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There was another staircase at the end of this corridor. Daylight fell in from above, but before we reached the stairs, two men with drawn swords stepped out of the shadows, as if they’d been waiting for us.
“Good day,” said Gideon. Unlike me, he hadn’t batted an eyelash. But his hand had gone to his own sword.
“Password!” demanded the first man.
“Surely you were here only yesterday,” said the second man, coming a little closer to take a look at Gideon. “Or your younger brother was. The likeness is remarkable.”
“Is this the boy who can appear out of nowhere?” asked the other man. Both of them stared openmouthed at Gideon. They wore clothes like his, and Madame Rossini had obviously been right: in the Rococo age men did like bright colors. These two had combined red and brown with turquoise, which was then embroidered with little mauve flowers, and one of them really was wearing a lemon-yellow coat. The sight should have been appalling, but there was just something about it. It was … well, colorful.
They were both wearing wigs with curls like sausages over their ears and a small extra pigtail at the back of the neck tied with a velvet ribbon.
“Let’s just say I know ways about this house that are unknown to you,” said Gideon with a scornful smile. “I and my companion have to speak to the Master. On urgent business.”
“That’s right, mention yourself first,” I murmured.
“The password?”
Quark edit bisquitis. Or something along those lines.
“Qua redit nescitis,” said Gideon.
Well, I’d had it almost right.
ELEVEN
THE MAN IN THE YELLOW coat put his sword away. “Follow me.”
Curious, I looked out the first window we passed. So this was the eighteenth century! My scalp began tingling with excitement. But all I could see was an inner courtyard with a fountain in the middle of it. I’d seen it looking just the same before.
We went up more stairs. Gideon let me go first.
“You were here only yesterday?” I asked, intrigued. I whispered it so that the man in the yellow coat wouldn’t hear what we were saying. He was only a couple of steps ahead of us.
“It was yesterday to them,” said Gideon. “To me it’s almost two years ago.”
“Why were you here?”
“To introduce myself to the count, and I had to tell him that the first chronograph had been stolen.”
“I don’t suppose he thought much of that.”
The man in yellow acted as if he wasn’t trying to listen to us, but you could practically see his ears popping out from under the white sausages of hair in the effort to hear.
“He took it better than I’d expected,” said Gideon. “And after the first shock, he was delighted to hear that our second chronograph really was in working order, giving us another chance to end the whole thing successfully.”
“Where’s the chronograph now?” I whispered. “I mean at this moment in this time.”
“Somewhere in this building, I assume. The count won’t be parted from it for long. He himself has to elapse to avoid random time traveling.”
“Why can’t we simply take the chronograph back with us into the future, then?”
“For a number of reasons,” said Gideon. His tone of voice had changed. It wasn’t quite so arrogant. More like patronizing. “The most important are obvious. One of the Guardians’ golden rules for the use of the chronograph is that the continuum must never be broken. If we took the chronograph back to the future with us, the count and the time travelers born after him would have to manage without it.”
“Yes, but then no one could steal it either.”
Gideon shook his head. “I can see you’ve never thought much about the nature of time. It would be very dangerous to interrupt certain sequences of events. In the worst case scenario, you might never be born.”
“I see,” I said untruthfully.
