The room shook … and something in Ned’s head and heart snapped.
The same something that the troupe and Benissimo had tried to put there. He felt dizzy and sick – what was it, what was it he had to remember?
Control! he thought, because in that moment, he had finally managed to grasp it. He raised the ring—
But it was too late.
He had not heard Sar-adin return, holding a wooden cudgel.
The blow hurt, but only for a moment, before everything went black.
“Don’t worry, dear boy,” whispered Barbarossa. “Just a few more hours and my machine will be ready to launch. You can play with your ring as much as you like after that.”
Help
oad the cannons!” roared Benissimo.
The Ringmaster was in the process of preparing a fast-moving scout ship. As soon as he’d found Lucy, they had rushed back to George who was still recovering from his fight with the wyvern, then made their way to the campsite and fired up the Gabriella’s engines.
Neither set of suited assailants had been prepared for the Circus of Marvels’ ferocity, not by a long way, and any remaining men in suits had been chased into the night by the Darklings that Finn had unleashed.
Tearing through the sky in the Gabriella, and pushing her new engines to their limit, they had made it to the Moroccan desert crater that Lucy had seen as the sun came up the next day.
Ahead of them, the Daedalus hovered in the shimmering-hot air, black and terrifying, high up above the crater.
“I feel him,” said Lucy. “I feel Ned, on board.”
“And the crater?”
“I think it’s the weapon. Or the weapon is in there.”
“Then we attack,” said Bene.
“We can’t go after them, boss, it’s suicide,” argued Scraggs. “The Daedalus is a class 2 destroyer, it’s got more cannons than we can even—”
Bene held up a hand. “It’s also alone. Whatever armada my brother has built is clearly not here. The Daedalus might be big but she’s slow and, suicide or not, the Armstrongs are depending on us.”
“He might still come, Bene. The Viceroy, with his ships.”
“I don’t see him, Scraggs. For all we know, Atticus has had the entire isle overrun with pinstripes by now. It’s just us. Prepare the guns!”
Lucy stepped forward, George behind her, both frowning.
“Prepare the guns?” said Lucy. “You promised me, Bene, you promised me we could save them! If we fire, Ned and his parents could die.”
“If we don’t, Barba may kill them anyway – and he certainly will if they get At-lan working and bring back the Darkening King. They cannot be allowed to power that weapon. So we do the only thing we can. We fight.”
George looked across to the Daedalus with its belching chimneys and steel-plated hull, then back to Benissimo’s small wooden ship.
“You’re going up against that, in this?”
“There’s no other way.”
Lucy looked to the sky, her vision momentarily blinded by the rays of the sun. She was not looking at the Daedalus’s smoking chimneys, but behind the Gabriella and away from the impending fight.
“You’re wrong. It’s here,” she said.
“What, child, what’s here?” demanded Benissimo.
“Another way.”
The sun’s rays were suddenly smothered by a wall of rushing black.
Just as promised, the Viceroy had arrived with his cavalry.
“Hell’s teeth,” spat the Ringmaster. “He’s brought half his fleet.”
The Gabriella’s crew watched in awe as St Albertsburg’s armada closed. Under the colours of the British flag, a sea of zeppelin balloons were carrying at least twenty gleaming warships of tempered steel, their sides brimming with cannons and harpoons, their decks lined with row upon row of armour-plated owls.
At the very front, riding the wind and bearing closer, came two of its great birds, one a riderless grey, the other plated in gold.
On the Daedalus’s deck, trained soldiers loyal to Barba took their places, shields were raised, cannons loaded.
Benissimo clapped his hand on the Gabriella’s railing and called out with joy.
“Ha! Let’s see how sharp your claws are against a full charge of St Albertsburg’s best!”
Mum and Dad
hen Ned woke, it was to the shake and thunder of buckling metal.
Through a tiny porthole, he could just make out the Gabriella and her smoking guns. But that was not what gripped his heart.
He was chained to the wall of a hot iron holding cell and he was not alone. On the opposite side were his parents.
If ever two things could be defined as broken, it was Terrence and Olivia Armstrong. Their faces were bruised and battered, listless and still – either unconscious or something worse, something that couldn’t be fixed.
“Wh-what have they done to you?!”
Something inside Ned stirred. His ring now worked on its own, an extension of his fear and dread. Without him asking, or even knowing that he’d thought it, his chains and the chains of his parents turned to powdery dust. An instant later he was shaking their shoulders and begging them to wake.
“PLEASE! You have to wake up! Please! I don’t know how to stop it! I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO!”
BOOM! Another shell came tearing past the Daedalus.
“FOolSs,” coaxed the voice and Ned’s ring finger fired.
Just as he’d seen it so often in his dream, the outside wall suddenly tore open in a mess of boiling atoms and shredded metal. And all by his own hand.
Through the new gash in the ship’s side Ned saw it. He was not staring into the vastness of space as before; this nightmare was real, but quite different. Barbarossa really was trying to end the world, or at least reshape it to his own dark ends, and far beneath them on an arid and rock-strewn desert appeared the tool of his shaping.
The Daedalus was floating over a giant crater, like a fly over a swamp. Millennia ago, the First Ones’ weapon had caused the Earth to refashion itself in this very spot. Today and now, the very same kind of weapon they had used stirred in the ground below. It was as if the world itself had come alive. Miles of desert poured away to some hidden chasm, as though falling through a giant hourglass.
Beneath the sea of rushing, falling sand Ned began to see it, as it emerged: a vast machine in perfect gold.
The hour was coming to an end.
“At-lan,” he murmured.
A clear Moroccan sun played brightly across its metal and for a moment it looked like it might be made of light or fire, or both. Even from the height of the Daedalus, he could just make out its army of engineers and crewmen as they ran to what Ned had first thought were buildings. As he watched, he realised that the great angular structures were machines and that the machines were linked.
The weapon was staggering, its proportions almost impossible to make sense of. Yet here it was, like a city seen from the air, only different – it was an ordered instrument with a singular terrifying purpose.
All the fighting, all the running and searching, the training and anguish, the nightmares and the voice – it had all come to this. Ned would not be able to undo it. Not without his father telling him how.
His parents were dying or dead and Barbarossa had already won. Nothing mattered now – all Ned wanted was to tear the Daedalus out of the sky, and as his rage took hold he became something else. A thing of darkness, willing and able to heed his new master’s voice.
“YeSs,” said the voice.
And Ned listened.
Into the Breach
n the deck of the Gabriella, Benissimo mounted the riderless grey owl and turned to the Viceroy.
“You look far too happy about this.”
“Well, whatever rumours there were about your brother’s armada, there’s no sign of it. In any case, the last time my Lancers charged was with my grandfather. The truth is, I never thought I’d see the day – my glorious owls i
n all their splendour; just look at them.”
The sky was filled with flying metal. The Lancers were wrestling with both their reins and their mounts’ urge to charge.
“And St Albertsburg?” said Benissimo. “What of your isle?”
“Aiding a suspected murderer to escape has done us no favours,” said the Viceroy. “Atticus and what was left of his men have been expelled from our shores, but he’s telling anyone who’ll listen that you’re guilty. Half of the Twelve believe him, the others don’t – it’s chaos out there, and not any pair of them can agree on what to do.”
“But you still came to my aid?”
“Politicking is all well and good but what we need is action.”
“Aye to that,” sighed Benissimo. “Your grandfather would be proud.”
Lucy was pacing at the feet of their owls, her courage fully returned.
“Monsieur Couteau and George will run the crew, Bene,” she said. “But if you don’t come back here with all of them, make no mistake – I am going to kill you.”
The Ringmaster looked down from his mount and attempted a smile.
“I can’t be killed.”
“Trust me, you old goat, I’ll find a way.”
“If anyone could do it, Lucy, I’ve no doubt it’s you.”
And with that George smacked his bird on its side and Benissimo took to the skies. Lucy’s face soured and she closed her eyes.
“What do you see?” asked the ape.
“It’s unclear.” Which was true in a sense, in that Lucy Beaumont could only see one thing – a darkness as black as night.
***
Mr Fox stood on the observation tower and peered through his binoculars. The Leviathan was a converted Ohio-class ballistic missile nuclear submarine, 560 feet long, weighing some 19,000 tons and carrying a payload of over 150 Tomahawk cruise missiles.
In short it was vast, quiet and utterly lethal.
The US Navy had been very careful to ensure that it was up to date before handing it over to the BBB. As well as its arsenal, it had access to sonar scanning, radar and their “eyes in the sky”: unmanned drones coupled with a worldwide satellite link that effectively gave them a bird’s-eye view of everything.
Fox’s ambush at the Circus had been an unmitigated disaster and an “arrest on sight” order had been issued to every governing body on the planet for a certain Mr Slight. As expected, though, their combined databases had been unable to find any trace of the man, past or present. He had quite simply vanished off the grid and had seemingly never been there in the first place.
But Mr Fox was not devoid of his own magic. The baton he’d struck the Ringmaster with had not only pumped a high dosage of electricity into the man’s thigh. That was what Mr Fox wanted him to think. Its real purpose had been to deliver the nanites. Microscopic tracking devices now flowed through Benissimo’s bloodstream, giving Mr Fox and the BBB his exact location.
When the comms operator told him that the satellite feed was abnormal and that he needed to take a look, Mr Fox listened. He peered at the sky and then checked his binoculars again. They were as close to the coastline as possible and their target some way inland. All the same, what he saw did not seem to make any sense.
“Orders, sir?” asked Mr Seal.
“I, um …”
“Sir, should we ready our weapons? Prepare to fire on them, sir?”
“Do we have anything that’s good for owls?”
“Sir?”
“Never mind, just get me a phone and patch me through to Mr Bear.”
Mr Seal forgot his training and looked openly nervous.
“Mr Bear, sir?”
“Yes, Mr Bear.”
Charge!
he air was crisp and clear, Benissimo’s mount pulling hard on its reins. “Right,” he called. “Once you get me on to the ship, keep them busy – ten minutes, no more, then let them have it!”
The Viceroy nodded through his visor and their two owls charged, behind them over twenty more, and behind them, a hundred birds circling and ready to strike. They crossed a bank of cloud and boom! the Daedalus’s small artillery launched their flak.
All around them the air filled with fire. Alongside Benissimo two owls were hit, one squarely in the chest, the other in the meat of its wing. Armour snarled, the birds screeched, but still they flew.
“Hold the line!” roared the Viceroy, and his birds and riders held.
Boom, boom, boom, boom!
Three-inch guns peppered the sky, and then Benissimo saw it. The crater beneath them all was tumbling away and rising from its sandy ashes, brilliant and bright, was At-lan.
“Odin’s beard?!”
The machine dwarfed his bird and his escort, it dwarfed the Gabriella and the Viceroy’s twenty ships; At-lan dwarfed everything. From the Daedalus and from below an explosion of sulphur and fire erupted in the sky. Benissimo yanked hard on the reins and his bird barrelled away, its plumes blackened and burnt.
“Aark!”
“Steady, girl!”
His grey flew on, a marvel of muscle and sinew carrying him through the air. The Daedalus was fast approaching – their owls almost in reach. To Benissimo’s side the Viceroy put his hand to his mouth and blew on his command whistle. All fifteen of the birds who’d made it through the flak responded in kind, “Aark!” Another whistled command and their riders lowered their lances.
“CHARGE!”
In a blinding rush of beating air they surged forward. Behind them the remaining wings dropped down in great swooping dives towards Barbarossa’s weapon. Benissimo readied his whip and cutlass, the deck of the Daedalus was almost his …
… till there was a loud VOOM! and the air shimmered all around.
Something had been hiding, or had just arrived. Around their wing of Lancers, readying themselves to fire, were suddenly more than a dozen warships.
One Daedalus had become an armada of Daedeli and Barbarossa had sprung his trap.
Benissimo hit the decking hard. His owl was losing blood and badly, but even so it fought. Everywhere Bene looked there was violence and smoke. The newly emerged Daedali had formed a semicircle over the emergent city, with the Viceroy’s fleet and the Gabriella squarely at its centre. Barbarossa’s ships, though slow, were powerful, and their decks lit up with great streaks of fire as their modern guns pounded on the enemy.
The ships of St Albertsburg in contrast had not changed their design in over a hundred years. Airship after airship burned and buckled, their spell-casters doing everything in their power to protect their precious balloons.
And as for the owls and their fearless Lancers? For that Barbarossa had his wyverns. A wave of scaly Darklings now flew through the air, clashing with their counterparts in a cloud of feather and fire. What had started as a fearless charge now turned to abandoned chaos. But the Viceroy and his best held their course. Fighting and flying was after all their life – a life that they would gladly give to stop the weapon’s launch.
Only one airship remained unscathed by the Daedali’s guns – the Gabriella. Three wyverns were closing fast, however, and one already at its decks.
“Keep her safe, George,” whispered Benissimo, before jumping from the back of his owl and on to a deck of readied swords and muskets. They were hungry for his blood and the Ringmaster ready to give it. What proved to be more alarming than the row of steel before him, however, was what they were trying to protect.
Wyverns and escape ships were being loaded by the dozen, the Daedalus’s higher-ups moving on to greener pastures. At the head was Barbarossa, making ready to abandon his ship.
George fought like the wild creature that he always tried to hide. His friend and ward was on Barbarossa’s ship, and between them and all around them the sky roared with the screaming of fair-folk, Darklings and cannon. The wyvern had already downed one of the Tortellinis and George was doing his best to fend the creature off, armed only with his fists and a wound that was barely healed.
“I crus
hed one of you before, I can do it again, monster!”
“Scree,” spat the Darkling, and George pounced.
His strike bounced off the monster’s scales, and the wyvern spun, knocking the ape to the deck with a painful crunch. Abi was at his side in seconds and the creature turned, sulphurous smoke pouring from its nostrils, its eyes brimming with hate. It was looking directly at Lucy.
“Stay back!” bellowed George.
Though her loyalty was always to her husband, Abi the Beard had lost none of her protective zeal. The trident in her left hand was tipped with silver, the net in her right baubled with the bones of a witch. These were substances that even a wyvern feared, though you’d never tell from its sneering mouth. It clawed violently forward, its head snapping towards her. Abi sidestepped and twirled the trident, driving it deep into the monster’s neck.
Roar!
A belch of sulphurous spit poured out of its mouth and a portion of the Gabriella’s decking erupted in flames.
“Rocky!” Abigail begged.
Her husband already had a hose in hand and doused the flames before they could spread. George got back to his feet and circled the beast. The ship and its crew were his to protect and he would do so with the last of his breath. The wyvern paced forward slowly, its Darkling mind clearly focused on Abi and her spear. The beast lunged again and George rammed it with a powerful and painful charge of his shoulder. A second later he was sprawled on the deck once more, only Abi and her trident between Lucy and the creature’s vile claws.
The beast was preparing for a final charge when Lucy stepped calmly and steadily between them.
“Lucy, no! What are you doing, child?!”
“Ending it. Get your nets ready, and forgive me.”
Her eyes closed and a shockwave poured out of the Medic’s ring. It was pain and fear personified, every dark thought she’d ever seen, every tremor, every tear. It flowed out of her and struck at the helpless beast.
As one, every living thing on the Gabriella howled in pain. Noses bled, ears hummed and they were all brought to their knees. All except Lucy Beaumont, who calmly took Abigail’s net and threw it over the wyvern. As the crew gathered themselves up again, they were greeted by a vanquished Darkling and the sight of an exhausted Medic falling to her knees.
The Gold Thief Page 26
