Sir Thursday (25 page)

It was hard being last, though the line moved very quickly. Arthur noticed that not one of the Piper’s children held back, though most of them turned their heads at the last second as if to avoid something happening to their faces. And their eyes were closed.

Arthur kept his eyes open. He wanted to be aware of any tricks Sir Thursday might try on the Stair.

He should have been relieved to find himself surrounded by white light, with the marble steps under his feet and a curling line of soldiers ascending the Stair ahead of him. But he wasn’t.

The Stair had not been a spiral when he’d climbed it before. Now it was tightly coiled.

Arthur realized he’d stopped for a second when he was jerked forward. For a horrible instant he thought he was about to lose his grip on Fred’s belt. But his fingers were jammed through and he closed them again tightly, looking only at the steps as he staggered forward.

“Hang on!” exclaimed Fred as quietly as he could while still being emphatic. “Sir.”

Arthur hung on and concentrated on the steps under
his feet. For the first twenty or thirty or so he kept expecting Sir Thursday to do something, but then he remembered how hard it had been for him to lead just Suzy Blue up the steps. The Trustee wouldn’t be able to do anything unless he put himself at risk of falling off the Stair as well—and in the case of the Improbable Stair a fall meant ending up somewhere you’d almost certainly not want to be.

This realization allowed Arthur to start worrying about what was going to happen when they came out at the other end. Even if Sir Thursday did only need five or six minutes to destroy the Nothing spike, a lot could happen in that time. In the battle at Fort Transformation, scores of Denizens and New Nithlings had been killed or wounded in the first thirty seconds, let alone the first five minutes.

There was also the possibility that something would happen to Sir Thursday. If he wasn’t able to lead them into the Improbable Stair, then they’d be trapped, easy pickings for the New Nithlings.

Unless I can lead everyone back into the Improbable Stair,
thought Arthur.

He wondered if using the Stair would increase the sorcerous contamination of his blood and bone. The crocodile ring was in his belt pouch, but there was no point thinking about it, or about the contamination. Arthur knew he would have to do whatever it took for them to survive.

Something caught Arthur’s eye, and he looked up. The Stair stretched on forever, disappearing in a haze of bright white light. But Sir Thursday was gone, as were the two Piper’s children behind him. The third was disappearing, in mid-step.

“We’re coming out!” said Arthur. “Hold on!”

He felt a bit silly as he said “hold on” because almost everyone had disappeared by the time he said it, so only Fred heard, and he knew Arthur was the one who hadn’t been holding on properly.

Then Fred was gone, and this time Arthur
did
instinctively shut his eyes. When he forced them open only a microsecond later, he saw the line of Piper’s children ahead of him, with Sir Thursday at the head. Only a few feet beyond Sir Thursday was a huge, rapidly spinning cone of utter darkness, shot through with occasional coruscations of blinding white.

It was the spike—and not only was it spinning, it was bigger than Arthur had thought it would be. The part he could see was about thirty feet high and twenty feet in diameter at the top, but it looked like it was half-buried in the ground, the point having long since bored its way through the topsoil and into whatever material lay beneath the organic layer of the five hundred/five hundred tile.

“Let go!” roared Sir Thursday. “Take up defensive positions.”

Arthur let go and looked around. They were on an earthen ramp reinforced with cut timber that had been built to emplace the spike. It was ten feet wide and perhaps sixty feet long. The raiding party was at the top of it, right next to the spike.

The other end of the ramp joined a dusty, well-trodden road lined with white rocks that stretched to the tile border, half a mile away. On either side of this bare road there were rows and rows of bright yellow bell-shaped tents. Hundreds and hundreds of tents, each one about twenty feet in diameter, occupying a forty foot by forty foot square.

There was also a parade ground, a square of bare earth two hundred feet long on each side. A unit of one thousand New Nithlings was drawn up there, in the process of being inspected by a very tall, very imposing New Nithling—or perhaps even a Denizen, because he was human-shaped and was wearing a pale yellow uniform greatcoat of many toggles and considerable gold braid, topped by a Napoleon-style hat worn sideways over what from a distance Arthur thought was either his own metal-masked head or some kind of horrible metal replacement. This very tall commander was trailed by a dozen officers, or superior Nithlings, and in the mere second that
it took Arthur to look down at the parade ground, he realized that this must be the mysterious leader of the New Nithlings.

He had no further time for thought. Sergeant Quicksilver was yelling and the Piper’s children were arraying themselves in a line across the top of the ramp, preparing their Nothing-powder pistols and carbines and power-spears and, in Quicksilver’s own hands, a muscle-fiber longbow.

“Very good, ah, Sergeant,” said Arthur. He had to struggle to keep his voice even. The whine of the spinning spike was very disturbing, rather like a human child complaining at an impossible pitch. The New Nithlings on the parade ground had also just noticed the intruders. The tall commander turned to look at them—and though he did not appear to say anything, there was a sudden flurry of activity among the officers behind him and shouted commands.

“Take ’em five minutes to get here,” said Quicksilver with a practiced glance. “All those tents in the way—”

She stopped talking as big kettle drums began to pound, in that same rhythm Arthur had heard in the attack on Fort Transformation. With the drums, New Nithlings emerged from almost every tent, like ten thousand hidden bees suddenly emerging from an innocent-looking square of honeycomb.

Arthur looked at Sir Thursday. He was next to the
spike, his sword raised above his head. Suddenly he shouted a battle cry, a sound that rose above the noise of the spike and sent a jangling vibration down Arthur’s spine. Sir Thursday cut down at the whirling Nothing, slicing off a huge piece that hurtled clockwise through the air and came down on a bell tent, destroying it instantly, so all that remained were some sagging guy ropes hanging down a hole in the ground.

But the spike did not stop spinning, nor was there any notable hole in it, as if the Nothing it was composed of had simply filled the gap.

Sir Thursday scowled and cut at the spike again, with similar results.

“Here they come,” said Quicksilver. “Do you want to give the order to fire, sir?”

It took Arthur a second to comprehend that she was talking to him. He was staring down at the mass of New Nithlings who were being shouted and cajoled into ranks as they raced towards the bottom of the ramp to make up an assault force. There were lots of less-organized Nithlings on the sides of the ramp as well, some of them trying to climb the sides, with some success, though it was thirty feet to the top.

All the New Nithlings were uniformed, armed with the crackly lightning spears Arthur had seen before, and clearly
well led. Though it was true they had greater physical variety among them than the Denizens, with extra limbs and distorted features, they bore no resemblance to the halfmad rabble Nithlings were supposed to be.

“Yes, I’ll give the order,” said Arthur as calmly as he could. “Musketoons first, then the power-spears. Quicksilver, you cover the left side and shoot the climbers. Suzy, you take the right and do the same with your pistols. Fred, you load for Suzy.”

Arthur drew his sword and moved to the center of the line, with only half a glance back at Sir Thursday. Even that was enough to know that the Trustee was not making any real progress against the spike, though at least he was timing his cuts so that the pieces of Nothing flew off into the camp rather than cutting a swath through the Piper’s children on the ramp.

“Wait for the order!” called Arthur as musketoons were leveled and power-spears raised.

A formation of New Nithlings twelve across and ten ranks deep was almost at the foot of the ramp. Arthur looked at them stomping forward and knew there was no way they could stop them, or hold them off, or even survive. They’d have time for perhaps two volleys from the five musketoons, a cast of three power-spears, and that would be it. They would be overrun.

Overrun,
thought Arthur.
Just another way of saying that we’ll all be killed. Unless Sir Thursday can do something with the Key. Or we could try to get back on the Stair…only there’s no time. We’d never make it. They’d charge and cut us down…the last few for sure…which means me. Maybe that’s what Sir Thursday planned from the start.

The enemy drumming suddenly changed tempo, getting faster. The New Nithlings shouted and began their charge up the ramp. Suzy’s pistols went off, and Quicksilver’s bow twanged and twanged again as Arthur counted to three and shouted, “Fire!” The musketoons banged and Nothing-powder smoke billowed up and Arthur shouted, “Throw!” and the power-spears flew and Arthur shouted, “Hold fast!” and moved into the front rank to be with the others, to hold the initial shock even if only for a few seconds and then—

A strange and unearthly sound filled the air. A breathy, high-pitched single note that sounded a little like a flute and a little like a whale singing and something entirely new and different as well.

The note stopped everything. In the case of the Piper’s children, they literally stopped, frozen in mid-action. All of them save Arthur, who looked at Fineold with his savage-sword half out of its scabbard and Jazebeth’s hand stopped with her fingers pulling back the lock of her musketoon.

Suzy was a statue on the brink of the ramp, a small
snap-hance pistol in each hand, pointed down the right-hand side of the ramp. Quicksilver was just as still across from her, her bow dropped in favor of a triangular-bladed poniard.

The New Nithlings were not frozen, but they had stopped their charge and their climbing. Those on either side of the twelve-Nithling-wide ramp assault force were turning around and withdrawing, and the rest were moving apart to create an avenue of clear space up the middle.

The tall commander was striding up that avenue, holding a simple wooden pipe to lips that were invisible behind a metal mask of dull steel, playing that one impossibly pure, impossibly sustained note.

Arthur heard movement behind him and twisted around. Sir Thursday was there, his face red and screwed up in rage.

“Traitors!” he screamed. “Five minutes is all I asked!”

Before Arthur could do anything, Sir Thursday’s sword sliced through the air and connected with the frozen Private Fineold at Arthur’s side, cutting off his head with a single stroke. Then Sir Thursday rolled his wrists and, without stopping, swung the blade back again, straight at Corporal Jazebeth.

Without thinking, Arthur parried the blow. He got his savage-sword in the way, but it was as if the gravity-condensed
steel were a mere twig. Sir Thursday’s sword snapped it in half, the impact making the broken sword fly from Arthur’s hand. Sir Thursday’s blow was hardly slowed, continuing to thunk horribly into Jazebeth’s neck.

Arthur half-fell and half-jumped back as Sir Thursday swung at him, changing the blow in midair from a cut to a thrust, flicking the point at Arthur. But the Denizen didn’t follow through. Instead he leaped to the right and began to draw steps with the blade, beginning to enter the Improbable Stair.

Arthur’s stomach muscles burned as he flipped himself fully upright. He took one swift glance around. The Nithling commander was twenty feet away, slowly walking up the ramp between the Nithlings, still playing that unearthly pipe.

Sir Thursday had one foot on his glowing step, his back to Arthur.

Arthur grimaced and reached alongside his cuirass under the armhole, feeling for the emergency dagger. But his fingers closed on a small plastic box. He had it out and in his hand before he remembered what it was.

I’m going to die,
he thought.
But I can save my family.

He threw the box at the spike and threw himself on Sir Thursday’s back just as the Trustee disappeared into the Improbable Stair.

A
rthur got his legs wrapped around Sir Thursday’s waist and his arms around his neck as he took his first step on the treacherous marble of the Improbable Stair itself.

“Don’t try anything!” warned Arthur. “If you do anything but move on the stair, I’ll throw both of us off!”

Sir Thursday growled something, a sound so inarticulate and full of anger it might have been a beast’s noise. But he kept plodding up the stair, carrying Arthur’s weight as if the boy were no more than a light rucksack.

After twenty steps, the Trustee spoke again.

“You’ll die for this. Mutiny is mutiny, no matter who commits it. You have sealed your own end,
Lieutenant
.”

Arthur did not reply. He kept all his attention on Sir Thursday’s movements, not his speech. The Trustee had his sword in his hand, and he could easily angle it back and slide it into Arthur without warning. Arthur knew he had to be ready to throw all his weight to one side, even if it ended up being a dead weight. At least Thursday would be thrown off the Stair, hopefully to somewhere horrible where it would not be easy to get back on again.

Justice will be served,
said a voice in Arthur’s head. The quiet, telepathic voice of the imprisoned Part Four of the Will.
I nearly had him back there. You must make him angry again.

Make him angry?
Arthur thought back.
Are you as crazy as he is? I don’t want to make him angry. I don’t know how I’m going to survive as it is.

It is the only form of distraction that will work on Sir Thursday,
replied the Will.
Distract him, and I will free myself and deliver the Fourth Key to you, Lord Arthur. Then he may be brought to justice.