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‘Jack?’
She dashed forward and waved a hand in front of the armour’s face, jumping straight back in case it was a trap. But why would it need a trap? It had caught her just seconds ago.
‘Jack . . . I think they’ve been turned off.’
He climbed through the window and hesitantly approached the armour. When it didn’t move, he tapped it on its cuirassed chest. The only thing this provoked was a deep, resonant bong.
‘I guess they have,’ he said. ‘But why? And by who?’
‘Let me see,’ said a muffled voice from his backpack. ‘Perhaps I can tell you.’
Jack pulled out Professor Olafsson. He examined the armour with interest, squinting and pursing his lips until at last he nodded with satisfaction.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Quiescent. Very clever use of the Gift for animating inanimate objects, very tricky, too . . .’
‘So why are they suddenly quiescent?’ asked Jaide.
‘Again, I can only imagine that it was your doing.’
‘Mine? But I didn’t do anything.’
‘You must have. Did you make any unusual signs or gestures—?’
‘No.’
‘Call it by any particular names—?’
‘No.’
‘Touch it, by any chance?’
Jaide opened her mouth to say No to that, too, but then she remembered otherwise.
‘It grabbed my ankle,’ she said. ‘It touched me then.’
‘There you have it,’ said Professor Olafsson. ‘I expect it was designed to recognise a Warden . . . even a junior troubletwister Warden. The moment you touched one of its agents, the booby trap realised you weren’t hostile and stood down.’
‘I’m glad it did,’ said Jaide. ‘But what about Thomas—’
She peered over the balustrade. Two suits of armour were frozen in mid-motion, with the unconscious form of Thomas Solomon hanging between them, his shirt bunched up in their gauntlets.
‘Is he dead?’ whispered Jack.
‘I . . . I think I can see him breathing,’ said Jaide.
‘We’d better go and check,’ said Jack. He looked around to make sure there were no other moving suits of armour lurking anywhere and suddenly added, ‘Where’s Ari?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Jaide. There was no sign of him on either level of the library, or on the roof, when Jack stuck his head out the window to have a look.
‘Perhaps he ran away,’ said Professor Olafsson.
‘He would never do that,’ said Jaide.
‘Unless it was to get help.’ Jack groaned. ‘I hope he hasn’t gone to wake up Grandma.’
They ran down the stairs, Cornelia zooming ahead of them and taking a perch on the picture frame.
Together, the twins gently lowered Thomas Solomon to the ground, though they ripped his shirt in the process.
‘He is breathing,’ said Jaide. ‘But . . . I guess we’d better call an ambulance.’
‘What if Mum comes?’ asked Jack, gesturing at the destruction all around. ‘How do we explain all this? Shouldn’t we go and get the card first?’
‘The man is not hurt,’ pronounced the professor. ‘He has merely fainted. He will come around in his own time, probably an hour or two.’
‘Are you sure?’ asked Jaide.
‘I am sure,’ said the death mask.
‘Okay, let’s go get that card,’ said Jack, ‘before something else gets in the way.’
‘Indeed,’ said Professor Olafsson. ‘I am curious to see the cross-continuum conduit constructor in action again. It was a little quick that last time.’
The cross-continuum conduit constructor was undamaged, apart from a small dent near one end that Professor Olafsson assured them would not affect its working.
As they lined it up again, Jack asked, ‘What’s it like in there? Did you see the card?’
Jaide explained what she had experienced, then confessed that, no, she hadn’t actually found the Card of Translocation yet.
‘I’m going to come with you this time,’ Jack said. ‘Two sets of eyes are better than one.’
‘Who’s going to watch out for more booby traps and hold the rope?’
‘Cornelia and Professor Olafsson will yell if something happens. We can tie the rope to the column and pull ourselves back.’
‘Actually, I guess we don’t need the rope,’ said Jaide. ‘I’ve been through, and we know it isn’t straight down or anything. Come on. Let’s line it up and we’ll touch it together on three.’
When the controller was aligned, Jaide counted.
‘One . . . two . . . three!’
The twins pressed their hands to the cool, brassy surface. Once again, Jaide felt herself being whisked along from the normal universe of the castle to the one inside the painting. She blinked, momentarily dazzled. There was no visible sun, but everything was lit by a warm, yellow light. She hadn’t noticed how dark it was getting back in the real world.
There was a rushing, tearing noise, and suddenly Jack was standing next to her, rocking faintly on his heels and blinking around him as she had done a moment earlier.
‘Wow,’ he said. ‘That was amazing!’
There wasn’t time to gawp at the scenery.
‘I’m going that way,’ Jaide said, pointing along the yellow brick road to the horizon. ‘You look around here.’
‘Don’t go far,’ warned Jack. ‘There could be other guards or traps.’
‘I’ll be careful. I won’t go out of sight.’
Jack stared up at the strange yellow sky, devoid of a sun, and across at the blurred horizon. Then he put aside his amazement at being inside a painting to concentrate on the task at hand. Where would he hide a gold card if he was the one doing so? There weren’t many places, or at least not many he could see close by.
First he tried the tree, peering around its roots and branches and into every knothole. Then he tried the ground around it, looking for signs that it had been dug up, but the ground was undisturbed. It didn’t even look like real soil. When he poked at it, it dimpled like rubber instead of crumbling.
Next he tried the table on which the young woman who looked a bit like Grandma X was playing cards. There was nothing taped underneath and there were no visible drawers. The cards themselves were all ordinary cards, much too small to hide something made of solid gold. The young woman was wearing a voluminous yellow dress that Jack was afraid he might have to look under, but it, too, was rubbery like the ground and seemed solid all the way through. Her hair also had the same texture, close up. There was no way to hide anything there.
A gleam of light caught his eye as he was examining her hair. There was something around her neck, something real: a silver locket suspended from a crimson ribbon, studded with tiny jewels. He peered closer, irrationally afraid that she might come to life if he tried to touch it. But she remained exactly as she was, a facsimile of someone, not alive in her own right.
His fingers lifted the locket. It was real, not part of the painting. Thinking there might be a clue inside it, he untied the ribbon and pulled the locket free. It rested lightly in his hand, and opened easily when he flicked the clasp with a thumbnail.
Inside was a lock of hair and a photo. The photo had once been black-and-white, but was now mostly brown. It showed the woman in the painting standing on a jetty, looking out to sea. Next to her was a young man with a broad, infectious grin below a moustache so fine it might have been drawn on with a pencil. Both wore old-fashioned clothes, but not as old as the woman in the painting, maybe early twentieth century. Behind them and to one side was the Portland lighthouse.
