All races begin in Pandemonium, even if they do not want to, for Pandemonium quite refuses to miss one single second of excitement.
Come with me. We shall get to the race grounds first, before even the maddest racing fan has thought to put the kettle on and start looking for her lucky socks. We shall kick off our shoes and stretch out our legs on the outskirts of the city, on Gingham Green, right on the lawns of all the rich and famous—they can’t stop us. Narrators may go where they please. We’ve got an excellent view of the Great Foulard, the winding, twisting, curlicuing avenue that connects every street and avenue and boulevard and humble chiffon alley in Pandemonium. Just past the Ghostloom Gate, the Great Foulard dives into the Barleybroom and comes up on the other bank clean and sparkling and called Gadabout Road instead. But from where we sit, we can see everything: the gownstone houses of Herringbone Heights, the glittering Angora Aqueduct, the silk balloon of Groangyre Tower. We can smell the bakeries of Calico Common as they heap pastries and bread and cakes and pies onto carts and wheel their wares into the Plaited Plaza, where they will sell every last cheese pastry and luckfig tart and wish they had baked more. And we can hear folk less industrious than we starting to arrive at the Plaza, yawning, shaking the dew off their wings, taking their morning constitutionals: changing into six or seven animals just to get the blood going. In the center of the Plaited Plaza, a fountain bubbles away happily in blue marble, silver, and watered silk. The great splashing statues depict Good Queen Mallow piercing the heart of Gratchling Gourdbone Goldmouth with her trusty needle while her sensible knit scarf flutters behind her. Already, a family of dryads have gathered to sit on the fountain’s rim, kicking their cedar-bark legs into the air. They wave us over—plenty of room for all. But we’ve already snatched up the best spot for ourselves. From a narrator’s picnic blanket, there’s nothing you can’t see.
*
The day of the Cantankerous Derby woke up with gold dust in its eyes and three lumps of sunshine in its tea. Garlands of lavender and rowan branches and great bright paper lanterns hung from the noses of all the gargoyles peering down into the Plaited Plaza. The Stoat of Arms paced back and forth nervously, reciting the rules of the race to itself and hoping it had not forgotten anything important, like its racing silks or the finish line. Bakers, spectators, souvenir sellers and bookmakers crowded in from the side alleys and streets and the Great Foulard as it emptied its morning traffic out onto the flame-colored patchwork cobbles.
September, Saturday, and A-Through-L arrived first. September had felt that it might look tawdry if the Queen came dawdling in when everyone else already had their shoes tied and their various engines purring. She’d set the moon in her bedchamber to wake her long before dawn and crept out of the Briary before even the Zinnias had stopped snoring. Ell soared up into the air and gave a few mighty flaps of his scarlet wings the way a runner stretches on the grass by the racetrack. She wore her Watchful Dress and her emerald smoking jacket as though they were ermine and veils of gold. Saturday wore his best sturgeon-skin trousers and a little blue-white stone on a lash of leather round his neck. September had asked many times why he wore that funny old opal, but he would never say. The Marid’s blue chest and all his marvelous tattoos shone darkly in the sun. Saturday and September, having become rather practical on the subject of adventuring over the last many years, filled a small suitcase with various trifles and pies and samosas and profiteroles from the carts. A pieman with round, friendly cheeks and round, friendly serpents where her hair ought to be insisted on slipping in a little almond-wood barrel of cider.
“The Queen shouldn’t thirst while I’m on my fourth cup,” crowed the pieman.