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Really, Jacob? How?
Fox, of course, saw the despair on his face.
"You didn't find Will," she whispered.
"I did, but he's gone."
A door slammed farther down the corridor. Valiant cocked his rifle. But the guards were dragging some other prisoner out into the corridor.
Fox climbed as swiftly as the Dwarf. Clara looked very relieved when she and Jacob pulled themselves up onto the iron beam next to her. Valiant swung himself onto the bridge while Jacob rubbed the Rapunzel-rope until it was again nothing more than a golden hair. Some time passed before the Dwarf finally waved them up to the bridge. Beneath them, a platoon of Goyl was marching across one of the lower bridges, and a freight train belched black smoke into the huge cavern as it crossed the abyss. Except for two shafts through which a hint of daylight entered the cave, there was no indication of how the Goyl dealt with their exhaust fumes. Your father will probably have shown them, Jacob, he thought as he followed Valiant across the iron planks of the footbridge. But he pushed the thought out of his head. He didn't want to think about his father. He didn't even want to think about Will. He just wanted to go back to the island and forget everything — the Larks' Water, the jade, and the iron bridges that looked as if John Reckless had left his signature all over this world.
"What about horses?" Jacob asked the Dwarf as they ducked into one of the archways that lined the cave's wall.
"Forget it!" Valiant said with a grunt. "The stables are right by the main gate. Too many guards."
"You want to cross the mountains on foot?"
"You've got a better plan?" the Dwarf hissed back.
No, he didn't. And all they had to get past the blind Guardians were Valiant's rifle and the new knife he had brought Jacob — in exchange for another gold sovereign, of course.
Beside him Fox shifted into a vixen again. Clara was leaning against one of the pillars, looking into the depths. She didn’t seem to be really with them. Maybe she was back behind the mirror, sitting with Will in the dingy hospital cafeteria. It would be a long journey back, and every mile would remind her that Will was no longer there.
Windows and doors behind curtains of sandstone. Houses like swallows' nests. Gold-Eyes everywhere. To make themselves less conspicuous, Valiant first went with Clara while Jacob and Fox hid among the houses. Then the Dwarf fetched the others while Clara hid in a dark alley. Coming down the steep roads and stairs was even harder than going up.
Valiant had refreshed the letter on Jacob's forehead, and the Dwarf proudly took Clara's arm, as if he was presenting his new bride to the Goyl. They encountered many soldiers, and every time Jacob pushed past a Goyl uniform, he expected a barked order or a stone hand on his shoulder. But after seemingly endless hours, they finally reached the opening through which they first looked out over the vast cavern. It was only in the tunnel behind it that their luck ran out.
By now they were so exhausted that they stayed together. Jacob supported Clara, though he couldn't fail to notice the way Fox was looking at him. The first Goyl they encountered were returning from a hunt. There were six of them, and they had a pack of the tame wolves that followed them even into the deepest caves. Two grooms were leading horses loaded with their quarry: three of the large saurians whose spines the Goyl cavalry wore on their helmets, and six bats, whose brains were said to be a Goyl delicacy. They gave Jacob only a cursory glance as they passed by, but the Goyl patrol that suddenly emerged from one of the dark side tunnels was much more curious. There were three soldiers. One of them was an alabaster Goyl — the color of most of their spies.
They exchanged a quick glance when Valiant named the merchant to who Jacob supposedly belonged. The alabaster Goyl reached for his pistol, calmly informing Valiant that his business partner had been arrested for illegal mineral dealing. Luckily, Valiant was quicker. He shot the Goyl off his horse while Jacob threw his knife into the chest of the second soldier. Valiant had bought the knife in one of the shops on the palace bridge, and its blade cut through the citrine skin cells like butter. Jacob shuddered as he realized how much he wanted to kill them all. Fox startled the horse of the third soldier, but the Goyl quickly regained control of his mount, and he galloped off before Jacob could pull a gun from one of his dead comrades' belts.
Valiant spat out curses that Jacob had never heard before. While the hoofbeats were still receding, though, they heard a tone that silenced even the Dwarf. It sounded like the chirping of thousands of mechanical crickets. The stone around them sprang to life. Bugs crawled from the fissures and holes; millipedes, spiders, cockroaches, moths, mosquitoes, and dragonflies fluttered into their faces. The creatures landed in their hair, crawled up their clothes, and when they tried to escape into the next tunnel, they were confronted by a solid cloud of fluttering bats.
The alarm of the Goyl had awoken the earth, and it exhaled life — crawling, biting, fluttering life.
They stumbled on, half-blind in the darkness, their arms flailing, creatures crunching under their steps. None of them remembered where they'd come from or in which direction they should be headed. The walls were chittering ever louder, and the beam from the flashlight was a probing finger in the darkness. Jacob thought he could hear hooves in the distance. Voices. They were trapped, caught in an endlessly branching labyrinth, and the fear washed away the despair he had felt in the cells, and reawoke his will to live. To live! Nothing else, just live and get back to the light and the air.
Fox barked. Jacob saw her disappear into a side passage. The hint of a breeze brushed his face as he pulled Clara with him. Light fell on a wide staircase, and there they were — the very Dragons the ferryman had spoken of. But they were made of metal and wood and were the grown-up brothers of the models that were hanging with dusty wings above the desk in John Reckless's study.
41
Wings
The alarm could also be heard in the hangar-cave, but at least here nothing was crawling out of the rock, which had been smoothed and sealed. A hint of daylight shone through a wide tunnel. Two unarmed Goyl were standing between the airplanes. They were only mechanics, and they lifted their arms as soon as Valiant pointed his rifle at them.
On their faces, fear of death was written as clearly as their infamous rage. Jacob bound them with a cable Clara found between the planes, but one of them tore himself free and lashed out with his claws. He dropped his hand as soon as Valiant cocked his rifle, but Jacob could only think of the claws that had torn into Will's neck. He'd never enjoyed killing, but the despair he'd felt since Will had followed the Fairy made Jacob afraid of what his own hands might do.
"No," whispered Clara, gently taking the knife from his hand. And for a moment, the fact that she understood the darkness in him bound them even more strongly than the Larks' Water.
Valiant had forgotten about the Goyl. The Dwarf no longer heard nor saw anything — neither the chirping in the walls nor the voices coming closer through the tunnels. He marveled at the three planes.
"Oh, this is wonderful!" he mumbled, stroking one of the red fuselages with delight. "So much more wonderful than any stinking Dragon. But how do they fly? What do the Goyl use them for?"
"They spit fire," Jacob said. "As Dragons do."
They were biplanes, similar to the ones built in Europe in the early twentieth century. A huge leap into the future, further than anything that was being developed in the factories of Schwanstein or by Her Majesty's engineers. Two of the machines were solo planes, like the ones flown by fighter pilots in World War I; the third one was a replica of a two-seater Junkers J4, a bomber and reconnaissance plane from the same period. Jacob had once built a model of that very plane with his father.
Fox kept her eyes on Jacob as he climbed into the tight cockpit.
