own troubles.’ She scowled. The way he talked about Finn annoyed her, his pretence of not caring, of not being hurt. Sometimes she wanted to scream her anxiety at him but that would be useless, would only draw the grin, the cool shrug. There was an armour round Keiro. He wore it flamboyantly and invisibly. It was as part of him as his dirty yellow hair, his hard blue eyes. Only once, when the Prison had cruelly shown them his imperfection, had she ever glimpsed through it. And she knew he would never forgive Incarceron for that, or for what he felt he was.
The horse stopped.
It whickered. Its ears flattened.
Alert, Keiro said, ‘See anything?’ Great briars wreathed round them, barbed with spines.
‘No,’ she said.
But she could hear something. A small sound, very far off, like a whisper from a nightmare.
Keiro had heard it too. He turned, listening. ‘A voice? What’s it saying?’ Faint, repeated over and over, a tiny breath of triple syllables.
She kept very still. It seemed crazy, impossible. But.
‘I think it’s calling my name,’ she said.
‘Attia! Attia, can you hear me?’ Jared adjusted the output and tried again. He was hungry but the bread roll on the platter was hard and dry. Still, it was better than feasting upstairs with the Queen.
Would she notice he wasn’t there? He prayed not, and the anxiety made his fingers tremble on the controls.
Over his head the screen was a stripped—down mass of wires and circuitry, cables rigged into and out of its connectors. The Portal was silent, apart from its usual hum.
Jared had grown to like its silence. It soothed him, so that even the pain that pushed its jagged edge into his chest seemed blunted down here. Somewhere high above, the labyrinth of the Court teemed with intrigue, tower on tower, chamber within chamber, and beyond the stables and gardens lay the countryside of the Realm, wide and perfect in its beauty under the stars.
He was a dark flaw in the heart of that beauty He felt the guilt of it, and it made him work with agitated concentration.
Since the Queen’s silken blackmail, her offer of the Academy’s bidden lore, he had barely been able to sleep, lying awake in his narrow bed, or pacing the gardens so deep in hope and fear that it had taken hours for him to notice how closely she was having him followed.
So, just before the banquet, he had sent her a brief note.
I accept your offer. I leave for the Academy tomorrow at dawn.
Jared Sapiens Every word had been a wound, a betrayal. That was why he was here now.
Two men had followed him to the Sapients’ Tower, he had made sure of that, but Protocol meant that they had not been able to enter. The Tower here at Court was a great stone keep full of the apartments of the Queen’s Sapienti, and unlike his own at home at the Wardenry this was a model of Era, a maze of orreries and alchemical alembics and leatherbound books, a mockery of learning. But it was a true labyrinth, and in his first days here he had discovered passageways and covered vaults that led discreetly out to the stables, the kitchens, the laundry rooms, the stills. Losing the Queen’s men had been almost too easy.
But he had made sure. For weeks now the staircase down to the Portal had been guarded by his own devices. Half of the spiders that hung on plastic webs in the dirty cellars were his observers.
‘Attia. Attia. Can you hear me? This is Jared. Please answer.’ This was his last chance. The Warden’s appearance had shown him that the screen still worked. That artful flickering out had not fooled Jared — Claudia’s father had switched off rather than answer Finn’s question.
At first he had thought of searching for Keiro, but Attia was safer. He had sampled the recordings of her voice, the images of her he and Claudia had seen through the Key; using the finding mechanism he had once seen the Warden use he had experimented for hours with the complicated imputs. Suddenly, when he had been almost ready to give up, the Portal had sparked and crackled into life. He hoped it was searching, pinpointing the girl in the vastness of the Prison, but it had been humming all night now and in his weariness he could no longer keep out the feeling that it wasn’t really achieving anything at all.
He drank the last of the water, then reached into his pocket and brought out the Warden’s watch and put it on the desk.
The tiny cube clicked on the metal surface.
The Warden had told him that this cube was Incarceron.
He spun it gently, with his little finger.
So small.
So mysterious.
A prison you could hang on your watchchain.
He had subjected it to every analysis he knew, and there were no readings. It had no density, no magnetic field, no whisper of power. No instrument he possessed had been able to penetrate its silvery silence. It was a cube of unknown composition, and inside it was another world.
Or so the Warden had told him.
It struck Jared now that they had only John Arlex’s word for that. What if it had just been his last taunting legacy to his daughter? What if it had been a lie?
Was that why he, Jared, hadn’t told her yet?
He had to do it now. She should know.The thought that she should also know about his arrangement with the Queen rose up at once and tormented him.
He said, ‘Attia, Attia. Answer me. Please.’ But all that answered was a sharp beep in his pocket. He whipped out the scanner and swore softly. Maybe the watchers had got tired of snoring on the Tower doorstep and come looking for him.
Someone was creeping through the cellars.
‘We should stay on the path,’ Keiro snapped down at her; she was staring intently into the undergrowth.
‘I tell you I heard it. My name.’ Keiro scowled and slid down from the horse. ‘We can’t ride in there.’
‘Then we crawl’ She had crouched, was on hands and knees. In the green gloom a tangle of roots sprawled under the high leaves. ‘Underneath. It has to be fairly close!’ Keiro hesitated. ‘If we turn aside the Prison will think we’re double-crossing it.’
‘Since when were you scared of Incarceron?’ She looked up at him and he stared back hard, because she always seemed to know just how to needle him. Then she said, ‘Wait here.
I’ll go on my own,’ and crawled in.
With a hiss of irritation Keiro tethered the horse tight and crawled in after her. The leaf litter was a mass of tiny brittle foliage; he felt it crunch under his knees, stab through his gloves. The roots were vast, a snaky smooth mesh of metal.
After a while he realized they were great cables, snaking out into the Prison’s soil, supporting the foliage like a canopy.
There was hardly room to raise his head, and over his bent back briars and thorns and brambles of steel tore and snagged his hair.
‘Keep lower,’ Attia muttered. ‘Lie flat.’ Keiro swore long and viciously as his scarlet coat ripped at the shoulder. ‘For god’s sake, there’s nothing—’
‘Listen.’ She stopped, her foot in his face. ‘Hear it?’ A voice.
A voice of static and crackle, as if the spiny branches themselves had picked up its repeated syllables.
Keiro rubbed his face with a dirty hand. ‘Go on,’ he said quietly.
They crawled under the razor-sharp tangle. Attia dug her fingers in the litter and pulled herself along. Pollen made her sneeze; the air was thick with micro—dust. A Beetle scurried, clicking, through her hair.
She wriggled past a thick trunk and saw, as if it was wreathed in the forest of thorn and razorwire, the wall of a dark building.
‘It’s like Rix’s book,’ she gasped.
‘Another one?’
‘A beautiful princess sleeps for a hundred years in a ruined castle.’ Keiro grunted, dragging his hair from
