‘That train is remarkably fleet, fast, light-footed,’ said Japeth, who was watching the smoke plume from the Grim’s train. ‘If I am to take the wheel, I perhaps should set forth, depart, leave, or absent myself immediately.’
‘You’re right,’ said Arthur. He forced a deep breath into his tired lungs and stood up straighter. He owed it to Japeth – and Suzy and everyone else – to do his absolute best and then some more. Giving up was not an option. ‘I will defeat Grim Tuesday and I will release you and all the other indentured workers. No one should be a slave. Here, or anywhere else.’
‘That’s more like the old Arthur,’ said Suzy. ‘There I was thinking this Pit had sucked the guts out of you. In a manner of speaking.’
‘Thanks a lot,’ muttered Arthur. He held out his hand to Japeth. ‘Good luck. I’ll do my best to help you.’
This time, there were fewer sparks when Japeth shook his hand. But Arthur felt a surge of energy come out of his palm and travel up through his arm, and Japeth’s arm trembled as if he felt something similar. Then Arthur noticed that Japeth had grown several inches, and his ragged shirt had restitched itself, even the string holding together his cuffs transforming into mother-of-pearl links.
‘I will serve you too, Arthur, when I can,’ said Japeth, letting go of his hand. ‘Farewell for now,Master.Miss Suzy, if I may trouble you to explain, elucidate, or illuminate the workings of this wheel?’
He hurried over to the wheel and climbed in. Suzy showed him the lever that controlled its speed and the locked access hatch to the gearbox that could only be opened by Grim Tuesday or one of the Grotesques, to allow the wheel to use its stored clockwork power to go up the railway rather than down.
Japeth gently pushed the lever forward and the wheel moved off. The Denizen waved as he passed Arthur, then pushed the lever as far as it would go. The wheel accelerated away, and was soon lost in the rising shadows.
The rain had also just started again. Spotting drops, so far without the Nothing taint. The clouds were spreading out from the edges of the Pit, drawing closer to the fading sunburst.
Arthur stood still as Suzy sliced through his cape and shirt with a short, sharp knife – the knife she’d picked up in Monday’s antechamber. Standing still while Suzy cut behind him reminded Arthur unpleasantly of being in the hospital, about to be injected in the upper arm.
After cutting the slits in his clothes, Suzy picked up one of the pieces of paper and quickly folded and tore it into two separate wings. The paper became fluffier and more feathery as she worked.
‘Lie down,’ she instructed Arthur. He lay down but craned his head to see what she was doing.
Suzy put the wings on the ground and weighted them with a piece of ballast. She unrolled two pieces of twine and set them next to the wings. Then she picked up the stick of sealing wax and the matches.
‘This’ll sting a bit,’ she said as she struck a match against the ground. It flared with a loud whoompah, and a flame about three feet long shot up out of the match.
‘Down,’ said Suzy. The flame receded. ‘Down some more. That’s it.’
Arthur couldn’t see what she did next, but he felt it. A blob of hot sealing wax went straight onto his shoulder blade, then he felt the paper wing brushing his back and the string dangling past his neck. Suzy’s thumb pressed hard into the wax.
‘Don’t move!’ she warned. ‘Got to do the next one quickly or they’ll grow unbalanced.’
Arthur bit his lip to suppress a yelp as the wax dripped on the other side. It was worse when he expected it, but it was only a momentary pain.
‘Done!’ exclaimed Suzy with satisfaction. ‘They take about ten minutes to grow. I’ll make mine, then you can stick them on for me.’
‘I don’t know how!’ Arthur protested.
‘It’s easy,’ replied Suzy as she quickly folded and tore the remaining paper into wings. ‘Just heat the wax, drop a bit on my shoulder, whack the wing and the string on, drop a bit more wax, then seal it with your thumb. There’s already holes in my clothes from my regular wings.’
‘OK,’ said Arthur doubtfully. He took the wings and weighted them down with the same piece of ballast, and put the string next to them. Then he picked up the matches. They looked normal enough apart from the cover of the box.
‘Hurry up,’ said Suzy, who was lying on the floor scratching her back through the holes in her clothes. ‘This stone is cold.’
Arthur struck the match on the ground, flinching as it roared into life. The flame was even longer than the one Suzy had struck, and dancing around in an excited fashion that had nothing to do with any wind. It even seemed to have a tiny, grinning face.
‘Down,’ said Arthur. ‘Down a lot.’
The flame slowly ebbed, the face losing its grin and becoming sad. When it was only an inch or so high, Arthur picked up the sealing wax and quickly melted the end to drop a dollop on Suzy’s back. Being nervous, he got it a bit wrong, so some wax fell on her coat and ran onto the skin. Arthur dripped a bit more on.
‘What’s the hold-up?’ asked Suzy. ‘It’s not like it’s a complicated spell or anything.’
Arthur frowned and dripped a whole lot more wax, then he carefully pressed the wing and the string down, melted more wax on top, and pressed it down with his thumb. He expected that this would leave a thumbprint in the wax, but it didn’t. Instead it made the wax glow in rainbow colours, followed by a perfect round seal, with a profile of his own head wearing a crown of laurel, and words around the outside in some weird alphabet that slowly changed into regular letters that read DOMINUS ARTHUR MAGISTER DOMUS INFERIOR and then changed again to LORD ARTHUR MASTER OF THE LOWER HOUSE.
‘What are you waiting for?’ asked Suzy in an exasperated tone. ‘Grim Tuesday to come and ask you to tea?’
‘Sorry,’ said Arthur. He’d been briefly mesmerised by his own seal. Quickly he put on the second wing. It had already grown a bit on the ground, and was much more like feathers than paper. Clean, glowing white feathers, totally in contrast to the soot-stained stone and the gathering darkness.
Arthur felt his own wings begin to flap, sending a draft around his ankles. But they were still too small to lift him off the ground.
Suzy handed Arthur one of the jars of what looked like woollen frog finger puppets, stuck the other in her apron pocket, then busied herself putting everything else back in the satchel. She hung it over her neck at the front so it didn’t get in the way of her wings.
‘There’s six stickit fingers in the jar. Bung them on now, thumb and every second finger,’ she instructed, unscrewing her own jar. ‘They won’t stick till you speak the spell, which is “Stick by day and stick by night, stick for a minute each, left and right.” Only one of your hands will stick at a time, so you can move about. Just remember which is sticky and which is about to unstick. I’ll tell you how to take them off when we need to.’
Arthur repeated the spell in his head to make sure he got it right, then put the six stickit fingers on his thumbs and alternate fingers. They were just like little woollen finger puppets, only they wriggled and squeaked like little live mice as he put them on, which made it quite difficult.
He was concentrating very hard on that task, so he got an awful shock when Suzy suddenly picked up the copper rod he’d almost used as a weapon and swung it at something that came flying in like a pitched baseball. It was about the size of a baseball too, but black and fuzzy, almost like a lump of tar.
Suzy hit it. The end of the copper rod puffed into metallic mist as it struck, but whatever it was batted over the edge of the Pit and went straight down.
‘A gobbet of Nothing,’ said Suzy with a frown. ‘Trying to find other gobbets to join to make a Nithling.’
She looked up at the sunburst, which was very faint now. The clouds were practically solid again all around it, and she and Arthur were in twilight that was rapidly turning into darkest night. ‘I thought the sunburst would keep that sort of thing down for longer. You’d better grab some kind of club. Copper’s better than steel, though neither’s much use really against unformed Nothing. Need silver or something special like one of them blades made from frozen moonlight or burning with architectural fire, like Noon’s. How’re your wings? Can you reach your strings? Don’t pull ’em yet.’
Arthur craned his neck to look. His wings now stretched from his shoulder blades to his knees and were magnificently feathered and shining. They were beating slowly, as if they were warming up. The air they washed around him was cleaner, faintly orange-scented, and very refreshing. He felt for the strings, which were hanging down his chest on either side of his neck.
‘I can reach them,’ he confirmed. He looked around and saw another piece of copper pipe, this one thicker and longer than the tube Suzy had appropriated. He started for it, was lifted off his feet, and overshot by several yards.
‘Be ready,’ warned Suzy. ‘They’ll flap proper-like in a minute.’
Arthur bent down and half-crawled, half-pulled himself to the copper pipe. Just as his hand closed around it, his wings gave an almighty beat, lifting him ten feet off the railway.
Suzy was still on the ground, her wings warming up.
‘You can lean to change direction!’ she shouted. ‘Aim for the centre of the Pit to start with. Harder to get shot at from the train or the road. If you get to the ceiling before me, you have to somersault just before you hit. That’ll confuse the wings for a bit and they’ll slow down. Use your stickit fingers to stick to the ceiling. It’ll be easy!’
Arthur’s wings increased the depth and the speed of their beat again, and he began to accelerate upwards. He looked down and saw a huge, only vaguely human figure that had long, wet dragonfly-like wings trailing down its back. As Arthur watched, it climbed up over the lip of the Pit and began to stalk towards Suzy.
She was looking up at Arthur, and obviously could neither hear nor see the Nithling.
‘Suzy!’ Arthur screamed. ‘Look out! A Nith –’
TEN
AS THE NITHLING lunged at Suzy’s back, the sunburst suddenly went out, plunging the Pit back into total darkness, save for the pathetic circle of light from the strom lantern clutched in Arthur’s shaking hand.
Suzy didn’t have a lantern – she’d only had the two fixed on the wheel taken by Japeth. Arthur strained his eyes, desperately trying to see what was happening, but to no avail. He couldn’t hear anything either, over the beat of his wings and the rush of air.
‘Suzy!’
There was no answer. Arthur’s wings beat inexorably on, taking him higher and higher, faster and faster.
‘Suzy!’ he shouted again.
The only response came from above, a sudden swathe of rain. But Arthur’s wings repelled or blew the drops away and surrounded him with an envelope of warm, dry air.
‘Suzy!’
She must have escaped.
Arthur tried to recall that last split-second image before the sunburst died.
Suzy’s wings had been fully extended, about to beat down, hadn’t they? She would have taken off an instant before the Nithling struck her.
Right?
Arthur remembered what Suzy had told him about Nithlings. It seemed like only yesterday and he clearly recalled her words:
‘A festering bite or scratch from a Nithling will dissolve you into Nothing. That’s why everyone’s afraid of them.’
It was only yesterday, Arthur realised. They’d both survived Monday, but Tuesday was much worse. It had been bad enough to start with, but now –
Something flittered into the light of Arthur’s lantern. Instinctively he hit at it with his copper tube, knocking it back into the rainy darkness. Only after he’d done it did he realise it was another one of those flying lumps of Nothing.
A gobbet. Seeking other gobbets to make a Nithling . . .
Arthur started to look everywhere feverishly, craning his head as far around as he could to either side.
What if a gobbet of Nothing hits me in the back of the head? Or in the wings?
Another gobbet hurtled past Arthur’s foot. He kicked at it, and the point of his clog disappeared, sliced off as if by a guillotine. For a heart-stopping instant Arthur thought his toes might have gone as well, till he wriggled them.
For the first time Arthur experimented with changing direction. As Suzy had said, the wings only flew up, but he found he could quickly change the angle of his ascent. To avoid any gobbets that were targeting him – which they might be able to, he didn’t know – Arthur leaned to the right, then the left, then backwards and forwards, till he started to spiral and had to try and remain still and straight to stop that.
Whatever he did, there were still gobbets flying around him. So far none had come from behind, or if they had, they were blown away by his wings. Soon Arthur was batting them away every few minutes with his rapidly diminishing piece of pipe. Every time he hit a gobbet, it dissolved several inches of copper and he had to be careful only to get them with the dissolved end.
Then one hit Arthur’s lantern, boring a hole straight through it, extinguishing its flame, or whatever actually shed the light behind the glass. Arthur groaned, but the darkness only lasted a few seconds. A soft, mellow white light slowly grew all around him, and the gobbets of Nothing were rimmed with luminescence as soon as they got close.
The light was coming from Arthur’s wings. That was comforting for a few seconds, till he realised that being lit up like a Christmas tree angel in the Pit was just an invitation to Nithlings, Overseers, and who knew what else.
Not that there was anything he could do, or any time to think about it. More and more gobbets were flying at him, most of them coming up from below, so he had to draw his knees and feet up and lean forward, which was quite difficult. Every time he leaned forward too far or let one knee fall lower than the other, he lost his balance and started to spin around.