The house of healing where we took Maddy’s body to prepare it for burial after Sergeant Hammar shot her for no reason at all.
“Keep going, Acorn,” I say, pushing the thought away. “The road up to the tower has to be around–”
The dusky sky suddenly lights up behind me. I turn and Acorn does, too, and though the city is far away and behind trees, we can see a huge flash of light, silent from this distance, no rumble of an explosion, just a bright, bright glow that grows and grows before dying away, lighting up the few people on the road who’ve reached this far out of town, and I wonder what could possibly have happened back in the city to make a light like that.
And I wonder whether Todd is in the middle of it.
[TODD]
The next blast of fire comes before anyone’s ready for it–
WHOOMP!
Shooting across the open ground and catching the retreating soldiers, melting their guns, burning up their bodies, laying ’em to the ground in the worst sorta heap–
“We gotta get outta here!” I shout at the Mayor, who’s watching the battle like he’s hypnotized, his body still but his eyes moving this way and that, taking in everything.
“Those white sticks,” he says quietly. “Obviously a ballistic of some sort but do you see how destructive they are?”
I stare at him wide-eyed. “DO SOMETHING!” I shout. “They’re getting slaughtered!”
He raises one eyebrow. “What exactly do you think war is, Todd?”
“But the Spackle’ve got better weapons now! We won’t be able to stop ’em!”
“Won’t we?” he says, nodding at the battle. I look, too. The Spackle on the horned creacher readies his torches for another blast but one of the Mayor’s men has risen from where he’s fallen, burns all over him, and he raises his gun and fires–
And the Spackle on the horned creacher drops one torch and slaps a hand to his neck where the bullet hit him, then falls sideways off the creacher to the ground–
A cheer goes up from the Mayor’s men as they see what’s happened–
“All weapons have their weaknesses,” the Mayor says.
And quick as that, they’re regrouping and Mr Morgan is riding his horse forward, leading all the men now, and more rifles are getting fired and tho more arrows and white flashes are coming from the Spackle and more soldiers are falling, Spackle are falling, too, their clay armour cracking and exploding, falling under the feet of other Spackle marching behind ’em–
But they keep coming–
“We’re outnumbered,” I say to the Mayor.
“Oh, ten to one easily,” he says.
I point up the hill. “And they’ve got more of those fire things!”
“But not ready yet, Todd,” he says and he’s right, the creachers are backed up behind Spackle soldiers on the zigzag road, not ready to blast unless they want to take out half their own army.
But the Spackle line is really crashing into the line of men now and I see the Mayor do a counting moshun with his hands and then look back down the empty road behind us.
“You know, Todd,” he says, taking Morpeth’s reins. “I think we’re going to need every man.”
He turns to me.
“It’s time for us to fight.”
And I know with a stab in my heart that if the Mayor himself is gonna fight–
Then we’re really in trouble.
{VIOLA}
“There!” I shout, pointing at what has to be the road up the hill to the tower. Acorn flies straight up the incline, bits of foamy sweat flying from his shoulders and neck. “I know,” I say between his ears. “Almost there.”
Girl colt, he thinks and for a second I think he might even be laughing at my sympathy. Or maybe he’s just trying to comfort me.
The road is incredibly dark as it curves around the back of the hill. For a minute, I’m cut off from absolutely everything, all sound from the city, all light from what’s happening, all Noise that might tell me what’s going on. It’s like Acorn and I are racing through the black beyond itself, that weird quiet of being a small ship in the hugeness of space, where your light is so feeble against the surrounding dark, you might as well not have a light at all–
And then I hear a sound coming from the top of the hill–
A sound I recognize–
Steam escaping from a vent–
“Coolant systems!” I shout to Acorn, like they’re the happiest words in the whole world.
The steam sound gets louder as we near the crest of the hill and I picture it in my mind: two huge vents at the back of the scout ship, just above the engines, cooling them down after entry into the atmosphere–
The same vents that didn’t open on my own scout ship when the engines caught fire.
The same vents that caused us to crash and killed my mother and father.
Acorn reaches the top of the hill and for a second, all I see is the vast empty space where the communications tower used to be, the tower Mistress Coyle blew up rather than have the Mayor use it to contact my ships first. Most of the metal wreckage has been cleared away in huge scrap heaps and when Acorn races across the open ground, at first I only see the heaps in the moons-light, three big ones, covered in the dust and dullness of the months since the tower fell–
Three groupings of metal–
And behind them a fourth–
Shaped like a huge hawk, wings outstretched–
“There!”
Acorn puts on a burst of energy and we race towards the back of the scout ship, steam and heat pouring out of the vents into the sky, and we get nearer and I see a shaft of light on the left that must be the bay door open under a wing of the ship–
“Yes,” I say to myself. “They’re really here–”
Because they really are here. I almost believed they’d never come and I can feel myself getting lighter and my breath start rushing faster because they’re here, they’re actually here–
I see three figures standing on the ground at the bottom of the bay doors, silhouetted against the shaft of light, their shadows turning as they hear Acorn’s hoofbeats–
Just to the side, I see a cart parked in the darkness, its oxes nibbling on grass–
And we get closer–
And closer–
And the figures’ faces suddenly loom up as Acorn and I enter the shaft of light, too, juddering to a stop–
And it is, it’s exactly who I thought it would be and my heart does a skip of happiness and homesickness, and in spite of all that’s happening, I feel my eyes get wet and my throat start to choke–