Modeset fought to control his temper; any sudden outburst would invariably alert the machine operator on the roof.
Remembering the folklore passages in Leaving Legends, Modeset used his shining silver wrist guard to view the Batchtiki. The reflection showed him that there were five of them in the cage; all seemed impatient to escape.
Modeset got to his feet and, heaving Pegrand’s statue onto his back, hurried from the room and slammed the door shut. Outside on the landing, he propped the manservant against the east wall and made for the opposite room, which fortunately turned out to contain a small armory.
FIFTY-THREE
THE SHAPE WAS SO slight that at first Obegarde thought he was seeing things. It started as a small orb, spinning in one corner of the ceiling, just below the first flight of the spiral staircase. Neither Modeset nor Pegrand had noticed it, but Obegarde’s superior vision had picked up the glimmer immediately. Now, somewhat worryingly considering their intended ambush, it was flashing red and green.
Obegarde cursed, and was about to hunt around outside for a suitable stone to throw at it, when the globe suddenly began to grow. Descending as it swelled, the globe re-formed into the features of a sharp and extremely intimidating woman. She was attractive, raven-haired, and emanated a presence quite unlike any Obegarde had encountered before.
He tried to run, but his legs wouldn’t move. He stood rooted to the spot as the facial image shimmered and expanded into an elfin figure, which emerged from the pool of light.
“Modeset!” Obegarde cried, fighting against his own inability to escape the paralysis brought on by the Lark. “Pegrand! Jimmy! Flicka! Anybody! Help me out, here!”
Somehow, the words became muffled as soon as they left his lips. He actually felt the sound reverberate and die before him. The reply, however, was not so impaired.
“The loftwing, I presume. Let us silence you first, shall we?”
The Lark stepped forward, mumbling unrepeatable syllables under her breath, and quite calmly closed a clawlike hand around his neck. She drove her other hand into his chest, and he felt fingernails like sharpened glass pierce his heart.
Obegarde threw punches and kicks that would have devastated a mountain troll, but still the Lark maintained her stranglehold, still she pierced his heart. He staggered backward, feeling the life drain from his body. Finally, in a last-ditch attempt to fight his way out, he tightened his jaw muscles and extended his fangs until they curved in a wide arc. Then he ceased his backward drive and darted forward, biting sharply into the Lark’s exposed neck.
“Ahhhhhh!”
She screamed and stumbled back, but in doing so she closed her fist around the loftwing’s heart. Clutching at the fresh wound in her neck, she yanked her arm from the vampire and fell against the wall.
Obegarde gave one last smile of satisfaction and collapsed in a heap on the floor.
Still grasping the bite on her neck, the Lark pushed herself from the wall. She gave the loftwing an experimental prod with her foot. He was dead.
“Interesting that the city’s resistance should include a vampire,” she said, as if the now silent Obegarde could still hear her. “How … quaint. Oh well, onward and upward.”
She folded her dark cloak about her and promptly vanished in a puff of smoke.
FIFTY-FOUR
ARMED WITH A SHORT bow, two throwing daggers, and Lord Bowlcock’s arm and its trusty saber, Modeset negotiated the rest of the spiral staircase and found himself in a small passage with a ladder leading to a trapdoor in the roof. A repulsively obese man stood on guard duty. At least, he would have been on guard duty had he actually been awake. Heaven only knew how he’d managed to drag that gut up two hundred stairs, Modeset reflected.
He crept over to the man, took a few moments to consider how his ancestors might have tackled the situation, and pummeled him on the head with the hilt of a dagger. Then, groaning with the effort, he dragged the unconscious figure away from the base of the ladder before beginning his ascent.
There were muffled voices coming from the other side of the trapdoor. Raising it a gnat’s wing, Modeset heard snatches of conversation.
“Won’t stay still, mistress!”
“Idiot! Just concentrate, will you?”
“S’not my fault, mistress! The little bugger keeps running between the tubes! Maybe we should fetch the rest of them, and then—”
“Don’t be ridiculous! If you can’t keep one of them in check, how on Illmoor do you envisage handling six?”
“Well, I thought … er … can’t we follow the prophecy with one lizard?”
“No! The machine must be at full strength, and that requires the glare of no less than six!”
“But, mistress, the intruders—”
“Are pathetic incompetents. I can, assure you, Edwy, I’ve dealt with the only one capable of any kind of offense. Now, just do as you’re tol—”
Before the Lark could finish, the trapdoor flew open and Modeset erupted from within. Fueled by an uncharacteristic taste for battle that went far beyond simple heroism, he pitched both daggers at Edwy and let out a scream of victory when one of them caught the Yowler disciple just above the kneecap. Edwy grabbed at his leg, gasped, and fainted.
“You?” cried the Lark. “Modeset, isn’t it? The Great Duke of Rats! Ha-ha-ha-ha!” She took a step back and removed a glass sphere from the sleeve of her robe. Muttering an incantation under her breath, she flung the sphere toward Modeset, her eyes gleaming as it erupted into flame. The duke, still thinking on his feet, used the silver saber to field the sphere right back at her, his fist closed tightly around Bowlcock’s fist on the handle.
The sphere exploded in the Lark’s face with a subdued flare. As she staggered against the far wall, Modeset saw his chance and darted forward.
One thrust with the silver saber shattered the huge glass eye of the lighthouse. It was only as Modeset turned to take out the glare machine that he realized his mistake. The Lark should have been his priority.
Now he found himself face-to-face with the machine.
In the few seconds he’d taken to demolish the glass eye, the Lark had wheeled the machine around to face him. Somewhere in those tubular bowels, the Batchtiki was glaring. Its stare, reflected and magnified through a network of tiny mirrors, fired a ray directly at the duke.
This is it, he thought. I’m absolutely, positively, going to die.
He closed his eyes.
He swallowed.
He held his arms up over his head and crossed them.
Then it happened.
The Batchtiki’s ray hit Modeset’s shiny wrist guard and beamed back directly along its length. When the duke finally did pluck up enough courage to open his eyes, the machine had been turned to stone.
Silence reigned in the little room.
Modeset put a fingertip to his forehead and wiped away a bead of sweat.
“And let that be a lesson to you,” he said, and passed out.
The Lark screamed with fury, levitated off the floor, and flew forward. She had almost reached Modeset’s prone figure when a small fist like bunched metal slammed into her face.
Flicka stood over the duke, fists raised defensively. With the Lark still reeling from her blow, Flicka executed a low kick into the priestess’s stomach and brought up her other knee to finish the job.
The Lark hit the ground, somersaulted backward, and leaped to her feet. Then she spun around with a backhand of her own, and Flicka, caught unawares, tripped on Modeset’s arm. She fell to the floor, gasping as her hand crunched awkwardly beneath her.
“Foolish girl,” spat the Lark, a second fire sphere already in her hands. She took aim, smiled grimly, and released it.
Flicka rolled aside at the last minute, struggling to her feet as the sphere exploded mere inches from the duke’s unconscious form. Then, muttering an incantation under her breath, she raised both palms and sent two miniature bolts of lightning on a zigzag course toward the priestess.
Electricity filled the air and, for the briefest of seconds, it actually looked as if the Lark were in trouble. A wave of her hands quickly dispelled the illusion and she stood firm once again, shaken and bleeding, but still with all her wits about her.
“So … a fledgling sorceress,” she said. “How … endearing. Your vampire offered no challenge; I wonder if you might?”
Without another word, she closed her eyes and levitated off the floor, arms held high and lips mouthing inaudible chants.
Flicka blinked and swallowed. She knew a little magic, enough to keep the witches away from the Fogrise water supply when she was a child, but she’d never read much beyond chapter four of Magellan’s Mastery. This woman, on the other hand, looked as if she might actually know what she was doing.
A large ruby red mist had begun to swirl around the Lark, gathering pace as it developed into a swathe of cloud. The speed of the cloud intensified, swirling faster and faster until the Lark was nothing more than a shadow in the eye of the storm.
The room swam with magic.
The stone machine shattered.
Flicka prayed.
And Duke Modeset, having woken from his slumber, held aloft the silver saber (arm and all) and hurled it with all his might at the center of the cloud. Or else he would have done if his ancestor’s appendage hadn’t chosen that moment to take over.
The dead arm of Lord Bowlcock glowed a ghostly green as it floated on the air, saber raised high. Suddenly, it swung back and released the blade, which traveled at lightning speed across the room, spinning over and over on a fierce and unstoppable course.
There was a moment of silence in which the air tingled so loudly that it set the duke’s teeth on edge.
Then the magic died, instantaneously.
The Lark, blood leaking between her lips, staggered back with the sword protruding from her stomach.
“May the Great Yowler curse you all in your graves,” she said, and died.
Flicka hurried over to the duke and flung her arms around him. Standing there, with his butler’s daughter clinging to him like a limpet, Modeset made a startling realization that this was infinitely more terrifying than the priestess or the narrowly averted destruction of Dullitch.
This, he thought, is the closest I’ve ever got to a real woman. A voice deep within his subconscious added: something you’re definitely going to have to rectify.
Flicka peered up at him through tearful eyes.
“I have something to tell you, Lord M,” she said, sniveling.
“Go on.”
“It’s about Obegarde; I’m afraid he’s dead.”
FIFTY-FIVE
AN INTERESTING SCENE GREETED Modeset and Flicka as they arrived on the landing below, dragging the unconscious form of Edwy after them.
They stopped in their tracks.
Jimmy Quickstint, looking dazed but aware, was standing over the trembling, obese guard that Modeset had encountered previously, the model blunderbuss pointed right at the disciple’s groin.
“This is Moors,” he said. “I think he wants to tell us a story.”
“P-p-please don’t kill me!” the disciple gibbered. “I don’t know how I got involved in all of this! I only wanted to be part of something!”
Modeset glanced at Flicka and then stepped forward. “Do you know how we can repair the damage your lunatic cult has caused?”
Moors shook his head and blubbed. “N-n-no.”
“Then we’re not interested in mercy,” continued the duke. “Jimmy, pull the trigger.”
“No! Please! I’ll tell you how to reverse the work of the glare machine.”
“And return everyone to their flesh state?”
“Yes.”
“How marvelous. And after that?”
Moors looked confused; sweat beaded on his brow. “I don’t follow. … ”
“Oh, you don’t? Jimmy!”
The gravedigger raised the blunderbuss once more.
“Okay, okay … what else do you want?”
“I want to know everything,” he said. “From beginning to end, start to finish, the whole pathetic story. You can begin with the reversal procedure.”
It took a few minutes for Moors to stop sniveling. He plunged a hand into the pockets of the elephantine robe that draped his endless rolls of gut, and produced a small mirror on a chain.
“Mirror,” he said weakly. “If the Batchtiki glares at you in daylight, it turns your flesh to stone. If its glare is reflected back to it, stone becomes flesh. Or so the scripture says.”
“I find that hard to believe; my wrist guard reflected the lizard’s stare directly. How come the lizard didn’t turn to stone?”
“The Batchtiki are a species cursed by the gods. They can’t see themselves. Well-known fact.”
“Is it.”
“Y-yes. We had to reverse a few glares during our testing phase. You just point the lizard away from you, hold a mirror up to it, and aim at whoever you want to be r-refreshed.”
Modeset nodded and grabbed the chain.
“Very well,” he said, turning to Flicka. “Take this and go downstairs to the room with the lizard cage. Change Pegrand back; be careful. When he’s human again, or at least has returned to his usual state of equivalence, perform a similar ritual on the people of Plunge. Make sure they know what happened here, and who is responsible for saving them: namely us.”
Flicka frowned. “You think they’ll be grateful, Lord M?”
“No, but at least we won’t get rocks thrown at us when we try to leave. Oh, and have Obegarde taken to the town chapel. We’ll bury him here in Plunge; after all, he did try to save the place, and I’m sure the people here will show him more respect than any Dullitch citizen could afford.”
Flicka started off down the spiral staircase, followed by Jimmy, who was still wielding the blunderbuss as if he truly believed that a vivid imagination could fire the thing.
“Right,” said Modeset, turning with a snarl on the last remaining disciple. “Do you know what this is?”
He brought the arm round from behind his back and brandished the silver saber.
Moors shook his head; sweat was streaming down his cheeks.
“This,” the duke went on, “spelled oblivion for your friend the Lark. Let us see what it spells for you.”
He lowered the saber and allowed it to nudge the throat of Moors.
“Well?” he prompted. “I think it wants to know everything almost as much as I do. You’re not going to disappoint us both, surely?”
“N-n-no. I’ll talk …”
“Yes, you will. Go on, then!”
“I worked at Counterfeit House. I was lonely: no wife, no kids, and no friends. So I looked around for something to do, some kind of meeting I could go to.”
“A meeting for sad, lonely people?”
“Yes … you must know what I mean. I can smell fellow unfortunates a mile off.”
Modeset tried not to look uncomfortable, and applied the merest fraction of pressure upon the saber.
“Ahhh … all right! So anyway, I found this new group that had started up at the Yowler church. The regular worshippers got together on Friday nights, but I was always working then. The Holy Convocation of Lopsalm met of a Tuesday lunchtime.”
“So you went along?”
Moors nodded. “The Lark was there, and Lopsalm. Mixer, the gnome, joined a few days after me; he was just a cleaner at the church, but they soon had him running round as an assassin. They chose him as the keeper of the great book, then faked a robbery so that the Yowler priests wouldn’t get suspicious when it went missing. It was all the Lark’s doing. She and Lopsalm were always conspiring, whispering to each other about some kind of deal they wouldn’t let the rest of us in on.”
“The rest of you? You and Mixer, you mean.”
Moors wiped a globule of saliva from his fat lips.
“And Edwy,” he blubbed, pointing at the prone figure. “He came last. He was workin’ at the church as a
caretaker, too. He’d overheard one of the meetings. They talked him into becoming number five.”
“I see.”
“And then, one night, they told us.”
Modeset raised an eyebrow. “Told you? Told you what?”
“About the machines; that’s what all the whisperin’ had been about. They’d found this mad inventor who’d been thrown out of the Mechanics’ Society. Somehow, among the three of them, they’d made exact replicas of the machines Doiley used in Leaving Legends, to turn the people of Plunge to stone.”
“And you were shown these machines immediately?”
Moors nodded. “Lopsalm assigned us each a task. I was in charge of the reflecting machine, finding a place to hide it and then keeping it hidden. It wasn’t too difficult; I used to be pretty influential in the guild. Edwy organized the church rota so that no one else found out about our Tuesday meetings. Mixer was supposed to tie up loose ends.”
“Such as?”
“The thief brought the lizards, so he had to go. The Lark had friends at Counterfeit House who sorted out a high-level forgery for her; they had to go. The old inventor … well, you get the picture.”
Modeset lowered the saber slightly. “The inventor was killed too?”
“Oh no,” said Moors, heaving a sigh of relief as the edge of the blade drew away. “Mixer put the frighteners on the old fool, and we never saw him after that.”
“Who came up with the idea in the first place?”
“Lopsalm, but really the Lark triggered it all off. During her time at the palace, Mistress Lauris had studied ancient lore. She discovered the Batchtiki, learned about their natural habitat. She even spent a few weeks in Grinswood checkin’ up to see if the tomes were right. It was Lopsalm who suggested the theft; he’s hated the dukes ever since he was fired from the palace.”
“What? Lopsalm worked for Curfew?”
“No,” said Moors. “For Vitkins. That’s where he met the Lark. Then Lord Vitkins died and you came in, your lordship. They disliked you right enough, but nothing like they hate your cousin. Oh, they despise Mr. Curfew; say he isn’t a patch on either you or your uncle; say he’ll bring the city down.”
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