Reckless (Free Preview) (25 page)

"Slowly!"
he whispered to her as he grabbed her arm.
 
"Just don't look down."

The Dwarf had
rappelled from a narrow bridge barely wider than a footpath.
 
The Rapunzel-rope was stretched taut between
the prison wall and the bridge's iron girders, and it was ten steep yards to
the bridge.

"Valiant's
right!
"
Jacob said
,
closing Clara's hands around the rope.
 
"Just look straight up.
 
And
stay under the bridge until we come back with Fox."

The golden
rope was no more than a spider's thread in the huge cavern.
 
Clara climbed painfully slowly, and Jacob
followed her with his eyes until she finally pulled herself onto one of the
metal struts of the bridge.

Dwarfs and
Goyl were well known for their climbing skills.
 
Jacob, however, had never even liked hiking in the hills, let alone free
climbing on the inwardly tapering façade of a building hanging hundreds of feet
above a hostile city.
 
But luckily they
didn't have to climb far.
 
Valiant had
been right.
 
Fox was imprisoned in the
cell right above theirs.

She was in her
human form, and when Jacob knelt down beside her, she wrapped her arms around
him and sobbed like a child.
 
Valiant
quickly undid her chains.

"They
said they'd skin me if I changed shape!" she sobbed.
 
All her anger was gone.

"It's all
right!
"
Jacob said soothingly, stroking her red
hair.
 
"Everything will be all
right."

Really, Jacob?
 
How?

Fox, of
course, saw the despair on his face.

"You
didn't find Will," she whispered.

"I did,
but he's gone."

A door slammed
farther down the corridor.
 
Valiant
cocked his rifle.
 
But the guards were
dragging some other prisoner out into the corridor.

Fox climbed as
swiftly as the Dwarf.
 
Clara looked very
relieved when she and Jacob pulled themselves up onto the iron beam next to
her.
 
Valiant swung himself onto the
bridge while Jacob rubbed the Rapunzel-rope until it was again nothing more
than a golden hair.
 
Some time passed
before the Dwarf finally waved them up to the bridge.
 
Beneath them, a platoon of Goyl was marching
across one of the lower bridges, and a freight train belched black smoke into
the huge cavern as it crossed the abyss.
 
Except for two shafts through which a hint of daylight entered the cave,
there was no indication of how the Goyl dealt with their exhaust fumes.
 
Your
father will probably have shown them, Jacob
, he thought as he followed
Valiant across the iron planks of the footbridge.
 
But he pushed the thought out of his
head.
 
He didn't want to think about his
father.
 
He didn't even want to think
about Will.
 
He just wanted to go back to
the island and forget everything — the Larks' Water, the jade, and the iron
bridges that looked as if John Reckless had left his signature all over this
world.

"What
about horses?
"
Jacob asked the Dwarf as they
ducked into one of the archways that lined the cave's wall.

"Forget
it!
"
Valiant said with a grunt.
 
"The stables are right by the main
gate.
 
Too many
guards."

"You want
to cross the mountains on foot?"

"You've
got a better plan?" the Dwarf hissed back.

No, he
didn't.
 
And all they had to get past the
blind Guardians were Valiant's rifle and the new knife he had brought Jacob —
in exchange for another gold sovereign, of course.

Beside him Fox
shifted into a vixen again.
 
Clara was
leaning against one of the pillars, looking into the depths.
 
She didn’t seem to be really with them.
 
Maybe she was back behind the mirror, sitting
with Will in the dingy hospital cafeteria.
 
It would be a long journey back, and every mile would remind her that
Will was no longer there.

Windows and doors behind curtains of sandstone.
 
Houses like swallows' nests.
 
Gold-Eyes everywhere.
 
To make
themselves
less conspicuous, Valiant first went with Clara while Jacob and Fox hid among
the houses.
 
Then the Dwarf fetched the
others while Clara hid in a dark alley.
 
Coming down the steep roads and stairs was even harder than going up.

Valiant had
refreshed the letter on Jacob's forehead, and the Dwarf proudly took Clara's
arm, as if he was presenting his new bride to the Goyl.
 
They encountered many soldiers, and every
time Jacob pushed past a Goyl uniform, he expected a barked order or a stone
hand on his shoulder.
 
But after seemingly
endless hours, they finally reached the opening through which they first looked
out over the vast cavern.
 
It was only in
the tunnel behind it that their luck ran out.

By now they
were so exhausted that they stayed together.
 
Jacob supported Clara, though he couldn't fail to notice the way Fox was
looking at him.
 
The first Goyl they
encountered were returning from a hunt
.
There were six
of them, and they had a pack of the tame wolves that followed them even into
the deepest caves.
 
Two grooms were
leading horses loaded with their quarry:
 
three of the large saurians whose spines the Goyl cavalry wore on their
helmets, and six bats, whose brains were said to be a Goyl delicacy.
 
They gave Jacob only a cursory glance as they
passed by, but the Goyl patrol that suddenly emerged from one of the dark side
tunnels was much more curious.
 
There
were three soldiers.
 
One of them was an
alabaster Goyl — the color of most of their spies.

They exchanged
a quick glance when Valiant named the merchant to who Jacob supposedly
belonged.
 
The alabaster Goyl reached for
his pistol, calmly informing Valiant that his business partner had been
arrested for illegal mineral dealing.
 
Luckily, Valiant was quicker.
 
He
shot the Goyl off his horse while Jacob threw his knife into the chest of the
second soldier.
 
Valiant had bought the
knife in one of the shops on the palace bridge, and its blade cut through the
citrine skin cells like butter.
 
Jacob
shuddered as he realized how much he wanted to kill them all.
 
Fox startled the horse of the third soldier,
but the Goyl quickly regained control of his mount, and he galloped off before
Jacob could pull a gun from one of his dead comrades' belts.

Valiant spat
out curses that Jacob had never heard before.
 
While the hoofbeats were still receding, though, they heard a tone that
silenced even the Dwarf.
 
It sounded like
the chirping of thousands of mechanical crickets.
 
The stone around them sprang to life.
 
Bugs crawled from the fissures and holes;
millipedes, spiders, cockroaches, moths, mosquitoes, and dragonflies fluttered
into their faces.
 
The creatures landed
in their hair, crawled up their clothes, and when they tried to escape into the
next tunnel, they were confronted by a solid cloud of fluttering bats.

The alarm of
the Goyl had awoken the earth, and it exhaled life — crawling, biting,
fluttering
life.

They stumbled
on, half-blind in the darkness, their arms flailing, creatures crunching under
their steps.
 
None of them remembered
where they'd come from or in which direction they should be headed.
 
The walls were chittering ever louder, and
the beam from the flashlight was a probing finger in the darkness.
 
Jacob thought he could hear hooves in the
distance.
 
Voices.
 
They were trapped, caught in an endlessly
branching labyrinth, and the fear washed away the despair he had felt in the
cells, and reawoke his will to live.
 
To
live!
 
Nothing else, just live and get
back to the light and the air.

Fox
barked.
 
Jacob saw her disappear into a
side passage.
 
The hint of a breeze
brushed his face as he pulled Clara with him.
 
Light fell on a wide staircase, and there they were — the very Dragons
the ferryman had spoken of.
 
But they
were made of metal and wood and were the grown-up brothers of the models that
were hanging with dusty wings above the desk in John Reckless's study.

41

Wings

The alarm
could also be heard in the hangar-cave, but at least here nothing was crawling
out of the rock, which had been smoothed and sealed.
 
A hint of daylight shone through a wide
tunnel.
 
Two unarmed Goyl were standing
between the airplanes.
 
They were only
mechanics, and they lifted their arms as soon as Valiant pointed his rifle at
them.

On their
faces, fear of death was written as clearly as their infamous rage.
 
Jacob bound them with a cable Clara found
between the planes, but one of them tore himself free and lashed out with his
claws.
 
He dropped his hand as soon as
Valiant cocked his rifle, but Jacob could only think of the claws that had torn
into Will's neck.
 
He'd never enjoyed
killing, but the despair he'd felt since Will had followed the Fairy made Jacob
afraid of what his own hands might do.

"No," whispered Clara, gently taking the knife from his
hand.
 
And for a moment, the fact
that she understood the darkness in him
bound
 
them
even more strongly than the
Larks' Water.

Valiant had
forgotten about the Goyl.
 
The Dwarf no
longer heard nor saw anything — neither the chirping in the walls nor the
voices coming closer through the tunnels.
 
He marveled at the three planes.

"Oh, this
is wonderful!" he mumbled, stroking one of the red fuselages with
delight.
 
"So much
more wonderful than any stinking Dragon.
 
But how do they fly?
 
What do the
Goyl use them for?"

"They
spit fire," Jacob said.
 
"As Dragons do."

They were
biplanes, similar to the ones built in
Europe
in the early twentieth century.
 
A huge leap into the future, further than anything that was being
developed in the factories of Schwanstein or by Her Majesty's engineers.
 
Two of the machines were solo planes, like
the ones flown by fighter pilots in World War I; the third one was a replica of
a two-seater Junkers J4, a bomber and reconnaissance plane from the same
period.
 
Jacob had once built a model of
that very plane with his father.

Fox kept her
eyes on Jacob as he climbed into the tight cockpit.

"Come
down from there!" she called.
 
"Let's try that tunnel.
 
It
leads out; I can smell it."

Jacob ran his
fingers over the controls, checked the gauges.
 
The Junkers was relatively easy to fly but difficult to maneuver on the
ground.
 
You know this from a book, Jacob, and from playing with model
airplanes.
 
You don't seriously think you
can fly this thing?
 
He'd flown a few
times with his father, when John Reckless had still escaped his world in a
single-engine plane instead of through a mirror.
 
But that was such a long time ago that it
seemed as unreal as the fact that he'd once actually had a father.

The alarm was
still shrilling through the cave like crickets roused from a freshly mown
meadow.

Jacob pumped
up the fuel pressure.
 
Where was the
ignition?

Valiant looked
flabbergasted.

"Hold
on!
 
You can fly this thing?"

"Sure!"
 
Jacob managed to sound so
casual,
he could’ve even convinced himself.

"How on earth?"

Fox jumped up
and barked a warning.
 
The voices from
the tunnels grew louder.
 
They were
coming.

Clara quickly
lifted the Dwarf onto one of the wings.
 
Fox backed away from the plane, but Clara just
swooped
her up and carried her into the cockpit.

Jacob's
fingers found the ignition switch.
 
The
engine sputtered to life, and the propeller began to turn.
 
As he made his final checks, Jacob saw his
father's hands going through the same motions.
 
In another world.
 
In another life.

"Look at this, Jacob!
 
Aluminum body on a steel
frame.
 
Only the rudder is still
made of wood."
 
John Reckless
had never sounded more passionate than when he spoke about old airplanes.
 
Or weapons.