Lord Sunday Read Free

he didn’t turn or look. All his attention was on that one pale blue sandbag, which was slowly, ever so slowly, beginning to turn white.

C HAPTER TWO
    S uzy Turquoise Blue, sometime Ink-Filler Sixth Class, Monday’s Tierce and General of the Army of Lord Arthur, waggled her left foot just enough to start her spinning in an anticlockwise direction. She’d been slowly turning clockwise for the past hour and she felt like a change. She could introduce that motion with only a slight movement of her foot, which was fortunate since it was the only part of her that wasn’t tightly wrapped in the inch-thick scarlet rope that suspended her from a crane that had been swung out some 16,000 feet up on the eastern side of Superior Saturday’s tower.
    “Stop that!” called a Sorcerous Supernumerary, who sat at the base of the crane. He was reading a large leatherbound book and dangling his legs over the edge of the tower. “Prisoners are not to spin anticlockwise!”
    “Sez who?” asked Suzy.
    “The manual says so,” replied the Supernumerary rather stiffly, tapping the book he held. “I just read that bit. Prisoners are not to spin anticlockwise, for the prevention of sorcerous eddies .”
    “Better wind me in then,” said Suzy. “Else I’ll keep spinning.”
    She had been hanging there for more than six hours, ever since being captured by the Artful Loungers near the Rain Reservoir, where Arthur had gone down the plughole in search of Part Six of the Will. Since being a prisoner was a definite improvement over being dead, which was what she thought was going to happen when the Loungers had attacked, Suzy was quite cheerful.
    “It says here, Prisoners are to be left dangling in the wind and rain at all times, unless ordered otherwise by Suitable Authority ,” said the Supernumerary.
    “It’s stopped raining,” said Suzy. “It’s not all thatwindy either. It’s quite nice in fact. Besides, aren’t you a Suitable Authority?”
    “Don’t make me laugh,” grumbled the Supernumerary. “You know quite well I wouldn’t be here if everyone else wasn’t up top, fighting Sunday. Or down below, fighting the Piper.”
    And that’s only the half of it, thought Suzy with a smile that would have annoyed the Supernumerary if he’d seen it. Superior Saturday is fighting Lord Sunday up above in the Incomparable Gardens; the Piper is fighting Superior Saturday’s forces in the lower portions of the Upper House; Dame Primus is trying to hold back the Nothing that is eroding the House, while also preparing to attack Superior Saturday; Arthur hopefully by now has got Part Six of the Will and will be trying to obtain the Sixth Key…
    It’s all like a very complicated game, thought Suzy as she spun back towards the Supernumerary. I wonder if anyone really knows what’s going on.
    Thinking about games gave her an idea. Artful Loungers were too crazed and dangerous to try to trick, but this Sorcerous Supernumerary was more like a normal Denizen.
    “You know, if you wind me in, we could playchess,” said Suzy. She pointed her toe at the chess set that was on top of the closer desk. It looked to be a very fine one, with ivory pieces that had ruby-chip eyes.
    “That’s one of Noon’s sets,” said the Supernumerary. “We can’t touch that! Besides, I failed chess.”
    “We could play draughts. We oughter play something until my rescuers show up and chuck you off the building,” said Suzy.
    “What?” asked the Supernumerary. He looked around nervously. Unlike most of Saturday’s tower, the prison section at level 61620 (that was really floor 1620, which was quite high enough) was a solid buttress attached to the main building, rather like a shelf that was put on as an afterthought. It was not made up of open iron-framed office cubes, but was a broad and elegant veranda of teak decking that ran alongside the tower for a hundred feet. The outer edge was lined with a dozen cranes that were mounted so that they could pivot