Howl's Moving Castle (51 page)

“Thank goodness!” said Sophie. “That’s a weight off my mind. It’s a
djinn
, did you know?”

“Even a djinn
couldn’t get through,” said Wizard Suliman. “But what did Howl do?”

“He swore,” said Sophie.
“In Welsh.
Then he sent Michael and the new apprentice away. He wanted to send me away, too. But I said if he and Calcifer were staying, then so was I, and couldn’t he put a spell on me that would simply make the djinn not notice I was there? And we argued about that—”

Lettie chuckled. “Now, why doesn’t that surprise me?” she said.

Sophie’s face became somewhat pink, and she put her head up defiantly. “Well. Howl would keep saying I’d be safest right out of the way in
Wales with his sister, and he
knows
I don’t get on with her, and I kept saying I’d be more use if I could be in the castle without the thief noticing. Anyway”—she put her face in her hands— “I’m afraid we were still arguing when the djinn came. There was an enormous noise, and everything went dark and confused. I remember Howl shouting the words of the cat spell—he had to gabble them in
a hurry
—and then yelling to Calcifer—”

“Calcifer’s their fire demon,” Lettie explained politely to Abdullah.

“—yelling to Calcifer to get out and save himself because the djinn was too strong for either of them,” Sophie went on. “Then the castle came off from on top of me like the lid off a cheese dish. Next thing I knew, I was a cat in the mountains north of Kingsbury.”

Lettie and the Royal Wizard exchanged puzzled looks over So-phie’s bent head.
“Why those mountains?”
Wizard Suliman wondered. “The castle wasn’t anywhere near there.”

“No, it was in four places at once,” Sophie said. “I think I was thrown somewhere midway between. It could have been worse. There were plenty of mice and birds to eat.”

Lettie’s lovely face twisted in disgust. “
Sophie
!” she exclaimed.
“Mice!”

“Why not?
That’s what cats eat,” Sophie said, lifting her head defiantly again. “Mice are delicious. But I’m not so fond of birds. The feathers choke you. But”—she gulped and put her head in her hands again—“but it happened at a rather bad time for me. Morgan was born about a week after that, and of course, he was a kitten—”

This caused Lettie, if possible, even more consternation than the thought of her sister eating mice. She burst into tears and flung her arms around Sophie.
“Oh, Sophie!
What did you
do
?”

“What cats always do, of course,” Sophie said. “Fed him and washed him a lot. Don’t worry, Lettie, I left him with Abdullah’s friend the soldier. That man would kill anyone who harmed his kitten. But,” she said to Wizard Suliman, “I think I ought to fetch Morgan now so that you can turn him back, too.”

Wizard Suliman was looking almost as distraught as Lettie. “I wish I’d known!” he said. “If he was born a cat as part of the same spell, he may be changed back already. We’d better find out.” He strode to one of the round mirrors and made circular gestures with both hands.

The mirror—all the mirrors—at once seemed to be reflecting the room at the inn, each from a different viewpoint, as if they were hanging on the wall there. Abdullah stared from one to the other and was as alarmed at what he saw as the other three were. The magic carpet had, for some reason, been unrolled upon the floor. On it
lay
a plump, naked pink baby. Young as this baby was, Abdullah could see he had a personality as strong as Sophie’s. And he was asserting that personality. His legs and arms were punching the air, his face was contorted with fury, and his mouth was a square, angry hole. Though the pictures in the mirrors were silent, it was clear that Morgan was being very noisy indeed.

“Who is that man?” said Wizard Suliman. “I’ve seen him before.”

“A Strangian soldier, worker of wonders,” Abdullah said helplessly.

“Then he must remind me of someone I know,” said the wizard.

The soldier was standing beside the screaming baby, looking horrified and useless. Perhaps he was hoping the genie would do something. At any rate, he had the genie bottle in one hand. But the genie was hanging out of the bottle in several spouts of distracted blue smoke, each spout a face with its hand over its ears, as helpless as the soldier.

“Oh, the poor darling child!” said Lettie.

“The poor blessed soldier, you mean,” said Sophie. “Morgan’s furious. He’s never
been
anything but a kitten, and kittens can do so much more than babies can. He’s angry because he can’t walk. Ben, do you think you can—”

The rest of Sophie’s question was drowned in a noise like a giant piece of silk tearing. The room shook. Wizard Suliman exclaimed something and made for the door—and then had to dodge hastily. A whole crowd of screaming, wailing
somethings
swept through the wall beside the door, swooped across the room, and vanished through the opposite wall. They were going too fast to be seen clearly, but none of them seemed to be human. Abdullah had a blurred glimpse of multiple clawed legs, of something streaming along on no legs at all, of beings with one wild eye and of others with many eyes in clusters. He saw fanged heads, flowing tongues,
flaming
tails. One, moving swiftest of all, was a rolling ball of mud.

Then they were gone. The door was thrown open by an agitated apprentice.
“Sir, sir!
The wards are down! We couldn’t hold—”

Wizard Suliman seized the young man’s arm and hurried him back into the next room, calling over his shoulder, “I’ll be back when I can! The Princess is in danger!”

Abdullah looked to see what was happening to the soldier and the baby, but the round mirrors now showed nothing but his own anxious face, and Sophie’s and Lettie’s, all staring upward into them.

“Drat!” said Sophie. “Lettie, can you work them?”

“No. They’re Ben’s special thing,” said Lettie.

Abdullah thought of the carpet unrolled and the genie bottle in the soldier’s hand. “Then in that case, O pair of twinned pearls,” he said, “most lovely ladies, I will, with your permission, hasten back to the inn before too many complaints are made about the noise.”

Sophie and Lettie replied in chorus that they were coming, too. Abdullah could scarcely blame them, but he came precious near it in the next few minutes. Lettie, it seemed, was not up to hurrying through the streets in her interesting condition. As the three of them rushed through the jumble and chaos of broken spells in the next room, Wizard Suliman spared a second from frantically setting up new things in the ruins to order Manfred to get the carriage out. While Manfred raced off to do that, Lettie took Sophie upstairs to get her some proper clothes.

Abdullah was left pacing the hall. To everyone’s credit, he only waited there less than five minutes, but during that time he tried the front door at least ten times, only to find there was a spell holding it shut. He thought he would go mad. It seemed like a century before Sophie and Lettie came downstairs, both in elegant going-out clothes, and Manfred opened the front door to show a small open carriage drawn by a nice bay gelding, waiting outside on the cobbles. Abdullah wanted to take a flying leap into that carriage and whip up that gelding. But of course, that was not polite. He had to wait while Manfred helped the ladies up into it and then climbed to the driver’s seat. The carriage set off smartly clattering across the cobbles while Abdullah was still squeezing himself into the seat beside Sophie, but even that was not quick enough for him. He could hardly bear to think of what the soldier might be doing.

“I hope Ben can get some wards back on the Princess soon,” Lettie said anxiously as they rolled spankingly across an open square.

The words were scarcely out of her mouth when there came a hurried volley of explosions, like very mismanaged fireworks. A bell began to ring somewhere, dismal and hasty—gong-gong-gong.

“What’s all that?” asked Sophie, and then answered her own question by pointing and crying out, “Oh, confound it! Look, look, look!”

Abdullah craned around to where she pointed. He was in time to see a black spread of wings blotting out the stars above the nearest domes and towers. Below, from the tops of several towers, came little flashes and a number of bangs as the soldiers there fired at those wings. Abdullah could have told them that that kind of thing was no use at all
against a djinn
. The wings wheeled imperturbably and circled upward and then vanished into the dark blue of the night sky.

“Your friend the djinn,” Sophie said. “I think we distracted Ben at a crucial moment.”

“The djinn intended that you should, O former feline,” Abdullah said. “If you recollect, he remarked as he was leaving that he expected one of us to help him steal the Princess.”

Other bells around the city had joined in ringing the alarm now. People ran into the streets and stared upward. The carriage jingled on through an increasing clamor and was forced to go more and more slowly as more people gathered in the streets. Everyone seemed to know exactly what had happened. “The Princess is gone!” Abdullah heard. “A devil has stolen Princess Valeria!” Most people seemed awed and frightened, but one or two were saying, “That Royal Wizard ought to be hanged! What’s he
paid
for?”

“Oh, dear!” said Lettie. “The King won’t believe for a moment how hard Ben’s been working to stop this from happening!”

“Don’t worry,” said Sophie. “As soon as we’ve fetched Morgan, I’ll go and tell the King. I’m good at telling the King things.”

Abdullah believed her. He sat and jittered with impatience.

After what seemed another century but was probably only five minutes, the carriage pushed its way into the crowded innyard. It was full of people all staring upward. “Saw its wings,” he heard a man saying. “It was a monstrous bird with the Princess clutched in its talons.”

The carriage stopped. Abdullah could give way to his impatience at last. He sprang down, shouting, “Clear the way, clear the way, O people! Here are two witches on important business!” By repeated shouting and pushing, he managed to get Sophie and Lettie to the inn door and shove them inside. Lettie was very embarrassed.

“I wish you wouldn’t
say
that!” she said. “Ben doesn’t like people to know I’m a witch.”

“He will have no time to think of it just now,” Abdullah said. He pushed the two of them past the staring landlord and to the stairs. “Here are the witches I spoke to you about, most heavenly host,” he told the man. “They are anxious about their cats.” He leaped up the stairs. He overtook Lettie, then Sophie, and raced on up the next flight. He flung open the door of the room. “Do nothing rash—” he began, and then stopped as he realized there was complete silence inside.

The room was empty.

Chapter 17
:
In which Abdullah at last reaches the castle in the air

There was a cushion in a basket
among the remains of supper on the table. There was a rumpled dent in one of the beds and a cloud of tobacco smoke above it, as if the soldier had been lying there smoking until very recently. The window was closed. Abdullah rushed toward it, intending to fling it open and look out—for no real reason except that it was all he could think of—and found himself tripping over a saucer full of cream. The saucer overturned, slewing thick yellow-white cream in a long streak across the magic carpet.

Abdullah stood staring down at it. At least the carpet was still there. What did that mean? There was no sign of the soldier and certainly no sign of a noisy baby anywhere in the room. Nor, he realized, turning his eyes rapidly toward every place he could think of, was there any sign of the genie bottle.

“Oh,
no
!”
Sophie said, arriving at the door. “Where
is
he? He can’t have gone far if the carpet’s still here.”

Abdullah wished he could be so certain of that. “Without desiring to alarm you, mother of a most mobile baby,” he said, “I have to observe that the genie appears to be missing also.”

A small vague frown creased the skin of Sophie’s forehead. “What genie?”

While Abdullah was remembering that as Midnight, Sophie had always seemed quite unaware that the genie existed, Lettie arrived in the room, too, panting, with one hand pressed to her side. “What’s the matter?” she gasped.

“They’re not here,” said Sophie. “I suppose the soldier must have taken Morgan to the landlady. She must know about babies.”

With a feeling of grasping at straws, Abdullah said, “I will go and see.” It was always just possible that Sophie was right, he thought as he sped down the first flight of stairs. It was what most men would do faced with a screaming baby suddenly—always supposing that man did not have a genie bottle in his hand.

The lower flight of stairs was full of people coming up, men wearing tramping boots and some kind of uniform. The landlord was leading them upward, saying, “On the second floor, gentlemen. Your description fits the Strangian if he had cut off his pigtail, and the younger fellow is obviously the accomplice you speak of.”

Abdullah turned and ran back upstairs on tiptoe, two stairs at a time.

“There is general disaster, most bewitching pair of women!” he gasped to Sophie and Lettie. “The landlord—a perfidious publican—is bringing constables to arrest myself and the soldier. Now what can we do?”