More bombs landed and suddenly the whole universe seemed to Jan to be filled with nothing but noise and blinding lights. She was knocked off her feet by a shock wave. It felt like being hit with a huge, invisible pillow. She lay stunned, on her back, for an indeterminable amount of time before she was able to roll over on to her hands and knees and crawl to the parapet at the front of the roof. Her eyes swam with tears at the sight that greeted her.
Minerva was being murdered. Fires were raging in every part of the town and still the bombs kept falling. She saw a great ball of fire rise up on the other side of town and knew that the alcohol plant had been hit. “Alsa …” she whispered to herself. The square was a mass of craters. Where the dais had been was just a pile of blackened, smoking timber. She had to get down there; she had to find her mother.
“You bloody cowards!” someone shouted behind her. She turned and saw Lisa, the wall guard, standing and brandishing her sword at the dark bulk of the Sky Lord overhead. “Come down, you male bastards! Come down and fight us like women!” Because of what happened next that image—of the muscular, golden-haired warrior making her brave but futile gestures at the monster above them—was imprinted in Jan’s mind. …
She actually saw the bomb hit the roof. It was just a dark blur of movement and then a hole appeared magically in the roof behind Lisa. The bomb didn’t detonate immediately. It must have passed all the way through the tavern until it hit the stone floor of the basement and exploded. Jan saw the rear section of the roof leap into the air then vanish. Lisa vanished too. Then Jan began to fall as her section of the roof collapsed beneath her. As she fell she heard Martha shrieking with terror. She never saw the chimp again, or any of the others who had been with her on the roof.
Her fall was broken by something soft. It was a bed. One of the tavern’s famous large and cosy ones. It might even have been the same one that Alsa and she would have had for their rendezvous that evening—if the day had turned out as Jan hoped it would. Later, when Milo, during one of his many discourses on bizarre topics, told Jan of the concept of alternative universes she often thought afterwards that somewhere, in one of these near-identical worlds, she and Alsa did keep their romantic rendezvous that evening.
She didn’t stay on the bed for very long because it started to tilt as the floor began to give way. She jumped from it and clung to a window ledge. Looking over her shoulder she saw that the whole rear of the tavern no longer existed. It was as if a great blade had come down and cut the building in half.
The bed picked up speed, slid to the edge of the sagging floor and disappeared. She heard it crash into the basement. She looked up and saw she had fallen two floors from the roof. Rubble was continuing to fall through the gaping hole overhead. She had to get out.
She climbed on to the window sill and looked down. The roof of the veranda that extended along the front of the tavern was only feet below her. She lowered herself on to it, then swung down from the guttering until she was standing on the veranda balcony and then jumped the rest of the way. And was immediately knocked over again by the concussion wave of an exploding bomb. She lay at the foot of the veranda, her face pressed into the dirt and hands clamped to her ringing ears, until the bombs ceased to fall. Only when she was certain that the bombing had really stopped did she rise and head across the ruined square to search for her mother. It was here that she encountered the dazed and stumbling Helen.
She never found Melissa’s body. Or if she did she failed to recognize it. There were parts of bodies scattered about but she didn’t have the stomach to examine these too closely. She did, however, find the corpse of Headwoman Avedon. Her face was badly burnt but the fungus on the side of her head was still plainly visible. Better to die this way, Jan reflected, than suffer a slow, painful death from the fungus. At least one of us has got something good from this foul day.
The square was filling up now. People who had nowhere else to go to escape the flames of the burning town. Jan saw Headwoman Anna in the distance and, relieved to see someone she knew well, even if it was her mother’s chief rival, hurried over to her. “Anna!” she called as she ran, not caring about formalities in such grim circumstances.
Anna turned as she heard her name being called. She frowned when she saw it was Jan. As Jan drew close to Anna she was astonished to see the Headwoman draw her sword and rush towards her, intention plain. “Filth!” cried Anna. “Spawn of the mother-devil who has murdered us all. Your mother may be dead but at least I will have the satisfaction of spitting you…!”
Filled with dismay, Jan retreated and drew her own sword just in time to parry Anna’s first vicious swing at her head. “Anna, don’t! I don’t want to fight you!” Jan pleaded but she could see it was no use. Anna’s eyes were wild and frightening. There was no way that Jan could reach her. She parried another blow—so strong it jarred her whole arm—and continued to retreat. She realized she stood a very good chance of being killed by Anna. Her hysterical rage was providing her with unnatural strength.
“They’re dropping more bombs!” screamed someone nearby. This and cries of alarm from other people were enough to make Anna cease her attack and look up. Jan felt momentarily safe to do likewise. The Sky Lord was moving, and as it moved it issued out a cloud of small black objects into the air, like a female frog squirting eggs into the water of a pond. At first Jan thought too that these were more bombs but then she saw strange shapes blossom out above each object which had the effect of slowing down their rate of fall.
And as the objects drew closer to the ground Jan saw that they were Sky Warriors. Hundreds of them.
It had been Jan’s hope that many of the descending Sky Warriors would land in the fires started by the Sky Lord’s bomb and burn to death but they were obviously very skilled at manipulating the black canopies of cloth that billowed out above them. None of the Sky Warriors landed within the town itself but around it, in the space between the edge of the town and the wall. Then they had begun to move in on foot from all sides at once.
“Here they come again!”
A solid wall of black armour was rushing up the wide avenue towards the hospital wall. Jan knew it was hopeless but she still felt no fear. Her only emotion was an unfocused hope that it would all be over soon and that her death would be quick. She aimed her cross-bow again and waited. The black tide advanced. She fired, saw her target fall along with many others but this time the Sky Warriors kept coming. Some were firing their long rifles as they ran. Jan could hear the fizzing noises the bullets made as they hurtled through the air. One of them seemed to pass by her head very closely. There was not going to be enough time to reload the cross-bow so she dropped it and drew her sword and her hatchet, backing away from the wall as she did so. The others were doing the same. The woman on Jan’s right suddenly grunted and fell backwards. Jan could only spare her a quick glance. There was a neat, round hole in her forehead. Jan envied her the quickness of her death.
The Sky Warriors were coming over the wall. It was the closest Jan had ever been to them before. She could even see their eyes behind the narrow slits of their shiny black face masks. They were yelling very loudly as they came. Jan, her hatchet in her left hand and her sword in her right, went to meet them.
Chapter Five
A weight was lifted from her lower body. Then a boot, planted against her left side, rocked her back and forth. She groaned and tried to open her eyes but the lids were crusted shut. The throbbing in her head was more than she could bear and she was terribly thirsty.