Old Kingdom 04: Across the Wall (31 page)

There were a lot of people gathered in that turning circle. All the people whom Alice May had expected to see in the streets. They’d come down early, to make sure they weren’t marked as tardies or reluctant supporters. The whole population of the town had to be there, many of them in Servants’ uniforms, and all of them waving red-and-black flags.

Alice May slid down the cutting and walked between the rails. This was the way she’d come as a baby, all those years ago. But somehow she didn’t think she’d come from Jarawak City.

All the attention was at the rear of the train, though it was clear the Master hadn’t yet appeared. It was too noisy for that, with the crowd cheering and the town band playing something unrecognisable. The newspapers all made a big thing about the total silence that fell in any audience as the Master spoke.

Alice May crossed the line and crept down the far side of the engine. Just as she came to the tender, an engineer stepped down. He wore denim overalls, topped with a black Servants’ cap, complete with the badge of the flaming brand.

Alice May’s hands moved. The butt of the rifle snapped out and the engineer went down to the rails. He crawled around there for a moment, trying to get up, as Alice May calmly waited for the crowd to cheer again and the band to crescendo with drums and brass. As they did, she fired a single shot into the engineer’s head and stepped over him. I’m a murderer, she thought. Many times over. I wish they’d stay out of my way.

Alice May stepped up to the private car’s forward balcony. She tried to look inside, but the window was smoked glass.

Alice May tried the door. It wasn’t locked. She opened it left-handed, the rifle ready.

She had expected a small sitting room of some kind, perhaps opulently furnished. What she saw was an impossibly long corridor, stretching off into the distance, the end out of sight.

The crowd suddenly went silent at the other end of the train.

Alice May stepped into the corridor and shut the door behind her.

It was dark with the door closed, but her star shone more brightly, lighting the way. Apart from its length, and the fact that the far end was shrouded in mist or smoke, the corridor seemed pretty much like any other train corridor Alice May had ever seen. Polished wood and metal fittings, and every few steps a compartment door. The only strange thing was that the compartment doors all had smoked glass windows so you couldn’t see in.

Alice May was tempted to open a door, but she held out against the temptation. Her business was with the Master, and he was speaking down at the far end of the train. Who knew what she would get herself into by opening a door?

She continued to walk as quietly as she could down the corridor. Every few steps she would hear a sound and would freeze for a moment, her finger on the trigger. But the sounds were not of people, or weapons, or danger. They came from behind the compartment doors and were of the sea, or wind, or falling rain.

Still the corridor continued, and Alice May seemed no closer to the end. She started to walk faster, and then began to run. She had to get there before the Master finished talking, before his poison took her foster parents and everyone she knew.

Faster and faster, bootheels drumming, breath rasping, but still cold, cold as ice. She felt like she was pushing against a barrier, that at any moment it would break and she would be free of the endless corridor.

It did break. Alice May burst out into a smoking room, one full of Servants, a long room packed with black-and-red uniforms.

Alice May’s hands and eyes started shooting before she even knew where she was. The rifle was empty in what seemed like only seconds, but each bullet had struck home. Servants slumped in their chairs, writhed on the ground, dived for cover, clutched at weapons.

Alice May flung the rifle aside and drew a revolver, a movement so fast that to the shocked Servants, the rifle appeared to transform in her hands. Six more Servants died as their nemesis fanned the hammer with her left hand, the shots sounding together in one terrible instant.

Alice May holstered one revolver and drew the other, right hand and left hand in perfect, opposite motion. But there was no one left to shoot. Gun smoke mixed with cigar and pipe smoke, swirling up into the ceiling fans. Servants coughed out their final bloody breaths, and the last screams died away.

So this is what they mean by a charnel house, thought Alice May as she surveyed the room, calmly watching from somewhere deep inside herself as some other part of her watched the final shudders and convulsions of dying men and women, amidst the blood and brains and urine that spread and soaked into the once-blue carpet.

Her hands—but not her hands, because surely hers would be shaking—reloaded her revolvers as she watched. Then they picked up the rifle and reloaded that.

The door opened at the far end of the smoking room. Alice May caught a brief glimpse of the Master’s back, caught a few of his shouted words, all of them tinged with the hint of a scream.

Her rifle came up as a young woman in black and red entered the room.

It was Jane. Alice May knew it was Jane, and still her finger tightened around the trigger.

‘Hello, Alice May,’ said Jane. She didn’t look at the newly dead around her, or bother to step back from the spreading pool of blood. ‘The Master said you would come. I’m to stop you, he said, because you won’t shoot your own sister.’

She smiled and picked up a pistol from the table. Its previous owner had slid underneath, leaving a wet trail of blood and skin and guts against the back of his chair.

Alice May’s finger pulled the trigger and she shot Jane. Only a last desperate exertion of will twitched her aim away from her sister’s chest to her right arm.

‘The Master is always right,’ said Jane. Her right arm hung at her side, her black sleeve torn apart, chips of white bone strewn along it.

‘No,’ said Alice May, as Jane stepped across the room and picked up another pistol with her left hand. ‘The Master’s wrong, Jane. I have shot you. I will shoot you again. I … I can’t help it. Don’t—’

‘The Master is always right,’ repeated Jane, with serene confidence. She started to raise the pistol.

This time, Alice May wasn’t strong enough to resist the inexorable pull of the rifle. It swung steadily to point at Jane’s chest, and it could not be turned aside.

The shot sounded louder than any of the others, and its effect was more terrible. Jane was knocked off her feet. She was dead before she even joined the piled-up bodies on the floor.

Alice May stepped over the corpses and knelt by Jane. Tears slid from her dress like rain from glass. The white cloth could not be stained. It turned the blood and broken flesh aside, just as it had the dust.

But her hands were different, thought Alice May. Her hands would never be clean.

‘Nothing ever happens in Denilburg,’ whispered Alice May.

She stood up and opened the door to the rear balcony. To the gathered town, and the Master.

He was shouting as she came out, his arms high above his head, coming down to pound the railing so hard that it shivered under his fists.

Alice May didn’t listen to what he said. She pointed her rifle at the back of his head and pulled the trigger.

A dry, pathetic click was the only result. Alice May worked the lever. A round ejected, brass tinkling and rolling off the balcony onto the rails below. She pulled the trigger again, still with no result.

The Master stopped speaking and turned to face her.

Alice May’s star burst into light. She had to shield her eyes with the rifle so she could see.

The Master didn’t look like much, up close. He was shorter than Alice May, and his goatee was ridiculous. He was just a funny little man. Till you looked into his eyes.

Alice May wished she hadn’t. His eyes were like the endless corridor, stretching back to some nameless place, a void where nothing human could possibly exist.

‘So you killed your sister,’ said the Master. His voice was almost a purr, the screaming and shouting gone. There was no doubt that everyone outside the train could still hear him. He had a voice that carried when he wanted it to, without effort. ‘You killed Jane Elizabeth Suky Hopkins. Just like you killed Everett Kale, Jim Bushby, Rosco O’Faln, Hubert Jenks, and Old Man Lacker. Not to mention my people inside. You’d kill the whole town to get to me, wouldn’t you?’

Alice May didn’t answer, though she heard the crowd shuffle and gasp. She dropped the rifle and drew a revolver. Or tried to. It stayed stuck fast in its holster. She tried the left-hand gun, but it was stuck too.

‘Not that easy, is it?’ whispered the Master, leaning across to speak to her alone. His breath smelled like the room she had left behind. Of blood and shit and terror. ‘There are rules, you know, between your kind and mine. You can’t draw until I do. And fast as you are, you can’t be as fast as me. It’ll all be for nothing. All the deaths. All the blood on your hands.’

Alice May stepped back to give him room. She didn’t dare look at the crowd, or at the Master’s eyes again. She looked at his hands instead.

‘You can give in, you know,’ whispered the Master. ‘Take your sister’s place, in my service. Even in my bed. She enjoyed that, you know. You would too.’

The Master licked his lips. Alice May didn’t look at his long, pointed, leathery tongue. She watched his hands.

He edged back a little, still whispering.

‘No? This is your last chance, Alice May. Join me, and everything will turn out for the best. No one will blame you for killing Jane or the others. Why, I’ll give you a—’

His hand flickered. Alice May drew.

Both of them fired at the same time. Alice May didn’t even know where his gun had come from. She felt something strike her chest a savage blow and she was rammed back into the balcony rail. But she kept her revolver trained dead-center on the Master, and her left hand fanned the hammer as she pulled the trigger one … two … three … four … five times.

Then the revolver was empty. Alice May let it fall, and she fell herself, clutching her chest. She couldn’t breathe. Her heart hammered with the knowledge that she’d been shot, that these were her last few seconds of life.

Something fell into her hand. It was hot, scorching hot. She gazed at it stupidly as it burned into her palm. Eventually she saw it was a bullet, a misshapen projectile that was not lead but some sort of white and pallid stone.

Alice May dropped it, though not quickly enough to avoid a burn deep enough to scar. She tried to breathe again, and could, though there was a sharp, stabbing pain in her lungs.

She looked at her chest, expecting to see blood. But her waistcoat was as clean as ever, save for a small round hole on the right-hand side, exactly parallel with the dimming silver star on the left. Gingerly, Alice May reached in. But her hands felt only the woven hair. There was no hole in her undershirt, and no blood.

Alice May sat up. The Master was lying on his back on the far side of the balcony. He looked just like a small, dead man now. The dread that Alice May had felt before was gone.

She crawled over, but before she could touch him, his flesh began to quiver and move. It crawled and shivered, his face changing colour from a reddish pink to a dull silver. Then the Master’s flesh began to liquefy, to become quicksilver in fact as well as color. The liquid splashed out of his clothes and dribbled across the floor into a six-spoked bronze drain hole in the corner. Soon there was nothing left of him but a small automatic pistol, a pile of clothing, and a pair of empty boots.

Alice May looked out on the crowd. It was already breaking up. People were taking off their Servants’ uniforms, even down to their underwear. Others were simply walking away. All had their heads downcast, and no one was talking.

Alice May stood up, her hands pressed against her ribs to ease the pain. She looked out on the crowd for her foster parents, for her surviving uncle Bill.

She saw them, but like everybody else, they would not look toward her. Their backs were turned, and they had their eyes set firmly toward the town.

Jake and Stella held each other tightly and walked down the main street. They did not look back. Uncle Bill sidled toward the platform. For a moment Alice May thought he was going to look at her. But he didn’t.

Alice May watched them walk away and felt them take whoever she had been with them.

The fourth Hopkins girl, like the third, was dead to Denilburg.

Listlessly, she picked up her rifle and revolver and reloaded them. Her bullet belt was almost empty now.

She was surprised when the engine whistled, but only for a moment. She had entered this life on a train. It seemed only fitting to leave it the same way. The train gave a stuttering lurch. Smoke billowed overhead, and the wheels screeched for a grip. Alice May opened the balcony door and went inside. The smoking room had disappeared, taking Jane and all the other bodies with it. There was the endless corridor again, and at her feet the steamer trunk.

Alice May picked up one end of the trunk, opened the first compartment door she came to, and dragged it in.

From the platform Uncle Bill the stationmaster watched the train slowly pull away. Before its got to the cutting, it veered off to a branch line that wasn’t there and disappeared into the mouth of a tunnel that faded away as the private car passed into its darkness.

Bill wiped a tear from his eye, for a friend who had borne the same name, for a town that had lost its innocence, and for his almost-daughter, who had paid the price for saving them all.

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