by Dave Butler
“Really?” Ollie asked. “Where, if you don’t mind my asking? Front door? Where’s that? Back the way we came? Closed off, mate. Follow Thomas? We’d have to climb out of this pit first. Secret escape airship, crewed by dwarfs? Oh, sorry, that’s already been blown up.”
“Whoever told you life would be easy?” Gnat’s face was fierce in the light of the burning hangar.
“No one,” Ollie muttered. “But I keep hoping.”
Bob emerged from behind her hands. Tears and soot streaked her face, but her mouth twitched in just a hint of a grin. “That’s what I like about you, my china. Always full of ’ope.”
Ollie elbowed Bob in the ribs. “I’ve got you to compete with, haven’t I? I can’t get too grumpy; I’ll just look ridiculous.”
Gnat looked to Charlie. “What d’you think, Charlie?”
Charlie stared at the device Brunel had thrown to him. “Down,” he said. “I think the way out is down.”
Ollie’s eyes bugged from his face. “Down? And then what? Dig?”
Charlie thought about the trousers he’d found in the stream in Giantseat. “I know we didn’t find an open door, but I think there must be one. I found a pair of trousers while we were hiding from the Hound. In the deserted fairy home. They were purple and white.”
“Like the dwarfs around here,” Bob said. “The trousers tell you there’s some way to get through.”
“That ain’t much, Charlie.” Ollie scowled. “A pair of trousers might slip through a pipe or a grate a human being could never fit into.”
“It’s the best we have.” Charlie started walking.
They followed him. He broke into a slight trot, careful not to leave his friends behind.
They needed to head south. North lay the valley between Cader Idris and Snowdon, and it was full of the Iron Cog’s men. This fact was helpful, because as they descended into the heart of the mountain and all the noise and fire was on one side of them, Charlie knew that way was most likely north.
He moved in the other direction.
All along, his path was lit by gas sconces set into the walls.
As they ran, the mountain fortress began to fall apart. Some hallways were full of water gushing from ruptured pipes—Charlie could cross them, but there wasn’t time to explore passages and find distances short enough for the sweeps and Gnat to hold their breath. Some hallways began to fill with smoke. Some were already choked with rubble.
Charlie ran with the Final Device in his hand, looking for evidence of what Brunel had told him: that the fortress was built to collapse on order. Now that he knew what he was looking for, he saw it: at major intersections, and every hundred feet in the larger passages, the ceiling appeared to be supported by pistons taller than a hulder. Charlie couldn’t be sure that the box he held in his hands would really push those devices into action, but if it did, the rock above would fall quickly and Mountain House would be buried.
They had to get out.
They ran past workshops, where Charlie saw devices including automata the size and shape of humans, creatures that turned their faces toward Charlie and cried out as he passed.
“Papa? Papa?” They reached for him with imploring fingers.
He ignored them.
They ran past furnaces venting hot steam through pipes in multiple directions. They ran past more viewing devices, and Charlie stopped to look into some of these, if only for a second.
He had his face pressed to one just in time to see the front gate of Mountain House fall.
It had to be the front gate, though Syzigon had said there was no such thing. Charlie saw two thick-paneled, ironbound doors closing off the throat of a wide cave. The slate paving stones of a highway led up to the doors.
Guns fired repeatedly from embrasures set in the stone around the doors, pounding a vehicle that resembled a brass log on six wheels and had an angled iron sheet with a slit for vision to protect the sole occupant of the cockpit. The front of the log came to a point like a sharpened stake.
Men behind trees fired back, with rifles and with mortars that sent shells high into the air and crashing down on the doors. Some lobbed hand grenades.
As Charlie watched, the guns fell silent.
The brass log cranked suddenly into gear. With a deep whine, it launched itself against the doors. Already battered, the doors splintered on contact.
Charlie heard the CRACK! as the doors imploded not far away.
He jumped back from the viewer and ran, his friends in tow. Behind them he heard the shouting of men and more gunfire.
When their path crossed a small stream, Charlie stopped. This wasn’t water gushing from a burst pipe; it was water flowing through channels left or deliberately built for it.
“Charlie.” Ollie leaned on Bob, and both panted heavily.
“I’m sorry.” He had been so absorbed in finding a path out, he had thought too little of his friends.
“No worries, mate.” Bob puffed. “Just tell us there’s a way out of ’ere.”
Charlie pointed at the stream. “This flows south, doesn’t it?”
“Yes,” Gnat said. “It probably runs through the old barony.”
“There’s no guarantee we can get through just because the water does, but it’s my best plan.” Charlie held up the box Brunel had thrown to him. “And I’m not sure, but I think this might destroy Mountain House behind us.”
“Who says?” Ollie challenged him. “Maybe those switches launch another airship, and we’re running away from our best chance to get out. And besides, a pair of trousers?” He shook his head.
“Brunel said he had some way to bring down Mountain House.” Charlie waved the Final Device, feeling less certain each second that he knew what it was.
“You ’eard him. Brunel said. Besides, look at it. It just says on an’ off, basically. What you want us to do, Ollie? Turn it on an’ just ’ope we don’t get blasted to kingdom come?”
Ollie muttered.
“This stream goes down,” Charlie said. “And south. That’s no guarantee it’s the stream that flows through Giantseat, but I think there’s a good chance.”
“ ’Tis the right direction,” Gnat confirmed.
“I reckon a good chance is all we ’ave. Let’s take it.”
Ollie shook his head, but he dropped the argument.
Charlie followed the stream. At every turn, he feared he would round the corner and see the stream sink into a hole in the wall. If that happened, what could he do? Even if he left his friends behind and dived into the water, the best case was that he wound up in Giantseat, on the other side of a wall he couldn’t break through, with his friends still trapped inside.
But the stream didn’t disappear into a hole. It crossed chambers; it ran along the edge of walls; it filled a sluice that descended more slowly than its parallel staircase, rising above Charlie’s head before eventually spilling out in a waterfall into a dark pool.
Out of the pool rose a wall of steel.
“Giantseat,” Gnat whispered.
“Maybe.” Ollie staggered off Bob’s shoulder to lean against the wall. “Or maybe there’s whole big caverns we don’t know nothing about that connect with Mountain House, and Brunel’s walled ’em all off. For all we know, there’s mountain lions on the other side of this wall, or ghouls, or lava.”
“I reckon we’d feel the ’eat by now, if it was lava.”
Ollie straightened his peacoat. “I’m just saying be ready.”
“We’ve a bigger problem than that,” Gnat pointed out.
“It’s a blank wall,” Charlie said. “No door.”
“Aye, no door.”
“I have a plan.” Charlie turned to Ollie and Bob. “You two are hurt. Stay here.”
“Well, now I’m ’urt more.” Bob straightened and frowned. “Stay ’ere? Those are wounding words, Charlie.”
“I don’t have time to argue.” Charlie pointed to a dark recess on the other side of the small pool. “Stay down, just in case.”<
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Bob looked mortified, but she and Ollie stepped through the shallow pool and hid. When Ollie collapsed to the ground, he had a grateful expression on his face.
“I take it you’ve a mighty deed for me to do.” Gnat grinned.
“Mostly I need you not to get shot.”
Charlie retraced their steps.
Almost immediately there was a troubling development. Splashing down the steps by which they’d come, water began to flow over the floor. Water from Mountain House’s broken pipes had caught up.
Charlie grunted.
“You’re worried we’ll drown,” Gnat said.
“Well, I was worried this water would hide the stream and make it hard for us to find our way back. Now I’m also worried you’ll drown.”
Picking up a small pebble, Charlie used it to scratch marks into each turn to remind himself of the way back. As they got nearer to the sounds of shooting, smoke filled the passage from the height of Charlie’s waist. Fortunately, he didn’t need to breathe, and Gnat walked beneath the smoke, sloshing in water that was up to Charlie’s ankles.
Finally Charlie found a space that fit his plan. “Stay here,” he told Gnat, setting her on a bulge in the rock wall that created a natural shelf. “All you need to do is be noticed.”
“I’m the decoy,” Gnat said.
“Or the bait.”
Charlie hid himself in a sharp turn of the rock farther along the passage.
Three minutes later, two men with rifles stepped into the hall and saw Gnat.
“Who are you, then?” one of them barked. They both raised their rifles, and Charlie saw what he had hoped for: grenades hanging on one of their belts. Grenades such as he’d seen tossed at Mountain House’s gate.
Gnat smiled. “Natalie de Minimis of Underthames.”
“This stinking place,” one rifleman complained. “Clockwork fairies, now? It’s giving me the creeps.”
“It wasn’t giving me the creeps,” the other said, “until you shot that metal boy with no arms or legs, and he kept talking.”
Charlie almost jumped out at the mention of a metal boy. Could they mean Thomas? No, Thomas was somewhere outside, on the slopes of Cader Idris. It had to be one of the unfinished automata.
“Begging me to turn him off,” said the first man. “The creeps, I tell you.”
“And now fairies.”
Charlie lunged from his hiding place. He snatched both guns from the men’s hands and hurled them away into smoke and shadow.
One man punched at Charlie’s head, but Charlie caught the fist with his hand.
“There are worse things than fairies,” Charlie said. He grabbed the other man by the shirt, pulled him off balance, and threw him back. The man slid twenty feet, fell into the water, then lurched upright and ran.
The remaining man grabbed for a knife at his side with his free hand, so Charlie grabbed that wrist, too.
“You wouldn’t dare.” The man glared.
Curiosity made Charlie hesitate. “Why not?”
The man shook his head and snarled. “Revenge. As bad as you give it to me, you expect to get it coming back.”
“I see. So if I took your trousers off, I should expect that someday you’d take off mine?”
Charlie’s prisoner frowned. “What?”
Charlie yanked the man’s belt from his body in a single pull. The grenades and the knife both came away with the belt, and the man’s trousers fell around his ankles, into the water. “I expect I could live without my trousers.” Charlie smiled.
Then he let go. The man yanked up his trousers and ran, showering drops of water all around him as he went.
Grenades in hand, Charlie grabbed Gnat and jogged to rejoin the sweeps.
The water was knee-deep by the time Gnat and Charlie rejoined their friends. It was warm, being a confluence of hot water from Mountain House pipes and cold water from the stream.
Bob and Ollie leaned against the steel wall; they broke into relieved laughter at the sight of Charlie and Gnat.
“Mate,” Ollie said, “now would be a good time to explain what you have in mind.”
“I’m going to blow a hole in the wall.” Charlie held up the belt of grenades.
“The water might make it ’arder,” Bob said.
Charlie nodded. “I need a place where the grenades can be out of the water and against the wall. Help me find one.”
After a few moments of searching, Ollie shouted that he’d located a good spot. An outcropping of rock created a tight space between itself and the steel wall. By rolling the belt up, Charlie found he could shove all the grenades down into the crack, with two of them angled up so he could pull their pins out and run.
By then, the water was flowing at waist height.
“This ’as to be it,” Bob said. “We must be at the bottom of the place, if the water’s starting to fill up on us. Giantseat’s just on the other side of this ’ere plate, I know it.”
“I don’t know it, Bob.” Ollie shook his head. “But I’m glad you do.”
“The shock of the explosion will be huge in this passage,” Gnat said. “And it will be even worse underwater.”
Charlie nodded. “I’ll pull the pins. I won’t be able to run far, but I’ll be okay.”
“The rest of us should get as far away as possible,” Gnat suggested.
Bob plucked Gnat from the rock where she perched and slogged down the passage. Ollie shambled at her side, and together they threw up a wave of water, now halfway up their bellies.
“Count to three,” Bob called to Charlie as she sloshed out of sight around a corner. “Pull on three.”
The stream was up to Charlie’s armpits, and he held Brunel’s Final Device above the water with one hand.
“Down this way!” he heard someone shout. “Has to be! And the little bleeder’s got my grenadoes!”
No time to waste.
“One!” Charlie called. “Two!”
“That’s him!”
Charlie turned and saw the two men whose rifles and grenades he’d snatched. With them were three others, and they all carried rifles. Seeing Charlie, they dropped the muzzles of their guns to point at him.
“Three!” Charlie pulled the pins.
He jumped. It was a leap made by springing forward, pushing himself slightly off the cavern wall with his feet, and diving. Like a fish, out of the water and back in a single motion.
He heard gunfire as he hit the water and then the zip! of bullets passing through the water around his head. Then the muffled, sloshing noise of submerged running feet.
KABOOM!
The grenades exploded. A wall of force battered Charlie and the water in which he was swimming. The blow knocked the air out of him and slammed him against the wall, but he pushed off the floor and emerged again.
The grenades had ripped the projecting rock out of place but hadn’t blown through the steel.
Bob and Ollie rushed back into sight from around the corner. Gnat rode perched on Bob’s shoulders, and Ollie clutched Thomas’s scarf to his neck to keep it from shaking off. All three were dripping wet.
“DEAD END! AN’ I CAN’T ’EAR, CHARLIE!” Bob yelled. “DEAF FROM THE GRENADOES!”
Charlie turned to see the riflemen floundering in the water. Two of them covered their ears with their hands, and two had scorched faces and singed hair. The other held his breath and dived, trying to get at the rifles they had dropped.
Charlie roared and charged the men. It was a slow assault through deep water, but they still fled.
They didn’t run far, though. He heard the splashing stop around the corner and then the shouting of more men. Then a bright orange light and a sudden increase in the air temperature suggested the igniting of some kind of flame.
Charlie turned to face his friends, shoulders slumping.
“I was wrong.” He shoved Brunel’s Final Device into the pocket of his peacoat, next to his father’s broken pipe. He was going to apologize and then slosh around the
corner to attack the Iron Cog’s men.
“No, you weren’t. Look!” Ollie pointed.
Charlie looked; water was now flowing around the steel wall. He swished closer.
The steel plate hadn’t budged. But in ripping a chunk of stone from the cavern wall, the grenades had exposed a crack, along with a section of the steel plate that wasn’t bolted to anything. Water was being sucked into the crack.
“Get back!” Charlie waded in. “Get on top of something. Breathe!”
His friends scrambled to climb the walls, anchoring their boots and their fingers into little irregularities in the stone and hoisting themselves precious inches higher into the air.
Charlie grabbed the steel and pulled. He could feel his mainspring unwinding to deliver force, but the steel was too strong.
The water passed his mouth. He kept working.
Charlie jammed his fingers into the crack. Digging with both hands, he scooped out fistfuls of pebbles and dirt. The water flowed faster through the hole.
But the level was still rising. He didn’t dare risk a look at his friends—they didn’t have the time—but he could hear them breathing.
He found a larger piece of the wall, a boulder he could get his fingers around. Gripping it with both hands, Charlie pulled.
Nothing happened.
He wished he’d asked Bob to wind his mainspring after they’d stolen back the flyer.
But it was too late now; he was underwater, and thrashing sounds from Bob’s direction suggested that she might be, too.
Charlie braced his feet against the steel, dug both hands in as deep as he could behind the big chunk of rock, and threw his entire body into the effort. He hummed, he groaned, he felt himself beginning to slip away and shudder—
and then suddenly the rock was gone.
He ripped it away from the wall in a heave that launched it up and across the hall.
Charlie’s body shook. He had no time.
Bob was trying to tread water but not doing a very good job of it. Despite Ollie’s attempts to catch them from his perch on the wall, she and Gnat went under repeatedly, and Bob’s feet kicked out in a random and useless pattern.
Charlie took her boot to the face twice before he was able to grab Bob by the belt. Once he had the aeronaut, it was easy to snatch Gnat from the water with his other hand.
