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  the right time!’

  Behind him, Rosenquartz began protesting, but the voice that replied to him outside wasn’t Mortimer’s – even if it was almost as beautiful as his. Orpheus. Talk of the devil! What did he want here? Come to complain that Rosenquartz had been in his house spying? If anyone has a reason to complain, I do, thought Fenoglio. After all, it’s my story he’s plundering and distorting! Miserable calf’s-head, milkface, bullfrog, whippersnapper … Fenoglio had many names for Orpheus, none of them flattering.

  Wasn’t it bad enough that he kept sending Farid to bother him? Did he have to come himself? He was sure to ask thousands of stupid questions again. Your own fault, Fenoglio! How often he’d cursed himself for the words he’d written in the mine at Meggie’s urging: So he called on another, younger man, Orpheus by name – skilled in letters, even if he could not yet handle them with the mastery of Fenoglio himself – and decided to instruct him in his art, as every master does at some time. For a while Orpheus should play with words in his place, seduce and lie with them, create and destroy, banish and restore – while Fenoglio waited for his weariness to pass, for his pleasure in words to reawaken, and then he would send Orpheus back to the world from which he had summoned him, to keep his story alive with new words never used before.

  ‘I ought to write him back where he came from!’ Fenoglio growled as he kicked the empty jug out of his way. ‘Right now!’

  ‘Write? Did I hear you say write?’ Rosenquartz asked ironically behind him. He was back to his normal colour. Fenoglio threw a dry crust of bread at him, but it missed Rosenquartz’s pale pink head by more than a hand’s breadth, and the glass man gave a sympathetic sigh.

  ‘Fenoglio? Fenoglio, I know you’re in there! Open the door.’ God, how he hated that voice. Planting words in his story like weeds. His own words!

  ‘No, I’m not here!’ growled Fenoglio. ‘Not for you, calf’s-head!’

  Fenoglio, is Death a man or a woman? Were the White Women once living human beings? Fenoglio, how am I to bring Dustfinger back if you can’t even tell me the simplest rules of this world? Enough of his questions. For God’s sake, who had asked him to bring Dustfinger back? If everything had gone the way Fenoglio had originally written it, the man would have been dead long ago in any case. And as for ‘the simplest rules’, since when, might he ask, were life and death simple? Hang it all (and there was more than enough hanging in Ombra these days anyway), how was he supposed to know how everything worked, in this or any other world? He’d never thought much about death, or what came after it. Why bother? While you were alive, why would death interest you? And once you were dead – well, presumably you weren’t interested in anything any more.

  ‘Of course he’s there! Fenoglio?’ That was Minerva’s voice. Damn it, the calf’s-head had roped her in to help him. Cunning. At least Orpheus was far from stupid.

  Fenoglio hid the empty wine jugs under the bed, forced his other leg into his trousers, and unbolted the door.

  ‘So there you are!’ Minerva inspected him disapprovingly from his uncombed head to his bare feet. ‘I told your visitor you were at home.’ How sad she looked. Weary too. These days she was working in the castle kitchen, where Fenoglio had asked Violante to find her a job. But the Milksop had a preference for feasting by night, so Minerva often didn’t get home until the early hours of the morning. Very likely she’d drop dead of exhaustion some day and leave her poor children orphans. It was a wretched situation. What had become of his wonderful Ombra?

  ‘Fenoglio!’ Orpheus pushed past Minerva with that ghastly, innocent smile he always had ready as camouflage. Of course he’d brought notes with him again, notes full of questions. How did he pay for the fine clothes he wore? Fenoglio himself had never worn such clothes, not even in his days of glory as court poet. Ah, he thought, but you forgot the treasures he’s writing for himself, didn’t you, Fenoglio?

  Without a word Minerva went down the steep staircase again, and a man made his way through Fenoglio’s door behind Orpheus. Even ducking his head, he almost got stuck in the doorway. Aha, the legendary bodyguard. There was even less space in Fenoglio’s modest little room with this huge meatball inside it.

  Farid, on the other hand, didn’t take up much space, although so far he had played a big part in the story. Farid, Dustfinger’s angel of death … he followed his new master through the door hesitantly, as if ashamed to be keeping such company.

  ‘Well now, Fenoglio, I’m truly sorry,’ said Orpheus, his supercilious smile giving the lie to his words, ‘but I’m afraid I’ve found a few more inconsistencies.’

  Inconsistencies!

  ‘I’ve sent Farid here before with my questions, but you gave him some very strange answers.’ Looking portentous, he straightened his glasses and brought the book out from under his heavy velvet coat. Yes, that calf’s-head had brought Fenoglio’s book with him into the world of the story it told: the very last copy of Inkheart. But had he given it back to him, the author? Oh no. ‘I’m sorry, Fenoglio,’ was all he had said, with the arrogant expression that he had mastered so perfectly. (Orpheus had been quick to abandon the mask of a diligent student.) ‘I’m sorry, but this book is mine. Or do you seriously claim that an author is the rightful owner of every copy of his books?’ Puffed-up, milk-faced young upstart! What a way to speak to him, Fenoglio, the creator of everything around Orpheus himself, even the air he breathed!

  ‘Are you after me again for information on death?’ Fenoglio squeezed his feet into his worn old boots. ‘Why? So that you can go telling this poor boy you’ll bring Dustfinger back from the White Women, just to keep him in your service?’

  Farid tightened his lips. Dustfinger’s marten blinked sleepily on his shoulder – or was this a different animal?

  ‘What nonsense you talk!’ Orpheus sounded distinctly peeved – he took offence very easily. ‘Do I look as if I have any trouble finding servants? I have six maids, a bodyguard, a cook and the boy. You know very well it’s not just for the boy I want to bring Dustfinger back. He belongs in this story. It’s not half as good without him, it’s a flower without petals, a night without stars—’

  ‘A forest without trees?’ Fenoglio muttered.

  Orpheus turned as red as beetroot. It was so amusing to make fun of the arrogant fop – one of the few pleasures Fenoglio still had left.

  ‘You’re drunk, old man!’ Orpheus spat. His voice could sound very unpleasant.

  ‘Drunk or not, I still know a hundred times more about words than you do. You trade at second-hand. You unravel whatever you can find and knit it up again as if a story were a pair of old socks! So don’t you tell me what part Dustfinger ought to play in this one. Perhaps you remember I had him dead once already, before he decided to go with the White Women! What do you think you’re doing, coming here to lecture me about my own story? Take a look at that, why don’t you?’ Furiously, he pointed to the shimmering fairies’ nest above his bed. ‘Rainbow-coloured fairies! Ever since they built their horrible nest up there I’ve had the most appalling dreams! And they steal the blue fairies’ stocks of winter provisions!’

  ‘So?’ Orpheus shrugged his plump shoulders. ‘They look pretty, all the same, don’t they? I thought it was so tedious for all fairies to be blue.’

  ‘Did you, indeed?’ Fenoglio’s voice rose to such volume that one of the colourful fairies interrupted her constant chatter and peered out of her gaudy nest. ‘Then write your own world! This one’s mine, understand? Mine! I’m sick and tired of your meddling with it. I admit I’ve made some mistakes in my life, but writing you here was far and away the worst of them!’

  Bored, Orpheus inspected his fingernails. They were bitten to the quick. ‘I’m not listening to any more of this!’ he said in a menacingly soft voice. ‘All that stuff about “you wrote me here”, “she read me here” – nonsense! I’m the one who does the reading and writing around here now. The only one. The words don’t obey you any more, old man, it’s a long time since they di
d, and you know it!’

  ‘They’ll obey me again! And the first thing I’ll write will be a return ticket for you!’

  ‘Oh yes? And who’s going to read these fabulous words? As far as I’m aware, you need someone to read them aloud for you. Unlike me.’

  ‘Well?’ Fenoglio came so close that Orpheus’s long-sighted eyes blinked at him in annoyance. ‘I’ll ask Mortimer! They don’t call him Silvertongue for nothing, even if he goes by another name these days. Ask the boy! If it weren’t for Mortimer, he’d still be in the desert shovelling camel dung.’

  ‘Mortimer!’ Orpheus produced a derisive smile, although with some difficulty. ‘Is your head buried so deep in your wine jug that you don’t know what’s going on in this world of yours? He’s not doing any reading now. The bookbinder prefers to play the outlaw these days – the role you created especially for him.’

  The bodyguard uttered a grunt, probably meant to be something like laughter. What a ghastly fellow! Had Fenoglio himself written him into the story, or had Orpheus? Fenoglio scrutinized the muscleman for a moment, irritated, and then turned back to his master.

  ‘I did not make it especially for him!’ he said. ‘It’s the other way round: I used Mortimer as my pattern for the character … and from all I hear, he plays his part well. But that doesn’t mean the Bluejay no longer has a silver tongue. Not to mention his gifted daughter.’

  ‘Oh yes? And do you know where he is?’ Orpheus asked almost casually. He was staring at his fingernails again, while his bodyguard had set to work on what was left of Fenoglio’s breakfast.

  ‘Indeed I do. He’s coming—’ Fenoglio fell abruptly silent as the boy suddenly came up and clapped his hand over the old man’s mouth. Why did he keep forgetting the lad’s name? Because you’re going senile, Fenoglio, he said to himself, that’s why.

  ‘No one knows where the Bluejay is!’ How reproachfully Farid’s black eyes were looking at Fenoglio! ‘No one!’

  Of course. Damn drunken old fool that he was! How could he have forgotten that Orpheus turned green with jealousy whenever he heard Mortimer’s name, or that he went in and out of the Milksop’s castle all the time? Fenoglio could have bitten his tongue off.

  But Orpheus smiled. ‘Don’t look so alarmed, old man! So the bookbinder’s coming here. Bold of him. Does he want to make the songs that sing of his daring come true before they hang him? Because that’s how he’ll meet his end, like all heroes. We both know that, don’t we? Don’t worry, I don’t intend to hand him over ripe for the gallows. Others will do that. No, I just want to talk to him about the White Women. There aren’t many who have survived a meeting with them, that’s why I really would like a word with him. There are some very interesting rumours about such survivors.’

  ‘I’ll tell him if I see him,’ replied Fenoglio brusquely. ‘But I can’t think that he will want to talk to you. After all, I don’t suppose he’d ever have met the White Women at all if you hadn’t been so willing to read him here for Mortola. Rosenquartz!’ He strode to the door with as much dignity as was possible in his shabby boots. ‘I have some errands to run. See our guests out, and mind you keep away from that marten!’

  Fenoglio stumbled down the staircase to the yard almost as fast as he had on the day when Basta had paid him a visit. Mortimer would be waiting outside the castle gates already! Suppose Orpheus found him there when he went to the castle to tell the Milksop what he had heard? The Bluejay was the Governor’s mortal enemy.

  The boy caught up with him halfway downstairs. Farid. Yes, that was the name. Of course. Going senile, for sure

  ‘Is Silvertongue really coming here?’ he whispered breathlessly. ‘Don’t worry, Orpheus won’t give him away. Not yet! But Ombra is far too dangerous for him! Is he bringing Meggie with him?’

  ‘Farid!’ Orpheus was looking down at them from the top of the stairs as if he were the king of the Inkworld. ‘If the old fool doesn’t tell Mortimer I want to speak to him, then you do it. Understand?’

  Old fool, thought Fenoglio. Oh, ye gods of words, give them back to me so that I can get this damned calf’s-head out of my story!

  He wanted to give Orpheus a suitably cutting answer, but not even his tongue could find the right words now, and the boy impatiently hauled him away.

  6

  Sad Ombra

  My courtiers called me the happy prince, and happy indeed I was, if pleasure be happiness. So I lived and so I died. And now that I am dead they have set me high that I can see all the ugliness and all the misery in the city, and though my heart is made of lead yet I cannot choose but weep.

  Oscar Wilde,

  The Happy Prince

  Farid had told Meggie how difficult it was to get into Ombra now, and she had passed on everything he said to Mo. ‘The guards aren’t the harmless fools who used to stand there. If they ask you what you are doing in Ombra, think hard before you answer. Whatever they demand, you must stay humble and submissive. They don’t search many people. Sometimes you may even be lucky and they’ll just wave you through!’

  They weren’t lucky. The guards stopped them, and Meggie felt like clinging to Mo when one of the soldiers gestured to him to dismount and brusquely asked to see a sample of his craft. While the guard looked at the book of her mother’s drawings, Meggie wondered in alarm whether she already knew the face under the open helmet from her imprisonment in the Castle of Night, and whether he would find the knife hidden in Mo’s belt. They might kill him just for that knife. No one was allowed to carry weapons except the occupiers from Argenta, but Battista had made the belt so well that even the suspicious hands of the guard at the gate could find nothing wrong with it.

  Meggie was glad Mo had the knife with him as they rode through the ironbound gates, past the lances of the guards, and into the city that now belonged to the Adderhead.

  She hadn’t been in Ombra since she and Dustfinger first set out for the secret camp of the Motley Folk. It seemed an eternity ago that she had run through the streets with Resa’s letter telling her that Mortola had shot her father. For a moment she pressed her face against Mo’s back, so happy that he was back with her, alive and well. At last she would be able to show him what she’d told him so much about: Balbulus’s workshop and the Laughing Prince’s books. For one precious moment she forgot all her fears, and it seemed as if the Inkworld belonged only to him and her.

  Mo liked Ombra. Meggie could see it in his face, from the way he looked around, reining in his horse again and again to look down the streets. Although it was impossible to ignore the mark left on the city by the occupying forces, Ombra was still what the stonemasons had made of it when they first carved its gates, columns and arches. Their works of art couldn’t be carried away and broken up – for then they’d be worth no more than the paving stones in the street. So stone flowers still grew under the windows and balconies of Ombra, tendrils twined around columns and cornices, and faces stuck tongues out of grotesquely distorted mouths from the sand-coloured walls, weeping stony tears. But the Laughing Prince’s coat of arms was defaced everywhere, and you could recognize the lion on it only from what was left of its mane.

  ‘The street on the right leads to the marketplace!’ Meggie whispered to Mo, and he nodded like a sleepwalker. Very likely he was hearing, in his mind, the words that had once told him about the scene now surrounding him as he rode on. Meggie had heard about the Inkworld only from her mother, but Mo had read Fenoglio’s book countless times as he tried again and again to find Resa among the words.

  ‘Is it the way you imagined it?’ she asked him quietly.

  ‘Yes,’ Mo whispered back. ‘Yes – and no.’

  There was a crowd of people in the marketplace, just as if the peace-loving Laughing Prince still ruled Ombra – except that there were hardly any men to be seen, and you could stop and watch entertainers again. For the Milksop allowed strolling players into the city, although only – it was whispered – if they were prepared to spy for him. Mo rode his horse past a crow
d of children. There were many children in Ombra, even though their fathers were dead. Meggie saw a torch whirling through the air above the small heads – two, three, four torches – and sparks fading and going out in the cold air. Farid? she wondered, although she knew he’d done no more fire-eating since Dustfinger’s death. But Mo suddenly pulled his hood down over his forehead, and then she too saw the familiar well-oiled face with its constant smile.

  Sootbird.

  Meggie’s fingers closed on Mo’s cloak, but her father rode on, as if the man who had betrayed him once already wasn’t there at all. More than a dozen strolling players had lost their lives because Sootbird had revealed the whereabouts of the secret camp, and Mo himself had almost been among the dead. Everyone in Lombrica knew that Sootbird went in and out of the Castle of Night, that he’d been paid for his treachery in silver by the Piper himself and was now also on excellent terms with the Milksop, yet there he stood in Ombra marketplace, smiling, unrivalled now that Dustfinger was dead and Farid had lost his enthusiasm for fire-eating.

  Oh yes, Ombra certainly had new masters. Nothing could have made that clearer to Meggie than Sootbird’s smug, masklike face. It was said that the Adderhead’s alchemists had taught him certain things, and that what he played with now was dark fire, wily and deadly like the powders he used to tame it. The Strong Man had told Meggie that its smoke beguiled the senses, making Sootbird’s spectators think they were watching the greatest fire-eater on earth.

  Whatever the truth of that was, the children of Ombra clapped. The torches didn’t fly half as high in the air as they had for Dustfinger or Farid, but for a while the show made them forget their sad mothers, and the work waiting at home.

  ‘Mo, please!’ Meggie quickly turned her face away as Sootbird looked in her direction. ‘Let’s turn back! Suppose he recognizes you?’

  They were going to close the gates, then the two of them would be hunted through the streets like rats in a trap!

  But Mo just shook his head very slightly as he reined in his horse behind one of the market stalls. ‘Don’t worry, Sootbird is far too busy keeping the fire away from his pretty face!’ he whispered to Meggie. ‘But let’s dismount. We won’t be so conspicuous on foot.’

  The horse shied when Mo led it into the crowd, but he soothed it in a quiet voice. Meggie saw a juggler who had once followed the Black Prince among the stalls. Many of the strolling players had changed sides now that the Milksop was filling their pockets. These were not bad times for them, and the market traders did good business too. The women of Ombra couldn’t afford any of the wares for sale, but with the money they had extorted the Milksop and his friends bought costly fabrics, jewellery, weapons, and delicacies with names that Fenoglio himself might not know. You could even buy horses here.

  Mo looked around at the bustling, colourful throng as if he didn’t want to miss a single face or any of the wares offered for sale, but finally his gaze turned to the towers rising high above the tiled roof tops, and lingered there. Meggie’s heart constricted. He was still determined to go to the castle, and she cursed herself for ever telling him about Balbulus and his art.

  She almost stopped breathing when they passed a ‘Wanted’ poster for the Bluejay, but Mo just cast a glance of amusement at the picture and ran his hand through his dark hair, which he now wore short like a peasant. Perhaps he thought his carefree attitude would soothe Meggie, but it didn’t. It frightened her. When he acted like that he was the Bluejay, a stranger with her father’s face.

  Suppose one of the soldiers who had guarded him in the Castle of Night was here? Wasn’t that one staring at them? And the minstrel woman over there – didn’t she look like one of the women who had gone out through the gates of the Castle of Night with them? Move away, Mo! she thought, willing him to walk on with her through one of the arches, into a street – any street – just to be out of sight of all those eyes. Two children clutched her skirt and held out their dirty hands, begging. Meggie smiled at them helplessly. She didn’t have any money, not a coin. How hungry they looked! A soldier made his way through the crush and roughly pushed the beggar children aside. If only we were in there with Balbulus, thought Meggie – and stumbled into Mo as he abruptly stopped.

  Beside the stall of a physician who was praising his miracle medicine at the top of his voice, a few boys were standing around a pillory. There was a woman in it, her hands and head wedged in the wood, helpless as a