Ambergate (6 page)

“The men would see it. They’re out by the main gate as well as at the front. More have come this time.” She saw my hesitation.
“Go, Scuff!” She pushed me out of the door.

I caught her hand. “Goodbye, Aggie.”

She wrenched her fingers away. “No time…” The door shut behind me, I was out in the stable yard, and the black figures of
the two men were striding away over the cobbles, the wind lifting Jukes’s cape. I thought I’d be left alone in the
dark spaces; I fled after them, clutching my amulet. But a thread of red cotton was so frail against the powers of darkness,
so easily broken.

After a moment I could see the stars shining in the heavens, like tiny golden beads. The round moon hung above the rise on
which the tower stood and filled the night with a soft white light, so that nothing—tree, bush, or blade of grass—had shadow.
To our left I could see the flare of torches: the other group of soldiers had left the main gates to search the grounds.

“Mr. Jukes!” I ran to his side as he quickened his pace up the track to the copse of blowing trees. “They will see us!”

He made no answer.
He’s doing this for Aggie
, I thought,
otherwise he’d leave me to face them on my own. He must hate me for putting the household in such danger
.

Jukes and Pegg skirted the dark ring of trees. Across a patch of rough ground, pitted with night-filled hollows, was the high
stone wall that ran around the boundary of the Murkmere estate. It stood in shadow, but they knew the whereabouts of the door
and made for it without hesitation. Jukes felt for the keyhole; I could hear him fumbling as he tried to fit in the rusty
key.

At last it was in, and he managed to turn it with great effort. Then, with Pegg’s help, he struggled to draw back the bolts,
top and bottom. They too were rusty and wouldn’t slide.

“No chance,” Pegg muttered.

A sound made us start around. Across the stretch of moonlit grass Aggie was running toward us, without cloak or hat,
her hair streaming in the wind. She held her skirts in both hands and her petticoats fluttered wildly. “I had to warn you!”
she gasped as she reached us. “They’re putting men at every exit from Murkmere! It won’t be long before they’re here!”

“We can’t move the bolts, Miss Aggie,” Jukes said.

“Can’t we lift her over the wall? We must!”

“Too high, Miss.”

I knew he did not want to help, and Aggie knew it too.

But what he said was true: even tall Jukes couldn’t lift me high enough.

Lights flickered among the distant trees. “They’re here already,” I whispered.

“You must go to the tower!” said Aggie. “I’ve the key here.”

“We’ll be spotted, Miss,” said Jukes, but he took it.

“Not if you approach it from the other side.” She pressed something warm and round into my hand. “My amber—take it, Scuff.”

“I can’t!”

“Take it—you have more need of it than I.”

Then she was gone. Blindly, I put her amulet around my neck. Pegg grunted, “Come on, then,” and the three of us began to steal
along in the shadow of the wall. The shouts of the searching men carried to us on the wind, the crashing in the undergrowth.
Light flared among the trees.

Somehow we made it to the tower unseen, each of us taking it in turns to cross open ground to the doorway. Once there, the
noise of the men seemed farther away.

Into the tower again, the door open a crack, squeezing through one by one into darkness. Inside, I couldn’t hear the
wind, only our breathing, my heart pumping. “Lock the door,” said Pegg.

I heard the scratch of metal in the darkness, the click of the key turning. Above us the darkness was lifted by a softer gray
tonight: moonlight shone through an arched window; below it was the black band of the stairs.

“We must go up,” said Jukes.

We reached the landing, and I followed the men into a large room. Through a great glass door at the far end, the night sky
was spread in its glory; a million stars glittered and danced around the glowing lamp of the moon, so that I thought I’d faint
at so much strange expanse of beauty, so much space.

What is this place? What infernal magic did the Master conjure here
? But I was too frightened to dwell on my old Master’s certain damnation; my palms were wet with the prospect of my own.

Jukes stood by the glass, staring down. “See how close the men are?” he said nervously to Pegg.

I went cautiously toward him, past a desk on which dust glowed luminous in the moonlight, past curious cabinets, glass surfaces
that gleamed. As I came to the window, I gasped, and for a moment I thought I’d fall straight out, straight down to where
the soldiers would soon come. A ragged line of light—torch flames torn by the wind—was moving toward the tower, along the
boundary wall.

A clatter made me jump. Behind us, Pegg had opened a drawer in the desk and was examining a small pistol in his hand. “The
Master’s gun’s still here. Still loaded too.”

The men were nearly at the tower, as if they knew we sheltered there. “Are those rifles they’re carrying, Mr. Jukes?” I said,
my voice high and strange.

Jukes nodded briefly. “Look at that, Pegg.”

Dark shapes slunk low around the soldiers. “They’ve brought dogs!” I whispered.

“They’ve followed our scent. Be sniffing us out next,” muttered Pegg, moving to Jukes’s side, the pistol still in his hand.

“But they’re not in uniform,” I said hesitantly. “Can they be soldiers, Mr. Pegg?”

“What else? Night maneuvers. Don’t want to be seen, do they?”

“There be a whole lot of them,” said Jukes, his voice shaking. He added dourly, “The law will have its way in this country,
sure enough. What she did”—he jerked his head toward me—“must have been wicked indeed that so many of them be eager to get
her, Pegg.”

“I never meant this to happen,” I said. “Please go—look to yourselves.”

“Too late,” growled Pegg. “If we leave now, we’ll be savaged by the dogs or shot by them soldiers most like. Accomplices,
they’ll call us. We’re harboring a criminal.”

“We’ll be taken to the Capital, up before the Lord Protector himself,” Jukes said, his lanky frame quivering.

“And all for a kitchen maid,” said Pegg.

Below us they began to hammer on the outside door. My heart almost stopped.

The two men stared at each other. Pegg looked down at
the pistol in his hand. “I’ve a little notion that might work, Jukes.”

Jukes eyed the pistol apprehensively. “You’ll be in worse trouble if you use that on them.”

Pegg shook his head; his teeth bared in a ghastly smile. “They want the girl, right? Well then, we shall give her to them
nice and easy and not be seen ourselves.”

And his right hand swung to point the pistol direct at me.

The group of men who surrounded the tower began to thump their sticks on the ground in triumph. Earlier the dogs had sniffed
a bodice taken from the missing girl’s bedchamber, and minutes ago they had picked up the same scent in the grounds by the
wall. Now they were going mad around the tower, panting and straining on their leashes: tough, rough-haired mongrels with
sharp noses and even sharper teeth. She must be in there, the girl they were after.

Not long until the door was down. Even solid oak couldn’t bear up against pickaxes.

In the dark and from a distance, it is easy to mistake a stick for a rifle. But soldiers do not carry sticks, and these men
were not soldiers. They were rebels.

The leader of the group of rebels, a young man called Titus
Molde, bent to feel for the dagger he always kept in his boot, and smiled to himself. He wasn’t expecting any trouble, but
it might be handy. He had spotted the two men with her and didn’t know if they’d let her go easily. Number 102. At last they
had found her. It would make all the difference to the morale of the cause, so badly damaged by the death of Robert Fane.

And he’d be glad to be out of this place. It made Titus Molde uneasy: the trees like ghosts in the moonlight, the whining
of the wind. He was used to working in the night, of course, but he didn’t like it. He wasn’t devout anymore, but at times
he regretted he’d ever cast away his amulet.

Something flickered against the full moon. A large bird, neck outstretched. His hand went up automatically to his throat,
to the place where his amulet had been. What could it be? What Night Bird had that wingspan—or was it a trick of the moonlight?
And now another bird was following it, and another: a whole flock of great, white, long-necked birds, swooping low over the
dark blowing trees of the copse and flying through the wind toward the men.

Then Titus Molde smiled again, at his own stupidity, as he realized what they were.

But the men in charge of breaking down the door looked up at the white birds flying against the stars, muttered together,
and put down their axes uneasily. Those holding torches shifted closer together, the ring of men around the tower beginning
to break up. The dogs, sensing the tension, were barking, hackles up, and from far away in the Hall there
came an answering howl from the imprisoned guard dogs of Murkmere.

“What are they?” said one of the men, looking up at the great heavy birds and rubbing moon-dazzled eyes.

“An omen,” said another.

The youth standing next to him gave a frightened moan. “What do they mean in the
Table of Significance
?”

It was time to stop this, thought Titus Molde. He strode over. “They’re swans, can’t you see that? Wild swans. They breed
in the Wasteland.”
These recruits from the city!

Unfortunately, the local men were down at the gates. The birds made no sound, no cry, as they circled beneath the moon. The
wind buffeted the men’s ears and hissed through the undergrowth around them.

Then there was a crash from far above their heads, from the top of the tower. Something fell through the air. Nerves on edge,
the nearest men leapt back. One of them held the object up, turning it gingerly this way and that in the moonlight. “Broken
glass,” he said. “She’s trying to break the window!”

“We’ll be waiting for her if she jumps!” said another man.

“Be sure to catch her, then,” said Titus Molde. “I want to take her back to the Capital in one piece.”

Another crash from above, and another, and then something invisible came hurtling through the air, followed by a lethal rain
of smaller pieces. The men dodged back, but one brought his hand to his face with a cry of anguish and took it away, black
with blood.

“We could try shouting up to her,” someone said to Titus Molde.

“She’d never hear, not with this wind,” Molde said. He hesitated, then yelled over to the men at the door, “Hurry up with
that, can’t you?”

More shards of glass fell, the smaller ones blown in all directions by the wind. The men on the grass drew back hastily; those
at the door of the tower pressed themselves against the wood for protection. They waited speechlessly to see what would happen
next, mesmerized by the dark hole that had been the great window at the top.

Then they gave a low groan of amazement and fear. Something extraordinary was appearing out of the darkness up there, something
inhuman—like a giant moth, with an eerie glow to the vast, furled wings. And even as they thought it a moth, the pale wings
uncurled and they saw it was a bird.

It had not yet flown out. It perched, swaying, on the very edge of the hole.

And in its claws it held a girl.

Too frightened to care about losing their quarry, the men clutched at their amulets, letting the dogs loose.

Only Titus Molde knew what he was seeing. He’d heard about the flying machine that had been fashioned long ago by the late
Master of Murkmere. It had never flown, so far as he knew. Was the girl so desperate she was trying to escape them in such
a risky contraption? Something so fragile, so amateurishly built, could only crash. She’d fall through the wind to her death
on the hard earth.

This went through his mind in a flash. A voice inside his
head screamed protest, then he was running toward the tower, shouting upward into the mocking wind, “Stop!”

Even before the word was torn from his mouth, the birdmachine had moved suddenly forward, had lurched over the edge.

The men below stood, transfixed. They held their breath. Alone among them their leader moved, gesticulating wildly, screaming
something inaudible above the barking dogs.

The bird thing did not fall immediately. As if there was some impetus pushing it from behind, it went horizontally through
the air for a short way, holding its height, the wind beneath its wings. Then it slowed. It seemed to judder in the air, hanging
stationary but quivering, for a second.

Titus Molde shut his eyes. He felt air press on his forehead as something flew heavily over his head. He ducked involuntarily;
the men behind him cried out.

When he looked around, black wings had blotted out the moon. The wind was full of birds. The swans were all about the men
in a turbulence, beating the air so that the screams of the men were muffled by the
thump, thump
of wings. The men cowered down, shielding their eyes.

Titus Molde fell flat on the grass, protecting his face with his hands. His heart was banging in his chest: he knew that swans
could kill a man. He heard the swans attack the contraption, beat it to the ground.

He lay motionless until he thought the vile birds had gone. He was full of fury and humiliation. He was the leader and he’d
done nothing to prevent the girl’s death. He’d been too scared, without an amulet. Scared of birds that had no sinister significance
in the
Table
, were no doom-laden omen.

The wind rattled the bare branches in the copse and lifted his hair. The dogs had fallen silent. His men would not get up
from the ground until he did. He’d best stand up and go over to the debris left by the shattered machine, the dead body in
the midst of it all.

But when he raised his head and looked up, there was nothing to see. Beneath the empty stars his men lay huddled on the ground:
pathetic bundles of rags and spent swagger, sticks at all angles, useless. A couple of dogs nosed at them and whimpered.