“Imagine it,” said Cath, gripping his wrist so tightly he was sure she’d stopped all the blood moving in his arm. “Imagine every bit of it.”
Danny brought the story back to his mind. He pushed away the fear he’d felt as he heard it. He pushed away the horror at the idea of stealing a chariot, of holding on to eight huge stags, trying to control them with a thin leather rein. He thought of eight Isbjin al-Orrs, each one bigger and more beautiful than the last.
“It’s gold!” shouted Cath, beginning to run. “With two massive black wheels!”
“Taller than me. Taller than both of us put together,” Danny tried, stumbling over a tuft of grass.
“Not that tall. Just tall enough for us. And covered in pictures,” said Cath, skipping more nimbly beside him.
“Pictures of the sun!” Danny added.
“And the moon!”
“And planets, and the stars!”
“The stags are in pairs, four pairs, and the front ones are red—”
“The second are black—”
“Then white—”
“Then brown!”
Danny stumbled on another tussock and nearly pitched into a bare strip of dirt. Long and linear, it stretched out before him in a dusty ribbon, marking the way.
“It’s a rut!” he gasped. “A wheel!”
“It’s coming!” yelled Cath. “Run!”
Without letting go of him, she began to sprint alongside the wheel rut, and the distant sound of Zadoc’s drumming hooves swelled up in a rumbling roar of pounding feet against bare earth, all jumbled together over the song of wheels running sweetly along a humming road.
The chariot was next to them before Danny had time to trip up again.
“Grab it!” yelled Cath.
Danny smelled the heat of eight galloping stags. The dust filled his eyes in a second as they rushed past him. They were going straight on, heading for nightfall—he’d never be quick enough to get on, never even manage to touch the gleaming gold of the chariot’s sides—
And then Cath shoved him almost underneath the giant black wheels so he had to put his hand out to save himself, and somehow he was holding on to the side rail of the chariot and hauling himself up onto the running board. First one foot, then the other was standing on the bumping, rackety floor, and Cath was scrambling up beside him, shoving the reins into his hand.
“You do it!” he shouted over the thunder of the stags’ hoofbeats and the rattle of the wheels. “You take them!”
He tried to give the reins to her, but her other hand was around the front rail of the chariot and she wouldn’t let go.
“You do it!” she yelled back at him. “Get some guts, for once!”
Danny balled the reins in his fist, trying to pull back against the massive stags. They were careering madly forward as fast as they liked, spurring one another on to greater speed. He wasn’t controlling them at all.
He had imagined them here, hadn’t he? Couldn’t he just slow them down by imagining it?
With cold horror he remembered Isbjin al-Orr’s words.
The stags, free from any restraining hand, at once doubled their speed. With no charioteer to guide them, they galloped closer and closer to earth, the flames roaring out in their wake, and the mountaintops began to scorch and shrivel as they passed overhead.
And he wasn’t even Phaeton. He wasn’t the son of the Sun God. He was Danny O’Neill, and his dad sold farm machinery, and neither of them had any kind of special powers.
“Steer them!” yelled Cath. “He’s coming!”
Sammael and Zadoc were only yards away, Sammael’s bare feet hanging at Zadoc’s sides. Danny felt the boots twitch around his ankles.
Picking up the reins, he slapped them across the backs of the last pair of stags.
“Go up!” he begged them. “Up! Or down! Or any way! Just faster! Faster!”
The stags leapt up into the sky and Danny felt a huge heat blaze out behind him. It must be the sun! He didn’t turn his head to look. He was driving the sun across the sky—he, Danny, driving the chariot of the sun!
He risked a glance at Cath. She was half smiling, half scowling, but a light reflecting in her eyes told him the truth, that she was as happy as he was, as terrified as he was; that for the first time, they were in this together, blazing the same path through Chromos.
“Did you see it?” he yelled to her. She looked at him, brown eyes shining.
“The sun? It’s behind us!”
“I know! On the back of the chariot!”
“Don’t look! You’ll go blind!”
“So will you!”
She shook her head and smiled, and with surprise he realized he couldn’t remember having seen her really smile at another person before. But then, it probably wasn’t a person she was smiling at now.
“Is he still there?” he yelled.
Cath looked down, leaning out of the chariot as far as she dared, to see what was happening on the plain below. She clung to the rail like a monkey.
Sammael was there, galloping beneath them, his right arm raised as if he were about to release a spear.
“You’ve picked the wrong story!” he called, and the smile on his face was tight. “I know how this one ends, too. Remember?”
And when Cath pulled herself back up, the smile had gone.
“He’s gonna shoot us down,” she said, in a thin, matter-of-fact voice.
“No! We’ll go faster!” Danny slapped the reins against the stags again, but Cath shook her head.
“It’s what happens, ain’t it? In the story. The sun gets hotter and then Phaeton gets shot down by a thunderbolt. Sammael calls the storm.”
“But we’re not Phaeton. We’re us. Danny and Cath. Don’t think about it—it won’t happen! It’s our minds that make this place!”
“We stole his story though. We know it’s what happens.” Cath closed her eyes for a second, but they both saw it before them—the rolling clouds, the dark thunder.
“We should have made our own story,” yelled Danny. “We can still—”
“It’s too late!” Cath smacked her fist on the chariot rail and gestured down at Danny’s feet. “So what are you going to do with them?”
“What?”
“Them boots. What are you going to do with ’em?”
Danny felt a desperate urge to keep the boots. As long as he had them, they could still run. If they were caught, it would be terrible. But as long as they weren’t caught …
“Burn them!” yelled Cath. “Throw them into the sun!”
He turned on her. “No! No way!”
“Fine! Give them back to Sammael then! If you’re too yellow to do what you want, let him do what he wants!”
“No!” Danny gripped the rail, trying to steady himself. What was she saying? She couldn’t mean it.
“Go on, then! Burn ’em! Get on with it!”
He struggled against his own clenched feet. “Would you?” he yelled at Cath. “Would you burn them?”
She shook her head. “I told you,” she said. “We’re different. This is your call. You’ve got ten seconds I reckon.”
Danny tried to see where Sammael was, but when he leaned out of the chariot to look behind, the scorching rays of the sun singed all the hair off the front of his head.
In despair, he pulled his feet out of the scuffed boots, looking at them for the last time. Like Sammael’s old coat, they were as unremarkable as the leftovers from a yard sale. Just a pair of old boots. If he’d gotten them sooner—if he’d had time to find out what new strength they gave to his feet—what could he have done with them?
Nothing, thought Danny hopelessly. I’d have done nothing, like I always do. But that’s going to change now. I’m never going to do nothing again.
And he threw the boots behind him. He didn’t have to throw them carefully, or risk blinding himself by turning to check that they really had been swallowed up by the gigantic fireball of the sun. He knew that nothing else could have ha
ppened to them. Sammael had destroyed so many parts of Danny’s world—his peace, his safety, the happiness of his family—and Danny had got his revenge. An eye for an eye, he thought. A tooth for a tooth. That’s what he’d done.
And then the dark clouds flashed and a great crack of thunder rang out. One of the stags seemed to stumble over the currents of the air and its antler-crowned head crumpled forward, dragging the harness down among the other stags until they were a great kicking mass of legs and antlers and thrashing bodies. They tumbled toward the great plain, the chariot lurching in their wake.
Danny and Cath clung to each other and to the sides of the chariot, pulling themselves against the gold rails, watching the wheels spin like wild tops. There was nothing else to do but cling on, and wait, and hope.
The chariot hit another gust of wind and spun madly until Danny and Cath couldn’t hold on anymore. The front rail tore itself out of their hands and they fell through the air, hanging on to the leather reins and each other, trying desperately to slow themselves, to climb back up, to fly away …
But they knew they were falling, and the floor of Chromos melted into olive-black brine.
CHAPTER 28
A MISTAKE
Sammael pulled Zadoc to a halt. His palm was stinging, but it wasn’t the thunderbolt that had burned a heavy mark in his skin. He hadn’t touched it; it had been summoned up by two other imaginations, not his own.
Perhaps it was his own fury that had burned him, and the stinging sensation was a sharp rush of hatred.
For he hated Danny O’Neill; there were no two ways about it.
It was impossible to believe he’d stolen the boots. And before that, Sammael’s coat. They were two of the most precious items that Sammael possessed, and Danny O’Neill had destroyed both of them. But he would never get his hands on anything else.
Because this was the end for Danny O’Neill. This was the last place he would ever see. As soon as he hit the floor of Chromos, he would be eaten by his worst nightmares. Whatever happened to the shell of his body down on earth, his mind would devour itself and leave nothing but a few trails of dribble soaking across the Chromos plain.
Sammael edged Zadoc closer to the place where the chariot would fall. He wanted to watch Danny O’Neill die. It was a shame about the girl—she had imagination and she was brave, and the world needed more people like her.
But a lot of things were a shame. One more wouldn’t make much difference.
Zadoc’s legs began to shake. Sammael kicked the horse roughly with his heels to keep it still. Stupid animal. Always afraid, looking for a way to flee. Chromos should have had a clever, courageous guide. But then, Chromos was a place to rightly fear. Even Zadoc, once, had been brave and full of heart.
What did it matter now? The stupid animal had been scared for hundreds of years. Just a beach donkey, fit for nothing but the glue factory.
The chariot was almost at the floor now. Another second or two …
Sammael kicked Zadoc on, not looking down at the horse’s feet. He knew this place, every inch of it—it was all too familiar.
The tangle of stags and wheels and harness crashed down before him. Leather straps whipped through the air, curling in high arcs around his shoulders. Hooves flashed past his impassive face.
He waited for everything to dissolve, to leave only two children lying on the plain, sinking into its darkening slime.
The hooves kicked and the legs struggled, and the tangle carried on falling. It should have stopped by now. It should have come to a crashing halt on the floor of Chromos—
A strip of harness snaked out and caught Zadoc’s leg. The horse tried to shake it off.
Another leather strap coiled around Sammael’s ankle, and before he had time to resist, they were pulled down into the tumbling carnage.
With a terrible, piercing agony, Sammael suddenly knew that the swift look he had cast around the ether before he’d stepped into the moon fire had not been long enough. For it had been his final look.
The plain of Chromos had gone dark gray, and he was being pulled through it, without his boots, onto the earth below.
A wide expanse of blue-gray flashed up, chopping at a narrow strip of pale brown—and beyond it, a field, some woods and mountains …
It was that girl. She’d seen something up here, she’d remembered it, and she’d well and truly done for him.
Not entirely perhaps. But well enough for now.
His jaw set in grim satisfaction as he was dragged from Chromos onto the hard, cold ground of the earth.
CHAPTER 29
THE BEACH
The last rays of sun were sinking into a great sheet of sea as Danny pushed his face up from the sand. Cath was a short distance off, already sitting up and looking around her. She was grinning from ear to ear.
“Made it!” she said, dusting off her hands.
Danny thought she was talking about the fact that they’d survived, and then he looked farther on behind her and saw a path over the back of the dunes leading to a tiny cottage with steep mountains rising up behind. Was this where she’d been trying to get to all along?
Well, she was welcome to it. He was going to find Tom and go home—
And then he remembered Tom, and his heart sank into the sand. Sammael had cheated.
“I told you, I never cheat,” said Sammael. But his eyes were on Cath.
She got to her feet and shrugged. “You made them paths.”
“Paths?” Danny looked from one to the other. “What paths?”
“Just paths,” said Sammael. “Gray ones. Rather like the one we just fell through.”
Danny frowned. “There are still holes in Chromos?”
“Oh, only those small ones from the bargains I used to make,” said Sammael.
“We fell through a hole you made?”
“Correction. Your friend dragged me through it,” said Sammael, but there was a note of admiration in his voice. “She took us all through it, in fact. Including Zadoc, which saved you mere mortals from having your brains leak out through your ears. Rather clever, don’t you think? A somewhat unfortunate strength of mind.”
“But then, you—you defeated yourself?”
Sammael stopped looking at Cath and turned his shrewd gaze back to Danny. “One man’s flaw,” he said, “is another man’s beauty spot. Which of us is which in this case, I wonder.”
Danny looked up at him. The tall, thin figure didn’t look quite so threatening down here, standing barefoot in the sand. He held out a bony hand, as if offering to help Danny to his feet. Danny got up by himself.
“We did it then,” he said. “We stopped you.”
“You,” said Sammael thinly, “are the worst example of your species I’ve ever had the misfortune to meet. Look at yourself.”
Danny looked at himself. In his mind’s eye he flew around his body and took a good summary of what he saw. Okay, he hadn’t exactly embraced his fears, but he’d gotten the better of Sammael, hadn’t he? He looked Sammael squarely in the face.
“So what?” he said, feeling his cheeks burn red. “I still beat you.”
Sammael laughed. “Lost anything along the way?” he asked. “Like, I don’t know, a cousin?”
Danny’s jaw and fists clenched tight to themselves.
“You cheated,” he said.
“Not at all.”
Sammael reached over his shoulder, into the collar of his shirt, and yanked out a stringy ball of brown fur and dangling limbs.
Barshin.
He dropped the hare at Danny’s feet. It crouched, looking out toward the sea, avoiding Danny’s eyes.
Cath, treading silently, came to stand beside him. Danny didn’t dare look at her.
“Hey, Barshin,” she said. But she didn’t follow it up with, “How did you get here?”
Danny pulled the crumpled page of Tom’s book from his pocket. The last page. He smoothed it out and read it. What had Tom said? I’ve only got one more page to go.
&
nbsp; On one side, the page was headed “Hares.” And on the other—
Blank.
“You killed him,” Danny said to Barshin. The words seemed impossible.
Barshin turned his black eyes up to Danny for one inscrutable second, and then looked back at the sea.
Danny tried again. “You talked to him when we got picked up by the wind. Hares were the last thing he had to learn.”
The hare didn’t answer.
“So all along you weren’t trying to save Tom?” asked Cath in a slow voice. “You just wanted—”
“To get Danny into Chromos for me,” said Sammael. “Correct. He was acting on my orders. I knew if I could only get that sniveling boy onto Zadoc’s back and into Chromos alone, he’d be sure to oblige me by imagining up a whole army of terrifying things to kill himself. You know, I’m quite keen on Danny dying a miserable death. I’m sure you’re aware by now that he has stolen three things from me, none of which I can get back.”
“Three?”
“A dog. A coat. And a taro, in the form of a small stick. Oh, and apparently a fourth thing now. My boots. A bit greedy, when you think about it. More than one small human really needs.”
“But if he was working for you … all that stuff about telas … Is it all crap, then?”
Barshin held his head high. “You can talk to me,” he said. “That’s not a lie.”
“But I can’t talk to other hares?”
“Not unless they’ve gained the ability to speak to you from me,” cut in Sammael. “It’s always illuminating when the ones we trust most turn out to be traitors, isn’t it?”
Cath didn’t look at him. She was still staring at Barshin as though she were having difficulty distinguishing his brown coat from the coffee-colored sand.
“I don’t get it,” she said. “Why’d you need to get me involved?”
“Danny wouldn’t listen to me on my own,” said Barshin. “And we knew that he’d never be able to get into Chromos if he didn’t really want to either. So we decided to use you to draw him in. We tried showing you how good Chromos could be so that you might persuade him. And you did help him find enough strength to get into Chromos in the end.”
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