pulled out two fur coats.
‘Here,’ he said, holding one up for the lawyer.
Schmidt stared at him. ‘What on earth did you bring coats for? The heat would kill us!’
‘Just put it on,’ Lex replied distractedly.
The top, bottom or centre? The broken mirror was bound to be in one of those places. As the top of the castle would be the hardest place to reach, Lex was guessing that it would be there. And to reach the top, they would have to pass through the blue doors, avoiding the red ones very carefully.
Lex pulled on his own coat, swung the bag back onto his shoulders and moved towards the shiny blue door, hardly hearing Schmidt’s complaints in his greedy preoccupation with what treasures he might find in the course of the Game. He pulled open the blue door and Schmidt fell silent as he stared over the top of Lex’s head at the huge icy room before them. Light poured in from the massive windows and cold air rushed towards them, shards of frost clinging to their clothes and hair. The entire room was made of ice, including the huge spiral staircase that curved upwards. Lex smiled smugly at the look of amazement on his employer’s face. ‘Put the coat on,’ he repeated.
‘How did you know?’ Schmidt asked, struggling into the coat as Lex stepped carefully into the room, testing the floor as he went. ‘How did you know the castle would be ice inside?’
‘It’s not entirely. The blue doors lead to ice and the red ones lead to sand and lava.’
‘But how did you know? I don’t remember sky castles appearing in any of the recent Games. You haven’t done this before, have you?’ Schmidt asked suspiciously.
Lex sighed. ‘My grandfather told me, okay?’
Alistair Trent had been a great Chronicler in his day. Fifty years ago, Adventurers were still exploring the Lands Above, but now that enough information had been gathered to create a comprehensive map, people no longer went exploring like they used to, because they could learn about faraway places by reading the Chronicles in the library.
Of course it cost a lot of money to raise an exploratory expedition and so there had only ever been gentlemen Adventurers. The only way for less well-off men to go was by selling their services as a writer, Chronicling the adventure as it happened and then donating the book to the library once it was over. Alistair Trent had been on many different adventures as a young man with several different Adventurers, including the famous Carey East. Lex and Lucius had often delighted as children in the stories Alistair would tell them and, when Lex had first moved to the Wither City, he had spent many an evening in the library reading the Chronicles his grandfather had written, marvelling that the man who’d raised them had really done all those incredible things.
‘Just be quiet and follow me,’ Lex went on. ‘There isn’t time to explain everything to you as we go, so I’m afraid you’ll just have to trust that I know what I’m doing. We need to get to the top,’ he said, pointing to the staircase. ‘Preferably without breaking our necks.’
It wouldn’t be easy. The stairs and balustrade were made of ice. That would make the stairs almost impossible to balance on and the balustrade painful to grip without gloves. Lex reached into his pocket and drew out a pair of the thick gloves that he had found with the coats on the ship.
‘There are gloves in the coat pocket,’ he said to Schmidt, squinting up at the staircase and trying to work out how high it was. Three storeys perhaps? He walked over to the base and gazed up thoughtfully.
‘So what’s your plan?’ Schmidt asked, coming up behind him.
‘What?’
‘How are you going to cheat to get up there?’
‘Cheat?’ Lex smiled. ‘I’m afraid that when it comes to stairs, Mr Schmidt, there is no way to cheat. They just have to be climbed.’
‘But they’re made of ice, you stupid boy.’
‘Yes.’
Lex considered the stairs for a moment longer, trying to think of something that would make the climb easier or, failing that, at least make it possible.
‘Why don’t we fly up?’ he asked at last.
‘Good idea, but for the one obvious flaw.’
‘There’s a desert bat tethered outside, didn’t you see it?’
‘You want to steal the prophet’s bat?’ Schmidt asked, aghast.
Lex wrinkled his nose in distaste. ‘I do wish you’d stop using that word. We would only be borrowing it.’
‘Isn’t it enough that you’ve already lost your brother’s drayfus?’
‘No, it’s never enough, Monty. You wait here, I’m going to fetch it.’
‘It won’t work, anyway. Desert bats have a very low tolerance to the cold. Besides which, they’re incredibly vicious towards anyone who isn’t their handler.’
Lex stopped halfway to the door and turned back around. Schmidt silently cursed himself. Why had he spoken like that? Now the insufferable little know-it-all’s eyes were positively ablaze with curiosity.
‘You’re right. How do you know that?’ Lex asked, walking back to the stairs. ‘I didn’t know that desert bats were required reading for lawyers.’
‘I don’t know, I just assume. It is a logical assumption,’ Schmidt said defensively.
Lex said nothing. But Schmidt realised that he knew he’d just clumsily tried to hide something from him. And Lex knew that Schmidt knew that he knew. What a nightmare this whole situation was!
‘Well, it looks like you’re right,’ Schmidt said briskly. ‘The stairs will have to be tackled the old-fashioned way.’
‘For Gods’ sake, why can’t you keep your damn balance for more than ten bloody seconds!’ Lex snarled, almost tearing his hair out in exasperation.
They were just over halfway up the staircase, about twenty feet above the cold ice floor below. The going had been painfully slow for Lex. There is no fast way to ascend an ice staircase — no fraudster can alter this material fact, no matter how talented he might be. By clinging to the railings, they were managing to stay upright — most of the time — but slipping on the ice was unavoidable and the effort of climbing required the whole body to be constantly tensed. Lex was feeling tired himself but the fuss that the lawyer was making was absolutely disgraceful. He just kept on falling over! And what was worse, he was actually letting go of the balustrade when he did, so that a couple of times he had actually fallen down a few stairs before managing to stop himself.
‘We seem to be taking one step forward for every two steps back!’ Lex exclaimed. ‘Why won’t you just hold onto the rail when you slip? You’d stay upright then. I mean it doesn’t take all that much intelligence to grasp that simple fact, does it?’
The lawyer was out of breath and Lex could tell from the way he was moving that he had hurt himself when he’d fallen. What an infuriating old idiot he was!
‘You’re slowing me down!’ Lex hissed. ‘Stop being so obstinate and hold on to the damned balustrade!’
Lex turned to continue the climb when Schmidt did something utterly unexpected. He pulled a pork pie out of his bag… and bit into it. The body switch was instantaneous. Lex sucked in his breath in startled pain. He was now standing further down the stairs in the lawyer’s body. Every muscle seemed to be on fire.
‘You greedy idiot,’ he wheezed, stifling the familiar distaste at hearing himself talk with Schmidt’s voice. ‘We have to eat together, remember? Get back down here and finish the pie with me.’
‘You think you can do so much better,’ Schmidt said in an odd tone from above him. ‘I’d like to see you prove it.’
Lex looked up, hardy believing his ears. ‘You switched us on purpose?’
‘Yes, I want to learn. Show me how it’s done, Lex.’
‘All right,’ Lex retorted, never able to resist a challenge. ‘All right, I’ll show you how it’s done, old man. Although really, for something so simple, I would have thought that a verbal explanation would have been more than sufficient.’
Lex stuffed the pork pie into his pocket and then gripped the banister in his gloved hand. Or tried to. He glanced down with a frown. The old man’s hands were shaking. Lex silently willed them to stop. It didn’t work. Scowling, Lex struggled his way up a few stairs before his feet inevitably slipped on the ice and, despite his best efforts, he was unable to retain a firm enough grip on the banister to prevent himself from falling over. He swore irritably and dragged himself back upright. After several more minutes, he was getting rather sick of continually bruising himself and called up to the lawyer who was now several stairs ahead of him, ‘Okay, you’ve made your
