Page 32 of The Poisoned King (Impossible Creatures #2)

The Secret Door

Anya set off at a run, the gaganas nesting together in her hair; Christopher and the others followed behind. It helped immeasurably to be doing something. The moment she stopped, she thought she might suffocate.

“Can we go to the banqueting hall first?” said Anya. Here were three immense oak tables and a carved marble fireplace wide enough to fit a dozen Anyas, in which reposed a fire iron, a toasting fork, and a superbly ugly stone sculpture of a tortoise shell, riven with spikes.

Anya ran from huge oil painting to huge oil painting, lifting them, checking behind them for openings. Then she screamed—the sculpture had moved, and put forth six legs and a lion head. It came toward her, sniffing hungrily.

“Ah! The terasque,” said Nighthand. He crossed rapidly to Anya and put his great bulk between her and the creature. “I forgot it was in here. It lost its tail in a battle, and Ratwin guided it here.”

“I shoulds have lefts it there,” said Ratwin. “It gaves me zero thankses and nil graces. It’s got no bring-up and no mannerlies.”

The terasque lumbered up to Anya. She stayed very still as it sniffed her feet.

“They can be good allies, but they’re natural misanthropes,” said Irian.

“In which they are much like me,” said Nighthand. “And, much like me, they eat anything, which can be helpful. But we’re keeping this one away from the other creatures until it learns not to be angered by the existence of living things other than itself.”

The terasque gave a huff and moved toward Christopher.

Christopher was walking past paintings of the Trevasse family. The most recent one had written, underneath, Anja Trevasse . He unhooked the portrait and handed it to the terasque. “Dinner,” he said. The terasque took the picture in its jaws and retreated to the fireplace.

“Who was she, that woman?” asked Anya.

“It’s a long story,” said Christopher.

“Tell it,” she said. And he did as they moved through the palace.

He told of his first voyage round the Archipelago, and Mal Arvorian, the Immortal.

Anya listened and felt suddenly shy of him again.

She watched Christopher as he carried Jacques down the corridor; his friendship would be a thing worth fighting for.

They moved through a passage of staterooms. “The receiving room,” said Nighthand, throwing open a door. Here the wall was lined with a number of tapestries, and two snow-white caladrius birds perched on the curtain rail—but no hidden doors.

“A nice bird, the caladrius. They can heal the sick,” said Nighthand, “though only if they wish it. And they can’t cure hangovers; I know it of old.”

In the games room there was a glowing hercinia bird making a nest in the center of a billiard table. It clacked its beak at them.

“No hidden libraries,” said Christopher.

Anya’s heart was beginning to sink as, a dozen rooms later, they passed into the salon. The sofa was taken up by a sleeping peryton, a beautiful brown winged deer.

This was the loveliest room so far, Anya thought. It was wide and airy, and the walls were clad with silk. On one wall hung the largest painting Anya had yet seen. It showed a life-size unicorn pawing at a door in a walled garden.

She looked closer at the painting. It reminded her of the garden at home, and the afternoons she had spent with her father digging in the earth; she held Koo up to see.

Gallia flew to land on top of the painting and looked at it upside down, her bright eyes narrowed. Suddenly she swooped, her sharp beak flashed out, and she pecked at the canvas, at the painted door’s hinges.

“Gallia! What are you doing?” said Anya. “Don’t!”

Gallia pecked again at the painted joint. Layers of the thick oil paint chipped away and fell to the floor. Beneath the layers there was a gleam of metal: a silver hinge.

Anya stared. “It’s a real door!”

The door in the painting had no handle, nor lock, nor key. But the hinge was real silver, and there was the slightest dip in the canvas around the edges of the painted door.

Anya did not wait for permission. She dug her fingernails right through the canvas, around the seams of the door. It would not open. Christopher wedged the point of his sword in the gap and tried to pry it open; that, too, failed.

“Wait!” said Anya, sprinting back to her room to retrieve the tin in which she had transported Koo. Gallia and Koo followed, flying protectively overhead.

She found her two remaining sprigs of rascovnic, each with its five delicate leaves. She snatched one up and darted back down the great sweeping stairs.

She rubbed the leaves in her fingertips as she ran, to extract the juice. It smelled as strong as perfume. It was the scent of rain on hot earth, and it catapulted her back to her father’s garden, and she stumbled and nearly fell.

Anya jerked her head left, and left, and up, and a twist. It meant “I’m coming” and “Father.”

Back in the salon, watched skeptically by Nighthand and adoringly by Koo, Anya rubbed the plant on the hinges, and then, with what was left, all around the edges of the door, tearing away the canvas.

“Has the concept of art angered you in some way, that you are so determined to obliterate my painting?” said Nighthand.

Nothing happened.

“It didn’t work,” said Anya. Her voice was very small. She had ruined the painting in her eagerness, and for nothing.

Gallia cawed and twitched her head round to the left seventy degrees. It meant “hope, maybe, perhaps, possibly.”

“I’m not convinced,” began Nighthand, “that there ever was a libr—”

But his words were cut off by a boom, a great crunching and grinding somewhere deep beneath their feet.

The door flew open, tearing the painting. Beyond it was…a nothing. A low ceiling over an immense black hole.

“Holds on to your undergarmentations!” said Ratwin as the ground began to shake.