He led the way at a run, with Arthur close behind. The cloud of smoke and dust quickly overtook them, shrouding them in its choking mass as they were admitted into the second defence line.

Behind them, the surviving bastions of the first line threw down their bridges, closed all connecting gates and doors, and prepared for the onslaught of seventy-five thousand New Nithling soldiers.

Twenty-nine

‘THERE IS NO answer, sir,’ said the Operator. ‘We cannot raise anyone in the Dayroom of the Lower House.’ Arthur handed the telephone back to Captain Drury and shook his head.

‘No answer! I can’t understand what’s happening. There should be someone there. And we should have had help arrive by now!’

Marshal Dusk did not say anything. They were in the third-line central-west bastion now. There were still individual bastions holding out in the first and second lines, but the defences had been breached in numerous places, all in the space of an hour.

‘Is it going to get worse at night?’ asked Arthur, with a glance at the setting sun. ‘Or better?’

‘I fear it will make no difference,’ said Dusk. ‘The moon will be bright, and there are fires enough to light their way.’

There were many fires burning below them. The New Nithlings had brought a new weapon to bear, a tube that squirted something like super-concentrated firewash in a tight stream. They had used this ‘incandescent lance’ – as it was quickly dubbed – to burn through thick stone walls as well as gates. The only thing that had saved the third defence line thus far was that the enemy appeared to have used up all their supplies of these tubes, which could only be used once.

‘Has that runner come back from the Star Fort?’ Arthur asked.

‘No, sir,’ replied one of the staff officers. His head was bandaged, the result of the last attempted escalade by the Nithlings against the central bastion. Their ladders had seemed too short up until the last moment, when they had thrown them against the wall and activated some mechanism that extended both ends by several yards. Arthur himself had fought in the effort to turn back that attack, an intense and horrible few minutes where New Nithlings seemed to be pouring over the walls like water.

Arthur’s soldiers had repulsed the attack, but the New Nithlings were massing once more below. Thousands and thousands of them, filling all the space between the defence lines, safe now because the defenders had run out of fire-wash and even easily procured debris to throw at them.

‘They’re forming up!’ warned Dusk. ‘Stand ready!’

His order was echoed all around the walls of the bastion and out across to the bastions on either side, picked up and repeated by officers and NCOs.

‘You had best get to the Star Fort now, sir,’ said Dusk. He spoke very quietly, close to Arthur’s ear. ‘I do not think we will hold them this time.’

‘I’m not going,’ said Arthur. He looked at the crocodile ring on his finger and thought of his home and family. They all seemed so distant now, so far away. He could not easily even summon up their faces or voices in his memory. ‘I will use the Key against them. We will prevail.’

He held up the baton and it caught the last light of the sun, transforming not into the unwieldy sword of Sir Thursday but a slim, needle-sharp rapier that caught the sunlight and reflected it back in a coruscation of beams that lit up all the bastions with a clean brilliance that cut through all smoke and dust.

‘The Army and Sir Arthur!’ shouted Dusk. Once again, his cry was picked up across the bastions, but it was louder now, more heartfelt.

‘Sir Arthur! Sir Arthur!’

The Nithlings below answered with their drums and their shouts. Rank after rank began to march towards the bastions, all abristle with ladders and hooked lines and smoking firepots to hurl.

‘Sir Arthur!’

It was not a war cry. Captain Drury was tugging at his elbow. But he was not holding the phone. He was pointing to the far west, where the disk of the sun had finally disappeared, though some of its light still lingered in the upper sky.

‘Sir! Look!’

Arthur blinked and blinked again. Through the drifting smoke, in the dim twilight, he couldn’t at first make out what Drury was pointing at. Then he saw it. The sky-line had changed. There was a mountain range immediately to the west, perhaps three miles distant.

A cheer rose up amid the shouts of ‘Sir Arthur’, the wild cheer of unexpected hope.

‘The spike,’ said Marshal Dusk. ‘Sir Thursday lied. He did destroy it.’

‘No,’ said Arthur. ‘I think maybe I did … I threw a sorcerous pocket in it.’

‘A what?’ asked Dusk.

‘Never mind,’ said Arthur. For a moment, he savoured an intense feeling of relief. The pocket was destroyed and the Skinless Boy with it. His family was safe. But the relief was very brief. Arthur looked out the embrasure and, though he had not held much hope, was unsurprised to see that the New Nithlings, though they might have lost some of their reinforcements to tectonic strategy when the tiles moved, were unfazed.

I wonder what I can do with the Key, Arthur thought as he looked out at the solid tidal wave of New Nithlings. I suppose I can use it to make me stronger and quicker and tougher than any Nithling or Denizen. But there’s just so many of them, it won’t make a difference in the end. They just keep coming … it is like being in a natural disaster. There’s just nothing that can be done … and those New Nithlings just want to be farmers, it’s all so crazy –

A hand suddenly jerked Arthur back behind the merlon.

‘Pardon,’ said a familiar voice. It was followed a moment later by the sight of a barrel flying over the battlements, two burning fuses trailing sparks as it went past. Four seconds later, there was a huge explosion near the base of the wall.

‘A grenado,’ said Sunscorch, Wednesday’s Noon, with a wide grin. ‘Biggest we could make. And there’s plenty more where that came from.’

‘Sunscorch!’ exclaimed Arthur. ‘You came!’

‘Aye, me and a few others,’ said Sunscorch.

Arthur sat up as more explosions boomed beyond the walls. The bastion was suddenly packed with Denizens. There were blue-jacketed sailors lighting fuses on barrels of Nothing-powder and firing them out of squat wooden mortars they’d set up at the back. There were Commissionaire Sergeants and Metal Commissionaires forming up in ranks alongside the soldiers. Midnight Visitors flew overhead, raining long metal darts down on the New Nithlings.

A crowd of buff-coated Artillerists rushed past, wheel-barrowing smaller barrels of powder and piles of canister shot, discussing how low they could depress the bastion’s cannons, ecstatic that they could once again use their weapons.

‘Dame Primus is preparing to sally below,’ said Sunscorch. ‘She’s going to use the Keys, and she’s got the Monday superior Denizens and Wednesday’s Dawn and old Scamandros and everybody we could bring who’s ever fought a Nithling or who says they have. About five thousand, all told, though they’re still coming through.’

Sunscorch paused to look over the side.

‘This lot don’t look much like no Nithlings to me.’

‘They’re New Nithlings,’ said Arthur. ‘Almost Denizens …’

‘You don’t sound real happy, Arthur. I mean, Lord Arthur.’

‘Just call me Arthur,’ said the boy. He looked at the sword in his hand and it slowly changed back into a baton, which he thrust through his belt. Then he stood up and looked through the embrasure.

The New Nithlings were retreating in good order. Though Dame Primus had not yet attacked, she had stalked out of the sally port, with her varied troops fanning out behind her.

It was not the presence of her followers that made the Nithlings retreat. It was Dame Primus herself. Eight feet tall, and clad in a greatcoat that was surprisingly similar in colour and cut to the Piper’s, she was wreathed in a sorcerous nimbus of whirling blue and green sparks that lashed out every few seconds up to eighty feet away, striking down Nithlings. And that was just with her standing still. When she raised her Second Key-gauntleted fists and crashed them together, a whole group of at least a hundred Nithlings was suddenly lifted into the air and smashed against the rear wall of the nearest second-line bastion.

For the first time, Arthur saw what it really meant to wield the Keys. He cried out as Dame Primus took the trident of the Third Key from her belt and waved it negligently, all the fluid in the bodies of several hundred Nithlings leaving them in a ghastly spray that splashed onto a burning walkway nearby, almost extinguishing the flames.

‘Let them retreat!’ shouted Arthur. ‘Let them go!’

No one could hear him. Even Sunscorch, only a few yards away, was busy shouting at the mortar crews, telling them to fire farther out.

Arthur took the baton of the Fourth Key from his belt and held it up.

‘Magnify my voice,’ he said. ‘And cast light upon the field.’

The baton did the latter first. It merely glowed itself, but in answer the newly risen moon shone suddenly brighter, its green light becoming bright enough in a few seconds to cast shadows.

‘Let the New Nithlings retreat to their trench lines!’ said Arthur, at normal volume. But as his words left his mouth, they became much, much louder, louder even than the booming mortars and cannons. ‘Cease fire and let them go!’

His voice was so loud, an echo came back from the new mountain range that had moved in at sunset.

‘Go … go … go … go …’ The bright moon faded, and there was sudden quiet.

‘They are going,’ said Marshal Dusk, relief in his voice. ‘I wonder if they will be back.’

‘It all depends on the Piper,’ said Arthur, his voice heavy and slow with extreme exhaustion. ‘But with Dame Primus here as well as me, and all four Keys, and our extra troops … I think he will either make peace or retreat to where he came from and prepare for another go.’

‘But with the tiles moving …’

‘He has an Ephemeris,’ said Arthur. ‘I saw the corner of it sticking out of his greatcoat pocket. And we’re in no shape to pursue them, are we?’

Suiting action to words, Arthur slumped down with his back against the battlements. Many followed his example, but Marshal Dusk remained standing, and Sunscorch busied himself directing the mortar crews to swab out and clean their massive wooden barrels.

‘Just a moment of peace,’ muttered Arthur. ‘Before Dame Primus gets here. Just one moment of peace, that’s all I want…’

His voice trailed off and his head slumped forward, as sleep claimed him.

On his finger, the crocodile ring glinted in the moonlight.

It was now exactly one-half pure gold.

Thirty

LEAF WOKE IN a panic, choking. Before she could work out where she was and what she was choking on, a stream of clear fluid gushed out of her nose and into a bucket that was being held in front of her, and her head was held over it.

‘Keep still,’ said a calm female voice. ‘This will last about five minutes.’

‘Eerggh, ick, eurch,’ spat Leaf as the stuff just kept coming, flowing fast enough that some of it washed back down her throat. That was what made her cough.

‘You’ve just come out of sedation,’ the voice continued. ‘This clear fluid is a mixture of an agent we’ve used to flush a foreign … well, fungoid, out of you and the denatured fungoid itself. Once it’s out, you’ll be fine.’

‘Oh ish sho horrigle,’ gasped Leaf. She felt weak and flaky and very disoriented and her sinus cavities really hurt. She was in a bed, that was clear, but the roof was green and very low and kind of saggy, and there were clear plastic walls everywhere.

She turned her head and saw it was a nurse holding her head and the bucket. A nurse in a biohazard suit, her face indistinct behind a double visor.

‘You’re in a field hospital, set up on the oval at what I believe is your school,’ explained the nurse. ‘Everything is going to be okay.’

‘How longsh ’ere?’

‘How long have you been here?’

Leaf nodded.

‘I think it’s been a week. Things have been very hectic, though they’re picking up now. At least they caught the terrorists who spread this thing.’

‘Shwat!?’

‘Well, not caught exactly, as they were all killed in the raid on their headquarters.’

Leaf shook her head in disbelief, till that motion was stopped by an even firmer grip.

‘Don’t do that, please. Keep it in the receptacle.’

A week, she thought in disbelief. I’ve been under sedation for a week. But Suzy must have got the pocket to Arthur, or I wouldn’t be here …

‘Air ow my parents?’

‘How are your parents?’

Leaf had meant ‘Where are my parents?’ but she nodded gently anyway, making sure this did not disrupt the cascade of fluid.

‘I’ll have to check. No visitors here, of course. They’re probably home, I should imagine.’

‘Ay woor in Est Eerea Hopital.’

The nurse’s hand holding the bucket shook.

‘They were in East Area Hospital?’

Leaf nodded slowly.

‘I’ll get a doctor to check for you,’ said the nurse carefully. ‘I’m sure they’re okay, but there were a … a number of casualties at East Area. After the helicopter crash, and the breakout attempt, the Army … most of the people inside … most were fine.’

‘Wat day iz?’ asked Leaf, two tears running down her cheeks to drip unnoticed into the bucket.