“Just ignore them,” said Cornelius. “If you pay too much attention, you’ll go back.”
“That’s reassuring,” I panted. Even though Colin wasn’t that heavy, he was limp and uncooperative, and it was becoming a strain to support him.
The place made a sort of groan, like the creaking of an old tree in a bad storm. The spiderwebs quivered. And what happened to the spiders, when the sorcerer’s House was taking up this space, I wondered?
“Stopthinking,” said Cornelius sharply, as if he could hear me.
“It’s a human thing,” I protested. “It’s hard to stop.”
Cornelius gave a disgusted sniff that summed up all his opinions regarding humans.
“Why is itshaking,though?”I asked. “Is this usual?”
“Not as far as I know. The sorceress may be looking for us, I suppose.”
“That’s not very comforting. What if she brings the place down around our ears?”
“Not much we could do about it,” he said.
I did my best to ignore my thoughts and just concentrate on following Cornelius’s tail down this new corridor.
“How do you know where you’re going?” I asked. My breath was coming shallowly.
“I just do,” said Cornelius, and looked back over his shoulder. “It’s a cat thing,” he added ironically. “It’s hard to stop.”
The Other House was not the same shape as the sorcerer’s House, exactly, but there did seem to be points where the two were a little closer together, like two streams of water flowing into one.
In these places, the walls shimmered more decidedly, as if the wood and plaster had become a curtain between one place and the next, that you could draw aside with your hand. I avoided looking at the shimmer for too long lest, as Cornelius had said, I sent us back to the House before we were ready.
The magical House seemed to be wrapped around this one like a vine choking a tree, stifling what it used to be, but there was a hint of life left. Standing in one of the abandoned rooms, I felt a twinge that told methiswas the kitchen, in the same way you might see the memory of old beauty in a wrinkled face.
We pushed open a door that seemed to have been long shut—or tried to. Something pushed back. I put my head down and shoved it as best as I could while still supporting Colin, and with a great sound of crackling and snapping, whatever was behind it gave way, and I practically fell through into a cloud of dust and plant matter.
The corridor behind the door was choked with dead and dying vines, crowding every inch of space, and smelling of rot and must. Cornelius sneezed. “I haven’t seen this bit before,” he said.
“It looks familiar,” I said. I had dreamed something like this, before coming to the city and then again during my heartsickness fevers. Those long, black corridors, so like the House, and those tunnels of vines. I felt a shiver.
“Well, my nose tells me this is the way out,” said Cornelius. “So we’ll have to push through.”
We picked our way through the vines, most of which were dead and dry, but some of which still had a little bend and juice to them.
Colin had woken a little, enough to move his limbs sluggishly, but he kept getting tangled up in the vines and coming to a standstill, his eyelids flickering and his mouth hanging open as if he were still half asleep.
The vines were covered with little thorns that reached out with malicious hands to snag clothing and skin. I had to use my little knife to cut him free several times, and the thorns left my hands crisscrossed with red lines and bright beads of blood. I cussed and muttered as I tried to maneuver Colin through each new obstacle.
“Just leave him,” Cornelius kept saying. “He’s barely alive as it is. I can smell it.”
“I can’t just leave him,” I grunted, lifting each of his legs in turn to guide him over a particularly nasty muddle of vines, tangled all together like a nest of snakes. “Barely alive is still alive. We might still be able to help him.”
Humans,I could hear Cornelius thinking, but he said no more and even helped to free a trapped piece of clothing with his little teeth.
“We’re nearly at the door,” he said. “I can feel it.”
I didn’t know if we would be able to get to the Outside from this House, or whether we would have to pass back into the sorcerer’s House to do so. All these layers of reality, one on top of the other like folded pastry! I couldn’t keep them straight in my head. What if there was another House beneath this one, and another beneath that, and . . .
The walls shivered. The vines rattled their thorns.
“You’re thinking too much again,” hissed Cornelius.
