‘Too late,’ said Ripton. ‘There’s the fire engine.’
He pointed through the smoke. An anc
ient horse-drawn tanker, of a kind obsolete everywhere save the most rural counties, was coming up the drive, with at least fourteen volunteer firemen crammed on or hanging off it. They were in various states of uniform, but all wore gleaming brass helmets. Several firemen on horseback came behind the engine, followed by a farm truck loaded with more irregular volunteers, who were armed with fire beaters and buckets. Two small cars brought up the rear, transporting another four brass-helmeted volunteers.
‘How did they—’
‘There’s another entrance to the estate from the village by the gamekeeper’s cottage. Cuts half a mile off the front drive.’
Nick plunged at the fire with the rake, and dragged some of the burning hay aside before he had to fall back from the smoke and heat. After a few seconds to recover, he pushed forward again, widening the gap. But it was going to take a few minutes to get through, and the firemen would be at the meadow before he could get out.
After his third attempt he reeled back into the grasp of Llew, who held Nick as he tried to swipe his legs with the rake, till Ripton grabbed it and twisted it out of his hands.
‘Hold hard, Master!’ said Llew.
‘It’s not attacking them!’ cried Ripton. ‘Just keep still and take a look.’
Nick stopped struggling. The fire engine had come to a halt as close as the men and horses could stand the heat, some fifty yards from the house. Firemen leapt off onto the lawn and began to bustle about with hoses as the truck and cars screeched to a halt behind them, throwing up gravel. The two mounted firemen continued on toward the meadow, their horses’ hooves clattering on the narrow bridge over the ha-ha.
‘It’ll take the horsemen,’ said Nick. ‘It must be hiding in the ditch.’
But the riders passed unmolested over the bridge and across the meadow, finally wheeling about close enough to the ring of fire for one of them to shout, ‘What on earth is happening here?’
Nick didn’t bother to answer. He was still looking for the creature. Why hadn’t it attacked?
Then he saw it through the swirling smoke. Not attacking anyone, but slinking up from the ha-ha and across the meadow toward the drive. Dorrance was riding on its back, like a child on a bizarre mobile toy, his arms clasped around the creature’s long neck. He pointed toward the gatehouse, and the creature began to run.
‘It’s running away!’ exclaimed Ripton.
‘It’s running,’ echoed Nick. ‘I wonder where?’
‘Who cares!’ Ripton exclaimed happily.
‘I do,’ said Nick. He slipped free of Llew’s suddenly relaxed grasp, took a deep, relatively smoke-free breath, sprinted forward, and jumped the ring of fire where he’d already made a partial gap.
He landed clear, fell forward, and quickly rolled in the grass to extinguish any flames that might have hitched a ride. He felt hot but not burned, and he had not breathed in any great concentration of smoke.
Looking back, he saw Ripton and Llew frantically raking the fire apart, but they had not dared to jump after him. He got up and ran toward the lawn, the parked cars, the fire engine, and the burning house.
There was only one reason the creature would flee now. It had nothing to fear from any weapons the Ancelstierrans could bring to bear. It could have stayed and killed everybody and drunk their blood. It must have decided to cut and run because the power it had gained from Nick’s blood was waning and it didn’t dare drink any more from him. That meant it would be heading north, toward the Old Kingdom, to find fresh victims to replenish its strength. Victims who bore the Charter Mark on their foreheads.
Nick couldn’t let it do that.
He reached the rearmost car and vaulted into the driver’s seat, deaf to the roar of the fire, the thud of the pumps, and the contained shriek of the high-pressure hoses. Even when Nick pressed the starter button, none of the firemen looked around, the sound of the little two-seater’s engine lost amid all the noise and action.
The car was a Branston Four convertible, very similar to the Branston roadster Nick used to rent occasionally when he was at Sunbere. He slapped the gear lever into reverse with the necessary double tap and gently pulled the hand throttle. The little car rolled back onto the lawn. Nick tapped the lever into the first of the two forward gears and nudged forward.
The firemen still hadn’t noticed, but as Nick opened up the hand throttle, the car backfired, hopped forward, and stalled. Someone, presumably the owner of the car, shouted. Nick saw a bronze-helmeted head approaching in the side-view mirror. To his left, Ripton and Llew charged up out of the ha-ha.
He depressed the clutch, hit the starter again, and hoped he had the throttle position right. The car backfired once more and leapt six feet forward, and then the engine suddenly hit a sweet, drumming note. The speedometer stopped hiccuping up and down and started to slowly climb toward the top speed of thirty-five miles per hour. A breeze ruffled Nick’s hair, undiminished by the tiny windscreen.
The bronze helmet disappeared from the mirror as the car accelerated along the drive. Ripton and Llew got almost close enough to lay a hand on the rear bumper before they, too, were left behind. Ripton shouted something, and a second later, Nick felt something rebound off his shoulder and land on the seat next to him. He glanced down and saw a chain of yellow daisies, punctuated every ten blooms or so with a red poppy.
Nick didn’t bother switching on the car’s headlights. The moon was so bright that he could even read the dashboard dials and see the drive clearly. What he couldn’t see was the creature and Dorrance, but he had to presume they were heading for the front gate. The wall around the estate was probably no great barrier for the creature, but if it didn’t need to climb it, he hoped, it wouldn’t.
His guess was rewarded as he turned out of the gate and stopped to look in both directions, up and down the lane. It was darker here, the road shadowed by the trees on either side. But on a slight rise, several hundred yards distant, Nick caught sight of the odd silhouette of the creature, with Dorrance still riding on its back. It disappeared over the crest, running very fast and keeping to the road.
Nick sped after it, the little car vibrating as he wrenched the hand throttle out as far as it would go. The speedometer went past the curlicued 35 that indicated the car’s top speed and got stuck against the raised letter n that completed the word Branston on the dial. But even at that speed, by the time he got to the top of the rise, the creature and Dorrance were gone. The lane kept on, with a very gentle curve to the left, so if Nick’s quarry was anywhere within a mile, he should have been able to see them in the clear, cool light of the vast moon overhead.
Various possibilities whisked through Nick’s mind. The most disturbing was the thought that they had seen him and were hiding off the road, the creature ready to spring on him as he passed. But the most likely possibility quickly replaced that fear. He hadn’t seen it at first, because of the trees, but another road joined the lane just before it started to curve away. The creature must have gone that way.
Nick took the corner a little too fast, and the car slid off the paved road and onto the shoulder, sending up a spray of clods and loose asphalt. For a moment he felt the back end start to slide out, and the steering wheel was loose in his hands, as if it were no longer connected to anything. Then the tires bit again, and he overcorrected and fishtailed furiously for thirty yards before getting fully under control.
When he could properly look ahead, Nick couldn’t see the creature and Dorrance. But this road only continued for another two hundred yards, ending at a small railway station. It was not much more than a signal box, a rudimentary waiting room, a platform, and the stationmaster’s house set some distance away. A single line of track looped in from the southwest, ran along the platform, then looped back out again, to join the main line that ran straight and true a few minutes’ walk away.
It had to be Dorrance Halt, the private railway station for Dorrance Hall. There was a train waiting at the platform, gray-white smoke busily puffing out of the locomot
ive and steam wafting around its wheels. It was a strangely configured train, in that there were six empty flatcars behind the engine, then a private car. Dorrance’s private car, with his crest upon the doors.
Nick suddenly realized the significance of the blazon of the silver chain. Dorrance’s several-times-great-grandfather must have been the Captain-Inquirer who found the creature, and the money gained from the sale of a silver chain was part of the current Dorrance’s inheritance.
The significance of the empty flatcars was also apparent to Nick. They were there to separate the locomotive from any Free Magic interference caused by the creature. Dorrance had thought out this mode of transport very carefully. Perhaps he had always planned to take the creature away by train. The thing’s long-term goal must always have been to return to the Old Kingdom.
Even as Nick pushed the little Branston to its utmost, the locomotive whistled and began to pull out of the station. As the rearmost carriage passed the waiting room, the electric lights outside fizzed and exploded. The train slowly picked up speed, the gouts of smoke from its funnel coming faster as it rolled away.
Nick wrenched the throttle completely out of its housing, drove off the road, raced through the station garden in a cloud of broken stakes and tomato plants, and drove onto the platform in a desperate effort to crash into the train and stop the creature’s escape.
But he was too late. All he could do was lock his knee and try to push his foot and the brake pedal through the floor, as the Branston squealed and slid down the platform, prevented from sliding off the end only by a slow-speed impact with a long and very sturdy line of flowerpots.
Nick stood up and watched the train rattle onto the main line. For a moment, he thought he saw the glow of the creature’s violet eyes looking back at him through the rear window of the carriage. But, he told himself as he put the flower chain around his neck and then jumped out of the badly dented Branston, it was probably just a reflection from the moon.
A sound from the waiting room made Nick jump and draw his dagger, but he sheathed it again straightaway. A man wearing a railway-uniform coat over blue-striped pajamas was standing in the doorway, staring, as Nick had just done, at the departing train.