by P. G. Bell
Suzy threw her arms around Ursel’s neck in a hug. Ursel grunted and extended her uninjured paw in what looked suspiciously like a thumbs-up.
They all turned at the sound of another foghorn cry. It came from some distance away, but was still too close for comfort. Another cry went up, and another, until the city seemed to throb with them.
“The other statues,” said Suzy. “They’re coming.”
“We’ll make a move as soon as the Postmaster’s aboard,” said Stonker. “Why isn’t he with you?”
The weight of Suzy’s grief came crashing down again, squeezing the breath from her. She tried to speak, but her voice broke in her throat, and she had to choke back a fresh rush of tears. “He’s gone.”
“What d’you mean, ‘gone’?” said Stonker. “Gone where?”
She took off Wilmot’s battered Postmaster cap and showed it to him. “It was Crepuscula,” she said thickly. “He tried to stop her from hurting me. He got in the way, and she…” Her voice trailed off into silence.
“Crepuscula?” Stonker’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Is that old witch behind all this?”
“It’s my fault,” she said. “I stole the package I was supposed to deliver to her.”
“Then for pity’s sake give it back,” said Stonker. “Before anyone else gets hurt.”
“I can’t!” she cried. “It wasn’t hers in the first place, and now I have to get it to the Ivory Tower.”
Stonker’s mustache twitched as he digested this. “You mean we were handling stolen goods? That’s a pretty steep charge.” He exchanged a look with Ursel. “So what is it? Treasure? Cursed artifact? Forbidden codex?”
“It’s … secret,” she said, and cringed a little at the sharp looks they both turned on her. “I’m sorry, but it’s better if you don’t know. I told Wilmot because I thought he could help me, and instead it just got him…” The word felt so big and heavy, she had to force it out. “… killed.” Saying it made it real, and for the first time since stepping aboard the Express, she wished she had stayed at home and let Fletch scramble her memories. Because she didn’t want to remember this moment at all.
“If we get this package to the Ivory Tower,” said Stonker, “Crepuscula will stop chasing us?”
“Yes.”
Stonker regarded her for a moment, weighing what she had told him. Finally, he accepted it with an almost-imperceptible nod. “Then we’d better make ourselves scarce,” he said. There was no sign of his usual exuberance as he turned to the controls, but a steely resolve. He released the brake lever and began backing the Express out of its siding.
Suzy looked out the porthole at the Trollville skyline sliding past. More statues were coming. She could see them climbing over the stationary freight cars in their sidings and marching along the platforms toward them. She counted five. No, six. Seven already. Something circled in the air overhead, and she knew without looking that it was Crepuscula’s gargoyle.
“They’re almost here,” she said, biting her lip.
“And we’re almost there,” said Stonker. “Let’s give them a run for their money, shall we? For Wilmot.”
Ursel growled in agreement, and their determination lent Suzy a little more courage.
“For Wilmot,” she said. “Let’s do it.”
They had backed out of the siding onto the main lines, and Stonker threw the locomotive into forward gear.
“Where are the tunnels?” she said.
“The far end of the bridge,” said Stonker. “A couple of minutes away.”
They gathered speed quickly, but the leading statues vaulted the last of the rail cars in the freight yard and cut across the tracks toward them.
“Faster!” gasped Suzy.
The nearest statue closed the gap between them. Casting its sword aside, it leaped for the train, hands grasping, but fell just short, sprawling across the neighboring tracks.
Suzy laughed with relief, but the next statue was right behind it, running hard. The Express was still accelerating, but not quickly enough, and when the statue leaped, it struck the H. E. C. By leaning out the window, Suzy could just see it pulling itself hand over hand onto the roof.
“It’s on board!” she shouted.
“Blast it all,” said Stonker, his hands flying over the instruments. “Do me a favor and throw a few more bananas on the fire. We need to balance out the extra weight.”
“Hurmph.” With obvious pain, Ursel levered herself onto her hind legs.
“Not you,” said Stonker without looking round. “You’re in no state to do anything. Suzy, shake a leg.”
But Suzy was too preoccupied to shake anything, as Stonker’s words had triggered an avalanche of thought. “Weight,” she murmured to herself. “Weight and speed.” Then, without warning, she threw open the back door of the cab and leaped across to the tender.
“Oi!” Stonker shouted after her, but she was already scrambling up the ladder to the pile of bananas. It was the same route she had taken in the Topaz Narrows, but there hadn’t been a killer statue waiting for her then.
“What’s happening?” cried Frederick from her pocket.
“I know what to do!” she said, wincing as energy escaped from the bananas, sparking and snapping against her bare hands. “My homework!”
“Homework!” he cried. “At a time like this?”
“I mean Newton’s laws of motion,” she said. “I know how to fix this!”
She was already over the bananas and slithered quickly down the ladder to the footplate at the rear of the tender. A length of thick chain coupled it to the H. E. C., locked in place by a stout metal pin.
“Newton’s second law of motion,” she said, wrapping her hands around the head of the pin. “Apply force to a mass—in this case a train—to make it accelerate. If you keep the force the same but reduce the mass, you increase the acceleration. So if I can pull this free…”
She strained with every ounce of strength she had, until it felt like tongues of fire were crawling up her arms. She arched her back with effort, looking straight up into the sky. And that’s when she saw the dreadful face of the statue looking down at her from the roof of the H. E. C.
It lunged for her, and she leaped back in terror. Her back collided with the rear of the tender, and, in a moment of cold horror, she realized she had nowhere to go. Fractured stone fingers reached for her …
… and closed on empty air, just inches in front of her face. Suzy blinked in astonishment, then looked down at the object she hadn’t realized she was still holding—the coupling pin.
The statue howled in frustration, but it was too late. As the Belle de Loin got faster, the H. E. C. started to slow down. It happened so gradually that Suzy wasn’t sure it was even happening, until the statue tried to grab the tender and got a handful of empty air instead. It roared in frustration, but it was too late—the gap was widening by the second, and when it made a last-ditch leap for the tender, it crashed to the tracks, just a few feet short.
A giddy cocktail of fear and relief welled up in Suzy’s chest. “You see?” she said, pulling Frederick from her pocket so he could see the statue, the H. E. C., and the sorting car behind it, dwindling into the distance. “We’ve got a smaller mass now that we’ve lost the carriages, which means we’ve got greater acceleration. They’ll never catch us now.”
Dozens more statues had emerged from the city, but they, too, were receding into the distance, unable to match the Belle de Loin’s remarkable speed.
“I’ll admit, that’s pretty clever,” he said.
“That’s physics,” she said. “It’s what I do.”
* * *
“Well done, that postie!” cried Stonker as Suzy re-entered the cab. “Now, brace yourselves, both of you. It’s almost tunnel time.”
Suzy ran to the front window and looked out. They were fast approaching the fringes of the city, where the Fourth Bridge completed its span of the canyon below and anchored itself in solid ground. The foothills of the mou
ntains reared up less than a mile ahead of them, and the tracks ran up to a sheer cliff face, hundreds of feet high, with a row of tunnel mouths across it. She traced the rails of their own track to a large tunnel in the middle of the row. The signal above it was green. The way was clear. They were going to make it.
And then the roof of the cab exploded, raining chunks of burning timber down on them. They threw themselves flat, and Suzy looked up through her fingers, through the smoking hole in the roof tiles, and into the hateful eyes of Crepuscula.
She was flying high above the locomotive, suspended in the claws of her monstrous gargoyle, whose wings blotted out the sun like dark sails. The creature swooped down on them, while Crepuscula took aim with her cane.
There was a flash, and Suzy just had time to see something like lightning jump from its tip before the cab’s rear door and windows blew in and a flare of blue light engulfed everything around her.
“What the devil?” she heard Stonker exclaim.
Suzy’s vision swam back into focus. Apart from her injured paw, Ursel appeared unharmed, and Stonker was still at the controls. But behind the cab, the tender was a bonfire of blue flame, full of hissing, popping bananas.
“She’s going to blow us to pieces!” Stonker cried.
The gargoyle sailed a short way above the cab, close enough for Crepuscula to shout down to them. “Halt!” she shrieked. “If Frederick reaches the Ivory Tower, it’s all over. What he knows is too important.”
There was an explosion in the depths of the tender, sending a fresh gout of fire into the sky, and the gargoyle banked to avoid it. Crepuscula called out again as it did so, and Suzy couldn’t be sure what she said over the roar of the locomotive, but it sounded like, “The fate of the Impossible Places depends on it!” Crepuscula raised her cane and loosed another bolt of magic, which missed. Then the gargoyle peeled away and she was gone.
“Disaster!” cried Stonker, pointing ahead of them through the front window. Suzy looked. Crepuscula’s magic hadn’t missed its mark at all—she had been aiming at the tunnel. The stone archway, barely a few hundred yards ahead, was crumbling, and the darkness inside it flickered like the image on an old TV set.
Stonker threw himself at the brake lever, but Suzy pushed him back.
“We have to go through,” she said.
“The tunnel’s collapsing. You’ll kill us!”
“Crepuscula will kill us if we stay here.”
They locked eyes as they both struggled for purchase on the lever, neither one of them gaining control. And then it was too late, as a rattling rain of stone dust struck the body of the locomotive, the world went dark, and the Belle de Loin plunged through the falling masonry into the tunnel, taking Stonker, Ursel, and Suzy with it.
25
BAD NEWS TRAVELS FAST
“Are you all ready?” Captain Neoma surveyed her platoon. She had assembled twelve of her most capable guards in the briefing bunker outside the Observatory, and they stood to rigid attention, their plate armor polished, their plasma rifles charged and ready.
“Yes, Captain!” they chorused.
“I won’t lie to you,” she said. “This is a dangerous mission against a powerful foe. We’ll be outnumbered, but we’ll have the element of surprise, and we need to use it to our advantage. In and out quickly, grab the snow globe, and go. Do I make myself clear?”
“Yes, Captain!”
One side of Neoma’s mouth curled into a satisfied little smile. “It certainly beats babysitting. Am I right?” She saw the smile reflected in the other women’s faces. After all the intrigue and uncertainty, it felt good to be on the brink of a proper fight again. “Then why are we still standing here?” she barked. “Let’s move out!”
She turned to lead them out of the bunker, only to find Lord Meridian standing in the doorway. “I’m afraid that won’t be necessary, Captain,” he said. “We no longer need to worry about the snow globe falling into the wrong hands. Or any hands, come to that.”
“Sir?” Captain Neoma could already feel her pent-up excitement turning to agitation. From the shuffling of feet behind her, the guards felt the same. “Why not?”
“Because he’s been destroyed, along with the Impossible Postal Express and its crew.” He gave a resigned shrug. “It’s a shame, I suppose. I had been rather looking forward to meeting them.”
Neoma’s excitement nosedived straight through agitation and into dejection. As much as she had grown to dislike that little brat Frederick in his absence, she hadn’t wanted to see him dead. But Lord Meridian already seemed to have moved on.
“We’ll have to recruit a replacement, of course,” he said. “We can’t afford to let the project fall behind. Have someone start canvassing the better schools in the Western Fenlands, would you?”
“But, sir,” said Neoma. “What about Crepuscula?”
“What about her?” he said. “She’s got no prize left to fight for. She’ll return to the Obsidian Tower and sulk.” He chuckled at the thought. “Now, if you wouldn’t mind, I’d like you all back at your posts, please.”
At a nod from Neoma, the guards trooped out, but with a fraction of their former enthusiasm. She followed them, trying to ignore her own disappointment. Not only had she been denied a fair fight with Crepuscula, but she would also never really know why Frederick had fled the Observatory.
She had been counting on him for some answers.
26
BLASTOFF!
The gargoyle set Crepuscula down in front of the row of tunnels, then launched itself back into the air with a snap of its wings. Cupping her chin in her hand, Crepuscula watched with resignation as the last of the broken tunnel mouth fell in. The flickering blackness flared bright purple for a second, there was a sudden inrush of air that sucked in clouds of dust like a huge vacuum cleaner, and then, with an anticlimactic fizz, the light was gone, leaving just the bare rock of the cliff face inside the shattered arch.
She was still standing there a minute later when, with a pounding of granite feet, the statues finally caught up with her. Having no breath to be short of, they simply stood and waited, following her half-vacant gaze and awaiting new orders. None came. She didn’t even seem to have noticed their arrival.
“What have you done?”
Finally jogged out of her reverie, she looked around into the scowling features of Fletch. Unlike the statues, he was very much out of breath, red-faced and sweating from the long run from the post office. He braced his hands on his knees and pointed at the ruined tunnel mouth. “You’ve killed them.”
“Yes, almost certainly.” There was no triumph in her voice. “It’s really quite unfortunate.”
“Unfortunate? You’ve brought the tunnel down on them. It’s a death sentence!”
“They were supposed to stop,” she said. “But it seems I miscalculated.”
“You’re a monster,” he said, plunging his hands into his pockets and turning his back on her. “And I’m sorry I ever set eyes on you. Do what you want, but I’m not helping you anymore.”
“Have it your way,” she said, and he flinched, expecting a blast of magic to strike him at any second. But when he looked back, she was still watching the tunnel mouth, as though expecting it to do something.
“Evil witch,” he muttered to himself as he stalked quickly away. “If there were any justice, she’d have gone in with them.” He sniffed. “And so would I, fool that I am.” His hands were shaking, from shock and anger and grief, but he refused to let any of it show while he was still in sight of her.
He had only gone a small distance, picking his way along the tracks toward the center of town, when he heard her speak again.
“Boys? I want you to run along to the Ivory Tower and see if our friends on the train made it through. I’m not expecting good news, but it’s better than not knowing.” She clapped her hands, and the statues took off at a run, each heading for a different tunnel. Fletch watched them go with a mixture of awe and disgust. No living thing woul
d ever dare set foot in a tunnel without a vehicle to see them safely through, but he supposed the statues were made of stronger stuff.
“No respect for the dead,” he spat. “Or anyone else.”
But watching the statues vanish into the tunnels stirred something else in him as well. It wasn’t hope—he knew better than to hope for the impossible—but it felt a bit like it. It was adjacent to hope. It was uncertainty, in the face of insurmountable facts.
Stonker, Ursel, and the girl couldn’t have survived the cave-in. It was impossible. And yet …
And yet Crepuscula had her doubts, small though they may be. Enough doubts to send her army through to finish the job, in case it needed finishing.
Which it didn’t. It couldn’t.
Could it?
Fletch had wandered as far as the H. E. C. and sorting carriage, which stood, abandoned, on the main line where they had come to rest after being uncoupled from the Belle de Loin. They were all that remained of the Impossible Postal Express.
He rested a hand against the pitted iron hull of the H. E. C. It still trembled with life, thanks to the myriad machines inside it. He had worked on a few of them himself: machines to go anywhere, from the depths of the oceans to the farthest reaches of space.
And just like that, he knew what he had to do.
Crepuscula turned from the tunnels when a sudden flash of light temporarily lit the bridge like a second sun. She shielded her eyes from the glare and from the clouds of dust that billowed into the air.
Beyond her remaining guard of statues, some way back across the bridge, the H. E. C. rose into the air on a column of fire. It rose slowly at first, but gathered speed with an earsplitting roar, until it was a vanishing speck in the tan sky.
“What’s that disagreeable creature doing now?” Crepuscula said. “These trolls always find the most ridiculous means of hurling themselves about.” She traced the capsule’s trajectory until it disappeared from her sight completely. Then she turned back to the tunnels, and waited.
Fletch sat at the H. E. C.’s control panel and allowed himself a smile as the carriage rocketed through the cloud layer into a clear blue sky. He hadn’t been sure the old crate would even make it off the chassis, it had been so long since it had flown, but everything was working as though it had been built yesterday.
