Authors: Tony Richards
Half an hour later – we had all piled back into the Rolls by then – I was still aching like hell, my wounded arm and leg especially. It felt like it would never stop, a constant, subcutaneous throbbing like I had been worked at with a tenderizer by some culinary-minded giant.
But I was back on my feet and moving around. And the good doctor had even made the scars fade away. That was the upside. On the down, I had never felt such a nauseated sense of panic as when he’d directed his powers into my veins, refilling them. I’d felt them stretch and move, as if there were insects shuffling round my body’s secret passageways.
I forced myself to just forget it.
Focus on the future
, I told myself. But that wasn’t particularly comfortable either.
The sun was still descending like a faded yellow volleyball.
In the back of the Silver Shadow – they’d popped into existence as we’d climbed into it – were a change of clothes for me, and a big pile of towels, courtesy of Woodard Raine without a doubt. So at least he’d not lost interest in us yet. His focus seemed to be in the right place, for once.
I was drying myself down, then struggling into them. And I had to admit that the new shirt and pants fitted perfectly, the shoes were pretty good ones.
I checked through my other clothes, the soaked ones, retrieving useful things like sets of keys. But my gun was definitely not there.
Up front in the driver’s seat, Hampton had been provided for as well. He was wearing a thick, voluminous bathrobe over his dripping smalls, the same color as his uniform. And a pair of dark blue flip-flops that he seemed a little puzzled by. The Rolls was moving rather jerkily. He was finding it difficult to work the pedals.
As for Willets, the doctor gazed at me suspiciously while I did up my cuffs. I slipped my brand-new jacket on, then did something I almost never do. I tried out a gentle smile on him, of gratitude.
Willets just frowned back. His sour, despondent mood had returned, crinkling his features.
“So, one small victory, and a tenuous one at that. Do you really still believe you have a chance?”
I looked at him without replying. Was he still trying to talk me out of this?
“You’ve bested his creature, true enough,” he granted me.
But he looked unimpressed.
“Stopping the one who created it in the first place will be infinitely harder.”
“Yes, I know that,” I replied.
But he had hit the nail directly on the head. Time was slipping away far too quickly, faster than was natural. And I still didn’t have even a basic plan for dealing with Saruak.
We were humming through the inner suburbs. Hampton’s footwork on the pedals seemed to have gotten more assured. But – once more – there was not a sign of life. Some of the houses’ doors were hanging vacantly ajar. The yards in front of them were all abandoned. There was no one on the sidewalks, and no other traffic on the streets. Which made our progress easier, at least.
What Cassie had said came back to me. A load more people tinkered with magic than you might expect. Most of them had to do it secretly. And were they
all
at Union Square? Hampton had to know more about it than I did, so I leant across and asked him.
“Pretty much the whole town’s there, sir,” he informed me. “I could see it from up on the Hill. The square is full beyond capacity. Those who can’t get into it have clogged up the surrounding streets.”
Exactly as the jewel had shown me. The look in his eyes, reflected in the rearview mirror said it all. They had taken on a sharp, tight gleam of apprehension.
“So many of them?” I asked. “They all …?”
“Yes. Of course.”
I suppose that, if you’re just an ordinary person and you live here in the Landing, the temptation becomes too great after a while. Which had left almost everybody vulnerable.
I looked back at Willets with a question in my own gaze. But he pulled another tired face at me, knowing what I wanted of him.
“I’ve done all that I possibly can, Devries.”
I ought to have got angry with him. But he had recently saved my life, so I held off a little
“Really? You’re quite sure of that?”
“I’m certain, believe me. From here on in, you’re on your own.”
Then he put back on the dark glasses I’d given him and turned his face away from me, refusing to look back.
We went across another intersection. The taller buildings of the town center were drawing into view. And still, there was nobody around. Shop doorways hung open – nothing moved, beyond them. A few lights ought to have been coming on in the rooms above, but the windows remained darkened to the last.
That added to the sense of deepening gloom. It looked to me as though the entire place was trying to fade from view, in spite of the fact it was still day.
We turned another corner. There was merely a block to go. But then Hampton stamped hard on the brake. The Rolls skidded to a halt.
I righted myself and peered ahead of us, at a dense wall running across the entire street. Except that it wasn’t made of bricks and mortar. It was people, jammed shoulder-to-shoulder, back-to-belly, as far as my eyes could go.
When I’d last been here, the townsfolk had been sitting down. But there was no room for that anymore. It looked to me like they were all trying to press a little further forward, something drawing them in that direction. And, despite the fact that they were making no sound, there was a tense air to them.
Something was coming, and they seemed to feel it in their bones.
Hampton slumped back in his seat.
“Good Lord!” he said again.
I took another glance at my watch. Six o’ clock. Two hours to go. Except the hands were moving even quicker. In real terms, how much time was left?
Saul Hobart – I could see, staring around – had been as good as his word. There were no obstructions remaining on this street, not so much as a skateboard. I wondered how much that would help when the terror really started kicking in.
I was still trying to think what to do next, when there was an abrupt, sharp clank above my head. An object rattled to the pavement.
Something had just struck the roof. A stone or suchlike. Thrown deliberately?
Hampton’s reaction was immediate and fierce. He seemed to forget all about the crowds in front of us, the situation we were in. He snorted angrily, then got out, the entire car lurching.
His only concern was for the Rolls’ paintwork. But I wound a window down and stuck my head out, trying to find out what was happening now.
There was a whistle from above. I tipped my face in that direction. Four stories up, a narrow head was poking out across the edge of the nearest building’s roof.
It was Cassie.
Going up the fire escape, stretching out my aching muscles all over again, wasn’t exactly pleasant. But it turned out to be worth the effort.
By the look on Cassie’s face, once I’d gotten up there, I wasn’t the only one who felt deeply relieved. Her face had gone paler than ever, the cheekbones stark as marble, but her eyes glittered. She looked like she was going to let out a whoop any second.
You’d have thought that she was sick of rooftops, after her recent experience with them. But she’d obviously come up here to keep an eye on things. It was far too crowded for that, down below us.
“You thought I was
dead
?” I asked her, as I stepped onto the wide expanse of tar paper. “Have you no faith in me at all?”
Her head did something in between a shake and nod. She released a breath and put a hand across her chest.
“Stop that! I … I wasn’t sure.”
I hadn’t been either, for a while there. So I could see her point of view.
“I watched you jump into the river. And the Dralleg go in too. Once I’d gotten back down, I headed after you. But there was no sign of you, or anyone else. I just assumed …”
But that didn’t sound exactly right. I recalled the way that Saruak had stalked me down the towpath. Even though he hadn’t followed me the entire way, where’d he been while she was doing that?
“He seems to have disappeared again,” Cass told me.
The rise and fall of her chest was starting to slow down, at last. I was glad that she was so pleased. But – my thoughts revolving round our visitor again – I became increasingly uncomfortable. He was preparing himself for his finale, doubtless.
“How about the Dralleg?” Cassie asked.
“A gonner,” I told her. “But it wasn’t easy. That damned thing was hard to kill.”
She nodded with approval, but that didn’t lighten my mood any. I knew what an enormous gap there was between ‘hard’ and ‘impossible.’ And Saruak still answered to the latter, any way you looked at it.
I gazed over the roof’s lip at the street I’d just climbed up from. There seemed no point in hiding. There were hundreds of people there. The light was weakening slightly. All their clustered faces were like pools of growing shade. The silence was enduring and profound. They still looked like they were moving very gently, trying to push a little further forward. That was all.
You could hear the swishing noise the breeze made as it sifted past the rooftops. You could hear the flapping of a nearby bird. There were little kids down there, and even babies. They were not letting out so much as a murmur or a cough.
Then the thrumming of a motor brought my head around. The Rolls was performing a three-point turn, then heading off through the barren streets, carrying Willets with it.
“Your second time in that thing,” Cass remarked, glancing at me sideways. “Getting used to luxury in your old age?”
She’d no idea what had been going on. Not the whole story. So I simply let the jibe slide by me.
My gaze wandered to the people jam-packed further up the street. The scene that had been revealed to me came back, in all its shrieking awfulness.
But it hadn’t been enacted here. I wanted to see what was happening down on Union Square itself.
Every eye down there was still fixed on the platform. We studied it all from the roof’s front edge.
Hot droplets of sweat formed on my lip. Once more, the scene was precisely as the white jewel had predicted it. The banners flapped. Every spare inch of space was filled, right down to the last small alcove. There were cops stringing nervously along the edges of the crowd – I recognized Jenny Pearce’s white-blond hair. But what they could do seemed pretty limited, to put it mildly. There were so many people pressed up around them, even moving anywhere was difficult. And most of them had given up trying.
One
thing was different. I took that in almost right away. In the scene the jewel had shown me, there were civilians standing on the statue’s plinth, clinging to our founder’s big bronze hems, God bless him. That part of the prophecy hadn’t been correct. Just one person occupied that spot.
It was Saul Hobart. He had cleared the others off, made some room up there that he could work with. I thought I could make out a walkie-talkie clipped onto his belt. And he had a riot gun propped up in front of him against the statue. What good he thought that might do, I had no real idea.
He kept glancing between the stage in front of him and then the sky above. Ready for whatever happened. And the man had to have some notion of how bad, how devastating, that was going to be. I’d already warned him about the stampede. But … run away? He’d rather die first.
I stood as tall as I was able, and tried to see what else was new. There was nothing. Events were traveling along the same dark route I’d watched before.
Off to the far side, the sun had almost reached the top of the wide gray buildings. Shadows were stretching everywhere. They swept over the clustered people. Countless eyes glittered dully from them.
“Jesus,” Cassie murmured, her tone breathless. “Look at all the little kids down there.”
There were toddlers, borne up on shoulders. Older children, trying to stand as tall as their dads, their moms. But what could we do about it? My heart became so heavy that it felt like it was going to stop.
My gaze went back to the lieutenant, and I turned that over once again. It was only a small detail, but he had managed to make a difference. The Eye of Hermaneus had not shown me that. And the question came immediately. If that could be altered, what else?
How, though?
How?
The bottom edge of the sun was touching the rooftop opposite me. And a rattling sound, then urgent movement, brought me jerking around to the north.
Mayor Aldernay, a small stout shape flanked by his assistant and his deputies, had emerged from the Town Hall. As I watched, they all came briskly down the steps and then went up onto the stage, the mayor taking his place behind a microphone.
He cleared his throat. It rang out loudly through the speaker system.
Oh my God, it was beginning.