Mister Monday: Chapter Seventeen

[pangolin20]

Chapter Sixteen (Part II) | Table of Contents | Chapter Eighteen

Kerlois: A good day, everyone, and welcome back to Mister Monday! Last time, we saw what the punishment of the Old One entails, Pravuil suddenly appeared again, and we discovered they are being followed by the Clock-Marchers. Let us see what happens now!

 

We open on Pravuil saying that they need to go up a pyramid. Before Arthur can move, he is halfway up one. I guess there is not point in waiting for Arthur on the ground, since Pravuil cannot defend himself, while Arthur can somewhat better… but it still feels like he should have made an attempt to pull Arthur along or the like. Arthur tries to follow Pravuil’s example, but he sinks into it and the pyramid nearly buries him.

He struggles out of it, “heart racing”. There is coal dust all over him, and he cannot see anything… but he can still hear the puppets. Then an axe blade appears in front of him, “heading straight at the wrist”. Somehow, Arthur parries with the Key. He feels the shock of it through his arm and the Key does not defend him magically. He realises that it is not strong enough to counter the puppets: the Key may be made by the Architect, but so were the puppets, and they were made to punish the Old One. I also think it does not help he only has half of the Key…

Pravuil shouts that they cannot climb, so Arthur should climb up. He is “teetering on top” of a pyramid himself, with his arms stretched out for balance. Maybe you should crouch down? This seems like asking to be hurt to me. Arthur asks how as he evades another blow and gets to his feet. He sees the woodsman in front of him, but no sign of the woman.

He sees something in the corner of his eye and jumps into another pyramid, just as the corkscrew “drill[s] the air where he [has] been an instant before”. Arthur sprints away. The woodsman is moving “impossibly fast” to his right, though, and he does now know where the woman is. There is a note about how fast the woodsman is moving even though his legs are completely stiff. The woodsman now hacks at his legs and Arthur jumps into another pyramid.

This time, he turns to slash at the woodsman, but it only gives a scrape across the puppet’s skin. He now begins to panic. He ducks beneath the axe, feints past the other puppet and runs for the biggest pyramid he sees. He thinks that he needs to make the coals stick together, so he jumps at the pyramid with the Key ahead, telling the coal to stick together.

The coal does, so Arthur hits the pyramid and bounces back into the path of the puppets. He evades the axe, and rolls straight into the path of the corkscrew. He just manages to use the Key to deflect it. The corkscrew bores into the ground instead, and the woman lets out an “angry shriek”. Arthur then gets on all fours, and crawls up the stable pyramid “like a lizard up a tree”. When he reaches the top, he slowly stands up and looks down, “his breath coming in sobs of relief”. Yes, he has made it!

I did quite like this fight scene. It was a bit bogged down by thinking at times, but it made sense and it certainly was exciting!

Well, the puppets simply circle the pyramid. They cannot climb, and they cannot look up, either. Pravuil then congratulates Arthur. He is holding a “candle [] that shed[s] far more light than any candle outside of a movie”. Arthur notices the whole candle shines, and the flame is stationary. Where did you get this from, Pravuil? Pravuil says they will “just have to wait” until the puppets go back in.

Arthur now quite sensibly crouches, and asks how long it will take. Pravuil says it will be on the hour, or if they catch someone before that. Arthur asks if there are many people in the Coal Cellar. Pravuil says there are some hundred Coal-Collator, some fifty Coal-Cutters, and a few others without any employment. I might think he would know their exact numbers after ten thousand years, but alright.

Arthur says they need to warn those people. By now, the puppets have left, and he thinks they can easily fall on “some unsuspecting Coal-Collator or Cutter who [is] intent on work”. He says they need to shout, as sound “should carry a long way” here.

Pravuil immediately tells him not to worry. Even if they do catch someone, they will “only gouge out their eyes”, and most will grow those back in a month or two. Besides, “you forget the pain”. It still cannot hurt to try, Pravuil! What is the problem with trying to keep people from getting hurt?

He goes one that they got him once, “a long time ago”. Naturally, back then, they were “vultures” (so the Architect showed some creativity). He almost prefers them to the puppets, but they were still “particularly nasty vultures”. (In what way?) Also… Pravuil has apparently been here for ten thousand years. How can the method of torture have changed when the Architect was not there to change it? I would say Pravuil is lying here.

Arthur says that they should at least try. Judging from how fast Pravuil jumped away from the puppets, he thinks the other workers might appreciate a warning. He comes up with ‘Look out! The clock things are loose!’ and has them both shout together. Pravuil shouts behind Arthur and comes up with ‘The tock lings are goose!’ Arthur has him try several times over, but Pravuil never quite gets it right, or does not want to. He thinks that the noise might still warn someone. (It still is quite curious that he apparently does not want to warn the others…)

They wait for a few minutes, and Arthur feels himself get cold. He asks if Pravuil has friends in the Cellar. Pravuil says he does not, since they are “forbidden to talk to each other, except upon business”, and one never knows who “might be a spy or a visiting Inspector or suchlike”. That makes sense, since the Cellar, if left unsupervised, could easily bring forth some kind of rebellion. What does not make as much sense is that Pravuil simply abides by these rules, even though he does not name anything that happens when they are broken. Why would he not seek companionship? (Also, the Inspectors are spying now? I might have wished to know that earlier.)

Pravuil says he thought Arthur was that, at first, but naturally his “superior intelligence” told him who Arthur really was. I think you could have deduced that from the Key already. Arthur does not find him especially likeable because of this, and says that he thought Dusk told him who he was. Pravuil quickly backpedals, saying that Dusk did, but he already had “more than an inkling” of what was going on.

Arthur literally told you he was a mortal, but you certainly “figured it out on your own”, naturally. Arthur now asks about the Secondary Realms. Pravuil finds this a “tricky, tough question” for some reason. He says there is the House, which is here, the Nothing, which is not here, but the House is built on it, and the Secondary Realms, which are “outside the House and not connected to Nothing”.

They begin as some kind of Nothing that the Architect “just threw out there”, and this became an entire universe full with planets and life and such, which is recorded in the House. There is also an “Original Law”, which means that no interference with the Secondary Realms is allowed. So the Old One went out and interfered at some point, but he was chained, and Pravuil thinks it “[s]erves him right”. I do think his current torture is quite disproportionate, Pravuil.

Then the Trustees began interfering when the Architect left, first a little bit, and then more. However, he has been trapped in the Cellar, so he does not know the specifics, but he thinks that if a mortal comes with the Lesser Key of the Lower House, “there must be a lot going on that shouldn’t”.

He stops to draw breath, and just then, there is a scream in the distance. Arthur can hear “two barely identifiable words” in it: ‘My eyes!’ Well, that is indeed horrible. Pravuil reacts like this:

‘Oh, good,’ said Pravuil happily. ‘We can get down now. My camp isn’t too far away.’

My, what a likeable person he is. How about sparing the least thought for whoever got their eyes taken? It is also notably Pravuil’s fault, since, if he had drawn back Arthur a bit earlier, the puppets would not have left the clock this night.

Arthur reluctantly climbs down the pyramid, though he now knows how to climb on another, if it is necessary. He also know that whoever lost their eyes will grow them back, but he cannot forget the “terrible scream”, nor the fact that “Pravuil [can’t] care less what happen[s] to anybody else”. Indeed.

As they go to the camp, Arthur thinks about that. He thinks he is “pretty good at figuring out what people [will] do and what they [are] really like”. Pravuil refused doing something he was not supposed to and suffered… but he still seems to “have his own interests very much at heart”. He finds that a “strange contrast”. Yes, I think so, too, given how vehement he just was about the Original Law…

He thinks it might be explained because Pravuil is not “really a person”, or rather, he is a person, but not human. (Thank you for that amendment, Arthur.) He is a Denizen, and naturally, no one in the House is human, except for the Piper’s Children, who once were, but even they have changed. Arthur is not exactly sure what the others are, let alone the Old One or the Architect. He does not care to dwell on it, especially since “his thoughts [are] heading in a direction that he [is] uncomfortable with”. His family is not religious and he knows quite little about religion in general. Now he somewhat wishes he does and also not.

Oh, this is nice characterisation! I do not quite get why he is bringing up religion, though… Oh, it is probably because the Architect has created everything. Yes, that might be something that religion can help with.

They finally reach Pravuil’s camp. That consists of “a small wooden chest, a threadbare armchair and a weird-looking metal urn about three feet high that [has] lots of taps, spigots and little drawers”. This thing “glow[s] with a dull heat” and Arthur warms his hands on it.

Pravuil explains the urn is “called a samovar”. Um… I think Pravuil is misapplying the name. A samovar is simply an urn that is placed over a fire to boil things in. Whatever this is, it is not a samovar at all! Pravuil says it is “his most precious possession”, which was bequeathed to him by a Coal-Collator who was allowed to leave. According to Pravuil, the samovar can, if it is correctly loaded, “provide hot tea, mulled wine, coffee or cocoa”.

Pravuil puts some of the tea Dusk supposedly gave him in it, and after some “spouting of steam and considerable rattling”, he finds out that there comes “a rather nasty blend of cocoa and wine” from it. That is interesting… After trying to fix this, he eventually comes up with “something hot, pale and amber that taste[s] faintly of apples”. He gives this to Arthur in a “pewter flagon” a foot high. Arthur gratefully drinks it, since he is quite cold and the liquid warms him.

Soon he asks why Pravuil did not conjure tea from Nothing, like the Old One did. Pravuil explains that it is a “great magic”. The Old One “is an adept”, though he is limited by his chains. Aside from him, there are few people who can work with Nothing, particularly without something like the Key. At that, Arthur wonders if he could use the Key to “conjure something out of Nothing”, but he quickly reminds himself that it would be best not to try without “expert help”. What if he conjures Nithlings like those from the Lower Atrium, for example?

The thought of “expert help” reminds him that he needs to talk to the Old One. He wonders if the Old One’s eyes might have grown back, and that leads him to wonder how much time has passed back home. The Will said that the time relation between the House and the Secondary Realms is flexible, but he is worried that he has been gone for too long. If he is gone for a day, his parents will be very worried, unless they have the Sleepy Plague already, in which case every minute is too long… I mean, every minute is to your disadvantage either way.

He then asks if it is safe to approach the Old One. Pravuil says it is hard to say, and offers to go look at his clock. The chapter ends there. Well, that was one of the better chapters, even though little happened in it. Until chapter twenty, then!