Magicians of Caprona - Diana Wynne Jones [41]
“Praised be!” said Antonio. He shouted, “Are you all right, Rosa? How did those words come here?”
“We don’t know,” Rosa called back. “They just appeared. We’ve been trying to get rid of them, but we can’t.”
Marco leaned over the rails and called, “It’s not true, Antonio. The Petrocchis wouldn’t do a thing like this.”
Antonio called back, “Don’t go around saying that, Marco.” He said it so forbiddingly that Paolo knew nothing he said was going to be believed. If he had had a chance of convincing Antonio, he had now lost it.
Chapter 8
When Tonino came to his senses—at, incidentally, the precise moment when the enchanted book began to shrivel away—he had, at first, a nightmare feeling that he was shut in a cardboard box. He rolled his head sideways on his arms. He seemed to be lying on his face on a hard but faintly furry floor. In the far distance, he could blurrily see someone else, leaning up against a wall like a doll, but he felt too queer to be very interested in that. He rolled his head around the other way and saw the panels of a wall quite near. That told him he was in a fairly long room. He rolled his head to stare down at the furry floor. It was patterned, in a pattern too big for his eyes to grasp, and he supposed it was a carpet of some kind. He shut his blurry eyes and tried to think what had happened.
He remembered going down near the New Bridge. He had been full of excitement. He had read a book which he thought was telling him how to save Caprona. He knew he had to find an alleyway with a peeling blue house at the end of it. It seemed a bit silly now. Tonino knew things never happened the way they did in books. Even then, he had been rather amazed to find that there was an alleyway with, really and truly, a peeling blue house at the end of it. And, to his huge excitement, there was a scrap of paper fluttering down at his feet. The book was coming true. Tonino had bent down and picked up the paper.
And, after that, he had known nothing till this moment.
That was really true. Tonino took himself through what had happened several times, but each time his memories stopped in exactly the same place—with himself picking up the scrap of paper. After that, it was all a vague sense of nightmare. By this time, he was fairly sure he had been the victim of a spell. He began to feel ashamed of himself. So he sat up.
He saw at once why he had seemed to dream he was shut up in a cardboard box. The room he was in was long and low, almost exactly the shape of a shoebox. The walls and ceiling were painted cream-color—a sort of whitish cardboard-color, in fact—but they seemed to be wood, because there were carvings picked out in gold paint on them. There was a crystal chandelier hanging from the ceiling, although the light came from four long windows in one of the longer walls; a rich carpet on the floor, and a very elegant dining table and chairs by the wall opposite the windows. There were two silver candlesticks on the table. Altogether the place was extremely elegant—and wrong, somehow.
Tonino sat trying to puzzle out just what was wrong. The room was awfully bare. But that was not quite it. There was something strange about the daylight coming through the four long windows, as if the sun was somehow further away than it should be. But that was not quite it either. Tonino’s eyes went to the four bands of too-faded sunlight falling through the windows onto the carpet, and then traveled along the carpet. At the end, he came to the person leaning up against the wall. It was Angelica Petrocchi, who had been at the Palace. Her eyes were closed beneath her bulge of forehead, and she looked ill. So she had been caught too.
Tonino looked back at the carpet. That was an odd thing. It was not really a carpet. It had been painted on the slightly furry substance of the floor. Tonino could see the brush strokes in the sprawling pattern. And the reason he had thought the pattern was too big was because it was too big. It was the wrong size for the rest of the room.
More puzzled than ever,