Keys and Curses (Shadow Book 2) (20 page)

Fitz, Flower and Nikifor ran down the forest track, keeping under the shelter of the foliage, until they found a hollowed out washaway leading down the steep incline to the road below.

It wasn’t the safest path by any means, but there was little time to find a better one. Nikifor pushed aside the bracken that concealed the top of the steep track, hung onto the sides and climbed down by jamming his boots into any precarious hold they could find in the rock. Flower came after him, and then Fitz, his hooves sending showers of dirt tumbling down the path and into their faces.

It wasn’t an easy climb. More than ever Nikifor felt how his muscles had softened from years of addiction and squalor in Shadow City. Yes, strength had been creeping back to him ever since he’d gone to work in the quicksilver mine, but his arms shook and every downward swing was agony, every moment between finding safe handholds a moment between safety and falling to his death far below. He clung to the rock face with grim determination and reminded himself with every ounce of pain that whoever the Tormentor was, he was not in control of this. He would never be in control again. Nikifor was going to claw his life back inch by inch from the monster who had stolen it.

He dropped to the road covered in scratches and bruises, then helped Flower down the last few feet.

Flower fended his hands off as soon as she was on solid ground and brushed herself down, ignoring him completely.

Fitz skidded the last few yards on the backs of his hooves and landed awkwardly. “I’m not built for this.”

“Come on.” Nikifor loosened the axe in its binding on his back and strode in the direction of the oncoming wagons.

“I’d like to know what you plan to do,” Flower said, hurrying to keep up.

“What I always do.” Nikifor could hardly keep the bitterness from his voice. “Kill everything that moves.”

“I’m sure that’ll work out fine for the fetches, but what about the false muse riding in front? How do you propose to kill her?”

Nikifor stopped walking. He hadn’t thought about that.

“We don’t kill her.” Fitz looked ahead at the bend in the road around which the wagons would come at any minute. They were now almost underneath where the Bloomin Fairies waited at the top of the cliff.

“What?” Flower and Nikifor said in unison.

“I want to know what she knows.” Fitz ran a hand over his beard and for a moment had the same cold look Nikifor had seen on him the night before, when he’d threatened Flower’s life over keeping Hippy Ishtar a secret. “Leave her to me.”

“Honestly,” Flower said. “I could be using this whole thing to feed my writers some serious inspiration if you two weren’t so uptight about my key.” She stalked ahead.

The wagons rounded the bend, lumbering along behind the upright figure of a young woman in a long gray coat. She could have been the sister of the one who’d led the attack on Pumpkin. She had the same dirty blonde hair, pulled back in a ponytail. Pale blue eyes ringed with black makeup were every bit as sulky as the mouth set in a permanent pout.

Flower planted herself in the middle of the road, folded her arms and scowled. Nikifor and Fitz ranged themselves behind her.

The false muse stopped just a few feet from Flower and raised a hand. The wagons lumbered to a halt. The fetches flew in low, lazy circles over their heads, but did not attack. Nikifor’s fingers itched to seize his axe, but he held back.

Then Flower did the last thing he expected. She smiled. “Hello,” she said. “What’s your name?”

The false muse scowled and studied her nails. “Shazza. What’s it to you?”

“Where are you going, Shazza?”

Shazza lifted her eyes and studied Flower hard. “Down this road. Move aside.” She gestured with her blunderbuss.

“Do you know who I am?” Flower asked.

“Couldn’t care less. Get out my way.”

“She’s good, your friend,” Fitz whispered in Nikifor’s ear. Then he moved around slowly, while reaching inside his coat.

Nikifor kept an eye on the fetches, who circled lower still.

“I met another false muse like you,” Flower said.

“I’m a real muse.” Shazza’s blunderbuss swung around to point at Flower.

“Oh, it was just she looked a lot like you. She wanted to take me back to the Guild, you see. I’m top of their wanted list.” Flower brushed the hair away from her face and smiled.

“That’s my sister Kazza. But I still couldn’t care less. I’m not in charge of catching crooks. I’m in charge of transporting freaking quicksilver.” Shazza stomped her foot. “So get out my way!”

Fitz by this time had made it past her and to the edge of the wagons, all the while trailing salt behind him on the ground.

Flower gave Shazza a look of wide-eyed sympathy. “You mean Kazza gets to chase crooks while you’re stuck with guarding a pile of quicksilver? That’s not fair!”

Shazza’s pout deepened. “No it’s not fair! She’s not so good as she makes everyone think! I-” She stopped and looked at Fitz, who had circled around and was almost back to Nikifor. “You! What are you doing?”

Fitz smiled, closed the circle and stepped inside of it.

Shazza screeched like a boiling kettle. Flower leaped forward and clapped a hand over her mouth. To Nikifor’s amazement, she didn’t disappear in a puff of smoke. She gave an outraged squeal and kicked Flower in the ankle.

He didn’t see what happened after that, because the fetches swooped. He had his axe in his hands in a second. He swung once, twice, three times and blew the first fetches into clouds of stinking gas. More swooped, but there were only about ten to deal with, which was nothing after yesterday.

The fairies came swarming down the cliff. They didn’t climb or tumble; like all fairies, they simply walked down the sheer surface as though it were an ordinary flat road.

Nikifor caught the last fetch on the tip of an axe blade and ducked the explosion of gas. The Bloomin Fairies swarmed over the road and onto the wagons, jumping up and down, shaking and rocking everything in sight like overexcited children.

Flower wrenched the blunderbuss from Shazza’s hands after delivering a nasty kick to the shin. Fitz grabbed her arms.

Shazza twisted in his grip and caught sight of the Bloomin Fairies. “Hey!” she yelled. “Hey you lot, stop that! This quicksilver is important you know!”

“We know.” Flower curled a fist, drew her arm back and punched Shazza in the nose. “That’s for pretending to be a muse.”

Shazza’s eyes rolled back in her head and she fell to the ground. Nikifor winced. It wasn’t often he saw Flower display any kind of violence, but when she did, it generally wasn’t a good idea to be on the receiving end. She knew what she was doing, no matter how hard she tried to pretend she was nice.

“We haven’t much time,” Fitz said. “We need to get her into that prison cart before she wakes up.”

Nikifor picked Shazza up by the shoulders and dragged her past the fairies, who continued to jump up and down on the carts. For someone made of smoke, Shazza wasn’t light. Sweat rolled down his face by the time he reached the final cart.

The cage was made of iron bars on an iron platform, with a door barred shut by a wooden pole fixed to the outside. Inside, three very miserable and ragged Freakin Fairies huddled in a corner. The three scrambled to the front of the cage and pressed their faces to the bars at the sight of Nikifor and Fitz.

Nikifor felt sick. “Strike Pin!” His voice rose. “But this is disastrous! Those dastardly fiends!”

Strike Pin sniggered. “That curse worked good, huh?”

Tick Tick and Tock Tock, both looking the worse for wear, sniggered too.

Nikifor’s cheeks burned. For a split second it occurred to him the fairies could be left in there. But the thought made him feel horrible. It was the kind of thing the Tormentor would have demanded. He dropped Shazza, yanked the pole away and wrenched open the doors.

The Freakin Fairies scrambled out of the cage. Nikifor lifted Shazza and shut her in there, before Fitz replaced the pole and set to work making a salt circle around the rim.

The Freakin Fairies watched in puzzlement.

“Look, what’s going on?” Tick Tick finally asked. “Why aren’t you looking for the Silver clan?”

“The Silver clan are locked in their mine under heavy guard,” Nikifor said. “We’re on our way to fetch someone who can help us free them.”

Tock Tock scoffed. “A likely story from a muse.”

“Why were you locked up?” Nikifor looked again at the state of them. Their faces were pinched and blue. They probably hadn’t even eaten in days.

The three glanced at each other.

“The Moon Troopers came and demanded we hand over every drop of quicksilver,” Strike Pin said. “We tried to stop them, so they put us in the cage there and said we had to go to Shadow City to stand trial for treason.”

“Where is the rest of your clan?”

“Probably locked up like the Silvers,” Tock Tock said.

Strike Pin studied Nikifor closely. “You’re not crazy anymore.”

Nikifor shook his head.

A big grin broke out on Strike Pin’s face. “That curse did work good! I’ll tell Coalfire.”

The three fairies began to walk away.

“Where are you going?” Nikifor said.

“Back to get everyone out of the mine.” Strike Pin gave a cheery wave. “You don’t expect us to hang about with a pack of Bloomin Fairies?”

“I’ll be back with help,” Nikifor said. “I swear it.”

“You can swear as much as you like mate, you’ll still be a muse in a pack of Bloomin Fairies.”

Nikifor watched them go. Fitz chanted unfamiliar words in a low voice while walking around the prison cart. Behind him, the Bloomin Fairies noise level escalated. The stench of dead fetches lingered in the air. He thought about the Moon Troopers imprisoning entire clans of Freakin Fairies to make them drag more and more quicksilver out of the reservoirs to feed a machine strung together by the keys of missing muses. A machine built, if Mudface was correct, to kill him.

For the first time Nikifor wondered what he’d done to merit such a fate from someone he didn’t even remember. Surely, when this was all over and he and Flower found the king, he would have all the answers.

Oddly, the thought held little comfort.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Flower snatched a teetering child off the edge of a wagon before she fell bodily into the silver. That was the tenth one. It was the bigger kids who’d tugged the coverings loose, and she’d been frantic trying to keep them all out of it ever since. Pumpkinhead and Carrots had gone back up the slope to fetch the Lord of the Gourd, Fitz and Nikifor were busy with Shazza and the adult fairies were just as bad as their horrible children. She deposited the squirming child firmly on the ground, only to have her bolt straight back to the wagon, leap onto the wheel and climb up again.

Flower pushed her hair out of her face. It was damp and sweaty like the rest of her and she was very, very close to screaming. She grit her teeth, dashed back down to the next wagon and hauled a full-grown fairy who should have known better away from the silver by the hair.

He set up a yell. “Ow! Ow! Ow! What’d you do that for you great big giant dead freakin muse?”

“Because that stuff will kill you!” Flower exploded. “You’re a full-grown fairy, what are you thinking?” A shape flashed past her peripheral vision. She reached out and grabbed a toddler away from the edge without even looking and dumped her in the fairy’s arms. “Grow up!”

The fairy sneered at her. “Oh, grow up is it? Typical muse attitude that is.”

Flower turned her back on him. “Hey! Hey you lot!” She grabbed a giggling fairy out of the uplifted arms of another fairy preparing to throw her into the silver. “Would you quit it? Even the Freakin Fairies aren’t this stupid!”

Dead silence. Every pair of eyes glared at her. A middle-aged woman with a greying topknot pointed a bony finger at her. “Take that back! Freakin Fairies are so stupider than us!”

Flower closed her eyes and counted to ten. She should have known better. Of course she should have, she’d studied fairy customs for years to avoid making mistakes like this, but the creatures were just–so–

Fitz laid a hand on her shoulder. “Everything okay?”

“She called us stupid!” yelled a kid no higher than her knee.

All of the fairies burst into babble and shouting.

“Honestly I’ve had it with them, I’m ready to hand them over to the Guild.” Flower pressed her fingertips to her throbbing temples. “I was just trying to stop them all jumping in the quicksilver!”

“It’s probably best if we get them moving to keep busy,” Fitz said.

“Moving where? Back into the forest?”

“No. We’re taking the wagons into Shadow City.”

“We’re doing what?” Flower grabbed his sleeve, horrified. “You can’t be serious!”

“Unfortunately it’s a necessity.” He ran a hand over his beard and cast a regretful look over the babbling pack. “That’s where the door into Dream we need is.”