by Garth Nix
“It must be the…but Dorrance was at least fifteen minutes ahead of the Flyer!”
“You’re involved in one of Mr. Dorrance’s japes, are you?” The inspector smiled. “His train just came in on the old track. Private trains aren’t allowed on the express line. Hey! Sir! Come back!”
Nick ran, vaulting the ticket inspection barrier, the inspector’s shouts ignored behind him. All his resignation burned away in an instant. The creature was here, and he was still the only one who knew about it.
Two policemen belatedly moved to intercept him before the stairs, but they were too slow. Nick jumped up the steps three at a time. He almost fell at the top step, but turned the movement into a flèche, launching himself into a sprint across the bridge.
At the top of the stairs at the other end, he slowed and drew his dagger. Down below, at the side of the road, the tall box was lying on its side, open. One of the two porters was sprawled next to it, his throat ripped out.
There was a row of shops on the other side of the street, all shuttered and dark. The single lamppost was also dark. The moon was lower now, and the shadows deeper. Nick walked down the steps, dagger ready, the Charter Marks swimming on the blade bright enough to shed light. He could hear police whistles behind him and knew that they would be there in moments, but he spared no attention from the street.
Nothing moved there until Nick left the last step. As he trod on the road, the creature suddenly emerged from an alcove between two shops and dropped the second porter at its hoofed feet. Its violet eyes shone with a deep, internal fire now, and its black teeth were rimmed with red flames. It made a sound that was half hiss and half growl and raised its spiked club hands. Nick tensed for its attack and tried to fumble the flower chain off his neck with his left hand.
Then Dorrance peered over the creature’s shoulder and whispered something in its ear slit. The thing blinked, single eyelids sliding across to dim rather than close its burning violet eyes. Then it suddenly jumped more than twenty feet—but away from Nick. Dorrance, clinging to it for dear life, shouted as it sped away.
“Stay back, Sayre! It just wants to go home.”
Nick started to run, but stopped after only a dozen strides, as the creature disappeared into the dark. It had evidently not exhausted all the power it had gained from Nick’s blood, or perhaps simply being closer to the Old Kingdom lent it strength.
Panting, his chest heaving from his exertion, Nick looked back. The two policemen were coming down the stairs, their truncheons in hand. The fact that they were still approaching indicated they had not seen the creature.
Nick sheathed his dagger and held up his hands. The policemen slowed to a walk and approached warily. Then Nick saw a single headlight approaching rapidly toward him. A motorcycle. He stepped out into the street and waved his hands furiously to flag the rider down.
The motorcyclist stopped next to Nick. He was young and sported a small, highly-trimmed mustache that did him no favors.
“What occurs, old man?”
“No…time…to explain,” gasped Nick. “I need your bike. Name’s Sayre. Nicholas.”
“The fast bowler!” exclaimed the rider as he casually stepped off the idling bike, holding it upright for Nick to get on. He was unperturbed by the sight of Nick’s strange attire or the shouts of the policemen, who had started to run again. “I saw you play here last year. Wonderful match! There you are. Bring the old girl back to Wooten, if you don’t mind. St. John Wooten, in Bain.”
“Pleasure!” Nick said as he pushed off and kicked the motorcycle into gear. It rattled away barely ahead of the running policemen, one of whom threw his truncheon, striking Nick a glancing blow on the shoulder.
“Good shot!” cried St. John Wooten, but the policemen were soon left behind as easily as the creature had left Nick.
For a few minutes Nick thought he might catch up with his quarry fairly soon. The motorcycle was new and powerful, a far cry from the school gardener’s old Vernal Victrix he’d learned on back at Somersby. But after almost sliding out on several corners and getting the wobbles at speed, Nick had to acknowledge that his lack of experience was the limiting factor, not the machine’s capacity. He slowed down to a point just slightly beyond his competence, a speed insufficient to do more than afford an occasional glimpse of the creature and Dorrance ahead.
As Nick had expected, they soon left even the outskirts of Bain behind, turning right onto the Bain High Road, heading north. There was very little traffic on the road, and what there was of it was heading the other way. At least until the creature ran past. Those cars or trucks that didn’t run off the road as the driver saw the monster stalled to a stop, their electrical components destroyed by the creature’s passage. Nick, coming up only a minute or so later, never even saw the drivers. As might be expected this far north, they had instantly fled the scene, looking for running water or, at the very least, some friendly walls.
The question of what the creature would do at the first Perimeter checkpoint was easily answered. When Nick saw the warning sign he slowed, not wanting to be shot. But when he idled up to the red-striped barrier, there were four dead soldiers lying in a row, their heads caved in. The creature had killed them without slowing down. None of them had even managed to get a shot off, though the officer had his revolver in his hand. They hadn’t been wearing mail this far south, or the characteristic neck- and nasal-barred helmets of the Perimeter garrison. After all, trouble came from the north. This most southern checkpoint was the relatively friendly face of the Army, there to turn back unauthorized travelers or tourists.
Nick was about to go straight on, but he knew there were more stringent checkpoints ahead, before the Perimeter proper, and the chance of being shot would greatly increase. So he put the motorcycle in neutral, sat it on its stand, and, looking away as much as he could, took the cleanest tunic, which happened to be the officer’s. It had a second lieutenant’s single pip on each cuff. The previous wearer had probably been much the same age as Nick, and moments before must have been proud of his small command, before he lost it, with his life.
Nick figured wearing the khaki coat would at least give him time to explain who he was before he was shot at. He shrugged it on, left it unbuttoned with the flower chain underneath, got back on the motorcycle, and set off once more.
He heard several shots before he arrived at the next check-point, and a brief staccato burst of machinegun fire, followed a few seconds later by a rocket arcing up into the night. It burst into three red parachute flares that slowly drifted north by northwest, propelled by a southerly wind that would usually give comfort to the soldiers of the Perimeter. They would not have been expecting any trouble.
The second checkpoint was a much more serious affair than the first, blocking the road with two heavy chain-link-and-timber gates, built between concrete pillboxes that punctuated the first of the Perimeter’s many defensive lines, a triple depth of concertina wire five coils high that stretched to the east and west as far as the eye could see.
One of the gates had been knocked off its hinges, and there were more bodies on the ground just beyond it. These soldiers had been wearing mail coats and helmets, which hadn’t saved them. More soldiers were running out of the pillboxes, and there were several in firing positions to the side of the road, though they’d stopped shooting because of the risk of hitting their own people farther north.
Nick throttled back and weaved the motorcycle through the slalom course of bodies, debris from the gate, and the live but shaken soldiers who were staring north. He was just about to accelerate away when someone shouted behind him.
“You on the motorcycle! Stop!”
Nick felt an urge to open the throttle and let the motorcycle roar away, but his intelligence overruled his instinct. He stopped and looked back, wincing as the thin sole of his left carpet slipper tore on a piece of broken barbed wire.
The man who had shouted ran up and, greatly surprising Nick, jumped on the pillion seat behind hi
m.
“Get after it!”
Nick only had a moment to gain a snapshot of his unexpected passenger. He was an officer, not visibly armed, wearing formal dress blues with more miniatures of gallantry medals than he should have, since he looked no more than twenty-one. He had the three pips of a captain on his sleeves and, more important, on his shoulders the metal epaulette tags NPRU, for the Northern Perimeter Reconnaissance Unit, or as it was better known, the Crossing Point Scouts.
“I know you, don’t I?” shouted the captain over the noise of the engine and rush of the wind. “You tried out for the Scouts last week?”
“Uh, no,” Nick shouted back. He had just realized that he knew his passenger too. It was Francis Tindall, who had been at Forwin Mill as a lieutenant six months ago. “I’m afraid I’m…well, I’m Nicholas Sayre.”
“Nick Sayre! I bloody hope this isn’t going to be like last time we met!”
“No! But that creature is a Free Magic thing!”
“Got a hostage, too, from the look of it. Skinny old duffer. Pointless carrying him along. We’ll still shoot.”
“He’s an accomplice. It’s already killed a lot of people down south.”
“Don’t worry, we’ll settle its hash,” Tindall shouted confidently. “You don’t happen to know exactly what kind of Free Magic creature it is? Can’t say I’ve ever seen anything like it, but I only got a glimpse. Didn’t expect anything like that to run past the window at a dining-in night at Checkpoint Two.”
“No, but it’s bulletproof and it gets power by drinking the blood of Charter Mages.”
Whatever Tindall said in response was lost in the sound of gunfire up ahead, this time long, repeated bursts of machinegun fire, and Nick saw red tracer bouncing up into the air.
“Slow down!” ordered Tindall. “Those are the enfilading guns at Lizzy and Pearl. They’ll stop firing when the thing hits the gate at Checkpoint One.”
Nick obediently slowed. The road was straight ahead of them, but dark, the moon having sunk farther. The red tracer was the only thing visible, crisscrossing the road four or five hundred yards ahead of them.
Then big guns boomed in unison.
“Star shell,” said Tindall. “Thanks to a southerly wind.”
A second after he spoke, four small suns burst high above, and everything became stark black and white, either harshly lit or in blackest shadow.
In the light, Nick saw another deep defensive line of high concertina wire, and another set of gates. He also saw the creature slow not at all, but simply jump up and over thirty feet of wire, smashing its way past the two or three fast but foolish soldiers who tried to stick a bayonet in it as it hit the ground running.
Dorrance was no longer on its back.
Nick saw him a moment later, lying in the middle of the road. Braking hard, he lost control of the bike at the last moment, and it flipped up and out, throwing both him and Tindall onto the road, but fortunately not at any speed.
Nick lay there for a moment, the breath knocked out of him by the impact. After a minute, he slowly got to his feet. Captain Tindall was already standing, but only on one foot.
“Busted ankle,” he said as he hopped over to Dorrance.
“Why, it’s that idiot jester Dorrance! What on earth would someone like him be doing with that creature?”
“Serving Her,” whispered Dorrance, his voice startling both Tindall and Nick. The older man had been shot several times and looked dead, his chest black and sodden with blood. But he opened his eyes and looked directly at Nick, though he clearly saw something or someone else. “I knew Her as a child, in my dreams, never knowing She was real. Then Malthan came, and I saw Her picture, and I remembered Father sending Her away. He was mad, you know. Lackridge found Her for me again. It was as I remembered, Her voice in my head…. She only wanted to go home. I had to help Her. I had to…”
His voice trailed away and his eyes lost their focus. Dorrance would play the fool no more in Corvere.
“If it wants to go north, I suppose we could do worse than just let it go across the Wall,” said Tindall. He waved at someone at the checkpoint and made a signal, crossing his arms twice. “If it can, of course. We can send a pigeon to the Guards at Barhedrin, leave it to them to sort out.”
“No, I can’t do that,” said Nick. “I…I’m already responsible for loosing the Destroyer upon them, and I did nothing to help fight it. Now I’ve done it again. That creature would not be free if it weren’t for me. I can’t just leave it to Lirael, I mean the Abhorsen…or whoever.”
“Some things are best left to those who can deal with them,” said Tindall. “I’ve never seen a Free Magic creature move like that. Let it go.”
“No,” said Nick. He started walking up the road. Tindall swore and started hopping after him.
“What are you going to do? You have the Mark, I know, but are you a Mage?”
Nick shook his head and started to run. A sergeant and two stretcher bearers were coming through the gate, while many more soldiers ran purposefully behind them. With star shell continuing to be fired overhead, Nick could clearly see beyond the gates to a parade ground, with a viewing tower or inspection platform next to it, and beyond that a collection of low huts and bunkers and the communications trenches that zigzagged north.
“The word for the day is Collection and the countersign is Treble,” shouted Tindall. “Good luck!”
Nick waved his thanks and concentrated on ignoring the pain in his feet. Both his slippers were ripped to pieces, barely more than shreds of cloth holding on at the heels and toes.
The sergeant saluted as he went past, and the stretcher bearers ignored him, but the two soldiers at the gate aimed their rifles at him and demanded the password. Nick gave it, silently thanking Tindall, and they let him through.
“Lieutenant! Report!” shouted a major Nick almost ran into as he entered the communications trench on the northern side of the parade ground. But he ignored the instruction, dodging past the officer. A few steps farther on, he felt something warm strike his back, and his arms and hands suddenly shone with golden Charter Magic fire. It didn’t harm him at all, but actually made him feel better and helped him recover his breath. He ran on, oblivious to the shocked Charter Mage behind him, who had struck him with his strongest spell of binding and immobility.
Soldiers stood aside as he ran past, the Charter Magic glow alerting them to his coming. Some cheered in his wake, for they had seen the creature leap over them, and they feared that it might return before a Scout came to deal with it, as they dealt with so many of the strange things that came from the north.
At the forward trench, Nick found himself suddenly among a whole company of garrison infantry. All one hundred and twenty of them clustered close together in less than sixty yards of straight trench, all standing to on the firing step, looking to the front. The wind was still from the south, so their guns would almost certainly work, but none was firing.
A harried-looking captain turned to see what had caused the sudden ripple of movement among the men near the communications trench, and he saw a strange, very irregularly dressed lieutenant outlined in tiny golden flames. He breathed a sigh of relief, hopped down from the step, and stood in front of Nick.
“About time one of you lot got here. It’s plowing through the wire toward the Wall. D Company shot at it for a while, but that didn’t work, so we’ve held back. It’s not going to turn around, is it?”
“Probably not,” said Nick, not offering the certainty the captain had hoped for. He saw a ladder and quickly climbed up it to stand on the parapet.
The Wall lay less than a hundred yards away, across barren earth crisscrossed with wire. There were tall poles of carved wood here and there, quietly whistling in the breeze among the metal pickets and the concertina wire. Wind flutes of the Abhorsen, there to bar the way from Death. A great many people had died along the Wall and the Perimeter, and the border between Life and Death was very easily crossed in such places.
Nick had seen the Wall before, farewelling his friend Sam on vacation. But apart from a dreamlike memory of it wreathed in fierce golden fire, he had never seen it as more than an antiquity, just an old wall like any other medieval remnant in a good state of preservation. Now he could see the glow of millions of Charter Marks moving across, through, and under the stones.
He could see the creature, too. It was surrounded by a nimbus of intense white sparks as it used its club hands to smash down the concertina wire and wade directly toward a tunnel that went through the Wall.
“I’m going to follow it,” said Nick. “Pass the word not to shoot. If any other Scouts come up, tell them to stay back. This particular creature needs the blood of Charter Mages.”
“Who should I say—”
Nick ignored him, heading west along the trench to the point where the creature had begun to force its path. There were no soldiers there, only the signs of a very rapid exodus, with equipment and weapons strewn across the trench floor.
Nick climbed out and started toward the Wall. It was night in the Old Kingdom, a darker night without the moon, but the star-shell light spread over the Wall, so he could see that it was snowing there, not a single snowflake coming south.
He lifted the daisy-chain wreath over his head and held it ready in his left hand, and he drew the dagger with his right. The flowers were crushed, and many had lost petals, but the chain was unbroken, thanks to the linen thread sewn into the stems. Llew and his nieces really had known their business .
Nick was halfway across the No Man’s Land when the creature reached the Wall. But it did not enter the tunnel, instead hunkering down on its haunches for half a minute before easing itself up and turning back. It was still surrounded by white sparks, and even thirty yards away Nick could smell the acrid stench of hot metal. He stopped, too, and braced himself for a sudden, swift attack.