by Rachel Ford
“There it is.”
“There it is,” he repeated. “It’s a shame we have to destroy it.”
“What?”
“It’s so beautiful.”
“But Trajan didn’t mention any way for us to retrieve it.”
“No,” he agreed. “No, we’d better destroy it. And before anyone realizes we’re here, or any patrols show up.”
She nodded, and reached into one of the pockets of her jacket. A moment later, she produced the pistol. “Let’s get back into the hall,” she advised. “Just in case the shot ricochets.”
They did, and Nance took a deep breath and aimed for the crystal.
Alfred heard the shot at the same moment he felt the tower tremble all around him. He heard the shot at the same moment a searing light pierced his eyes, stinging his brain. A second later, as he was reaching a hand to shield his eyes, a wave of energy barreled into him. Before the taxman knew what was happening, he was slammed up against a stone wall. Then, he was tumbling to the floor.
Each sensation was just a new way to suffer: his head ached, as if the light had seared into his brain; his back throbbed from being beaten against stone; his knees and elbows screamed with pain, from each unceremonious introduction to a stone surface. “Ow,” he groaned.
At the same time, he heard Nance whimper. That, at least, roused him from his own stupor of agony. “Nance? Darling?” He blinked away the disorientation, searching for her.
She was lying in a similarly discombobulated heap. But at the sound of his voice, she stirred. “Alfred?”
“Oh my God.” He crawled over, pulling her to him.
“Ow. Ow, Alfred, that hurts.”
He knew it did, because it hurt him too. He wrapped her in a hug anyway, and breathed, “Oh darling.”
She grumbled for a moment longer, then wrapped her arms around him. “What the hell happened?” she said.
“I don’t know. It’s like that thing exploded when you shot it. It was like a bomb going off.”
She nodded, drawing back to look him in the eye. She was, he could see, deeply troubled. “Shouldn’t Trajan have warned us? If we were standing any closer – babe, we could have been killed.”
He had no good answer for her. “Maybe he figured we’d know that?”
“How? We don’t have time crystals. He knows that.”
“Yes, but…well, he loses at chess, against himself, Nance. We’re not working with Einstein here.”
Further discussion, though, was curtailed. The sound of voices carried up the stairwell, and they exchanged mortified glances. “Quick,” he said. “To the roof, and the airship.”
She didn’t need urging, and, wincing all the while, they got to their feet. The way up was long. They’d already ascended several stories’ worth of stairs in the initial climb, but it was another few before they reached the top.
The taxman was winded and even sorer than when they’d started the ascent. “Good God, I’m out of shape.”
Nance squeezed his hand and laughed. “Getting blown up isn’t doing either of us any favors, babe.”
She pushed open the door, and they stepped onto the rooftop, into the bright sunlight.
And were utterly alone. There was no airship waiting here. There was no airship on the horizon. There was nothing but open sky and the city below.
Alfred gulped, a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. “What’s going on?”
“Where’s the ship?”
“You don’t think…they forgot?”
Nance, though, did not. “Fuck,” she said, and the emotion was too like his own to elicit anything more than a cringe from the taxman. “That son-of-a-bitch double crossed us.”
“You don’t think he’s coming back for us, then?”
“If he was, they’d have had a dirigible on standby. That explosion? You probably could hear that thing for miles around. Anyway, he said their sensors could detect the crystal.”
Alfred nodded. “Well hell.”
“What are we going to do, Alfred?”
Something in Nance’s tones drew him from his own befuddled state. It was stronger than confusion. It sounded a lot like fear. He took her hand, and mustered a confidence he didn’t feel. “Come on, babe. We need to get back downstairs, and try to slip out with the crowd. They’re probably panicking after that explosion. We’ll get lost in the confusion, and no one will be the wiser.”
She nodded, and they turned for the door. They did not, however, make it very far. They’d just gotten inside and descended half a dozen steps when the sound of voices carried up the stairwell. Alfred couldn’t tell what was being said, but the how was sufficient. Whoever was down there, they were good and mad. And there were a lot of them, to judge by the din of angry voices.
“We’ll never get by,” Nancy whispered. “They’ll see us.”
He didn’t want to, but he was inclined to agree. “Do we make a break for it then? Or should we go back to the roof, and hope they don’t figure out we’ve gone this way?”
They lingered for a moment in hesitation – and it was a moment too long. A guardsman’s head jutted onto the landing, the billowing feather of his cap bobbing with the movement. “The saboteur can’t have gone down,” he was calling. “We’d have seen –” Alfred saw the other man’s eyes bulge. “They’re here. They’re here!”
“Fudge muffins,” the taxman breathed.
A moment later, a host of bodies poured onto the landing, all of them turning agitated glances in their direction.
“Fudge muffins,” he said again.
“Get them,” someone yelled.
“Get the spies,” another added.
“Catch the saboteurs.”
“Run,” Nance urged.
“Where?”
But she was already dragging him back up the stairs. In a moment, they were on the rooftop, and she slammed the door after them. “We need to find something to block this off, so they can’t get up. Do you see anything we can use? Alfred?”
Normally, he would have attended to every word she said. But right now, quite another sight caught his attention. “The island, Nance: they’re coming back.”
She glanced up too, then whooped with delight. It was true: Atupal was there, looming great and beautiful on the horizon, casting its long shadow over the countryside below.
“They didn’t forget us,” Alfred decided. “They came back.”
“I thought Trajan said he’d send a ship – not the entire island.”
He’d heard the same thing, but, in the moment, it didn’t much matter. All that mattered was that they were going to be rescued.
“They’ll never get here in time,” Nance said. “We have to block the door, Alfred – to buy them some time.”
Chapter Nineteen
There wasn’t much on the roof that could be repurposed, but a pile of blocks and mason’s tools near a damaged merlon did the trick. A hanging scaffold had been pulled up onto the roof by the battlements, no doubt to resume repairs as soon as the celebrations ended. Now, Alfred and Nancy rigged up a kind of door stop with the timber and blocks, wedging the lumber under the door at an angle, formed by blocks, to prevent the door from moving.
“That should buy us a few minutes, anyway,” she declared.
“Look,” Alfred said, pointing to a dirigible, “there’s an airship.” It looked tiny by comparison to Atupal, and gray against the sunlight and sky.
Nancy squeezed his arm excitedly. “We may just survive this, babe.”
He wrapped her in a hug, even as thumping sounded against the door, and laughed. “We may at that, darling.”
“Two airships?” Nancy asked suddenly, her tone full of confusion. “Wait, there’s more. Look.” She pointed to one of the smaller adjacent islands, and he frowned. She was right. Like a swarm of hornets leaving their nest, a fleet of dirigibles lifted off the surface.
“They’re headed for Katar,” he observed.
“Why so many?”
“I don’t know.” The taxman didn’t even have a guess. A few ships, he could understand: that would be enough to keep any potential attackers at bay while performing their rescue mission. But as he stared at the dozens of airships, all buzzing this way and that, he felt a shiver of apprehension run up his spine. “What’s Trajan up to?”
“I’m not sure. But babe, I don’t think he’s here for us.”
“No,” he conceded. “Neither do I.”
“Oh my God. Look.” She pointed to a cluster of balloons hovering at the eastern end of the city. These were free floating, and Alfred tried to recall Trevil Tannerson’s heated words about dirigibles versus balloons.
He remembered the guardsmen calling the pilots monkeys in uniforms, but there’d been more to it than that. Balloon troopers. That’s what he’d said. They just float around up there, tossing spears at the folk below. “Oh God.”
“They’re troops,” Nance gasped, apparently coming to the same realization at the same moment. “Oh God, Alfred: they’re sending troops over the city.”
“Trajan didn’t say anything about troops. Or airships. Or attacking Katar. We were just here to destroy the time crystal. To stop a planetwide genocide.” He was shaking his head. It didn’t make sense.
But, even as he watched, he saw a stream of projectiles rain down from the balloons – tiny threads against a blue sky, they seemed from this vantage.
“They’re attacking civilians,” Nance said. “They’re attacking the city.”
“Oh God, Nancy. What have we done?”
It was now that the thumping at the door ceased. Or, rather, gave way to a terrible splintering sound. The pair started, turning just in time to see a furious, red-faced bear of a man burst through in a shower of splinters. A dozen uniformed men followed, circling the two of them.
Alfred drew Nancy to him, gulping in fright. There was no way, even with the pistol, they could outfight this many guards. And the truth was, he wasn’t certain in the moment that drawing the gun would be anything short of murder. Not after seeing what was ongoing in the skies of Katar. Not after they’d come here in aid of the mad king behind the assault. Fudge muffins. “There’s been a mistake,” he tried.
The men didn’t engage, though. They remained in place, until the sound of bootheels rang out, sharp and high behind them. Then, those nearest the door peeled away, creating a gap in the ring of bodies.
Alfred saw a woman with severe features, and piercing black eyes – the same woman he’d seen earlier, in the Great Hall. “Chancellor Irma.”
She stepped forward, until she was an arm’s length away from the pair of them. Only then did she speak, and she fixed those piercing eyes on him. “Who in the gods’ names are you?”
He shrank from her gaze, stammering, “Alfred. Alfred Fa-Favero.”
“I’m Nancy Abbot. What’s going on? Why is Trajan attacking the city?”
Irma’s gaze moved to Nance now. “Is the massacre of Katar a joke to you, Nancy Abbot?”
But Nance blanched at the words. “Massacre? Chancellor, what’s going on?”
An angry growl escaped some of the guardsmen, and Irma scoffed. “Are you really trying to pretend you didn’t destroy the crystal?”
“No,” Nancy admitted, and Alfred gasped at her frankness. “We did. I’m sorry, but it was only to stop you from traveling back in time: if you used the time crystal, you would have wiped out all sentient life on this planet. But why is Trajan attacking Katar?”
Irma blinked, glancing between the two of them again, as if she couldn’t quite believe what she’d just heard. “Time crystal? What are you talking about?”
“The crystal – the one I shot. To stop you from traveling back in time.”
Irma’s frown returned, as severe as ever. “Good gods. Time crystal? Time Travel? I don’t know what you’re talking about, Nancy Abbot, but the crystal you destroyed was our magnetic shield generator.”
“Wait,” Nancy said. “What?”
“You’re not researching time travel?” Alfred put in. “That’s not what the Science Academy is working on?”
“Time travel? Are you insane? Does Trajan have lunatics working for him now? Or do you think the destruction of this city, the murder of my people, is a joke?”
“We should cast them over the side of the tower, Chancellor,” a voice behind the pair suggested. “Let them laugh all the way to the bottom.”
“Hear, hear,” another agreed.
Alfred gulped. “If that wasn’t a time crystal…what was it then?”
“I told you: our shield generator. To create enough magnetism to repel Atupal.”
“Oh my God,” Nancy gasped. “That’s why they’re here now: because we destroyed the shield generator.”
“Yes. Obviously.” Irma scrutinized her for a long moment. “My gods, did you really think…” She shook her head. “Time travel?”
“Yes,” Nancy admitted. “Trajan said…well, you were researching it to stop the Royal Academy from forming. So the Science Academy would be…well, more prestigious.”
Here, the Chancellor’s jaw nearly dropped. “The Science Academy is more prestigious. It has been for the last two hundred years. While the Royal Academy is researching auras, we’re building our world.” She shook her head again. “My gods, you’ve doomed us all.”
“I don’t understand,” Alfred said. “Can’t you, well, shoot down those balloons?” His mind was full of old World War II documentaries, and the bombers that terrorized London. Surely Katar had some manner of defense, to protect its citizens in such circumstances. “Don’t you have any anti-aircraft guns or anything?”
Chancellor Irma scowled at him. “We’re forbidden to develop them, by the king. Or aircraft of our own.”
“Oh.”
“But even if we had, that would only stop the airships. It wouldn’t stop Atupal.”
“What do you mean?” Nancy asked.
Irma gestured above them, and Alfred glanced up. The day, he realized, had suddenly gone very dark. And as he raised his eyes, he understood why: the island was moving over the city, blotting out the sun. “They mean to do to us what that monster did to Idan.”
“What…what did he do to Idan?” Nancy wondered hesitantly.
“How can you not know that?”
“We’re visitors. Please, tell me.”
“It was ten years ago. The mayor of Idan refused to send more conscripted soldiers as tribute. So Trajan…” She shivered. “Trajan brought Atupal over the city, and lowered it until…well, until he’d crushed every man, woman and child living there. Until he’d flattened the buildings and ground the trees into the dirt. Until there was nothing but desolation and ruin left behind.
“And now you – you two have condemned Katar to the same fate.”
Chapter Twenty
Alfred stood in stunned silence for a long moment. Nance gasped, “Oh God.”
“Chancellor,” one of the guards said, “we need to go. The tower will be the first thing destroyed.”
The taxman at first did not comprehend. But the tower stood far above the rest of Katar. When Atupal lowered itself onto the city, it would be the first thing reached, and so the first thing crushed.
Irma nodded. “We need to get the people to safety, as many as we can, anyway. Let’s go.”
“What about these saboteurs?”
“Can we throw them over the battlements?”
Alfred frowned, scanning the group for the bloodthirsty speaker. This was the second time he’d recommended this rather drastic course of action. Whoever it was had fallen silent before he spotted him, though.
“No,” Irma said. “We don’t have time for that.”
“I can be quick. Very quick.”
“I’ll help,” someone else added.
The chancellor ignored them, though. “May the gods have mercy on your souls, Alfred and Nancy: you have the blood of thousands on your hands. Guards, with me. Start evacuation procedures.”
An
d, with that, they fell in behind her, trickling down the stairwell. When they’d disappeared, Nancy asked, her tone low and raw, “What have we done, Alfred?”
He shook his head. The long shadow of the island had fallen over them, now, as it inched its way forward, over all Katar. “I don’t know, babe. I don’t understand. Winthrop said they were working on time travel.”
“I know. We were here to stop genocide. Not enable it.”
“He must have got his wires crossed. Or else Trajan tricked him somehow.”
“Like he tricked us,” she said. “Dammit, Alfred, what are we going to do? We can’t stand by and let him murder an entire city.”
He nodded slowly. “No. But…what can we do?” All this time, they’d been approaching the problem as if Irma and the people of Inbalibrab were the antagonists, the genocidal party. Now, too late, it looked like they were the good guys. And the taxman and Nance had just cleared the way for the bad guys to march in and crush the good guys. Literally crush them, Alfred thought with a shiver. How do you just undo that?
The truth was, he couldn’t think of a way. Life wasn’t like one of her videogames, where you could just restart. If they had the time travel device, sure: they could go back and warn their earlier selves.
But Winthrop had taken that. They were here on their own, with one shot at this. And we blew it.
Nance, though, turned to him suddenly with eyes that glimmered. “I’ve got an idea.”
Alfred felt a sudden pang of apprehension at her excitement. “Oh no. What kind of idea?”
“A crazy one.”
“That’s what I was afraid of,” he groaned.
She seized him by the shoulders, though. “Come on, babe. It is crazy, but it can work. It will work. And we owe it to these people. They’re all going to die if we don’t.”
He groaned again. “You better not get us killed.”
“I won’t. I hope. Come on.” She didn’t wait for him to object further – good planning, he had to concede, because he had plenty more objections lined up. Instead, she took off at a run for the stairs, calling, “Chancellor, wait. Chancellor Irma.”