Twelve-year-old Carmen has a secret: she can talk to her cat Grim. But the powerful Brotherhood has banned pets, and the penalty is death.
Ward is the most wanted boy in the world. The only thing standing between him and the hangman's noose is maste...
As she stepped through the threshold the door breathed shut behind her. The sound echoed down the hall, rolling away into a dead silence in which only the memory of the sound reverberated. Before her a carpeted hall vanished away into darkness. Grim melted into it. Slops was already almost out of sight up ahead.
"Wait for me!" Carmen said, unable to keep the note of panic out of her voice. She had already forgotten about his lie.
She soon lost her bearings in the dark passageways, and followed Grim, who seemed to know where to go. Here and there hung a lanthorn of a kind she had never seen before, that gave forth a steady light like that of the moon. They climbed a staircase. A tall, ornate wooden thing stood on the landing at the top. It made a ticking sound, and Carmen realised it was a kind of tempus, for although it had hands, there were three instead of two, and the symbols spaced about its face were strange. Below, in a case, a brass pendulum resolutely swung.
They descended a long flight of stairs and came to a gloomy corridor where a procession of lanthorns filed away into the distance. Paintings hung between the lanthorns – at least Carmen thought they were paintings – in any case they were extraordinarily lifelike. She reached out to touch one, but found it was protected by a sheet of glass. She had half expected the archon behind the glass to move. She moved onto the next picture. Another archon. And another. They were clearly not the same bird, for beneath each was a plaque with a name etched on it: first Igor, then Felix, Franz, Wolfgang, and Frederic. Peculiar names. As they progressed down the corridor the pictures gradually faded and became brownish around the edges, the archons growing more and more ghostly. In the final few the archons were nothing but shadows, and if there had ever been names beneath them they had faded away altogether.
A door stood at the end of the corridor. It was a forbidding thing, like the door of a furnace, arched at the top and seemingly of solid iron. Slops gave Carmen an encouraging look, then rapped on the door.
Carmen heard a slow shuffling and the creak of floorboards. The door swung open.
"Oh hello Rupert," said a tiny old man. "And I'm guessing this is the cousin you told me about. Carmen is it? Come in. And who is this?"
"His name is Grimalkin," Carmen said, unable to keep the defensive note out of her voice.
"He's a beauty," said the old man. The fel twined himself about his legs, purring, and Carmen felt a twinge of jealousy. If there was one thing that annoyed her about Grim it was how he would take to a complete stranger. She sent a thought to him
(careful)
but if he heard her he didn't let on.
Old Abe seemed to Carmen a bird of some kind – a hawk perhaps. He had a long beak-like nose, and dark eyes beneath a beetling brow and widow's peak. His complexion was darker than that of most native Bareheepians, and he had a foreign look about him, but where he had come from Carmen could not guess, and was not brave enough to ask.
"Don't mind Ludwig," he said as they followed him in. Carmen had no idea who Ludwig was.
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