The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There

CHAPTER XV
TEMPORARY MAD ASSISTANT

In Which September Gets Some Experience with Deep-Sea Diving, Fairy History, and Practickal Physicks

September plunged through the waves.

The Forgetful Sea grew dark quickly and totally once the moonlight ceased to pierce the water. The cold tide pulled at her with biting fingers, yanking her hair back to get at her face, her mouth, her nose, to get inside her and scrub her clean. Still, September was a good swimmer and had managed to get a deep breath before she splashed down. She kicked powerfully up toward the surface, but her strokes only sunk her deeper into the chill ocean. Very soon she would not have enough breath to get back, but the harder she swam, the faster she fell.

The top layer of her skirt, a gauzy golden veil, snapped up swiftly and covered her face. September clawed at it, panicking. But the skirt flattened against her face like a glittering mask, sweeping back over her skull, flowing up into her nose and down into her mouth. She tried to keep her precious breath, but she couldn’t help choking on the fabric as it wormed into her. September braced for the end, for the fast inrushing of salt water and then, well, blackness and as little pain as possible, she hoped. Now that she was certainly going to die, September felt reasonably calm about it. She thought of the fish she had caught and killed on that other Fairyland sea. Poor fish! Perhaps you can laugh at the joke-both of us perished on the sea. Some sailor I turned out to be!

September squeezed her eyes shut. Any moment, the ocean would swallow her just as she had swallowed that sad little fish so long ago.

But she could breathe! As easily as if she stood on land in the sunshine with a stiff breeze blowing. The skirt masked her face from the cold water, sending blessed air down into her lungs. The rest of the Watchful Dress swelled up around her like a bright balloon, to keep her safe and the pressure of all those heaps of water off her poor bones. It warmed and glowed slightly with the heat it gave to her clammy skin. The wine-colored coat stretched grumpily around the clever, clever dress. Thank you, Glasswort Groof! September thought giddily, relief seeping through her along with the warmth.

Far down below her, September saw a pale, fitful light. At first, she could not be sure it was anything but a great fish flitting by, but as she kicked downward toward it, it grew brighter. Since I can’t swim up, I might as well swim down, she thought. Avogadra said I’d have to go very far down, sooner or later. Might as well be sooner.

The Watchful Dress spat out streams of bubbles, sucking in jets of water through the sleeves and propelling her along as best it could. Still, the light lay deep down at the bottom of the Forgetful Sea, and September’s arms and legs ached from swimming. Saturday pushed me. Her mind insisted on bringing up this subject. She did not want to think about it. He meant to kill me. September tried to focus on the light, but her thoughts would not obey her. No, not kill me-make me forget. Forget everything. He said we’d live together in a house of pumpkin and gold-yes, once I couldn’t remember why I’d come to Fairyland-Below, or recall Fairyland-Above, or even Omaha and Mother and Father and any reason not to live in Tain and feast every night! How could he? That’s as bad as killing, to take away everything a person is. September had never been betrayed before. She did not even know what to call the feeling in her chest, so bitter and sour.

Poor child. There is always a first time, and it is never the last time.

But why can I remember that he did it? Aubergine said even the sea spray makes the head fuzzy. But I remember it perfectly! And all the rest, too! Why, I have never been so clear about things! The light shone strong and steady now, a warm, ruddy light spilling up from the ocean floor. It lit every part of September in her balloon-dress and deep-water diving skirt. She was falling very fast. The Watchful Dress spat out a powerful jet from her sleeves and her collar.

The light twitched and wriggled in the dark-September could almost touch it. She kicked harder, swimming after it, and in a moment or two, she could see that the light was a lantern, clutched in the tiny hand of a Monaciello.

Avogadra swam ahead, lighting the way, encased in a smart diving suit with a huge bell for her hat. She held her lantern out to show September the path through the sea. At sorest need, when a brother passed beyond all human aid, we’d come in the dark and show them the way out. That was what Monaciello did, their oldest instinct and profession. A tear fell onto September’s cheek. The skirt of the Watchful Dress drank it up and wicked it away.

Avogadra set down on a sandy, empty seafloor, where a glass hatch rose up before her in a little dome. She knocked three times on it with her lantern, and then the little monk vanished, leaving September alone on the endless wasteland at the bottom of the ocean.

It doesn’t matter what Saturday did or Ell, either. I have to keep going. A Monaciello would keep going, no matter what.

The hatch had a glass wheel, like the steering wheel of a great ship. Warm, buttery, rosy light flowed through the frosty, ice-patched glass. September felt sure what ever lay inside the hatch was much better and more friendly to the body of a young girl than the dark freeze of the Forgetful Sea. And besides, Avogadra had brought her here. This was the way out. The way home. September reached out to turn the wheel. The Watchful Dress had made its sleeves into coppery-red gloves for her when it swelled up. And a good thing, too, for even through the gloves the wheel was so cold as to turn any girl-skin that touched it black and dead.

September leaned her weight into the wheel and pushed as hard as she could. It did not even creak. A few shards of ice broke off and floated slowly upward. She tried again, wincing beneath her golden mask. It refused to budge, as stubborn as a pickle jar. She took hold of a glass spoke to go again.

Beside her hands appeared two new ones-silky, strong, dark-green hands, made of nothing but the long rope-belt of the Watchful Dress. The two of them pushed the wheel, straining. The Dress tore a little, and then a little more.

Whips of wine-colored leather shot out and wrapped tight around the smooth handle of the wheel. The tails of September’s coat, feeling much put upon, shoved with such a force that it nearly knocked September off her feet. But the wheel moved. It ground around in a slow circle, ice splintering off of the thing and drifting up through the miles of black water. The wheel groaned and squeaked in protest. September feared the whole sea would rush in once she opened it, but she could not see how else to manage. She lifted the hatch-and the Forgetful Sea minded its manners.

September sighed with her whole self and climbed down into the hole at the bottom of the sea.

September fell, soaking wet, out of the ceiling of a house and landed roughly on a long worktable. It creaked under her weight, but held. Several pieces of metal and ceramic made themselves understood underneath her, poking her spine and her shoulders. Her vision spun, gone hazy with the sudden taste of real air and absence of a half a mile of ocean pressing in on her. A large, greasy hand grabbed hers and pulled her upright. September pulled the sodden Dress off of her face.

A woman looked at her with curiosity, and for an awful, brilliant, dizzying moment, September thought it was her mother. She had a broad, dear face creased with dirt and motor oil, friendly green eyes, and her hair pulled back in a short ponytail, tied up in a kerchief. Her shoulders squared broad and strong, her fingernails black with work grime. She wore a dark-blue boiler suit with lapels that had probably been crisp and dapper before she’d gone crawling through some huge infernal engine to find the erring part. The suit had a name tag that read: B. Cabbage.

But it was not her mother. A pair of iridescent wings poked through the woman’s work dress, like a luna moth’s wings, with long, drooping tips. So much black machine grease and dust and soot clotted those wings that September could not be quite sure what color they were underneath it all. She took a ragged breath as the hope went out of her that somehow her mother was here with her, impossibly, in Fairyland. Machines and pieces of machines, devices, pumps, motors, wheels, and gears and broken bits of bearings, shafts, cranks, and rods crowded the room on every surface. A small path had been cleared through the floor, but no other inch of space spared.

The Fairy reached into her breast pocket and took out a mea sur ing tape. She hooked the business end into September’s shoe and snapped out a length, all the way up to the crown of her head. She put her thumb on the mea sure ment and peered at it.

“One hundred and twenty-odd centimeters,” B. Cabbage said to herself. “Thirteen years, born under the sign of the Bull, carrying 2.3 kilograms of hardship and sorrow, rather a lot for your age, second seasonal cycle, recent contact with harsh Q-rays. Missing.00021 of total body weight due to shadow surgery, memory excised via Ocean one hour, fifty-two minutes, and seventeen seconds ago, replaced by Järlhopp Clutch one hour, fifty-two minutes and six teen seconds ago, unit reads thirty-seven percent Gumption by volume.”

The Clutch! September’s hand flew to Gneiss’s pendant hanging around her neck. It pulsed warm in her hand. Saturday hadn’t known about it. He hadn’t guessed she had such a thing.

“You can tell all that about me from your mea sur ing tape?”

“Well, I use the metric system. It’s the only way to get really exact numbers.” The Fairy stuck out her calloused hand. “Belinda Cabbage, Mad Scientist and Proprietor.”

“September. I’m…sorry about your roof.” Where had she heard the name Belinda Cabbage before?

Belinda Cabbage looked up over September’s head. The ceiling, though showing several alarming blast-scars, seemed no worse for wear and entirely hatchless.

“Looks all right to me.” The Fairy shrugged. All the same, she selected a piece of equipment from the table, one cluttered with delicate colorful antennae and ampules of liquid with varying numbers of bubbles in them. Several etched lines marked mea sure ments on their surfaces. B. Cabbage shook it vigorously, then held the device up to the ceiling and waited for the bubbles to settle. The antennae spun-some of them looked like they might have once belonged to a snail or three.

“Wondrous strange!” Cabbage exclaimed. “Where did you say you came from?”

“I didn’t, but I came through a hatch at the bottom of the Forgetful Sea.”

Belinda Cabbage smacked her free hand against her forehead. It left a sooty print. “My foot! I must have left it there! What a menace that ocean is, I tell you what! The Forgetful Sea is miles and miles from here, girl. And then miles more! But I think, I think I might have collected samples, oh, it couldn’t have been more than a hundred years ago, and it was so much easier to open up a squidhole than to walk all that way. Ugh, who wants to walk when you can tentacle?”

“Squidhole?”

“Oh, well, you’ll be familiar with the basic Physicks of wyrmholes I’m sure. You need a frightful lot of equipment to manage one; the grocery list is hideous. Bee-souls, eel-hearts, about six liters of gnome ointment, a hair off of the head of Cutty Soames, and that old pirate never falls asleep, no matter how much gloamgrog he drinks-and that’s just for the preliminaries! Anyone with a beaker full of sense goes for squid-holes instead. You need a Dread Device and several willing field mice, that’s all!” She gestured at a bluish, fleshy sort of engine the size of a bread box. It had been shoved absentmindedly on top of a stack of journals and manuals. Under its eerily undulating skin, toothy gears spun. Several long fleshy tubes extended from its face and hung limply down the stack of books to lie dormant on the table, their ends capped with glass. Inside the glass, tiny, sweet-faced mice slept curled up with their tails in their paws. “A wyrmhole just goes from one place to another place. Dull as a street. A squidhole starts in one place-like my shop here-and goes to five to ten other places, depending on how many field mice you managed to get. I suspect I left an end open, and I do apologize for that-sloppy of me, truly sloppy.”

September did not like the look of the Dread Device. She felt it prudent to change the subject. And suddenly, she did remember where she had heard the name before. She closed her Clutch in her hand. “I heard about you on the radio,” September said. “But I thought you lived in Fairyland-Above. ‘Belinda Cabbage’s Hard-Wear Shoppe, bringing you all the latest in Mad Scientific Equipment.’ ”

“That’s me!” The Fairy agreed with a wide, frank smile. “And I do, or I did. But my Narrative Barometer started reading Imminent Katabasis Event, and I knew it was time to go underground.” This time, Belinda Cabbage pointed at a smart brass dial on the wall, sealed in a glass bell. It had hands like a clock’s, though there seemed to be at least seven or eight of them, and possible readings of Katabasis, Anabasis, Incoming Hero(ine), Musical Thrones, Kidnapping, Locked Room Mystery, Coming of Age, Trea sure Hunt, Epic, War Saga, Edda, and many others in concentric rings so small September could not read them. “I built it to track Pandemonium, so I could get home whenever I needed to. But then Pandemonium stopped moving around, and it seemed a bit useless-but I never throw anything away. Jolly way of behaving, no matter what my assistants might say! Want not, waste not! And a good thing too. Imminent Katabasis Event means something’s going on Down Below, because Katabasis means a journey to the underworld. It means put your business trousers on and head underground! I don’t mean to suggest you didn’t know that! It’s only that I am also a Mad Professor, and I often teach, so I’m used to explaining things. Just raise your hand if you don’t understand. Anysquid! I’ve been investigating the shadows and building and thinking down here. I think better by myself, anyway. Broke my heart to leave Eva Lovewool, my first assistant and an Extremely Mad Scientist in her own right. Heart of my heart, that girl. Handsome as an armoire and twice as useful! But she’ll keep the roof on the place till things sort themselves out.”

September twisted her cold hands. “Will things work themselves out?” The Watchful Dress was valiantly trying to dry itself, but having little success. Parts of it inflated and deflated as it shook off the Forgetful Sea.

“They usually do. If you take the long view, as I do. Formally, I’m a Queer Physickist, but I dabble in Questing, too, hence my Barometer. We Queerfolk are big-picture types. You have to be, to see how the Queerness of the World works itself through everything. Queer Physickists are so terribly Queer that most people don’t even like to have us for tea. We might wear the tea on our heads to prove our theory on the Gravitationals of Guest Magic. We might be practicing Being a Broom or on a Visibility Fast. So many just shun us altogether. You have to be able to see the world as a whole to bear it-to see the Queerness that moves in every bit of Fairyland, how it threads through every heart and field, how we are all bound together up in the Weird Well of the World. Can’t get too upset about folk being wicked. The Queer old world does so love to turn itself on its head on the regular. Anyway, Fairyland has a kind of weight to it. It tends to settle back into its own ways. Oh, we’ll have a wicked Thorn-King for a century or nine, but in the end, where there’s a Thorn-King, there’s a Rose-Maid to throttle him silly. It might take her a while to get here, but like I said, you have to take a long view.”

“That’s not much comfort to people who have to live their whole lives with a Thorn-King being wretched to them!”

“Isn’t it? I think it’s comforting. I thought about it a great deal when the Marquess was making her mess. I had a good place to watch it all happen, up in Groangyre Tower. I could see her warping the weft of the world. And I certainly didn’t appreciate her telling me to stop my Electricks program or to fire Miss Lovewool just because her Reign Gauge said the old tyrant wouldn’t last. Well, I know what loyalty is, thank you very much. And at night I comforted myself by lathing out a Calendar Centrifuge-to whirl out the present, dark day and leave behind only the distant tomorrow when I would be able to breathe again. It was comforting. Of course, Fairies can afford to look at things that way. We live so long.”

“But… Miss Cabbage, do you really? I know something’s happened to the Fairies up above. There are rather few of you left. Do you really live so long? If it’s something the Marquess did, shouldn’t it be all mended by now?”

“You know,” said the Mad Scientist, “many years passed between Queen Mallow and the Marquess. She was hardly the only person capable of making dreadful things happen. I am working on the problem. I and all of us in Groangyre and Shearcoil both. You needn’t worry about it. What I mean to say in plain Professorial terms is mind your own business, begging your pardon. I know humans have sensitive manners.”

September minded her business. She didn’t know quite what else to say, however. An awkward silence fell between them like a curtain.

“Would you like to see what I’m working on now?” Cabbage said hopefully.

“Certainly!” said September gratefully.

The Fairy rummaged behind her Dread Device, leaning over it to get something on the far side of her worktable, kicking her legs up into the air as she reached. She came back with a most peculiar object which she pointed alarmingly at September, a strange sort of gun made of brass and silver and mother-of-pearl. It had a big barrel, as big as a grown man’s fist, and a long pneumatic tube hanging from it, attached to nothing in par tic u lar.

“Oh, don’t worry!” Cabbage laughed, seeing September’s understandable concern at having a gun pointed at her. She had not even known Fairyland had guns, and she would really rather it didn’t! “I haven’t invented bullets for it yet.”

“What is it?”

“Well, it’s a Rivet Gun, obviously.”

“What is it meant to rivet?”

Belinda Cabbage looked at the Rivet Gun curiously, peering down its monster of a barrel. “That’s not how Science works, love. First, you build the machine, then it tells you what it’s for. A machine is only a kind of magnet for attracting Use. That’s why we say things are Useful-because they’re all full of the Use that chose them to perform itself. Understand?”

September didn’t.

“Well, take the Dread Device. Do you think I had the first idea what a squidhole was when I invented it? Certainly not! I was just messing about! That’s when the very best and very Maddest Science gets done, you know. I thought, Why, this alabaster octopus looks like it wants a nice transmission inside it, and fairly soon I had a thing that obviously had a Use, though what that Use could be was a total mystery. I set it out to cool on the windowsill of Groangyre and what do you know, within a year or two it had punched six holes in the damask of space-time (that’s what it’s made out of, if you didn’t know it, and of course, I’m sure you did) and I had a lovely vacation in Broceliande! Take my Sameness Engine over there.” She pointed to the other end of the room, where a huge silver-green machine squatted. It looked like a printing press had grown claws and teeth. “I haven’t the first notion of what it’s for! That’s not why I made it-I made it for the sheer joy of making something new! It’s getting up to telling me what it wants to do, though, I can just feel it. It’s been giggling a lot at night. I expect sooner or later the Rivet Gun will tell me what it’s good for, and until then I have patience. Patience is always the last ingredient in any spell, the last part in any machine, what ever your original blueprints say.”

All the while the Fairy Scientist talked, the gun’s pneumatic tube had crept across the floor toward September like a careful snake. It snuffled at her feet, and at the hem of the Watchful Dress.

“It seems to like you,” Belinda Cabbage said. “If you’re willing to report back in detail, I don’t mind letting you take it for field testing. Sometimes you have to get out in the thick of things to get a really good Use going.”

September did not know how to answer. She had seen the veterinarian Mr. Walcott’s revolver, when he went out to put down a horse that had broken its knee or couldn’t pass a stone, and her swimming coach had a starting pistol, but that was the beginning and end of her experience with guns. Only it wasn’t really a gun, she supposed, not like Mr. Walcott’s revolver was a gun. She knew a little about rivets from her mother, who made use of them on airplane bodies that had to hold together very tightly. But to be sure, a Rivet Gun and Mr. Walcott’s revolver were in the same family, perhaps even siblings. The Rivet Gun looked solid and powerful to her, and she hadn’t a weapon to protect herself except for her Dress, whose feats she could never predict. Now that Ell and Saturday had abandoned her-and she winced, remembering that-she had to take care of herself somehow. She held out her hand, trembling a little, shy.

Cabbage tossed the gun up and caught it by the barrel, handing it over grip first. September took it. It felt heavy and good in her hand. The pneumatic tube snaked up to her waist, tucking its loose end in her little bustle.

“See? You’ll be fast friends in no time. Be sure to keep good and copious notes, time and date stamped, and if at all possible, collect samples of anything it Rivets.” Belinda Cabbage took up a lightning rod and touched each of September’s shoulders with it. “I dub thee September, Temporary Mad Assistant.”

September holstered the Rivet Gun in a silken pocket that formed helpfully in the hip of her dress, just the right size for it. “Do you know which way I ought to go? To get to the bottom of the world, I mean. Where Prince Myrrh sleeps.”

Belinda Cabbage cocked her eyebrow skeptically at September. She turned to the Narrative Barometer and cracked open its glass bell. The Fairy flicked one of the hands to MUSICAL THRONES.

“There’s usually a door of some sort,” she shrugged. “I’m sure there’s one lying around.” Cabbage put both hands against a pile of machinery on her left-hand workbench and shoved it to the back wall of her shop. In the rough wood of the bench gleamed a safe-door. She spun the combination and hauled it open.

“Copious. Notes,” she said in a tone that no one, even in their wrong mind, would argue with.

September took Cabbage’s hand and climbed up onto the bench. “One last thing,” she said. “I wonder if…being a leader of the Scientifick community, I wonder if you ever knew a…a highly puissant Scientiste, who wore the biggest pair of spectacles ever built, and lived with a lady-Wyvern, and had a wonderful Library?”

Cabbage put on her own pair of spectacles, square industrial nickel-rimmed goggles. “Of course,” she said. “That’s my father you’re talking about.”

September shook her head and laughed. Then, holding her gun tight to her hip, she jumped feet first into the safe and disappeared from Belinda Cabbage’s workshop.