I felt much more sympathy for the poor fool now than I ever had before. If I ever made it back to my village, I thought, I would sit down for a long conversation with Dav Mallet.
When I reached the higher levels of the city, all I could think about was sinking into my soft, black bed, resting my aching body, and letting my mind slow its unrelenting race for long enough to sleep a little before breakfast. I don’t think I had ever lived through a longer day.
According to my reckonings earlier, I should have started to feel the full strength of the heartsickness again, but I was still fairly hale and hearty when I stepped into the courtyard.
When I opened the door to the main part of the House, however, Cornelius was there to greet me, his tail like a great bottlebrush standing up behind, and his eyes even bigger and yellower than normal.
“Where were you?” he said.
“I told you I would be back.”
“He’s going mad,” said Cornelius. “Smashing everything. Setting fire to things.”
“What? Who?” I asked stupidly, before realizing. “He’s back already?”
He was back, much sooner than expected, and he knew that I had been out. I didn’t know what to make of that. It did mean that I wouldn’t be getting heartsick again, though, so that was something.
“Who do you think? He singed my whiskers,” said Cornelius. “He didn’t mean to, but he did. Now I’m lopsided.”
“They’ll grow back,” I hazarded.
“Maybe,” he said gloomily. “Either way, you’d better go in.”
He turned and then added, “He’s in a right state.”
I started toward the throne room. But Cornelius said, “He’s in the kitchen.”
“Thekitchen?He’s never in the kitchen.”
“Well, he’s there now.”
The House practically hurled us through the door, like a mother handing her child over to the father when he gets home and saying, “I can’t do a thing with him, you try.”
The place was a mess. Sylvester was standing beside the kitchen shelves and on top of a stack of broken china. Less of a stack, really, and more of a small hill.
There was far more broken china than there should have been, judging from the number of dishes the House had conjured into being for me. It must have made more of them just for him to smash—or perhaps the sorcerer had made them himself.
His arms were upraised, his hair was wild and floating about his face, and his whole bearing had more energy than I’d ever seen in him before. His lean form was a black flame, wavering at the edges a little as he moved, as if his agitation was shaking the air around him.
The House trembled. When he noticed that Cornelius and I had burst into the room, the sorcerer paused mid-smash, staring at us wide-eyed. The final plate hovered with an apologetic air, as if denying its involvement.
“What are you doing?” I asked, because that seemed like the thing to say. I rested my palms very slowly and carefully on the kitchen table.
“Oh,” he said. “You’re back.”
“Yes, I just ... went out,” I said.
He let the hovering plate drop. It only broke in half, rather than smashing into smithereens like the others. The pile of splintered china gave a cheerful, welcoming tinkle as the halves joined their ranks.
“How long have you been at this?” I asked, staring at the pile. “That’s quite a stack.”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, stop it.”
He paused, seemingly at a loss. His hair, which had been crackling about his head with manic, magic energy, floated down to its normal place about his shoulders.
As he calmed down, a broom appeared in the corner, with an expectant sort of look on its ... Well, it didn’t have a face, but it managed to look expectant anyway. I grabbed it. Seemed like the sorcerer could have cleaned his mess up himself, but the House didn’t seem to be presenting that as an option.
