CHAPTER FORTY SEVEN

Jane went into a mild state of shock after hearing that Trinket didn’t want Jane to come to Coronet. Two years ago Lulu had invited three out of four friends to a birthday party. Jane had been the fourth. The feeling of missing out on that enormous occasion had been terrible.

This felt the same.

‘So, now that you have Elion you don’t need me anymore?’ said Jane.

Immediately impatient, Trinket looked at Tom, expecting, perhaps, that Tom would back her up. Only Tom had a blank expression. Trinket turned from him, her cat’s eyes twitching, and her mouth as thin as a pencil.

She spoke with a low voice, meant to be gentle but filled with slinking menace.

‘Don’t forget … I saved your life.’

‘I understand … but … tell me why you don’t want me now? Why save my life just to abandon me in a cave about to be flooded by a river.’

‘I'm not abandoning you here. I will take you into the catacombs where there is an Inn. You can rest in the Inn until Elion and I have completed our business in Coronet.’

‘But why?’

‘Because the path from the Inn to Coronet involves going past the silent children. To get past the children we will have to move fast, and that means keeping the horses light.’

‘So Tom will ride the horse by himself?’

Looking at Tom, Trinket nodded and smiled with her lips drawing green lines up her cheeks.

Tom shook his head, distrustful.

Speaking brightly, Trinket said, ‘It will work better with just the two of us, my Lord.’

‘I think I want Jane with me,’ said Tom.

Reaching into the top of her green tunic, Trinket brought out the leather strap with the iron key, identical to the one that Tom wore.

Tom scratched his ear and leaned toward Trinket to view the key.

‘How do you have this? I understood, after talking to the wood Thrip at the Silver Tongue creek that only the three King’s held keys. I have the thrip King’s key, and the Emperor has a key. To whom does your key belong?’

Trinket raised her eyebrows. ‘It is a queer time when neither the man king, nor the thrip king, nor the dwarf King are holding the keys.’

Tom brought his lip in under his two teeth.

There was silence for a minute.

Finally Tom said:

‘I want Jane with me.’

Trinket nodded, as though she understood that people can hold different (but wrong) opinions from her. She spoke abruptly. ‘We must get moving.’

She mounted, throwing her body over the back of the horse so that she lay flat against its shoulders and neck. Her head would have bumped into the roof of the cave if she sat upright. She put a hand down for Tom to take, to help him onto the horse behind her, but he had already turned away.

‘Ride with me,’ Trinket called.

‘No … I will ride with Jane.’

In a crisis of faith Jane didn’t even want to go with Trinket, but she didn’t know what else to do. Why was Trinket so intent on getting Tom into a machine? She didn’t seem to care for Jane’s desire to find the Wyld Book of Secrets.

Jane mounted her horse and leaned forward over the horse's spine with her nose in a mane that smelled of hay. She put her hand down for Tom to take. Tom held her hand and placed his foot in the left stirrup, his skinny leg way up so that he looked like he was doing the splits. He came up the side of the horse and his momentum nearly pushed him right over the horse and down the other side. He stopped himself from falling by grabbing Jane’s shoulders.

Trinket made a clacking sound in her throat, and her horse jumped, and cantered into the cave, hooves banging and falling flat. There was something aggressive and final in the way Trinket left, as though she was leaving Jane and Tom behind.

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‘Hold on,’ said Jane

Tom gripped her around the waist, until Jane told him to ‘loosen off a little.’

‘I’m not comfortable with heights,’ said Tom. ‘Nor am I comfortable with horses.’

‘I could tell.’

Jane clicked her heels into the side of her little mare and the mare broke into a trot. The mist and water from the floods outside didn’t make it far into the cavern, and the air quickly became dry.

Strange torches were spaced at intervals along the cave walls, casting a gentle radiance. It was possible to pick out the shape of the cave, and the blot of the objects within the cave. The light of the burning torches was queer, as though the flames weren’t made from chemical reactions, like a burning wick or burning fuel. These torches burned with something deeper.

The cavern narrowed and the roof got lower. And Jane and Tom flattened themselves hard along the spine of the horse.

They came to a grotto where several caverns split off.

Waiting, sitting stolidly on her horse, Trinket wore an expression of patience-for-the-idiots.

‘This way,’ she said, and she urged her horse to the right into an upward sloping cave. Jane followed. A moment later they entered a giant underground chamber, so large it could have held a small cathedral. Jane looked up and around with a sense of awe.

Trinket sat upright and turned.

‘This is the Gathering Hall.’

Tom spoke from behind Jane. ‘What kind of gatherings happened here?’

‘There used to be a religious group that lived inside the catacombs. The Castions. They lived here for a thousand years before the twelfth King of Coronet defeated them in a battle.’

The chamber was well litten by torches that were constantly changing colours, sliding from red to pink to purple to blue to aqua to yellow. Embedded in the walls were crystals that shattered the light into tiny pulsing rainbows. Huge boulders and stalactites were strewn across the chamber's floor. Shadows made unsettling shapes amidst the rainbows.

They rode through the cavern and into a maze of tunnels, taking lefts and rights and staircases in a bewildering cascade of decisions that left Jane completely befuddled. They were truly in the catacombs now and even the horses had lost all sense of direction.

Sometimes a path might straddle the edge of an enormous drop with darkness laying far beneath. Other times the path would climb steep stairs that circled up around columns. Sometimes the path narrowed so that the walls squeezed Jane’s legs against the side of the horse. Sometimes there would be a corridor wide enough for two carriages to drive side by side.

The only one who knew where they were going was Trinket, and she changed direction with little thought. Jane wondered how much time the princess had spent in the catacombs to give her such an unerring sense of direction.

After, perhaps, an hour of riding, Trinket said, ‘We are nearly there.’

‘Nearly where?’

Tom seemed bright and interested in what was going on. His voice shouted in Jane’s ear every time he asked Trinket a question.

‘Nearly to the Cave Spiders’ Inn in the town of Grinstone.’

‘What kind of creature lives underground … in a town?’

‘The Drizzles.’

‘What is a Drizzle?’

‘In a moment you will see.’

Presently they emerged into a long and wide and high corridor. On either side of the corridor were small huts. Outside the huts were dozens of rugs all laid out across the road so that it was necessary to walk on the rugs to proceed. The rugs were so colourful and beautiful Tom felt the horses shouldn’t be walking down the centre of them with their filthy hooves.

As they walked slowly along, the residents of Grinstone came out of their little huts, curious. These were the Drizzles. They were little people with wide bodies and hair all over, giving them the appearance of little bears. They had the faces of people, with features bunched together like they had been squashed.

At first the Drizzles didn’t notice Jane and Tom. They were tremendously excited to see Trinket. They milled around, and touched her legs and put their hands on her horse, and they kept praising the ‘Royal Princess’ in the same way that the common people lined the streets and called good wishes to England's young queen.

One of the Drizzles kissed Trinket on the leg, and she gently pushed out and said, ‘That is enough now.’

The kissing Drizzle stepped away from Trinket and looked around with faded blue eyes, until his eyes came to rest on Tom. The Drizzle called with a voice like a little blasting trumpet above the hubbub of Drizzle voices.

‘Silence everyone … look who it is.’

A moment later every Drizzle erupted with joy, like children on Christmas morning.

‘Elion … Elion.’

A small Drizzle with a giant wart on his nose, said, ‘You are worthy of our praise.’

All the praising and ballyhoo continued until it was interrupted when, three huts along the path, there arose a disturbance. A female Drizzle emerged from a hut to stand on a yellow rug that lay outside her door. A wave of silence moved across the Drizzles.

The female Drizzle scowled through a parting in the long hair that dangled across her face. The hair from her head was so long it cascaded across her body and pooled around her feet. If this Drizzle was wearing clothing you wouldn’t know.

She looked at Tom, uninterested in anyone else.

One of the other Drizzles said:

‘Now isn’t the time Demurmur,’

Demurmur put a hand up to stop this Drizzle from saying another word.

She said, ‘I’ll just say one thing.’

‘Please choose another time …

‘Let her speak,’ said a third Drizzle.

Tom, leaning out so that he could see around the bulk of Jane, looked into the eyes of the Drizzle named Demurmur. Jane wondered if Tom had picked up on the fact that this Drizzle was harbouring some kind of distress, and that she was about to direct the nature of this distress at Tom.

Tom seemed like the kind of boy who would try and make other people feel better.

Demurmur crossed her furry little hands across her belly, and cast her eyes down for a moment while she thought. Eventually she brought her eyes up, and they were large and glistening, like the eyes of a surfacing otter.

‘I think it was you who made the people of Paris disappear.’