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“Pull her out and give her the Luminous Eight-Handed Thrill-Throttle!” They all agreed.
The Bathysphere crunched into the plain of anemones. September could feel Fizzwilliam’s bruises and bent clawfeet. “We’ll get you free and safe again,” September promised him. “You’ll see your brothers and sisters again and they won’t even notice the dents!” Fizzwilliam assured her in his gleaming voice that it was not in the least her fault. He should have asked for anti-octopus modifications for Abyssmas.
The leader swirled over the top of the Bathysphere. She
snapped her tentacles together and flung them out again in fury. “I am Hugger-Muggery, High Assassin of the Pieces of Eight! I personally throttled Scylla, Charybdis, and Mr. David Jones and they thanked me for the privilege! You have but two choices, biped! Come into the open water and show me you are a creature of the Sea, even though you’ve got dirt and drought written all over you, or let me in.” She coiled and uncoiled those flame-bright tentacles to show that September would not enjoy it if she chose the latter.
“She will do no such thing,” Saturday said.
“Don’t make a ruckus in your grandmother’s house, Marid!” Hugger-Muggery’s huge, round black eyes narrowed in her bulblike head. “She likes her quiet. She does not like clumsy cows chewing on her china!”
“I’m not a cow!” September said finally. It is very hard to get a word in edgewise with octopi. They love to talk. Only manatees love it more.
Hugger-Muggery dismissed her with one tentacle. “All dryhairs look the same. Cow, cheetah, wallaby, who cares?”
“September has every right to visit Mumkeep,” Saturday continued as though no one had said a single thing—though September could hear the tremble in his voice. “She is my wife. By law, she owns half my secrets. I have brought her to meet my grandmother. Isn’t that what a good grandson does?”
September held her breath. She was not anyone’s wife, thank you very much. But the way Saturday said it, wife sounded like something exciting, something daring, something a bit scoundrelly, like pirate or bandit. And they were bandits, of course. Come to steal the Heart of Fairyland.
The Pieces of Eight stared in at September. “She’s not your wife,” Hugger-Muggery finally said. “Where’s her tattoos?”
Saturday rolled his eyes to show how little he cared for the objections of octopi. “She can’t get tattooed without the cuttlefish’s approval, you soft-headed bully. We’ve only just wed. In the Autumn Provinces, in the Worsted Wood. I put a wreath of kelp round her neck, and she painted her name upon my eyelids. She wore green; I wore blue. We danced for three days, my wife and I—along with a Wyverary, a wombat, a Dodo, a family of trolls, a matchstick girl, a gramophone, a whole gang of shadows, a Yeti and his dog, a talking lamp, Winds of every color, a wairwulf and both his wives. Seventeen versions of me were there, along with her parents and mine and a pooka and Ajax Oddson, the greatest Racemaster who ever lived. We told each other our true names and fell asleep among our friends, covered in moonlight and the silver comfort of the right ending. She is my wife and I am her own and you were not invited. Leave us alone.”
September’s heart shook within her. The way he spoke sounded strange to her. It did not sound like a lie. It did not sound like a clever trick played with sly glee. It did not have his circus grin peeking out on one side. It sounded just the way it did when her father told someone how he had married her mother. It sounded like a memory. But it had never happened. Of course it had never happened! They’d never even met a troll before Hawthorn came galumphing into the Redrum Cellar. She would remember painting her name on anyone’s eyelids, let alone Saturday’s delicate blue lashes. But she knew his voice like her own, and somehow, she knew he wasn’t lying to the furious eight-armed assassins. And September remembered the little girl they’d seen that long-ago night on the Gears of the World, the girl with pale blue skin and a mole on her left cheek. Saturday had called her their daughter, come to visit them in the past as Marid children always do. September could hardly speak.
“Did you truly marry a saber-toothed tiger?” the Octopus Assassin asked Saturday incredulously.
“I’m not a saber-toothed tiger,” said September through gritted, non-saber teeth.
“Close enough!” snapped Hugger-Muggery. “If you’re hitched, she won’t mind letting the cuttlefish ink her properly.”
“That’s why we came,” Saturday lied boldly.
“Only take us quickly,” September said. “We haven’t much time.”
Hugger-Muggery narrowed her watery eyes. “What’s the hurry, hm?”
The Cantankerous Derby, September thought. My crown running away from me. The thought surprised her. She touched the circlet of jeweled keys on her head. If it is my crown. Maybe there is someone better, in all that crowd in the Plaited Plaza. Hawthorn and Tamburlaine, or Sadie Spleenwort, or the Green Wind. Oh, I wish I were back in the Redrum Cellar! I couldn’t leave, but I knew what was right and what was wrong!
But she lied along with Saturday: “No hurry! I’m just … eager to meet a real live cuttlefish!”
The Octopus Assassin snorted bubbles. “Dryhairs. We will escort you, obviously. I never trust anyone with greater or fewer limbs than myself. How can I? I see the world in eights—eight directions, eight seasons, eight virtues, and eight deadly sins. Eight is holy! Eight is supreme! Who knows how a bear like you sees? In twos, for your weak arms? In fours, for arms and skinny legs together? Your ugly hard head makes five extremities, but then you have ten fingers and ten toes. In your murky mind, are there ten seasons? Twenty directions on a compass rose? There can never be peace between us! The best we can hope for is … curiosity. I have only felt curiosity for one dryhair in my life—Woofwarp, the Spider-Monk of the Torii Orchards. He was the boiling hot green of an emperor tetra fish and his venom could lay waste to a thousand fugu! I taught him our ways and he taught me the devastating Flying Snowstorm Spinneret Strangler. We saw the eights of the universe eye to eye to eye to eye. But I had to abandon him. He would not leave his rickety orange gates for the excitement of Ys or even the mysteries of Mumkeep. So what? I don’t cry about it! Only dryhairs cry. When they feel hurt, they stop fooling themselves that anyone can truly survive on land and the Sea pours out of them. It’s beautiful, but they forget quickly. Dryhairs come and go like punches in the wind! Only the Sea lasts!”
Hugger-Muggery shot forward through the water like an eight-armed orange bullet. When she drew up her tentacles, she looked like a flower. When she snapped them back again, she became a spear. The other Octopus Assassins dragged the Bathysphere along behind, even though September kept trying to explain that Fizzwilliam would be more than happy to provide his own propulsion. They ignored her with the kind of brute force only an octopus can muster.
September could see a hundred things she wanted to investigate pass by on the ocean floor below. How could so many ships have wrecked in the whole history of the world? After half so many, September thought people might have considered giving up the naval life. Strange fish moved between safes and lockers and sunken chests of drawers. Their snouts and gills glowed in brilliant shades of purple or yellow or electric blue, but they wore robes spun from rough brown kelp, belted with ropes from the riggings of all those dead ships. Fizzwilliam gave up on convincing the Pieces of Eight to let him drive his own self. He told her that the creatures in robes were monkfish. They tended the vast loot of Mumkeep Reef, kept an accurate count, and formed a number of societies to discuss the best pieces and what they might mean, as well as to drink a great deal of brine brandy and tell jokes about squid.
“We ought to talk to them,” September whispered. “Surely, they’d know where to look for Fairyland’s Heart.”
Fizzwilliam laughed. When a Bathysphere laughs, it sounds like water trickling down through a golden drain. He would not explain what he found so funny, but I shall tell you. The idea that a Monkfish would answer any question put to it is quite, quite absurd. They speak only in riddles—well, that’s fine enough! Most monks do. But a Monkfish speaks only in the answers to riddles, and this makes them intolerably annoying. All wise fish avoid them.
The cuttlefish lived in a dark, pitted corner of Mumkeep Reef. Dragon-eye coral twisted up into sloping, pointed shapes very much like a certain opera house in Australia that would not be built for many years yet. (All coral in every world think of Australia the way that you and I think of Mesopotamia—it is the ancestral paradise of their civilization and they send it Valentines each February.) Orange cup corals held little scraps of light like lime peels. Peach-colored staghorn corals snaked out into shelves, ladders, and baskets full of glass pots of green-blue cuttlefish ink. Inside the coral opera house rested a gargantuan cuttlefish, her great sad W-shaped eyes rimmed with incandescent ultramarine like spectacular eyeliner. But cuttlefish eyes only look sad. It’s the shape that does it. But they are secretly the happiest of all cephalopods—only no one believes it, for they always look as though they were about to burst into tears from the weight of all the sorrow in the world. But truthfully, they were probably just thinking of an especially rude joke.
Unless you are a sushi chef or a marine biologist, you have probably never seen a cuttlefish. September certainly hadn’t. Up till then, she had thought orca whales or perhaps the Portuguese man-of-war she had seen in one of her father’s books were the prettiest things that lived in the sea. In one second, on the far north cropping of Mumkeep Reef, she changed her mind.
A cuttlefish has a head like a particularly soft, glum, toothless crocodile. Really, they’ve got a great lot of short tentacles for a face, but that frightens people and puts them off their dinner, so they hold them all together to look friendlier when company happens by. A cuttlefish has a body like a lovely colorful teardrop-shaped blanket with graceful veils running all round the border. They’ve got stripes like zebras, three hearts, and best of all, they can be any color they like at any time. The skin of a cuttlefish is like a screen in a cinema, and they can show anything they please on their big, silky backs. (In fact, it’s on account of an encounter with a cuttlefish that the Marquess acquired
her kaleidoscope hair—though it was terribly embarrassing for her and she made me swear not to tell.)
