‘They’re mostly armour,’ said Fred. ‘I dunno how much of the original child is left inside. Least, that’s what I was always told.’
‘It could easily be true,’ said Arthur. ‘It’s just the sort of thing Grim Tuesday would have done. By the way, have you used wings before?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Fred. ‘Only it was before we got washed between the ears … Still I expect it will come back to me …’
‘I hope so.’ Arthur’s own memory had completely returned, or at least he thought it had. But then he had only a fraction of experience to recall compared to Fred, who had lived for at least several hundred years by House time, maybe more. ‘Well, we’d better get on with it.’
Suzy helped Arthur attach his wings, which grew to size. While he flapped them experimentally, she assisted Fred and Ugham. Arthur belatedly realised that Ugham might not know how to use the wings, but when he asked, the Newnith was already going through a series of exercises with his wings that displayed far greater competence than Arthur had himself. This was because Arthur had only flown once previously, in Grim Tuesday’s Pit.
‘Our lord the Piper was very thorough in our training,’ Ugham explained. ‘We spent many decades in practice of all kinds, before the attack on the Great Maze.’
‘You’ll need an escort,’ said Friday’s Dawn, who left Digby to approach Arthur. ‘It has been reported that the Piper and a dozen soldiers, probably Piper’s children, flew to the Scriptorium peak several hours ago, followed by Saturday’s Noon and a force of Internal Auditors. Now that we have Binding Junction, I can spare forty or fifty of my Gilded Youths. I would that it were more, but far too many Denizens here are experiencing.’
‘I don’t like this experiencing business,’ said Arthur. ‘I’m not sure I really get it. Where do these experiences come from?’
‘Lady Friday takes them from mortals, Lord Arthur,’ Friday’s Dawn explained. ‘She partakes of most of their good memories and leaves the bad. The Denizens who are with her in her retreat fix the discarded memories on sor-cerously charged paper and bring them back here to sell. Though they are usually sad and depressing memories, they are fascinating to many Denizens. You see, we do not dream, and our lives have a fixed purpose. The mortal experiences are very attractive.’
‘Takes them from mortals …’ Arthur repeated quietly. ‘What happens to the mortals?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Dawn. ‘I have never approved of the practice and Lady Friday never took me to her retreat.’
‘Do you know where it is?’
Friday’s Dawn shook his head. ‘Somewhere in the Secondary Realms.’
Arthur stood silently for a moment, his wings twitching. Then he took out the crystal and looked at it again.
‘First we find the Will,’ he said. ‘Then we get it to help us get the Fifth Key. Come on.’
He started along the corridor with everyone trailing behind, then stopped.
‘Uh, I don’t know the way out of here. Digby?’
‘Follow me, Lord Arthur,’ said Digby. He led the way along the corridor and out into a pleasant, open courtyard set with strange trees that had long, curled-up yellow leaves that looked almost like scales. From there they went back into another building, into a large hall that was full of small presses, workbenches, piles of documents, and at least a hundred Denizens who were lying on their backs experiencing, with pieces of sorcerous paper stuck to their foreheads.
At the end of the hall was the main gate, which was guarded by a mixed force of mutually suspicious Gilded Youths and High Guild bookbinders, the latter armed with nasty-looking spears in the shape of seven-foot-long bookbinder’s needles.
Arthur got his first proper look at the Top Shelf when he stepped outside. The mountain on which the Scriptorium sat was an imposing rocky peak some miles away. It completely dominated the northern skyline and was about four or five thousand feet high, Arthur estimated. Or at least the bit that poked up from the second sky was. He knew the actual mountain extended all the way down below the Flat, and the Top Shelf was just a small plateau of the greater whole.
Apart from the fortress behind him, most of what he could see looked like a pleasant country scene. There were meadows and occasional copses of trees. Not trees that he recognised, but still identifiable as trees, even if the colour and shape of the leaves and branches were a bit strange.
There were two suns in the eastern sky, which helped explain why it was so hot. Neither was particularly large, but one was much smaller than the other. Arthur knew better than to look at them directly, but the light they cast was of a similar colour to that of his own Earth sun in summer.