by Dave Butler
The two hulders were flapping their arms to ward off the flurry of hats that threatened to cover them, dodging brass mechanical attacks and staring at the fire overhead. Grim took advantage of their distraction and dragged himself onto his feet. He backed away slowly and stiffly, but he was moving.
Charlie’s other friends still struggled, but it looked like they might be winning. Charlie saw Ollie, in the form of a heavy constrictor, wrapped around one attacker’s legs while Gnat swooped in sideways to kick the same man in the stomach. Bob chased a now-unarmed man around the floor with his sword. Henry Clockswain aimed his pistol at one of the swordsmen.
All around the factory, a ring of flame sprouted. Patches of fire burst here and there through the wood of the walls.
Charlie ducked as a long brass arm, out of control, swung over his head.
“Rats!” he heard Bob shout. Charlie looked down and saw the rodents, a horde of them. They flooded through the front doors, sweeping away the fighters.
And a man in a black cloak was coming up the stairs.
The Sinister Man.
In his hand he held a long pistol.
The Sinister Man raised his pistol. “Be a good little thing. Come with me.”
Being called a little thing was worse than being treated like a baby.
“Clock off!” Charlie yelled.
He threw the matches. The wooden box hit the Sinister Man in the chest and fell to the floor, and the Sinister Man only laughed.
Charlie noticed again the cog-shaped pin holding the man’s cloak in place. “What does the Iron Cog want with me?” he asked. It was an attempt to buy time.
The Sinister Man arched one eyebrow. “What has your maker told you of the Iron Cog?”
Maker? Little thing? Charlie felt uncomfortable and confused, but he had no time to think about it.
He ducked as the mechanical arm swung past him again. It was a sturdy piece of gear, built to move heavy things from one side of the factory to the other. Now its pole was knocked off-kilter and the arm swung in a big circle, swooping down fast and low over the mezzanine floor and then gliding higher and slower at the far end of its orbit.
“What does the Iron Cog think it knows about me?” Charlie tried to grin confidently, like an adventurer would. Like Bob grinned.
The Sinister Man pointed his gun at Charlie’s head. “No more questions! Come with me now, or you’re scrap!”
The arm swept down again, and Charlie grabbed it with both hands.
Bang!
He had to shift his stance to grab the swinging arm without being knocked down, and that movement was just enough; the Sinister Man missed. He lurched forward and reached for Charlie with his free hand, but the mechanical arm brushed Charlie over the edge of the mezzanine floor—
bump! against the railing—
and high into the air.
The Sinister Man stumbled against the railing but didn’t fall.
Pulled away from the burning walls, Charlie immediately felt cooler. For a moment the floor below and the building around him spun in a kaleidoscope image of brass and orange. He held on tight.
The arm reached the top of its swing, and he slowed down.
Bang!
The bullet whizzed by him in the air. On the mezzanine floor the Sinister Man pointed his pistol at Charlie again.
Charlie looked down to see if there was a safe space below, but all he saw was a tangle. Long brass poles swung, pistons pumped, and steam hissed out in constant jets. The rod-studded spine writhed and buckled off its track, and the tool-holding arms flailed in all directions. If he dropped into that chaos, Charlie would be chopped to pieces—as well as chalked and polished with pumice.
He tightened his grip.
Bang!
The shoulder of Charlie’s jacket twitched as the bullet nicked it, just at the edge.
Charlie gulped. He scrambled, trying to get out his knife without letting go of the arm, wishing again that Grim had gotten him a pistol.
The arm was starting to pick up speed again and rush downward, and Charlie was a sitting duck. The Sinister Man would get a point-blank shot or would simply knock him off his perch by force.
Then he saw Heaven-Bound Bob, sprinting up the staircase to the mezzanine with something big and floppy balled up in his hand. Behind him came Henry Clockswain and Grim Grumblesson. The hulder was walking backward, a black silhouette against the flaming wall. Gnat zipped through the air about the troll’s head.
They were moving backward because they were fighting a wave of rats. Gnat knocked them off the staircase’s handrail and with her spear skewered the few that slipped past Grim. The troll kicked with his feet and swung his pistol like a club.
Behind the rats came the other hulders, and men with swords. At the bottom of the stairs the pouchy-eyed captain shouted and pointed at Grim, sending his men up to attack.
The Sinister Man saw Bob rushing him and swiveled around to aim his pistol. “Stop right there!” the Sinister Man shouted.
Bob threw the thing he had balled up in his hand.
Bang! The Sinister Man shot him. Bob staggered and fell. But the thrown object kept going. It unraveled in flight, like string, and wrapped itself around the Sinister Man’s neck.
Charlie swung back down. The offices below the mezzanine floor were burning, and it would only be moments before that fire chewed its way up. The Sinister Man dropped his gun and staggered back. A yellow-green constrictor snake was wrapped around the Sinister Man’s neck.
Charlie picked up speed, racing toward the low point of his orbit.
The Sinister Man scratched at the snake with his fingers, trying to rip Ollie away.
Charlie raised his feet and kicked the Sinister Man in the chest. Then he let go and dropped to the mezzanine floor.
The Sinister Man flailed his arms and slipped backward, bumped against the railing, and tumbled, falling over into the flame.
Charlie shoved one hand out over the edge of the mezzanine, just in time to catch Ollie, who was a boy again, by the back of his peacoat.
Ollie was falling, and he was heavy. Charlie threw his other arm around the railing and tried not to be dragged into the fire. Ollie bounced, and for one second Charlie thought he would be forced to drop his friend into the hungry flames below. His shoulder made a popping sound but he gritted his teeth and held on.
The Sinister Man shouted and disappeared into the blaze.
“Cripes, Charlie, but you’re strong!” Ollie muttered.
Charlie chuckled. “Just a good healthy lad, ain’t I?” He braced himself with his feet and managed to drag Ollie back, onto the mezzanine floor.
The three boys all clambered to their feet at the same moment. Bob was bleeding from a wound in his shoulder, but he had a big grin on his face.
“Run!” Henry Clockswain shouted. The kobold staggered up out of the staircase. Fire licked all sides of the mezzanine and the walls like golden-orange curtains. The catwalks that led away from the mezzanine floor and around the factory were all burning, or had already burned away.
K-k-k-krangggggg!
The mechanical arm that Charlie had just ridden finally twisted off its axis and collapsed into the floor. It crushed squealing, chittering rats beneath it. Charlie smelled the burning fur and flesh stink of their deaths and felt sick.
Grim Grumblesson stepped back onto the mezzanine. Beyond him a wall of rats gnashed its many teeth and shrieked in anger.
“Up the stairs!” Charlie shouted. He ran, and his friends followed.
Cre-e-e-e-eak…CRASH!
The floor of the factory below gave way. All the spinning arms collapsed into the cellar in a jumble of brass and flame.
Charlie looked over his shoulder as he popped up into the top floor. He saw fire everywhere, and behind him a struggling line of people and beasts that wanted out of the flames. His friends were first, and then the rats, and last the hulders and cutlass men of the Iron Cog.
Charlie picked up the pace.
The fl
ames had not yet reached the attic, but the heat had. Still, this air was better than the furnace blast of the factory below, and Bob and Ollie both sucked in big breaths. Charlie rushed for the box of Extradynamit.
“Don’t mess with that stuff now!” Bob yelled in a strangled voice. “It’s too ’ot in ’ere—might go off in your ’and!”
Charlie ignored his friend’s warning. He wasn’t a baby.
He grabbed a stick of the blasting powder and rushed to the stairs. Looking down the stairwell, he saw Grim Grumblesson’s shoulders squeezing through. The rain slicker was gone, and Grim’s back was sweaty and marked with blood.
When Grim had stepped far enough from the stairs that Charlie could see the black, swarming rodents and the orange fire in front of him, Charlie threw the blasting powder. He tossed it as far past Grim as he could, down onto the mezzanine.
KABOOM!
Rats squealed and flew away in all directions. Grim staggered back but kept his feet.
“Come on, Charlie!” Ollie called from the window. “We’ve got to get out!”
With the rats off him for a moment, Grim thundered up the stairs. Gnat buzzed fiercely around him, spear in her hand.
Charlie looked out the open window. Bob and Ollie and Henry Clockswain had already jumped across the gap to the adjacent rooftop, and they waved at him to join them. Grim turned to face the stairs and began loading his gun.
“Come on, Grim, we have to go,” Charlie urged.
Grim kept working. When he had taught the kobold to load his pistol, it had been a slow exercise. Now Charlie saw that the hulder really did know what he was doing. He poured grains of powder in with practiced and casual speed and then thumbed in six of the gun’s huge bullets and caps in no time at all.
He finished loading the gigantic Eldjotun and raised it just as the Iron Cog’s hulders poked their heads up out of the stairwell. In the darkness, with orange light blazing up from below, their bulls’ horns and shaggy hair made them look like devils.
Charlie noticed that a wisp of smoke was curling from the first hulder’s coat. That didn’t make much sense, though, unless maybe the troll had stuck a lit pipe into his coat pocket—
BANG!
The hulder ducked as Grim fired. Grim took two steps closer and fired again.
BANG!
“Aye, Grim, the lad’s right,” Gnat urged her boss. “And you’ve got to come now, or we’ll burn with the factory!”
Grim’s face twisted. Charlie climbed out the window and onto the roof. The rain had stopped, but the shingles were wet. There was bare wood exposed where Charlie had landed earlier.
BANG!
Grim fired again and then squeezed into the window frame. For a moment it looked like he wouldn’t fit. He grunted and pushed, and the wooden frame around the window cracked in several places. And then he fit through just fine.
Across the alleyway, Bob and Ollie backed away from the edge. Mr. Clockswain huddled with them.
“ ’Urry up!” Bob shouted.
Rats squealed again in the attic behind Grim.
“You first.” Grim nodded at Charlie. His eyes bulged and his mouth twitched.
Charlie turned and rushed down the rooftop, easily jumped over the alley, and then scrambled up to join Ollie and Bob.
“Come on!” he yelled to Grim.
Grim nodded, but something was wrong. He held his head stiff and chewed his upper lip with his tusks. He didn’t look down.
He was afraid of heights.
There was noise inside the building. Grim turned, pointed his gun back inside the window, and pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened.
“Now!” Natalie de Minimis shouted. She poked Grim in the rump with her spear.
Grim lunged forward onto the slope of the roof. He hit it hard, and shingles scattered beneath his feet as he started to slide.
Charlie saw faces at the window, but he had no attention to focus on them.
Grim Grumblesson was skidding toward the abyss, and his eyes were closed.
Charlie sprinted down the slope toward his troll friend. He didn’t have time to think.
Across the alley, shingles sprang into the air around Grim’s heavy boots. Grim plowed twin furrows in the rooftop as he slid.
Charlie jumped.
“No!” Bob shouted.
Gnat buzzed through the air in front of the hulder—and Charlie slammed shoulder-first into Grim’s chest. The troll fell backward, air whooshing out of his lungs from Charlie’s blow. Charlie saw his friend’s eyes open in astonishment, and then they crashed together onto the rooftop—
—and kept sliding.
Gnat plunged, spear held over her head with both hands. She jammed her weapon into the rooftop, just under the troll’s armpit.
Grim’s arm caught on the spear, and he stopped.
The troll’s sudden halt didn’t stop Charlie’s motion. He tumbled backward, but grabbed Grim’s belt buckle with both hands. His body, and the hulder’s booted feet, hung together over the edge of the roof. Charlie looked up at Grim and saw hulder faces in the window above them.
“Grim!” Charlie yelled. “The window!”
Grim’s eyes were screwed shut again. He pointed the Eldjotun over his head and squeezed the trigger.
BANG!
His shot went wide. The bullet gouged a head-sized chunk of wood and shingle out of the peak of the roof, several feet to one side of the window. But the threat and the noise were enough to make the hulders disappear.
With the faces gone, Charlie saw orange light through the window. Smoke billowed up in the alley below him. It reminded him of the Gullet, and Lucky Wu’s Earth Dragon Laundry, only here the air stank of fire and blood. If Charlie fell, he would not survive.
“Grim!” He grabbed the troll by the front of his shirt.
Grim kept his eyes squeezed shut. “Shoot again?”
Natalie de Minimis zipped in close to the window, still off-balance due to her sprained wing. She took a peek inside and flapped back abruptly, just in time to avoid a tide of rats. The rodents surged around and over Grim, some turning left and right to race away in the rain gutter and others tumbling into the alley. Charlie and Gnat fought to batter the rats aside. Grim helped, swinging his gun about blindly.
“They’re getting away!” Charlie heard Gnat’s high, silvery voice over the rat shriek. Through puffs of smoke he saw the shadowy outlines of hulders and men slinking away across the rooftops.
The rat tide continued, but suddenly a booted form crashed into the rooftop beside Charlie and Grim. It was Bob, with Ollie wrapped around his neck in the shape of a slender yellow snake. Rats squealed as he kicked them aside.
“Ow! That’s ’ot!”
Poof! The rotten-egg smell was lost in all the other smoke and in the sewer stink of the rats, but Ollie took his human form again and dropped to his hands and knees on the shingles. “Ow!”
“Grim, stand up!” Charlie yelled.
“I can’t!” the troll bellowed. “My feet are dangling!”
“Open your eyes, you big oaf!” Ollie shouted.
“I can’t!” the troll roared again.
Bob met Charlie’s gaze through the smoke. “The blasting powder is in the attic,” the aeronaut reminded him. “It’s going to explode.”
“If the roof don’t just cave in first,” Ollie grumbled.
Charlie scrambled up the troll’s chest. He grabbed Grim by one shoulder and pulled. “Help me,” he begged. Bob and Ollie grabbed the other shoulder and they all tugged together.
“I’m too big!” Grim wailed.
But with all three boys hauling, he budged.
The wave of rats was past. The smoke hung around them thick as cobwebs, and everyone but Charlie was coughing.
“Use your hands!” Charlie yelled at the hulder.
“Hurry up!” Gnat shouted. “The flames are into everything!”
Grim Grumblesson pushed with his hands, and the boys pulled, and with a big heave
they managed all together to drag his legs back onto the roof. The troll stumbled to his feet, but his eyes were still closed. He weaved to and fro.
“Come on!” Ollie backed up the rooftop, took a few steps’ run, and jumped across the alley. Bob followed.
“I can’t open my eyes!” Grim wept. “Go!”
“Gnat!” Charlie yelled. “Hold his eyelids!”
The pixie pounced on the troll’s shoulders. Wrapping her legs around her friend’s horns, she reached over his heavy forehead with both arms and grabbed handfuls of troll eyelashes. Grunting and throwing her back into it, she pulled open Grim Grumblesson’s eyelids, revealing bloodshot yellow orbs and twitching blue irises.
Charlie caught Grim’s gaze. The troll coughed, and sweat streamed down his face.
“Follow me!” Charlie slapped Grim in the belly to make sure Grim heard him.
The hulder nodded, quick and nervous. He still wasn’t looking down.
Charlie trotted several steps back up the rooftop. Smoke curled from the soles of his shoes, which felt like they were on fire. He waited a second, and then Grim stepped up behind him. The troll was puffing like a train.
Charlie started running down the slope.
“De Minimis and Underthames!” Gnat yelled. The rooftop shook as Grim thundered on Charlie’s heels.
“Pondicherry’s of Whitechapel!” Charlie cried in response. Then he jumped. The alley was invisible below him. He sailed blindly into smoke, and when he smacked into a rooftop on the other side, it was almost a surprise. The shingles hurt his hands and knees, but at least they were cool.
“Mutatis mutandis!” Grim yelled behind him.
Charlie heard a huge whoosh! as the troll jumped, and then a CRASH! as he hit the roof and smashed right through it.
Bob and Ollie grabbed Charlie by the back of his jacket and yanked him down into the hole Grim had just created. The others coughed and spat, and the air got even cooler and suddenly tasted like sawdust. Charlie could see almost nothing, and he tried to stop.
“Is everyone here?” he called.
Bob and Ollie dragged him along. “Keep running!” Ollie yelled in his ear.
Ahead in the darkness, Gnat shouted directions. “Left! Right! Stop!” Then a door opened, yellow light flooded the room, and Charlie could see again.
