Then she saw Aubrey and she froze. She pointed at him. Bloody Brow turned and gaped, letting his fists fall to his side. Manfred didn’t move.
‘That’s him, Guttmann, he’s your competitor,’ the woman said, and Aubrey saw that it was Madame Zelinka, his mysterious contact from the lounge car. She didn’t have a veil this time and her exotic beauty was on full display.
Manfred stared, and appeared as astonished as Aubrey. ‘You?’ He looked over his shoulder at her. ‘That’s him?’
In two steps, Bloody Brow crossed the compartment and seized Aubrey by the shoulders. He smiled, and the effect was disturbing. As well as the rivulets of blood coursing down his face, Bloody Brow had very bad teeth.
‘Well,’ Aubrey said. ‘It looks like you have this all under control. I’ll just be going.’
‘I don’t sink zo,’ Bloody Brow said. He yanked at Aubrey and stuck out a foot. Aubrey tripped and stumbled into the compartment. Before he knew it, Manfred had grabbed him and pulled him closer. He squinted, staring at Aubrey, studying his face as if he had writing on it that was small and hard to read. Then a gust of cold air whipped over his shoulder and he smiled.
Aubrey saw that the outer door had been flung open. He flailed, but all he managed to grab was a feather from Madame Zelinka’s hat. Then, suddenly and awfully, Manfred heaved and Aubrey was sailing through the air.
He had time to see that the train was crossing a steel bridge before he began the long arc to whatever lay below.
Sixteen
Aubrey was falling. He was relatively happy about this state of affairs; it meant that he hadn’t yet reached the sudden stop at the bottom.
Wind tore at him. A yell was wrenched from his throat as he flailed uselessly. Every fibre of his being wanted him to be perched cosily on solid ground instead of falling free and heading toward certain death.
It made rational thought difficult, but in the middle of his terror, his attention was taken by what he had in his left hand.
An ostrich feather. Long, black, flapping wildly, it was indisputably an ostrich feather. Dimly he remembered snatching for something solid as he was hurled from the compartment. He saw his hand seizing the most flimsy handhold imaginable – the feather in the hat of Madame Zelinka.
Suddenly, a spell wrote itself across his mind in blazing letters a dozen feet high. Like to like, the Law of Sympathy, the ostrich feather. He barked out syllables that were torn from his throat by the wind. He finished, sought desperately for any sign of taking on featherlike floating, then he hit the ground.
That’s a good sign, Aubrey thought groggily as he lay on his back and gazed at the branches overhead. I can open my eyes.
He groaned. He felt as if a herd of elephants wearing concrete boots had wandered over him on the way to a meeting, then come back to look at the lumpy patch they’d stumbled over. He closed his eyes and waited while the thundering in his head abated. In the painful interim, he scrabbled at the ground and his hands came back full of pine needles. He stared at them numbly. They must have helped cushion his fall. Then he felt the rocks under the pine needles and he decided that his hasty feather spell must have worked.
Slowly, with every movement revealing a new bruise – but nothing more serious – he sat up. A few deep breaths and he felt rash enough to attempt to stand. When he did, he swayed on rubbery legs, glad he could feel anything at all. He checked, and the Beccaria Cage was still around his neck, and it was undamaged.
He heard the sound of water nearby. Limping and shuffling like a crab, he winced his way to the edge of a stream, silver in the moonlight. He stood watching the ripples for a moment, then he looked up at the dark sky. He stared for a moment, then all the strength went from his knees and he sat, heavily, on the soft, muddy bank.
Some time later, he realised that the stream lay at the bottom of a gorge. The railway bridge stretched across it. It was high above the tallest trees and Aubrey’s head spun as he tried to work out how far he’d fallen. Two hundred feet? More?
He looked back to where he’d landed, half-expecting to find an Aubrey-shaped outline imprinted in the ground. Then he crawled over and searched the area until he found the ostrich feather. He held it up and laughed. Just a little. It hurt too much otherwise.
After tucking the feather inside his jacket, he trudged to the stream again and washed his face. The water was icy cold and took his breath away. He drank a sip or two, not because he was thirsty, but for something to do while he thought.
His body must have taken on just a little of a feather’s lightness before he struck the ground. He still had momentum, but that last instant transformation may have saved his life.
Giddy with relief, he stood and pushed back his hair. He was alive, and that at least gave him a chance to try to work out what had happened. The mysterious Madame Zelinka had obviously been having a disagreement with Manfred and another equally mysterious man. A deal gone wrong? An old grudge? Three people – who was allied with whom? Or was it a triangle of mistrust, each of the other two?
And why was Manfred here? He’d disappeared after betraying Count Brandt and his people, but Aubrey doubted that he’d gone to an idle retirement. A Holmland spy like him could be involved in a hundred different plots.
Aubrey had admired Manfred’s stage skills, and had been assured of his loyalty to the exiled Holmlanders’ cause during the Brandt episode. When the truth of Manfred’s treachery became known Aubrey had been outraged. The notion of that sort of betrayal offended him in a deep and affecting way. It wasn’t just the loss of life, it was the baseness of the act, the calculated, cold-hearted ability to doom others for personal gain.
It made his head hurt all over again. All that was clear was that the instant Aubrey arrived, at least two of the people in that compartment had suddenly decided he was more important than their disagreement. United against him, they pitched him out of his train.
To his death.
He shuddered, then took a deep breath. George would miss him soon, and his mother would too. Eventually. It wasn’t that she didn’t care for him, he added to himself. It was simply that when she was busy, little things like food and missing offspring tended to slip by her.
George would realise something was wrong, but Aubrey could imagine it taking some time before he could convince the authorities on the train of this. Then there would have to be a search of the train. And after that? How far away would the train be by then? Could George, and his mother, make it stop?
He shook his head. He was on his own in the shadowy wilderness. He had to do his best to get to civilisation. The border crossing was only a few hours away. If he could get word to an Albion consul by telegraph, then all would be well.
Now. Which way to the nearest telegraph station?
A breeze made its way down the course of the stream. The trees lining the banks sighed; the sound spread across the night like a chorus of disapproving librarians. The landscape was alive with motion – shadowy, half-glimpsed movements as branches swayed, leaves bent and dipped. Aubrey could hear nothing artificial, not a sign of humanity. No machinery, no voices, no music. He may as well have been the only person on the face of the planet.
He rubbed his hands together. Twenty or thirty of his bruises demanded his attention but he ignored them and studied the water. Right, he thought. If I follow it downstream, it’s bound to reach a bigger stream. If I follow that, I’ll come to a river. And so on.