Lady Friday

Lady Friday
Garth Nix

Friday is here! The race is on to find the secret of the Middle House. The fifth eagerly awaited installment in Garth Nix’s best selling fantasy series,The Keys to the Kingdom.Arthur Penhaligon’s adventures in the House get ever more perilous as the week unfolds. On the fifth day, there was fear…Four of the seven Trustees have been defeated and their Keys taken, but for Arthur, the week is still getting worse. Suzy Blue and Fred Initial Numbers Gold have been captured by the Piper, and his New Nithling army still controls most of the Great Maze. Superior Saturday is causing trouble wherever she can, including turning off all the elevators in the House and blocking the Front Door.Arthur can't even find out what is happening back home. All he knows is that Leaf isn't on earth any more. She's missing and so are hundreds of other people who were transferred from regular hospitals to a private institution run by a 'Doctor Friday'. From there they have been taken somewhere else in the Secondary Realms, for Lady Friday's own horrible purposes.Amid all this trouble, Arthur’s mother is also missing, and he must weigh up an offer from Lady Friday that is either a cunning trap for the Rightful Heir or a golden opportunity he must seize – before Superior Saturday or the Piper beats him to it.

LADY FRIDAY

GARTH NIX

ILLUSTRATED BY TIM STEVENS

Copyright (#uf545b455-1d24-5b55-af80-4c699620bdcb)

HarperCollins Children’s Books An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)

First published in the USA by Scholastic Inc 2007

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books 2007

www.garthnix.co.uk (http://www.garthnix.co.uk/)

Copyright © Garth Nix 2007

Illustrations by Tim Stevens 2007

Garth Nix asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

Source ISBN: 9780007175093

Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2008 ISBN: 9780007279159

Version: 2016-11-17

To Anna, Thomas, Edward and all my family and friends; and with particular thanks to all the staff at Scholastic in the USA, Allen & Unwin in Australia, and HarperCollins UK.

Contents

Title Page (#u0a61cb65-1737-5d92-8ed2-3ba78f9e56a4)Copyright (#u7fec7c16-2d04-50ff-a933-9922529e53e5)Dedication (#u96dcd32d-6e12-53e3-b2fb-50fa4074f3b3)Prologue (#u3727f8ca-6b78-5d9c-bad3-8ffa11701eca)Chapter One (#u082c48ab-b401-5c7b-a3a0-2472f79e120d)Chapter Two (#u4c4af3bc-8e17-5776-870c-01c5727a81d9)Chapter Three (#u0a18dd61-c5e0-5c03-be62-dd057b1de7df)Chapter Four (#u9fe455a9-5429-56e6-9f19-2e4a50083c4a)Chapter Five (#u4e89777a-60d8-5985-9e8d-517ce3f50b18)Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)Also By (#litres_trial_promo)About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

PROLOGUE (#uf545b455-1d24-5b55-af80-4c699620bdcb)

Leaf woke with a start and sat up in bed. For a moment she was disoriented because she wasn’t in her own bed. No band poster stared back at her from the wall at the foot of the bed because there was no wall. The bedside table was missing too, and on the other side there were no winking red eyes from her four-foot-high troll clock, the one she’d made with her brother Ed several years before for a school science project.

She wasn’t in her normal sleeping clothes either: a band T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms. Instead, she was wearing an ankle-length pale blue nightshirt of soft flannel, something she would never have chosen to put on herself.

The room she was in was much bigger than her bedroom and there were eight other beds. The closer ones definitely had people asleep in them because Leaf could see bodies under the covers and the tops of their heads. The other beds were probably occupied as well.

It looked like a hospital…

Leaf suddenly became a lot more awake. She tried to jump out of the bed, but her legs wouldn’t hold her up and it turned into more of a slither on to the floor. Clawing at the bedclothes, she got herself upright and leaned against the mattress while she tried to work out what was going on.

Slowly it all started to come back. Very slowly, as if her recent memory was broken and her brain was having trouble putting all the pieces back together.

Leaf remembered visiting her friend Arthur in the East Area Hospital. He’d told her about the House that was the epicentre of the Universe and how he had been chosen to become the Rightful Heir to the Architect – not because he was born to be or anything like that, but because he’d been the right person at the right time. (Or the wrong person at the wrong time, depending on how you looked at it.) The Architect was apparently the creator of everything. She’d made not only the House but also the whole Universe beyond it, including the Earth.

Arthur had told Leaf about all this, and about Mister Monday and Grim Tuesday, two of the Trustees who had betrayed the missing Architect and refused to execute her Will. But before he’d finished, a huge wave had come from nowhere, washing them both into an ocean that wasn’t even on Earth. Arthur had been carried away even further out on the strange sea, but Leaf had been picked up by a ship, the Flying Mantis…

“The Mantis,” whispered Leaf. Even a whisper sounded loud in the quiet room. There was no noise at all from the sleeping people in the other beds. Not even a snore. Suddenly Leaf wondered if they were actually dead rather than sleeping, and she stared at the closest bed to check. She could only see the top of the person’s head, just a tuft of hair – not enough to figure out whether it was a man or a woman. But after a few seconds Leaf was relieved to see the blanket rise and fall slightly. Man or woman, the person was breathing very slowly.

“I sailed on the Mantis,” Leaf whispered to herself. It was all coming back. She had sailed the Border Sea in the House for six weeks. She’d become one of the crew… then the pirates had attacked. Her friend Albert had been killed…

Leaf shut her eyes. She didn’t want to have that memory come into her head. But at least she had helped Arthur defeat the pirates, and had kicked their leader Feverfew’s head into a pool of Nothing-infused mud. Then they’d gone back to Port Wednesday and caught an elevator to—

“The Front Door,” said Leaf. “Doorstop Hill. The Lieutenant Keeper…”

She and Arthur had tried to get back home through the Front Door in the Lower House, but there’d been a problem. The Lieutenant Keeper wouldn’t let Arthur through the Door and then there was the meeting with Dame Primus where they’d found out that the Skinless Boy had taken over Arthur’s identity back on Earth, preventing him from going home. But there hadn’t been anything to stop Leaf from going home. She’d wanted to go home, after what had happened, but it wasn’t as easy as that.

“I volunteered to banish the Skinless Boy,” Leaf muttered, in amazement at herself. “I must have been crazy.”

But she had succeeded in finding the source of the Skinless Boy’s power, and she had managed to deliver it to Suzy Turquoise Blue, against all odds. But along the way she had been infected with the mind-control mould that would let the Skinless Boy control her every thought and action.

Memories joined up and stitched themselves together. Leaf frowned in concentration as she tried to work out what must have happened. Suzy had obviously delivered the sorcerous pocket the Skinless Boy had been made with to Arthur, and he must have used the pocket to destroy the dangerous Nithling. If either one had failed, Leaf wouldn’t be conscious now. She’d be a brain-dead slave of the Skinless Boy.

But Leaf didn’t feel particularly victorious because she’d finally remembered that this wasn’t the first time she’d regained consciousness after being affected by the mind-control fungus.

“There was a tent hospital… a temporary one,” Leaf said. Talking to herself helped bring back the details. “I was vomiting up the sludge left from the mould…”

Leaf groaned and pushed her knuckles into her temples as she remembered something else. The nurse had told her she’d been in a coma for a week. From Thursday afternoon to Friday morning.

But how long ago was that? she wondered. Imust have gone back into a coma, or…

Leaf stopped knuckling her temples and let her forehead smack into the mattress. She leaned back and did it again. It was a bad habit, but she couldn’t help herself. She always beat her head – with something soft – when things went wrong.

The last thing she remembered was the nurse pointing out an approaching female doctor. And then she’d said the terrible words:

“Doctor Friday, imagine that! We call her Lady Friday on the wards…”

Leaf vaguely recalled feeling an awful sensation of fear swarm up inside her as an incredibly beautiful woman had approached with a whole host of people behind her… but everything after that was blank.

Doctor Friday – who clearly had come from the House and really was the Trustee called Lady Friday – must have done something to her.

Maybe I’ve lost even more time, Leaf thought. Anything could have happened.To Arthur. To my parents. To Ed. Anything.