Behind them all, the short-lived respite came to an end as three more wyverns landed heavily on their ship. One wyvern was nothing like the threat of three – no amount of courage would see them through. George’s eyes grew wide and he glanced across to the Daedalus.
“Live,” he whispered, in a clumsy goodbye, and steeled himself to charge.
The Engine
bove them and below them the battle raged. Ned couldn’t see the bravery of his troupe or hear the desperate cries of the owl riders. He didn’t know that they were all trying to save him, trying to come to him in his hour of need, because Ned had simply seen and heard too much. His eyes no longer understood and his ears had forgotten how to listen. There was only darkness, the Darkening King and his single solitary voice.
“MoRre.”
And Ned let it in. A tidal wave, a tempest, a hurricane of hate, for everything and everyone who’d brought him to where he stood – over his parents’ lifeless bodies and by Barbarossa’s hand.
The holding cell and surrounding corridors warped and buckled, bent and re-formed. In that small space and away from his protectors and enemies, Ned began to change. His powers had become a living thing, an extension of his will, so pure and frightening that they roared across the fabric of everything. On every floor of the Daedalus, metal turned to water, then ice. Wood splintered to granite and marble erupted in great swathes of smoke. Bubbling, burning, tearing and melting in a fluctuating storm of bending atoms.
“MoRrRe,” begged the Demon.
And Ned Armstrong, youngest Engineer of a long and great line, gave the Darkening King exactly what it sought. The whites of his eyes filled with an oily black and an eruption of power poured out of him, unending and bright, that reached to the ends of Barbarossa’s warship, to its cut-throat allies and the Viceroy’s best. For a moment their fighting ceased and they watched in awe as a blast of folding light struck down into At-lan.
There was a moment of silence and then, like a great waking beast, there came a deafening roar. An engine, so strong, so powerful that it was felt across the deserts of Algeria and on to Libya and the Sudan.
Pistons the size of city blocks pumped, vast gears turned and impossible valves drew on a thousand cubic tonnes of air and fuel. Far away in the shadows of the world old things stirred, with the gnashing of teeth and pulling of hair.
Barbarossa’s weapon had risen and Ned had provided the spark.
“Ned!” called a voice, desperate and weak – a voice that he almost knew.
***
The Daedalus’s deck was torn and tattered. A snarled mess of fused atoms and smoking metal. Deep in its guts, the engine room gave its last and there was a final belching of blackened smoke. Like a ship at sea taking on water, its magic began to wane and the Daedalus very slowly descended.
Benissimo’s whip had cracked and his cutlass had cut, till his brother was almost in his grasp, standing on the deck before him.
“You’re too late, fratello,” said Barba. “Wake up! Just look at it, in all its glorious beauty – my machine is ready!”
The Ringmaster might well have given his all, right up to the moment that the shockwave had come. But he had failed, he had not been fast enough or strong enough to stop Ned from fulfilling his brother’s plan.
Even as the ship he stood on came apart, he watched in awe while At-lan drew itself up from the ground. A great inverted pyramid, the size of a city and cased in gold. Its peak was pointing to the ground beneath it, its great weapon readying to fire, to resurrect the Darkening King, and all to the resounding bass of its vast and frightening engine. Boom, boom, boom.
The air shook and the desert trembled – the weapon had taken flight, poised to deliver its power. Two thirds of the Viceroy’s fleet had been decimated and its owls now flew in retreat.
Benissimo gathered himself grimly, wiping his bloodied cutlass across his thigh.
“Ned provided the spark, Bene; that was all we needed – nothing can stop the weapon now, nothing. Not even you! The Darkening King will rise.”
Benissimo charged, knocking his brother to a buckled railing with a loud crunch. A punch, then another and another, till Barbarossa’s bearded grinning face finally lost its smugness. But that was the miracle of their curse. Even as he struck him, his brother healed, the purple and ruddy patches re-forming themselves with every blow. Benissimo grew tired and his brother smiled.
“It will always be like this, fratello, always.”
“Not if I break our curse!”
The butcher grabbed the cleaver at his side. He brought Bessie up hard, striking Benissimo on the side of the head, and in a second their two roles were reversed. Bene now dangled from the side of the descending ship, his back to the air, with Barbarossa and his bulk pressing down on him hard.
“The creature that gave us this gift, that made us so strong, it was the Darkening King, brother, and it’s going to tear down the Veil, just like I always wanted!”
“You’re lying! That creature’s been trapped for thousands of years!’
“Am I? You think just any Demon could grant immortality? Wake up, brother! Our father heard it, just like the boy and the girl. All those centuries ago, he tied our fates to its evil!’
But in place of Benissimo’s anger and shock he was met with a broad cut smile. Even to the end the Ringmaster would not be shaken.
“If I hold on to you, dear brother – then fate is still in my hands. You’ll not see the end of this and neither will I!”
Barbarossa had never truly understood what it was to feel fear. He had always been the one to cause it. But as the Ringmaster tightened his grip on his waist, he finally understood. His eyes widened. Benissimo was going to let himself die and he was going to bring his brother with him!
The Daedalus’s slow fall began to pick up speed, and its crew were now all but gone by parachute or balloon. Only a single wyvern remained and it was steeling itself to flee.
“He’s alive,” spat the butcher desperately.
Benissimo’s grip round his brother loosened for just a moment as he weighed up the odds.
“You’re lying.”
“I couldn’t very well draw out his power if he were dead, now, could I? He’s still alive, mid-deck; you can save him.”
Ned Armstrong might well have been just a spoke in the Ringmaster’s wheel. But now, as always, he was an important spoke, and the Ringmaster would do anything to see the wheel turn. Even as his arms surrendered their grip for the hope of finding him, Barbarossa pushed with all of his might. The Ringmaster’s brows crossed in silent fury and he fell, fell over the side of the Daedalus to the weapon and desert below.
“Always with that pitiful heart, brother. We’ll see the end, all right, it’s what we were made for.”
And with that the pirate-butcher mounted the last wyvern and flew from his plunging, broken ship.
***
“Ned!” tried Terrence Armstrong again.
His son’s eyes opened, their whites returned. Even as he looked to his father and away from the darkness that had taken him, the walls and floor around them still ebbed with his power. They warped and twisted as though a living thing, lost somewhere in his rage.
“D-Dad?! You’re alive – what about Mum?”
“She hasn’t come round yet. Barba drugged us both so that you’d lose control.”
For a moment the metal around them spiked angrily as Ned realised he’d been played like a puppet on Barbarossa’s string.
“Dad, I-I think I’ve done something really, really bad.”
Even as the ship fell, they could see Barbarossa’s golden weapon through the tear in the Daedalus’s side. Down below, it was rising up from the desert and the air filled with static as it readied itself to fire.
“It’s not your fault. It’s what he planned, like he always does. From the moment he realised he needed you to be the spark, he’s worked to get you here alone, truly alone. He gloated about it all: framing Bene, turning the Twel
ve against you, it was all meant to leave you with no allies and no choice, to fire you up so badly that you would teleport here and launch his weapon.”
“Then he’s won.”
His dad looked out to the sky as it rushed by – they had only moments before impact.
“Not yet, son; it hasn’t fired, we can still break it!”
Ned looked at the weapon, looming larger. “But … how? What do we do?!”
“What happens when you give an engine too much fuel?”
Ned’s face brightened, it was so simple.
“IT BLOWS!”
But his dad didn’t smile back. “Son … I’m going to have to ask you to be very brave. You see … we’re not going to survive this, not a chance.”
The Daedalus continued to fall, its pace quickening, and Ned felt his chest tighten. He nodded, slowly. “But it’s still worth it, isn’t it?” he said. “To give the world a chance?”
And this time Terrence Armstrong did smile, if only a little. “Yes, son, it’s still worth it …” he said. “I wish I had the time to tell you all the ways you make me proud. But we have to work quickly. You’re going to give Barba what he wanted, but this time control it, Ned – make the surge too strong and make it yours. I’ll help as much as I can.”
Ned’s dad took his hand and they focused. They focused on their love for Olivia Armstrong, the certainty that they would not get to say goodbye, and their unending determination to stop Barbarossa and his monster.
VROOM! the air roared as the mighty weapon that was At-lan ramped up her power.
“Together,” said father and son, and the very structure of everything around them, from the clouds in the air to what was left of the Daedalus, warped and twisted to their wills. They were conduits now, two forces of nature unleashing pure power and focusing it on the weapon below.
It tore down from the sky in a great column of bending light and fusing atoms, deep into At-lan’s core. The device drank deeply, its engines spinning faster and faster, but it was too much power, too much of everything. Gold tore and girders buckled. But even as its engine strained Ned heard it –
“NoOoOo!” cried the Darkening King.
“Yes,” breathed back Ned.
KABOOM!
The weapon fired.
It was too late.
In that final moment At-lan let out a great and angry roar, turning in the air drunkenly, before its engines exploded. Great chunks of machinery the size of skyscrapers blew apart, whole streets of pipework ruptured and the pyramid fell from the sky like some angry, stricken giant. Beneath it the desert answered, screaming from its weight and its wreckage.
Exhausted, Ned’s dad crumpled. “Let’s hope we helped.”
Ned frowned. “But … It still fired, Dad?!”
“I know how it was put together, son. It’s a giant teleporter, designed to bring the Darkening King back from the Earth’s core. And you know better than I do the control you need to teleport safely. We broke the machine as it was firing, didn’t we?”
“Yes,” said Ned.
“So we disrupted its control. The Darkening King may well return. But we must have weakened him; wounded him. It’s possible we’ve slowed him down, even prevented him from re-forming properly.”
His dad was right and he’d heard the voice pleading for them to stop. Ned thought about the way it had disrupted his own control, causing teapots to shatter, Whiskers’s head to reattach the wrong way round.
“Then there’s still hope?” he said.
“Oh,” his dad said, “there’s always hope.”
Air rushed in through the sides of the holding room, the Daedalus was falling fast now and the Armstrongs, like the golden machine they’d vanquished, were plunging to their deaths. Ned didn’t care, not really. It had all been for his parents and, as the ship fell, he took their hands in his own.
“You’ve done everything you could – now use whatever’s left of you, and teleport yourself out of here,” yelled his dad through the beating wind.
Ned shook his head and smiled.
“Sorry, Dad, but I’ve got everything I want right here.”
“If you don’t go, then all this was for nothing!”
Through the gash he’d created, Ned saw a great wall of rushing gold filling the horizon. Even to its end At-lan was a wonder, a marvel of reflected light.
“So pretty,” he mumbled.
Till the gold came tearing towards him and through the gash in the Daedalus’s side, in the form of the Viceroy and his owl.
It landed between them in a beating of feathers and screeching beak.
“Quickly, boy!”
A great claw grabbed at his waist, and a second riderless grey joined them, snapping its talons round Terrence and Olivia Armstrong. In a rush of stifling wind, the Viceroy, his two birds, Ned and his parents took to the skies.
Ned watched as the ship he hated came crashing to the ground. Approaching low and fast was a single helicopter, on its sides a small logo with three Bs at its centre. It hovered over the warship’s remains, searching for something – or someone – in the wreckage.
And then there came a VOOM.
With a shimmering of air, the remaining Daedali all vanished as one.
Under the beating of the great owl’s wings, his father turned and managed to smile, then mouthed something. Though Ned couldn’t hear him, he was quite sure that one of the words he’d said was “hero”.
***
Mr Fox had been apologising for over twenty minutes, when he saw Benissimo fall from the Daedalus. By some miracle, the nanites in the Ringmaster’s blood were still sending their signal.
“Mr Seal?”
“Sir?”
“Send another chopper. I want that body found and brought here.”
“Mr Fox, sir, is there any point?”
“Just a hunch. Humour me.”
Mr Fox would never forget the sight of the floating pyramid, or the explosion that had brought it down. The sky had literally filled with falling gold.
The phone in his ear snarled.
“Yes, sir, I know you wanted results but the thing of it is, Mr Bear, I have most certainly found the gold, sir. It’s about the Ringmaster. I think he was one of the good guys.”
The line went quiet. Somewhere in a dark room a very powerful man was thinking. The phone crackled but this time with just a little less of a snarl.
“What do I need, sir?” replied Mr Fox, who at that precise moment was staring through his binoculars at a desert on top of which lay the scattered remains of the world’s gold, every last brick. “I think, sir, that I may need a bigger boat.”
After
he Gabriella had taken a terrible beating. What had not been smashed by the Daedali’s weaponry, or scorched by the wyverns’ spit, was still miraculously airworthy. The Viceroy’s owls had delivered the Armstrongs, in a flurry of claw and feather. Finally reunited, their small family did not notice the smoking deck, or the burning chaos in the skies, only that they were together.
Ned’s mum, though weak, was the first to speak, her lined and haggard features crinkling into the faintest of smiles.
“Breathe,” she whispered.
And for what felt like the very first time since Carrion had come knocking at their door, Ned Armstrong, youngest Engineer of all the Armstrongs before him, did just that.
He dared not think what they had been through together, what cruelties the butcher had made them endure, or what the world was about to face if and when the Darkening King rose, and yet, battered as they were, it was the mum and dad he’d come to rescue that now consoled their son.
Turning the Dial to 10
et planes had been launched by the Moroccan military, only to be ordered back to their bases before they could fire their missiles. Someone on the deck of an Ohio-class nuclear submarine had told them to go home. Before the local press could tell their stories, men in grey suits had arrived by air and by ship. The world was not ready to learn about t
he Hidden, about giant owls and flying cities of gold. There now remained the rather complicated matter of collecting up the gold and returning it to its various rightful owners.
Things were less simple for the Hidden.
Ned and his allies were taken to St Albertsburg to recover. In the two weeks that passed after their battle, the Hidden and any hopes of an alliance had come undone. The murder of Madame Oublier had caused widespread distrust and the Twelve were close to falling apart.
Worse, it was clear that the Darkening King had returned.
Farseers all over the world had sensed a new presence. Something ancient and cold had started to speak to them and in the horrors of their waking dreams they sensed that it was waiting. It seemed that Ned hadn’t entirely prevented the machine from working, after all – though the Farseers were quite sure that the presence they felt was badly weakened, and only slowly piecing itself together.
As far as Ned and his family were concerned, this was a second chance. There was still time to stop the ancient Demon before he regained his strength.
In the absence of a new Prime, despite Atticus’s attempts to gain control, refugees were now descending on St Albertsburg in their thousands. It would now fall to the Viceroy to lead those brave enough to fight. There was no longer any question that war was coming; there seemed only the need to set a date. Through all of this, only one question remained: where was Benissimo?
His body had been seen falling from the Daedalus and yet ten full days of searching had found nothing. The Ringmaster was alive, Ned and his parents were sure of it – and more importantly, so was Lucy. Why had he not shown himself, and at a time when his people needed him most? His beloved Circus had disbanded now: some had stayed on in St Albertsburg, others gone in search of their families, but not before coming together for one last time.
They buried Jonny Magik’s body in the woods where he had drawn his last breath, and it was George, stricken with guilt for having questioned the man’s motives, who had led the ceremony. In that final moment together, what was left of the Circus of Marvels would have made their Ringmaster proud.
The Gold Thief Page 27
