His Royal Whiskers Page 14

  And Death still hadn’t turned up anywhere.

  Pieter thought back to the skeleton with the scythe, that had come to fetch the soul of Bloodbath. He wondered why Grim hadn’t shown up for Pieter, or anyone else in Petrossia.

  Maybe he was running late.

  Perhaps he’d overslept.

  Or taken a Yuletide holiday?

  Pieter had his own theory. He didn’t know how she’d done it, but it had to be her. Who else could it be? There was only one person he knew who could work actual miracles.

  Somehow, Teresa Gust had saved his life. Pieter was sure of it.

  There was only one problem with his theory: if it was true, then why was she still missing?

  * * *

  24. In the Kingdom of Barbaria, everyone had to wear beards, even women and children. It was also a criminal offense to do unbarbaric things like read poetry, cuddle rabbits, and talk about your feelings (unless they were feelings of rage, hatred, or bloodlust).

  (A NOTE ON DEATH)

  There are some readers right now who might be saying to themselves things like:

  “A country where nobody can die? That sounds a lot like heaven!”

  And, “I wouldn’t mind living in Petrossia!”

  Or, “So it’s just like a fairy tale, and everyone gets to live happily ever after?”

  These readers are wrong. A country without death would be an utterly dreadful place. Just think about it.

  First of all, there’s the problem of room. With no one dying but babies still being born, Petrossia is gradually filling up with people. More and more and more of them. Eventually, it will grow so crowded that everyone will have to stand on one another’s heads.

  Then, there’s the fact that eternal life does not equal eternal youth (just as Grimaldi the Most Wise proved). People are still growing older. And balder. And wrinklier. And so on. Forever.

  Eventually, people will grow so ancient that their brains will shrink to the size of Brussels sprouts and then evaporate out their ears. The only topic of conversation will be “The Good Old Days.” Walking-stick manufacturers won’t ever go out of business, but that is about the only plus.

  Yes, a land of eternal life is a terrible place indeed. Life without death just feels wrong, like a sentence that won’t end, but just keeps building and building, trying to reach a moment that never comes, until it starts to run out of things to say, and just repeats itself, saying the same old thing, again and again, repeating itself, and so on, and so forth, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. . . .

  You see? Life needs death the way a sentence needs a full stop.

  Petrossia had a big problem. It needed fixing, fast.

  5

  Priest to Meet You

  The Petrossia folk could deal with bitter winters and cruel rulers and next to no food, but now they had had enough. People began to pack their things and leave. The cooks, the maids, the guards . . . one by one they all went south like the geese, until the corridors of the Winter Palace were empty and silent, and only the defrosting heads on spikes stood watch at the gates.

  “We ought to leave too,” Amnabushka said to Pieter’s head the next morn, when she shuffled up the stairs with his cup of khave (and a bucket to catch it in once he’d drunk it). “Find a trundle wagon and ride it west until we’re a million miles old.”

  Despite everything, Amna made Pieter smile. It was hard to believe there’d been a time when he’d been rude about her magic. In a way, she was mightier than he’d ever realized.

  “A fairy folkmother and a talking head!” she said. “We’ll make a fair living telling fortunes. Especially at a time like this. We’ll save up until we can pay a doctor to stitch your body back on. One of the maids told me about a surgeon from Ingolstadt who—”

  Pieter shook his head. Or tried to. “I can’t leave, Amna.” He didn’t need to tell her why. Across the rest of the continent, life was still starting and ending like it always had. It was only in Petrossia that nothing could die. If Pieter crossed the western border into Hertz, his life might leave his head in a heartbeat (or a lack of one).

  “You should go,” he told her, trying not to think any more about death and dying. “There’s nothing keeping you here.”

  Amna looked quite cross at the suggestion. “There’s a wildfolk saying: There aren’t many miles in a one-wheeled wagon.” She leaned down and kissed his stone-cold cheek. “Which means, we go together or not at all.”

  Pieter tried to swallow the lump that was stuck in his throat, but it rose like a bubble into his head, pushing the hot tears out of his blurry eyes.

  “Thank you, Amna,” he managed to whisper. “Thank you.”

  The old Baba Sister touched the abacus bead, a new charm she had tied into her hair, and looked pleased. “He thanks me twice now! How could I abandon a boy with such manners?”

  Somewhere in the Winter Palace, a grandpapa clock chimed two of the morn. The hallways belonged to the mice and the moonbeams. From down in the kitchens came the faint sound of a pig left oinking inside an oven, even though the last chef, before they left, had roasted it for hours and shoved an apple in its gob to shut it up. In the tallychamber, tinderflies crackled and snapped as they snoozed on their sugarstick stumps.

  A hooded figure robed in black moved silently up the stairs.

  It seemed to be carrying some sort of long stick with a pointy metal thing on the end.

  The hooded figure opened the door to the tallychamber and glided inside.

  A head lay snoring on a velvet pillow.

  Soundlessly, the figure in black crept closer. Closer. There were only two possibilities: either the figure knew exactly where to step, or the old floorboards were too terrified to make a creak and draw attention to themselves.

  “Ahem,” said the figure.

  The head snored on.

  “Oi.” The figure in black reached out and flicked the head on the nose. “You.”

  Pieter snorted, yawned, and sleepily opened his eyes. “Amna? What time is it?”

  He looked up at the figure before him, taking in the blackness of the hood and the long sticklike thing it carried.

  “Oh,” he said. “It’s you. I was beginning to think you weren’t going to show up.”

  Pieter had been expecting this visit. After his near-death experience in the Gloom Room, he’d known it was only a matter of time before he came face-to-face again (or face-to-skull) with the skeleton called Grim. Strangely, he didn’t feel afraid. Perhaps it was because he could no longer feel his heart race, or his spine shiver, or his kneecaps quake.

  “You’re late, you know,” he said, trying to fill the awkward silence. “People have been concerned. Come on, then. Hurry up and take me to the land of the dead. There’s quite a long line behind me, you know. You really haven’t been doing your job very—”

  The figure threw back its hood.

  “Oh,” said Pieter. “It’s you. What do you want?”

  Ugor seized him up by the hair. His eyes were red and crazed. Pieter could smell barbeeri on his breath.25

  “What Ugor wants?” he said, shaking Pieter in his huge fist. “Czar alive! Empire back! No more beetroot soup for dinner! And most of all Ugor wants Tallymaster DEAD!”

  One of the advantages of his current predicament was that Pieter didn’t feel scared by death threats anymore. Ugor could rant and rave at him as much as he wanted, but what could he possibly do? Chop Pieter’s head off again?

  “Wait a minute.” Pieter noticed for the first time that the long stick Ugor had set aside was not actually a scythe. “Why have you brought a shovel?”

  Ugor chuckled. His laugh was a scarred and ugly thing, just like him.

  “Tallymaster won’t die,” he said, “but Ugor can still bury you.”

  Pieter had always imagined that death would be the scariest thing that could happen to him. But now that he was dead, he realized there were worse things.

  Like being buried in a coffin . . .

  Lik
e having to lie underground for centuries, while the worms wriggled and the roots wrapped round him like fingers. . . .

  Like being trapped in total darkness, forever . . .

  “Exactly,” said Ugor when Pieter explained all that to him.

  “Amna!” Pieter yelled. “Amnabushka Baba Gale, help!”

  Ugor seized up a ball of paper from the tallychamber’s overflowing bin and stuffed it in Pieter’s mouth. “Priest? Come up here! Bring coffin!”

  In the doorway, the priest appeared. He was very short. He wore crisp white robes, clean and billowy as bedsheets, and a name badge that said “Holy Father Robin—Priest to meet ya!” His face was mostly a beard that looked like black sheep’s wool. He carried a small, box-shaped coffin.

  “Oh, Saint Ivan protect us!” Father Robin said in his high-pitched voice when his eyes fell upon Pieter. “When the dead refuse to die, the End of the World is surely nigh! Warmaster Ugor, must I bury this thing? My graveyard is very quiet. I do not want an undead head coming in and causing a ruckus. It might encourage the other corpses.”

  Ugor took his blundergun from his shoulder and aimed it at Father Robin. The barrel was like the end of a trombone. “You bury him,” he said. “Or I bury you.”

  Father Robin’s fluffy beard trembled. He opened his mouth to protest, but the only thing that came out was a sort of strangled warble, similar to the sound he might make during hymns. He clutched at his big wooden rosary beads. They were the size of hazelnuts.

  In fact, Pieter realized, they were hazelnuts.

  And as he realized this, Father Robin jammed them into the barrel of the blundergun.

  Ugor was momentarily stunned. So was Pieter. It wasn’t until they saw the priest yank off his fake beard with one hand, and reach up with a blazing pip chili in the other, that either of them realized what was happening, and who Father Robin really was.

  By then, Teresa had already stuffed the red-hot chili into Ugor’s bellybutton.

  “YOWWW!” Ugor howled, or maybe it was, “YOUUU!”

  The Warmaster yanked at the blazing pip, then roared as the green stalk broke off in his clumsy fists, leaving the red chili still lodged in his hairy gut. He swiped at Teresa like a wounded bear. She ducked under his legs as his fists sent volumes of books tumbling off the shelves, then he smashed the bed in two with a headbutt. Pieter tumbled headfirst onto the rug and Teresa booted him like a soccer ball, then dived after him like she was trying to save her own shot. The world whirled around them as they both rolled under the desk.

  “Say your prayers!” Ugor bellowed above them.

  And then, because he was sizzling so much with rage and pain that it had made him stupid, the Warmaster pulled the trigger on his blundergun.

  There was a kind of stifled-farting sound from the trombone end, as the enormous explosive power of the gunpowder ignited, traveled down the barrel in search of something to blow up, and found the hazelnut.

  Beneath the desk, Pieter shut his eyes as Teresa threw her hands around him. There was a bright flash like thunder that he saw behind his lids, a second of searing heat, a shriek of tearing metal, and finally just the smell of toasted hazelnut.

  When Pieter looked out from under the desk, Ugor had been blown backwards into the wall, his face blackened and scorched. The blundergun was still in his hands. It had blossomed out in all directions, like the petals of a brass flower. The barbarian’s mouth was open, his eyes were dazed, and the tip of his beard was smoking like an incense stick.

  Pieter spat out the ball of paper. He found himself babbling. “Teresa? How can . . . What was . . . Is this a . . .” He took a deep breath and finally managed to ask an actual question. “Where have you been?”

  “Brewing potions,” she said. “Watch.”

  As a dazed Ugor tried to get up and out of the wall, Teresa rolled back out from under the wreckage of the desk. Her hands disappeared beneath her priest robes, and came out again with something silver and glinting.

  A glass bottle, shaped like a J.

  Twisting off the cork, she poured the alchemical gloop down over Ugor. The top of his head began to fizz. The Warmaster’s huge belly first wobbled and then collapsed like a burnt soufflé. Tiny glittering discs began to drop from his body and clatter onto the floorboards. One of them rolled over to Pieter.

  It was a coin. A gold rouble. The back of it had Ugor’s face stamped on it, instead of the Czar’s.

  Teresa had just turned the Warmaster into a pile of money.

  “Mammonia,” she said, tossing the empty alchemical bottle into the bin. “It’s weak alchemy. A few months at most, and it’ll wear off.” She turned to look back at Pieter. “Hey,” she said quietly.

  Pieter looked up at his best and long-lost friend, and wondered what to say back. It felt like a lifetime ago since they had last said goodbye to each other. Actually, for Pieter, it really was. What words could possibly sum up everything that had happened since then?

  He eventually settled just on stating the obvious.

  “Hey,” he said back. “Your disguise is on fire.”

  Teresa looked behind her and yelped, swatting out the smoke sizzling from her Father Robin robes. Finally she gave up, and just pulled off the whole disguise—the white vestment, the wig, the rubber wrinkles—until it all lay in a heap on the floor.

  Teresa had changed. She wore her same suit of patchwork pockets and colored ropes, but hanging from her grappling hooks now were clinking, swinging bottles. Dozens of alchemical potions. Some were long, thin, and green as runner beans; others were tiny and round and red as cherries; still more were yellow and curved as bananas. She was taller than he remembered, or perhaps he was just a lot shorter. Her hair had grown back a little, and she had plaited it again, but the starlight and moon-white colorings had washed away from her, leaving her green-eyed and dark.

  “I missed you,” she said.

  “I missed you too.”

  She looked down at his neck, and smiled weakly. “You’re missing lots of things.”

  Pieter shrugged, then remembered he didn’t have shoulders. “Maybe,” he said. “But at least I’ve found my friend.”

  * * *

  25. Barbeeri: a gloopy mix of beer, pig’s blood, iron fillings, and beard sweat, that no one with more than a twenty-word vocabulary can stomach.

  6

  Escapes, Reunions, and Revelations

  After rushing down the North Spire and waking Amna—

  After hugging and laughing and calling for Alexander—

  After yelling his name, and running toward the Hall of Faces, and throwing open the doors, and kissing his nose, and high-fiving his paws—

  After Alexander’s tears had soaked all the floors, and after he purred to show how he’d missed her—

  After telling him Teresa was really his sister—

  And he was her brother—

  And they were a family and finally together—

  And nothing could part them, not now and not ever—

  Teresa told them about her escape from Petrossia.

  The three of them lay on Alexander’s upturned paw as if it was a sofa, while his enormous face beamed down like an orange sun. Pieter had not seen the Empurrer this happy since before his sixth birthday. Amna was laughing and tying the Priest to meet ya! badge into her hair as a new charm, while Teresa told the tale of her escape from Petrossia.

  It turns out the rumors had all been true—more or less. After escaping up the chimney while Pieter and Amna had become the Czar’s hostages, Teresa hid up on the rooftop for days, surviving on pigeon eggs and frozen gutter water. She spent the days huddled over the chimney pots with blue shaking hands, trying to keep warm, while the wind ran through her like a wolf runs through a forest, swift and howling and hungry for her heat.

  At night, she crept down to the Winter Palace, trying to stir up trouble.

  MIRROR, MIRROR ON THE WALL, WHO’S THE WORST KING OF THEM ALL?

  . . . she wrote in dust on one of th
e hallway mirrors.

  Next, she arranged the leaves of the runner bean plants in the Winter Palace glasshouse so they spelled out: PEAS, NOT WAR.

  The Czar was furious. He ordered the hallway mirror smashed and crushed—and the peas mashed and mushed.

  “Let that be a lesson to anyone or anything that dares to defy me,” he announced.

  But the next day, a bunch of kindling told the Czar YOU’RE FIRED (the Czar ordered it to be burned to death), and a disused toilet in the South Wing was discovered saying: IF THE CZAR THINKS HE CAN SCARE ME, HE’S POTTY.

  It seemed like the Winter Palace itself was rising up against the tyrannical king. But the Czar knew better.

  “It’s the Spice Monkey!” he growled. “She’s still here somewhere, using the chimneys to sneak about! Trying to distract us so she can rescue her friends.”

  From that moment on, every hearth was kept roaring hot, every flue was filled with choking smoke, and Teresa could no longer climb up and down her secret corridors to stir up trouble. There was nothing she could do but run.

  After she fled the Winter Palace, Sir Klaus chased Teresa halfway across the Empire. There are stories as long as this one that tell of the deadly games of hide-and-seek Teresa and the Spymaster had played across the rooftops of Muscov, through the forests of Tumber, and beneath the sewers of Günkel. Twice the Spymaster had caught her, and twice she had escaped him again before he could return her to the Czar.

  Finally, cornered in Port Xanderberg, Teresa hid inside a barrel of pickled catfish, where she nibbled on fish tails and sipped vinegar-water for three days, until a ship rolled her onboard and set sail across the Boreal Sea, to Albion.

  “But I took someone with me,” she told them as they sat there, all together again.

  “Who did you take?” Amna asked. “Tell us.”

  Teresa said, “I took Blüstav.”

  Pieter frowned as he remembered the name. “The Czar’s old Alchemaster? I thought he was a pile of coins, like Ugor.”