The Providence Rider (35 page)

The parapet was deserted, but a single torch burned in a wooden socket on the left about fifty feet away. Beyond that another fifty feet, a second torch flamed. And on and on, around the fort’s huge perimeter. Below them stood several buildings of white stone with roofs of gray slate. Far away, toward the center of the dirt-floored enclosure, was a larger building with a chimney, where the gunpowder’s chemicals must be cooked and combined. So far there was no sign of any human occupancy though an occasional torch was set out and burning. Matthew looked for what he thought might be the powder magazine. Over on the right there was a long white building with wooden shutters closed over the windows and, telltale enough, banks of dirt built up about six feet high on both sides to act as blast walls. That would be where the powder was kept until it could be shipped out. But where might the fuses be found? Matthew reasoned there had to be fuses here, as the bombs that had destroyed the buildings in New York were fashioned here and if not directly fitted with fuses in this location, then fuses ought to be on the premises somewhere. Unless they’d been made aboard the
Nightflyer
, but Matthew thought the raw materials must be stored here in a safe place. The question being: exactly where? It had taken him and Minx over two hours to cross the thicket and swamp to reach the fort. They were quite simply pressed for time, as the
Nightflyer
would fly at first light with or without them.

Minx said, “I want you to wait here.”

“Wait
here
? Why?”

“In this case,” she answered, “one is better than two. I can move faster than you. Trust me when I say…you will do better to let me be your…” She frowned under her hood, searching for the words.

“Providence rider?” Matthew supplied.

“Whatever that means. You stay
here
. I’m going to find out where the guards are.”

“You can do that and I can’t?”

“I can do that,” she said, “without getting us both killed.
Stay
,” she said, and then she turned away and strode purposefully off along the parapet.

Matthew eased down on his haunches alongside the wall. This was a damnable thing to let her take such a risk, he thought; yet he had the feeling Minx Cutter was perfectly capable of getting in and out of places he could not, and it might be the ungentlemanly act to let her go alone but it was probably the most sensible.

He waited, listening to the night and watching the torches flicker in the same breeze that stirred the forest’s treetops.

He waited longer, and sat down on the stones.

After what seemed like twenty minutes he decided he could wait no more. He was keenly aware of the passing time and the lowering moon, and if Minx had been caught he was going to have to do something about that. He stood up and started along the parapet in the direction she’d gone, and in another moment he came to a stone staircase leading down. He descended to the dirt floor, passed two empty wagons, and continued on beneath a stone archway into an area not quite fully revealed by any torchlight. He moved through a territory of shadows with his back against a wall. It seemed to him his back had been against a wall now for many months. His heart was beating hard and the air felt oppressive. He could smell the bitter tang of chemicals and cooking vats. He came to a corner and paused, peered around and found the way forward clear and so he started off again. He passed under another archway and on between two stone walls leading him somewhere though he had no idea where.

And just that fast, a figure turned the corner before him, took two strides in his direction before he realized Matthew was there and then stopped.

“Who are you?” the man asked.

“I’m new here,” was all Matthew could think to say, stupidly.

“The hell you are.” A wooden whistle was lifted to the man’s mouth.

Before Matthew could kick the man either in the stomach or the groin, which he was considering, there came a solid-sounding
thunk
and the man shivered like a leaf in a high wind. The whistle dropped from his hand, to hang about his neck on a leather cord. The man took another step toward Matthew and then his knees crumpled. As the body toppled forward, Matthew saw the hatchet buried in the back of the man’s head.

Minx Cutter was standing behind the now-fallen guard. She put a foot on the man’s back and pulled the hatchet loose. The man thrashed on the ground as if trying to swim through the dirt, and Minx hit him again in the right temple just behind the ear.

This time he was still.

“I
told
you,” Minx said as she pulled the weapon free, “not to leave there, didn’t I?”

“Yes, but I was concerned about you.”

“Hm,” she said, and she put the blood-wet hatchet’s blade up under Matthew’s nose. “I entered the professor’s employ as an assassin. I killed three men before I decided the job wasn’t to my liking. Lyra Sutch trained me for that role. She was as near a mother to me as I could find after my family threw me out.” The blade dripped blood upon Matthew’s shirt. “I understand you killed Lyra, who helped me grow from a confused girl into a confident woman.”

Matthew said nothing; he could not say that at the end of Lyra Sutch’s life she was a wretched, demented sack of broken bones and axe-torn flesh.

“But,” said Minx, as she lowered the hatchet, “I’m all grown up now. And you are an impatient and foolish milksop.” Her left arm emerged from the folds of her cape. Wrapped around the wrist were several gray cotton cords. “I found a storehouse unguarded and unlocked. The hatchet came from there. Also these three fuses, from a crate. The longest should give us fifteen minutes, the shortest about six. Or they can be knotted together as one.”

“Excellent,” said Matthew, who still had the coppery smell of blood up his nostrils.

“I doubt the magazine will be so easy to get into. I’ve seen four other guards making their rounds, but they’re in no hurry and they’ve gotten lazy. There’s a barracks building where the workers must be sleeping. The professor has done us the great favor of not making his men work all night long like slaves.”

“Christian of him,” said Matthew.

“Sharpen your blade,” she said, correctly judging that Matthew’s senses were reeling due to her cold-blooded killing of the guard and her revelation of past mutual acquaintances. She knelt down and went through the dead man’s pockets, presumably searching for keys to the magazine. She came up empty, and stood up. Her gaze was both fierce and frigid. Looking upon her frightened Matthew to his core. “You should follow me,” she said, and she set off to the left without waiting for him to exit his trance.

The first step was difficult. The second a little easier. Then he was following her, and Minx continued on looking right and left but never glancing back.

They came to the magazine, the long building of white stone with the gray slate roof. A distant torch gave enough light to fall upon two locks on the door. Minx broke one with her knife’s blade, but the second resisted her. She told him, “Keep watch!” as she struggled with the more intricate mechanism.
“Damn,”
she said through gritted teeth, when it still defied her. “Hold this,” she commanded, and she gave him the bloody hatchet the better to concentrate on her lock-breaking.

Matthew heard the voices of two men raised in conversation. It was coming from somewhere off to the left. There was a bray of laughter; something obviously had hit one’s funny bone. Minx continued her task as Matthew turned himself in the direction of the voices. He could see no one, but the men seemed to be coming closer. Minx’s blade worked at the lock, the sharp tip digging at the stubborn innards.
Hurry
, he wished to say, but she knew what she was doing. The knife jabbed, the voices came closer still, and Matthew thought he might have to kill someone with this hatchet, to burden his soul further with death.

But then the men took a turn away from the magazine, for the voices began to diminish, and a moment afterward there came a metallic
click
and Minx whispered, “Ah. Got the bastard.” The lock fell to the ground. Minx pulled a latch and pushed the door open.

It was utterly dark within. She took the hatchet from him and said, “Light your tinderbox.”

Matthew took a moment fumbling with the thing. He got a spark in the wads of cotton and from that touched the wick of his candle. He looked to her with apprehension, wondering if the merest flame in that enclosure would set off the powder, but she motioned him in and he gathered his balls from where they’d shrivelled up into his groin and crossed the magazine’s threshold.

She closed the door behind them. “Impressive,” she said, as Matthew’s candlelight showed barrel upon barrel of—presumably—Professor Fell’s Cymbeline. Matthew counted fifteen just in the realm of the light, and beyond it were dozens more. A shipment must be imminent, he thought. The place looked to be nearly full.

He hadn’t realized he was holding his breath. He had the same feeling of dangerous pressure as he’d experienced upon the stone seahorse. If two small Cymbeline bombs could have blown that house on Nassau Street to splinters, what would dozens of barrels of the powder do?

“I’m counting sixty-two,” Minx said. “I hope you’re ready for a brilliant bang.”

He let his breath out, thinking that he’d already had one of those last night.

Minx strode toward the first barrel. She lifted her hatchet and quite readily bashed in the top of it with three blows. Matthew winced at the noise; surely that was going to bring someone running. Then Minx put her shoulder into it, overturned the barrel, and light grayish-white grains began to stream out upon the dirt. She repeated this action with a second barrel, and again the gunpowder poured out of it onto the earth. “I think,” she said, “that will be enough.” She uncoiled two of the cotton cords from her wrist and placed them in the grains of destruction, stretching them out toward the door.

“Light them,” she suggested, sweat sparkling on her cheeks.

Matthew bent down, picked up the end of one fuse and touched the candle to it. His hand was trembling, but at once the red eye opened and the fuse began to sizzle. He did the same to the second. The nitrate-saturated cord began to burn steadily toward its target. There would not be time nor opportunity to destroy the actual chemical works, but no doubt this would be a monstrous explosion and might serve to blast everything in the fort to pieces.

“Now,” said Minx, with just a trace of nerves in her voice, “we get out.”

They closed the door and latched it behind them, just for the sake of tidiness. Then Matthew was following Minx as she ran the way they’d come, seeking the stairway to the parapet. There were no guards in view, but no time for undue caution. They were both aware that very soon a little part of Hell would open on Pendulum Island.

Once up the steps, they sought the vine that had brought them here. It was like searching for a peg in a haystack. Everything from this height looked flimsy, unable to support either of them. In a few minutes they would have to learn how to fly.

“Hey!” someone shouted, from ahead. “You there!” For the want of anything else, the guard began to blow his whistle and then he came at a run toward them with a drawn sword.

His run was stopped by a knife that entered the pit of his throat, thrown from a distance of nearly twenty feet. He gagged and grasped at the knife’s handle to pull it out, but then he was staggering off the edge of the parapet like a clumsy drunk and he toppled into the darkness below.

Another voice, further away, began shouting for someone named—it sounded like—Curland. Minx leaned over the parapet, seeking a way down. Matthew looked back toward the magazine. If the guards got in there, they might yet stomp out the fuses. “I’m here!” he shouted toward the other shouter, just to confuse the issue. “This way!”

“We’ve got to go over,” Minx said, and now her voice did quaver for even her tough spirit quailed at the thought of those fuses burning down to their merry damnation. “Right here,” she told him, and motioned toward thick vines and leafy vegetation that had melded to the stones. Without hesitation she swung herself over the wall, gripped hold of whatever her fingers could find, and started down.

Matthew caught a movement to his left. A heavy-set man carrying a torch was coming up the steps. The gent looked big enough to be a match for Sirki. Minx was almost to the ground. Matthew couldn’t wait. He climbed over, grasped vines and leaves and found places to put his boot-toes into. Halfway down there was a cracking sound and Matthew felt the vines start to pull away from the stones. At the same time the man with the torch leaned over the wall and thrust the flame at him to get a better look.

“The magazine!” the man suddenly shouted over his shoulder. Matthew saw that horror had rippled across the craggy face. “My God! Check the magazine!”

Matthew reached the ground with help from the vines pulling away from the stones. Minx was already slogging into the swamp. Matthew followed her, thinking that if the guards put those fuses out all this had been for nothing. The water rose up past his knees, then over his thighs to his waist, and snakes be damned. He heard shouting from the fort, which filled him with fresh alarm.
Damn it!
he thought.
The fuses should have burned
down by now! Where was the—

His thought was never finished. It was knocked from his head by the roar of a thousand lions mixed with the shriek of five-hundred harpies and carried along by the burning breath of sixty dragons on the wing, and he was thrown insensible into the muddy drink, sinking down into the realm where the reptiles coiled and twisted safe from the evils that men did.

A hand gripped the back of Matthew’s coat and jerked him up from the water. He sputtered and coughed, spewing liquid from mouth and nostrils. Night had turned to day, and he had to squint against its glare. Hot winds rushed through the swamp, bending trees and tearing leaves loose in green flurries.

“Keep moving!” Minx shouted, for shouting was the only way to be heard above this symphony of the cataclysm. She, too, had taken a spill into the soup. Her face and the curls of her hair were darkened by muddy slime. She started off and pulled Matthew along as he fought to find his balance.

He looked back and saw nothing but white flashes and red centers of flame. It appeared as if the main wall of the fort had been blasted down. The Cymbeline’s thunder was deafening; Matthew’s ears rang like seventeen Sabbath bells and he could feel the continuing detonations in the pit of his stomach. He saw something on fire fly up into the air, and then it too exploded with a bone-jarring report and a flash that nearly burned the eyes blind. Another object rose up, burning, and also exploded in the ash-swirled sky. The barrels, he thought. Some were being blown out of the magazine and detonating overhead. A rain of pieces of flaming wood and chunks of scorched stone was falling around them, splashing heavily into the swamp. “Move! Move!” Minx shouted, up against his ear so he could hear her above the din.

He did not have to be told a third time.

He staggered on, as birds flew for their lives from burning branches. Minx slipped and fell and he pulled her up as she had saved him. A flaming barrel came down on the left and blew trees up from their roots and a geyser of water when it exploded. Part of the thicket over on that side was already burning, and still the barrels were coming down to blast their Cymbeline across the tortured landscape. The heated winds blew back and forth and the shockwaves knocked Matthew and Minx hither and yon as if they were made of flimsy paper. Gray smoke whipped across this battlefield. Perhaps twenty yards ahead of the struggling pair they caught sight of something hanging in the upper branches of a burning tree that might have been a human torso, black as a fistful of coal.

More explosions ravaged the night. The barrel bombs were flying, some to blast their flaming innards overhead and others to crash into the swamp and forest before they detonated. The noise was like the collision of three armies using triple-mouthed cannons, firing in confusion to the north, south, east and west. Another massive blast and belch of red fireballs rose up from the wrecked fort, and suddenly part of a burning wagon came crashing down in front of Minx and Matthew so close their eyebrows were singed.

“This way!” Minx shouted, and grasping his arm she guided him at an angle to the left. He realized she was looking for the road to get them out of this fiery morass, and he followed her gladly and yet still a bit woozy in the head.

They sloshed through the muck with flaming comets whirling overhead and the thunder of explosions making the earth shiver. Matthew looked toward the fort and saw nothing but a pall of smoke with red fires burning within.
Good
, he thought. If the chemical works was not totally destroyed, the next shipment of Cymbeline surely was. And there had to be enough damage in there to make rebuilding a costly and time-consuming task.
Good
, he thought again, and narrowly missed getting tangled in thornbranches that had a snake coiled amid the stickers.

They came out upon the road after what seemed a trek of fifteen or twenty minutes. Was the first shade of light showing to the east? It was hard to tell, for Matthew’s eyes were still dazzled. Fires growled and crackled here and there amid the thicket, burning underbrush and trees.

“Can you hear me?” Minx shouted at him, and he nodded. Her face was both stained with mud and ruddy with heat. She stared back for a few seconds at the smoke-covered fort, her eyes glittering with wild emotion between terror and exhilaration.

It was Matthew, then, who first saw the two men with torches stagger onto the road before them. One held a cutlass with a chopping blade about fourteen inches in length. Both men were bloodied by scrapes and cuts, their clothes dirty and dishevelled. Matthew’s first thought was that they had been atop a watchtower that the blast’s winds had knocked to the ground; they looked more fearful than fearsome, yet the sword meant business.

“What happened?” the man in the lead demanded. It was a foolish question, so he asked another: “What are you doing here?”

Minx regarded the men with a tight smile. “What do you think, you idiot? We blew the place to pieces.”

“What?”

“You don’t get anymore questions,” she said, as she reached into her waistcoat for the second knife that was hidden there.

The swordsman took a step forward to strike at Minx, who brought the blade out and started to throw it, but in the next instant all thoughts of edged combat were ended.

The ground shook under their feet.

It was not just a tremor. It was a side-to-side motion that made true the name of Pendulum Island. It was so severe both the two men and Matthew and Minx were knocked to their knees, and in the eerie stillness of its aftermath there was a shrill keening of wind whipping through the trees and in the distance the urgent howling of dogs.

With the second agony of the earth, a crack winnowed along the road and engulfed a shower of gravel and crushed oyster shells.

The man with the sword gave a bleat of terror. He struggled up, dropping his cutlass and torch, and ran along the road in the direction of Templeton, perhaps to see to a wife and child. The second man sat on his knees for a moment more, stunned and blinking, and then he too stood up and, following his torchlight, began to shakily walk away from Matthew and Minx as if strolling through a dreamscape. Or rather, a nightmare, for he hadn’t gotten very far where there was a ghastly low rumble of stones grinding together in the troubled guts of the island and he was whipsawed down again as the ground shifted under his boots. This time the shaking went on for perhaps six seconds, an eternity, and when it was over the man stood up again and continued determinedly walking away until his torchlight was only a faint glow.

Minx got to her feet, and so did Matthew. Her voice was choked with tension when she said, “We’ve got to—”

“Yes,” he answered, for the devil’s breakfast was being served early this day. He picked up the swordsman’s fallen torch and cutlass, thinking that both might be useful in the hours ahead.

They reached the end of the road, where the skulls had hung before the earth’s shaking had dislodged them, and they spent some time retracing their path and searching for the horses that had obviously torn loose from their moorings and were no longer there. They had no opportunity to go to Falco’s house; either the captain was already getting the
Nightflyer
in order, or he was not. Matthew was betting his life, and the lives of others, on Falco being true to his word. They therefore began walking toward Templeton as quickly as they could manage, and both noted the fissures—some the width of a hand—that had opened in the road. From time to time small tremors shook the earth, and it was clear to Matthew that the blast of Cymbeline had awakened the foul spirits of Pendulum’s past.

In Templeton, the town was illuminated by the blaze of torches and the street was crowded with citizens if not fully terrified then well on the way. Here and there a brave soul tried to calm the throng, but there was the sense of entrapment on an island doomed by its own history. Wagons were pulling out, loaded with family belongings, on the way to the local harbor wherever that might be. Minx motioned Matthew over to a wagon that was for the moment abandoned by its owner, and within another thirty seconds she was cracking a whip over the team’s heads and the horses were carrying herself and the providence rider away from Templeton toward the castle of Professor Fell.

The moon sat on the horizon. Early light stained the eastern sky. Minx’s whip was urgent. The castle came into view, also torch-lit. Matthew clutched his own torch and the sword, and he was thinking furiously that he might have to slash some Thacker flesh to get Fancy loose from their grip.

They pulled up in front to find the entry unguarded. The tremors obviously had sent the servants off to tend to their own families. Matthew saw fresh cracks in the white columns of the porte-cochere. Minx dropped the reins and drew her remaining knife, for she had business this morning with Aria Chillany.

Augustus Pons, Toy and Cesar Sabroso were in the candle-lit foyer, wearing their night clothes and expressions of terrified bewilderment. “What’s happening out there?” Pons asked the two arrivals as they went past to the staircase. He had seen the sword and the knife and their swamp-dirtied clothes, and he added to this question another query in the voice of a frightened child: “Is it safe?”

“No,” Minx said. “It is definitely
not
safe. Where is Madam Chillany?”

“Upstairs. All the way to the third floor. She and the Thackers.”

“And Fancy?” Matthew asked.

“With them. They were going to the library’s balcony for a view. Something exploded. Didn’t you hear it?”

“Yes,” Matthew said, his hearing still an issue of bells ringing. “We did hear it.”

“The whole place
shook
,” said Toy. His eyes were huge. “It was like the end of the world.”

“For some,” Minx said, like a grim promise. With candlelight glinting from the blade of her knife, she started up the stairs two at a time with Matthew at her heels. Matthew saw that a number of fissures had appeared in the staircase wall, and the stained-glass window depicting Temple with his bloody and haunted eyes had collapsed upon the risers as so much meaningless debris. Before they reached the top, another tremor made the castle groan like a sick old man in an uneasy sleep, and somewhere in the walls there was a pistolshot
crack
of stones breaking under God’s own pressure.

Matthew figured only the Thackers would be stupid enough to get to the highest balcony of Fell’s castle while an earthquake was in progress. Madam Chillany was obviously still addled in the head from the doctor’s loss of head. As Minx pushed open the pair of polished oakwood doors, Matthew found exactly what he knew must be happening: the Thackers in rumpled clothing, drinking from the bottles of wine and spirits that had been replenished on the table, and Fancy in a dark green gown standing between them, staring through the open balcony doors at the somber gray light that advanced upon the sea.

“Oh ho!” said Jack, wavering on his feet with a bottle tipped to his lips.

“Boyo,” Mack added, sitting sprawled upon one of the black leather chairs with a bottle in one hand and another on the floor beside him. Obviously neither brother turned away the opportunity to drink, even at the end of the world.

Matthew noted that the shaking of Castle Fell had dislodged a few dozen volumes from their shelves. The treasures lay underfoot. They had been trampled on by Thacker boots, for ripped pages and torn bindings were in evidence like so many wounded soldiers.

“Where is Aria Chillany?” Minx demanded.

“Was here,” said Mack.

“Ain’t now,” said Jack.

“I have to find her,” she told Matthew. “I have to finish it for
him
. Do you understand?”

Matthew nodded. “I can handle this. Go. But for God’s sake be—”

“I am always careful,” she interrupted. “For my own sake.” Then she turned and left the library, and he was in company with the two animals and the young woman he must set free from their grasp. “Didn’t you hear that blowup?” Jack asked. “Place shook like a whore with the crabs.” His bleary eyes aimed toward the cutlass. “What the fuck are you up to? No good?”

“Actually,” Matthew replied, “I am up to
good
. I am leaving this island within the hour, and I’m taking
her
with me.” He motioned with the torch at the Indian girl, who had turned toward him. She was expressionless, her beautiful face perfectly composed. Her raven’s-black hair moved slightly with the breeze that came through the balcony’s entrance. She was waiting, and she knew he was not leaving without her.

“Damn,” said Jack. He shook his head. His smile was bitter. “You are one piece of work, Spadey.”

“My name is not Nathan Spade. I am Matthew Corbett, and I want you to remember who bested you.”

That statement caused a shock of silence. Then, slowly, Mack stood up one of the bottles in his hand. The flesh seemed to have drawn more tightly over his facial bones and his eyes glittered. “Corbett, ya little shit…I say…you ain’t takin’ Fancy nowhere…”

“…boyo,” Jack finished, with a gritting of his teeth.

“Will you come over here, please?” Matthew asked the girl.

With that, Mack Thacker broke the bottle on the table’s edge. Gripping the back of Fancy’s neck he put the jagged edges to the side of her face. She winced, but otherwise did not move.

“Come take her,” he said. “‘Cause in another minute, she ain’t gonna be good for nobody.”

And so saying, the younger Thacker began to draw the broken glass across the beautiful girl’s cheek and the blood welled up bright and red.

Jack snorted a laugh. The girl shivered, her sad gaze on Matthew; one hand pushed weakly against Mack’s arm, but she had seemingly come to the end of her rope and was all played out.

Matthew gripped torch and cutlass and stepped forward to the fight.

Kk

Minx Cutter knew which door belonged to Madam Chillany’s room. She knocked on it, waited for the knob to turn, and then she kicked it as hard as she could kick.

The door flew open and Aria Chillany fell backward into the room, toppling over a white-upholstered chair. Minx walked in, taking note that the other woman was fully dressed in a gray gown and upon the bed was a bag she’d been packing. It appeared Madam Chillany had been about to leave the castle, possibly to find any safer place she could. By the eight tapers of the overhead chandelier cracks had appeared in the walls and chunks of plaster had fallen from the ceiling.