Howl's Moving Castle (50 page)

The house was not far from the inn, but it was in the Old Quarter, which meant that the way was mostly through confusing small alleys and hidden courts. It was twilight now, with one or two large liquid stars already in the dark blue sky above the domes and towers, but Kingsbury was well lit by big silver globes of light, floating overhead like moons.

Abdullah was looking up at them, wondering if they were magical devices, when he happened to notice a black four-legged shadow stealing along the roofs beside him. It could have been any black cat out for a hunt on the tiles, but Abdullah knew it was Midnight. There was no mistaking the way she moved. At first, when she vanished into the deep black shadow of a gable, he supposed she was after a roosting pigeon to make another unsuitable meal for Whippersnapper. But she reappeared again when he was halfway down the next alley, creeping along a parapet above him, and he began to think she was following him. When he went through a narrow court with trees in tubs down the center and he saw her jump across the sky, from one gutter to another, in order to get into that court, too, he knew she was certainly following him. He had no idea why. He kept an eye out for her as he went down the next two alleys, but he saw her only once, on an arch over a doorway. When he turned into the cobbled court where the Royal Wizard’s house was, there was no sign of her. Abdullah shrugged and went to the door of the house.

It was a handsome narrow house with diamond-paned windows and interwoven magic signs painted on its old irregular walls. There were tall spires of yellow flame burning in brass stands on either side of the front door. Abdullah seized the knocker, which was a leering face with a ring in its mouth, and boldly knocked.

The door was opened by a manservant with a long, dour face. “I’m afraid the wizard is extremely busy, sir,” he said. “He is receiving no clients until further notice.” And he started to shut the door.

“No wait, faithful footman and loveliest of lackeys!”
Abdullah protested. “What I have to say concerns no less than a threat to the King’s daughter!”

“The wizard knows all about that, sir,” said the man, and went on shutting the door.

Abdullah deftly put his foot in the space. “You must hear me, most sapient servant,” he began. “I come—”

Behind the manservant a young woman’s voice said, “Just a moment, Manfred, I know this is important.” The door swung open again.

Abdullah gaped as the servant vanished from the doorway and reappeared some way back in the hall inside. His place at the door was taken by an extremely lovely young woman with dark curls and a vivid face. Abdullah saw enough of her in one glance to realize that in her foreign northern way, she was as beautiful as Flower-in-the-Night, but after that he felt bound to look modestly away from her. She was very obviously going to have a baby. Ladies in Zanzib did not show themselves in this interesting condition. Abdullah scarcely knew where to look.

“I’m the wizard’s wife, Lettie Suliman,” this young woman said. “What did you come about?”

Abdullah bowed. It helped to keep his eyes on the doorstep. “O fruitful moon of lovely Kingsbury,” he said, “know that I am Abdullah, son of Abdullah, carpet merchant from distant Zanzib, with news that your husband will wish to hear. Tell him, O splendor of a sorcerous house, that this morning I spoke with the mighty djinn Hasruel concerning the King’s most precious daughter.”

Lettie Suliman was clearly not at all used to the manners of Zanzib. “Good heavens!” she said. “I mean, how
polite
! And you’re speaking the exact truth, aren’t you? I think you ought to talk to Ben at once. Please come in.”

She backed away from the doorway to give Abdullah room to enter. Abdullah, still with his eyes modestly lowered, stepped forward into the house. As soon as he did, something landed on his back. Then it took off again with a heavy rip of claws and went sailing over his head to land with a thump on Lettie’s prominent front. A noise like a metal pulley filled the air.

“Midnight!”
Abdullah said crossly, staggering forward.

“
Sophie
!” screamed Lettie, staggering backward with the cat in her arms. “Oh, Sophie, I’ve been worried
sick
! Manfred, get Ben at once. I don’t care what he’s doing. This is
urgent
!”

Chapter 16
:
In which strange things befall Midnight and Whippersnapper

There was a great deal of confusion
and rushing about. Two other servants appeared, followed by first one and then a second young man in long blue gowns, who seemed to be the wizard’s apprentices. All these people ran about, while Lettie ran back and forth in the hall with Midnight in her arms, screaming orders. In the midst of it all, Abdullah found Manfred showing him to a seat and solemnly giving him a glass of wine. Since this seemed what he was expected to do, Abdullah sat down and sipped the wine, rather bemused by the confusion.

Just as he was thinking it was going to go on forever, it all
stopped.
A tall, commanding man in a black robe had appeared from somewhere. “What on
earth
is going on?” said this man.

Since this summed up Abdullah’s feelings entirely, he found himself rather taking to this man. He had faded red hair and a tired, craggy face. The black robe made Abdullah certain that this must be Wizard Suliman; he would have looked like a wizard whatever he was wearing. Abdullah rose from his chair and bowed. The wizard shot him a look of craggy mystification and turned to Lettie.

“He’s from Zanzib, Ben,” said Lettie, “and he knows something about the threat to the Princess. And he brought Sophie with him. She’s a
cat
! Look! Ben, you’ve got to change her back at
once
!”

Lettie was one of those ladies who look lovelier the more distraught they get. Abdullah was not surprised when Wizard Suliman took her gently by the elbows and said, “Yes, of course, my love,” and followed that by kissing her forehead. It made Abdullah wonder miserably whether he would ever have a chance to kiss Flower-in-the-Night like that, or to add, as the wizard added, “Calm down—remember the baby.” After this the wizard said over his shoulder, “And can’t someone shut the front door? Half Kingsbury must know what’s happened by now.”

This endeared the wizard to Abdullah more than ever. The one thing that had prevented him getting up and shutting the door was a fear that it might be the custom here to leave your front door open in a crisis. He bowed again and found the wizard swinging around to face him.

“And what
has
happened, young man?” asked the wizard. “How did you know this cat was my wife’s sister?”

Abdullah was somewhat taken aback by this question. He explained—several times—that he had had no idea Midnight was human, let alone that she was the Royal Wizard’s sister-in-law, but he was not at all sure that anyone listened. They all seemed so glad to see Midnight that they simply assumed that Abdullah had brought her to the house out of pure friendship. Far from demanding a large fee, Wizard Suliman seemed to think that
he
owed Abdullah something, and when Abdullah protested that this was not so, he said, “Well, come along and see her changed back, anyway.”

He said this in such a friendly and trusting way that Abdullah warmed to him even more and let himself be swept along with everyone else to a large room that
seemed
to be at the back of the house— except that Abdullah had a feeling that it was somehow somewhere else entirely. The floor and the walls sloped in a way that was not usual.

Abdullah had never seen any working wizardry before. He gazed around with interest, for the room was crowded with intricate magical devices. Nearest to him were filigree shapes with delicate smokes wreathing about them. Beside that, large and peculiar candles stood inside complicated signs, and beyond those were strange images made of wet clay. Farther off he saw a fountain of five jets that fell in odd geometric patterns and that half hid many much odder things, crowded into the distance beyond.

“No room to work in here,” Wizard Suliman said, sweeping through. “These should hold by themselves while we set up in the next room. Hurry, all of you.”

Everyone whirled on into a smaller room beyond, which was empty apart from some round mirrors hanging on the walls. Here Lettie set Midnight carefully down on a blue-green stone in the middle, where she sat seriously washing the inside of her front legs and looking totally unconcerned, while everyone else, including Lettie and the servants, worked away feverishly at building a sort of tent around her out of long silver rods.

Abdullah stood prudently against the wall, watching. By now he was rather regretting assuring the wizard that he owed him nothing. He should have taken the opportunity to ask how to reach the castle in the sky. But he reckoned that since nobody seemed to have listened to him then, it was better to wait until things calmed down. Meanwhile, the silver rods grew into a pattern of skeletal silver stars, and Abdullah watched the bustle, somewhat confused at the way the scene was reflected in all the mirrors, small and busy and bulging. The mirrors bent as oddly as the walls and floors did.

At length Wizard Suliman clapped his large, bony hands. “Right,” he said. “Lettie can help me here. The rest of you get to the other room and make sure the wards for the Princess stay in place.”

The apprentices and the servants hurried away. Wizard Suliman spread his arms. Abdullah intended to watch closely and remember clearly what happened. But somehow, as soon as the magic working started, he was not at all sure what was going on. He knew things were happening, but they did not
seem
to happen. It was like listening to music when you were tone-deaf. Every so often Wizard Suliman uttered a deep, strange word that blurred the room and the inside of Abdullah’s head with it, which made it even harder to see
what
was happening. But most of Abdullah’s difficulty came from the mirrors on the walls. They kept showing small, round pictures that looked like reflections but were not—or not quite. Every time one of the mirrors caught Abdullah’s eye, it showed the framework of rods glowing with silvery light in a new pattern—a star, a triangle, a hexagon, or some other symbol angular and secret—while the real rods in front of him did not glow at all. Once or twice a mirror showed Wizard Suliman with his arms spread when, in the room, his arms were by his sides.

Several times a mirror showed Lettie standing still with her hands clasped, looking vividly nervous. But each time Abdullah looked at the real Lettie, she was moving about, making strange gestures and perfectly calm. Midnight never appeared in the mirrors at all. Her small black shape in the middle of the rods was oddly hard to see in reality, too.

Then all the rods suddenly
glowed
misty silver and the space inside filled with a haze. The wizard spoke a final deep word and stepped back.

“Confound it!” said someone inside the rods. “I can’t smell you at all now!”

This made the wizard grin and Lettie laugh outright. Abdullah looked for the person who was amusing them so and was forced to look away almost at once. The young woman crouching inside the framework, understandably
enough,
had no clothes on at all. The glimpse he caught, told him that the young woman was as fair as Lettie was dark but otherwise quite like her. Lettie ran to the side of the room and came back with a wizardly green gown. When Abdullah dared to look, the young woman was wearing the gown like a dressing gown, and Lettie was trying to hug her and help her out of the framework at the same time.

“Oh,
Sophie
!
What
happened
?” she kept saying.

“One moment,” gasped Sophie. She seemed to have difficulty balancing on two feet at first, but she hugged Lettie and then staggered to the wizard and hugged him, too. “It feels so odd without a tail!” she said. “But thanks awfully, Ben.” Then she advanced on Abdullah, walking rather more easily now. Abdullah backed against the wall, afraid she was going to hug him, too, but all Sophie said was “You must have wondered why I was following you. The truth is
,
I
always
get lost in Kingsbury.”

“I am happy to have been of service, most charming of changelings,” Abdullah said rather stiffly. He was not sure he was going to get on with Sophie any more than he had got on with Midnight. She struck him as uncomfortably strong-minded for a young woman—almost as bad as his father’s first wife’s sister, Fatima.

Lettie was still demanding to know what had turned Sophie into a cat, and Wizard Suliman was saying anxiously, “Sophie, does this mean that Howl’s wandering about as an animal, too?”

“No, no,” Sophie said, and suddenly looked desperately anxious.

“I’ve no idea where Howl is. He was the one who turned me into a cat, you see.”

“
What
? Your own husband turned you into a cat!” Lettie exclaimed. “Is this another of your quarrels, then?”

“Yes, but it was all perfectly reasonable,” said Sophie. “It was when someone stole the moving castle, you see. We only had about half a day’s
notice,
and that was only because Howl happened to be working on a divining spell for the King. It showed something very powerful stealing the castle and then stealing Princess Valeria. Howl said he’d warn the King at once. Did he?”

“He certainly did,” said Wizard Suliman. “The Princess is guarded every second. I invoked demons and set up wards in the next room. Whatever being is threatening her has no chance of getting through.”