“It’s true,” said Oona. She smiled, but she was still sad. Perhaps she missed her father. “We were in league. That, of course, was how I was able to rescue Jack and come and go from Countess Flana’s apartments.”
“Why was Flana involved with Klosterheim and the others?”
“In her case, a certain ambition to be queen, but mainly nothing more than boredom. She found solace in intrigue, since she never found it in human company. She paid a high price for her distractions. Don’t grieve for her, young lady. She’d never known love and had seen twelve husbands come and go. Some of them went painfully and reluctantly. She would never have known what love was, I’m sure.” Oona looked up, shrugging. “She might well have welcomed her death as another adventure.”
It sounded a bit morbid to me. I had liked poor Countess Flana in spite of her part in my imprisonment.
From out of the shadows came a familiar and welcome figure. Lord Renyard looked flustered but highly delighted. His dandy pole clutched under one arm, he put his paws around me in an awkward, strong, and entirely affectionate embrace. His expression changed, however, as he addressed the others. His tone became urgent.
“We must leave here,” he said. “We have only a few hours at best.”
“But Londra’s defeated,” I said. “Isn’t it?”
Lord Renyard shook his shaggy head. “Far from defeated. The diversion we created here allowed Londra’s troops to remarshal against their enemy. Seeking you proved a useful distraction, which is another reason I didn’t want you to be found. The death of this lot and of King Huon allowed the soldiers to rally under fresh leadership. Lobkowitz and Fromental are gone, vanished from a world they helped create. We can only hope they’re safe. Hawkmoon’s dead, and his dimension-shifting crystal lost. A badly wounded Count Brass has fallen back across the Silver Bridge.
“The Dark Empire controls the city again and will defeat us if we cannot give the Balance time to restore itself. Huon may be dead, but Meliadus has merely disappeared. Some believe he’ll return and make himself king. Count Brass is content to leave the Empire confined within her island home and reach an armistice. Like most old soldiers, he wants as little bloodshed as possible. He was always given to seeing the Empire as a bringer of order and justice to disparate nations.”
“But that’s a mistake,” I said.
“That’s what Colonel Bastable thinks,” declared Lord Renyard with a frown.
“He still means to bomb the city?” St. Odhran demanded urgently.
“I believe so, sir. That’s why he let me and the Kakatanawa off the ship. So we could tell you and help you get away if necessary. A mighty infernal machine, I gather.”
“Oh, mighty indeed,” said Oona, suddenly alert again. “He’s going to drop an atom bomb on Londra.”
“There has to be a way of stopping him,” I said reasonably as my mind reeled. Sorcery and atom bombs? How were they able to accept all this at the same time? “Can’t you get an ornithopter up there to signal to Colonel Bastable?”
“It would take too long,” said Oona. “Besides, they’ll be at a far greater altitude than any ornithopter could reach.” She frowned. “That’s what he was building in Mirenburg. In case our other plans failed. As Count Brass retreats, he believes we face defeat. We can’t contact that airship …”
“The HMAS Victoria,” said St. Odhran softly to himself, and shook his head.
“A nuclear blast will stop them forever,” I murmured, overawed.
“I doubt it,” said St. Odhran, “but by Bastable’s logic it will give Europa time to recover thoroughly and ensure the Dark Empire does not threaten others for many centuries to come. You’ll recall what brought about the Tragic Millennium? And it was after that the Empire emerged …”
“Come, my dear friends. Colonel Bastable was adamant. We have to leave at once.” Lord Renyard’s yap was shrill with anxiety. “He insists we couldn’t possibly survive such a blast. If nothing else happened to us, the river would flood in and drown us. Hurry, my friends. Hurry!”
“What about the Balance?” I asked. “Who’s going to look after it?”
“The Balance has gathered all its elements together,” said Oona. “And they are, anyway, primarily symbolic. The blast will only facilitate its restorative powers. He’s right, young lady; we’d better get moving.”
“But it hasn’t got all its elements,” I pointed out. “They never had the right twins, and there’s still the Runestaff! Am I the only one to see that? What about our blood? Taragorm and Bous-Junge would have won if they’d had everything properly sorted.”
“I doubt that, dear.” Oona sighed and reached out her hand to me. “The Runestaff doesn’t exist, you see. It’s a myth, that’s all. A myth common to many of the worlds where the Dark Empire has had an influence. Just another image and a word to describe the Grail, which takes many forms. We were hoping to delay them a little further by letting them think they needed it, but my guess is, they knew instinctively they could go ahead without it.” She smiled at me. “You were in even greater danger than you ever knew! Most of us were.”
“Look,” murmured St. Odhran. “Will you look?”
There, growing before our eyes, hung the Cosmic Balance, the sword embedded in the great emerald, the cups suspended from the sword’s wide crosspieces, an aura of pale blue-green fire flickering around it. A sight so profound, so awesome, I almost felt I should kneel in front of it, the way you do in a church.
Oona interrupted this reverie. “Quickly,” she said, “I promise you the Balance is now beyond harm. We have done our work. Come.”
Then, with Jack’s help, Oona led us back the way she and Elric had come: a series of winding tunnels, below Londra. But we didn’t go back into Londra. Eventually we entered another system of caverns, untouched by the artistry of the Dark Empire, where the walls were entirely illuminated by moss and slender streams of phosphorescent water running between high banks. Jack had an instinct for the best places to ford, listening carefully and then leading us forward. Patches of pastel moss glowed here and there in the distant roof, giving the impression of ancient stars.
Soon we had left that awful amphitheater far, far behind. I, for one, was relieved it was going to be destroyed.
“This is beginning to look familiar,” I said as we stopped to rest and eat. Oona nodded. “You have been in Mu-Ooria before, haven’t you? We’ve reached the borders of their land. They are not the only folk who live underground, but for the most part they exist in peace with the other inhabitants. Peace, they find, ensures their longevity. Generally speaking, it seems fair to argue that those who live by the sword generally do die by it as well.” And she sighed. She seemed to be recollecting her earlier sorrow.
Lord Renyard hadn’t noticed any change in her expression. He came and stood beside us, looking out over the eerie planes of that extraordinarily beautiful nightscape. “I will lead you from here,” he said. He pointed with his pole. “That way lies Mirenburg, drowned beneath a lake of mercury, where once I studied the French.” He pointed in another direction. “There lies the road I took when I was a cub, seeking a route to Paris, where I might discourse with my heroes. And this way”—again he pointed in a new direction—“lies Ingleton.”
So I was going home. At last! I could hardly believe it. In fact I would not completely believe it for a while!
As I babbled my thanks to Lord Renyard and to Jack, Anayanka, one of the Kakatanawa, stepped forward and spoke to Oona. It was clear they had decided to leave us. “They know the way home from here,” she told us. After a dignified and affectionate leave-taking, they made their way across a glowing field of moss and disappeared into darkness.
A little later we saw a herd of white buffalo being stalked by a pack of equally white panthers. I thought I caught Oona casting a wistful glance towards the panthers. What had happened to her own companion? Had she been left behind? I asked.
“No.” Oona smiled. “She’s perfectly safe.”
A spear of rock detached itself from overhead and, whistling like a shell, landed ahead of us. More rock crashed from the impact. We dived for any cover we could find. Another huge fragment fell, and another, but none too close to us. I was relieved when at long last the shaking stopped.
“Bloody hell,” said Jack. “What was that?”
“Bastable’s bomb.” Oona paused. “So he’s done it at last! Targeted the seat of the Empire and blown it to bits. Whether he survived or not, I guess we’ll find out later.”
“How do you mean? Wouldn’t a blast like that just wipe an airship out?” said Jack.
“Not if it’s Bastable’s,” she replied mysteriously. “He has a habit of being blown sideways, away from the result of his actions.”
This made St. Odhran smile, but it only baffled me and Jack.
“This isn’t the first time he’s done something like this,” said the Scottish aeronaut.
Lord Renyard still wanted us to hurry. We stopped and rested several more times, and although I tried to count the number of days likely to be passing in my own world, I lost track somewhere.
Eventually Jack lifted his head, hearing something the rest of us did not, and pointed. Shortly afterwards we came again in sight of that gloriously ethereal city of the Mu-Oorians, its pale, spiked towers rising into the cavernous gloom. Here we were greeted as long-lost friends and treated to the best which that strange people could offer us, including their scholarly conversation. We described our adventures, much to their awed approval. And then Lord Renyard announced his intention to spend the rest of his days among this gentle people. “I pray you will not think me ungrateful for all the offers you have made. But it would be best, I feel, if I remained with folk who see me not as an exotic sport of nature, but rather merely the last of his race.”
The Off-Moo became agitated by the tale of the airship bombardment of Londra but accepted that an unspeakable evil had been forestalled. How strange, they said, that so much energy was wasted on negotiating war, when peace could be negotiated with exactly the same amount of effort and to far more profitable ends. They mourned all Londra’s innocents.
Invigorated by their integrity, we took our leave of the Off-Moo. We all found their world attractive. It offered a kind of tranquility without loss of intellectual stimuli, a tranquility which could not be reproduced elsewhere. Lord Renyard was happy to be with these old friends, he assured us. He promised to lead us to the surface and then would return to their city after he had delivered us safely aboveground.
In our final journey we crossed underground hills and valleys washed by that peculiar silvery light. Sometimes, in the distance, we saw herds of animals, pale descendants of creatures which had once roamed the surface of the world.
Less than a day later Jack lifted his head and pointed, sniffing the air, and we began the steep upward trudge to the surface. I had hoped we might emerge just above Tower House on Ingleton Common, where I had first fallen into the World Below, but that route was closed to us. Any caves which had temporarily opened up were filled in again. We finally squeezed into one of the old mine shafts and crawled out through abandoned workings that the quarry blasting had closed off as dangerous. We eventually got to the surface, emerging into one of Mr. Capstick’s fields, to the irritated surprise of his sheep. I forgot my own happiness when I looked at Jack’s face. I never knew anyone who showed his joy so obviously. He took a deep breath of that good dales air. “Are we home?” he asked.
I was blinking back my own tears. “It certainly looks like it,” I said.
Then Lord Renyard and I parted. I didn’t want him to go. He was just as upset. He gave me a lot of advice, most of it to do with reading Rousseau and the Encyclopedists, and then he was gone, loping back into the darkness of the Middle March to continue his lonely life among a people even stranger than himself. I was never to see him again.
We walked into a perfect dales morning, bright, crisp and clear. It was good to get some healthy northern air into my lungs.
“Come along,” said my grandmother briskly, stripping off her weapons and bits of her costume so she looked as if she were wearing a fancy tracksuit, “let’s get down there, then. Your parents will be wanting to see you.”
A mile or so down the hill we soon spotted the grey granite tower of our house, where Mum and Dad were waiting for us with some very bad news.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
MY GRANDFATHER HAD died the night before. He had waited in London to see if there was anything he could do to help, my parents said, but they thought the anxiety had been just too much for his heart. Strangely, when they found him, he had seemed very much at peace and had written, perhaps to cheer himself up, a note on his scratch pad. “She’s safe.” Nobody was entirely sure who “she” was. He’d lived a fine life to a good age.
My grandmother, of course, took the train to town at once. She was very sad but soldiered on and made all the funeral arrangements herself. It was amazing how many people came to old Count Ulric’s memorial service. The funeral picture appeared in most of the papers, and they had it on TV. Grandma didn’t come back to Yorkshire. She had some family business to sort out in Mirenburg. She said we weren’t to worry if we didn’t hear from her for a while.
Jack D’Acre was living with us. Oona had asked my mum and dad to make him part of our family. She left it to me to offer them what details seemed relevant, but they were happy to have him. They assumed he was homeless, an orphan, the natural son of some distant relative. He certainly had the family looks, they said. Alfy and Gertie came back with us from London. They got on well with Jack.
Colonel Bastable had missed the funeral. He phoned from London later, then caught the train the following day. Dad picked him up at the station. Bastable’s big Bentley tourer was still parked under canvas on the common. Red-eyed and laconic, he asked if it would be all right if he stayed overnight and then drove out early the next morning, after he’d helped St. Odhran inflate his balloon and get airborne. He needed a break, he said. Mum and Dad fussed over both men while they were at our house. As they understood it, Bastable and St. Odhran had contributed enormously to my rescue when I was lost underground.
My parents were sorry they had missed Monsieur Zodiac, who had an engagement, St. Odhran told them, and sent his apologies. They were glad to hear we wouldn’t be bothered by Klosterheim and Gaynor again. Those two had clearly been dynamiting new routes down below.
Privately, I still missed Lord Renyard, but he had probably been right. My parents, though broad-minded and sophisticated, weren’t ready for a man-size, talking, eighteenth-century-educated fox.
Colonel Bastable had apologized on behalf of Messrs. Lobkowitz and Fromental. He said some important national business had taken them away.
I had one last conversation with St. Odhran. We went for a walk together over the tranquil hills above the house. I wanted to know a bit about the Balance.
“The Balance was destroyed. Both sides wished to restore it for their own reasons,” he told me. He looked down at me. Those eyes, which had managed to deceive me, were now frank, serious.
“Who destroyed it?”
He smiled sardonically and looked away up the fell. “The Champion,” he said.
“And the Champion restored it?”
“It looked that way, didn’t it?”
“Is nothing permanent? Even the Cosmic Balance? I thought it was the ordering mechanism for the multiverse!”
“It’s a symbol,” he said. “A useful one, but a symbol. Sometimes we fight to restore the Balance, sometimes to maintain it, and very occasionally, to destroy it.”
“What point is there in all that? What logic?”
“The logic of context,” he s
aid simply. “Context is all-important. One set of views, one faith, one idea, can be useful and good for us at a certain time. At another, they threaten our destruction. The Eternal Champion fights to maintain equilibrium between Chaos and Order. But his fight is not always a clear one. Not always sympathetic to most of us.”
St. Odhran was graceful as always in his leave-taking. A small crowd of locals and tourists gathered around the balloon. He left as the sun got high, scattering what looked like golden confetti down on the cheering crowd. It turned out to be handfuls of the little fake gold coins they throw over the bride and groom at Egyptian weddings. A few hours later, Colonel Bastable made his excuses. He had another appointment he was bound to keep, he said. He roared off in his Bentley. And then it was just us, the family. I think we were all a little glad to be together again with no one else around.
That next night was Midsummer’s Eve, and St. Odhran had told us to expect a great battle as Law and Chaos fought for the Balance across all the realms of the multiverse.
From our Ingleton tower we watched the War among the Angels, as it was described in our part of the world. All of us were crammed into those few square feet with windows all around, so that we could see inland up Ingleborough and across the rolling hills out to sea at Morecombe Bay. The glaring silver and black sea was lit by the most intense sheet lightning I had ever witnessed in Texas or the tropics. And silhouetted against the lightning (some would later describe them as intense black clouds of unusual shape) were the forms of angels.
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