"I should damn well hope so!"
"Well, you'd better hope it doesn't happen before you get on that train or the constables will hold everyone here and start checking identification." Her voice was tight with desperation. "You'll wind up in the Penumbra Fieldshire jail and sometime before Tansy's solicitor gets here you'll decide to hang yourself in your cell."
"I'll what… ? But I wouldn't…" He suddenly realized what she was saying. His heart was thumping away like a methedrined woodpecker. "How could that happen?"
"Whoever hired these fellas isn't joking around, Theo. There aren't but a dozen or so Cathedral knives in the whole of the land — they're made of spell-hallowed glass from the ruins on the Old Mound itself. They don't get handed out to every Tom, Dick, and Hobthrush, y'know — those fellas are working for someone important."
"What do I do now? Oh, shit, poor Rufinus — he was an idiot, but I can't believe he's dead!" Theo wiped sweat off his face. The only idea he could come up with was to run screaming across the station, but it didn't seem like a good one. "How will I get to the city without him? I don't even know what it's called!"
To his amazement, Applecore burst into shrill, near-hysterical laughter. "By the Trees, fella, you really do take it all. What's it called? The City, man, the City! There's only one! It's like saying you don't know which 'up' someone's talking about." The sprite fell silent. She seemed to be oscillating between terror and a kind of fast-thinking omnicompetence. After a long moment of close-eyed concentration, she said, "I suppose I'm going with you, then, amn't I?"
"Oh, Jesus, can you really? Will you?"
"Stop saying that blasted name — you made that lady over there shiver and she didn't even hear you. No more talking." She shot off for a moment, then returned. "Those three fellas are still poking around down by the tea shop. Step out from behind here and just start walking toward Track Twelve. See if you can find some other people going that direction. Whatever you do, don't look around!"
Rufinus' body had begun to sag and now stared down at the floor with glassy eyes, as though it had lost something and was looking for it there. A little fairy woman with a rolling basket full of parcels had seated herself at the other end of the bench from the corpse. At the moment she was oblivious to her companion's condition, but how long could that last?
"Let's go, then," Theo said. "I might as well have my heart attack walking as standing."
The sea of unfamiliar fairy faces which at first had seemed fascinating, and for the last half hour had mostly gone unnoticed, now swirled past him like a nightmare. At any moment he expected someone to point at him and shout, "Impostor!"
Most difficult of all was the feeling — no, the certainty — that something with a clammy white face was moving up behind him, reaching out a hand for the back of his neck…
"Don't you dare turn around," said Applecore.
As he fell in with a group of people his own size moving down the platform of Track Twelve, heading for the first-class section, something came to him like a splash of cold water.
"Oh, my God, Tansy's cousin must have the tickets!"
"No, he doesn't. I took 'em off him an hour ago and stuck 'em in your coat because I didn't trust the poor daft lad not to lose 'em."
"And I didn't notice?"
She snorted. "I could have shoved the Parliament building into your pocket and you wouldn't have noticed. You were lookin' at girls. Now turn here — get on!"
He stepped up into the third-class compartment. Inside it was a zoo, almost literally, as creatures of all shapes and sizes struggled for a place to sit down. Applecore whispered that it would be just as well not to get wedged in, so they moved to the far end of the car and stood near the door, among a group of other human-sized but apparently lower-class fairies who eyed Theo's clothes and quickly turned away. He wondered what that meant.
"Why won't this stupid train leave?" he whispered to Applecore. He could feel the trio of hollow-men out there as though they were fins circling his leaking boat. He wanted to run down to the engine and take the driver by the neck and bang his head until he throttled up and pulled out of the station.
As if the distant engineer could feel this potential threat to his well-being, the steam whistle let out a great pteranodon shriek.
"Thank God," Theo gasped. An instant later two corpse-faced, black-clad shapes hustled past the windows of their railway carriage. For a moment he thought the hollow-men would come into his car and his stuttering heart would stop completely, but instead they shoved onward through the crowd on the platform, heading toward the first-class cars. A few moments later the train began to ease its way out of the station.
"Did they get on?" Theo asked Applecore. "Or did we leave without them?"
She shrugged, but she did not look either happy or confident.
It rode the planar winds like an invisible kite, a shapeless presence stretched wide, wide, every bit of it alive and alert to the thing it sought. It was close now — even in the midst of all the similar creatures surrounding its quarry, the irrha sensed its target as easily as an owl might spot a single small motion of warm life in the midst of a forest of undergrowth.
Following that target had not been easy this time: the journey between the two planes was more difficult than the irrha had, in its unthinking way, anticipated — rougher and more strenuous. Things had changed during the slow millennia it had sleepwalked in the dark between-places. If a tireless thing could be weary, it was. If a thing without emotions could be frustrated, it was that, too. To be so close to its goal — to touch the quarry, nearly — but not to close and seize and complete its burning directive, had filled the irrha with a sensation it had not experienced in so long that it did not remember what it was. But one thing the hunter did know: it did not like the sensation at all.
Closer, closer… there. It had located its target precisely. All that remained was to cross that last fragile membrane and become embodied, to take form by joining with something that could move through this plane before the quarry slipped away again. It had chosen badly in the last place, first wearying itself dispelling the body's living inhabitant, then finding that the fleshy envelope was so damaged that it had been forced to spend valuable time supplementing the damaged parts with bits of other bleating, warm meat-things. The quarry was so close here, actually within reach — the hunter could not afford to be slowed again by such resistance or such incompleteness.
It swooped, spun, fell closer. So much life here, so confusing for senses honed in the chasms of the deepest, most lightless and warmthless dimensional oceans! But the irrha was determination itself. It found what it was looking for and moved to take possession, bursting out into a jittering, exploding worldsphere of light and color and sound.
Cornelia Yarrow surveyed her purchases — a flying toy powered by a simple but long-lasting charm, a goblin doll in traditional dress of feathers, beads, and dragonwing cloak, not to mention a selection of sports pennants with the insignia of leading houses and butterfly-patterned scarves that friends had assured her were being worn by all the fashionable ladies and gentlemen in the city, as well as dozens of other trinkets. She thought she had spent a little more than she should have on a few of them, but the main thing was that she still had half an hour until her train back home to Willow and she had finished buying gifts for everyone on her list, her niece and all the many grand-nieces and grandnephews. Out in their little forest village, her relatives considered Penumbra Fields to be almost as big as the City itself: they would have been terribly disappointed if Aunt Cornelia had not brought back gifts from her trip to the Honeysuckle Academy for Girls' tricentennial reunion.