Lady Friday(61)

Breathing, thought Arthur. Wheezy breathing from something with very, very big lungs … The Servant stopped. Arthur stopped too, swaying back from an almost-step.

‘Is it here?’ Arthur whispered. He couldn’t help himself from gripping the Fourth Key with his left hand almost as hard as the Servant was holding his arm.

They both stood utterly still. Arthur could hear the breathing getting louder. Getting closer. He could hear his own breathing grow louder, and his heart started to beat faster, tapping out a message of fear to the rest of his body. The pulse in his neck felt as if it might break out of the skin.

Suddenly there was a mighty rush of displaced air. Arthur felt movement, close by. The Servant’s grip tightened like a sudden twist of a vice, only to release an instant later as hand, arm, and indeed the whole Servant were snatched away, his still-closed fingers ripping through Arthur’s paper coat, paper shirt, and skin.

Arthur cried out, but the Denizen did not. He made no sound and for a few seconds all Arthur could hear was the breathing of the Beast.

Then it began to chew. The awful sound of a particularly rude dinner-table companion, magnified many times.

It was too much for Arthur to bear in the darkness. It was too much not to know exactly what was making the awful noise.

He didn’t think it through, or consider his vow not to use sorcery, didn’t think he could have his wings shed light. Fear of the unknown, fear of the dark, was as deeply implanted in his psyche as in any human’s, and he couldn’t take any more.

He drew the Fourth Key completely from its sheath and held it high, speaking in a shrill and shaking voice that he barely recognised as his own.

‘Light! Give me lots and lots of light!’

The Key began to glow with a soft, golden radiance, then before Arthur could do more than half-glance away and lid his eyes, it exploded into brilliant white light, brighter than any electric light Arthur had ever switched on, with his face effectively only inches from the source.

Something out in the former darkness shrieked so loudly the noise hurt Arthur’s ears. It was a frantic Kee-kee-kee-kee of extreme discomfort, pitched at a tone that would have surely shattered glass if there had been any present.

Arthur tried to see what was shrieking but he was as blinded by the light as he had been by the dark a moment before.

‘Less light!’ he shouted urgently, focusing his thoughts on the Key. ‘Much less light!’

Slowly the brilliance ebbed. Arthur shielded his eyes with his right forearm and looked around. He was in a truly vast cavern of pallid green stone, and his stomach flip-flopped to see that the iron ladder came straight down the middle of it, stretching up into thin air farther than the light illuminated.

The Beast was only twenty yards away, lying on a bed of thousands of multicoloured pebbles. It was shielding its head too, but with one enormous, leathery wing that stretched from the wrist of a russet-furred forearm to the ankle of a blue-scaled leg. It was about forty feet long and to Arthur’s eye looked to be a weird mixture of bat and dragon.

It was lizardlike from the waist down, scaled in blue iridescence, with a long, club-ended tail. From the waist up, it had red fur like a fox, and its wings were pale black and partially transparent, the bones very obvious, like struts in an old biplane’s paper wing.

It had huge, pink, four-fingered taloned paws, so dextrous they could almost be hands.

In its left paw, it held the Servant, now looking like a normal Denizen, albeit one in a pale red one-piece undergarment with attached socks. He had been stripped of wings, helmet, and flying suit. All those items were in the Beast’s right paw, scrunched up into a ball.

Arthur stared as the creature slowly lowered its shielding wing to reveal a fierce, foxlike head with huge, round eyes of limpid brown and a long, tapered mouth replete with rows and rows of sharp, narrow teeth.

Arthur stared even more as he saw the collar around its neck. Or, to be exact, the silver, sharp-tined crown that was welded in place, the points blunted under the Beast’s chin. It made the creature look like some bizarre heraldic creature. A loose chain led from the crown-collar off into the dark.

The Beast opened its mouth wide, and Arthur forgot the crown. But before he could even think of doing anything, it suddenly threw up one hand and snapped down on what it had been holding, jaws closing with a resounding snap.

‘Stop!’ yelled Arthur. ‘Don’t eat him!’

His commanding voice faltered as he saw that the Beast had in fact only swallowed the Servant’s clothing, as a second course to the wings, which it had obviously eaten first.

‘I wasn’t going to,’ protested the Beast. It had a curiously high-pitched voice that made it sound a bit like a small child. ‘I never do. Though I must say I like the wrappers. Still, everything in moderation.’