Superior Saturday

GARTH NIX

ILLUSTRATED BY TIM STEVERTS

To all the patient readers and publishing folk who have been waiting for me to finish this book. And, as always, to Anna, Thomas and Edward, and all my family and friends.

Contents

Prologue Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty-One Chapter Twenty-Two Also By Garth Nix Copyright About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

Saturday, self-styled Superior Sorcerer of the House, stood in her private viewing chamber at the very apex of her dominion, atop the tower that she had been building for almost ten thousand years. This clear crystal-walled room was always at the top, the builders lifting it higher and higher as new levels were slotted in below.

Saturday looked down through the rain-washed glass, at the multitude of fuzzy green spots of light below. It looked like the tower, which was thousands of feet high, had suffered a vast, vertical infestation of green glow-worms, but the spots of light actually came from the green-shaded lamps that sat on every desk in the Upper House, in exactly the same position, just as each desk was set exactly in the middle of an open cube of wrought red iron, with a grille floor and no ceiling.

These cubes—the basic building blocks of Saturday’s tower—ran on vertical and horizontal rails, ascending, descending or moving sideways according to the merits of the Denizens who worked at the desks.

Each cube was dragged into place by a series of chains that were driven by mighty steam engines, deep below the tower. The actual work of building the rails and fuelling the engines was done by bronze automatons and a small number of luckless Denizens who had failed Saturday in some way. Even lower in status were the grease monkeys, Piper’s children who oiled and maintained the miles and miles of dangerous, fast-moving machinery.

Superior Saturday looked down upon her domain, but the sight of her mighty tower and the tens of thousands of sorcerers within it did not quicken her pulse. Eventually, though she fought against the urge, she stopped looking down and started looking up.

At first she saw only cloud, but then came a glimmer of green light, a darker, more mysterious green than the glow of her lamps. The clouds parted slightly to show the emerald ceiling of the Upper House, which was also the floor of the Incomparable Gardens. Saturday grimaced, an ugly look on her otherwise extraordinarily beautiful face. For ten thousand years she had been building her tower in order to reach and invade the Incomparable Gardens. Yet no matter how high she built, the Gardens moved further away, and Lord Sunday taunted her by making sure she was the only one to see it. If any of her Denizens looked up, the clouds would close again.

Saturday curled her lip and looked away, but her new view offered no solace. Far off, on the edge of the Upper House, there was a dark, vertical shadow that stretched from the ground to the clouds. Close up, it too would shine green, for it was a vast tree, one of the four Drasil trees that supported the Incomparable Gardens above.

The Drasil trees were the reason Saturday could never build her tower high enough, because the trees grew faster than she could build, and lifted the Gardens as they grew.

She had tried to destroy or stunt the Drasils with sorcery, poison and brute force, but none of her schemes had affected the trees in the slightest. She had sent Artful Loungers and Sorcerous Supernumeraries to climb the trunks and infiltrate the domain of Lord Sunday, but they had never made it further than halfway up, defeated by the huge defensive insects that lived in tunnels within the bark of the great trees. Even flying was out of the question. High above the clouds, the Drasils’ branches spread everywhere, and the trees’ limbs were predatory, vicious and very fast.

This had been the situation for millennia, with Saturday building, the Drasils growing, and Sunday remaining aloof and mighty above, secure in the Incomparable Gardens.

But all that had changed with a sneeze on the surface of a distant dead star. The Architect’s Will had finally been released and had selected a Rightful Heir. Now that Heir was gathering the Keys from the disloyal Trustees. Arthur, his name was—a mortal whose success and speed had surprised not only Saturday.

Not that Arthur’s triumphs mattered too much to Saturday, given that she had been planning for the execution of the Will and the arrival of an Heir almost since the moment the Architect disappeared. She was not just a Trustee, with the power the Architect’s Key gave her; she was also an enormously powerful and learned sorcerer in her own right. Apart from the Old One and the Architect, she was the most ancient entity in the Universe. Therein lay the canker in her heart. She was the first Denizen the Architect had made and she felt she should have been supreme over all others, including the Architect’s children (an experiment she had decried at the time). It was not Sunday who should dwell in the Incomparable Gardens, but Saturday. Everything she did was directed to remedying this injustice.

A muffled cough behind her recalled Saturday to present events. She turned, her cloak of starshine and moonshade billowing up around her shapely legs. Apart from the cloak, which was an ancient thing of sorcery, Saturday wore a robe of spun gold scattered with tiny sapphires, and high-heeled shoes that were made of steel and had vicious points. Her long electric-blue hair was loose on her shoulders and restrained at the brow by a gold circlet on which sorcerous words looped and writhed, spelled out in shifting diamonds.

“I beg your pardon, Majesty,” said a tall, impeccably-dressed Denizen. He knelt as she turned around, his swallow-tailed coat falling on his impossibly shiny boot heels.

“You are the candidate to be my new Dusk,” said Saturday.

The Denizen bowed his head still lower, indicating agreement.

“The former Dusk was your brother? Turned out of the same mould?”

“Yes, Majesty, the elder of us by a moment.”

“Good,” said Saturday. “He served me well, and was at least partially successful in his last assignment, though he met his end. Has Noon acquainted you with all the matters at hand?”

“I believe so, Majesty,” said the new Saturday’s Dusk.

Saturday flicked a finger and her Dusk stood up. Though he was easily seven feet tall, his mistress was at least a foot taller, even without her steel shoes. In any case, he kept his head bowed, not daring to look her in the eye.

“Tell me then,” she said. “Do all my enterprises conjoin for the final victory?”

“We believe so,” said Dusk. “Though the House does not crumble as swiftly as was hoped at one time, it does fall, and our new offensive should accelerate matters. At present our reports show that Nothing has impinged greatly into the Far Reaches and across large areas of the Border Sea, and though it is not related to our activities, there has been some considerable damage to the mountain defences of the Great Maze. It is now almost certainly beyond the power of Dame Primus, as the Will calls itself, and its cat’s-paw, Arthur, to prevent the destruction.”

“Good,” said Saturday. “What of the effect upon the trees?”

“As the Nothing spreads, the deeper roots of the Drasil are severed. This has already slowed their growth by some six per cent. However, they still lift the Gardens faster than we can build. Projections indicate that when the entirety of the Far Reaches and the Lower House has been devoured by Nothing, we will be able to build faster than the trees can grow and can reach the target position in days. If more of the House falls, it will be a matter of hours.”

“Excellent!” cried Saturday, a smile rippling across her shining, blue-painted lips. “I trust the Front Door remains closed and the elevators secured? I want no interference from Primus or the Piper.”

“The Front Door remains shut, though the Lieutenant Keeper has petitioned the Court of Days for it to be reopened. So if Lord Sunday—”

“Sunday immures himself in the Gardens,” Saturday interrupted. “He cares not for anything else. He will not interfere—at least not until it is too late for him to do anything.”

“As you say, Majesty,” said Dusk diplomatically. “All elevator entrances into the Upper House have been sealed and are guarded, but it is believed that renegade operators have opened some services in other parts of the House.”

“Let them run about the ruins,” said Saturday. “The sorceries against the Improbable Stair and the Fifth Key remain constant?”

“Four shifts of nine hundred sorcerers each maintain the wards. Twenty-eight hundred executive-level sorcerers wait at ready desks, should they need to counter any workings of the Keys held by the Pretender or a sorcerous attack from the Piper.”

“The Piper!” Saturday spat. “If only I had managed to finish him centuries ago! At least he blames his brother. What is the latest news of the Piper? Have we got rid of his blasted Rats?”

Dusk proceeded with caution. “We are not absolutely clear on what the Piper is doing. His forces have withdrawn from the Great Maze, presumably to the worldlet he made for his New Nithlings. But we have not yet located that worldlet, nor do we know if he masses his forces there against us or against Dame Primus.”

“Our defences will hold as well against the Piper as they will against the Pretender,” Saturday stated confidently. “They cannot enter via elevator, Stair, Front Door or by use of the Fifth Key. There is no other way.”

Saturday’s Dusk did not speak, but the faintest frown line appeared on his forehead, just for a moment, before he smoothed it away.

“And the Rats?” prompted Saturday.

“None has been spotted in five days. We have lost fourteen lower-level clerks and some Piper’s children to the Rat-catcher automatons, and there have been requests that they be recalled.”

“No,” said Saturday. “Keep them at it. I do not want those creatures sneaking about here.”

“Speaking of Piper’s children, we employ a large number of them as grease monkeys and chain-hands, but there was a report that some of Sir Thursday’s Piper’s children were turned against him by the Piper. We would not want our Piper’s children to be similarly turned against us.”

“Yes,” said Saturday. “He has power over his creations and they must answer to his pipe. It is not an eventuality that should arise, if he is kept out of the Upper House, and we need those children to maintain our building speed. However, we should be prepared. Tell Noon to detail a suitable number of Sorcerous Supernumeraries to shadow the Piper’s children—and slay them, if I so command.”

“Very good, Majesty,” said Dusk. “There is one other matter…”

“Yes?”

“The Pretender, this Arthur Penhaligon. We have just had a report that he has returned to the Secondary Realms, to Earth. Do we implement the contingency plan?”

Saturday smiled.

“Yes, at once. Do we know if he has a Key with him?”

“We do not know, Majesty, but circumstance suggests he has at least the Fifth Key.”

“I wonder if that will protect him? It will be interesting to see. Tell Pravuil to act at once.”

“Ahem…” Dusk coughed. “I regret to say that it is not yet Saturday on Earth, Majesty. It is some forty minutes short of Friday’s midnight, and the House and that Secondary Realm are in close temporal step.”

Saturday hesitated, weighing up the situation. The Accord between the Trustees was effectively broken, but the Treaty still existed and there could be sorcerous implications if she or her agents acted outside their allotted span of power in the Secondary Realms.

“Then Pravuil must strike as the twelfth chime of midnight fades,” she instructed. “In the first second of Saturday. No later. See to it at once.”

“Yes, Majesty,” replied the new Dusk. After an elegant bow, he retreated to the silver spiral stair that led down to the desk cube immediately beneath the viewing chamber.

As soon as he was gone, Superior Saturday’s gaze was once again drawn to the sky, the parting clouds, and another infuriating but tantalising glimpse of the underside of the Incomparable Gardens.

CHAPTER ONE

It was dark outside the small private hospital, the street lights out and the houses across the road shut up tight. Only the faintest glowing lines around some windows indicated that there were probably people inside and that the city still had power. There were other lights in the sky, but these were the navigation lights of helicopters, tiny pinprick red dots circling high above. Occasionally a searchlight flickered down from one of the helicopters, closely followed by the harsh clatter of machine-gun fire.

Inside the hospital, a flash of light suddenly lit up the empty swimming pool, accompanied by a thunderclap that rattled every window and drowned the distant sounds of the choppers and gunfire. As the light from the flash slowly faded, a slow, regular drumbeat echoed through the halls.

In the front office, a tired woman clad in a crumpled blue hospital uniform looked away from the videoscreen that was carrying the latest very bad news and jumped up to flick on the corridor lights. Then she grabbed her mop and bucket and ran. The thunderclap and drumming announced the arrival of Doctor Friday, and Doctor Friday always wanted the floors cleaned ahead of her, so she could see her reflection in the glossy surface of the freshly-washed linoleum.

The cleaner ran through the wards, turning on lights as she passed. Just before the pool room, she glanced at her watch. It was 11:15 on Friday night. Doctor Friday had never come so late before, but her servants sometimes did. In any case, the cleaner was not allowed to leave until the day was completely done. Not that there was anywhere to go, with the new quarantine in force and helicopters shooting anyone who ventured out on to the streets. The news was now also full of talk of a “last-resort solution” to the “plague nexus” that existed in the city.

Outside the pool room, the cleaner stopped to take a deep breath. Then she bent her head, dipped her mop and pushed it and the bucket through the doors, reaching up to flick the light switch without looking, as she had done so many times, on so many Fridays past. She had learned long ago not to look up, because then she might meet Friday’s gaze or be dazzled by her mirror.

But it wasn’t Friday or her minions who were emerging from the dark portal in the empty swimming pool and climbing up the ramp.

The cleaner stared at their bare feet and the blue hospital nightgowns. She dropped her mop, looked up and screamed.

“They’re coming back! But they never come back!”

The sleepers that she had seen enter the pool only that morning, led by Doctor Friday herself, were shambling their way up, arms outstretched in front of them in the classic pose of sleepwalkers seen so often in films and television.

But this time Doctor Friday wasn’t there, and neither were any of her ridiculously tall and good-looking assistants.

Then the cleaner saw the girl, the one who had been awake that morning. She was shepherding the very first sleeper, a woman at the head of the line, steering her to the centre of the ramp. The sleepers weren’t as obedient as they had been going out, or as deeply asleep.

“Hi!” called the girl. “Remember me?”

The cleaner nodded dumbly.

“My name’s Leaf. What’s yours?”

“Vess,” whispered the cleaner.

“Give us a hand then, Vess! We’ve got to get everyone into bed, at least for tonight.”

“What…what about Doctor Friday?”

“She’s gone,” said Leaf. “Defeated by Arthur!”

She gestured behind her and the cleaner saw a handsome young boy of a similar age to Leaf. His skin was almost glowing with good health, his hair was shiny and his teeth were very white. But that was not the most striking thing about him. He held a light in his hand, a brilliant star that the cleaner recognised as Friday’s mirror.

“Sir!” said the cleaner, and she went down on one knee and bent her head. Leaf frowned and looked back at Arthur, and in that moment saw him anew.

“What?” asked Arthur. “Hey, keep them walking or we’ll get a pile-up back here.”

“Sorry,” said Leaf. She hastily pulled the leading sleeper—her own Aunt Mango—out of the line and held on to her arm. “It’s…well, I just realised you look…you don’t look the same as you used to.”

Arthur looked down at himself and then up again, his face showing puzzlement.

“You used to be a bit shorter than me,” said Leaf. “You’ve grown at least three or four inches and got…um…better looking.”

“Have I?” muttered Arthur. Only a few weeks ago he would have been delighted to hear he was getting taller. Now it sent an unpleasant shiver through him. He glanced at the crocodile ring on his finger, the one that indicated just how far his blood and bone had been contaminated by sorcery. But before he could gauge how much of the ring had turned from silver to gold, he forced himself to look away. He didn’t want to confirm right then and there if his transformation into a Denizen had gone beyond the point of no return. In his heart, he knew the answer without even looking at the ring.

“Never mind that now,” continued Arthur. “We’d better get everyone settled down. What’s your name again? Vess, we’ll need your help getting all these sleepers back into bed, please. There’s about two thousand of them, and we’ve only got Martine and Harrison to help.”

“Martine and Harrison?” yelped Vess. “I haven’t seen them in…I thought they were dead!”

“Martine and Harrison have been…looking after sleepers at Lady Friday’s retreat,” Arthur reported. “Hey! Leaf, they’re running into the door!”

Leaf gently spun her aunt around to face the wall and sprinted ahead to guide the leading sleepers through the door, pressing down the catch to keep it open. Then she took a small silver cone from her belt and held it to her mouth. The cone was one of the tools Friday’s servants used to direct the sleepers. It amplified and changed Leaf’s speech, and Vess shivered as she caught the echo of Lady Friday’s voice.

“Walk to an empty bed and stand next to it,” ordered Leaf. “Walk to an empty bed and stand next to it.”

The sleepers obeyed, though they tended to bunch at a bed and bump against one another before one firmly established himself or herself next to the bedhead. Only then would the others shamble off. Leaf ran back to her aunt, who was turning in circles trying to obey the command to find a bed.

Arthur stayed back at the pool, repeating Leaf’s instruction to the sleepers as they came through. He didn’t need a silver cone to be obeyed, probably because he held the Fifth Key, or because the sleepers responded to the power in his voice, feeling the authority of his position as the Rightful Heir of the Architect.

In outward appearance he looked just like a boy, but Arthur had wrested five Keys from five of the faithless Trustees. Now he ruled over the majority of the House, the epicentre of the Universe. In the process he felt he had grown much older, even if little time had actually passed. He also knew that he was becoming less human.

The sleepers kept coming through, emerging out of the dark floor of the pool that was in fact a passage to another Secondary Realm, the secret retreat of Lady Friday, where she had been stealing humans’ memories, leaving them as mindless husks. The sleepers who were being returned had narrowly avoided that fate. They would wake in due course, knowing nothing of their ordeal.

Martine, one of Lady Friday’s human staff, emerged and nodded at Arthur before starting up the ramp. She had an expression on her face that Arthur guessed was equal parts fear and excitement. Martine had been forced to stay and work in Friday’s retreat for more than thirty years.

She would find the contemporary world a very strange place, Arthur thought. A world that was getting stranger by the day—not least because the appearance of Denizens and Nithlings from the House had a bad effect upon the Secondary Realms like Earth, disrupting the environment on many different levels, including the spontaneous generation of new and deadly viruses.

Arthur thought about that as he watched the sleepers march, occasionally intervening to keep them moving. His presence now with the Fifth Key would undoubtedly destabilise something on Earth, maybe even create something really bad like the Sleepy Plague. He would not be able to linger, and perhaps should not even stay long enough to go home and check up on his family. But he desperately wanted to see if his sister Michaeli and brother Eric were all right, and also to find some clue to where his mother Emily might be or who might have taken her, if Sneezer was correct and she was no longer on Earth at all.

A ringing phone interrupted his thoughts. It got louder and louder, closer and closer. Arthur scowled. He didn’t have a mobile phone, but the old-fashioned ring tone was coming from the pocket of his paper suit…

He sighed, put the Fifth Key in his pocket and rummaged around to see what else was in there. When his fingers closed on a small cold tube he knew hadn’t been there before, he pulled it out and found a full-sized, antique candlestick-style phone with a separate earpiece that could neither have fitted into his pocket in the first place or come out of it if it had. It was, in other words, a perfectly normal manifestation of a House telephone, behaving according to its own magical rules.

“Yes?” said Arthur.

“Stand by,” said a voice that sounded much more like a human telephone operator than a Denizen. “Thru-connecting now, sir.”

“Who’s that?” asked someone else. A familiar, masculine voice—again not a Denizen.

“Erazmuz!?” asked Arthur in surprise. Erazmuz was his oldest half-brother, a major in the army. How could he be calling on a House telephone?

“Arthur? How come the screen’s off? Never mind. Is Emily home?”

“Uh, no,” said Arthur. “I’m not—”

“Eric? Michaeli?”

Erazmuz was talking really fast, not letting Arthur get a word in, so he couldn’t tell him that he wasn’t home, even if it was the number that Erazmuz had dialled.

“No, they’re not—”

“That’s…”

Erazmuz’s voice trailed away for a second, then he came back, talking faster than ever.

“OK…you’ve got to grab any bottled water and food, like tins or packaged stuff, and an opener, get warm clothes and head down to the cellar as soon as you can, but no more than ten minutes from now. Ten minutes maximum, OK? Shut it up tight and stay down there. Do you know where Emily and the others are?”

“No! What’s going on?”

“General Pravuil has just flown in and he’s ordered the launch of four micronukes at what’s left of East Area Hospital at 12:01. If you get to the cellar, you should be OK, just don’t come out till I get there. I’ll be with the clean-up—”

“What!” exclaimed Arthur. “Nukes! I can’t believe you—the army—is going to nuke part of the city? There must be thousands of people—”