fortunately Janet had on awesome boots.
“Anyway,” she said, “Martin Chatwin beat Ember. So it can be done. What’s Martin Chatwin got that the three of us don’t have?”
“Like about six more fingers,” Josh said. “For starters.”
It was good to be out in the field again, whatever the odds. And it was good to be in charge. Before the desert she’d never really given things her all, at least not when the others were around to watch. It was too vulnerable-making; in a way she hadn’t really had her all to give. No wonder the others hadn’t taken her as seriously as they should have. Plus she’d done a few fucked-up things. She wondered whether Quentin felt angry about what happened that night. Like it was her that broke up him and Alice! She’d only done it out of habit. If you’ve got a junkie in the house, you don’t leave your meds just lying on the table.
And like they would have lasted two more weeks anyway, given what a loser Quentin was back in those days anyway. The funny thing was, the more Quentin got his shit together the less she wanted to sleep with him. Weird how that worked.
When they found the boardwalk Janet started trotting along it, double-time. Poppy jogged along behind her but Josh called out “Hey, wait up!” and when they didn’t he started sort of slowly motivating his doughy body along. Guy lives in a fantasy world without junk food or cars or trans fats or TV and he’s still fat. You had to admire his dedication to the cause.
On the way Janet noticed a pair of child’s shoes, ancient and weathered, abandoned on a rock. It was the oddest thing. They looked pitifully small. She wondered what could have brought a boy that young—they were a boy’s shoes—all the way out here, this deep into the Northern Marsh, and what could have happened to him. Nothing good.
When the pier was in sight she drew the crossed axes from her back.
“Awesome axes,” Josh said. “Where did you—”
“Your mom gave them to me,” Janet said. “After I fucked her.”
“Why—”