Mad House Read online

  The ogre wanted to help the House—it still felt ridiculous to say it like that—but more than that, he was pledged to do so, for he was bound to it. Which did not explain me at all.

  “John Golly,” I said, “I believe you. But I am wondering what my part is in this.”

  “You must open the lock.”

  “Bernat already told me that joke.”

  “Inside, you will perhaps help me.”

  I shook my head and waved a wing at him.

  “That can’t happen. Bernat will be watching me all the time. I intend to steal something from the Library, something to pay me for my trouble. I can manage that much. It will be risky, but Bernat deserves to lose something for all this. But even I can’t manage to disappear for hours while we search the Library for something you don’t even know what it is.”

  He was unmoved by this.

  “I said ‘perhaps.’”

  “Hmph. So you did.”

  He sighed again and settled into a brooding silence. I let him be and paced around for a while. I was a little angry at him for telling me his tale, for complicating my affairs. I couldn’t help him. Helping myself was going to take all my skill and attention. I wasn’t worried about the lock itself—I really am the best—but I was very much worried that Bernat would contrive to break his deal. He would get his Library back and I’d land in prison again. That was more than enough to worry over, but somehow I couldn’t stop thinking about John Golly.

  The ogre did not deserve to be here. Bonded to a house, of all things. Bullied by that elf and by who knew how many others.

  I said I was tired and we both turned to our beds. I lay there wondering how to open a broken lock, steal from magicians without getting caught, get a pardon from people who didn’t really want me to have it, and help an ogre who talks to buildings.

  I’m not sure why I was so concerned about him. If we had met in the tunnels at some siege, I would readily have killed him, or at least cut off a knee. I’m good with a slitknife. Instead, I was losing sleep over the lug.

  I felt sorry for him, with his condotte and his honor—he was in chains as surely as any slave, regardless of what he said. It was pure ogre and it was pure stupid. What bothered me more was how the wizards knew this, used it to exploit him, and would very likely would abandon him like old clothes. He had been a soldier. He deserved better. Anyone deserved better.

  Somewhere in there, I fell asleep.

  I dreamed of former days, fighting in the mountains along the River Adige, going into troll holes where the lightless air was putrid and the fighting was close and brutal. A nasty business. Then I was on the sand dunes of Pomerania, hunting orcs with a chill wind blowing in from the German Sea.

  The dream shifted and I was in prison, in a shamble of cells beneath Sirmione Castle, lake water seeping through the rocks. I was trying to open a lock that should have been easy, but for some reason refused to budge. In the cell next to me I could hear an ogre pounding on the heavy oak doors. I tried to tell him to be quiet, that I would let him out as soon as I picked this stupid lock, but he wouldn’t stop and the lock wouldn’t give.

  The pounding continued as I clawed my way toward wakefulness. I sat up.

  “Noble sir!” Pound, pound. “Most urgently I entreat you! A storm comes!”

  I grumbled my way to the door, then realized it was far too big for me to open. I went to the ogre and prodded him awake.

  “John Golly, wake up,” I said. “Somebody’s upset about the weather.”

  The ogre roused himself with grumbles, but he recognized the voice on the other side of the door and scrambled up. He pulled the door open. There stood a young human in a pale blue robe, eyes wide, one foot already on the stairs. He looked back.

  “Oh, John Golly,” he cried, “a storm comes. A procella venefica! You must hurry. Everyone is leaving. The Grandmaster is already gone. Oh, please do hurry, at once!”

  “Bernat ran out on us?” I yelled from behind John Golly. “Coward!”

  The youth barely glanced at me. “The last boat is about to leave. No one would come to warn you.”

  He was panting.

  “Run, Asperos,” John Golly said. “I will not leave. I am the Warden.”

  The young man’s face contorted in anguish. “There is no time!” he cried.

  “Then go!” John Golly’s voice shifted to a soldier’s command. “Run!”

  The kid in the blue robe jumped like a startled cat. He uttered an inarticulate cry and darted up the stairs. John Golly turned to me and gestured after the departing mage.

  “You are not a Warden,” he said. “If you fly, you can catch up. A wizard storm is no small thing.”

  He was right about that. The kid used the technical term, but ‘wizard storm’ was the common parlance. Such storms are extremely rare, once a century or so. No one knows what causes them, only that they arise somewhere in the depths of the Ocean, a deadly mix of natural and magical forces that can level a kingdom, according to the legends.

  I could head for that boat, hope the boat got to the ketch without sinking, that the ketch could make landfall before the storm hit, and hope I found myself a nice, deep hole until it blew over. Then hope Bernat survived, that the Library survived, that the deal was still on.

  I’m just not that hopeful a fellow. Besides, Bernat still needed robbing.

  “I’ll stay, comrade,” I told John Golly. I didn’t bother him with the details.

  He looked hard at me. The goofy eyes and lumpy face no longer looked ridiculous; rather, his face looked serious and hard as a judge. He nodded once, and his face softened again.

  “Done,” he said. “Gather what you need. We should hurry.”

  It took me only a few moments to grab what I needed, and I left at a run. We bounded up the narrow, black stairs through an oppressive silence. The air was warm and unmoving, like a heavy blanket thrown over a sick man. I extended my underwings but recoiled at once. The stillness was not a calm, it was a held breath. It was cards stacked a thousand high waiting for a single touch.

  We reached the main floor and entered the oval room. The wide hearth no longer held a cheery fire. Now, water gushed from it, flowing in a river across the room and out the door opposite. From that doorway came the sound of waterfalls.

  “Not that way,” John Golly said. I couldn’t decide if he was being ironic or simple. We went through the other door and plunged into a shriek.

  A keening filled the hall. It rose and fell in an anguished wail. It was like being inside a human throat, its scream tearing past. I was relieved when John Golly took the first available exit. The wail cut off as soon as he closed the door.

  “What’s happening,” I asked as I trailed after him.

  “The House is sick,” he said.

  “You say that as if it were an explanation.” I admit it sounded peevish.

  “The mages are all gone. The threads unravel and now there is no one to tie them together. The mind is going and the heart is locked away.”

  He stopped abruptly and looked down at me. “We must get out, quickly, or we may never get out. The House no longer knows me. Stay close, comrade.”

  He was wringing his hands as he said this. The sight of an ogre wringing his hands was the most worrying thing of all.

  “Lead on, brother,” I said. “I’ll be right beside you. If you don’t run.”

  The House was coming apart, the way someone descends into madness. It writhed and ranted and foamed. Just as a lunatic frightens most because he becomes a travesty of a man, so the House was becoming a grotesque parody of a building. A room became nothing but doors. Another bent and rolled, while a third, when we opened its door, was utterly filled with worms and dirt. We passed through a hall whose floor was made of reptilian scales, and it moved.

  My fae senses retreated, wings tucked tight, but I still sensed powerful forces at the edge of perception. A thrumming as of strong winds outside the walls. A pounding swirl, as of flood waters around a ho
me. A sour smell, the stench of what lies inside walls and beneath cellars. All of it leaned against my senses like a great tree about to fall.

  I don’t know how John Golly managed to navigate through all this. I know we doubled back more than once, that he stopped repeatedly, like an elk that hears wolves crying on every side. I know he was talking to himself, and wringing his hands.

  And I know, at the last, I was running down a magnificent hall, which had carpeted floor and dark wooden walls that looked as old as the island itself. Tapestries hung along one side, flapping in no wind. There were no doors, only the long walls, John Golly up ahead, and oblivion behind.

  I’ve been in long hallways before. I am familiar with how the walls appear to narrow to some distant point of convergence, as they did here. But in this hall, that point was drawing steadily closer.

  I looked back and the ceiling seemed to cant downward, the floor slope up, the walls angle toward each other, until they met a mere fifty feet away. I ran harder. I dared not use my wings or I’d be swept under by the tidal waves of magic all around.

  I looked back and the ceiling, walls and floor met at a point not thirty feet away. I ran still harder.

  My heart was pounding furiously. I looked behind me again and the ending was even closer. I looked forward and saw John Golly standing in a doorway, with daylight beyond. But he was too far away. I knew I couldn’t reach him before the hall collapsed upon me.

  I looked back again. I couldn’t help it. I knew every backward glance only slowed me down, but it is impossible not to look at oblivion when it’s on your heels.

  A few strides now. I wanted to scream. From pure instinct my wings started to open. In an instant, torrents of magic were at my mouth, ready to pour in and fill my lungs.

  Then a bear-paw of a hand grabbed me. My vision blurred, and I was horizontal for a few seconds, slung at John Golly’s side. His feet thudded on the carpeted floor, then the sound changed and I saw daylight all around me. Still hanging at his side like a half-empty sack, I saw the doorway to the hall snap shut like a mouth. At its center was a black dot that hung in the air. It glowed, if blackness can be said to glow, then vanished altogether.

  John Golly put me down and looked at me with concern.

  “Are you all right?”

  I nodded, still too shaky to speak. I tore my eyes away from where the dot had been and looked around. The House still stood, with a gap like a missing tooth where the hallway had been. The House gave forth groans and crashes and tearing sounds as if an inanimate beast were dying. Which I suppose it was.

  I looked above the jumble of spires and rooftops to the westward horizon.

  The sky was a mix of unnatural colors and shapes. Great sweeps of cloud circled, charcoal gray bruised with deep reds and purples, shot through with stabs of blue lightning. Overhead, the clouds became a green miasma that glowed at the center. It felt like looking into Hell’s whirlpool.

  I turned and looked eastward. Before us was an open space tiled with brick. At its center stood a huge black pyramid well over a hundred feet high. Typical of the House’s disjointed architecture, someone had stuck a limestone tower at the pyramid’s summit, that rose another fifty feet.

  I looked up at John Golly.

  “The Library,” he said. He, too, looked at the sky. “We had better get going.”

  Even as we started across, rain began to spatter here and there with big, splashy drops, dotting the red bricks.

  A short entryway pierced the pyramid ahead. Just as we reached it, a long explosion of thunder resounded, in repeated crashes, sounding like the workshops of Prometheus. Magical forces reeled above me, swooping like swallows, but they had not yet touched down.

  At the door, John Golly pulled and it opened easily. We dashed inside. Behind us, thunder rolled again and the patter became a downpour.

  “That was too easy,” I said as he closed the door. “I’m glad to stay dry, but weren’t the doors supposed to be locked?”

  “That was not the locked door.” He pointed. “That is.”

  I looked across a small antechamber. Light came from sconces, as if torches had been lit, but I saw no fire and we had struck no spark. I walked partway across the room, amazed by what I was seeing.

  Bronze doors, each five feet wide and thrice that height, were sectioned into panels. Into each panel was carved a scene of wonderful detail. Some scenes were horrible to see, others were beautiful, while still others were merely mystifying. Each was nearly life-like. In one, a man was bound to a tree while another threatened him with an upraised knife, a look of terrible rage on his face. In another, people fled a burning city. Near the top of one door, a prophet declaimed to an open-mouthed crowd, while down low another crowd looked upward in fear, pointing at something beyond the edge of the panel. I saw a goblin lecturing to a classroom of mermaids, a lone woman in the midst of a desert, weeping; her tears filled a well to overflowing. One panel was filled entirely by the face of a screaming man. Some of the panels were square, others rectangular, vertical or horizontal, all fitted together like a monstrous puzzle.

  As bizarre as the scenes were, I knew there was another layer. I opened my wings just a fraction, and the scenes came to life. In each panel, a miniature vignette was enacted: the people fled and the city burned, tears actually fell from the woman’s face, the bound man died under the knife. Then a panel would blur and the thing would play again.

  I moved nearer the door. I recognized this type of lock, although I had never encountered one so elaborate. Opening the lock was a matter of touching each panel at the right moment, to freeze the scene. Do it in the right order, and the lock opens. Do it in the wrong order and any number of things could happen. I’d heard about a few of them.

  I watched for a time, listening to the storm’s fury. Despite the swelling of forces outside, I kept my wings attenuated and was able to sense the magic of the doors without being overtaken by the storm.The basalt walls felt reassuring, but what I was seeing was not.

  The figures were starting to escape the boundaries of their panels. One of the mermaids climbed over the edge and dove into a neighboring lake. The people fleeing the fire escaped into the classroom. A knight on a horse rode at full gallop across scenes, waving his sword like a madman. The deep magic of the doors was coming apart, just like the rest of the House.

  “It’s broken, John Golly.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  We stared at each other a moment, but I gave that up. No sprite ever out-stared an ogre.

  “Look,” I said, “if it were locked properly, I could try. But it’s not locked properly, not at all. It’s not just coming apart, it’s melting together.”

  “Truly.” He nodded solemnly, as if he had come to agree with me on an obscure point of philosophy.

  “We can’t get in,” I said. I had to be as blunt as a club.

  “Yet, we must. The House is ….”

  I can take only so much stubborn ogrish repetition.

  “Assuredly! I have heard about the House! Too much about the House. Let it go, John Golly. We can’t save it. That storm outside, we’ll be lucky to save ourselves.”

  He was rocking side to side, one foot to the other, like an animal about to charge. I decided being quiet for a while would be a good idea.

  The thundering outside kept growing until now it was a continuous roar. Within that roar came a rattling hammer I recognized, though it was amazing I could hear it through the stone. Hail. Dangerous stuff for a sprite, and far worse when it’s magical. I hoped the pyramid would hold.

  I did my best to ignore everything external. I inspected each panel, using only my physical wings to rise to the higher sections, looking everywhere for some secret switch, some hidden clue. Anything to make this even slightly possible.

  The ogre began to pace, back and forth in front of the door, muttering to himself. I was at the last section of the right-hand door and had found nothing when he stopped, turned, and said, “We must get inside.”


  He clenched his fists and said it again. “We must get inside.”

  He kept repeating those words, not loudly, just to himself. I got worried about three seconds too late.

  He began to pound on the doors with his big fists.

  “Whoa, stop!” I cried. “Don’t do that! John Golly, halt!”

  I shouted in my best battlefield voice, which admittedly isn’t much, but the shout stopped him.

  He put his hands down, but they still curled into fists.

  And that’s when I had my idea.

  It was a mad idea, one of those notions that may be reasonable enough in one situation, but quite insane in another. I was pretty sure this was one of the ‘another’ situations.

  “Gian Galeazzo, of the Company of Wolves,” I tried to keep my voice of command. To my own ears I sounded a little hysterical.

  “We are tunnelers,” I said.

  He turned and looked at me then.

  “We should tunnel.”

  And there was that needle-fanged smile.

  “I’ll have to go first,” I said. “Open a way into the panels. You stay close to me then, yes? Somewhere in there, we get to the real doors, maybe even to a real lock. It will seem we are within the doors, and we will be in one way. In another, we will still be right where we are standing. Once I open the lock, the doors will still need to be opened, and these will still be bronze doors. Too heavy for me, brother. You’ll have to pull or push or whatever makes sense to you at the time.”

  “First you, then me,” he said. “We get into the Library. Once we do that, then ….”

  “Stop. First we get inside. We can talk about then, then. I don’t know we’ll even get inside. Nobody has ever tried to go through a door, not a magical one like this.”