by J M Sanford
Two dark-haired gentlemen, wearing fancy dark coats and riding dappled grey steeds, pursued the beast. Harold recognised them at once from the Flying City of Ilamira. As they rode away, Meg jumped up and ran after them. She hadn't a hope of keeping up with the horses, but she didn't need to. The giant creature soon came to the banks of a river running sluggish and black in the night, where the giant bounded across to the other side as easily as a boy jumping over a brook, but the gentlemen had to rein in their horses in a hurry. Seeing this, the creature crouched on the hillside, out of reach, watching his pursuers impassively as the two gentlemen walked their horses up and down, seeking a way around or across.
Meg crept up as close as she dared, with Harold at her heels, and crouched low in the shadow of a sufficiently large rock. Percival had stayed far behind, presumably for fear of his clanking giving them away.
One of the black-haired gentlemen dismounted and pulled a long, heavy steel bar from the saddlebag of his horse. Even at a distance, Harold could see the finely curling sigils that covered its surface, but couldn't begin to guess what the artefact might be. If their previous experience in Ilamira was anything to go by, it would be some sort of weapon…
The second gentleman retrieved something from the saddlebag of his own horse, and Meg craned her neck to get a better view, but it turned out only to be a kettle and teacups. The witch murmured something under her breath, and the wind changed subtly so that the gentlemen's conversation drifted towards her hiding place.
“Archmage Morel's orders were that we insert the new script and return the construction to the City as soon as possible,” said the twin without the kettle.
Meg swore. “Script,” she hissed at Harold, as if he couldn’t hear the conversation for himself. “More golems.”
One of the twins opened up his silver pocket watch.
“May I ask what you mean to do with that?” asked the twin with the kettle, struggling to light a fire in the damp and windy night.
“I intend to report our difficulties and ask for further advice, unless you have some objection I may have overlooked.” His voice was somewhat hoarse, no longer identical to that of his twin.
“It would be unwise. We absolutely must not draw further attention to our own failings.” He considered this in silence for a moment. Then, “Open your mouth and put out your tongue,” he instructed. He placed one finger in his twin’s obediently open mouth, a little like a prim old maid checking a mantelpiece for dust. Then, with his other hand, he performed the same examination on himself. “The problem with your hydration is worsening,” he said a moment later, wiping his hands on his handkerchief before folding it neatly and putting it back in his pocket. “Your temperature is also notably higher than mine.”
“We are not as we ought to be,” said the twin holding the script, looking uneasy at the thought.
“Agreed. And I have neither the skills to discern the cause of the fault, nor the means to repair it.”
Harold hadn’t known the stone men could get sick, but before he wrote it off as his own ignorance, he sneaked a glance at Meg, who looked similarly puzzled.
The gentleman attending to the kettle looked long and hard at the silent giant across the river. “We must reconsider our approach to the problem in hand,” he said. “In the meantime, please join me in a cup of tea.” Temporarily thwarted, the two gentlemen perched neatly on the riverbank, their handsome horses standing by, eerily quiet and patient, not even eating the scrubby grass.
Harold turned his attention back to the enormous golem squatting on the hillside out of reach. Its craggy face might not have much in the way of facial features, but it was looking undeniably smug at eluding its pursuers so easily. Harold couldn't fathom how it had come down to earth without breaking, let alone how the two gentlemen planned to get it back up to Ilgrevnia, especially when it obviously had no intention of going.
Meg wriggled closer across the grass like a cat after a bird. “They've got swords,” she whispered to Harold, “but if they have more of those lightning guns they used at Ilamira, I 'spect they'll be in the saddle bags. We might not get a better chance to overpower them…”
Harold lunged for her, but missed. “Miss Spinner!” he whispered as loud as he dared. “I don't think I should let you do that!”
Meg turned back to him, her eyes owlishly round and indignant behind the glass of her spectacles. “You don't think you should let me? I don't see how you'd stop me.”
Harold thought desperately hard, trying to remember what Sir Percival had taught him. Not so long ago, Meg had wanted time to think; now she was all impatience… “I reckon we're more use to Amelia if we stay hidden. If they find out we're here, they'll know she must be about an' all!”
That stopped Meg, if not for long. “Well I can't just sit down here doing nothing forever!” And she darted back off the way they'd just come.
Back at the cave, she seized the fire sprite's gilded cage, threw open its door and shook the creature out into the open air, where he floated around in sleepy confusion, trailing smoke.
“Meg?” said Percival. “What did you see? What are they up to?”
Meg shook her head. “I'll tell you in a minute.” Then she turned to the befuddled fire sprite. “Go and find Amelia, Stupid! And then you damn well better come back and tell me where she's got to!”
9: THE OLD MAGIC SHOP
With each passing hour, it had become more and more obvious to Amelia that she was alone and would remain alone for some time to come. Night had fallen, and the City that had looked grim enough in daylight became a nightmarish jumble of dead stone by the stark light of the moon. Jagged black shadows had taken great bites out of the grey stone and left hiding places where a hundred horrid things might lurk. Any one of those shadows might hide a griffin or a dragon, or an unseen pit in the decrepit City, waiting for her to stumble into it. Rats scurried past her from time to time, intent on their own business. Amelia took a deep breath, shivering and trying to fool herself into believing it was only down to the increasing cold. Logically, she knew the half-tame wyvern must have abandoned them, caught up in its grudge with the griffin, but in her heart she couldn't help but fear that something terrible had happened to Meg and the others. Wyvern or no, Meg would have found some way up to Ilgrevnia by now…
After her near miss with the white griffin and the guardsman, Amelia desperately wanted a nice cup of tea and a sit down, but she knew what she must do: find her White King, if she could, and put an end to this nonsense. She had the crown strapped to her leg, hidden by her skirt. If she should find the White King or the throne room by herself… well, she didn't quite know what she'd have to do if it came to that, so she could only hope that Meg would find her own way into Ilgrevnia soon. In the meantime, there was no sense in Amelia cowering in the abandoned street waiting for her – not if the end of the quest would put a stop to this ridiculous fighting. Not wanting to draw attention to herself by summoning a light to search by, Amelia pulled her spell book from her pocket. Squinting in the moonlight, she found a spell that promised the user eyes like a cat's. She wished she had Meg with her to show her the spell rather than try to replicate it from the illustrations, and it took a few tries before she got the shape of the spell right and her vision stopped blurring and shaking, but on her fourth or fifth attempt she could see as clear as day. She set out into the City.
The streets of Ilgrevnia twisted and doubled back on themselves, tunnels with arched brick ceilings burrowing under roadways and houses. Stairways spiralled up and down, and narrow alleyways ended suddenly, sometimes with a brick wall and sometimes with a nasty drop that might have been the end of Amelia, but for the cat's eye spell. Back along the centuries, something had taken an enormous chunk out of this Flying City. At the ragged edges, loose bricks and isolated blocks of masonry floated just off shore as if on some strange tide, bobbing when the wind gusted. The thought occurred to Amelia that a braver person might be able to use those fragments as stepping st
ones… if they would hold a person’s weight. As for Amelia, all she could do was to look across the abyss, to where a whole street of terraced houses had been torn open and left to the elements. She shuddered to think what it must have been that could do such a thing, and she moved on swiftly. These houses had been homes and businesses in another lifetime – she wouldn’t find the White King or the throne room in such ordinary surroundings, surely.
Alone in Ilgrevnia's Main Street, she stood looking down at the great wooden gates, closed and barred for who knew how many centuries. The gigantic clock hanging above them, though, still told the time. She turned, and lights caught her eye through the mist and thin drizzle of the night. Keeping to the shadows, she crept closer, towards Ilgrevnia's central square. The lights were street lamps illuminating the great polished obelisk of the Keystone: the Flying City's magical linchpin that stood ominous as some enormous tombstone at the very heart of it all. Grand houses (more like palaces, in the eyes of a provincial girl like Amelia) stood in a circle around it, packed shoulder to shoulder to crowd out the less magnificent buildings around them. Amelia dared not brave it out into the open space of the square, but could see the flames of oil lamps dancing in windows paned with clean unbroken glass. They lit the lavish interiors of huge rooms – extravagantly huge in a City so pushed for space. A terrace or balcony belonging to the very grandest of the mansions overlooked Ilgrevnia's Keystone Square, and this too had enormous bright windows. Amelia thought she caught a glimpse of a figure moving in one of the rooms beyond, but couldn't be sure.
If she could find the White King in Ilgrevnia at all, surely it would be in this palace. But what if her White King did turn out to be Prince Archalthus? The only time she'd ever seen the prince he'd been furious, and though he might have every reason (what with the Black Queen causing everybody so much trouble), she at least wanted to see him not frowning before she made up her mind to marry him. Oh, but the thought of marrying a real live prince had seemed so appealing during the more tedious parts of the long journey… and now that she was alone and perhaps on his very doorstep, her legs felt weak and her heart began to skitter like a frightened animal. The thought of meeting Prince Archalthus again frightened her so much that she didn't hear the footsteps coming up behind her until it was almost too late. Two gentlemen in fancy clothes were strolling along Main Street towards her: the Prince's men. With her cat's eye spell, the scene looked bright as daylight, and it was hard to imagine they couldn't see her. Amelia stood stock still in the shadows, invisible, holding her breath, head bowed and barely daring to look at the two gentlemen. They walked without speaking, precisely in step with one another, apparently patrolling. But they walked right past Amelia, and she slid away into a side street, still shaking from her latest lucky escape.
She sought shelter in a deserted street lined with what had once been shops, which now stood empty and with their doors and windows boarded up for the most part. She could have dealt easily enough with locked doors – she'd learnt a spell for that early on in her journey – but the boards posed more of a problem. She ran through every spell she could think of, and flicked through her spell book. Cringing at every sound she made in the quiet of the night, she soon gave it up as a bad idea, and when she noticed one open doorway in the row, she ducked inside. The shop had stood long abandoned, its wares gathering cobwebs on the shelves, the dust of decades on every surface. The boards over the door had been smashed in not so long ago, she thought, but whoever had been here must have found what they wanted and moved on.
Perhaps she ought to have a plan for dealing with the angry prince. Perhaps he wouldn't be so angry if she apologised for that business at the jade temple. Perhaps they'd just got off on the wrong foot… She sagged against the counter, sighing heavily. All her life, all she'd ever wanted was to be a princess and marry a handsome prince. The opportunity to live out her fondest dream had dropped into her lap without her having to lift a finger, so how could she have made such a terrible mess of it? Tears prickled at her eyelids and her throat ached as she tried not to cry. “Silly time to cry,” she muttered to herself, wiping her damp eyes, “Silly Amelia. Stop it.” She tilted her head back in the hopes that the tears wouldn't brim over, because if she let the first one fall, then all its companions would follow, and the snotty sobbing, and all the unattractive accoutrements of feeling sorry for oneself. She might find her White King yet, and he might turn out be perfect, so “buck up, or you'll end up looking a frightful mess,” she growled. She didn't even have a handkerchief. She sniffed and took another look around the abandoned shop. An empty moneybox lay open on the counter with its padlock smashed off, and the floor around the counter was littered with small crystals and gems: some round and some jagged, all gathering dust. Hundreds of strips of loose paper dangled from the wall behind the counter. She'd seen them before – a variety of spells written out and ready for use – but her cat's eye spell washed their bright colours out almost to grey. Against the opposite wall stood a rack of brooms, and Amelia could see at once that these hadn't been made for sweeping: they each had a leather grip on the handle, plus a pair of fur-lined gloves and goggles tied to them. She got up and lifted one of the brooms partly out of the rack, shivering at the cobwebs but somehow managing not to shriek when spiders went running everywhere. The broom had a strange lightness to it, as if impatient to fly. Since the wyvern had apparently abandoned them, perhaps she could fly back down to the ground and fetch Meg by broomstick. If she could work out how to control the thing… The thought of launching off Ilgrevnia's Walls and into a drop of a thousand feet or more made her almost physically sick. Perhaps she could give it a try at a low height, just a short hop along the deserted street, just to see what it would be like. She felt guilty at the idea of stealing, but the shop’s owner must be long gone, and it was clear a thief had been here before her. She put on the gloves, pleased by the soft cosy fur lining and hoping it boded well for the quality of the rest of the broom set. The gloves were a tight fit with her conjuring rings still on, but she might need them at short notice. She'd just set the broomstick aside and was trying to work out the buckles on the straps of the goggles when a bolt of flame shot past her ear, bright enough to make her newly-sensitive eyes water. She whirled round to see a girl in a grey blazer, pinafore and feathery wings standing in the doorway, a light spell glowing over her shoulder. Amelia squinted at the sudden brightness, and just for an instant, she thought the girl looked almost as surprised to see Amelia as Amelia was to see the girl. White Queen and Black Queen soon recognised one another, but the Black Queen recovered herself more quickly. “You! Hand over the crown and I'll let you go free.”
Amelia shook her head mutely. Did the Black Queen really expect her to give in so easily? Why did she have wings all of a sudden? What… what was she doing? The girl had raised her gloved hands, and with a look of intense concentration, held them before her chest in a strange attitude, mindful of her cumbersome new wings. The girl must be wearing conjuring rings beneath those black gloves: it looked as if Amelia would be forced to fight. Careful not to take her eyes off the Black Queen for even an instant, she dropped the broom back into the rack, and raised her own hands to defend herself, sparks fizzing like fireworks and scorching the palms of the riding gloves. Was it honourable for magic users to duel like this, or would it be murder to fling the first bolt?
“Don't you even think about it!” the Black Queen warned fiercely. Her eyes were hard and dark, her face grim for such a young girl. With a clap of her hands, a cloud of noise and darkness burst forth from the ether; a flock of sharp-beaked starlings mobbed Amelia and dissolved even as she threw her arms up to protect her face.
“Ow!” Amelia stumbled back as the last ghostly remnants of starlings tangled in her hair, pulling sharply. The Black Queen had birds on the brain…
“I mean it!” said the girl, “You hand over the crown and I'll let you go, no hard feelings. If you put up a fight, it'll go badly for you.”
�
�I don't have the crown on me!” Amelia lied. After all, who would be so foolish as to carry the wretched thing around, unarmed, in a strange city… “And even if I did, I wouldn't give it to you!”
“I want that crown!” the Black Queen shrieked, stamping her foot and bristling like a furious territorial cat. “I want it more than you do and I've worked harder for it!”
“Lots of people want that crown,” said Amelia, “but I won it fair and square.” And with that, she turned invisible. Another shot of blindingly bright fire whistled past her ear as she ducked beneath the counter. She could hear the Black Queen muttering and cursing, breathing heavily as she struggled to get her temper under control. Under the counter, Amelia tried desperately to think of a spell, praying that by witch's intuition the right one would break forth, but she'd learned too many and now they all fluttered uselessly around the inside of her head like a storm of butterflies. She remembered Meg's warning not to gesticulate wildly for fear of what might come out, but what could be worse than capture by the Black Queen? She thought of grabbing a random spellpaper from the wall and again hoping for the best, but the Black Queen seemed to be ahead of her: another shot ignited a section of the spell wall in a terrible cacophony of bangs and whistles and flashes. Amelia pressed herself into the corner beneath the counter, casting around for something, anything that she might use in self-defence, and as the smoke began to clear, she caught sight of a ring in the floor: the handle of a trapdoor. She yanked the trapdoor open and dropped down into the cellar before the Black Queen knew what was going on.
