by Garth Nix
“Can you do anything, Viv?” shouted Merlin. It was almost impossible to hear him.
The engines suddenly emitted an awful asphyxiating cough and stopped entirely. The rotors changed rhythm yet again, sounding slower and somehow less confident. The helicopter started to spin around on its axis, the tail sweeping around like a clock’s second hand.
“No! It’s too heavy!” shouted Vivien.
“We’re autorotating!” shouted the crew chief. “Brace! Br—”
The helicopter hit the ground and slid forward with a terrifying screech of tortured metal before it smashed into something, stopped with a deafening bang, and rolled over on its right side. Susan was thrown into Merlin, who was holding on to one of the bench struts with his left hand and was steady as a rock.
Everything stopped. There were no more bird impacts, no engine noise, no whup-whup-whup of the rotors. Only the low, sad groan of stressed metal and composites and the sound of a piercing, high-pitched alarm.
Merlin was the first to move. He looked swiftly around, saw Vivien was hanging down but had braced her feet against the buried door, and was already moving to undo her seat belt. Susan was lying back but also wrestling with her belt. The crew chief, hanging sideways in her harness, was shouting into her helmet mike, trying to raise the pilots.
The bookseller undid his restraint and pulled himself upright to stand on the back of his seat. He slid open the left-side door, which was now above their heads. The right-side door beneath Vivien was buckled in and broken, with clumps of grass and earth visible through a long gash in the hull.
The crew chief half fell out of her harness as she tried to get a footing to reach up as well, managed to get her boots on the back of the bench, and helped Merlin with the door. She began to cup her hands to give him a boost up and out, but he simply jumped, pulling himself over the edge. He crouched there and leaned back in, offering a hand to Susan. But she passed up the bag with the sword first, which he took and hurled safely away, before Susan climbed out and up.
Tendrils of smoke were beginning to drift into the passenger compartment. Even more smoke was eddying around the hull and rising up to join the fog. Part of a rotor stuck straight up in the air, like a drowning person’s arm raised for help.
Visibility was no more than a dozen feet, but as far as Susan could tell the helicopter had crash-landed in a grassy field, one littered with small rocks.
“Jump down and move away!” shouted Merlin, leaning down again to help Vivien out, and then the crew chief.
Susan jumped down, but didn’t move away. Instead she circled around to the front of the helicopter, flinching as she saw the craft had slid front-first into a huge outcrop of stone. The nose and cockpit were smashed beyond recognition, pushed back to the bulkhead that separated it from the passenger compartment. There were pieces of metal and composite hull and Plexiglas strewn everywhere, all smothered in blood and feathers.
Some of the blood was not from the birds, Susan realized, and she had to look away. There was no chance the pilots had survived.
The crew chief came panting up next to her, and stared. She stood there, staring for several seconds, until Susan touched her arm.
“Mel . . . isn’t it? There’s nothing we can do.”
Mel nodded slowly, shook herself, and stared at the thin coils of smoke starting to find their way out of the many rents and holes in the helicopter’s tail and the rear of the cabin. Beyond that, the fog closed in. It was as if there was the burning helicopter and the few survivors, and nothing else, the rest of the world cut off by thick, wet mist.
“No,” she said. Her voice caught for a moment, then she spoke more strongly. “We . . . uh . . . we should move to a safe distance.”
Susan followed her, away from the helicopter. Merlin and Vivien were already moving, but slowly, both looking around, like scouts in enemy territory. Merlin had the sword bag, holding it in his right hand, and his left hand was in his yak-hair bag, no doubt holding the revolver as he peered through the fog. Vivien was walking slowly, her right hand held in front of her, as if she was feeling her way.
Suddenly, both looked at each other. Though they didn’t speak, Susan felt that something had happened. There was a subtle change in the world around them. Nothing she could see or hear, but it felt different. . . .
Acrid smoke billowed across her face and she coughed. It not only had a chemical, metallic odor, there was also the unpleasant stink of cooking birds, all too like a rarely cleaned fried chicken shop not far from Milner Square that Susan always crossed the road to avoid smelling.
“I’ve never seen a fog come up like that,” said Mel. “Or a flock of birds in a fog . . . and . . . where the hell are we anyway?”
Susan looked around. The fog was still too thick to see very far, but the burning helicopter had created an eddy effect that was thinning it out around the crash site. There was a very dense, overgrown forest immediately behind the helicopter, with many very tall and broad oaks, and the field they had landed in was all rough clumps of grass and was littered with stones, not at all the sort of manicured paddock to be expected in a rich outer London semirural village like Totteridge. Not to mention the massive outcrop of stone the helicopter had plowed into; that would have been broken up long ago.
“Where are we?” repeated Mel. She stopped to look back. “We were following an A road, there were big houses either side . . . nothing like this . . .”
She gestured around them, fog wafting about her waving hands, pointing at the glimpses of the tall forest and the rough field with all its stones. There was not a house or a road in sight, or any sign of human civilization at all.
Everyone flinched as something exploded aboard the helicopter. It was not the massive explosion of a Hollywood blockbuster, though it did mark the fire spreading into the main cabin. It began to burn whiter and hotter, and the many independent wisps of smoke began to weave together into a gray-black column that rose up with a crackling roar to mix with the fog.
Save for the crack and pop of the burning helicopter, it was unnaturally quiet. There were no other sounds at all, no human or traffic noise.
Something moved at the visible edge of the fog. A large dog, seen for an instant, then gone again.
“Wolf,” said Merlin. “The fire should keep them off.”
“A wolf? What are you talking about?” asked Mel. She gulped, then started talking again, clearly to reassure herself. “Someone will probably have already dialed 999. Ted might have got a Mayday out . . . there’ll be a rescue bird . . . we can’t be more than five hundred yards from the planned LZ, the police waiting there will have heard the impact, the smoke will break through the fog layer—”
“I think there are some . . . er . . . unusual local problems that will delay rescue for a little while,” said Merlin apologetically. “You should stay here, Sergeant.”
“What the hell is going on?” asked Mel.
“You’ve signed the Official Secrets Act, no doubt,” said Merlin. “Let’s say it’s something covered by that. Lie low, we’ll send help as soon as possible.”
“I should go find a phone, call in—”
A long, baying call stopped her mid-sentence. Not that far off in the fog. The call was answered by several others.
“Wolves,” said Mel slowly.
“Yes,” said Merlin. He spoke hurriedly, as if keen to move on. “Are you armed?”
“No! We’re in England, not a war zone.”
Merlin bent down and drew his Beretta from the ankle holster. He kept it pointing down.
“I think the fire will keep off the wolves,” he said. “But you can keep this. Thumb safety, here. Cock the hammer to fire. Watch your grip or the slide will take your skin off.”
He handed the weapon to the crew chief, along with a spare magazine from his yak-hair bag.
“But I would advise you to fire as a last resort,” he said. “Keep low and quiet.”
“What are you going to do?” asked Mel s
lowly.
“We have to go and sort someone out,” said Merlin. He opened the bag and took out the sword. Surprisingly, this seemed to snap Mel out of a bewilderment that was bordering on panic.
“Is that a spatha? A Roman cavalry sword?”
“Of that general pattern, yes, though it’s seventh century,” admitted Merlin. “I’m surprised you recognized it.”
“I’m a reenactor,” said Mel. “First century AD legionary. Gladius, of course.”
“As it happens I have a gladius as well, back home,” said Merlin. “But it’s not in the same class as this—”
He stopped as Vivien plucked urgently at his sleeve.
“Yeah. We can talk swords another time,” he said. “Like I said, stay low and quiet. Come on.”
He addressed the last two words to Vivien and Susan, as if they’d been the ones holding everything up. Vivien snorted and Susan raised an eyebrow.
“What?” asked Merlin. “Follow me.”
They followed him, into the fog.
Chapter Twenty-Five
In the dusk, she loosed without a care
The thrice-barbed arrow flew ’cross the air
Lodging not in a deer, but her lover’s heart
And so they were doomed, forever to part
THEY DIDN’T GO VERY FAR BEFORE MERLIN STOPPED AND HUNKERED down, gesturing them to do likewise. Susan crouched by his side, every sense alert. She couldn’t see anything through the fog, or hear anything. All she knew was that the Copper Cauldron was somewhere ahead of them, perhaps two or three hundred yards away, but she couldn’t describe how she knew.
“Okay, we’re far enough away from Mel to work out a plan without her flipping out,” he said. He spoke quickly, obviously worried.
“Maybe I’ll flip out instead,” said Susan. “Where are we? What’s the situation?”
“We’re in Southaw’s primary demesne,” said Vivien bluntly. “And he’s taken it—and us—out of time. Somewhat like what happened to you and Merlin in the May Fair.”
“But he made a big mistake bringing the helicopter down when he did,” said Merlin. “Spite, no doubt, because you were aboard.”
“Why was it a mistake?” protested Susan. “We were almost killed—”
“But we weren’t! And we’ve come down inside his demesne right at the moment he took it out of time,” explained Merlin. “Great-Aunt Evangeline and Cousin Una and the troops have started to bring it back; we both felt it. So we’re like an enemy inside the gates during a siege. A fifth column! A Trojan horse! A—”
“He’ll know we’re here, though,” interrupted Susan anxiously. She pointed at the ground. “I mean, exactly here. Back at Coniston I knew where everybody was, every living thing within the bounds!”
“He can’t do much about it right now,” said Vivien. “The right-handed are forcing the demesne back to the New World. He’ll have to use all his strength to stop them. But the contest won’t take long, one way or another. We’ll win, I’m sure, but to be on the safe side we should help, and we’ve got about fifteen minutes—”
“Fifteen minutes!” interjected Merlin. “Is that all?”
“Yes,” said Vivien. She held up her right hand as if weighing some invisible object. “Maybe even less.”
“What happens if they can’t bring the demesne back?” asked Susan. “Bring us back?”
“We’ll be stuck here,” said Vivien. She looked around at the fog, which had not lessened. “To be honest, I’d have thought we’d already see signs of the New World coming back. . . . Southaw is more powerful than I expected. It must be because he has the cauldron.”
“What does being stuck here actually mean?”
“Your usual fairyland thing,” said Vivien. She was still looking around. “Time dilation. A few hours or days here, months or years in the normal world. Maybe centuries.”
“Southaw will kill us straight away,” said Merlin. “So we don’t have to worry about that.”
“So what do we do?” asked Susan.
“Find Southaw’s locus,” said Vivien. “Distract him. If he has to turn his power against us, he’ll have less to use against the right-handed team—”
Something leaped out of the fog.
Merlin spun to meet it with his sword. Vivien dived aside, stripping off her glove and holding her breath. Susan fell over half backwards and scrambled aside to grab a big stone. When she looked back, the fog had swirled across. She couldn’t see anything and could only hear an animalistic grunting, the thunk of Merlin’s sword striking something, and Merlin’s shout, “Blind it, Viv! Blind it!”
Susan raised the stone she held and ran forward, parting the fog. Suddenly, Merlin was in front of her, overtopped by a massive bear. A dead Cauldron-Born bear, its head half-skeletal, part of its skull and jaw showing through rotten fur. One eye was a bloody ruin, doubtless Vivien’s quick work, but the other was bright with a coppery fire.
Merlin swung at the bear, the sword blurring in swift motion. A huge slice of decayed flesh flew from its barrel-like chest, but did not slow it or have any other noticeable effect. It was fast, faster than it ever had been while alive. Merlin leaped back from its counterstrike, his slippered foot turned on a stone, and though he recovered almost instantly, in that lost moment the bear grabbed Merlin by the ankles and twisted his legs.
Susan heard bones break and screamed, her scream drowning Merlin’s own cry of pain. She threw the rock at the bear’s head, striking its remaining eye. The beast threw Merlin away and rushed towards her, she scuttled back frantically, and—
Vivien stepped in front of the Cauldron-Born, her right hand raised, shining with blinding silver light, light reflecting off the shifting planes of the eddying fog.
The bear halted in place, every sinew frozen.
Beads of sweat ran down Vivien’s forehead. Her cheeks were pinched, the muscles in her neck corded with the effort of holding her breath. She fought Southaw’s controlling intelligence inside the Cauldron-Born bear, but she could only hold it as long as she had breath.
“Susan! Bind the beast!” gasped Merlin. He tried to stand but it was impossible, his legs were like snapped twigs. He began to crawl towards the bear, his legs dragging uselessly behind him.
Susan drew the butter knife. The blood had dried on it, and she wasn’t sure that would work. Swiftly, she slashed the sharp edge across her palm, ignoring the sudden pain to wipe the blade. Then she held it tight in her bloodied hand and frantically searched her pockets for the third salt sachet.
Vivien sank to her knees, her left hand down and clenched on the ground, her shining right hand wavering in front of the Cauldron-Born bear.
Susan felt coins, a tissue, and her door key. For a terrible moment she doubted her memory of Vivien giving her three salt packets. Maybe it had only been two. . . .
She found it, smushed up in the corner of her pocket. She pulled it out and ripped it open with her teeth, eased her grip on the knife, and poured the salt in the gap between thumb and forefinger, like a magician stuffing down a handkerchief for a trick.
Vivien made a choking sound, but still her right hand stayed up.
Susan took the blood-and-salt-smeared knife in her own right hand and stepped forward, sliding the knife into the wound Merlin had scored across the Cauldron-Born bear’s massive chest.
“I am your master!” she shouted. “You will obey!”
At almost exactly the same moment Vivien gasped for air and fell down on the spot, completely unconscious.
Unlike when she’d tried to enslave Southaw, Susan instantly felt the effect of this binding. An intense pain blossomed between her eyes, like a severe sinus pain, but through it she also felt a connection to the creature in front of her. She could see the strange golden-red fire that burned within it, the motivating power of the Copper Cauldron that had replaced the living will, and there was a line, a string of that same fire coming out of its head, rising up as if it were a puppet controlled by some presence in the s
ky above, beyond the fog.
She also saw the misshapen shadow that pooled behind the beast’s feet, the polluted detritus of the bear’s spirit, forced from it by the power of the cauldron, but still connected to the remnant flesh.
Susan bent her will upon the bear, trying to wrest control away, to become the puppet master herself. She felt a sudden flash of nausea as she lost her own vision and senses and took over the bear’s, but a moment later she was thrown out, back in her own head again.
She heard Holly’s bullying, confident voice right next to her, shouting in her ear, and felt his presence, Southaw’s immense power.
“Mine! This is mine!”
He was too strong. She could not prevail against him—and Susan also knew she didn’t want to; that brief, foul taste of controlling the poor bear was more than enough. She would never direct a Cauldron-Born, never.
But Susan instinctively knew there was something else she could do. She lifted her salt-stained, bloodied knife again and slashed through the fiery string emanating from the bear’s head, as Southaw lifted its huge, taloned paws to strike at her.
The bright copper-red cord parted without resistance, curling back up like a burnt hair. The fire inside the bear went with it, blown out like a candle. The misshapen shadow re-formed into the true shape of a sad, bewildered bear, sank into the grass, and was gone.
Susan leaped back as the physical remains of the monster tumbled down in front of her, a gut-wrenchingly awful pile of decomposed bear meat, rank blood, and broken bones. Some of it spilled over Vivien’s feet, but she still didn’t move.
She looked like she was dead. Fearing the worst, Susan knelt at her side and felt for the pulse in her neck, gasping in relief as she found it. Faint, but regular, and she could see the slow lift of Vivien’s chest under her eggshell-blue waistcoat. Blood trickled from her lip where she had bitten it in the effort to hold the Cauldron-Bear. And her bare silver hand still shone.
Merlin dragged himself up and Susan turned to him.
“Overtaxed her strength,” muttered Merlin. “She’ll be okay. . . .”