Grimoire: Curse of the Midions

From the depths of sleep Jarvey surfaced suddenly, thrashing and yelling. He opened his eyes and saw the crate-walled room in a thin gray light. He was alone. As he scrambled up, he remembered the book and unwrapped it. The hanging blanket that served as the door had been twitched aside, and a little light seeped through the opening.

He peeked out. The cavernous basement had a few high, small windows, and through these, dusty bars of daylight slanted in, buttresses against the dark wall. Jarvey could see nothing through the windows. They were fifteen feet above the floor, and their panes had been so bleared with grime that they were barely translucent.

The room stretched out for a hundred feet or more, and fifty feet from side to side. A double row of pillars helped to support the raftered ceiling. Six huge panels, heavily outlined in two-foot-thick timbers, looked like trapdoors that opened up to a floor somewhere above. Dust lay thick everywhere, and scuttling spiders had strung their webs over the bricks and every other surface. Corroded gear wheels the size of dinner plates littered the stone floor, and a few broken-down machines, bigger than automobiles, crouched against the far wall, some upright, some on their sides.

Where had everyone gone? Jarvey wandered until he found a single splintered door. It was unlocked, and it creaked open on rusty hinges when Jarvey tried it. A steep ramp led up into what looked like an alley, narrow and dark between featureless walls of sooty brick.

Jarvey fished in his pocket until he found the crumpled card that Zoroaster had forced on him. Did the man really know where his mom and dad might be? Zoroaster had admitted lying to him, but he seemed to be Jarvey’s only hope. Jarvey studied the engraved script on the card: Lord P. Zoroaster, Ruling Council. Beneath that was what had to be an address: 3, Royal Crescent.

Stuffing the card back into his pocket, Jarvey crept up the incline, holding the book tight. The alley was narrow, only about three feet side to side. To his right, it ran for fifty feet and then bent around the corner of the huge building and vanished in darkness. To his left he saw light. When he reached the alley mouth, Jarvey paused, his jaw dropping.

Early-morning light made a cloudy sky milky-white. A ghastly throng of men, women, and children trudged past in the street, all of them wearing coarse, ragged gray clothing, most barefoot. Their heads drooped, and they all looked hopeless, helpless. In the washed-out light of morning, the soot-streaked buildings loomed like forbidding prison walls. A few heavyset, tough-looking men in black strode beside the crowd, brandishing six-foot-long staves. Now and then one of them yelled and struck out at a straggler, who would cower, cry out, or stumble.

Jarvey shrank back into the shadows. One of the guards jerked his head around, his eyes narrowing. Jarvey backed away as the man shouted to one of the other guards and then came toward him, brandishing his heavy staff.

Looking wildly around, Jarvey realized he had no choice—he had already retreated past the entrance to the basement. He hurried through the alley, away from the street and the man, took a sharp left turn and found himself in a dead-end passage between two crumbling brick walls, a passage no more than a yard wide.

Tucking the book inside his shirt again, Jarvey looked around frantically. Suddenly an idea struck him. He braced his back against the right wall and pressed his feet against the left one. He walked a little way up the wall, holding himself there by the pressure of his back, and then hitched himself up. Back and forth, first moving his feet, then his back, he crept up until he was a good twelve feet or more above the ground.

Then he froze. The man with the staff had reached the mouth of his dark, narrow passage. Jarvey tried to force his heartbeat to slow and held his breath. The leather-clad man leaned in and peered down the blind alley to the far end. He sniffed, like a bloodhound.

The guard below continued to sweep his gaze up, past Jarvey. And then he turned on his heel and walked away, his footsteps echoing and fading as he strode back toward the street.

Climbing down was much worse than climbing up had been. Jarvey stared at his sneakers as he inched down, and in the darkness he saw something strange: Sparks danced around the toes of his shoes as he took baby steps downward, silvery white sparks like tiny bolts of lightning. They faded as he crept down, sweat running into his eyes.

He stood at last in the mouth of the passage, swaying on his feet. Timidly, Jarvey peeked out. The alley lay deserted, and he hurried back to the ramp and the cellar, wondering what fate he had just escaped. A scrawny arm reached out from the doorway, snagged his shirt, and dragged him inside before he could fight back or yell out.

It was one of the rangy kids—Jarvey dimly remembered that Betsy had called him Charley—who gave him a brown-toothed grin. “Nah, then, you don’t wanna go out in the street. Not healthy, if you catch my meanin’.”

“Bein’ driven to work, is all.” Charley had an unruly mop of black hair. He brushed it out of his eyes and snuffled as if he had a cold, and carelessly wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “So you’re a Midion, are you?”

“Nothin’, only”—Charley leaned close and lowered his voice, and his foul-smelling breath made Jarvey wince—“only, watch out for our Bets, if you know what’s good for you. Full of plans, that one is, but she don’t always think of what her plans might mean for the rest of us.”

“Suit yourself,” Charley said carelessly. “Me, I’m guardin’ this here door for the time being. But you remember what I said, right? I don’t know as how I’d trust Bets all that far. She’s got a head on her, but she looks out for herself before she thinks of anybody else.”

Then, after what seemed like ages but really couldn’t have been more than an hour, he heard a rattle of laughter. The blanket flipped aside, and six kids came running in, doubled over, each of them clutching something, all of them chuckling. One of them was Betsy. Charley sauntered through after her, smirking and smoothing his untidy black hair away from his forehead.

She tossed something at him, something the size of a softball, and he caught it. It was round, or mostly round, with one flat side, and it was, as far as he could tell in the dimness, gray. “What is it?”

Jarvey wrenched at the lump until it broke apart. It was bread of a sort, dense and heavy. He nibbled at it. Not much taste, but his empty stomach grumbled so loud that he wolfed it all down. “Here, wash it on its way,” Betsy said, holding out a quart-sized bottle bound in brown leather strips. “Careful of that, now. Cost a lot o’ slenkin’, that did!”

It was tea, lukewarm and unsweetened, but that didn’t make any difference. Jarvey drank half the bottle, then when one of the other boys reached out, he handed it over. “Sl-slenkin’? What’s that?” Jarvey asked.

“Left my brass in my other trousers, I did,” the boy with the bottle, the one named Plum, said. “Green he is, Bets. Dump him, says I, or it’s the Mill Press for you and him both, most like.”

“Leave us, you lot,” Betsy said as a couple of the kids exchanged a dubious look. Then they all scrambled out, Charley herding the younger ones ahead of him. When they had gone, she sat beside Jarvey. “All right, then, let’s educate you. Have you been out and about enough to see anyone—anyone ’sides us, I mean?”

“He told me he knew where my mom and dad are!” Jarvey said hotly. “I’ve got to find them. Anyway, I didn’t go because there was a crowd of people in the streets. Some men in black leather coats were guarding them, and one of them—”

Betsy interrupted, “Yeah, shift change, that would’ve been. Right, then. Them’s mill hands, see? When the tippers or the pressers find someone out past curfew, or when someone does somethin’ out of line, or when the tippers just feel like it—”

“The men in black leather. Constables, policemen. The men all had clubs, right? Tipstaves, they call ’em. Tippers, see? Keeps order, they do. Anyway, the press goes by night, and the tippers by day, an’ if they put hands on you, you go with them, see? Into the mills. And if you’re as might be lucky, then you’re there for maybe twenty years, if you can live that long, and then you get a second chance at obeying orders. Or if you’re not lucky, you draw a life sentence, or more likely you die at the machines before your sentence is up, and then your troubles are over, right?”

An angry, brooding expression crept into Betsy’s face. For a moment she didn’t answer, but took a drink from the bottle of tea. Then she growled, “In the mills they make things for the Toffs, mostly. Clothes, furniture, fancy scents, jewelry. Some work in the cookeries, bakin’ the bread, dressin’ the meats, makin’ the wines and all for the Toffs to eat. Sometimes we can slenk some, see? Nip into a storehouse or cookery, grab a bit o’ bread or a pan of smoked fish, maybe. Get caught at that, it’s life in the mills, but we don’t get caught, ’cause we’re Dodgers, see?”

“They owns Lunnon, don’t they? They’re in charge of the whole show, as you might say. Not more than a hundred of them, though, and the Lord Mayor, well you should know him right enough.” She nudged him with an elbow. “They all call him Nibs, but not to his face, and his name’s Tantalus Midion. You got his property there.”

Jarvey felt as if his blood had chilled. “This, you mean?” he asked, holding up the Grimoire. “But I got this from an old man, Siyamon Midion, some kind of cousin or something. He took me to his house—”

“Aye, you said that last night. Look, cully, here’s all I know about that. In the year of 1848, Tantalus Midion used the Grimoire to open up a pathway to this place. An’ him an’ his friends, the Toffs they are now, they brought people here an’ made them work to build Lunnon as it is now.”

Betsy shook her head. “Don’t work that way, cully. Look, there’s time, see, an’ there’s book time. This here’s book time, time created by the magic of that book there. The ones that come through from the other side of the book stay the same, see? They don’t get no older. Their children, though, well, we grow up and grow old and we die, see? Don’t ask me how it works. I don’t have the art of it and couldn’t tell you. Anyway, it’s all account of the art and the book there.”

“That’s the art working, see? The magic, I guess you’d call it. This Siyamon, he wanted to get rid of you for some reason, and he used the book to send you here. You were going to be a Transport. But here’s the thing, see: Every Midion, so they say, writes his own chapter in that book. Every chapter leads to a different world, see? Your Midion, your Siyamon, must have been tryin’ to send you to his chapter, not to ours. You tricked him, though. First one I ever heard of that got the best of a Midion, so good for you, cully.”

“Well, see, you brought the book along with you. And that makes you valuable to Nibs and valuable to us, doesn’t it? You know, some of the lot last night was for scragging you and—”

“Killing you,” she said with a shrug. “Scragging you and takin’ the book. But no, I told ’em. I know the power of that thing. My own mother, see, she was Transported.”

Irritation quirked the corner of Betsy’s mouth. “Transported? Like you was. Brought here to Lunnon she was, from elsewhere, like all the first people. To help start old Midion’s world, like. He used his book and he brought her here.” Betsy balled her right hand into a fist and pounded it on her knee. “Mam hadn’t done nothin’ wrong, see? She just got caught by old Midion’s lackeys, an’ next thing she knows, she’s through the book an’ into Lunnon. Like all the firsts. My dad, well, I dunno. I think he was born here, though. He got Mill-Pressed when I was just a littl’un. You get Mill-Pressed, you don’t get to talk to your family at all, and no news of you gets out, barrin’ one of your mates gets released and dares to tell your wife or husband about you. Nobody ever told Mam. Dad may be dead by now. Probably is.”

With a shake of her head, Betsy said, “Somebody green and not knowin’. Somebody a stranger, but not a threat. It’s kind of matey, but kind of sneering, tell you truth. Not a bad name. But what do you want me to call you, then?”

Jarvey hesitated. Broken windows, blown light-bulbs, exploding baseball bats . . . melting candles. But he said gruffly, “I thought magic wasn’t real. Just stuff in books and movies and like that. I never even believed in it until all this happened.”

Betsy leaned in close, her green eyes sharp enough to stab Jarvey to the soul. “My mother’s in trouble. We’ll do a deal. I’ll take care of you, see, and make sure you don’t get pressed, and teach you how to get food and drink, and help you find how to use that book. You’re a Midion, you ought to be able to use the art, right? But when you do, see, you help me. You use your book to find my mother and set her free. Will you do that?”

Betsy gave a solemn nod. “Look, I believe in you. You have the blood of the Midions, and that’s sorcery blood. They do say that some of’em tried to use their art for good and not evil, but the bad’uns, the ones like old Nibs—well, you stick with me, and we won’t worry about him, right? We won’t worry about them until you get strong enough to kill him.”