by Tad Williams
Only a few dozen paces beyond the star-crossing the corridor began to get hot and Theo began to have a pretty bad feeling about what might have happened to the main tower above his head. Within twenty more steps he was sweating profusely. Then the corridor dead-ended in a wall of gently smoking rubbish where the ceiling had collapsed.
Oh my God. Here, too. He stood, swaying. It seemed clear that the destruction above must be general, and that it extended all the way down to this place, a floor beneath ground level. Which meant that he had just forced his way into the most dangerous parts of another crippled building.
But it's not as bad down here as where I was before. He clung to that thought. She might be trapped in there and the doors are just stuck closed. No more time to stand around: it was painfully hot and seemed to be getting worse. He pulled his jacket sleeve over his fingers and gingerly touched the vertical rubble, looking for a safe place to apply pressure, but it did not move when he shoved it. He turned and retreated back up the corridor.
Theo tightened the shirt over his mouth and wiped at his streaming eyes as he reached the five-way crossing. He chose one of the two closest corridors and followed it until he again reached another spot where deadfall from the ceiling sent him back.
Golden beetles with charred shells dropped from the crevices above, pattering on his shoulders and head, crunching underfoot when he walked. At least the humming, buzzing voice-leak had finally gone silent, dying as the hob-voice had died. He chose another corridor and followed a succession of twisting passageways, struggling to keep himself focused on which direction was the one he wanted, but he hadn't had time to learn much about the main house tower's geography and it was even more baffling from underneath. He stopped at another ragged wall of collapsed ceiling, heartsick and exhausted, but just as he was about to turn back once more he saw that one of the open doorways on the edge of the destruction led to a short passageway and another door.
Theo fought through the debris, protecting himself with the jacket as he pushed heavy pieces of beam out of the way, their charred edges still glowing in places. When he reached the other door he found it was blocked by an obstacle on the far side, but at last he managed to shove it open. An arm fell across the gap as he stepped through; he almost tripped over it and fell down another set of stairs. The fairy-corpse at his feet had been crushed by a large chunk of metal from above, which after doing its murderous work had tumbled on down the open stairway. The air duct or whatever it was had finally lodged about halfway down the steps, a blacksmudged clot of silver.
Neither corpse nor fallen duct held his attention very long: beyond and below, spread across the massive chamber and visible only because much of the smoke was being drawn up into the ruined ceiling, lay a bewildering panorama of devastation.
Theo's first thought was that somehow, through some incomprehensible fairy-magic, he had stepped right out of Daffodil House and was viewing the great complex's destruction from some perch high above. It took a moment to realize that what he was seeing instead was an accidental reflection in miniature.
The ceiling of the huge, vaulted room that contained Daffodil Comb had come down in a tumult of flaming beams and shattered ducts and material, smashing the center of the comb flat and setting the remnants on fire: tongues of flame still leaped toward the ruined ceiling, filling the air with a swirl of ash and sparks, a storm of white flecks and orange glitter, so that the wide space seemed like nothing so much as a souvenir snowglobe out of Hell's giftshop. Bodies were scattered everywhere, on the floor and in the rubble. A dozen or so were Theo's size, ordinary fairies who had been visiting the comb for work or social reasons, but the ghastly majority were pixies and sprites and other small creatures, uncountable hundreds or even thousands of tiny bodies burned black, translucent wings curled and crisped, so that what had been an entire city of speaking, singing people now looked like drifts of dead flies. But not all had died in the first destruction: small cries of shock and pain filled the air, and Theo finally realized that what swirled through the chamber was more than bits of fiery ash, that the upper reaches were full of tiny, awkwardly fluttering shapes, some of them actually aflame, others just beginning to smolder — flying sparks hunting madly for escape but instead being sucked upward by the hot drafts. Others that had managed to stay below the updrafts were battering themselves against doors and walls as they died, blind and brainless. It began to seem like half of the million sparks that filled the air were dying fairies.
Theo stumbled down the stairs, batting out the flecks of burning ash that settled in his hair and threatened his eyes, but he already knew it was hopeless: the heat was too intense. He could not stay in the burning room long enough to reach the worst of the destruction, let alone search in that horrid, charred pile for one little body. He felt as though his eyes were coming out of his head, raw and so dry he could not even blink. The smell was terrible.
He stopped when he reached the floor. A great piece of burning beam fell from the hole in the roof and clattered into the rubble of the comb, sending up a massive plume of sparks and flame. In the momentary glare he saw that someone was kneeling on the ground not far away — someone his own size. Although debris had fallen very near and floating embers were settling on the figure's back, the fairy did not look badly burned. He was even moving, although very slowly, trying to pull himself across the ground.
"Stay there!" Theo shouted, but it came out as a garbled yelp. He pulled the shirt away from his mouth so he could make himself understood. "I'll help you!" The figure's head came up and glanced around, half-blinded by the smoke. To Theo's astonishment, he recognized him. "Cumber?"
He crossed the floor as quickly as he could, leaping over piles of burning debris, edging around those that were too large to vault, struggling to stay upright, blocking any thought about what was crunching and smearing underneath his feet. He reached the ferisher's side and dragged him upright, ignoring the protests of his own agonized muscles. Cumber Sedge looked at Theo for a long, stunned moment without seeming to recognize him.
"Come on, it's me — Theo! I'll help you. Can you walk?"
"My leg — something fell on it." Cumber took another step and almost fell. Theo got under his shoulder.
"Yeah, me too. You forget about it after a while. Hold on." They went staggering back through the smoke like some sickly twoheaded, three-and-a-half-legged monster. It was incredibly difficult for Theo to pull the fairy up the stairs — Cumber was nowhere near his size, but he was no thing of swansdown and dandelion fluff, either. Something buzzed past Theo's face whimpering and trailing sparks. The ceiling groaned and another large piece shifted and then smashed down, throwing gobbets of fire past them as they struggled to mount to the landing. "They killed everyone," Cumber said sadly. "Everyone."
"Not you and me," Theo said through clenched teeth. He was beginning to think he'd have to put the ferisher over his shoulders. "Not yet." The most difficult part was getting past the lump of metal that had killed the fairy at the top of the stairs. It had overbalanced since Theo had passed and rolled down another length of stairway and was now wedged crossways across the steps. Theo's only option was to climb past it himself, then lean back and try to help Cumber Sedge over the obstruction.
As the ferisher was struggling to climb over the hot metal, the duct began to shift again. Cumber more or less leaped off the chunk of metal, gasping with pain, just as it shifted, slid, and then tumbled on down the stairs to the fiery floor of the Daffodil Comb chamber.
Theo just stepped over the corpse at the top of the landing, but Cumber Sedge balked, although he had been surrounded by charred bodies only moments earlier.
"The rest of the roof is going to come down any second," Theo told him. "Step through this door or I'll slug you and drag you." He had actually raised his hand — he was coughing and his eyes were so teary he could hardly see, but he was definitely going to do it — when Cumber swallowed and stepped over the ruined body.
"That was Drift Burd
ock," he said as Theo pulled him through the doorway. "I've known him since I was small. He worked with my mother." "We're heading for the stairs." There was nothing else to say, really. Theo got under Cumber's arm again, hobbling with him toward the star-shaped crossing. Behind them something began growling in such a deep voice that for a terrified instant Theo thought that the winged shadow, the dragon, had returned, had come down to the ground and forced its way into the vast room behind them. Then the walls of the corridor shook hard, the floor bounced, and the growl became a crackling groan. "The ceiling!" Theo shouted. He bent and got hold of Cumber Sedge as best he could, draping him awkwardly over his shoulder, then ran, his heart swelling in his chest until he thought his ribs would explode outward. He made only a dozen steps before there was a loud scraping, squealing sound followed by a titanic slam and a blast of hot air from behind them. The floor convulsed beneath their feet and Theo pitched over, Cumber falling awkwardly beneath him.
After a few dazed seconds, when the rest of the roof and walls had not come down on top of them, Theo dragged Cumber up and hurried him toward the only place that he knew for certain led up and out to safety.
By the time they reached the stairs leading to the conference center lobby, smoke was roiling around their feet like swamp-mist. Cumber, dazed and in great pain, wanted to stop to get his breath, but Theo would not allow it.
The last moments went like a falling dream, like the instant between realizing you were about to be in a car accident and the first smash of metal on metal. As they staggered up out of the stairwell Theo saw that the lobby was full of people, mostly hooded constables helping victims out toward the open doors, but all those other living creatures might as well have been in some kind of parallel dimension, a place that although visible had nothing to do with Theo Vilmos. His only thought, the one thing that kept his legs driving, was to get out of the building, to reach air and light and to have nothing above his head but sky.
A huge daffodil made of wood and gold leaf had fallen from the wall and shattered, flinging pieces everywhere; it seemed an exhausting insult at this late point to have to lift his weary legs over the fragments, but he did. They stumbled out of the doors to stand stunned beneath black sky and the burning hulk of the main tower, the flames reflected a thousand times in the windows of Daffodil House's other buildings. The shorter, slenderer tower of Narcissus House was standing almost untouched just a few hundred feet away, although many of the windows were broken and some leaked smoke. The grotesque scene should have looked like something out of Dante — it did look like something out of Dante — but to Theo it was beautiful beyond description. It was the world again, the open sky, things he had been certain many times in the last hours were now lost to him forever.
They let hoarse-voiced constables shove them away from the door. Cumber disengaged himself and limped along unsupported. Theo smelled air that didn't have smoke in it, or at least that had more air than smoke.
Escape, he thought, blurry and tired, struggling to make something of his rattling thoughts. I'm out. I'm alive. Now what?
He couldn't think of much of anything that mattered, except taking a long, cool shower and then sleeping for a hundred years.
26 LOSING A FRIEND
The air outside was almost as smoky as what had been choking him inside the buildings, but when Theo could stop coughing for a moment it seemed almost deliciously pure, the breath of angels. He unknotted the sooty shirt around his face and threw it to the ground, then stood sucking in the wonderful stuff. He resolved to celebrate every single breath he ever took for the rest of his life.
Rivulets of golden beetles scuttled over the walls that still stood and across the ground, crackling under his feet as he trudged away from the conference center doors. Giant emergency lanterns had been set up all through the grounds of the Daffodil House gardens, out of reach of most of the falling debris, their lamps roofed over with lenses that beamed their mustard-colored light upward through the dark, swirling pall. Shouting constables and singed and dust-smeared victims were everywhere, as purposeless as the golden bugs except for one group of about a dozen fairies in long gray robes who stood in a circle at the farthest edge of the open space around the building, waving their arms in the air and singing. Some kind of religious group, he assumed, the fairy equivalent of the Salvation Army praying at a disaster scene, but then he heard a rumble of true thunder from high overhead and felt a spattering of rain on his face, and just at that moment the singing jumped up a key. Not holy-rollers, then, but a fairy version of the volunteer fire department, perhaps, their true mission meteorological rather than missionary. Theo shook his head. Time after time Faerie had almost killed him, yet he still understood so little about this place! But he could not afford to stand, dazedly watching them — he was still too close to the two most badly damaged buildings, the conference center and the main tower which seemed to be barely holding together. Bits of roof and façade came whirling down at intervals from the spotlight-painted heights to shatter against the ground, deadly as grenades.
With Cumber still in tow Theo staggered out toward the Daffodil House gardens and at last fell to his knees to retch up what felt like pounds of soot, coughing so hard that he could only lie on the ground when he had finished, too dizzy and weak to get up. For a long time he lay gasping, watching sparks drift past as he slid in and out of a fractured near-sleep while Cumber sat beside him, mumbling to himself and moaning. At last a female fairy appeared out of the murk, her eyes wide but her ash-smeared face wearily blank. She handed each of them what looked like an expensive goblet before she wandered off again into the near-darkness and the new rain. Theo sat up and drank a little of the water, coughed most of it up, then drank again. For a brief moment his entire life was in that silvery thread of water running down his throat, a thing of indescribable sweetness and wonder.
As he sat, feeling for the first time in hours that there might be some point to being alive, another shape came staggering toward them like a broken toy. That poor bastard's in worse shape than we are, was all Theo had time to think, then the wind pushed the smoke away and he could see a familiar face. For a moment he thought he must be wrong, fooled by the dim light, but as the figure came closer, ten paces away, nine, eight, he grew certain. Stunned and exhausted, he could not think of the name or remember why this sudden visitation should seem so unlikely, but he did know that filmy-eyed face, he did.
"Iron and blood," Cumber groaned, watching the approach. "Look at that poor bastard. He's been blinded." "It's him," Theo said, almost too quiet to hear himself. "It's Tansy's cousin." A moment later the name came back too, but so did the memory of Rufinus weft-Daisy being stabbed to death in Penumbra Station. Before Theo could speak again, Rufinus' long coat flapped open to reveal the wrinkled, black-rimmed gape where the slit belly had collapsed inward and Theo felt an electrifying terror run through him. This was not Rufinus but something that wore his body, and Theo knew exactly what it was.
The dead thing came straight toward him. Air hissed through its gaping mouth as the hands came up, shriveled fingers flexing. Theo scrambled to his feet and tripped over Cumber Sedge. A moment later the corpse was on him, clutching at him with idiot strength. So frightened he could not shout for help, Theo smashed at the familiar but empty face that loomed over him, slamming his hand against it until he felt bones crack, but although he forced a belch of carrion air out if it, the thing did not lose its grip. The hands on his neck were icy cold. He grabbed at its body, trying desperately to push it away, and gobbets of flesh came loose in his hands like boiled chicken. The clutch on his throat grew colder, seemed to bury his thoughts in frost, turn his muscles into silt bleeding from the bank of an icy river. He could see nothing, think of nothing but the slack-skinned face . . .
Abruptly the fingers came off his neck and the living corpse tumbled from on top of him. He could hear Cumber's frightened grunting as the ferisher beat at the thing's head with his water goblet. Theo rolled over, gasping for
breath but strangely dreamy and slow-minded as he watched the thing fight back in near-silence. It clutched doggedly at Cumber Sedge's scorched pants legs, crawling up him even as the whimpering fairy beat its head — the head that had once been Rufinus weft-Daisy's, and which still had the look of a grisly caricature — into a shapeless knob.
Shaking off the frost on his thoughts, Theo crawled across the ground and tackled the dead thing, which pulled Cumber down as well. For a moment they both thrashed in panic, tangled in each other as well as their clawing, relentless adversary. Theo got away first and kicked the thing as hard as he could, felt ribs break underneath the mummified flesh. He kicked it again and again until it had to let go of Cumber to protect itself, curling like a silent, stinking spider, but even after the ferisher was free Theo kept kicking it in a screaming fury of horror and disgust, kicking the torso into broken meat and fragmented bone, until Cumber Sedge yanked him away.
"It's dead now!" the ferisher told him. "It's dead!" "It . . . was . . . already . . . dead," Theo gasped. He pulled free and kicked it again. The thing's eyes seemed completely dimmed now, the body finally motionless. "Hurry up," he said. "We have to get out of here." He grabbed at Cumber and began to pull him away from the body.
"Wait," Cumber said, "you need help. You're bleeding . . . !" Another shape appeared out of the murk and stopped beside the huddled thing on the ground. "Here, what's going on — what have you done?" the newcomer growled at them. "Come back!"
"It's a constable," Cumber said, relieved. "Hold on, he'll help us . . . !" Theo had no strength to spare on such nonsense. He sped to a staggering trot, tugging Cumber Sedge after him.
