The Death of Yorik Mortwell (11 page)

No
, Yorik thought.
It’s them. The Dark Ones do this
. He concentrated on Susan and the clear lament
she’d sung in the attic. He hummed a few bars, and the nightmares receded.

Master Thomas growled and edged closer, grimacing as he eyed the tablet.

“Yorik,” he began—but Yorik darted forward with ghostly speed, his right hand flashing into Thomas’s pocket. Then he was back on the tablet. He opened his hand and revealed Erde’s last two mud-balls.

Master Thomas hissed and spat.

“I wanted these back,” said Yorik.

Dark Doris laughed like tinkling glass. “Yorik, Yorik, poor little ghost. Two muddy bits against a million
Yglhfm
? Now that Lord Ravenby has succumbed, we can consume you quite easily, you know. Why don’t you come and take my hand?” As she reached toward Yorik, she began to change. Her face hollowed, her eyes became voids, and her skin smeared and faded. Master Thomas, too, seemed to be melting.

You will ssserve usss
, they hissed, reaching out with their spindly arms, the remains of their flesh blackening and burning.

“I’m not anyone’s servant any longer, ever again,” said Yorik, and he jumped.

He clung with one hand to a mammoth’s rib jutting several feet over his head.
Yglhfm
pooled around Doris and Thomas, then boiled up into a mound, bearing them regally upward.

Yorik mounted the rib, then slid down to the mammoth’s spine, but
Yglhfm
were flowing onto that too. He leapt to the next skeleton and the next as
Yglhfm
tumbled after him. He spied a pile of mangled and broken bones with another skeleton lying on top of it, the highest point in the cavern, its ribs poking up toward the ceiling. In three swift, vaulting leaps, he landed on the pile. All around him the dark tide rose, lapping at his feet as he ran to the final skeleton and climbed its last rib.

A cluster of small
Yglhfm
blocked his path.

Ghost …
, they began, their formless mouths gaping.

A mud-ball struck the cluster, bowling them aside. They fell into the swirling pools below. Yorik heard children’s laughter behind him.

At the tip of the rib, Yorik leapt, his hands thrusting into the stone ceiling.
Like swimming
, he reminded himself, hoping. And it worked—up and up he went, swimming into the stone, swimming up as fast as he could, the chaos of the cavern passing into silence as stone became dirt. He swam until his fingers broke into clear air and he emerged from the grass under the light of Pale Moon Luna.

He pushed himself up onto the Manor lawn, which was crawling with tiny Dark Ones.

Oke and Dye raced by in their green spirit forms, snarling and biting, seizing one Dark One after another in their teeth and ripping them to wisps. But there were far too many now, and Yorik knew the valiant hounds had no hope of fighting the enormous
Yglhfm
rumbling up from below the Manor.

He heard crashes and shouts from the Estate’s far meadow. Turning as he raced across the lawn, he saw the black shadow of the
Indomitable
against the flame-blue clouds. The dirigible’s cabin was half lit, and the ship was listing nose down away from its mooring tower, crewmen hanging from dangling
ropes. It swerved against the dock, and the gangplank fell, crashing into the meadow, followed by splintered beams from the tower.

Yorik sprinted toward the aviary glade, evading the dark voids gliding everywhere. He dodged through the forest and along the wooded paths. Horses were running free, and shots could be heard, along with the screams of men and women. The deadly pale light of small fires sprang up all around.

As he neared the glade, he glimpsed through the trees what looked like a wall. It blocked his way, and he was forced to stop before it, puzzled. The wall was broad and made of nothing at all, and for an instant he felt again as though he were gazing into the black void of the universe. He reached for it, and his hand grew cold. He pulled back. He could see what this was now—a blockade of
Yglhfm
, thousands of them having joined the wide circle around the glade. They were piling up as he watched, already nearly up to his shoulders. This time there was no opening in the line. He gauged the height carefully. He thought he had jumped at least that high in the mammoth graveyard—an
apparent advantage of weighing almost nothing. He raced back, turned, and charged the darkness, leaping up and over and landing within the safety of the glade.

He found the Princess sprawled facedown beside the grass cradle. Erde had dwindled to the size of an acorn at the bottom of her bed.

“Princess, Princess,” he said, shaking her shoulder. “You have to get up!”

The Princess raised her tear-streaked face to look blearily at Yorik. “No,” she said. Her face plopped back onto the grass.

“Please,” begged Yorik. “I know what Thomas did. I know how the Dark Ones managed to return. There’s a portal under the Manor. It had been sealed with a tablet, but the Dark Ones made Thomas break it. The tablet had runes on it. I think they had the red lion’s blood in them—”

The Princess lifted her head again and sniffed. “Runes? What runes?”

“I don’t know, I’ve never seen them before—”

“Draw them,” ordered the Princess. She waved her leafy twig, and a patch of dirt appeared on the grass.

Yorik used his finger to draw what he had seen on the tablet. His whole hand tingled as he drew.

“Hmph,” the Princess said, sitting up. “That’s a powerful spell. Humans did that? I’m impressed. Those were the old humans, though. These new ones are worthless.” She gestured toward the world generally.

“Can the runes help? Can I fight the Dark Ones with them?”

“Too late,” the Princess said. “And anyway, you’d need a new lion, and … oh, it’s completely beyond your capacity to understand.”

“Then
you
have to fight them,” said Yorik. “You have to leave the glade and fight them! You’d only be doing it to save Erde. Your father would forgive you.”

Her eyes filled with silver tears. “No, he wouldn’t,” she croaked. “You don’t understand. Gods don’t think like humans. I can’t defy him!” The Princess dropped her twig and threw herself into the dirt, sobbing again.

Yorik was about to reply when he was interrupted by a rackety, droning sound in the sky overhead.

He looked up. The
Indomitable
loomed directly above.

The rackety sound was wrong. The dirigible normally purred as it prowled the sky, flying straight and proud in the service of Lord Ravenby and his guests. Now it careened over the trees, and Yorik could see people running through the cabin brandishing weapons. Flame burst from an engine, and then the ship disappeared from view.

Yorik stood, counting the seconds.
Susan
, he thought. Lord Ravenby’s last loyal servant would surely be on board.

Even the Princess had looked up from her sobbing. “Now that is the most ridiculous way to travel I have ever—”

The aviary glade shook with the power of a massive explosion.

The speed and direction of the dirigible told Yorik the terrible news. “The topiary garden,” he said to the Princess, and then he was running.

T
he dark blockade around the glade was becoming taller. Yorik barely cleared it with his leap, the tips of his toes growing cold as they brushed the void.

“Yorik!”

A cry on the Wooded Walk slowed him. The Matron held a blazing torch and was stumbling through the dark, her dress muddy. She was staring at him with wild eyes. There were no
Yglhfm
on her shoulders.

No, it’s a Dark One trick
, he thought.
The Matron can’t see me
. He ran on.

“Yorik!” another voice thundered. This time Yorik stopped.

The Kennelmaster was striding along with torch and shotgun. Beside him was Oke, limping and bloody.

“Can you see me?” asked Yorik, astonished.

“Aye,” replied the Kennelmaster. “The Dark Ones are victorious. The worlds of man and spirit are joined.”

“No,” said Yorik desperately. “There’s still time.”

Mr. Lucian spat. “Perhaps a bit o’ time, to flee. But too many have flooded in from the outside. We can fight them no longer.”

“But they didn’t come from outside—they came from within. From beneath the Manor.”

“Ah, then I was wrong all along.” The old man slumped wearily. “Ye fought yer best battle, I know, lad. Run while ye can.” He went forward with Oke at his side.

“Where are the others?” called Yorik after him. “The other hounds?”

“Dead,” came the reply. “They shot them all.”
Then Mr. Lucian and Oke disappeared around a bend in the path.

“No,” Yorik pleaded.
No no no
. He ran for the topiary garden.

He found the topiaries burning, each of them—lion, elephant, swan, even the great hare—a pillar of flame. The garden was sundered by an enormous furrow of earth where the
Indomitable
’s cabin had struck and slid through. In the forest beyond the garden, the airship’s envelope was ablaze, billowing free from its steel skeleton. Flames from the burning engine were spreading.

In the smoke and firelit shadows, a human figure crawled from a smashed cabin window.

Lord Ravenby.

Two dark things were with him—not
Yglhfm
, Yorik saw, but a pair of shadows in the shape of children. Each shadow held one of Lord Ravenby’s arms and helped him stagger away from the wreck. In one hand, Lord Ravenby held his mammoth rifle.

Behind him, the engine exploded, and Lord Ravenby was thrown forward onto the grass, the mammoth rifle clattering away.

Yorik recognized the two shadows.

“Doris,” he said. “Thomas.”

The Thomas shadow looked at him.
yorik
, came a scratched, tiny whisper, though the shadow had no mouth.
i’m sorry
.

“What happened?” asked Yorik.

yorik
, moaned the Doris shadow.
the
yglhfm
don’t need us any longer. they’ve abandoned us. won’t you run, yorik, at last? there is nothing left
.

She pointed, and Yorik looked. There was the Manor, or what had been the Manor. Now, even as he watched, it was transforming into a mountain, the many giant
Yglhfm
piling up into a single vast, dark presence, its peak breaking above the flame-blue clouds.

Yorik turned away. “If there is nothing left, Doris,” he said gently, “then why are you still helping your father?”

As if in answer, Lord Ravenby moaned and stirred, and his shadow-children floated to him and helped him rise.

Then he spotted Yorik and cried out, his eyes crazed and panicked. He crawled forward and
grasped his rifle. He swung it wildly, seeming to see enemies all around. Apparently mistaking a topiary bear for the real thing, he fired.

The bear exploded in a cracking cloud, and the bullet smashed through the garden behind.

Yorik heard animal screams.

He watched the shadow-children trying to calm their father. He thought of the Princess, tending to the dwindling Erde. And thinking of the Princess, he remembered something he had seen, just before the crash of the
Indomitable
. One last chance. But he would have to move as fast as he could, as fast as a ghost could ever move, swifter than a deer, quicker than an eyeblink, for he was about to do the most dangerous thing he had ever done.

Just before leaving, he paused as a movement in the wreckage caught his eye—behind a blackened window there was a toss of hair, a frightened face, and two hands pressed against the glass.

Susan
. Yorik longed to run to her. He could see she was unhurt and safe for the moment, and he knew this was likely his last chance to speak with his sister, ever again.

But there wasn’t time. Gathering himself, he raced back toward the aviary glade, hurdling the blockade once more, the chill reaching into his ankles.

Fast as he was, events around him crawled slowly by. There, under the cherry boughs, crouched the crying Princess, huddled over the last dusty crumbs of Erde in the grass cradle. A teardrop hovered between the girls. In that instant, the Princess did not yet see Yorik.

Beside her, glowing in the grass where in her anguish she had dropped it, was the leafy twig.

Yorik aimed for the twig. He put his fingers down as he passed.

The Princess opened her mouth and began to turn.

Yorik snatched the leafy twig.

He had grasped a lightning bolt in his hand. His teeth seemed to shatter from the shock. But he held on, running. Something was happening behind him as he left the glade—a tidal wave of light and power. On the edge of his vision he saw curls of blistering light reaching for him like fingers.

Then he was leaping out of the glade and back onto the Wooded Walk. He had been in the glade for less than a second.

The instant any bit of me left my glade, he would know
, the Princess had said.

The pain in his hand burrowed up his arm, feeling like flesh peeling away as electricity and fire ate into him.