‘Grembilard will,’ he said, ‘naturally find you a suitable chamber. If you stay put this time, it will almost certainly not move. Of course, I can’t guarantee it, the palace being what it is.’
‘This palace is insane!’ I shouted.
‘True. It was made to be mad, by my mother. One of her most cunning tricks.’
The Star blared on the clearing. His face was blue-white. I expect mine was too.
Then something growled, long and low, echoing and seeming not far off.
‘It’s only a vrabburr,’ he chillily (I think) said.
‘Oh, that’s all right then.’
‘They don’t come into the gardens. Stay inside the walls and you’ll be perfectly safe.’
‘Oh will I? Will I?’
‘I’m afraid, Claidis, I don’t understand you,’ he said. ‘If it’s all been so difficult, you shouldn’t have asked to come here, should you?’
‘ASKED???’ That was all I could get out.
Somewhere or other, the safely-outside vrabburr (or another one) growled again. Which was the only reply I got.
Venn-etc. just walked off. He was on his stair, going up, back to his room.
From the back, he didn’t look like Argul, or Nemian – or anyone I’d ever met.
I sat down again on my chair; I was so stunned I didn’t even try to think.
After a while Jotto appeared. He bent over me.
‘Don’t you fret, now,’ said Jotto. ‘He can be a bit – standoffish. His mother, you know. She was very harsh. Left him when he was only nine. Grem says the Rose Room will be all right. Come and see.’
The west walls, which face across the gulf west, and the outer corridors there, and most of the rooms in these outer areas of the Rise, don’t move ever. That is, they don’t have the mechanisms and can’t.
It seems my yellow rooms, though in the west wall, do move – well, they did. But they hadn’t for ‘years’, and were thought ‘quiet’.
The inner rooms of the palace can almost all move. They do it at will – only it isn’t will – it’s some clockwork thing, which makes them shift about, sliding and slotting around each other, but not in any real order.
Although Jotto told me that some rooms and sets of rooms do tend to ‘go wandering off’ about the same times of day and night, and in the same sort of direction – ‘quite often’.
He started explaining all this, or trying to, as he showed me the Rose Room. He was obviously trying to cheer me up, console me for Venn-etc. being unfriendly. But it just added to my feelings of utter furious frantic bewilderment.
‘The thing is, you mustn’t go out of here until we fetch you. Someone will always come to you, if you press this carved flower, here. They may take a little while, though, so be patient, lady dear. Sometimes a walk of ten minutes can take all morning, the way things move around.’
Apparently if a human presence – or even a clockwork one, as Jotto bashfully added – is in a room, it doesn’t normally move but stays put.
Treacle had been left in the yellow rooms earlier, just in case, to keep them anchored. She only slipped out when I came in. Then, when I put one foot outside (twice), the yellow rooms ‘woke up’. Perhaps they thought I’d gone. Anyway, they got frisky. (That was why Treacle had tried to stop me going out and jumped right at me.) After that though, even when she and I stayed in the rooms, they took off. And the staircase had moved, hadn’t it, too, when Treacle left it?
Was I even listening to Jotto’s explanation? I must have been, to be able to write it down now. Does it make any sense? I doubt it.
Finally I said to Jotto, who was by then artistically arranging some pineapples he’d collected on the way, in a dish, ‘Who told Ve – him – I asked to come here?’
Jotto glanced at me. ‘Well. I can’t say. Your companions, perhaps?’
‘That Yazkool, you mean, and Hrald—?’
‘Or it might have been in the flying letter.’
‘The – what’s that?’
‘Oh, just a letter, dear.’ Intent on getting the last pineapple just right, Jotto held up his hand for silence.
‘Oh blast the pineapples, Jotto. He has to be told – now – that I was brought here against my will. And I – want to go home!’ I added in a wail.
But Jotto just positioned the last of the fruits and beamed at me. ‘There, isn’t that better? Nothing like a proper display of fruit and flowers to make things civilized. Now don’t you worry. You’ll feel right as rain after a nice sleep.’
‘You don’t believe me. He didn’t. Of course I’d have to want to come here,’ I sarcastically added.
‘That’s right!’ cried Jotto, even his beam beaming.
I gave up.
This Rose Room is about twenty feet tall. Everything is roses, and rose colour, including dresses in its closet. I hate it, naturally.
VRABBURRS AND OTHERS
I suppose another endless century has gone by. Haven’t marked the days or anything. Days here are alike, and even weather seldom changes, except for a couple of insane storms. (You can see them coming, from the Rise.) I’ve counted twenty cats, all with domed foreheads. But since a lot are black or brown, and I haven’t seen all of them up close, some might be ones I’d already counted …
What to put down. I mean, things have sort of happened. Nothing much.
I’m supposed to stay in this big room, because it won’t move about if I’m in here. And it hasn’t. But I’ve been out too, into the gardens, which don’t move ever, thank goodness.
I fully expected the Rose Room to have made off when I came back, and I’d taken everything I wanted outside with me. But the Room was there. Jotto says this R. Room is ‘sleepy’. It hasn’t gone anywhere for ages. (I reminded him about the
