Toymaker, The (26 page)

Then Mathias understood.

He began sweeping the tabletops clear, smashing every spirit jar and bottle onto the floor. He pulled a curtain from its hanging, and trod it into the wet mess that he’d made. Then he stood back and watched. Koenig covered the pan of the pistol, and struck the flint. A single spark curved and fell, and with a thump, like the shaking of a huge blanket, the soaked floor caught fire.

The flames took hold with astonishing speed. They curved up the walls and across the beams of the gilded ceiling. In the cages, the birds and animals began flapping and beating against the bars, hissing and screeching. But Mathias didn’t see them any more than he heard the roar of the fire, because he had suddenly realized something more awful than that.

There was no door.

The room was filling with stinging smoke. A tapestry on the wall burst into flame, burning like dry paper. A row of spirit jars fell and smashed as the shelf they stood on caught fire. Mathias could feel the sudden heat of the flames blistering his skin.

But there was no door, only the one they had come through, and that was lost to them on the other side of the fire. With a crash, one of the huge windows shattered and the fire shot greedily upwards and out.

There had to be a door, hidden like the one in Leiter’s panelled room. They began pulling at the books and shelves on the wall.

But there was no door.

And then they found it, a lock plate where there needn’t have been one. They could see the join in
the wall. Koenig pulled at it, beat weakly at the lock with the butt of the pistol, but it wouldn’t move. So he stepped back, put the muzzle to the place and fired. Shards of metal sang past their ears as the lock burst. Coughing and choking, they pulled at it and fell through the door into the room beyond.

It was a galleried hall with stairs at either end. The air about them was filling with smoke. Above the roar of the fire they could hear men shouting. Mathias looked about, not sure what to do.

‘Up,’ hissed Koenig. His teeth were gritted, his face creased with pain. ‘Up,’ he said.

Together they stumbled towards the stairs. They had only just reached the top when men spilled out into the hall below them, but not one of them looked up. All they could see was the fire. They threw off their coats and jackets and began beating at the flames, shouting for water and buckets. But the floor beneath their feet was already alight.

Mathias didn’t wait to see. Pulling Koenig after him, he started along the gallery, not knowing where he was going. Another bell was ringing now, louder than the first, more clamorous, as the smell of smoke and burning filled the air. There were shouts and voices too. As they turned one corner, people
pushed past them, running, but no one stopped them. Mathias had no idea where they were. The place was a labyrinth. Koenig could go no further. He folded to his knees and closed his eyes.

They were by a high window that opened onto a terrace. From it, Mathias could see where the fire had taken hold. Huge flames had already broken through the roof of the palace. Thick smoke was billowing upwards. In the courtyard below, people were running to and fro, but there was no way of fighting the fire. The water in the troughs and fountains was frozen solid.

‘Come on!’ said Mathias, pulling at Koenig. ‘Get up!’ He tried to lift him to his feet, but he couldn’t. ‘Get up!’

‘I don’t think he can,’ said a voice behind him.

Mathias didn’t need to turn round to know whose it was.

Leiter was standing at the end of the passage, the silver-topped cane in his hand. But he wasn’t alone. A young woman in a plain gown stood beside him. Her face was cold and hard.

Koenig still held the empty pistol in his hand. Mathias pulled it from his grasp.

‘I’ll shoot you!’ he said.

‘Will you really?’ said Leiter and began to walk towards him.

‘Stay back!’

The pistol was heavy and awkward. Mathias pulled back the hammer and pointed it at Leiter’s chest, praying that something would happen, but the hammer only fell with an empty click when he pulled the trigger, just as he knew it would.

With a look of amusement on his face, Leiter turned towards the woman. ‘We have found them, Duchess,’ he said. ‘Would you like to play a game now?’

She looked at him, her face furrowing as she tried to follow his words. Then, slowly, she nodded her head.

‘But these are not our friends, are they?’

Just as slowly, she shook her head, as though she hadn’t known that before.

‘Shall we kill them?’ said Leiter. ‘That would be a good game.’

She turned her head and looked at Mathias and Koenig.

Leiter twisted the silver handle and drew the long sharp blade from the cane. ‘Would you like to kill them?’ he said, his voice singsong, as though talking to a small child.

She looked at him, slowly following the words, then she nodded.

He held the blade out to her, and she took it from him.

‘No,’ said Mathias.

He tried desperately to make Koenig stand, but he couldn’t. Koenig just raised his eyes and, through a sea of pain, watched as she walked slowly towards them. There was nothing he could do.

Mathias looked up at her, pleading. ‘Please?’ he said.

She stared down at him, hard-faced, but then her face clouded as though something had suddenly puzzled her. She frowned. Slowly she turned and looked at Leiter. He hadn’t moved. He was watching her.

‘Kill them, Duchess,’ he said.

But she hesitated. She looked down at the man, and at the boy. Then her lips moved as though she were trying to say something.

‘Kill them,’ said Leiter.

She lifted the blade and Mathias flinched from her, his eyes tight shut. He didn’t see her take the two quick steps and drive the steel straight through Leiter’s heart. Eyes bulging with astonishment,
Leiter stood, his mouth rounded in a perfect, silent O. He looked down at the blade in his chest, and as he did so, a stain like the bloom of a rose spread across the front of his white shirt. Without taking her eyes from him, she pushed in the blade right to its silver handle, and only then did she let go, watching him as he sank slowly to the floor at her feet.

Even little dolls with sparrows’ hearts sometimes remember they were sparrows once.

As Mathias opened his eyes, she was standing quite still, her fingers lightly touching her cheek as though brushing it with a feather that had dropped from a carnival mask.

In a voice that he never thought to hear again – haltingly, uncertainly – she said her name.

Mathias could still hear the shouts of alarm, smell the bitter stinging smoke that filled the air. But suddenly it all seemed far away. Dumbly he stood up.

Leiter lay dead on the floor at the woman’s feet – his eyes were wide open, the silver-topped cane driven straight through his heart. She was standing over him, but she wasn’t looking at him. She was holding her hands in front of her face, staring at them as though she’d never seen them before. Even as he watched her, she put them hesitantly to her head, feeling for something that should be there and wasn’t.

And then she screamed.

She screamed as though every demon in hell had found her.

He started to back away, but she was too quick.
She caught hold of him, her eyes staring and mad. Her grip was like iron.

‘Like – them!’ she cried.

And for Mathias the world stopped – it was Katta’s voice that he heard coming from her mouth. Broken and mad, but Katta’s voice, as though somehow she were locked inside.

She saw the look of blank incomprehension register on his face. ‘Yes! Like – them!’ she said, nodding insanely.

He felt her fingers wrap in his; they were hard and cold. She pressed his hand to her cheek. It was hard and cold too, like a doll. Her eyes never leaving his, she put his hand to her breast. It was hard and cold, but he could feel a heart beating beneath.

‘My – heart!’ she gasped. ‘Mmm-eeee!’

The words made no sense. For Mathias it was just as it had been for Katta in the crypt when she saw the dead men that she knew were alive – and suddenly the two moments connected in his mind and he realized what she was trying to say.

She was like them.

And then he knew why Leiter had laughed.

This is what Gustav really knew.

They weren’t men at all.

She could see him staring at her in disbelief – his face, the hall and the smoke – but for her it was like looking through thick windows at a world outside. She couldn’t even say the words she wanted. They were drowned by the deafening whine, like wasps in her head, of a thousand minute cogs and wheels as they wound and turned – and through it all, pounding like a drum, she could hear the hammer beat of her own heart.

Only one word came, and it sounded like a scream.

‘Mmeee!’

What happened next happened like a slow nightmare.

There were flames on the stairs behind them. Koenig lay folded against the wall where he’d fallen. Mathias couldn’t see whether he was alive or dead, but with Katta’s help he lifted him to his feet. They half walked, half dragged him through the window and onto the terrace outside.

The palace was ablaze.

Flames had leaped unchecked from building to building, and now it was all on fire. People were running and shouting – horses let free from the
burning stables ran amok between them. Everywhere was smoke and burning and noise.

There was a long ornate stair that wound down from the terrace into the gardens below. Holding Koenig between them, they went down it step by step.

No one stopped them. No one questioned them. They pushed through the press of people and no one spared them a look – not at the gates, not in the streets or in the alleys. There were only eyes for the soaring flames and the bright hot embers that carried on the wind and drifted out over the frost-covered roofs of the city below.

Sometimes it seemed that she knew who she was; sometimes she didn’t. She’d put her hands to her head and scream, and then there was nothing that Mathias could do.

At last they reached the stable. It was dark now – an eerie, flame-lit dark with shadows that moved.

Mathias laid Koenig in the straw. For a moment in that darkness, the bloodless face looked like Gustav’s had done all that time before.

‘We have to get him help,’ said Mathias, but Katta didn’t answer.

She was crouching in the straw, rocking to and fro,
her hands to her head, trying to shut out the noise that was driving her insane. He didn’t understand that though. All he could see was the mad woman rocking in the dirty straw.

He didn’t know what to do. He felt the world swim as the hopeless enormity of it all overwhelmed him.

Then, in the flickering of the light that fell on the wall, he saw the saddle.

Somewhere in the woods nearby there had to be Burners. If he could only find them, they would help. They would know what to do.

Looking at the mad woman and the dying man, he pulled the saddle from the wall. He heaved it across the back of the horse. It turned its head and he saw the angry white of its eye, but he didn’t care. Fumbling beneath its belly for the strap, he drew the buckle up as tightly as he could, then he bent over Koenig and shook him. Slowly, as though being called from a long way away, Koenig opened his eyes.

‘Can you ride?’ said Mathias, his face pressed close to Koenig’s. ‘You have to ride.’

If you had stood at the city gates, you might have seen them – a boy leading a huge horse by the rein
– a grim, silent man in the saddle and a mad woman walking beside him, her hand upon his stirrup.

But you wouldn’t have looked.

You would only have had eyes for the fire – for the huge columns of flame and sparks that engulfed the top of the hill.

No.

You wouldn’t have seen them.

And the boy didn’t look back.

In the spring, the ice in the harbour melts. The floes break up and drift out to sea.

When it does, some people might take a boat out to the islands to visit the monastery of St Becca the Old. They might walk between its ruined walls or sit on the rough grass and listen to the thump of the sea against the rocks below.

They might even go into the chapel itself.

But they will find nothing.

The stairs to the crypt have been filled in and covered. Even the floor has been swept quite clean, though there is a dark stain on the stones that might have been blood.

And of Valter? Of the thousand minute wheels and cogs that filled his head?

If they looked for him?

They would find not a trace.

I would like to thank Linda Sargent for her unfailing encouragement and friendship over more years than I care to name, and David Fickling, Bella Pearson and Ben Sharpe, who between them helped me make this a better story than I would have made of it alone.

This story was begun for the children of Wells Central Junior School, Somerset, in the school year 2005 to 2006. My thanks go to them and also to Jane Murray, whose idea it was that I should come to the school, and to Mike Rossiter, my friend and supporter while I was there.