Страница 72 из 77
"How do you know this?" Will asked.
"I told you that Eitri was a gossip. We get together for tea in the afternoons. It's the only vice I have left to me."
The Land of Youth wavered and was gone, and Will found himself standing in the cabinet of curiosities again. Dame Serena, old once more, pressed something into Will's hand. It was the ivory fire-amulet he had failed to steal the other day. "Take this," she whispered. "Just in case you need it."
"Why, Dame Serena!" Will said in astonishment. You do like me after all."
"Oh, zip your lip, or I'll give you the back of my hand. You're a fool, like every other king I've ever known, and I'm doubly a fool for trying to help you." Her look softened. "But I've always had a soft spot for kings."
They were expecting him to make his move that afternoon. So of course he did.
Will was taking the air in the garden when Ariel said, "The Master of the Tests wishes to see you, sir."
"Florian? Send him to the reception room. Make him wait." "He says its urgent, sir."
"Then tell him I'll be with him as soon as possible, and an hour from now remind me that he's waiting."
Will stuck a cigarette in his mouth and lit up. It was a deliberately provocative gesture, and one that engendered a response almost immediately. Eitri came ru
"Why not?"
"There's a city ordinance against smoking in a government park. Which your gardens, technically, are."
"You have a smoking room, sir," Ariel said. "It's rather well appointed."
"Yeah? Well, I can't be bothered to go there." Will blew a mouthful of smoke in the general direction of his majordomo's voice. "So what're you go
"I can't touch you, of course, sir. But I can dock all of the palace staff day's pay for every incident." Eitri, who had a gambling problem he fondly imagined wasn't common gossip, looked stricken. "If that is what you want."
Will cursed and threw the cigarette down on the ground and stomped on it. In a flash, Eitri was on his knees, sweeping the ashes into his hand. "Just... bugger off, all of you, okay? Leave me alone. If I can't smoke, at least let me have five minutes alone. Go away, both of you, and take the rest of the staff with you." Yes, sir. Thank you, sir." Eitri said fervently.
"As you wish, sir."
The creepy feeling that Will always got when Ariel was near evanesced.
As soon as he was sure he was alone, Will flipped over the wicker table so that it made a basket shape with a short pedestal-well at the center, rather like the mold tor a bundt cake. He dumped the fruit from a large copper bowl on a nearby table and placed the bowl snugly atop the pedestal. Then he tossed the fire-amulet into the bowl and activated its rune with a muttered word. Heat washed up from it, not enough to make the canopy lift free of the ground — that would come later — but enough so that it tugged lightly against its guy lines. These Will untied from their stakes and retied to the edges of the basket. The tent poles he let fall to the ground.
He was ready!
Will hastily set several armfuls of potted plants into one side of the basket to balance it and then climbed into the other. "Sir? What are you doing?"
"My duty," Will said. He muttered a second word that brought the fire amulet to full power. Heat gushed up from the copper bowl and with a great whoosh the canopy overhead billowed as it filled with hot air.
Will untied the witch-knot and a brisk west wind sprang up, scattering napkins across the patio and pushing at the swollen canopy.
Alarmed servitors came ru
"Enough."
The air grew cool. The canopy-balloon ceased to flutter. In the center of the garden Ariel had manifested in his physical form: a slim figure with a chalk-white face, lank black hair and a rooster's cox-comb. His mouth was twisted and bitter. Yet his voice was calm and dulcet.
Ariel raised an arm and twisted a hand and the balloon returned without fuss to its point of origin. Servitors ran up to hasten away the fire-amulet, to right the wicker table, to restore the scattered fruit to the copper bowl, to reerect the canopy. In seconds all was as it had been before.
They had caught him. But of course, there had never really been any question of that.
Now that Ariel stood before him in visible form, eyes cold and mouth cruel, Will found himself more convinced than ever that the creature was his household's spy master, the one that Eitri and the yakshis and for all he knew Dame Serena as well, reported to.
Slowly Ariel faded back into insubstantiality.
"Sir?" his voice said out of nowhere. "This is perhaps a little early, but... you wished to be reminded that Florian L'Inco
Like most of the rooms in the Palace of Leaves, the reception chamber was far too big and far too ornate for Will to feel comfortable in. The ceiling was white with rose-colored plaster swags of fruits, ribbons, and medallions. If Fabergé had made a pink Wedgwood teapot the size of a bus depot and turned it inside out, it would look much like this.
Florian, of course, looked right at home. He rose gracefully from a leather chair at Will's approach, stubbing out his cigar in a nearby ashtray.
"I must speak to you in absolute confidence," Will said without preamble. "The other evening in the garden you said things I am certain would not have been spoken had you thought one of the palace spies might overhear them. So I presume you have means of ensuring our privacy."
Florian removed a BlackBerry from his jacket, tapped several keys, and pocketed it again. "You may speak your mind freely." "Tell me," Will said. "Am I truly the king?" "Yes," Florian said. "I honestly believe that you are." "Then kneel.'' "What?"
"Kneel!" Will repeated with force.
Florian L'Inco
"Both knees!"
Florian's face hardened, but he obeyed. "Touch your forehead to the ground." Flushed with humiliation, he did so.
So, thought Will, this is what true power feels like. He could grow to like it. It would be the easiest thing in the world to abuse. Which in and of itself was another compelling reason for him to leave this place immediately. "Stand," he said, "and take oft all your clothing."
Warily, Florian did as he was told. "May I ask what all this is about?"
"Absolutely," Will casually picked up a heavy crystal ashtray. Then he smashed it into the side of Florian's head. "While you're in the hospital recovering from that concussion, I'll be making my way out of Babel."
The spell Will used to disguise himself as Florian was the flimsiest of things, cobbled together from tissue paper, moonlight, cobwebs, and filched fingernail parings. If an inmate in a state penitentiary had employed it, it would have worked no better than a gun carved out of soap and blackened with shoe polish. Which is to say, well enough to get him in trouble, but no so well as to get him over the wall. But the Palace of Leaves was unique among prisons in that its wardens had forgotten that it was one, and thus were not prepared for a break.
Wearing Florian's stolen face and his clothing as well, Will walked unmolested to the main elevator bank where a haint so deferential he almost wasn't there at all, rang for a car. The great bronze doors opened and he got in. "Ground floor," he told the operator. Downward they went. The car stopped only once, at the seventieth floor, to let on a passenger.