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The Key missed the ferry September rode into Pandemonium and was forced to sleep on the grassy shore, where it was picked up by a delighted banshee child. The girl squealed piercingly and pinned the Key to her little green-gold breast. Her mother admonished her not to pick up strange treasures which were surely not hers, but no one can listen to a banshee shriek in indignation for long without giving in. So it was that the Key boarded the ferry and passed into Pandemonium, three days after September had left the city behind.

The Key cursed its slowness. It wept an orange tear, slightly rusted.

The Key remembered being part of a green smoking jacket. It remembered wanting to please. It remembered, a little, being born out of a lapel, the sudden rush of air over facets and gold. It recalled with sorrow being torn from its mother, the jacket, and the taste of a young girl’s blood under its needle. It shuddered at the memory of her blood, at night.

What the Key knew was that it was connected to September, that the purpose of its whole being was to be with her, just to rest near her skin. The Key had been created to make her smile. It could not stop wanting to make her smile, any more than you can stop walking on two legs or start breathing with your liver instead of your lungs. What if September needed the Key? What if the world became dark and frightening and it was not there to comfort her? The Key knew it must fly faster.

It was only that the girl kept running, so far, and so fast, almost as if she didn’t know that the Key was trying as hard as it could to keep up.

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Chapter VII: Fairy Reels

In Which September Enters Pandemonium At Last and Is Discovered by the Marquess, While A-Through-L Enjoys a Lemon Ice.

“Go on,” said the Wyverary, nudging the girl in the orange dress with his great red nose. “Ask.”

September squinted dubiously. The brass face before her did not move.

In fact, it was a brass face hoisted up on a tower of tangled brass hands that seemed to be frozen in the acts of pleading, praying, beseeching, orating, pointing, prodding. They wound around each other until five of them fanned out in a kind of finger-fringed flower that held the face aloft. The burnished face had swollen, puffy cheeks, a pursed mouth, and eyes squeezed tightly shut. Its ears flared enormous, larger than its head. Behind the post rose a huge, bustling, and walled city. The sounds from within rumbled indistinctly, as bustle will do. The wall did not look terribly sturdy--it was patchwork, motley-colored, a dozen kinds of brocade and stiff silk and satin and broadcloth, all sewn together with gnarled, ropy yarn the color of squash, thicker than tree trunks. They stood at a gate of goat-hide. The Switchpoint, for that’s what Ell called it, made a kissing face at them. All around them well-kept lawns wound down to the lapping Barleybroom, full of gentle little paths and sedate violets nodding pleasantly. A sundial spun its shadow slowly around cluster of yellow peonies. Not at all what you might expect from a place called Pandemonium, really, especially the bird baths and commemorative benches. It looked much more like Hanscom Park in Omaha than the outskirts of a Fairy City.

The Switchpoint still pursed its lips at them. A sparrow landed on one of its over sized ears and flew away again, as though the brass burned its feet. Ell insisted that this was the way in.

“What shall I ask?” said September, shuffling her feet.

“Well, where do you want to go?” Ell stretched his long neck, uncoiling it and yawning, then coiling it up again.

“I expect to wherever the Marquess lives.”

“That’s the Briary.”

“But then…thieves work at night, mostly, and I ought to start acting like a thief, if I mean to steal something. So we ought to wait, until nightfall, you know. It’s easier to be sneaky in the dark.”

“September, Queen Among Thieves, you will never get into Pandemonium this way. You must have a Purpose. You must have Business Here. Loiterers, Lackadaisicals, and other Menaces might