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“Now listen, you little rotters,” the Magazine Man whispered, though there was no one to hear them in the deeps of the earth, “I’m going to set you down for half a tock and you might think it’s a swell idea to run off, but I promise you, you’ll get nowhere fast but dead if you do. I know these twisty-turnies like my own covers, front and back, but you can’t see in the dark any better than a blind, drunk hedgehog. Understand your old Brunto?” The creature sniffed the air. He turned right. “Postscript! There’s a chasm three inches to your left that bottoms out in a subterranean ocean just teeming with ravenous wormsharks and at least one immortal three-eyed leviathan, so root your stupid feet to the ground, right?”
Branwell trembled, and was glad Anne couldn’t see it. Anne. Why couldn’t old Brunty have grabbed Charlotte instead? Anne was little and slow and any time he had a really good slaughter
going among the soldiers in the room at the top of the stairs, she gave them all sweet, tender burials and resurrections in Tabitha’s butter dishes. What could he do with an Anne?
Anne looked up at him in the dark. He couldn’t see her, not really, but he could see a sliver of the shine in her big eyes.
“Don’t leave me,” she whispered. “Don’t you run off.”
She didn’t think he would. But she couldn’t be sure. If only the Magazine Man had snatched Emily instead, Anne would have felt much safer. At any minute, Branwell might get the idea that he could save her better by dashing off to do some foolish thing with a trebuchet, a bucket of nails, and a bloodsucking bat, or whatever other savagery came into his head. She grabbed his hand and squeezed so tight his knuckles popped.
“Right, Mr. Brunty. We’ll be good.” But Bran felt rather small and childish saying that, and he hated that feeling more than old porridge or new shirt collars. So he added: “For now.”
Brunty clapped his illustrated hands. Anne could hear it in the dark, dry and raspy and sneering. “Oh, very brave, Little Lord Backtalk!”
The buzzing grew louder and more pointed while their kidnapper rummaged and rustled with some bit of presumably frightful business Bran and Anne strained to see. Finally there was a popping, sucking noise and the blackness fizzled away in a gout of greenish-blue light. Brunty had got his uncanny contraption working again, that strange and sickly hourglass frame full of weeping saucers. It glowed on an outcropping of shining obsidian stone, bubbling with acid and sizzling with tiny forks of lightning. The ghostly lantern-light flickered over the pages of Brunty’s brutal face, his scroll knob belly, his glossy evening-edition hands. It turned his spectacles to spectral green lamps. And they could see, now, that Brunty was all bad news. The newspapers on his waistcoat announced WAR! and MURDER! and ALL-DESTROYING FLOOD CONSUMES PLANET in giant headlines. The magazines that formed his meaty hands showed terrible woodcuts of famine and mayhem. The master spy raised the capital O’s of his eyes to heaven and patted his waistcoat for something—what had he forgotten? Ah! A tiny glass vial of sand, which in any other light, would have shone red.
“What is that thing?” Bran asked. He could hardly take his eyes off it. The seething, venomous green danced deep in his pupils.
“None of your bloody business, Quentin Q. Questions! Hasn’t anyone taught you anything? The first rule of spying is Do Not Ask Plainly for What You Seek or Nobody Will Tell You Nothing. You’d get strangled on your first day. Oh, the Great Encyclopedia tests me so! He knows I hate children. What a better world we’d have if we were all born grown!”
“That’s a nasty thing to say and you’re a nasty man,” Anne said matter-of-factly.
“What’s the second rule?” Branwell piped up.
“Eh?”
“Of spying. You said the first rule already. What’s the second?”
“Ah. Er. Never Use Your Real Name.”
“Is Brunty not—”
“Third rule of spying is No Backtalk!” yelled the Magazine Man.
Anne glanced to her left. There really was a vicious cliff dropping down into mist and shadows. She hadn’t believed him at all, but the wind blew up from the depths of the chasm like the breath of the earth.
“You were little once, too,” she hissed. “And I’d bet anything I’ve got you bit somebody fierce and then went back for seconds and I know you backtalked everyone you ever met.”
Brunty tapped the vial of sand, licked his finger, and held it up to test the wind. “Well, that just shows what you know, Little Lady Whinebag! I never was little. Never. The Great Encyclopedia made me as I am, from page to spine. You don’t buy a book when it’s tiny and watch it grow on your shelf, do you? Nonsense. On my day of publication, I was every inch the Brunty you see before you. Childhood is ruddy inefficient, I tell you what. I don’t know why your lot bothers with it.”
“The Great Encyclopedia?” Bran asked, shuffling his feet away from the chasm’s edge, though he really desperately wanted to know what a wormshark looked like. “Do you mean . . . God?”
The Magazine Man grunted. He unstoppered the vial and poured it out in a neat little pool on the floor of the cavern. “Who else would I mean?”
Anne laughed. “God’s not an encyclopedia! That’s the funniest thing I’ve ever heard!”
Brunty’s eyes grew rounder and softer and gentler. The headlines on his waistcoat ran like water. Now they read things like CANDLELIGHT VIGIL HELD AT MIDNIGHT and MIRACLE IN LAVENDRY in modest type. “The Encyclopedia is the Son of the Gods, sent to redeem us from disorder.” Brunty lifted up his O-eyes. “In the beginning were the Genii, blessed be their crowns of lightning! The Genii dwelt together in the void and fashioned out of nothing Heaven and Earth and Participles and Fate and Gravy Without Lumps and the Great Encyclopedia. The Encyclopedia contains everything in the world, from first to last, top to bottom, A to Zed. He protects the world, and organizes it, and explains it to any with the patience to listen. We all begin in the Nest of Knowledge, and from thence we learn to fly. I am of strong Bookish stock. We are an ancient race, possessed of great secrets and great strength. No Bookman could exist without some sacred spark of the Encyclopedia inside him.” Brunty seemed to remember himself. His face snapped back into its usual irritated expression. He whacked his chest until the headlines went boldface and angry again. INFIDEL HORDES AFOOT IN OCHREOPOLIS! “Oh, I suppose you think God is shaped more or less like you, only bigger and burlier and beardier and boomier?”
“Well . . . yes?” Branwell ventured.
Brunty snorted. His ribbon nose fluttered up and down again. “Disgusting.”
The buzzing sound suddenly sharpened itself into a long, wet scream. A huge shape came barreling down the tunnel toward them, something black and massive and shrieking and humming, something that reflected the light of Brunty’s horrible acid-lantern and exploded it into green and blue fireworks.
It was a fly. A fly the size of a small whale.
The fly descended on the little pile of red sand and devoured it, raising its head every once in a bit to chortle and thrum with delight. Beneath a rich, carved onyx saddle, its body rippled with shimmering black muscles and veins and long gray wings. Its huge, faceted eyes drank up the dark. It flicked its proboscis and rubbed its feelers together, gloating over its feast.
