Chapter 32
Dr. Maddeson turned and fled, emitting a warbling scream that might have been comical in other circumstances.
“Get him!” I shouted.
Perry complied at the same time as Pretoria threw out her hands towards Wake, a skew of time already blurring the air.
He seemed to anticipate the gesture. He darted around her, avoiding the skew, and hurtled around a corner after Madge and the artifact.
Fear and hatred collided inside me, both of them directed towards Madge.
My sister was not helpless, but her self-defense capabilities could be described as ‘provisional’ at best, and she had always been more than willing to hide behind the next, larger mage.
Glim magic, too, was little use in physical confrontations. If Wake caught her…
Pretoria seemed to be of the same mind.
“I have them, get out of here!” she shouted, then she, too, was gone in a ripple of skirts. “Go!”
Lewis and I were left bleeding in the hallway with Geoffrey’s grey-skinned corpse and the stink of smoke.
I flinched after Pretoria, but in the sudden quiet, I could just about pick out a new sound. The roar of engines.
Headlights cut through the tall windows, beaming through the foyer and slicing down the hall towards us. Before they had even stilled I heard doors slam, and the light was interrupted by the flickers of running figures.
“Damn,” Lewis said, eloquently. “That will be the Grand General.”
“Can you walk?”
“I will follow you. Go. Help Pretoria.”
For a moment, I almost considered the idea. I had come so far for the artifact, suffered so much.
But I disregarded it all with embarrassing readiness. It was chased from my skull by the image of Lewis struggling through a dark museum, hunted by soldiers. The sadness in his dying eyes, as there had been in Geoffrey’s.
“I shall not abandon you,” I vowed. I had intended to sound aloof, but there was a softness in my voice that I did not expect—my hearing was properly returning now, though I still endured a constant, distant ringing.
I added, “You agreed to escort me to Ilandrume. And how would I find your forger without you?”
“You would manage.”
Not without a penny in our pockets, a quiet voice murmured at the back of my mind. But now, of all moments, was not the time to admit the police had seized our savings.
I slipped an arm under his shoulders and we set off, slipping out of the hallway just as the foyer doors opened and voices drifted inside.
“Ottilie, go,” Lewis urged in a low voice. “If Pretoria gets her hands on the artifact first, you may not see it or her again.”
I tightened my arm about him, refusing to let go. “I am more concerned with Wake at the moment. Is this your top hobbling speed, Illing?”
“It is.”
“Then you will be winning no ribbons, good heavens.”
Lewis made a strange sound, and it took me a moment to realize it was a laugh. I looked up at him, an inane, completely inappropriate smile on my face.
“I had forgotten how ridiculous you are under duress,” Lewis said as we hastened on, ducking around displays of great hairy elephants and passing beneath several dozen suspended birds, swinging vaguely against the painted ceiling.
A shout came from up ahead, beyond the Hall of Natural History with its myriad displays of stuffed creatures: Pretoria, vengeful and frustrated.
“Would you prefer I flew into hysterics?” I whispered.
“Those are your only options?”
Another flurry of shouts and curses came from up ahead, and here and there crashes and twisted bursts of sound.
“Faster, Lewis,” I urged.
We rounded one corner, then another, and entered another exhibit—Weapons of Antiquity.
Glass-fronted cabinets glinted out at us, their armaments dormant in their cradles, upon their hooks, and within their velvet nests.
Several cabinets were already shattered, the floor strewn with glittering shards.
A row of cannons I had noticed upon my last visit hulked in the center of the room, facing the windows and the blazing headlights from vehicles in the courtyard beyond.
The lavishly adorned ceiling looked down upon it all, its river spirits and imps rapt in their lascivious play.
No one had seen us yet—we remained hidden in the entranceway, watching the scene unfold.
Madge lay strewn beneath the creatures’ stone-eyed gazes, struggling and failing to find her feet in a sea of shattered glass.
She was covered in blood, streaks and patches punctuating the pale blue of her dress and the gaunt white of her skin.
The artifact lay on the floor nearby, surrounded by glittering shards.
Pretoria advanced on her, a saber in hand, glass crunching beneath her boots. Moran stood between them.
The air blurred as Moran threw out a hand. Pretoria shuddered, bracing as the skew hit her. Her whole body froze—every smooth black hair, every ripple in her skirts, every flicker of expression and spark of light across her blade.
Pretoria broke free with a vengeful sound and hurled a skew right back at him—tendrils of blurred air, warping the light and twisting off her sword, towards her enemy.
Moran moved. I blinked, losing sight of the both of them before they reappeared on the run.
If one has never witnessed two Starlight mages duel I must apologize, for I am no Bronze, and I can do the act little justice.
Events became nearly impossible to follow.
They fought with time, in blurs and skews cast from their free hands, Pretoria’s sword, Moran’s cane, and the movement of their bodies.
They seized one another in their magecraft and shattered one another’s holds.
Constant distortions of time turned the thud, shift, and skid of their feet into a mind-bending, disjointed trommel, and blurred the thin light into a sheen like frozen river fog on a winter’s morning.
A flicker of movement jerked my attention to the side. Wake stepped from the shadows behind a cabinet and started across the floor, making for the artifact, Madge, Pretoria, and Moran.
“Wait here,” I urged Lewis, and took off.
I cannot say what I truly ran towards. Was it Pretoria, fighting for her life?
Was it Madge, wounded and traitorous and perhaps, in the end, just trying to protect me?
Or was it the artifact and the ever-thinning hope that, with its acquisition, Lewis and I might finally be free?
Pretoria caught sight of me. Her attention was only divided for a moment, but it was enough to alert Moran. Without so much as turning, he threw a hand in my direction and clenched his fingers.
My lungs seized, suspended outside of time. I staggered.
“Moran!” Wake bellowed.
The hold on me released and I hit the floor on my hands and knees. Mr. Moran spun, something between horror and resignation flooding his face.
“He. Is. Mine.” Wake advanced with a sword levelled. “Move, Rushforth.”
Pretoria vanished in a skew of time. She reappeared beside me just as I found my feet again.
“Get Madge, I’ll get the artifact,” I panted. “This is going to get bloody.”
She nodded and asked no questions. Instead, she squeezed my hand. “To the hunt.”
“The hunt.”
We closed the remaining space between ourselves, Madge, and the artifact as Wake and Moran faced off. There was a fresh breaking of glass, and Moran levelled a saber at Wake. The very same sword that had slain Empress Alessandra.
“Do you all know what he did?” Wake bellowed, his voice taking up every corner of the hall and crashing back upon us in echoes. “Do you know what he wants that for?”
He threw out his free hand at the artifact, lying in the glittering glass and the ever-shrinking space between me, Pretoria, and Madge.
“Baffin thinks he can change them, the Lusterless, the mundane, into us,” Wake spat. The intensity of his hate was staggering. “But all it truly does is turn us into monsters.”
Moran hurled a skew of time and physically charged. The skew distorted Wake’s words but could not stop them, echoing, repeating, and embedding in our ears as the older man threw himself at the younger.
I would not grasp what Wake had said, nor its implications, until later on. Just then, Madge finally found her feet and made to intercept me.
We reached the artifact almost simultaneously. I seized it and dodged. Madge howled in fury and snatched at me, just as Pretoria tackled her.
At the same time, every light in the museum turned on, momentarily blinding the lot of us. I rolled, panting and clutching the artifact to my aching chest. I glimpsed Pretoria dragging Madge away. I saw Lewis, hobbling into the fray as Wake chased Moran—straight towards me.
I lunged to my feet and took off towards the other end of the hall.
“Ottilie!” Pretoria shouted as I passed. She had Madge by the arm, but with her free hand, she tossed me a sword.
I snatched it from the air and bolted through the doors to the next exhibit.
Statues surrounded me. I darted around them, skirting busts and fragments of motifs, a statue of a profoundly naked young man, and threw myself behind a broken facade of warriors in profile.
I peered through its painstaking carvings just as Wake sprinted into the room.
He held a newly acquired sword, and Moran did not follow.
Was he dead? What of Madge, and Pretoria? What of Lewis?
Wake vanished behind a pillar. I froze, taking stock of the shadows nearby.
Too late. He lunged from a patch of darkness not a pace away, sword flashing—a fine, long rapier.
I batted the lighter blade aside and backed off, my own saber crooked casually between us. Its grip might be unfamiliar but this moment, this confrontation, this I knew.
I slipped the artifact into my pocket and attacked.
I moved quickly and sharply, casting aside finesse in favor of driving him back, away from the shadows and into the light, where he might be trapped.
He parried every thrust and cut, clearly taken aback by my ferocity.
He managed a twisting thrust—I stepped off line and dropped the tip of my blade, catching the other side of his weapon and charging in.
Our hilts met, forearms braced. I held for a skull-pounding moment, then hooked my crossguard under his hands and drove the hilt of my saber into his face. He staggered and I sidestepped past him, already slashing for his exposed back.
He followed me with his blade, dropping it over one shoulder to protect himself as he turned.
I delivered a quick thrust to his sword arm.
The blade, for all its quality, was dull with age. It pierced the sleeve of his coat but only just. I twisted my wrist, snapping the blade down at his forearm instead and beat a swift retreat.
He dropped his rapier. His mouth bloodied, bellowing with pain and blind with rage, he grabbed a delicate bust from a nearby pedestal and hurled it at my head.
I dodged. He snatched up his sword again and delivered a long punch of a lunge. His mouth was crimson, teeth lined with blood, and I was sure in that moment that I had never seen an expression so freely malevolent, so utterly grotesque.
His sword was longer, his arm longer. I parried, barely nudging the tip of his blade to the side. I retreated a tight step, flowing into another guard, then another and another.
Now it was I who had little chance to retaliate. I moved on pure instinct, my muscles remembering, my instincts reacting far quicker than my conscious mind.
But I was tiring and wounded, and adrenaline could not keep the pain at bay forever.
When our blades next locked, I had to yield. My muscles screamed as I disengaged, deflected a wild blow and darted behind a statue. My savior, poised with a pitcher of water on one broad hip, was only saved from a thrust through the throat by the fact that she was, obviously, granite.
I heard a ping, unexpectedly light, as Wake’s blade broke. I would have pressed my advantage, but Wake threw himself at the statue with all the forethought of an enraged bull.
It toppled with a thump and crack that made the floor shake and shattered the tiles.
I barely made it out of the way in time, blocked a stunted, graceless stab from his broken blade and tripped on a piece of stone.
I caught myself on the edge of an ancient sundial, once large enough to park a carriage atop, and fled.
No footsteps followed. Instead, Wake vanished into the shadow of a hallway.
I sprinted on, avoiding shadows where he might reappear and reaching into my pocket for the artifact.
“Rushforth!” Moran’s voice rippled across the chamber.
I ducked behind another lavish facade, hollow with carvings, and watched him stride into the room. He still carried Baffin’s legendary sword.
I was not stupid enough to duel a Starlit mage, let alone expose myself to that deadly blade. My head was pounding now, my breathing ragged.
Surreptitiously, I tucked the blue orb into the intricate facade in front of me. Then I burst out with the last of my strength, sprinting for another set of doors. A skew of time grazed me, tugging at my hair and skirt like a wave of water, then I was free again.
Another exhibit, more glass cabinets, a grand doorway guarded by winged stone statues of mythological beings. I avoided the shadows, few though they now were, and—
I burst into the foyer and skidded to a stop directly in front of Grand General Baffin. He stood in apparently heated conference with Detective Supford who, looking as though he had just received a verbal lashing, still had a gag about his neck like a kerchief and was rubbing rope-raw wrists.
Shock flicked across the Grand General’s expression, but only momentarily. Supford’s own face shifted to something indecipherable, save for the tightness around his eyes that warned he could, or would, not help me now.
A dozen rifles levelled at my chest.
I raised my empty hands.
“Grand General,” I wheezed. “So good to see you. I was just beginning to miss my box.”