Flight (63 page)

Of all that Fflowers looks at, it is the
man-horse, a white marble millennial old Etruscan statue standing
three meters tall that holds his attention the longest. When he
finally moves away, he whispers the same three words that he had
written minutes before.

Fflowers rolls his way close to the parapet
that surrounds the Airie. Manhattan is glowing from the reds and
oranges a profligate fallen sun is splashing across half the sky.
Far to the west, the spires of Newton and Screwton glisten. To the
east, the old scientist can see where the interlacing of rivers and
ponds and land has made urban islands which, from his vantage
point, look like giant flagstones. To the south are the canted
masts of Wall Streets’ lost fleet. But, it is the open air beneath
him that holds the most intriguing sight for Fflowers. Here and
there, far below, solitary winged workers are leaving their posts a
few minutes early.

Fflowers pushes himself to his feet. As his
body wavers from the exertion, the old man is struck with how long
is has been since he has stood on his own two feet—with no doctors,
no nurses, no helping hands. Despite his fragile stance, the
trillionaire revels in that small gift. He is upright and
alone.

The old man stands in the warm light of the
failing sun and waits his moment. And, when that moment comes, as
thousands of his fellow humans below spread their wings for home,
he, too, spreads his limbs and takes for himself, after decades and
decades of jealous waiting, the gift, the complicated gift, he has
given to so many. And, as Joshua Fflowers, finally, flies, as he
leisurely flaps his rail thin arms, his ancient face breaks into a
wide smile as he welcomes the freedom he has achieved in that last,
late warm spring afternoon. And, as the seconds of his short flight
into a longer journey pass, Fflowers, still the purveyor of dreams,
thinks of how he and Elena, Reiklein and Grammai, damp from rain,
bubbling over with excitement at what the future held, squeezed
into a cab and rode away into a glistening spring night.

Charlie Chapfallen

Unbonny Prince Charles.

Smirking at him.

The money is gone. Joshua Fflower’s trillions
are going elsewhere. The last swirl of an enraged father’s willful
pen. Gone to every kind of mundane goodness. Distributed like
indulgences to shorten the time in whatever the old man’s purgatory
might be.

With the money, goes the power. Poof.

Oh, not all the money and not all the power.
Adanan still has his billions and he still shares the presidency
with Illiya. That hasn’t been taken. Yet.

But.

The real money and the real power are
gone.

As his wife is gone.

Because Jack had decided to tell his mother
why he himself felt that he had to go. From accomplice to
traitor.

And the girl, who had cost him the money and
power and his wife and his son, she, too, is gone. Not a sighting
since Schecty’s men were plucked in Mudtown.

No crown. No throne.

All because of the girl.

Was he wrong to have gone after her?

Hindsight was hindsight.

He needed to look forward.

Much was gone, but not all.

What was left must be his.

He would not be Prince Charles. He must be
king even if it be as ruler of a much smaller realm.

But for that to happen, Illiya had to go.

It would take some time and deep thinking to
decide what kind of go would be best. But, patience was a virtue.
And, patience would be repaid.

Fright

If a winger had been able to hover outside
the fifth floor window of Dicky Baudgew’s apartment and see past
the faded maroon damask curtains, he might have thought he was
witnessing an aging actress auditioning for the part of a dowager
princess in a Chinese court drama. Dicky’s cheeks, forehead and
chinlet are colored a whitish green from a thick covering of some
emollient. He has clipped back tufts of his remaining hair to keep
them safe from the cream. As he paces back and forth in his living
room, the agitation of his steps make his bright paisley robe
billow and flare. If the windows had been open on what was proving
to be a warm, blue-skied day—the kind of day that entices all but
the darkest of souls to come out, and once outdoors, to enchant
them to slow their lives—through those open windows would have come
the shuffle slap of Dicky’s ancient red Moroccan leather slippers
and the clicking sound his nervous tongue makes as it snaps against
his worn cider-colored teeth.

Dicky’s feet and tongue, and even the tips of
his fingers, are moving fast. Dicky is moving all these things to
distract himself from what he really wants to do. The ancient
sprite paces and clucks and huffs and sighs, but, finally, all of
these efforts fail.

With a dramatic flounce of the skirts of his
robe, a flaring of material that would have done a matador proud,
Dicky Baudgew plops into his favorite suede chair and begins to
cry. His hands go to his cheeks and his agitated fingers began to
smear the cream they find there as Dicky sobs and sobs.

Dicky Baudgew loves a puzzle…, but he hates
to lose. Oh, how he hates to lose.

And lost he has and lost he is. As are Edgee
and Whir.

It has been four days since his
two…assistants… have gone beyond the Pale to capture the girl. Four
days and he has heard nothing. Nothing! One day with no
communication was to be expected and two could be explained. Four
days, too, could be explained, too, but only by one word: disaster.
The girl is gone, and Dicky Baudgew’s ideas of what to do next are
gone with her.

Because the girl is gone, but death
remains.

The very idea of death has enraged Dicky as
far back as he can remember.

Five years old, wide awake in an ice cold bed
in a colder room where the idea of It, Death, the End, swells over
him like an equinoctial tide. He splutters, but in rage, not fear.
What force can be so malign, or, if not malign, then stupid, or, if
not stupid, then horribly, horribly short-sighted as to want Dicky
Baudgew dead?

It has taken decades of boredom and being
ignored and enduring poor health and a limited wealth that feels
like poverty, and more ill-health, that small, niggling, sap
dripping kind of ill-health, before Dicky could even think about
The End without being blinded by a bloody rage. But, when kind
fate, in retrospect, a suspiciously kind fate, offered him the key
to two more centuries of living, Dicky first had felt relief and,
then, a giggly euphoria. But, then…but, now…. No word for four days
and what could be the word, but Disaster?

Dicky Baudgew feels like a man condemned to
death who, having been stood against the wall, is miraculously
pardoned by some unknown benign force. Pardoned, yes, but only for
a few seconds before being slapped back against the unforgiving
wall with a bullet.

IT ISN’T FAIR.

Dicky Baudgew, who loves a puzzle, who loves
a puzzle, but doesn’t like to lose, HATES to lose…poor Dicky is
sobbing and the colors in his robe, wet from tears, are running and
that is what Dicky wishes he could do, too.

…But, Dicky knows that he cannot run because
he has known since he was just a wee boy of five, that running just
brings Death glee.

Flight

They have been waiting at the river’s edge
less than five minutes before Hortos unslings his bow and nocks an
arrow. The remaining orange-feathered winger is flying rapidly
upriver. Prissi can only guess what has happened to Joe, but the
fact that the winger is flying rather than piloting the launch
gives her hope. Even though the winger is a dozen meters in the
air, in the middle of the river and beating his wings furiously,
all of that activity seems to have no effect on the centaur. He
draws his bowstring so far back that Prissi can’t understand why
the bow itself doesn’t crack. When the arrow releases, the bow
string hums. Prissi listens to that locust-like sound die as she
watches the arrow fly toward where there is no winger. Yet.

To an incredulous Prissi, the arrow and the
left leg of the winger intersect. Wings stop beating as the winger
looks to see what possibly can have happened. Edgee plunges toward
the water, until, at the last second, his wings start to beat
again. When Hortos steps out of the shadow of the woods, Edgee
notices. He immediately drops his left wing and makes a sharp turn
toward where Prissi sits astride the man-horse. For some unknown
reason, later Prissi thinks it could have been pride or even
despair, Hortos delays reaching back into his quiver to draw
another arrow. As Edgee flies toward them, he reaches down to his
wounded leg. Prissi assumes that it’s the wound that draws his
hand, but, instead, Edgee reaches into a pant leg pocket and
withdraws the folding saw. Edgee is less than five meters away when
Hortos’ second arrow digs deep into the winger’s chest. His wound
will be mortal, but momentum and anger carry him forward. Prissi is
thrown from the centaur as Hortos rears to protect himself from
Edgee’s attack. The centaur’s hoofs strike as high as they can, but
only catch the winger’s legs. Edgee’s wings cover Hortos’ torso as
his hand begins maniacally slashing at the centaur with the saw
blade. The dying winger and the centaur, bleeding from a dozen
cuts, thrash about in the dense brush. Prissi, caught for a third
time that day among the vines and thorns, struggles to twist
herself away from the battle. Edgee knows he is in his last
minutes, but with hate and rage is how he wants to leave life. He
frantically slashes and stabs, but each following stroke of the
blade does less and less harm. Hortos bucks and kicks and finally
manages to throw Edgee to the ground. His hoof lashes out and snaps
the arm that holds the blade. The centaur places a hoof and his
weight upon the winger’s chest until the wildly pounding wrathful
heart beneath grows still.

Although she is not wounded, Prissi is
horrified that she is covered in almost as much blood as Hortos.
She looks around and sees that she has been lucky because most of
what holds her down is vine and not bramble. She twists and turns,
plucks and pulls and manages to free herself. She uses the
centaur’s rear legs to pull herself up. At her touch, the skin on
Hortos’ legs quiver as if a horsefly had landed, but the legs
themselves remain immobile. Once she is standing, Prissi works
herself around Edgee’s blood-soaked wings so that she can see
Hortos’ face. She reaches up to wipe the blood from the man-horse’s
face, but he flinches.

”Let me help.”

“Going will help.”

Prissi doesn’t know whether the centaur means
that her leaving will help or that his going, like Mortos and
Olewan have gone, will help. She stands by, hands reaching out, but
doing nothing until the man-horse bends his forelegs and, then, his
hind legs so that he is sitting on the blood churned forest
floor.

Prissi tries to catch his eyes, but Hortos is
looking somewhere else. After a minute, he must have seen enough
because he closes his eyes. Prissi closes hers, too and her hand
reaches up to grab the crescent crystals hanging from her neck. She
can wait for Hortos to die. Another one of her victims. Or, or she
can move on.

More for Hortos sake than her own, the
devastated girl starts off down the path. She has no idea of where
she is going, and the idea that she is walking away from the water
fills her with trepidation, but she feels she has no other
choice.

She hasn’t gone a half kilometer when she
hears a long moan that three times rises up an octave before
dropping back down. In respect, Prissi waits for the sound to
disappear before she continues hobbling down the path. She doesn’t
stop until it is too dark to see.

Prissi, hungry, tired, near crippled Prissi,
worms her way a few meters into woods, works her way under a clump
of barberry, and spreads her wings to clean them as best she can
before she folds them around her like a blanket. Exhaustion
overrides all else—hunger, fear, remorse, sadness, even, hate. Her
wounded body needs to heal as much as her mind needs relief. She
takes three pills from the vial she had taken from the Bury,
swallows them and falls deeply asleep.

The slivered moon is high in the sky, its
light mostly filtered by spring’s new leaves, when Prissi is
rousted by a hand tugging on her ankle. Despite how deeply she has
been sleeping and how rough the awakening, the girl opens her eyes
without fear.

The hand belongs to Fair. Even when Prissi
sits up, the boy keeps pulling on her. The broken light of the moon
hides what his face might tell, but his hands are insistent. When
Prissi folds her wings so that she can get herself to her knees,
Fair backs his way out to the path. Once they are both on the path,
Fair talks, but what he is trying to communicate is more
effectively done with his hands than his words. Prissi gets the
gist. Olewan, the old man, Mortos and Hortos are dead and Fair’s
world is crumbling. He has come to Prissi to seek salvation.

Since Prissi has no idea where she is, and
since she has no desire to test her wings, even if she could find a
break in what seems to be an unrelenting, unbroken, forest canopy,
she snorts at the idea of the woods boy looking to her for help to
make his escape. Although Prissi doesn’t see how she might be
useful to Fair, it only takes her a moment to get an idea of how he
might be able to help her.

“I’m going to the big water, the ocean. I can
help you, but, first, I have to get to the ocean. Do you know where
it is? The big water?”

Prissi shakes her head in disgust as she
listens to herself. Fair’s nod is so tentative that the girl isn’t
sure whether he understands what she is asking.

She points along the path, “The big
water?”