Ring. Sister. Piano (Book 4 of The Powder Trail)

Chapter Fifty One: Chatter-pie and Ishmael

The Queen showed them into a little antechamber to await the trial – a room carved out of black stone, which seemed to have been designed with no other end in mind than to showcase the large, significant doors at the end of it. The floor sloped down towards them, giving them the feel of some large planetary body that could pull you into its orbit.

There was a crowd outside. Jack could feel the rhythm of their feet overhead, hear their excited buzzing. The doors at the far end of the room must have led out to some kind of auditorium. 

Well, he was used to fighting in front of a crowd. He knew how to tune them out. Harder to tune out, perhaps, would be the Queen, who would be seated somewhere highly visible, leaning down to him in her breathy black dress.

Still, he was cheerful, for a given value of cheerful. Sita was with him. He had his lovely axe. In fact, that was probably more of a reason to be cheerful than he'd realized, because the Queen had tried to get it off him. 

She had summoned a procession of pages, all wearing the same black and white livery as Joel and Alim. They had filed past slowly, each of them carrying a weapon on a velvet cushion – or simply holding the weapons by their hilts in cases where said weapons were too large to render this arrangement practical.

"Will you keep your own weapon, interloper?" the Queen had said. "Or will you exchange it for one of mine?"

Jack had never seen so many beautiful pointy objects gathered together in one place – all so highly polished that he had to shield his eyes from the glare. There were rapiers with tangled, filigree hilts, broadswords and battle-axes, halberds, sabres, curving knives that looked like tiger-claws, daggers with wavy blades, spears and hunting hangers and beautifully-weighted throwing knives.

But still, he had clutched his axe instinctively to his chest, for no other reason than the fact that it was solid, where the others seemed to be beautiful, shimmery dreams. The axe was like Sita or the gryphon: something wholesomely outside of his head. Solid and shiny and uncomplicated. 

But now he was beginning to suspect that he'd avoided some kind of trap – that the procession of gorgeous weaponry had been put in place to tempt him away from one of his two only friends in this place. 

Now he was waiting in the antechamber with his other only friend – his wonderful, semi-transparent Sita. He was practising with the axe – getting used to its weight and its reach. It sliced beautiful, clear circles around him, and cut through the fog teeming about his temples, making his head ache.

He was conflicted. It had all been straightforward when he'd been thinking only of Ellini, but now he was thinking of Sita too, and he wasn't so sure he was doing her a favour by rescuing her. The grief that would be there to meet her when she got out turned him cold.

Should he prepare her for it? Should he tell her beforehand that her parents were dead? But he wasn't the right person, surely? She needed someone who could hug her and cry with her.

He soothed himself by thinking of all the people he would surround Sita with, if he ever got her out. When she toppled through that doorway in the Faculty, he wanted it to be straight into Manda's arms, with Sergei nearby to raise his eyebrows and tend to her injuries, Danvers to fill her head with all his spluttering ideals, and Sam Hastings on the door, glaring at any would-be intruders.

Then Ellini – once she had stopped crying – would open up a book on her lap and start reading. And Sita would interrupt with questions, because she was Sita. And Leeny would answer softly and imaginatively, and make a better story with her intervention than the one she'd started with.