by Dave Butler
“But the rods aren’t moving,” Charlie said.
She shook her head. “They don’t move. It ain’t that kind of machine, a vimāna. In fact, I ain’t sure she’s quite a machine at all.”
“What does that mean?”
A nāga that had slipped past Ollie sprang up out of the water, leaping toward Bob—
Gnat sprang into the air to intercept it, stabbing the creature with her ivory weapon and falling with it into the water.
“She’s got a mind, Charlie. I don’t think the vimāna is a machine; I think she’s a creature. Pushpaka is a spirit, or a demon, or a god, an’ when I ’old these rods, I can talk to ’er. She doesn’t want to fly—says she’s too old, it’s been too long—but I reckon she’s about to come around. It ain’t that easy, though; there’s still the facts of aeronautics, wind an’ gravity an’ so on, an’ she needs guiding.”
“You’re talking to her?” Charlie asked.
“Mostly I’m listening.” Bob grinned. “Pushpaka is lonely. Also, she’s pretty angry with the blighters ’oo crashed ’er ’ere in the first place. Some chap called Ravana, an’ ’is pilot.”
Charlie was so astonished, he found he had nothing to say.
Bob leaned forward, without releasing the knobs. “Just between you an’ me, Charlie, I think she likes the fact that I’m a girl.”
“So do I,” Charlie said. “And you know who else does?”
A dead sea snake floated to the surface of the water, and then Gnat climbed out.
“ ’Oo?”
“Ollie,” Charlie said. “I’m pretty sure Ollie kept your secret, just like you kept his. Only he kept it so well, he didn’t even tell you that he knew. And I think he did that because he knew you wanted to keep your secret from him.”
“Yeah.” Bob sniffed, but she nodded, and a hint of pride crept into her face. “Yeah, I reckon you’re right.”
“We’ll go help Ollie,” Gnat said. “You fly this demon.”
Gnat gulped air again, and she and Charlie both exited the bell.
Ollie continued to fight, but the nāgas closed in—until, with a sudden lurch, the vimāna rose.
The nāgas froze and were almost instantly left behind. The last Charlie saw of them, their faces bore expressions of gratitude, and then heads and upper bodies disappeared, and sea snakes scooted away.
“Hold on!” he shouted to his friends, voice muffled by the water, as he grabbed Gnat and clung to one of the swan’s tails. Thomas anchored himself to another swan, and Ollie slipped into snake form and wrapped himself around Thomas’s neck.
The vimāna shot straight up.
CRASH!
Bricks smashed into Charlie as the Pushpaka vimāna battered its way through the lowest, tightest levels of the stepwell. He hunched over Gnat, shielding her with his body, and grunted in pain as the masonry struck him in the head and chest.
The diving bell protected Bob.
Then the bricks were gone, and the water was a muddy fog.
Then the water was gone, and Charlie was shooting straight up into the monsoon on top of Pushpaka.
Over the pouring rain, he heard a mass shout of astonishment.
Then a loud groan of iron, and the diving bell was suddenly ripped away. Bob crouched with a mad gleam in her eyes, clinging to the two control spheres.
“Charlie!” she shouted. “Get off! Pushpaka ain’t used to flying, an’ this wind is too strong for ’er!”
Charlie and Thomas both obeyed. They ran down the levels of the vimāna, leaping from walkway to walkway until they reached the bottom. As the vessel shook and swayed back and forth, they hurled Gnat and Ollie (still in snake form) into the water of the stepwell.
Then they dropped.
Charlie hit the gravel around the stepwell hard, and bounced. After landing facedown in a puddle, he immediately flipped himself over to look for signs of Bob.
He raised his face just in time to see the Pushpaka vimāna framed against the dark monsoon clouds and glowing with a golden light. And then the storm snatched it away, and Bob and Lord Ravana’s demon chariot both disappeared.
“The rajah! Rajah Singh!” Charlie heard.
He staggered to his feet. Whatever the nāga had done to his chest, it had aggravated Charlie’s limp. He followed the crowd to the stepwell and stopped at the edge.
The lower parts of the well were completely destroyed. The stairs and porticoes and walkways of the upper part were cluttered with the rubble the vimāna had generated as it smashed its way out.
Jan Wijmoor stood at the edge of the destruction and stared at the rubble, a look of dismay on his face.
The crowd of people—no, the three separate crowds of people—who had been standing around the stepwell’s pumps to collect water now streamed down into the stepwell. Whatever the divisions had been among them, they were now forgotten as the rajah’s subjects linked arms to create a long human chain that anchored itself to one of the top-level swans and descended all the way to the water, down the last shaky, disintegrating steps, to extend to the rajah, who, still in his long yellow coat, thrashed in the brown mud.
Not far from him, Charlie saw the diving bell. It lay on its side atop a pile of the chain that had lowered it into the water, and the giant spool around which the chain wound, and the crank that moved the spool.
Bamf!
Ollie stood beside Charlie at the lip of the stepwell, staring at the sky. Gnat trudged up the steps behind him.
“Bob?” Ollie’s face was twisted, and he shook.
“She…she’ll be back,” Charlie said.
Ollie stared at him. “Will she? How do you know?”
“Because she’s Heaven-Bound Bob.” Charlie wished he felt as certain as he sounded. “And, Ollie…she wasn’t taken by some monster; she was flying an airship.”
“Biggest bloody airship I ever saw.” Ollie still trembled, but he nodded and grinned. “Big as a museum. Big as a village. I only wish those royal aeronaut toffs she always wanted to impress had seen her.”
Down in the stepwell, the rajah’s people had managed to grab his coat and were pulling him to safety.
“She’ll be back,” Charlie repeated. “How did you get down into the well, by the way? And how did you stay down there so long without air?”
Ollie shrugged, and something like a smile crept into the corner of his mouth. “I’m a wizard, ain’t I?”
Charlie stared.
“All right, then, mate. I borrowed—that is to say, I stole—swords from two of the rajah’s men. Then I turned into a snake and slithered down the air tube into the diving bell. Got there just in time, because some of those beasties were about to jump Bob. I reckoned my only chance was to keep them off guard by changing into and out of snake form. I discovered that when I did that, I kept finding air.”
“In the same pocket where you kept the Almanack,” Charlie said. “And me.”
“Same place,” Ollie agreed. “Also, the fact that I was a snake, of all things, seemed to impress the monsters.”
Charlie whistled to show that he was impressed.
“Too right,” Ollie said. “Show me the loup-garou who can do half of that, mate. I ain’t French.”
Once he was certain that the rajah’s people had extracted their prince from the well, Charlie gathered his friends around the pump. The bodyguard captain joined them and provided white cotton towels.
As wet as they were, Charlie expected to see everyone shivering. But it was a hot rain, and a warm wind that blew it sideways under the pavilion, so instead of huddling against the cold, his friends wiped off rain and sweat as they talked.
“You’ve all come with us on a long road,” Charlie said. “And I think this is where it ends for the rest of you.”
“No way, mate,” Ollie said. “To borrow a phrase from
my friend Bob: the ’eck. I ain’t stopping here.”
“Nobody is,” Gnat agreed. “Besides, what do you imagine I’ll do here, wingless and alone? And I’ve a third mighty deed to perform.” She grinned recklessly. “I expect my best chance of meeting fearsome monsters is to stick with you lads.”
“We have to go to Russia now,” Charlie said. “That’s where Brunel said he and Thomas were going. I don’t even know how we’re going to get there, unless Bob shows up again with the Pushpaka chariot. I guess we’ll walk.” As he spoke, though, another possibility occurred to him.
“Where in Russia?” Gnat asked.
“Thomas knows.” Charlie turned to his brother.
“No, I don’t.” Thomas looked at his feet.
Charlie was stunned. “What? But…”
Thomas shrugged. “I don’t know. I tried to tell you: I know the magic, but I don’t have all the pieces.”
“I thought you meant you didn’t have the nails,” Charlie said. “But we have the nails now.”
“I don’t know where the pit is.” Thomas shrugged again, and he looked tiny.
Charlie turned to Ollie. “What about the Almanack?” he suggested.
“I haven’t seen it, mate, and I read the article on Napoleon and the Romanovs. I can look more, but…” Ollie raised his hands to show he was helpless. “It might not be in there.”
Charlie shook his head slowly. “Russia’s a long way away. I guess we can just go in that direction, and try to find someone who knows where it is when we get there.”
“Russia’s also very big,” Ollie pointed out.
Jan Wijmoor made the noisiest sigh Charlie had ever heard, an exhalation so large it nearly knocked the kobold over. “I know where the pit is.”
“You?” Charlie and Thomas spoke together; Charlie felt as surprised as Thomas sounded.
“But this is not an easy thing for me to tell,” the kobold said. He pointed a finger at the pavilion overhead. “Nondisclosure, you know!”
“I don’t know,” Charlie said, “but I’ve heard that from you before.”
The corners of Wijmoor’s mouth tugged down. “I am not permitted to share the secrets of the Syndikat. But even more than that, I am not permitted to share the secrets of my folk.”
“You’re short, and you break stuff,” Ollie muttered. “What’s to share?”
“Shh,” Charlie hushed his friend. “Go on,” he said to the kobold.
“Some of us have a great gift for stopping and wrecking machines,” Wijmoor said. “Many more of us have a gift for making them.”
“Or for both,” Charlie said. “Like Heinrich Zahnkrieger. He worked with my father to make things in the shop, and he did it very well. But it turned out he was also a redcap, a wizard with the special gift of making machines malfunction.”
Wijmoor nodded. “And to be a redcap is seen among my folk as an illness, or a curse. A redcap is exiled by any right-thinking cooperative, and not spoken of afterward. But my folk’s gift was not always with machines at all. Once, we had a great gift for working with animals.”
Ollie wrinkled his nose in surprise.
“You understand, I am violating my duty of Nondisclosure in telling you this.”
“You keep talking, mate, or I might have to violate my duty of not punching you in the face.” Ollie shook a clenched fist.
“Relax, Ollie.” Charlie put an arm around his friend’s shoulder, which was hard, because Ollie was taller than him, but he could stand on tiptoes and just make it. “I miss Bob too. She’ll be fine.”
Ollie sobbed once and stepped away from the circle.
Wijmoor nodded heavily. “We were the world’s greatest muleteers, and equerries, and mahouts. We handled beasts.”
“It is true.” The captain nodded. “The old stories tell that it was the little people of the woods and rivers who guided all our elephants. But it has not been so since my grandfather’s time.”
“Since 1812, to be precise,” Wijmoor said. “When my people managed the carts and wagons for the greatest invading army the world has ever known, the Grande Armée of Napoleon, and helped him attack Russia.”
“This is starting to make sense,” Charlie said. “I remember reading in the Almanack that the last tsars summoned a demon from some pit when Napoleon attacked Moscow. So some of your folk were present when the Romanovs’ demonologists freed the demon, or the spirit or whatever, that lived in the pit.”
“We were there,” Wijmoor said. “And in its emergence, the demon changed us. We lost our gift with animals, and so Napoleon’s retreat was a rout. The mules wouldn’t cooperate; what horses were left pulled up their pickets and bolted; the goats would no longer give milk. We thought our gift had been stripped from us as punishment.”
“Was that not it?” Charlie asked.
“Who can say?” Wijmoor rubbed his hands together. “But as steam trains, and telegraphs, and airships have exploded into use over the last century…we have learned that we have a new gift. We are gifted with the things of the new world, their use and also their obstruction. Did a demon force a bargain on us? Did the demon’s emergence simply overwhelm our talent and impress us with a new power?”
“Or did you make a willing bargain with the demon?” Ollie suggested.
Wijmoor shrugged. “Who can say?”
“Were you all standing in the pit when the demon was summoned, then?” Gnat asked.
Wijmoor shook his head. “Only a few of us. But the underlying rule of magic, its single most basic principle, is that all things are connected. What affected those few gnomes in witness affected us all.”
And if Charlie and Thomas rebottled the demon, what would happen? Charlie looked at his brother, and the look of worry on the other boy’s face told him that Thomas was having the same thought. Charlie and Thomas themselves might cease to function. And would all kobolds lose their gift, and become nothing more than short humans?
And what about the pumps that brought water to the rajah’s people, and his plans for pipes to bring the water directly to their homes? How much of that would go away?
And the tractors he liked so much?
And the library in Marburg, and all the marvelous knowledge it contained? It had been burned, but if the technology was possible, couldn’t it be rebuilt?
“I know this is all very sensitive,” he said to the kobold. “Thank you for telling us.”
“And I know where the pit is,” Wijmoor said. “We all do.”
“What, like an inborn memory?” Ollie returned to the group, sniffing slightly and red around the eyes.
Wijmoor shook his head. “No. It’s an important part of our story, and our managers tell it to us over and over, from a very early age. It’s in Moscow. The pit is in one of the longest-occupied places in Moscow, one of the city’s oldest buildings. It’s in the deepest cellar beneath the palace called the Kremlin.”
Thomas’s face brightened, but then fell again. “Well, that tells us where to go, to put an end to this. But it’s still a long way away.”
“I have an idea,” Charlie said. “The Path of Root and Twig.”
“The what?” Ollie asked. “Do you mean that elf road you took in Wales? I don’t see how that can help you here.”
“Charlie’s right,” Gnat said. “If he can find alfar, they can put him on the Path. The Path is everywhere, at the same time that it’s nowhere. At least, it’s everywhere where there are trees.”
“The Kremlin’s a palace,” Ollie said. “It’s got to have trees. Every palace I ever saw had a garden.”
“How do we travel on the Path, though?” Charlie thought out loud, looking at the elephants huddling under the pavilion to shelter from the rain. “I was thinking we could ride elephants, but Moscow’s cold, isn’t it? It seems like it would be cruel to take an elephant there and
possibly have to leave it.”
“We can’t just walk?” Jan Wijmoor asked.
“I don’t think so,” Charlie said. “Plants on the Path sort of…tear at you. The donkeys didn’t like it very much, and I think it might hurt. I think we need something like a cart.”
“I’ll get you a cart,” the captain said, stroking his mustache.
Thomas clapped Charlie on the back. “And you and I can be the donkeys!”
Charlie laughed, thinking of his friend Syzigon, and how the dwarf had called Charlie Donkey when they’d first met. “Perfect!” He turned to the captain. “And one more thing. Can you tell me where to find standing stones? You know, like menhirs, or some other kind of megalith? Preferably surrounded by trees…”
The standing stones were different from the ones Charlie had seen in England. Each was only about his height, a solitary column of black slate. He counted forty-one of them, in a circle large enough to accommodate all thirteen of the rajah’s elephants, had he wanted.
Instead the rajah’s elephants had stayed away, out of sight on the other side of a low rise. Charlie wasn’t sure, but his sense was that the alfar, who lived in forests and seemed almost like trees themselves, valued their privacy and would prefer that the smallest number of people possible see them. Only the rajah and his captain—at the rajah’s request—had followed Charlie to the edge of the circle. They each held an umbrella, though the rajah was so wet from having fallen into the stepwell that his scarcely mattered.
At the last minute, Charlie hesitated. “Does anyone else want to do this? Does anyone have experience with the alfar, or knowledge of them?”
“Mate, are you joking?” Ollie asked. “I’m from London.”
“Aye, my folk are also urban,” Gnat said.
The kobold only shrugged.
Rajah Singh shook his head. “My people know them as yakshas, but we have no ordinary commerce with them. When we see them, as we occasionally do, we regard it as a good omen for the next growing season.”
It was up to Charlie, then. “Does anyone have a good gift?” he asked. “Something that a tree might like?”