They began to wade through the crowd, Jack Sprat tangle-fingered and five meters tall, his wife humping along beside him like a massive jellyfish, killing as they went. The refugees, trapped between the wall of fog and the pit and unable to scatter, trampled each other in mindless terror. Bodies and pieces of bodies flew through the air. The screams rose to an unbroken chorus of wailing.
Forced backward by the crush Paul could only clutch Martine and struggle to keep her sagging form upright. Light strobed and flashed from the pit behind them as though some kind of terrible conflagration was building, but Paul was hemmed so tightly now he could not look around, could barely breathe.
"Give us the princess!" Jack Sprat had something in his twiggy fingers that might once have been a living being. He was using it as a club. "Bring her to us!"
They were only meters away from Paul and the others now. The light leaped and burned on them, making them even more grotesque.
"Stop!" The voice was thin, but it cut through the chaos like a razor. "Stop!" it cried again. "You are hurting them—killing them!"
The huge, deformed shapes paused, eyeless and rapt, facing out toward the pit.
"Our princess." Jack Sprat's wife almost groaned it, a ravening hunger finally introduced to the ultimate feast. "Princess!"
The shrieks of the wounded and dying still drifted to the skies, but even the refugees had slowed and stopped as if under compulsion, turning from their murderers to stare out at the pit.
She hung above the agitated sea of light with her arms spread wide, hung on some invisible cross of misery, flickering in and out of existence like an image on ancient celluloid film. It had been so long since he had seen her that Paul had forgotten the beauty of her presence, the great light that could shine through even this corrupted incarnation.
"Ava." His voice was choked, no more than a murmur. "Avialle."
She did not see him, or did not care that he was there. In the sudden stillness she flickered and grew even more insubstantial, her ghostly face full of pain and horror.
"Let . . . them be. She was beginning to smear like dirt on a rain-spattered window. "You . . . are . . . hurting us. . . ."
"We eat you, princess bellowed Jack Sprat's monstrous wife. "Come home!" The Twins began to shuffle toward the edge of the pit, sweeping bodies from their path or crushing them into the dead gray earth.
She moaned, a sound that swept across the shore, then brought her arms together in front of her face in helpless resignation.
"Avialle! Avialle!"
It was not Paul's voice this time. A man was shoving his way through the press of refugees toward the hovering apparition. It was Felix Jongleur.
"Avialle!" the bald man screamed, and this time Paul could hear the rage beneath the desperation. Jongleur's face, pale and full of crazed intensity, seemed to grow so bright that Paul could see nothing else, not even the shimmering angel shape that had haunted him for so long. "Come to me! Avialle!"
His words echoed in Paul's head, growing instead of diminishing, until all he could hear was her name sounding over and over, tumbling through his brain like a bullet, smashing his mind into fragments so that the blackness beneath came up and swallowed him whole.
Oh Ho!" someone said.
Ava shrieked and threw herself backward out of Paul's arms. He turned to see the grinning, misshapen face of Mudd peering through the trees.
"Naughty, naughty," said the fat man. "What have we here?" But despite the mockery, Mudd seemed a little uncertain, as though he too had been caught by surprise.
"Leave us alone!" cried Ava.
"Oh, I don't think so." Mudd shook his large head. "I think Mr. Jonas has overstepped his privileges." He gave Paul a look of gleeful malice. "I think some punishment is in order." Now he turned his leer on Ava. "For both of you, perhaps."
"No!" Ava leaped to her feet but stumbled, tangled in her long nightgown. Mudd stretched out a heavy hand to seize her, or perhaps just to steady her. Seeing that great paw reach toward her, Paul snatched up the first heavy thing he could find, a rock the size of a fist, and flung it into Mudd's face. The big man bellowed in pain and fell backward, when his hands came away from his forehead they were covered in blood.
"I'll kill you, you little shit," he rasped. "I'll pull your bones out!" Paul yanked Ava to her feet and ran. Behind him, Mudd was talking to someone, talking to the air. "Attention! Security to Conservatory Level. Now!"
Branches slapped Paul's face as he pushed Ava before him, running blindly through the tangle of trees. Where could they go? This was not a true forest, it was a park on top of a skyscraper. Security would be coming up in the elevators. There was no way down.
He slowed to a walk. "This is pointless, Ava. We can't escape, and you might be hurt." And they're going to hurt me no matter what, he thought but did not say. "Is there some way you can contact your father directly?"
"I don't know! I only speak to him when he . . . calls me." Her eyes were wide, feverish, as though she were the one who had drunk too much. Paul felt himself growing cold and distant, everything happening at a great distance. "I can't let them hurt you," she said, tears welling up. "I love you, Paul."
"It was all foolish," he said. "We should never have let it happen. I'll give up."
"No!"
"Yes." They had him and they could do what they wanted to him. He had a sudden thought, an unlikely glimmer of hope. "Can you talk to your helper—the one you call the ghost? Can you contact him now?" It was perhaps the only insurance he could provide against simply being swatted and disposed of like a troublesome insect. If the intruder could enter the communication lines, perhaps it could contact his friend Niles Peneddyn. At the very least he could construct a message for Niles, tell him something of what was happening. It would make it much harder for Jongleur's men to make him disappear—perhaps he could even use it as a bargaining chip. "Can you contact him?" he asked Ava again.
"I . . . I don't know." She stopped and closed her eyes. "Help me! My friend! I need you now!"
In the silence that followed Paul could hear the sounds of pursuit—not just Mudd's voice now but several others too, shouting back and forth through the trees—along with the alarmed shrieks and whistles of birds. The first security team must have arrived, he decided, and were even now fanning out through the artificial forest behind him.
"He's . . . he's not answering me," Ava said miserably. "Sometimes he doesn't come right away. . . ."
Now I know why they wanted to hire someone like me, who didn't have one of those implanted jacks, Paul thought bitterly. I thought it was because it looked too modem, but they just didn't want anyone who could communicate freely with the outside world.
"Where is he?" The sharp, high-pitched voice echoing through the trees was Finney's. Jongleur's dogs were all out now, in full cry. Paul considered sitting down and waiting for the inevitable.
"Help me!" Ava cried to the air.
"Forget it." He felt little more than anger now—anger at himself, at this foolish, deluded girl, even at Niles and his upper-class contacts. "It's over."
"No." Ava pulled her arm from beneath his hand and dashed away into the trees. "We'll go beyond the forest—there has to be a way out!"