“What happened to you? Why did you come here?”
He tilted his head back so he could look right up at her. “I’m dying, aye,” he said. “I didnay want to be alone.”
She looked down at Charlie, at his face white with pain but so very calm, and the moment seemed to stretch on forever. Then she tore her eyes away and looked up at the stars. Her mind worked quickly. A doctor would be useless and the doctor on the island was a drunk anyway. The Sorma might be able to help but then again, they might not. And how would she get to the desert, how would she find them without Eliza? Although she did not remember the Crossing to Tian Xia herself, she had forced Charlie and Eliza to tell her about it many times, how she had almost died on the way and how the healing cave had restored her to perfect health. The cave had healed Eliza’s arm too, which had been crushed by a hound of the Crossing. The cave could save Charlie now.
“You’re nay going to die, Charlie,” she said firmly. “Just hold the towels to your chest and wait here.”
“Dinnay go,” he pleaded as she shifted him off her lap and back on to the grass. “It’s all right, I’m nay scared. I’ve been around forever. Long enough, aye. I just didnay want to die in some dark corner without any friends.”
“Charlie, stop it. I told you, you’re nay going to die. Just wait. I’ll be right back!”
“Nell!” he called after her, but she was off, running out the back gate and down the road to where Ander Brady and his mother lived.
The streets in Holburg were generally empty after eight o’clock and it was past midnight now. Everybody was sleeping. Her bare feet slapping against the road was the only sound besides the crickets in the gardens. When she reached Ander’s house she ran straight up the front steps and rang the bell several times, then pounded on the door for good measure.
A light went on in one of the rooms and a few moments later Ander appeared at the door in his pajamas, looking sleepy and confused.
“Nell?” He squinted at her in the dark of the porch.
“I need help,” Nell told him. “I need the helicopter and I dinnay have time to explain.”
He frowned and rubbed his chin, then ducked his head at her and sniffed. “You’ve been drinking!” he said, appalled. “Your parents let you drink?”
“I dinnay think they really remember how old I am,” she said impatiently. “Mister Brady, please listen to me. You know what we saw on the news, General Malone talking about Tian Xia attacks?”
Ander shook his head. “Come on, Nell. I’ve got to get you home.”
“Aye, yes, walk me home, quick,” she backed down the steps as he put on a pair of shoes and a light jacket over his pajamas and followed her. “So you remember what General Malone was saying?”
“Uh huh.” In spite of himself he had to stride along very quickly to keep up with her.
“It’s worse than they know. The Xia Sorceress is free. And – lah, it’s complicated – but there’s a being here now who is good and he’s been hurt very badly. Di Shang doctors wouldnay be able to help him. I dinnay think even the Sorma could help him. But there’s a place in Tian Xia that...heals beings when they’re hurt or sick. And I need to get him there, aye.”
“Do your parents know you’re running around drunk in the middle of the night?” asked Ander.
“Of course they dinnay know!” snapped Nell. “Are you paying attention? There are ways into Tian Xia...a lot of ways, aye, and there’s one not far from here. The only way to get there fast is to fly, but this being, he cannay fly now, because he’s too badly hurt. But you can fly the helicopter, nay? The one for emergencies? You flew Missus Brock to the mainland hospital when she had a heart attack!”
They had reached the back gate.
“Let’s get you inside,” said Ander wearily.
Nell dragged him by the hand to where Charlie lay in the grass.
“You’re back,” said Charlie with a faint smile. “Good. Who’s that?”
“Mister Brady,” said Nell. “He can help us.”
“He’s hurt?” Ander asked, kneeling swiftly. “You didnay wake up your ma?”
“She cannay fly a helicopter,” said Nell.
Ander took the towels gently from Charlie’s chest and looked for a long moment at the rippling fusion of gleam and gloom that bled from the wounds.
“What in the name of the Ancients is that?” he muttered.
“He’s a Shade,” said Nell, pressing the towels to the wounds again, though it did little good. “It means he can change shape. He’s good, aye, and he helps humans. He helped to get rid of the Cra. But now he needs help. I’m nay drunk or crazy and I know exactly what to do. I just need you to fly the helicopter.”
“Nell,” said Ander, but she didn’t let him finish.
“Whatever you’re going to say, save it. I dinnay care. You’re just trying to think of what you should do and he’ll die while you wonder. We have to help him. I’m going inside to get a couple of things and when I get back, you need to carry him.” Nell ran back into the house. Ander looked down at Charlie again.
“I cannay just take the helicopter,” he said to Charlie apologetically. “I dinnay understand what’s going on here. We should call somebody, I spec. Dinnay know who, though.”
Charlie didn’t waste his strength talking to Ander. He was trying to hang on until Nell reappeared.
It was a testament to her family’s ability to sleep through anything that none of them woke as Nell tore through the house. She filled a school bag with bread and cheese and apples, two bottles of water and a half-empty bottle of brandy. Then she fetched her maps of the caves in Holburg from the stacks of papers in her bedroom. The tunnels had been built during the war for the islanders to hide in in the case of a Tian Xia attack. As children Nell and Eliza had known the entire complex by heart and had mapped it out. She placed these old penciled maps on the kitchen table with a note for her family, Please check in on Missus Brady. Hide if you need to. Back soon. Then she went back up to her room and added to the bag of food her three most prized possessions. These were the First Place Medal in the Kalla District Mathematics Competition she had won last year and the birthday presents Eliza and Charlie had given her when she turned fourteen. Eliza had gotten hold of a signed Cherry Swanson album (Any friend of Eliza’s is a friend of mine! Cherry S., she had written), and Charlie had brought back from Tian Xia a shard of black rock, embedded in which was the fossil of a tiny dragon no bigger than her hand. All of these she put in the bag. She ran back out to the yard, where Ander was massaging his temples with his thumbs and Charlie was quietly dying.
“Do you have anything valuable on you?” she asked Ander. “That watch! Is it valuable?”
“This?” He looked at his watch in surprise. “I dinnay spec so. It was my father’s.”
“Perfect,” said Nell. “Pick him up. We have to hurry.”
“Nell,” said Ander again.
“Pick him up!” Nell all but snarled.
Without really knowing why he was letting a fourteen-year-old girl with alcohol on her breath boss him around in the middle of the night, Ander did as she said.
“Praps we should stop by the doctor,” he suggested, following her out the gate.
“Dinnay be stupid,” said Nell angrily. “You know just as well as I do that a doctor cannay heal a wound like that. We’re saving his life.”
Somehow that settled it for Ander. He had his doubts that Nell knew what she was doing, but she seemed to think she knew, at least. He himself hadn’t a clue, but he held that action was better than inaction. And so he found himself wrapping the thing in blankets in the back of the helicopter, loading up with extra fuel and climbing into the front with Nell.
“I dinnay think you should come,” he told Nell, knowing perfectly well it was useless.
“You’ll nay find it without me,” said Nell.
Ander put on his aviation headset and gestured for her to do the same. They fastened their seatbelts and he opened the throttle
all the way. The helicopter had not been flown since Missus Brock’s heart attack four years ago. It had been old and unreliable even then. But the rotary blades began their slow spin and, as they spun faster, the helicopter began to feel light, swaying slightly and giving a couple of awkward jerks. Then it lifted off the ground and Ander powered it forward. They skimmed along the alley for a few seconds then swooped upwards, leaving Holburg behind them.
“South!” shouted Nell, pointing.
In the back of the helicopter, Charlie tried to say Nell’s name but the noise drowned him out. He couldn’t hear his own voice. He could feel his life draining out of him. It seemed such a waste of effort, roaring off in this noisy machine. He just wanted her to sit with him while it all faded to black.
~~~
As Charlie was making his final desperate, wounded flight over the archipelago to Nell, powered only by Swarn’s potion, Eliza was a few hundred miles southeast of Kalla, breaking into the Republic’s top military command centre.
Flying across the country on Ka’s dragon, she had tried to think of the ways it might be possible to get in touch with General Malone. She concluded that face-to-face was best. It could take hours or more to convince somebody to let her speak to him. Once he saw her he would remember her and would listen.
The dragon, with its mighty wings, was much faster than a gryphon. Still, it was dark by the time she caught sight of the command centre, a vast walled complex on a high plateau. She wished she’d had the foresight to mix up an invisibility potion while she’d been in the Citadel but it was too late now – she’d find no invisible eels to use in the wilds of Di Shang. She didn’t dare fly too close, so she instructed the dragon to land east of the command centre, in the wooded foothills. She would have to go quite a distance by foot but a dragon approaching would be too obvious and would almost certainly be viewed as an attack. They would see her coming, too, but might hold off firing on a girl. From the foothills, she jogged down into the valley and then half-scrambled up onto the broad plateau. Once on the plateau she could not escape being seen and the important thing was speed. She sprinted straight for the high concrete walls. She was surprised to feel, as she approached, that they were protected by enchantment. The Mancers must have done this to help protect the complex from a Tian Xia attack. This would require more effort than she had thought. She pressed her hand to the wall, knowing full well that somebody would be watching her do so. The barriers were fairly simple. She made the symbol with her hand to conjure a door and then pushed.
She could feel the danger before she heard it and drew her dagger in a sweeping motion over her head, deflecting a hail of bullets. The wall groaned, a door opening into it. She created an empty space the size of a cupboard, stepped inside, and sealed herself in to catch her breath for a moment.
She didn’t want to just emerge on the other side, where no doubt they would be waiting for her. She would have to walk through the wall a little ways. She closed her eyes. The wall was concrete and she could separate its parts in her mind – gravel, broken stone, sand, cement (which was oxidized lime and clay), and water. She needed to separate them, but in a precise enough way that the wall didn’t just collapse on her. Her heart began to pound in her chest. She was not terribly good at separating elements and had certainly never done so while there was a risk of being crushed to death. She took a deep breath and let her Magic flow into the wall – Undo, be pure, be what you were – pulling element from element. For a moment, she was able to hold each part where she wanted and she felt space opening up before her – and then the fleeting thought, Where’s the sand? interrupted the flow. The entire structure began to crumble. Without thinking she jammed the elements back together. The wall closed on her, concrete filling her ears, fitting itself around her limbs and face, pressing tighter and tighter around her. She could not move her hands to make a door and in a moment it would crack her into slivers. With her last ounce of strength she pulled the elements around her apart again and leaped forward as the wall around her loosened. She tumbled out of the wall in a small avalanche of sand and pebbles and slimy clay and water, and was fired on immediately. She rolled aside, gasping a simple barrier spell against metal. It would do for bullets but her barriers never lasted more than a minute or two. She had barely a moment to take in where she was. There were soldiers on the wall above her and soldiers running towards her as well, fast dark shadows. She ran straight for a squat concrete building in front of her while the wall collapsed behind her. No time to find the door, she would have to make one – she made the sign and leaped through the wall of the building as it opened and shut behind her.
She landed in an empty hallway. A siren was blaring now, alerting everyone to her presence. This was not at all how she had intended to find General Malone. The best thing to do would be to hide and send a seeking spell, which would be less visible than her. There was a supply closet in the hallway, so she stepped inside it and shut the door. Ignoring the sound of heavy boots outside, she sat cross-legged and spoke the spells of Seeking. Great beings could work these spells across vast distances but as yet Eliza was only able to seek within a radius of a few hundred feet. If General Malone were not nearby, she would have to move and try again.
The military complex spent the rest of the night and the early hours of the morning in a state of high alert. Something had breached the walls. It was impervious to bullets. It had vanished. They did not know what it was, except that it looked like a girl, and they did not know what it intended. It had emerged from the main wall and disappeared for ten or fifteen minutes inside the mess hall. Then it had suddenly emerged again and run into the armory. This had everybody most anxious. A sweep by Special Forces showed there was indeed a living thing inside the ceiling, although they weren’t sure how it had gotten there. They fired a rocket straight into the ceiling and none of them heard or saw anything more for a further twenty minutes, when it was spotted again running for the Communications Tower.
General Malone’s office was under heavy guard in case this was an assassination attempt. He was at his desk now, on the phone with a commander who told him that dragons had been sighted near the border. Reports were coming in from all over. This was the greatest influx of Tian Xia beings that Di Shang had seen since the arrival of the Xia Sorceress nearly half a century ago. Worst of all, the Mancers were nowhere to be found. The normal lines of communication yielded no response. Pilots were out looking for their Citadel but it could be anywhere in Di Shang. It was like looking for a needle in a haystack.
Quite suddenly the carpet under his feet shifted and then bulged. General Malone muttered, “Keep me posted,” and hung up the phone. He backed away from the desk and drew his gun. The bulge in the carpet grew bigger, the carpet split, and a breathless girl with untidy hair crawled out from under his desk and looked up at him imploringly. She was wearing a dirty black robe and a dark green winter coat. He recognized her instantly.
“By the Ancients! Eliza Tok.”
“Everybody’s chasing me,” she said, seeming rather hurt. “Would you tell them to stop?”
“You are what the entire complex is after? You breached our wall?”
“I needed to see you, aye.”
General Malone went on the intercom. “Attention all personnel. The intruder has been found. The threat is eliminated. Resume your normal duties.” He looked back at Eliza. She had grown a few inches. She looked older but not so different from when he had last seen her in the Xia Sorceress’s web of Illusions.
“The outer wall will have to be rebuilt,” he said. “We’ve shot up our own armory. The whole place is in uproar.”
“I’m sorry,” she said meekly.
General Malone wasn’t sure if he wanted to scold her or laugh. He did neither.
“Perhaps you can shed some light on what’s going on,” he said. “Where are the Mancers?”
“The Xia Sorceress turned them all to stone,” said Eliza. She didn’t know what had happened to Kyreth but there wa
s no point mentioning that now. General Malone stared at her in horror, speechless.
“She’s free of the barriers but she’s going to Tian Xia,” Eliza continued. “We dinnay need to worry about her here, yet.”
“Tian Xia worlders must know the Mancers are no longer defending Di Shang,” said the General. “That’s why so many are crossing over. The military...we can’t handle a full-scale Tian Xia invasion without the Mancers.”
There was a tap on the door.
“Enter,” called General Malone.
Two guards opened the door.
“Everything all right?” asked one of them, looking warily at Eliza.
“Fine. Our intruder is...an old acquaintance of mine,” said General Malone dryly. “She has a strange way of making a visit.” He looked at Eliza again. “You do know I have a telephone, don’t you?”
“I didnay know your number,” said Eliza.
The General nodded to the Guards, who exchanged a look and shut the door behind them.
“I appreciate the information about the Mancers,” said General Malone heavily. “Was that what you invaded a top military command centre to tell me?”
“No, there’s something else,” said Eliza. “There’s a creature that the Sorceress Made, and if you kill it, it might...hurt her, or stop her. I’m nay sure. But it’s connected to her. That’s the one you need to go for, aye. Two of the Mancer dragons are following it now.”
Eliza sat down on the floor abruptly and stopped talking. General Malone knelt at her side, touching her shoulder lightly.
“What’s wrong?”
She shook her head. “I havenay eaten in a while. Nor slept. I came straight here.”
The General nodded. “I’ll have a bed made up. Let’s get you some food.”
He started to rise but she caught his sleeve with her hand. “First you have to send soldiers. It’s heading for the border towns around Quan, aye. Going south. It might take a lot. Rockets, or...I dinnay know. It willnay be easy to kill.”
General Malone patted her on the shoulder and helped her to her feet. “Consider it done, Eliza.”
The Unmaking: The Last Days of Tian Di, Book Two Page 12
