Fire in the Wall

by S G Dunster

  We flung ourselves aboard as soon as we came up against the rail.

  We lay there for a few minutes, just breathing.

  “Well.” Eap stood gingerly and leaned against the prow. “We’ve made ourselves something firm,” he muttered. “Let’s hope it doesn’t explode with the fire.”

  I stood, too, not entirely steady. People were streaming out from the cabins, kitchen, pouring up from the engine room.

  “Mission accomplished,” I told them, and they cheered, all except for Corinne, who gave me an up-and-down. “Go wash up.” She swatted the back of my head, then looked at her sticky, bloodied palm in disgust. “And get the physic to stitch ye up.”

  “Right.” I laughed a little. Then the grief, like a lead weight, settled in my gut.

  Arapahoe. Selah.

  We’d have to have another funeral.

  You can always tell them again, Lil had said. But she was wrong.

  They didn’t want to be told.

  They wanted me to leave them alone. Arapahoe had said, You bring us back, you kill us.

  This is the death I choose.

  I sat in the crook of the prow, watching the globe. The glow of red-orange through it, the curls of smoke streaming out through the holes in the metal cap where the witches’ lair was.

  Two flecks flew out, flitting away into the distance.

  Our witches.

  Our death-dome.

  Our firmament.

  I lost two friends for it. They were my friends. They’d been my comfort in loneliness, stories I told to escape the wreck my life was becoming in snowy Saint Anthony. And now, they were gone.

  And I had a burnt-out sky globe as compensation.

  I sat, my back in the corner of the prow, and ran my hands through my blood-sticky hair. Corinne was right. I needed stitches. But what was inside hurt more.

  Chapter 24

  What could have been several hours later—I guess the proper term is one hunger later—Lil, Eap, and I went back on deck to examine our work.

  “Still there,” Eap remarked, as we gazed out at our blackened ruin of a sky-globe.

  “Yeah.”

  Lil was conjuring up a swarm of daschund-sized gnats for Mr. Smiley’s pleasure. He cheerfully attacked each and every one of them, making odd, whale-like noises I took to be delight, and licked their gelatinous guts off his hairy face with his long curled tongue.

  “It is beautiful,” Eap said quietly. He grasped my shoulder. “Well done.”

  Beautiful. I wasn’t sure that was the word. Not for our firmament globe. It still glowed fierce red and orange, like an ember. Smoke curled up from it, and the crows were scattering. I thought . . . I wasn’t sure, but it looked like some of the flying things were larger—bat-wraiths, swooping around, dipping toward the surrounding domes.

  The sky city was lit up brilliantly, like stars. Bright candles in a dimming day—dusk.

  Eap gestured to Lil with two fingers. “Have you your cure ready?” he asked.

  Lil paled slightly. She glanced up one last time at Mr. Smiley, shoved her hands in her pockets, and followed Eap to the trapdoor in the stern.

  I waited, breathing in deeply, out slowly, watching the shifting colors of setting sun over the dome. Pinks . . . oranges . . . a slash of gold on the horizon where the sun was disappearing.

  The realization hit me in the face like cold water. I ran across the deck.

  “Who made the sunset?” I shouted after the others. They had the door open and were about to descend. Lil shrugged and gave me a grumpy look. Eap immediately stiffened, stared. He went a little pale, which on him meant grey. “They’ve found us,” he murmured.

  “They changed the sky.” Lil’s hand flew to her overall pocket.

  Eap, Lil, and I looked at each other.

  “This is it,” Eap said. I didn’t like the cold resolve in his voice. “They’ve found us. They’re coming soon.”

  “Hans,” Lil said. A lump shifted in her pocket. Satie stuck her head out, gazed up at Lil, and flicked her tongue over her eyeballs.

  Lil. Her hair was a ragged mess that stuck up like duck’s down all over her head. She looked woebegone, shorn.

  What would the people back home think? Would mom take it as one more sign she was unhinged, bad for me?

  Home.

  Lil and I had to be able to go back. Eventually. Somehow. There had to be a way. Things go in. Logically, they must also go out.

  Hans had found a way to talk through the barrier that divided the crust, and home, from this Caldera. There had to be other thin places. We just needed safety and time to explore. And, if this was all one giant, grand-mal hallucination, which happened to contain Lil, my brain had to know a way out.

  If we got rid of these Grimwoods, if we took out the ones making them—the enemy—logically, I should be able to come out of this, shouldn’t I?

  But what if we didn’t win? If this was some hallucination, what happened if my brain lost the battle?

  My skin tingled. For a split second I thought of my Dad sitting in his chair, empty. Caught. Stuck. Trapped somewhere nobody could reach him.

  We were standing by the jail’s door now. Lil gave me an odd, hesitant sort of look. I didn’t know what it meant. I nodded, hoping it was the reassurance she needed.

  “All in, then.” Eap let out a gust of breath and opened it.

  It stank of death. Not the rotting, maggot-covered type we’d experienced in the abandoned dome . . . more the elderly, paper skin, sweet-sour breath, slow-starved organs smell. It was the lingering undertone in the facility where we stored dad.

  He was like a grey puddle on the floor, robe piled around him, hair a glimmer tangled in there somewhere. His face was turned away from us toward the wall. He had something clutched in his hand—a picture.

  A woman with dark curling hair.

  “Hans,” Lil snapped.

  It was the first time I’d heard her say his real name.

  But there was no noise, no indication he heard. Lil shifted her weight as if to take a step inside.

  A cascade of dirt poured down suddenly. A landslide, rich, brown. From where? I didn’t know. It piled on Hans’ prone body, mounding over him, burying him.

  His hand stuck out, pale and skinny. It twitched. Dropped the picture.

  The mound shifted, then burst apart. Choking, Hans crawled out, clawing, on his knees. “Stop!”

  Eap gestured, and another cascade broke over Hans, like a wave against a pillar. “Stop!” Hans roared, shoving off of the floor, managing to get to his feet in spite of the flood of soil pouring around his shoulders, turning him into a brown hill with a head. Struggling, sweating, face gritted tight, he lifted his hand clear.

  The dirt began to fly away from him, spattering off the walls, piling across the floor. Cool dirt buried me to the ankles.

  “Awake, eh?” There was a note of mockery in Eap’s voice. “Do I frighten you? Wasn’t that what you wanted—death, burial? Look at this fine ruin you’ve become. You’re too cowardly even to die.”

  Hans eyes sharpened, hardened. He reached, spread his fingers out, and a stream of icy air blasted through the room, caught Eap square in the chest, and sent him stumbling, stunned, clutching his chest and gasping. “None of us here,” he rasped, “can die, as well you know.”

  “I thought you weren’t fighting, Old man,” Eap retorted, a chuckle caught in his chest, breathing hard, his dark eyes all malicious glitter. “I thought you were done. Is your skin so soft now, even words burn you as they brush by?”

  Hans took another step, his legs shaking. The fire burned for a second, then died out in his eyes. He crumpled to the floor, falling back into a kneeling position, pulling his cloak tight around his body. “Leave me.”

  “To what? Die. Say it, Hans.” Eap scrambled back to his feet. “Say you want to die. Say it!”

  “I shan’t.”

  “Come and fight!” Eap strode to the doorway. “Fight! And we all may yet live outside the sh
adow!”

  “I’m nothing,” Hans replied faintly. “To melt into the air, earth, and water. To grow smaller and smaller until not even the sharpest eye can pick me from the grains of sand. That is what I wish.”

  “You would abandon her.” Eap pointed to the picture. “You have chosen to leave her to the wolves. And here is another,” he gestured to Lil, “a girl who followed you into the depths of hell, who came expecting a friend, a father.”

  At this last word Hans shuddered, raised his eyes slowly, and looked at Lil. “I am sorry,” he wheezed. “I am quite sorry. There’s not enough of me left, Lil. I cannot give you what you desire. I am no kind of friend. I did not mean to lead you down here.” He coughed suddenly, spasmodically. “I let the warmth of regard flow over me. I let you think well of me. I led you astray.”

  “No,” Lil said. She stood there, and I could tell, from the way she stood—stiff, hands gripping the material of her trousers, that she was trying to be brave. Lil, who isn’t afraid of anything, was scared. “No,” she repeated, then reached into her pocket. She took out the pill. It glittered, even without any light—gleamed bright as a lightning bug.

  She climbed over the slope of dirt and knelt. She held it so they could both look at it.

  It turned, slowly, from white to golden—the color of her lost braids. Hans looked at it, then at her. He reached up to touch her shorn hair with a fingertip.

  “It’s medicine.” Lil’s voice was high and a little unsteady. “Please.” She held it closer to him, just under his chin. “Please take it.”

  A flurry of expressions twisted his features. Anger, despair, resignation, and then something even more painful . . . something deep. Something beyond any feeling I’d ever had. Pure pain. It was there, on his face, in the lines around his eyes and mouth.

  Fingertips trembling, he traced the charm with a fingertip. “Lil,” he whispered.

  “Please,” Lil said, her voice rising in pitch. “Please take it. It’ll make you strong enough to . . . strong.” Tears leaked from his eyes.

  The whole world was suspended.

  Without Hans, we were not enough to hold off the Grimms. Without Hans, I lost my chance of finding my way back home.

  I let my breath out—I didn’t realize I was holding it—when his reluctant fingers took the lump of gold.

  He palmed it, squeezed it, opened his palm again. A gold thread shot through it, a loop large enough to pass over his head.

  He let it settle onto his chest. There was a crackle of light so bright it left spots in my vision. I closed my eyes, the light still hurt through my lids, pink and fierce.

  I opened them again, blinking. Slowly, he stood. His color looked a little better.

  There was something about the way he stood—tall. Shoulders square. His silver hair flowed down his back. His beard framed his face like filigree. He took a deep, groaning breath, and there was something more solid about him, it seemed to me.

  He took Lil’s face in his hands, turned it up so he looked down into her eyes.

  I couldn’t quite believe it, but there they were—streams of wet down her cheeks. Lil was crying.

  “You are right, little one. My heart,” he tapped the charm, “tells me this is a just penance. I shall be strong until I can get you back. If that takes a day or . . .” he sighed, and gave Eap a look. They shared a look. I didn’t think I liked it, what I thought it might mean.

  The room swayed wildly. We all went skittering across the floor, banging into the metal walls. And then, a horrible wrenching sound, which vibrated through the room, and all of us.

  “They’ve found us,” Eap said.

  One of my shift managers came running from the engines. “It’s a great dark cloud. A storm. Like a hurricane only . . . not. Not a hurricane, Cap’n.”

  I ran for the ladder.

  There was another huge jarring, one that nearly knocked me off the ladder, and a sickening crunch, the vibrations humming through all the walls around us.

  I leapt onto the deck, and there it was—a dark mist towering over us, whirling like a cyclone, buzzing and vibrating like a massive swarm of bees.

  “This is ours,” I shouted up at it. “This is our place! Go to hell, Grimms!”

  Eap sucked in his breath.

  The cloud hummed louder, louder, until the noise rang in my head. It spread, rose, and then formed into a great wolf’s head with two clear twilight-colored eyes.

  “It’s getting dark,” Lil said. “They’re changing the sky!”

  The wolf bared its black teeth and leapt suddenly, biting into the boat’s stern, splintering it and sending a wave of buckling boards over the deck. My coal boys, my serving girls, were scurrying, trying to secure the balloon, which jerked toward the funnel of wind.

  “Fire the cannons!” I shouted.

  Several men skidded in their tracks, turned and ran for the below-deck hatches where they could get to the cannons. They fired in a wave, letting out fifty-pound cannon balls. I knew there was a limited supply of them—you can’t store many fifty-pound cannon balls on an airship. I clung to the rail, staring down the giant wolf.

  A giant cannon—compressed air.

  It swelled up out of the middle of the cabin roof: short, stubby, wide-mouthed. It fired. I felt the force of the air even from behind—the wave of it passing through the great wolf-cloud, stretching, distorting it.

  And then the wolf bubbled, swelled to three times its height.

  “Fool!” Eap shouted. “You cannot make figments here! Change breeds change, Logan! Anything so new they take for theirs! Use something more solid, or use nothing!” He clawed the air, and a cloud rose up behind us—a shadow just like the wolf now reforming, eyes narrow and dark with the sky, which had grown black, pricked with stars.

  Eap’s shadow clumped into a million shapes—birds. Ravens. They screeched with a noise that could shatter glass and flew at the shadow wolf, clawing for its eyes, scratching at its nose, covering every inch of ragged fur.

  There was a horrid howl, and the wolf began to shrink, to dissipate. Dark shapes flew all over the place—drops of wolf—and scattered across the sky, fleeing from the ravens.

  And then another cloud bloomed up. Rusty, laughing caws.

  Rooks.

  Their bald, angry faces stared us down and flew at the ravens.

  “Hans!” Eap cried out, his voice cracking.

  Hans emerged from the trap door, slamming it against the deck. Crooked and grey, hollow-faced, he was standing ramrod straight. He fixed a glare at the writhing dark shapes, a cool rage that was both terrifying and regal.

  He stretched out his hand. A staff formed in it—tall, wooden, carved intricately with vines and leaves, topped by a carved rose. A curve of leaves arced over for a handle.

  A bird—grey, brown and white—spiraled down suddenly from the dark sky above us and landed on his shoulder. It was carrying something. Hans tweaked it gently from the beak, held it up to look at it.

  It was hair. A long dark wavy strand.

  Hans closed his eyes, breathed in, and pressed it to his chest. He fumbled for Lil’s heart, hanging from his neck by a gleaming yellow ring. He wrapped his palm, and the hair, around the heart and squeezed it tight.

  When he took his hand away the hair was gone, but there was a swirl of light and dark in the heart-stone—Lil’s gold, and the dark, woven together.

  Hans flung his arms up, swung the staff in a swift arc over his head. His eyes were wild and fierce. His crooked teeth gleamed.

  There was a booming crack and a flash of light—a stripe of light cut through the sky, and the darkness dissolved.

  Gold and yellow, pink and orange bloomed all around us. A glittering, golden rim edged on the horizon.

  “There it is!” Eap cried, a wild hope alive in his face, glittering in his eyes. “There you are! Clever, Hans, clever to take back the sky!”

  Birds shrieked, swarmed, swirling like a yin yang sign in the sky, trying to engulf one another.
The compression cannon I’d made was firing at them, sending the ravens swirling away while the rooks advanced. Soon, they’d be over our ship, able to swoop down on us.

  Eap was right. It had been a mistake to make it. It was too new, too easily changeable, and it had been taken from us. Maybe I could take it back. Maybe. I’d made it, after all. I could fight for it. I should, shouldn’t I? It was my mistake. I should fix it.

  I turned and looked directly into the face of a wolf. Suddenly there, made of the darkness.

  It stood there, panting, eyes like ice. It was small to me, after the great wolf-giant that had bitten off the Whippoorwill’s prow off the Whippoorwill, but the dread that lodged in my throat was much worse as it hunched its body. In that moment before it sprang on me—that moment before—I felt a thrill of terror so sharp I couldn’t even move. I couldn’t yell. Couldn’t make a sound.

  Lil was waving at the sky, conjuring up something. Eap and Hans were also fixed on the battle in the air around us. My crewmen were below, firing off round after round of explosions which rocked us, split the air with noise.

  Nobody saw the wolf leap at me.

  Nobody saw it sink its teeth into my shoulder and drag me to the ground.

  Its breath was odd—spicy, like cumin and garlic. Its teeth felt strange—stinging, cold. They made me numb, like something drained out of me. Like it sucked something from me. Blood, yes, but something else. I couldn’t move. I was losing my periphery. The world swam and dimmed.

  Arapahoe. He’d thrown himself into the fight I’d given him. Even though I’d hurt him. Even though I’d betrayed him.

  Arapahoe, strong, muscled, eyes blazing—a spirit, only more than a spirit; a shadow, a giant, stretched along the deck and touched the wolf. The braid down his back arched in the air, pointed like a scorpion stinger, and hit the wolf right between its eyes. And the two joined. Meshed together.

  I watched, mesmerized, as the two shapes fought to become each other—morphing into wolf, then man, then wolf, then man.

  A weird grey shadow with a face, crawling toward me. Not Arapahoe, but not a wolf.