by Dan Davis
‘Then you found us,’ Writer said.
‘It began with your friend Weaver, who came to kill me in a snow storm, mad with grief and hunger and her anger was enough to shake my tower. I had not felt fear for hundreds of years until that moment but she could never do anything like it again after. She was too wild and ill-tempered and I thought to break her will upon the loom so that she would become compliant and learn to do my bidding. Instead she grew bitter. Weaved me a good lot of cloth, though.’
‘She hates you,’
‘She does. But then the rest of you came, one by one and then I knew it was finally time. I had my weapons with which to change the world. With you children behind us we would finally have the edge we needed against the art and devices of the Alchemist’s Guild.’
‘What about my magic, though?’ Writer asked. ‘You said I could do real magic, too. The Alchemist’s art.’
Bede shook his long head and scratched his chin. ‘What a failure that all was. As well as the elemental powers I had a separate breeding plan. They had to be kept absolutely separate, you understand because the magic and the elemental powers cancelled each other out. Someone magical, like myself, can never have any elemental ability. And someone able to control an element can never perform any magic.’
‘But...’ Writer started.
‘Yes, yes, clearly I was wrong,’ Bede said. ‘But I could never maintain the lines for magi. My last success was your grandfather. No, your great-grandfather. On your mother’s side. Is that right? Never mind.’
A musket went off some distance away. Writer looked for the source of the noise.
‘Probably just shooting a rabbit for dinner,’ Cedd said.
But then there was shouting from the fields up river outside the camp and then more muskets did fire. She saw soldiers running about by the hedgerow a couple of fields’ away. The wind blowing in from the river grew stronger and that was when she knew who was causing the commotion.
‘It’s Archer,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ Cedd said, squinting. ‘And Weaver is there and Keeper.’
‘What are they doing?’ Writer asked, horrified.
‘Bede?’ said Cedd, calmly. ‘Your weapons are attacking an army by themselves.’
Bede scowled. ‘Fools.’
‘They’re going to get themselves killed,’ Writer shouted.
‘Yes,’ Bede said.
‘Do something,’ Writer cried, grabbing his arm.
Muskets sounded, banging away one after the other and some all together.
Bede shook off her hand. ‘I do not see what I can do about it,’ he said.
Writer could for a moment do no more than stare at him in shock. ‘Cedd?’
‘We can do nothing that would not result in our deaths.’
‘You’re cowards.’ As soon as she said it, she realised it was true. It explained so much.
‘Quite right,’ Bede said. ‘We do not take risks for petty rewards. We must never lose sight of our overall objective.’
‘How do you think we have lived so long?’ Cedd asked. ‘Even with the Elixir that slows our ageing, most alchemists die due to violence. Not us.’
‘Petty rewards?’ she said and strode off along the top of the bank.
The wind was getting stronger and stronger, the noise rushing in her ears like a storm.
Bede and Cedd shouted at her to come back but she was in such a fury she ignored them. She could hear Bede chanting a spell so she started to run but the ground beneath her feet shifted and turned to liquid mud.
Writer sank up to her knees and then the mud turned dry and hard and she was stuck fast into the top of the bank.
‘Let me go,’ she shouted as the two old alchemists came panting up behind her.
‘You are our last hope,’ Bede scolded her from his great height, raising his voice lest the wind snatch it away. ‘We cannot lose you.’
The anger welled up inside her. The unfairness of it. Writer gritted her teeth and reached out to the Sweetwater. It was so easy now as she brought up two snaking columns of water from the river and whipped them into Bede and Cedd with enough force to smack them both down from the bank into the road on one side and the field on the other. They coughed and gasped, both looking stunned.
She brought some water up through the ground to her feet, turning the dry earth to liquid mud and freeing her legs. Then she poured more water under herself until it surrounded her up to her shoulders and then she used the force of the water to lift herself up into the air above the bank. From that height she saw the focus of the commotion inside, with all the soldiers pouring in to an area with a great mass of wagons. In the gaps between them she saw glimpses of her friends darting this way and that. Smoke from muskets kept obscuring them but the clouds were snatched away again by a strong wind. Soon they stopped by one wagon, and Writer saw them uncover Burp.
She descended back to the top of the bank and let the water drain away into the earth. Her skin and clothes and hair were soaked so she pulled the water away from herself and became dry in an instant.
Muskets were firing inside the camp. She watched the tiny figure of Archer hold off dozens of soldiers trying to charge through the wagons. She could just about make out Weaver and Keeper struggling with an enormous Burp who thrashed around in his chains.
Bede and Cedd were coughing as they got to their feet. She wished she could do the same to the entire army camp and save her friends from all the soldiers but the distance from the Sweetwater to the camp was simply too great. She looked at the muddy pit she had pulled herself from, the pit that Bede had dug as a trap for her using some spell.
‘Bede, get up here,’ she commanded, shouting into the wind. The old man took forever to climb the slope, clutching his soggy book.
‘You can fly?’ he asked, astonished and shivering.
‘I made the column of water and I floated upon the top.’ Bede looked dumbfounded. ‘Now,’ she continued. ‘You must dig a channel along the length of this road, as wide and deep as you can. And also cut a hole through the rampart surrounding the camp.’
‘You do not give me orders,’ Bede bristled. ‘I am your master and you...’
Cedd cut him off. ‘Do as she says, you flaming idiot.’
Bede hesitated then bowed his head briefly. He cleared his throat, dropped his book and held his hands aloft.
Then, the cannon on the landship boomed but instead of shooting at the tower, it was shooting into its own camp and Writer watched as the cannonball blasted the wagon where Keeper, Weaver and Archer were struggling with Burp and smashed it into a thousand pieces.
The Return of Hopkins and Stearne
Archer coughed. His head hurt. There was no sound but an endless ringing in his ears. Something felt funny; his arm?
His face was wet and there was something in his eyes. Coughing, he rolled over onto his hands and knees and wiped his face as he staggered upright then saw blood on his hands. His face was covered in blood. There was a long gash on the top of his head that he gingerly prodded.
There was a big splinter of wood sticking through his forearm. A narrow but jagged shard about a foot long pushed his sleeve into the wound and poked out the other side. It was strange that there was little and no pain. He pulled the splinter out slowly, pulling the sleeve out and dropped it to the mud. Pain, finally, lanced through the wound making him gasp.
Looking around he saw smoke and devastation. The wagon was gone. Turned into bits of wood scattered all over. Weaver and Keeper were climbing to their feet. Burp was writhing in the mud, bound in chains, steam pouring from the iron muzzle clamped round his mouth. Soldiers stalked toward them from out of the smoke. Archer tried to call up the wind to blow them away but there was nothing there. The effort of trying made his head swim and his vision clouded over.
He had exhausted himself.
‘Weaver,’ he shouted and coughed and shouted again. ‘Weaver, I need you!’
He staggered towards her and Keeper as the g
round rumbled and shook so hard he fell to his knees next to Weaver who had her hands in the mud and her eyes glowing with green fire. She was making a circle of earth rise up around them, to shield them from the soldiers. The earth sloped up to ring around them in a continuous bank which grew tall as a man then taller still. Mud and bits of wood and muskets and helmets rolled down the slopes toward them, tumbling down in a clatter. When the top was ten or twelve feet high the rumbling slowed and stopped. The three of them and Burp were in the bottom of bowl-shaped depression.
A cannon fired again and the cannonball smashed into the outside of their tiny earthen fort and Archer saw as it bounced over the top and away across the camp.
There was shouting outside and muskets were fired but at what he had no idea. Weaver was on all fours with her head down, breathing deep, shaky breaths.
‘Thank you,’ Archer said to Weaver as he pulled her to her feet. Her hands were caked in mud past the elbow and she looked almost as tired now as he felt. ‘Now we need a way out of here.’
Weaver was staring at him in horror. There were dark circles under her eyes. ‘Your face,’ she said, quietly.
‘Oh,’ Archer said, wiping at the blood. ‘It’s just from this little cut up here.’
‘It’s not little, Archer. I think I can see the bone.’
He felt sick but he swallowed the feeling down. ‘The Elixir will take care of it,’ he said. ‘A nice long sleep and I’ll be good as new.’
‘You’ll get killed before then.’ Weaver said. She nodded at the walls she had built around them. ‘That mud ain’t steep on the other side neither.’ She was exhausted.
‘Can you make the slopes steeper?’ he asked. ‘Can you shake the men off?’
Weaver shook her head. ‘Took it out of me,’ she said.
He squeezed her shoulder. ‘You did good,’ Archer nodded. ‘Help Keeper to free Burp. A fire breathing dragon gets us out of here, right?’
Weaver nodded and bent to help Keeper who was mumbling reassuring words to his chained friend. Burp’s eyes were wide and his nostrils flared and snorted steam; muscles rippling under black scales. He looked enraged and dangerous and letting him loose would probably turn out to be a mistake but he saw no other way out.
From the corner of his eye he saw movement at the top of the bank around them and without thinking, without remembering that he was tired, he smashed a column of air into the men up there who were aiming muskets down toward them. In an instant those men were gone and Archer found himself on his knees again. Weaver moved to help him but he gestured she should stay.
‘Free the dragon,’ he said.
More men appeared on the opposite side and from his knees he swept them away even before they could level their muskets.
He was lying on his face, he found. The cold, sucking mud on his cheek. When had he fallen? He got back to his knees and waited for the next group to come. He waited longer. And kept waiting.
‘Alchemist’s children,’ a voice cried from the outside of their earthen fort. ‘Alchemist’s children, can you hear me? We wish to negotiate.’
Weaver was looking at him. Keeper was using the ramrod from a musket to prise open links on Burp’s chains.
Archer had no breath to answer.
‘We are coming in,’ the voice shouted. ‘But it is only myself and my associate. I vow to come in peace and with only good intentions. Do you assent?’
Archer nodded at Weaver.
‘Yeah, alright,’ she shouted back at them. ‘No funny business or you’re dead, right?’
‘Agreed,’ came the response after a tiny pause.
A few moments later a man appeared at the top of the circular bank with his open hands raised above his head and looked down at them for a moment before trudging down the mud on the inside. Another man followed.
Archer forced himself to his feet.
‘My word,’ the first man said as he slid to the bottom of the slope. ‘You appear gravely wounded. Might I suggest our physician take a look?’ The man spread his arms and smiled and Archer saw then that the man was Hopkins. The Witchfinder General who had kidnapped Writer and tried to drown her. And the man with him was the one Writer called Stearne. The one with the brass mechanical arm.
‘No,’ Archer said. ‘What do you want to talk about?’
‘Well,’ Hopkins smiled his oily smile. ‘We do appear to be at somewhat of an impasse, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Depends,’ Archer said. ‘On what that means.’
Hopkins scoffed. ‘It means that we clearly cannot get into this mound of yours and you are unable to get out.’
Archer forced himself to not look at Burp or Keeper. ‘Perhaps,’ he lied.
‘And so we are come to negotiate,’ Hopkins said.
‘What are we negotiating for?’ Archer said.
‘Well, what do you want?’ Hopkins said, smiling. Stearne was looming behind, a twisted look on his face.
‘For you and all your soldiers to leave the Vale, for ever.’
Hopkins burst out laughing. Even Stearne grinned and muttered something about idiot peasants.
‘No,’ Hopkins said. ‘That’s not how these work. You are to request something that is possible, not your mad fantasies.’
Archer nodded to himself, closing his eyes as if he was considering. All he had to do, he thought, was keep them talking long enough for Keeper to free Burp and then it would be time for the fire. Fire spreading from tent to tent and driving them all out of the Vale back through the swathe they had cut through the Moon Forest and he watched them go, dejected and defeated, streaming out in a ragged line. Suddenly, he felt himself swaying and he snapped his eyes open. He had been dreaming. He had fallen asleep standing up.
Hopkins was watching his shrewdly. He was still watching Archer when he spoke to his man behind him. ‘The boy is dead on his feet.’ He looked at Weaver. ‘The girl, too. At least, I think it’s a girl.’
Weaver growled and started to charge at Hopkins but the Witchfinder General reached both hands inside his coat and pulled out a pair of pistols. Archer noted that they had already been cocked and were ready to fire and he watched as Hopkins pointed one at Weaver and the other one at Archer. Weaver dug her heels in and stood fuming. Keeper knelt by Burp with his hand on the dragon’s head.
‘Negotiation is over,’ Hopkins said, grinning.
‘Call the lads in?’ Stearne muttered. ‘What about the dragon?’
‘No need,’ Hopkins said. ‘It’s never getting out of those chains. Grab this boy instead.’
Stearne marched at Archer and grabbed him around the neck with one hand, tight. The hand that was made from metal. Archer grabbed the hand and tried to prise the fingers apart but his wounded arm was next to useless and the fingers were like a vice. Stearne lifted Archer up off his feet and he found that he could not breathe.
‘Now, you will answer some simple questions and then I shall toss you in a wagon and send you to London. Cromwell can do what he likes with you but no doubt you will be working in the Tower like all the other traitors. If you do not answer or if you lie, and I shall know if you do, then you shall suffer a quite different fate’ Hopkins voice sounded far away. ‘First question is, where’s the other witch?’
Archer was confused. What witch? He could not speak to answer yet Hopkins must have read his mind.
‘The witch called Maerwynn,’ Hopkins sounded irritated. ‘Where is she? Tell me and I shall spare you.’
Archer gasped and Stearne loosened his grip. ‘I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you.’ Stearne placed him on the ground and let go. Archer rubbed his neck and swallowed a dry throat. His arm throbbed. The ground underfoot seemed to be vibrating.
‘Well?’ Hopkins said, and poked Archer in the chest with a pistol.
‘Shove it up your bum,’ Archer said.
‘You cheeky rotter,’ Stearne said and grabbed Archer round the throat again, lifting him off his feet. The metal fingers dug into his neck and the world started turning
black at the edges as began to pass out.
‘This is your last chance,’ Hopkins hissed at him. ‘In a moment I shall stop pretending to be a reasonable man.’
Then Hopkins frowned and looked around. The earth slopes around them were shaking. Little spills of stones and mud slipped and rolled down the slopes into the bottom. More discarded muskets rolled down. Stearne and Hopkins exchanged a confused glance as the rumbling grew louder and the men outside began shouting warnings which quickly became cries of fear. There was a rushing sound like a river or even the sea.
‘Put him down,’ Hopkins commanded Stearne. ‘Go look.’
Stearne dropped Archer, who fell to his knees and sucked air gratefully down his throat but it hurt to breathe. Archer looked over at Weaver, expecting to see her hands plunged into the earth but she looked as confused as he was. The earth beneath them was shaking but it was not her doing it. Keeper was behind her, his hand on Burp who was still bound in chains. There was no hope of freeing him; Archer saw that now.
‘Don’t try anything,’ Hopkins said. ‘I’ll shoot you.’ Archer saw the pistol pointed at him. There was only one shot in it only the other pistol was pointed at his friends. Hopkins called out to Stearne, who had scrabbled to the top of the bank. ‘What’s happening out there?’ The rumbling, roaring had stabilised into a constant, low noise. The screams of men were now in the distance and fading every moment.
Stearne said nothing for a long moment. ‘They’re gone,’ he said, flatly.
Hopkins blinked. ‘What do you mean? Who’s gone?’
‘See for yourself,’ Stearne said, irritably.
Hopkins hesitated then backed away from them, keeping his pistols pointed at them until he was halfway up the slope. ‘Don’t you try anything,’ he said. ‘I’ll get you before you do.’ And he turned and scrambled up to join Stearne at the top. He, too, froze. Archer could not hear what they were saying to each other but they were facing away.
