The Emerald Atlas (26 page)

It was an enormous black bird. The creature was wounded and flopped about in a circle, making desperate cawing noises.

“Something is wrong,” the Secretary said. “Gather the host. Fortify the entrances—”

His command was cut off by a hard
thuck
, and the dark end of an arrow suddenly protruded from the Screecher’s chest. The creature fell to its knees; a foul-smelling smoke rose, hissing, from the wound.

“ATTACK!” the Secretary shrieked. “We are under attack!”

Gabriel’s band had entered through the dark northern end of the city. Two Screechers standing sentry had been felled by arrows, another by Gabriel’s falchion. Emma was amazed at how silently the large, heavily weaponed men moved. They were like deadly shadows, sliding among the ruined buildings, and it thrilled her to be with them.

Gabriel stopped everyone along a half-destroyed wall a block from the center of the city. They were close enough to the gas lamps to see clearly, and Emma could hear, out in the square, shouting and the sounds of blows. Glancing down the wall, Emma saw the men spreading out, disappearing down alleys and into buildings to take up closer positions around the square.

Dena was beside her. Gabriel had placed them in the charge of a young warrior only a few years their senior, giving the boy strict orders to keep the girls back once the action started.

Dena poked Emma in the side and the two of them, the boy, Gabriel, and half a dozen others passed through a gap in the wall and into the ground floor of a building that bordered the square.

A memory came back to Emma. It was from one night a few months earlier. She, Kate, Michael, and the other orphans at the Edgar Allan Poe Home had been taken to a baseball game in Baltimore. Emma couldn’t remember anything about the game itself, but she remembered the long tunnel they’d walked down, the muffled sounds of the crowd, the darkness, and then the sudden explosion of light as they’d entered the stadium. It was like that now, crouching with Dena at the hollowed-out window, staring at the harsh, bright scene before them.

There were at least three dozen
morum cadi
in the square, most of them gathered near four large cages. Inside the cages, Emma could see fifty or so sickly-looking men huddled about. Immediately, her heart filled with pity. She thought of the Countess, dressed up in her finery, having pretend balls in the Cambridge Falls mansion. Someone should lock her in a cage and see how she liked it! In her mind, Emma went ahead and put Miss Crumley in the cage as well. She knew the orphanage head wasn’t the same kind of evil as the Countess, but as long as Emma was locking people up, she figured why not.

Emma’s gaze stopped on a group of figures in the farthest cage. They were half the size of the men and, for a brief moment, she thought they were children. Then she noticed their beards and the stockiness of their arms and legs and realized she was looking at a group of dwarves. Emma reflected that if Michael were here, he would be having like nineteen heart attacks. Personally, she couldn’t see what the big deal was. They were short, okay, and their beards were kind of funny, but she wasn’t going to go out and start a fan club. As she was thinking this, the largest of the dwarves, the one with the filthy blond beard who’d been hurling abuse at the Screechers, moved, and Emma let out a gasp.

Ignoring the hiss from the young warrior, Emma scampered past Dena to the break in the wall where Gabriel knelt. He was fitting a thick black arrow on the string of his bow. Emma seized him by the arm and pointed. It was all she could do not to cry out. In the farthest cage, standing among the dwarves, wearing clothes she had seen him wear a thousand times before and an expression that even from this distance told of bewilderment and fear, was her brother, Michael. A black-bearded dwarf stood beside him, his hand on Michael’s shoulder.

Gabriel nodded, indicating that he’d seen Michael already, and gestured to a building across the square.

The whole front of the building was missing, allowing Emma to see directly into the rooms. There, on the second floor, sitting between a Screecher and a short figure in a suit whom she immediately recognized as the Countess’s secretary, was Kate.

Questions swirled through Emma’s mind. How had her brother and sister come to be here? Were they all right? How had the Secretary found them?

A pained cawing cut the air, and a black shape fell out of the darkness and into the room where Kate was being held. There was a soft twang beside her as Gabriel released his arrow. The Screecher with Kate staggered and fell. Then—it was all happening so quickly now—the Secretary gave a strangled shout, there was a volley of rifle fire, the thick
swoof
of a dozen arrows taking flight, the broken thudding as they found their targets, and all was chaos and shouting. Dropping his bow, Gabriel pulled the falchion off his back, gave a great, bellowing cry, and leapt through the gap in the wall. The battle had begun.

Kate lay on her stomach beside the motionless body of the Screecher. A dark, foul-smelling ooze was leaking from its wound.

“Birdie!”

The Secretary was behind the desk. He’d scurried for cover in the first moments after the attack.

“Come here!”

She ignored him. Propping herself on her elbows, she inched forward till she had a clear view into the square. It was a mass of dark, struggling figures; there were shouts and cries, sickening crunches, the clang of metal on metal, and, above everything, the inhuman shrieks of the Screechers. Kate felt the familiar sweeping weakness, the inability to draw breath, and, to her surprise, she found she was furious. No, she told herself, it’s not real! Her anger must’ve given her thoughts force, for while the screams were still awful, the invisible hands crushing her lungs vanished almost at once.

Breathing deeply, Kate sent Gabriel a silent thank-you.

She stared down into the square, trying to make sense of what she was seeing. Who was fighting who? How did they not all hit each other accidentally? Then, just as she was noticing the bare heads of the attackers and feeling relief that they were men and not some strange underground race of mole people—she didn’t actually know if there were such a thing; she would have to ask Michael—she saw Gabriel himself.

He was in the thickest knot of the fighting, carving his way through the Screechers with long, vicious swings of his falchion. He looked unstoppable, and the sight of him gave her hope. But only for a moment. For as Kate watched Gabriel hack his way through the Screechers, she noticed that more and more of the Countess’s black-clad horde were pouring into the square. At the start of the battle, Gabriel’s men and the
morum cadi
had been fairly evenly matched, but with each passing second, the balance was shifting to the Screechers. Gabriel’s men would soon be completely surrounded, and that would be that, the end.

“Kate!”

Michael’s voice penetrated the din, and she looked left, toward the cages. Michael and Wallace stood apart from the pack of dwarves and men massing at the bars. Michael jumped, pointed toward the fighting, and shouted something. It was lost in the clamor, but Kate understood. He’d seen Gabriel and thought they were going to be rescued. He couldn’t see that Gabriel and his men were doomed. They needed help. They needed two, three times the men.

An idea seemed almost to explode in Kate’s mind. She turned to the dead Screecher, reaching beneath its tunic. The corpse had an unnatural, cold hardness; just touching it made Kate nauseous, but she forced her hand between its body and the floor, feeling along the creature’s belt. Earlier, when it had entered the room, she’d heard a soft jangling. Come on, she thought, come on.… Her hand closed on a bundle of keys.

A weight slammed down on her.

“No, no! Bad birdie! Bad-bad-bad!”

The Secretary had thrown himself on top of her. Clammy hands scrambled for her wrists. He was panting, his breath warm and sour against her cheek. Kate struggled, but the man was much stronger.

“Must be punished, yes. Disobedient. The Countess has ways. Ways to make you obey. Bad birdies must learn—”

He was still hissing threats when Kate turned her head and bit down on his ear. It tasted foul and sweaty and the man shrieked, but she kept biting, harder and harder, till she tasted blood and he let go of her wrists. Then, using all her strength, she pushed against him. She’d only planned on getting him off her back, but she heard his shriek change and looked in time to see him disappearing out the open wall. She crawled to the edge. The Secretary lay without moving on the ground. Well, Kate thought, serves you right, and she spat to clear her mouth. Turning back, she reached under the Screecher, took hold of the keys, and yanked them free. Then it was down the stairs, out the building, and across the square.

Michael had squeezed through the crowd of men and dwarves, and they embraced awkwardly through the bars. She wanted to ask if he was okay, but there was no time.

“Gabriel’s here!” Michael began. “He—”

“I know. He needs help.”

She was looking at the ring of keys. There were a half dozen. She would have to try them all.

“The silver key! With the hole in the center! Hurry!”

It was a man who’d spoken. He was as thin and filthy as the others, but there was still fire in his hollow eyes. Something about him struck Kate as familiar.

“Hurry, girl!”

With nervous fingers, Kate started to fit the silver key in the lock.

“Oi, now! That ain’t the way!”

A hairy-knuckled hand reached through the bars and grabbed at the keys.

“I’m the king, right? Only fittin’ I’m the one opens the door! Protocol and such!”

“Stop it!” Kate yelled. “There isn’t time!”

“Stop it?” Hamish snorted, still yanking at the keys. “Who’re you to tell me to stop anything, eh? Who’s the bloody king here?”

“Watch out!” Michael cried.

Kate looked over her shoulder. A Screecher was running at her, sword raised to strike. Suddenly, the creature jerked about and collapsed. Two arrows were buried in its back.

“See there? Now quit actin’ the brat and let go or—woof!”

The keys were released. Wallace had stepped up and calmly punched his king in the gut.

“Go on,” Wallace said. “Open the door.”

Kate fit the key in the lock, turned it, and a flood of men came pouring out. The man who’d told her which key to use was among the first.

“Free the others,” he commanded. “Do it quickly!” And he picked up the sword from the fallen Screecher, shouted, “Follow me!” and charged toward the battle. Weak and sickly as the men had seemed minutes before, they ran after him, grabbing what weapons they could—swords, shovels, axes—along the way.

Hamish lumbered out, still gasping, and pointed a sausagey finger at Wallace. “You’ll get yours one day, laddie. Don’t you worry.” Then he snatched up an ax, marshaled the other dwarves, and charged into battle. Kate had to admit, whatever else Hamish was, he was no coward.

Michael nearly knocked her over with his hug.

“I know,” Kate whispered as she hugged him back, “I know; it’s okay.”

Wallace stood a few feet off. He’d picked up a short pickax. Kate could see he wasn’t going to leave them. She kissed the top of Michael’s head. His hair was unwashed and greasy, but she couldn’t have cared less.

“Come on. We need to free the others.”

“Lemme go!”

“Gabriel said—”

“My brother and sister need me!”

The moment Gabriel and the other men had charged into the square, Emma had set off. Kate and Michael were nearby and in trouble. She wasn’t going to wait around with her hands in her pockets. She would free Michael from his cage (she wasn’t quite sure how yet), the two of them would get Kate away from the Secretary (she wasn’t sure how she’d accomplish that either, but it would probably involve her being incredibly brave while Michael scribbled some nonsense in his notebook), and then they would all three finally be together (of that she was absolutely sure). There was just one problem. The young warrior, her and Dena’s appointed guardian, had intercepted Emma as she made her break and now held her, struggling, a foot off the ground.

“You gotta let me go!”

“Gabriel wants you to—stop!”

He grabbed Dena by the ankle just as she was climbing out the window, knife in hand, clearly intent on joining the battle.

“Let go a’ me! I’m gonna kill a Screecher!”

“And I gotta help my brother and sister!”

They continued like this for several minutes, the two girls struggling, pleading, threatening, Emma warning the boy (he really was just a boy) that if he didn’t let her go by the time she counted to five, he was going to be really, really sorry, then counting to five and announcing she would give him to ten, but then that was it (Emma knew the boy was only doing what Gabriel had told him, so she didn’t think it really fair to bite and kick her way free, which made her threats finally somewhat empty), and Dena doing much the same on her side of the young warrior, prying at his fingers, digging her nails into his hand, and the boy wondering what he had done to make Gabriel punish him like this, when they heard a low, raspy hiss.

They turned as one. The Screecher stood there, sword drawn and watching them.

Immediately, the young warrior dropped Dena and Emma and reached for his falchion. But the girls had sent him off balance and he stumbled backward, tripping over a pile of rubble and falling just as the Screecher’s sword cut the air in front of him. Without thinking, Emma grabbed a stone. The Screecher was moving in for the kill when the stone bounced off its head, drawing the creature’s attention. At the same moment, Dena attacked from the other side, burying her knife in the Screecher’s leg. The creature let out one of its terrible, breath-crushing shrieks and sent Dena spinning with a backhand blow. It pulled the knife free and—

There was a thick, crunching
chunk
. Everything stopped. The creature looked down. The young warrior had buried his falchion halfway through its body. The boy stood, yanked the blade free, and then brought it down, driving the monster to the ground. The creature’s body lay there, smoking. The whole thing had only taken a few seconds.