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Millard hesitated for a moment, then dropped the knife and ran. Caul made a grab for him but missed, and Millard’s footsteps curved away in a trail of divots.
Bentham composed himself and straightened his mussed shirt. Caul, his good humor gone, turned the gun on Miss Peregrine.
“Now listen to
me!” he barked. “You there, across the bridge! Let those guards go!”
They had little choice but to do as he asked. Sharon and his cousins released their collared wights and backed away, and the wight who’d been standing on our side of the bridge lowered his hands and picked his gun up off the ground. Within seconds the balance of power had been reversed completely, and there were four guns aimed at the crowd and one at Miss Peregrine. Caul could do what he wanted.
“Boy!” he said, pointing at me. “Pitch that hollow into the chasm!” His shrill voice a needle in my eardrum.
I walked my hollow to the edge of the chasm.
“Now make him leap!”
It seemed I didn’t have a choice. It was an awful waste, but perhaps just as well: the hollow was suffering badly now, its wounds leaking black blood that flowed around its feet. It wouldn’t have survived.
I unwrapped its tongue from my waist, unsaddled myself, and stepped down. My strength had returned enough for me to stand on my own, but the hollow’s was going fast. As soon as I was off its back it bellowed softly, sucked its tongues back into its mouth, and sank to its knees, a willing sacrifice.
“Thank you, whoever you were,” I said. “I’m sure that if you’d ever become a wight, you wouldn’t have been a completely evil one.”
I put my foot on its back and pushed. The hollow tumbled forward and dropped silently into the misty void. After a few seconds, I felt its consciousness disappear from my mind.
The wights across the bridge rode over to our side on the hollow’s tongues, Miss Peregrine’s life threatened again if I interfered. Olive was yanked out of the sky. The guards set about herding us into a tight and easily controllable cluster. Then Caul shouted for me, and one of the guards reached into the crowd and dragged me out.
“He’s the only one we really need alive,” Caul said to his guards. “If you must shoot him, shoot him in the knees. As for the rest of them …” Caul swung his gun toward the tightly packed crowd and fired. There were screams as the crowd surged. “Shoot them anywhere you please!”
He laughed and twirled with his arms poised like a squat ballerina. I was about to run at him, ready to dig out his eyes with my bare hands and damn the consequences, when a long-barreled revolver appeared front and center in my field of view.
“Don’t,” grunted my monosyllabic guard, a wight with broad shoulders and a shiny bald head.
Caul fired his own gun into the air and shouted for quiet, and every voice fell away but the whimpers of whomever he’d shot.
“Don’t cry, I have a treat for you people!” he said, addressing the crowd. “This is a historic day. My brother and I are about to culminate a lifetime’s worth of innovation and struggle by crowning ourselves the twin kings of peculiardom. And what would a coronation be without witnesses? So we’re bringing you along. Provided you behave yourselves, you’ll see something no one has witnessed for a thousand years: the domination and expropriation of the Library of Souls!”
“You have to promise one thing, or I won’t help you,” I said to Caul. I didn’t have much negotiating power, but he believed he needed me, and that was something. “Once you get what you want, let Miss Peregrine go.”
“I’m afraid that won’t do,” Caul said, “but I’ll let her live. Peculiardom will be more fun to rule with my sister in it. Once I clip your wings I’ll keep you as my personal slave, Alma, how would you like that?”
She tried to respond, but her words were lost beneath the bear’s meaty paw.
Caul cupped a hand behind his ear and laughed. “What’s that? I can’t hear you!” Then he turned and began walking toward the tower.
“Let’s go!” the guards shouted, and soon we were all stumbling after him.
We were herded toward the pale tower at a brutal pace, the wights encouraging stragglers with shoves and kicks. Without my hollow I was a limping, hobbling mess: I had nasty bite wounds across my torso and the dust that had kept me from feeling them was beginning to wear off. I forced myself forward anyway, my mind spinning out ways we might save ourselves, each more implausible than the last. Without my hollows, all our peculiar powers were outmatched by the wights and their guns.
We stumbled past the wrecked building where my hollows had died, over bricks misted with the blood of parrots and wights. Marched through the walled courtyard, into the tower door and then up and up its winding hallway past a blur of identical black doors. Caul paraded before us like a deranged bandleader, high-stepping and swinging his arms one moment and turning to hurl profane insults at us the next. Behind him, the bear waddled along with Bentham riding in the crook of one arm and Miss Peregrine slung over its shoulder.
She pled with her brothers to reconsider their course of action.
“Remember the old stories of Abaton, and the ignominious end that came to every peculiar who stole the library’s souls! Its power is cursed!”
“I’m not a child anymore, Alma, and I’m no longer frightened by old ymbrynes’ tales,” Caul scoffed. “Now hold your tongue. That is, if you want to keep it!”
She soon gave up trying to convince them and stared silently at us over the bear’s shoulder, her face projecting strength. Don’t be afraid, she seemed to telegraph. We’ll survive this, too.
I worried not all of us would survive even the trip to the top of the tower. Turning around, I tried to see who it was that had been shot. Amidst the tight-packed group behind me, Bronwyn was carrying someone limp in her arms—Miss Avocet, I think—and then a meaty hand smacked me in the head.
“Face forward or lose a kneecap,” growled my guard.
Finally we came to the top of the tower and its very last door. In the hallway beyond, pale daylight shone on the curving wall. There was an open deck above us, a fact I filed away for future reference.
Caul stood beaming before the door. “Perplexus!” he called. “Signor Anomalous—yes, there in the back! Since I owe this discovery in part to your expeditions and hard work—credit where credit is due!—I think you should do the honors and open the door.”
“Come now, we’ve no time for ceremony,” said Bentham. “We’ve left your compound unguarded …”
“Don’t be such a ninny-willow,” Caul said. “This won’t take but a moment.”
One of the guards dragged Perplexus out of the crowd and up to the door. Since I’d last seen him, his hair and beard had turned alabaster white, his spine had curved, and deep wrinkles grooved his face. He’d spent too long away from his loop, and now his true age was beginning to catch up to him. Perplexus seemed about to open the door when he was struck by a fit of coughing. Once he’d regained his breath, he faced Caul, drew in a snorting lungful of air, and spat a glistening wad of phlegm onto his cloak.
“You are an ignorant pig!” Perplexus cried.
Caul raised his pistol to Perplexus’s head and pulled the trigger. There were screams—“Jack, don’t!” Bentham shouted—and Perplexus threw up his hands and spun away, but the only sound the gun made was a dry click.
Caul opened the gun and peered into its chamber, then shrugged. “It’s an antique, like yourself,” he said to Perplexus, then used its barrel to flick the spittle from his jacket. “I suppose fate has intervened on your behalf. Just as well—I’d rather watch you turn to dust than bleed to death.”
He motioned for the guards to take him away. Perplexus, muttering oaths at Caul in Italian, was dragged back to the group.
Caul turned to the door. “Oh, to hell with it,” he muttered, and opened it. “Get in there, all of you!”
Inside was the same familiar gray-walled room, only this time its missing fourth wall extended into a long, dark corridor. With a few shoves from the guards, we were hurrying along it. The smooth walls became rough and uneven, then widened into a primitive, day-lit room. The room was made from rock and clay, and I might’ve called it a cave but for its approximately rectangular door and two windows. Someone had carved them, and this room, using tools to dig it out of soft rock.
>
We were herded outside into a hot, dry day. The view opened dizzyingly. We were high in a landscape that could’ve been an alien world: everywhere around us, towering on one side and rolling away into valleys on the other, were humps and spires of strange, reddish rock, all honeycombed with crude doors and windows. A constant wind blew through them, producing a human-sounding moan that seemed to emanate from the earth itself. Though the sun was nowhere near setting, the sky glowed orange, as if the end of the world were brewing just beyond the horizon. And despite evidence here of a civilization, other than ourselves there was no one in sight. I had a heavy, watched feeling, like we were trespassing someplace we were not meant to be.
Bentham climbed down from his bear and removed his hat in awe. “So this is the place,” he said, gazing across the hills.
Caul threw a big-brotherly arm across his shoulders. “I told you this day would come. We certainly put each other through hell getting here, didn’t we?”
“We did,” Bentham agreed.
“But I say all’s well that ends well, because now I get to do this.” Caul turned to face us. “Friends! Ymbrynes! Peculiar children!” He let his voice echo away into the strange, moaning canyons. “Today will go down in history. Welcome to Abaton!”
He paused, waiting for applause that didn’t come.
“You’re standing now in the ancient city that once protected the Library of Souls. Until recently, it hadn’t been seen in over four hundred years, nor conquered in a thousand—until I rediscovered it! Now, with you as my witnesses …”
He stopped, looked down for a moment, then laughed. “Why am I wasting my breath? You philistines will never appreciate the gravity of my achievement. Look at you—like donkeys contemplating the Sistine Chapel!” He patted Bentham on the arm. “Come on, brother. Let’s go and take what’s ours.”
“And ours as well!” said a voice behind me. One of the guards. “You won’t forget us, will you, sir?”
“Of course I won’t,” Caul said, attempting a smile and failing. He couldn’t disguise his irritation at having been challenged in front of everyone. “Your loyalty will be repaid tenfold.”
