“I can’t take all of them.”
“Aren’t they your kin?” Mercy asked. The demon bared her teeth.
“No kin of mine.”
They fled up into the mountain wall. Once, Mercy glanced back and saw the storm demons falling on the disir. The shamans were plucked from their mounts and carried kicking into the sky. Mercy saw a demon drop one of them onto the rocks, splitting armour and carapace as a thrush beats a snail against a stone. Then another demon whisked down out of the heavens. They cowered down between the rocks, Shadow’s veil billowing out across their heads. Mercy felt rather than saw it rip; it felt as though something had scratched her own soul. She heard Shadow cry out in pain and understood at last what the veil was: part of Shadow herself, a visible part of her spirit. Mercy whispered an incantation, flung it upwards at the writhing white form. Grooves of bloody fire appeared on the thing’s flank, but although the demon shrieked it did not fall. But then, as if something had summoned it back, it wheeled away and flew towards the river.
They hurried on through the rocks, emerging onto another plateau of snow. This was much wider, with the black rock wall rearing jagged at its further side. To Mercy, the monochrome landscape was a nightmare fairy tale. What had Nerren said, the day the monorail blew up? White as snow, black as night. Red as blood. There was no blood there now, at least, not yet.
She looked back. The disir army was a struggling mass at the river’s edge, with the storm a locust cloud above it. When the demons had finished with the disir, they would come after straggling prey. The only reason, Mercy knew, that they had not yet been devoured had been accident, and that only a couple of demons could be bothered. That situation would not last. She shouted to Shadow, “We’ve got to get across the snowline now. In a minute it will be too late.”
But in this she was wrong.
Fifty-One
Deed had just returned to the cabin when the windscreen shattered. There was a heavy thump on top of the airship, and a moment later the glass imploded as a stinging whip-like tail burst through it. The pilot, impaled, did not have time to cry out as he died. Deed ducked as the demon withdrew its tail, then sent it back inward for another lashing thrust. He was unable to reach the controls: the tail filled the cockpit. The airship’s engine began to emit a high mosquito scream. Its nose veered sharply downwards. Deed would have slithered uncontrollably towards the shattered windscreen had he not grabbed onto one of the wall stanchions. Didn’t matter, though, did it? Deed thought. He was going to die anyway, because the airship was going to crash. He hurled an incantation at the demon, blasting it away from the stricken ship, but by now the engine was making a noise like a tortured tomcat and the ship was corkscrewing down towards the river. He could see the ice-flecked water spinning up in a series of loops and coils as the ship plummeted down.
He was not conscious, for once, of changing. It happened fast: bones jutting out from his skin, his vision altering, teeth extending. The hand that gripped the stanchion now had long iron-coloured talons and the bones stood out like knives. Deed snarled as the ship skimmed over the surface of the river, the breath of ice blasting cold through the shattered glass, and ploughed into the bank.
Fifty-Two
Mercy ran, slogging through the deep snowfield. It had an icy crust like a loaf of bread, but her feet were plunging into the depths beneath and the Duke finally had to help both Mercy and Shadow, seizing their hands and dragging them along. From above, Mercy thought, they must look like three children, little dark figures toiling over the snow. It was with a terrible sense of despair, but no surprise, when the demon swooped down out of the sky, a hawk hunting. Gremory’s hard hand was torn from Mercy’s grasp and she was whisked up into the storm as easily as a captured dove.
“Gremory!” Shadow cried, in a voice of startling loss. Mercy, futilely, brandished the sword, but the Duke was gone. A dove, Mercy thought. Aloud she cried, “Mareritt! Mareritt! Mareritt!”
A silver bolt flew out of the shadows of the mountain wall. It shot over her head and buried itself in the storm demon’s throat. Blood pattered down, burning Mercy’s skin; Shadow threw the torn veil over them both. The storm demon dropped Gremory. She fell, twisting elegantly through the air, and landed in the snow. Mercy heard a hissing sound that was unknown and yet oddly familiar: she turned to see Mareritt’s sleigh gliding swiftly over the snowfield.
“Well, get in.”
Mercy did not need asking twice. Shadow pushed her over the side of the sleigh, into the mass of heads, then followed. Gremory crouched on the sleigh’s side, knees drawn up; she appeared unharmed. The heads gaped, astonished.
“What is happening?” the Brass-bound head asked in a voice like a bell.
“Hush,” Silver-Bound said. “You ask such foolish questions.”
“It is the time,” Golden-Bound remarked. The others looked at him, their eyes rolling in their sockets.
“You never make any sense,” Brass-Bound complained.
The Bronze-bound head appeared to be sleeping, but Iron-Bound, the one who must have been a warrior, laughed, silently showing its bloodstained teeth. Its eyes, black and small, met Mercy’s for a moment: they exchanged a glance of complicit enjoyment.
Over her shoulder, Mareritt said, “Well done.”
“I found your book,” Mercy said.
“Excellent.”
“I’m just not sure that there’s still a city to read it in.”
“We’ll have to see, won’t we?” Mareritt said. She cracked the whip in a shower of silver bells and the sledge sped on towards the mountain wall.
Mercy did not wish to backseat drive, but she did want to know what the plan was. And even if there was one. She crawled to the front of the sleigh, behind the driving seat.
“Careful,” Bronze-Bound said, without opening its eyes.
“Sorry.” Cautiously, for the sleigh was travelling fast, she stood and found herself looking past Mareritt’s white-clad arm, all lace and frost, and over the silvery rumps of the running deer. “Where are we heading? For the gap?”
“Oh, no, dear.” Mareritt turned her head and grinned a feral grin. “I can’t take this through something that narrow-a person, perhaps, but not this sleigh. We came the long way round when I heard your call, along the Dead Road. I’m not going back that way. I don’t think you’d survive it.”
Mercy was aware of a cold lump of dread, lodged beneath her breastbone. “Then which way are we going?”
Mareritt pointed with the whip, to the lick of fiery cloud that was the newly opened Pass. “We’ll be going through there.”
Deed lay, face down, in snow. It was cold enough to have killed a human by now. He raised himself up on taloned hands. The airship rested several yards away. It was burning. A hard blue flame flickered throughout its exposed bowels and occasionally something shorted out with a hiss. He saw a small spirit, released from the mechanism, darting out across the snow, beak gaping, before it faded and vanished.