by David Walton
They flew past shop after shop, past the rows of latrines that emptied out into the river below, past the Chapel of St. Thomas, a church dedicated to Thomas Beckett that was larger than some churches built on land. When they passed around the chapel and through the narrowest arch of the bridge, Elizabeth wheeled the horse around and turned to face their pursuers. As the first two charged through the arch after them, they exploded into flame. The horses collapsed, blocking the tunnel, already dead. Their riders were blackened ash. The next horse collided into this devastation and went down, catapulting his rider off of his back before he, too, burst into white flames.
The tunnel was black with smoke and barricaded with blackened corpses. Frightened whinnies and shouts could be heard from the other side. Juan Barrosa emerged from the passage where he'd been hiding with the Ignis Dei for the better part of the day. "Right on schedule," he said. "Lucky I had it primed."
Elizabeth still stared at the destruction. "I had no idea," she said. "You told me what it could do, but I didn't realize . . ."
"We can't wait," Ramos said. "Let's go."
Barrosa lifted the Ignis Dei onto his own horse and jumped into the saddle. They galloped the rest of the way to the end of the bridge toward Southwark. The top of the south gate bristled with pikes on which human heads were impaled, gruesome and covered in tar. These were all that was left of criminals who had been convicted by the crown of high treason. Ramos couldn't tear his eyes away.
If this went poorly, it would be his own head grinning down from there before the end of the day.
As they hurtled through the gate, it suddenly became clear why the bridge was deserted. At least a hundred soldiers stood solemnly in ranks, guarding the gate. They were facing south, away from the gate, though some of them turned as Ramos, Elizabeth, and Barrosa bore down on them. Philip and Mary must have feared a rebellion, that someone would mount an assault on the city to rescue Elizabeth, so they had posted soldiers here to guard the bridge.
The soldiers hadn't been expecting anyone from the bridge, so they were slow to act. Elizabeth spurred her horse on, charging right past them, and Barrosa followed just behind.
"That's the princess!" an officer shouted. "After them!" Soldiers ran to their horses to give pursuit.
Elizabeth, Barrosa, and Ramos turned a corner, out of view for the moment, but knowing it wasn't for long. This was not good. They needed more time, time to board a coach and leave the city without the king knowing which way they had gone. The coach would bring them to Gravesend, where they could board the ship for the Netherlands.
Ramos had never been on this side of the Thames before. He barely saw it now, jostled on the back of the sweating horse as Elizabeth urged it ever faster. It was an ugly part of the city, a place for bear-baiting, gambling, and whoring. Taverns and brothels whisked by along with cheap tenement housing and the occasional playhouse. Finally, they reached an inn on Tooley Street, where the coach was waiting for them with fresh horses.
They handed their mounts to the men who had risked their lives to make this escape possible. "Bless you," Elizabeth said. "Get out of sight now; there are soldiers coming."
"Quickly," Ramos said, and ducked inside. He breathed a prayer of thanks at the sight of Antonia, already seated, mumbling rapid nonsense to herself. He gave her an embrace that she neither responded to nor seemed to notice, but that was all right. She was safe. All the way from the Tower, he had worried that their plan might have been found out, that Antonia would be in a dungeon, or worse, already dead, a victim of the king's wrath.
Elizabeth climbed in across from him, and with a cry from the driver, the horses broke into a run, and the carriage lurched forward with the clatter of wooden wheels on paving stones. The friends who had helped them scattered.
As they drove east out of Southwark and into farming country, Ramos kept checking behind them for signs of pursuit. Cows meandered near the road, and sheep dotted the grassy hills farther south. Could they really have made it away safely? His heart began to slow down, and he dared to hope.
"They say that a star disappeared from the sky, and some people went mad," Antonia said.
Ramos whirled to face her. "What did you say?"
She didn't meet his eye or acknowledge his presence. "They started babbling nonsense, and many of them were killed, at least in Spain. I think we are the mad ones they're talking about," she said.
A rush of heat flooded through Ramos's chest. Antonia spoke from time to time, and occasionally her speech made a kind of sense, though never in context. But this was the first time he had heard her actually refer to her own condition, or to the nova.
"Our spirits left our bodies behind and came here. Our loved ones may even be hearing what we are really saying, only it doesn't make any sense to them, so they call it babbling," Antonia said.
This time, Ramos couldn't help it. He started to cry. He snatched up her hands and squeezed them. "I'm here, Antonia!" he shouted. Elizabeth and Barrosa watched in astonishment, looking back and forth between them.
"She is aware," Elizabeth said. "She is alive and thinking and interacting somewhere, just not here."
Ramos passed a hand in front of Antonia's eyes, but she didn't blink. "Could she be in another body? Living somewhere else in the world, but unable to return?"
"Perhaps she is in heaven," Elizabeth said. "Perhaps her soul has passed on to the blessed realm, but something has prevented her body from being severed completely from it."
Ramos remembered Antonia's terrified screaming from the night the nova had first appeared. "I don't think so," he said.
"Do you hear that?" Barrosa said, suddenly tense.
"What?"
"Hoofbeats."
Ramos concentrated. Yes, he could make out another set of hoofbeats, faster than their own. He leaned out of the carriage and looked behind. A plume of dust billowed in the distance.
"We're being followed!" he shouted to the driver. "Hurry!"
The driver cracked the reins, and the carriage picked up speed. Without a carriage to pull, however, their pursuers were faster. It was hopeless, Ramos knew. They could never outrun them, now that they had been spotted.
"We need to stop the coach," Ramos said. "Your Grace, you must take a horse and ride. On your own, you might elude them."
"No. I will not abandon you," she said.
"Please. It is to save you that we risked everything. If you, at least, were spared . . ."
She held his gaze, her eyes green and clear. "What kind of ruler would I be if I left my friends to die while I saved myself?"
Matchlocks fired behind them, and Ramos heard one ball thud into the wood of the carriage. There were empty fields around them in every direction, with nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.
"Thank you for your loyal service," Elizabeth said.
Ramos grimaced. "Don't give up hope quite yet. I have one last desperate trick to pull." He pulled a chicken bone out of his pocket and began to talk to it. "Matthew," he said. "Are you there?"
MATTHEW followed his father out of the cave, with Parris wandering distractedly behind him. Ferguson and Craddock flanked them, making sure they didn't speak with any of the other colonists on their way out. Matthew suspected the others were being given salt only to the degree that they were loyal to Ferguson. Those closest to him were the most powerful; those suspected of disagreeing with his leadership were given short rations, if any at all. It was the feudal system back again: a single lord who controlled the natural resource (in this case, salt instead of land), and thus controlled all the people as well. In retrospect, Matthew realized they'd been foolish to overlook this kind of power grab as a possibility.
Out of the caves, they headed north, higher up into the mountains. Matthew didn't know where his father was leading them, if anywhere. They were three humans in a vast wilderness, driven out by their own people, their home destroyed, and with enemies on every side. They had nowhere to go. They made camp in the shadow of a large rock jutting
out of the mountainside, though with no supplies and without quintessence, their shelter was damp and exposed, and all they had to eat was a meager collection of roots and greens that Parris scavenged for them. It demonstrated how dependent they were on quintessence for everything.
Matthew sank to the ground and put his head in his hands. "What are we going to do?" he said.
"God will provide, as he has always done. We will pray and wait on his goodness," his father said.
It was something Matthew himself might have said two years earlier, before coming to Horizon, but a lot had changed since then. He was no longer afraid of his father, nor afraid of disagreeing with him. "Always provided? What does that mean? Catherine is dead. She's not coming back, and I don't know what I'll do without . . . I don't know how to live without . . ." Tears flooded into his eyes, but he gritted his teeth and didn't let himself cry. This was no time to grieve.
"Thanks to me, the colony is totally destroyed," he continued. "Ferguson thinks we need new leadership, and maybe he's right. With your passive piety and my wild experimentation, we haven't done very well by them, have we?"
"We did the best we could, by God's grace. And will continue to," his father said.
Matthew hurled a stone into the trees, where it cracked against a rock and then bounced soundlessly through the foliage. "Continue how? Ferguson threatened to kill us if we come back, which he would be very able to do, since he controls all the salt. The Spanish would kill us for sure, or worse, torture us and make us tell them how to find and kill everyone else. We can't get home, and our best allies are a tribe of manticores who are less than hospitable and only agreed to help us when they thought we could provide help in return."
"For someone who worships reason and logic, you're not thinking very clearly," his father said mildly.
Matthew raised an eyebrow. "No? I think I laid out our situation pretty plainly."
"That's because you're so focused on yourself. You think it's your fault that Catherine may be dead." Matthew tried to object, but his father held up a hand. "I say may be dead, because we only have the word of one who did not see it happen. But that's not my point. My point is that you feel like you should have stopped her from going or should have protected her better. And you think it's your fault that the settlement was destroyed."
"It was my experiment!"
His father gave him the sort of glare that had sent him scurrying when he was young. "Close your mouth and listen to what I'm saying. It's not all about you. You're so wrapped up in your inventions that you think the only way a problem can be solved is if you do it yourself."
"So I should sit around and do nothing?"
"You just finished telling me how powerless we are. So instead of despairing and blaming yourself for what you can't do, acknowledge that life . . . that reality . . . is a lot bigger than you are. That there's more to life than you can measure or control."
Matthew stood up, annoyed. "I don't understand this. Didn't you teach me to take responsibility for my actions?"
"Yes. But not to take responsibility for everything that happens. God is telling this story, not you. No matter how much power or knowledge you have, you can't write the ending."
"So you want me to give up."
His father sighed. "I think you know what I'm telling you. You just don't want to listen."
"I am listening. I know what you think; I always have. I just don't agree."
Matthew wasn't sure his father would ever understand. What he saw as the best hope for the future of mankind, his father saw as an obsession with the unnatural and a rejection of the Almighty. His father blamed him for the decreasing attendance at Sunday worship services and the colonists' increasing self-reliance where they should be sensing their need for God. Most people believed in God out of a fear of the supernatural. Storms, lightning, and disease were all ways that God showed his displeasure with the sins of men. But what if those things could be understood and controlled? What was left for God?
Parris stood up. "Something is happening," he said.
They both looked at him. Matthew had almost forgotten he was there. "What do you mean?"
"Among the manticores," Parris said. "Something big. Loyalties are changing. The tribal structure is being overturned. And something else . . ."
The ground heaved under Matthew's feet, throwing him sideways. He landed painfully, twisting his wrist under his body. The rock they were sheltering under split with a deafening crack. The mountain seemed alive, like a giant waking up. It reminded him of a year ago, when the island had been sliding over the edge of the world.
"What's happening?" Matthew shouted.
"The lords of the earth are rising!" Parris shouted back.
"What does that mean?"
The massive rock above them shifted and leaned toward them. "Run!" Marcheford said. They ran out from under it just as it crashed down, exploding into shards. The whole mountain shook under them. Boulders sheared off from cliffs higher up the mountain, starting avalanches of uprooted trees and rubble.
It started to rain. Sheets of water pelted down on them from above, and lightning split the sky. They ran, the ground uncertain beneath their feet, looking for shelter.
"Matthew!" said a voice. "Are you there?"
It wasn't his father or Parris talking, and there wasn't anyone else around. Besides, the force of the rain was so loud he wouldn't have been able to hear anyone who wasn't right next to him. It took him a moment to realize it was coming from his pocket.
He snatched out the stick that Blanca had given him. "Ramos?"
"Let's do it," Ramos's voice said from the stick. "Just like we talked about."
"Not right now," Matthew said, tripping over a root, and then regaining his balance. "We're a bit busy at the moment."
"It's now or never," Ramos said.
"We're running away from an earthquake. If we survive the next five minutes, I'll give it a try."
"If we don't do it this instant, it'll be too late, and I'll be dead," Ramos said.
"I can't. I don't even have any vitriol," Matthew said.
"You said you'd be ready for us." Ramos's voice was angry, despairing.
"There!" Parris shouted. There was a depression in the mountainside, not a cave, exactly, but a indentation with a narrow rock ledge. They huddled underneath it, out of the rain, but it was barely enough to fit them.
"We can't stay long," Matthew's father said. "This whole mountain could come down on top of us."
"Wait," Matthew said to Ramos. "I shouldn't need the vitriol. The quintessence thread tied to the stick is holding the void open. It never really closed. That's why we can hear you whenever you speak through it."
"It doesn't matter," Ramos said. "I've got a void here, and I have nothing to lose. We'll risk it."
"Who are you talking to?" Parris said.
"Make some room." Matthew set the stick on the ground in the middle of their little shelter. "We think solid matter can travel along a quintessence thread, just like sound can. We saw it happen with smoke, which is just burned particles of matter. We planned to test the theory with larger things, even living things, but we haven't had a chance."
The mountainside shuddered. They could feel it vibrating through their feet.
"We should go on!" Matthew's father shouted.
"We have to wait, just a little longer."
"Why?"
"This stick is tethered to a quintessence thread that reaches all the way back to London. We've been talking to two men there—Spanish by birth, but they're on our side—only they were afraid they might need to escape London in a hurry."
Parris got it right away. "You mean these men are going to try to travel from London to Horizon through a void?" The idea obviously excited him, but there was horror in his voice as well. "How do you know it won't kill them? The void is pure nothing, just the space between the atoms. What if the atoms of their bodies just fly apart? What if they go into the void and never come out?"
&nb
sp; Matthew spread his hands. "I don't know," he said. "We were going to test it first, and answer those questions, but we've been running for our lives."
Around the edges of the stick, a void began to form, its deep blackness seeming to suck the light out of their little shelter. Parris gasped. "I've never seen it just form like that, all by itself."
"It never completely closed," Matthew said. "They must be coming through right now." He looked at his father. "There's one more thing you should know."
"What's that?"
"There's someone else with them. Someone who desperately needs to get away from King Philip and Queen Mary."
His father gave him a wary look. "You don't mean . . ."
Matthew nodded. "The princess Elizabeth is coming with them."
THE VOID yawned black and terrifying, taking up half of the carriage. It had already annihilated a section of upholstery and some of the floor.
"What is that?" Elizabeth said, terror plain on her face.
"An escape route. I hope," Ramos said.
The soldiers were gaining on them, shouting at the driver to stop. They had only seconds, but Ramos hesitated. Now that he was facing it, it seemed like a terrible idea. The void was rapacious, growing larger and devouring everything it touched. It was like throwing oneself into a dragon's mouth.
Just as he was about to jump, the soldiers shot the driver. Tumbling from his seat atop the carriage, he dragged the reins with him, and the horses veered, pulling the carriage up on two wheels around a sharp turn. They were all thrown to one side of the carriage. They grabbed for handholds, all except for Antonia, who fell silently out onto the road, disappearing from view behind them.
"No!" Ramos shouted, reaching out for her, too late.
The carriage, off-balance, teetered for a moment, and then crashed to the ground on its side, dragged along until the horses, terrified and tangled in their harnesses, tripped over each other and sprawled, neighing in terror.
