Across the Wall Read online

  ‘Dorrance,’ said Ripton. He drew his revolver, rested the barrel on his left forearm, and aimed for a moment, before holstering the weapon again. ‘Too far. I’ll wait till the bastard’s closer.’

  ‘Don’t worry about Dorrance for the moment,’ said Nick. He looked around. The guests were all clustered together in the centre of the notional fifty-yard diameter circle, and only the servants were spreading hay, under the direction of the butler. Nick shook his head and walked over to the guests. They surged toward him in turn, once again all speaking at the same time.

  ‘I demand to know—’

  ‘What is going on?’

  ‘Is that . . . that animal really—’

  ‘Clearly this is not properly—’

  ‘This is an outrage! Who is respons—’

  ‘Shut up!’ roared Nick. ‘Shut up! That animal is from the Old Kingdom! It will kill all of us if we don’t keep it out with fire, which is why everybody needs to start spreading hay in a ring! Hurry!’ Without waiting to see their response, Nick ran to the nearest haycock and tore off a huge armful of hay and ran to add it to the circle. When he looked up, some of the guests were helping the servants, but most were still bickering and complaining.

  He looked across at the house. The creature was no longer on the steps. There was a body sprawled there, but Dorrance had vanished as well.

  ‘Start pouring the paraffin!’ shouted Nick. ‘Get more hay on the ring! It’s coming!’

  The butler and some of the footmen began to run around the circle, spraying white petroleum spirit out of four-gallon tins.

  ‘Anyone with matches or a cigarette lighter, stand by the ring!’ yelled Nick. He couldn’t see the creature, but his forehead was beginning to throb, and when he pulled his dagger out an inch, the Charter Marks were starting to glow.

  Two people suddenly jumped the hay and ran across the meadow, heading for the drive and the front gate. A young man and woman, the woman throwing aside her shoes as she ran. She was the one who had come to his door, Nick saw. Tesrya, as she had called herself.

  ‘Come back!’ shouted Nick. ‘Come back—’

  His voice fell away as a tall, strange shape emerged from the sunken ditch of the ha-ha, its shadow slinking ahead. Its arms looked impossibly long in the twilight, and its legs had three joints, not two. It began to lope slowly after the running couple, and for a brief instant Nick thought perhaps they might have a chance.

  Then the creature lowered its head. Its legs stretched; the lope became a run and then a blurring sprint that caught it up with the man and woman in a matter of seconds. It knocked them down with its clubbed hands as it overshot them, turning to come back slowly as they flopped about on the ground like fresh-caught fish.

  Tesrya was screaming, but the screams stopped abruptly as the creature bent over her.

  Nick looked away and saw a patch of tall yellow flowers near his feet. Corn daisies, fooled into opening by the bright moonlight.

  . . . wrapped in three chains. One of silver, one of lead, and one made from braided daisies . . .

  ‘Ripton!’

  ‘Yes, sir!’

  Nick jumped as Ripton answered from slightly behind him and to his left.

  ‘Get anyone who can make flower chains braiding these daisies, and those poppies over there too. The maids might know how.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I know what it sounds like, but there’s a chance that thing can be restrained with chains made from flowers.’

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘The Old Kingdom. Magic. Just make the chains!’

  ‘I knows the braiding of flowers,’ Llew said, bending down to gently pick a daisy in his huge hand. ‘As does my kin here, my nieces Ellyn and Alys, who are chambermaids and will have needle and thread in their apron pockets.’

  ‘Get to it then, please,’ said Nick. He looked across at where the young couple had fallen. The creature had been there only seconds ago, but now it was gone. ‘Damn! Anyone see where it went?’

  ‘No,’ snapped Ripton. He spun around on the spot as he tried to scan the whole area outside the defensive circle.

  ‘Light the hay! Light the hay! Quickly!’

  Ripton struggled with his matches, striking them on his heel, but others were quicker. Guests with platinum and gold cigarette lighters flicked them open and on and held them to the hay; kitchen staff struck long, heavy-headed matches and threw them; and one old buffer wound and released a clockwork cigar fire starter, an affectation that had finally come into its own.

  Accelerated by paraffin, brandy, and table polish, the ring of hay burst into flames. But not everywhere. While the fire leapt high and smoke coiled toward the moon over most of the ring, one segment about ten feet long remained stubbornly dark, dank, and unlit. The meadow was sunken there, and wet, and the paraffin had not been spread evenly, pooling in a hole.

  ‘There it is!’

  The creature came out of the shadow of the oaks near the drive. Its strangely jointed legs propelled it across the meadow in a sprint that would have let it run down a leopard. It moved impossibly, horribly fast, coming around the outside of the ring. Nick and Ripton started to run too, even though they knew they had no chance of beating the creature.

  It would be at the gap in seconds. Only one person was close enough to do anything—a kitchen maid running with a lit taper clutched in her right hand, her left holding up her apron.

  The creature was far faster, but it had farther to go. It accelerated again, becoming a blur of movement.

  Everyone within the ring watched the race, all of them desperately hoping that the fire would simply spread of its own accord, all of them wishing that this fatal hole in their shield of fire would not depend upon a young woman, an easily extinguished taper, and an apron that was too long for its wearer.

  Six feet from the edge of the hay, the apron slipped just enough for the girl to trip over the hem. She staggered, tried to recover her balance, and fell, the taper dropping from her hand.

  Though she must have been shocked and bruised by the fall, the maid did not lie there. Even as the creature bunched its muscles for the last dash to the gap, the young woman picked up the still-burning taper and threw it the last few feet into the center of the dark section.

  It caught instantly, fed by a pool of paraffin that had collected in the dip in the ground. Blue fire flashed over the hay, and flames licked up toward the yellow moon.

  The creature shrieked in frustration, its hooked heels throwing up great clods of grass and soil as it checked its headlong rush. For a moment it looked as if it might try to jump the fire, but instead it turned and loped back to the ha-ha, disappearing out of sight.

  Nick and Ripton stopped and bent over double, resting their hands on their knees, panting as they tried to recover from their desperate sprint.

  ‘It doesn’t like fire,’ Ripton coughed out after a minute. ‘But we haven’t got enough hay to keep this circle going for more than an hour or so. What happens then?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Nick. He was acutely aware of his ignorance. None of this would be happening if the creature hadn’t drunk his blood. His blood, pumping furiously around his body that very second but a mystery to him. He knew nothing about its peculiar properties. He didn’t even know what it could do, or why it had been so strong that the creature needed to dilute it with the blood of others.

  ‘Can you do any of that Old Kingdom magic the Scouts talk about?’

  ‘No,’ said Nick. ‘I . . . I’m rather useless, I’m afraid. I’ve been planning to go to the Old Kingdom . . . to learn about, well, a lot of things. But I haven’t managed to get there yet.’

  ‘So we’re pretty well stuffed,’ said Ripton. ‘When the fire burns down, that thing will just waltz in here and kill us all.’

  ‘We might get help,’ said Nick.

  Ripton snorted. ‘Not the help we need. I told you. Bullets don’t hurt it. I doubt even an artillery shell would do anything, if a gunner could
hit something moving that fast.’

  ‘Keep your voice down,’ Nick muttered. Most of the people inside the ring were huddled right in the centre, as much to get away from the drifting smoke of the fires as for the psychological ease of being farther away from the creature. But a knot of half-a-dozen guests and servants was only a dozen yards away, the servants helping the kitchen maid up and the guests getting in the way. ‘I meant Old Kingdom help. I sent a message with Malthan. A telegram for him to send to some people who can get a message to the Old Kingdom quickly.’

  Ripton bent his head and mumbled something. ‘What? What did you say?’

  ‘Malthan never made it past the village,’ Ripton muttered. ‘I handed him over to two of Hodge-man’s particular pals at the crossroads. Orders. I had to do it, to maintain my cover.’

  Nick was silent, his thoughts on the sad, frightened, greedy little man who was now probably dead in a ditch not too many miles away.

  ‘Hodgeman said you’d never follow up what happened to Malthan,’ said Ripton. ‘He said your sort never did. You were just throwing your weight around, he said.’

  ‘I would have checked,’ said Nick. ‘I would have left no stone unturned. Believe me.’

  He looked around at the ring of fire. Sections of it were already dying down, generating lots of smoke but little flame. If Malthan had managed to send the telegram six or more hours ago, there might have been a slim chance that the Abhorsen . . . or Lirael . . . or somebody competent to deal with the creature would have been able to get there before they ran out of things to burn.

  ‘Hodgeman’s dead now, anyway. He was one of the first that thing got.’

  ‘I sent another message,’ said Nick. ‘I bribed Danjers’s valet to go down to the village and send a telegram.’

  ‘Nowhere to send one from there,’ said Ripton. ‘Planned that way, of course. D13 keeping control of communications. The closest telephone would be at Colonel Wrale’s house, and that’s ten miles away.’

  ‘I don’t suppose he would have managed it anyway—’

  Nick broke off and peered at the closer group of people and then at the central muddle, wiping his eyes as a tendril of smoke wafted across.

  ‘Where is Danjers? I don’t remember seeing him at the dinner table, and he’s pretty hard to miss. What’s the butler’s name again?’

  ‘Whitecrake,’ said Ripton, but Nick was already striding over to the butler, who was issuing orders to his footmen, who in turn were busy feeding the fires with more straw.

  ‘Whitecrake!’ Nick called before he had closed the distance between them. ‘Where is Mr Danjers?’ Whitecrake rotated with great dignity, rather like a dreadnought’s gun turret, and bowed, allowing Nick to close the distance before he replied.

  ‘Mr Danjers removed himself from the party and left at five o’clock,’ he said. ‘I understand that the curtains in the dining room clashed with his waistcoat.’

  ‘His man went with him?’

  ‘Naturally,’ said Whitecrake. ‘I believe Mr Danjers intended to motor over to Applethwick.’ Nick felt every muscle in his shoulders and neck suddenly relax, as a ripple of relief passed through on its way to his toes.

  ‘We’ll be all right! Danjers’s valet is bound to have sent that telegram! Let’s see, if they got to Applethwick by seven thirty . . . the telegram would be at Wyverley by eight at the latest . . . They’d get the message on to the Abhorsen’s House however they do it . . . Then if someone flew by Paperwing to Wyverley, they’ve got those aeroplanes at the flying school there to fly south . . . though I suppose not at night, even with this moon . . .’

  The tension started to come back as Nick came to the realisation that even if the Abhorsen or King Touchstone’s Guard had already received his message, there was no way anyone could be at Dorrance Hall before the morning, at the very earliest.

  Nick looked up from the fingers he’d been counting on and saw that Ripton, Whitecrake, several footmen, a couple of maids, and a number of the guests were all hanging on his every word. ‘Help will be coming,’ Nick announced firmly. ‘But we have to make the fires last as long as we can. Everything that can burn must be gathered within this ring. Every tiny piece of straw, any spare clothes, papers you may have on you, even banknotes . . . need to be gathered up. Mr White-crake, can you take charge of that? Ripton, a word if you don’t mind.’

  No one objected to Nick’s taking command, and he hardly noticed himself that he had. He had often taken the lead among his school friends and at college, his mind usually grasping any situation faster than his fellows did and his aristocratic heritage providing more than enough self-confidence. As he turned away and walked closer to the fire, Ripton followed at his heels like an obedient shadow.

  ‘There won’t be any useful help till morning at the earliest,’ Nick whispered, his voice hardly audible over the crackle of the fire. ‘I mean Old Kingdom help. Provided Danjers’s man did send the telegram.’

  Ripton eyed the burning straw.

  ‘I suppose there’s a chance the fire’ll last till dawn, if we rake it narrower and just try to maintain a bit of flame and coals. Do you . . . Is there a possibility that . . . that thing doesn’t like the sun, as well as fire?’

  ‘I don’t know. But I wouldn’t count on it. From the little I heard my friend Sam talk about it at school, Free Magic creatures roam the day as freely as they do the night.’

  ‘Maybe it’ll run out of puff,’ said Ripton. ‘Like you said. Dorrance didn’t even expect it to wake up, and here it is running around—’

  ‘What’s that noise?’ interrupted Nick. He could hear a distant jangling, carried on the light breeze toward him. ‘Is that a bell?’

  ‘Oh no . . .’ groaned Ripton. ‘It’s the volunteer fire brigade from the village. They know they’re not to come here, no matter what . . .’

  Nick looked around at the ring of red fire, and beyond that at the vast column of spark-lit smoke that was winding up from Dorrance Hall. No firefighter would be able to resist that clarion call.

  ‘They’re probably only the first,’ he said quietly. ‘With this moon, the smoke will be visible for miles. We’ll probably have town brigades here in an hour or so, as well as all the local volunteers for a dozen miles or more. I’ll have to stop them.’

  ‘What! If you leave the circle, that monster will be on you in a second!’

  Nick shook his head.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about that. It ran away from me after it drank just a little of my blood. Dorrance was yelling something about getting it other blood to dilute mine. It could easily have killed me then, but it didn’t.’

  ‘You can’t go out,’ said Ripton. ‘Think about it! It’s drunk enough in the last hour to dilute your blood a hundred times over! It could easily be ready for more. And it’s your blood that revved it up in the first place. It’ll kill you and get more powerful, and then it’ll kill us!’

  ‘We can’t just let it kill the firemen,’ Nick said stubbornly. He started to walk to the other side of the circle, closer to the drive. Ripton hurried along beside him. ‘I might be able to hurt . . . even kill . . . the creature with this.’

  He pulled out Sam’s dagger and held it up. Fire and moonlight reflected from the blade, but there was green and blue and gold there, too, as Charter Marks swam slowly across the metal. Not fully active, but still strange and wonderful under the Ancelstierran moon.

  Ripton did not seem overly impressed.

  ‘You’d never get close enough to use that little pigsticker. Llew! Llew!’

  ‘You’re not catching me like that again,’ said Nick, without slowing down. He stowed the dagger away and picked up a rake, ready to make a gap in the burning barrier. A glance over his shoulder showed him the huge-shouldered Llew getting up from where he was braiding flowers. ‘If I want to go, you’re going to let me this time.’

  ‘Too late,’ said Ripton. ‘There’s the fire engine.’

  He pointed through the smoke. An ancient horse-d
rawn tanker, of a kind obsolete everywhere save the most rural counties, was coming up the drive, with at least fourteen volunteer firemen crammed on or hanging off it. They were in various states of uniform, but all wore gleaming brass helmets. Several firemen on horseback came behind the engine, followed by a farm truck loaded with more irregular volunteers, who were armed with fire beaters and buckets. Two small cars brought up the rear, transporting another four brass-helmeted volunteers.

  ‘How did they—’

  ‘There’s another entrance to the estate from the village by the gamekeeper’s cottage. Cuts half a mile off the front drive.’

  Nick plunged at the fire with the rake, and dragged some of the burning hay aside before he had to fall back from the smoke and heat. After a few seconds to recover, he pushed forward again, widening the gap. But it was going to take a few minutes to get through, and the firemen would be at the meadow before he could get out.

  After his third attempt he reeled back into the grasp of Llew, who held Nick as he tried to swipe his legs with the rake, till Ripton grabbed it and twisted it out of his hands.

  ‘Hold hard, Master!’ said Llew.

  ‘It’s not attacking them!’ cried Ripton. ‘Just keep still and take a look.’

  Nick stopped struggling. The fire engine had come to a halt as close as the men and horses could stand the heat, some fifty yards from the house. Firemen leapt off onto the lawn and began to bustle about with hoses as the truck and cars screeched to a halt behind them, throwing up gravel. The two mounted firemen continued on toward the meadow, their horses’ hooves clattering on the narrow bridge over the ha-ha.

  ‘It’ll take the horsemen,’ said Nick. ‘It must be hiding in the ditch.’

  But the riders passed unmolested over the bridge and across the meadow, finally wheeling about close enough to the ring of fire for one of them to shout, ‘What on earth is happening here?’