His Royal Whiskers Page 9

  Those who’ll play with cats must expect to be scratched.

  —DON QUIXOTE, MIGUEL DE CERVANTES

  Psychopomp | ‘sʌɪkə(ʊ)pɒmp | Noun

  A guide for souls to the land of the dead.

  (A NOTE ON STUPIDITY)

  Most people think that geniuses are not capable of stupidity. In fact, the opposite is true. The brain of a genius is simply capable of more than other brains, which not only means they can be smarter than everyone else, but also stupider.

  This is what makes a genius one of the most dangerous creatures on Earth. It is their habit of having the most incredible ideas without thinking through the consequences that makes them so lethal. On the list of the World’s Deadliest Animals, a genius could easily make it into the Top 10, depending on how much thinking they were doing that day.

  At that moment, Pieter and Teresa were currently joint-third on the list—just below the remaining vial of the Black Death plague that had wiped out Eureka. The Czar, of course, still held the number one spot. For now.

  But there was another creature steadily climbing the ranks, who was growing more dangerous—and more enormous—by the day.

  1

  Five Doses of Gargantua

  The first week of Welkin was full of changes. The days turned shorter and drearier; the nights grew glittering and cold. Down from the wild northern Waste, the wind began its slow unceasing wail, that would stretch on through Welkin and rise to a shriek when Worsen came, until it got so loud and piercing it would sometimes shatter windows, like an opera singer’s high note.

  But it was Alexander that changed most of all.

  On Mournday, he was lion-sized.

  By Toilsday, he was oliphant-sized.

  By Warsday, he was whale-sized.

  By Czarsday, he was dinosaur-sized.

  By Firday, after his fifth dose of the Gargantua potion, Prince Alexander was beyond colossal.

  He entered and exited the Winter Palace in a specially made cat flap that was seventy feet high. He napped in the Hall of Faces—the only room he could now fit into—leaning his head on a tremendous pillow that had been stuffed with the wool of a hundred flocks of sheep. Since Warsday, the Czar had taken to sleeping on the prince: he would lie down in the fur that was long and reddish-golden, and rippled like corn in the breeze.

  Alexander could leap across the River Ossia in a single bound. He could outrun the wind, and unhorse a hundred knights with one swipe. His meow could be heard in far and distant countries, where it was mistaken for the sound of the end of the world. And perhaps it was, for as he grew ever bigger, Alexander’s thirst grew ever more insatiable.

  He had stopped drinking his milk out of saucers, buckets, and bathtubs—they were far too small. Instead, he drank from the Fountain of Sobs in the palace courtyard, which had been disconnected from its usual water supply and hooked up to the udders of a herd of cows.

  The prince’s appetite, too, had grown just as enormous as he had. By Czarsday, Alexander was devouring a herd of cows for breakfast, a shoal of fish for lunch, and an entire murder of crows for supper.

  After four days of his guzzling, the River Ossia was almost empty, the hills were bare, and the forests were silent. Alexander was hoovering up every last scrap of food in the kingdom. Having eaten every animal for miles around, he was now starting on the poor creatures in the small zoo that formed part of the palace gardens. On Firday, Alexander gobbled up a camel, some flamingos, two koala bears, a firebird (which gave him heartburn), a bilebear (which gave him a stomachache) and a puffin (which made him out of breath).

  After dinner, several rare species the Czar had plundered from exotic lands—including two pygmy tigers, a gold-feathered chicken that laid Fabergé eggs, and a glacier slug that Alexander nibbled on like a popsicle stick—were suddenly extinct.

  The people in Petrossia were growing nervous.

  So were Pieter and Teresa.

  “I think it’s time we told Alexander to pounce,” Teresa said when they woke on the second week of Welkin. “He’s got to be big enough now, and besides, I’m getting impatient.”

  “I’m getting hungry,” said Pieter, deciding now was the time to bring up a problem nagging him. There was simply not enough food now that Petrossia had Alexander’s enormous belly to fill. Pieter had tried to solve the problem as best as he could, using mathemagics. Hunched over a list of all the stores left in the Winter Palace kitchens, he split turnips into tiny fractions, or divided not enough eggs between too many people. He multiplied milk by mixing in water, he added sawdust to flour.

  No one had starved, but everyone was miserable. They’d had nothing but beetroot soup and butterless bread since Czarsday. By the Czar’s decree, what meat was left was now only to be eaten by Himself and Alexander.

  Pieter looked down into the courtyard. Up from the basement kitchens, cooks were wheeling huge barrows piled high with food. Sausages, roast beef, bacon, and blood pudding . . . all heading toward the Hall of Faces.

  Teresa feasted her eyes on the parade of deliciousness passing beneath them. Then she slapped her hand to her head and laughed. “Pieter, we’re fools!” she said. “The solution’s easy: the Czar even showed it to us on Mournday! Why don’t we just use the Gargantua on Alexander’s food?”

  In a few moments, she had latched on a grapple to the sill and rappelled out the window. Pieter passed her a fork tied to a yardstick, and like a spider on a thread, Teresa dropped down the North Spire and speared a garlic sausage from a passing barrow. Up she winched herself, while Pieter got Nuttikins to fetch one of the dozen acorns of Gargantua potion they had spent all week brewing. Teresa shook the sausage off the fork and onto a plate, cracked the acorn that Pieter passed her, and the two of them stepped back and waited for the WOMPF.

  It took a long time to come.

  Too long.

  Something was wrong. Why wasn’t the sausage bigger? It ought to have swelled to the size of a well-fed boa constrictor.

  “Did you remember to turn it upside down?” Pieter asked.

  “Of course I did,” Teresa said. “Must have been a bad nut. Or a silly sausage. Get Nuttikins to fetch another acorn, and we’ll try again.”

  But the next acorn didn’t work either. None of them worked. Not on the sausage, not on the lamb chop, not on anything else Teresa rappelled down to fetch.

  The potion’s list of ingredients had grown again. Teresa’s Gargantua recipe was now just as useless and incomplete as Grimaldi’s original recipe had been.

  “We can solve it!” Teresa insisted. “Just like we did last time. We just need to add a few dozen more things. . . .”

  Pieter groaned. “By the time we’ve done that, there won’t be any more food to enlarge. Alexander will have gobbled it all up, and everyone in Petrossia will starve.”

  The two friends looked at each other in stunned silence. They had set out to save Petrossia from the Czar’s conquering—had they ended up dooming it to Alexander’s appetite?

  “That’s it, then,” said Teresa, rushing over to shrug on her Alchemaster robes. “We have to get Alexander to overthrow the Czar right now. And then we have to start shrinking him back down to size, before it’s too late.”

  2

  Meowtiny

  The Winter Palace fireplaces were always kept roaring and stoked in the cold Welkin weather, so Teresa could not climb down the chimneys to visit Alexander in secret. The only time they saw the prince was each breakfast, when they came with the acorn to crack into his morn milk.

  Luckily, Amna had already managed to explain Operation: His Royal Whiskers to Alexander on Toilsday when she had swept his room. Everything was set. All Pieter and Teresa had to do was yell out “MEOWTINY!” as loud as they could, and the prince would pounce on the Czar.

  It sounded easy as counting one-two-three.

  So why did Pieter suddenly feel so nervous?

  Pieter and Teresa followed their guards down the corridor to the Hall of Faces. The Czar was in there
, clipping his son’s claws with garden shears. Pieter’s breath caught at the size of Alexander. He was stretched out on the floor, snoozing happily. A rumbling, rising-and-falling orange-furred mountain. His purr sounded like distant drilling, as if deep within his belly there were dwarves mining for gold. He did not even wake when Pieter and Teresa entered. They must have been about as distracting as scurrying ants.

  “Alchemaster! Tallymaster!” said the Czar. His smile gleamed bright as his armor. “I am so pleased with your work! I knew I was right to spare your lives!” He put down the shears and gestured to his vast son.

  Pieter and Teresa glanced nervously at each other. Should they shout now? Should they wait until Alexander was awake? What if they didn’t yell “MEOWTINY!” loud enough, and the prince carried on snoozing?

  “You are indeed masters of alchelements,” grinned the Czar. “I am envious. I have only mastered one element—the element of surprise. Let me demonstrate. Come in, Spymaster!”

  He turned to face the stained-glass doors. They creaked open, and something entered the hall.

  It was a ball.

  A small ball.

  A small ball, all made of wire.

  It rolled across the flagstone floor toward them, like a soccer ball dribbled by a ghost, until the Czar stopped it with his boot.

  A hatch on the wire ball’s surface swung outward, and a small white something scurried out. He wore worn leather boots, a floppy hat with a blue budgie feather tucked into the brim, and a small toothpick of a sword strapped to his side. He perched on the wire ball for a moment, panting as he caught his breath, and blinking his red eyes.

  “Highness,” said the small white something.

  Pieter blinked. Teresa gawped.

  “Nuttikins!” cried Teresa.

  “Nuttikins?” cried Pieter.

  “Also known as Sir Klaus the Mousketeer,” the Czar corrected. “My Spymaster.”

  Pieter gawped at the mysterious member of the War Council he had never seen before. Except he had seen him—many times. The Spymaster had hidden in plain sight.

  Sitting on his wire ball, Sir Klaus twitched his whiskers. “Alchemists,” the mouse said, shaking his head. “So wrapped up in their own thinking, they miss what is right beneath their noses.”

  Pieter and Teresa both looked at each other and yelled out together: “He can talk?!”

  “Oh yes,” said the Czar. “And he has told me everything. I know about Operation: His Royal Whiskers, I know about the old Baba Sister who’s been helping you with her witchery, and I know the Gargantua potion is useless.”

  Pieter’s heart went slack.

  “Also,” the Czar added, “I hear you stole a sausage.”

  “Firstly,” began Teresa, “that was for scientific purposes. Secondly, I didn’t do it. Thirdly, MEOWTINY!”

  Her voice echoed round the rafters. Alexander’s purring snores rumbled on. Pieter shot Teresa a nervous glance.

  “MEOWTINY!” they both bellowed together.

  The prince’s ears twitched in his sleep. That was all. Why didn’t he wake?

  “Snoozeweed in his milk, and cotton wool in his ears,” the Czar explained with a smile. “Not that I didn’t trust my own son not to betray me, but still . . . it’s wise to take precautions.”

  Then he clicked his fingers, and the Slinjas slid out from behind the Hall of Faces portraits. In an eyeblink, Pieter and Teresa were surrounded.

  “I have to admit,” the Czar said, “I’m impressed. The two of you might not be strong, but you are imaginative. I respect that. Imagination is its own sort of power. And with it, you came close—closer than anyone has ever come before—to defeating me.”

  “You’re wrong,” Teresa said, as she and Pieter stood back-to-back while the Slinjas closed in. “Imagination isn’t our power. It’s friendship.”

  Pieter said nothing. Keep him talking, Teresa. The longer he talks, the more chance there is that Alexander might wake.

  “Friendship? You think friendship is a power?” The Czar’s laugh was like an artillery barrage. It made Pieter wince.

  And it made Alexander’s enormous tree-trunk tail twitch.

  He nudged Teresa. No need—she’d seen it too.

  “Let me show you what true power is,” said the Czar, and he clicked his fingers again.

  The Slinjas moved fast.

  Teresa moved faster.

  Pieter moved fastest of all.

  As the Slinjas came toward them, feet whispering over the floor, Teresa threw a fistful of hazelnuts to trip them. But Pieter shoved her, and they flew over the heads of the bodyguards, and landed straight in the fire that roared in the hearth.

  “Pieter! You made me miss!”

  “No, I didn’t,” he said, as in the fireplace, the cooking hazelnuts started to pop.

  Bang! Crackle! Snap! It was like a small fireworks display had commenced inside the hearth. Toasted hazelnuts flew into the hall, smelling of burnt sugar and smoke. Drawn up from the depths of his dreams by the noise and the aroma, Alexander opened one enormous green eye. There was a swishing sound, like a field of wheat in Swoon, as he sat up and pawed at his head. Huge white tufts of cotton wool fell from his ears, wafting in the air like clouds.

  Then the prince looked down, and saw his best friends in danger.

  “MEOWTINY!” Pieter and Teresa shouted the word as loudly and desperately as they could.

  The Czar let out a bellow of anger. His midnight cape billowed as he whirled round, drawing Viktor.

  Alexander sent the sword spinning from his father’s grasp with the flick of one claw. It hit the floor, clatter and clang. Before he could pick up his blade, the Czar found himself gently pinned to the floor by his son’s enormous paw.

  Even the Slinjas stopped to stare.

  For the first time ever, the Czar had just been beaten. Without moving his paw, Alexander swung his mighty tail across the flagstones. Pieter and Teresa leaped back as the tidal wave of ginger fur swept half the Slinjas to one side. The rest of them turned sideways and posted themselves through the door crack, vanishing away.

  The tumult died down, until the only sounds were the papery scrabblings of the Slinjas slapped flat against the far wall, the mighty sigh of Alexander’s vast lungs, and Pieter’s own stunned heartbeat hammering hard in his chest.

  Operation: His Royal Whiskers was complete.

  Pop! went the last of the hazelnuts.

  “See?” Teresa said to the Czar at last. “It doesn’t matter how weak you are. If you have friends, they’ll lend you their strength.”

  Pieter thought the Czar would either be too furious or too stunned to reply. But despite the fact that he was disarmed and held firmly to the floor, he did not look trapped or beaten.

  Instead, he was smiling.

  “Perhaps,” he said, voice strained beneath the weight of Alexander. “But you’ve forgotten one thing.”

  Teresa scowled. “What’s that?”

  And then she froze, and Pieter felt something clamber onto his shoulder.

  “Me,” said Sir Klaus.

  Going unnoticed is the talent of all mice, and Sir Klaus had honed that particular skill to deadly perfection. The minute the fight had started, he had slipped from sight and mind completely, just as he always did. Now the Spymaster had suddenly reappeared, drawing his sword like a silver blade of grass. He held the point to Pieter’s neck.

  “Release the Czar, Young Majesty,” Sir Klaus said to the prince. “Now.”

  Alexander hissed at the mouse. The noise was so deafening, it made Pieter rock back on his heels slightly. Teresa edged forward a fraction. Just another few steps and she could reach out and—

  “Stay where you are, traitor.” Sir Klaus held up a paw to her. “Lord Xin has coated my sword with the cobra venom of the Slinjas. Take another step, and the Tallymaster will be dead in a dozen heartbeats.”

  Teresa clenched her fists in helpless rage. “How can you do this?” she said to the mouse. “I fed you crumbs
and nibbles every day.”

  Sir Klaus’s voice was pained, but his grip on his sword did not waver. “You showed me much kindness, it is true. But I am a knight, in sworn service to the Czar. If I break my oath, I am no knight at all. Now tell the prince to free His Majesty.”

  “Don’t worry, son,” sneered the Czar from beneath Alexander’s paw. “When you release me, nothing bad will happen to Pieter and Teresa. Or to that Baba Sister. I’m going to take good care of all three of them. They’re my guarantee that from now on, you’ll do exactly as I say. You wouldn’t want anything to happen to them, would you?”

  Teresa slumped her shoulders. “Do it, Alexander. Let the Czar go.”

  Alexander began to lift away his paw, freeing his father. The Czar looked triumphant as he began to wriggle free . . .

  “ALEXANDER, WAIT!”

  Pieter’s shout echoed through the hall. Confused, the enormous paw pressed down again. Oof! went the Czar, as he slammed back to the floor.

  Teresa stared at him. “Pieter, what are you doing?”

  The answer was simple mathemagics. “Alexander has the Czar. Sir Klaus has me. That evens out. But no one has you yet, Teresa. You have to run!”

  She gave him one of her looks (the one with the narrowed eyes and the scorn). “I’m going nowhere. We’re in this together, for better or worse. That’s what being friends means.”

  Behind them, the doors to the hall opened. Lord Xin appeared, with his curved claw of a dagger, and Ugor with his blundergun. They began to edge forward, step by step. Pieter had only a few seconds left to convince her.

  “I won’t leave Alexander!” Teresa insisted. “Or Amna! Or you!”

  “There is no me!” Pieter cried. “There’s no Alexander, no Amna, only us! And if you escape, then we’re still twenty-five percent free! We’ve got twenty-five percent more of a chance! Twenty-five percent more hope!” Normally, Teresa Gust didn’t care for percentage-based arguments. But this time, Pieter’s reasoning made perfect sense.