Leaf took a deep breath and pulled herself out. That took most of her strength, so it was a few seconds before she could crouch and then stand up. She had an idea of where she was, but to check she looked back towards where the hospital ought to be.
It was there all right, but that wasn’t what made Leaf gasp and sit back down as if she’d been punched in the guts.
Looking over the rim of her special glasses, she didn’t just see the white bulk of the hospital’s three towers, all concrete and glass, about a mile-and-a-half away. She could also see another building, hovering in the air directly above the hospital. A vast, crazy building of weird turrets and towers, houses and halls, outbuildings, underbuildings, overbuild-ings, and battlements. One small part of it rested directly on top of the hospital and Leaf could just make out a shining gate that she knew instinctively was the Front Door.
It was the House. Not manifested where Leaf had expected it to be, near Arthur’s home, but above the hospital. She had just managed to escape from the only place where it might have been possible for her to reach the Front Door.
Leaf lowered her head and gripped her hair, ready to pull some of it out. How could she have assumed the House would manifest itself where Arthur said it had before? Clearly it appeared wherever the last Denizen or Nithling to use the Front Door had gotten out – in this case, the hospital.
‘Get off the road, girl! You’ll get shot!’
Leaf jumped at the voice and looked wildly around.
‘Come on, then! Get in here!’
It was a woman talking. An old woman, standing in the doorway of one of the terraces, gesturing at Leaf to come inside.
Leaf groaned, rolled over, pushed herself up with her hands, and walked slowly over to the woman’s door.
‘Hurry up!’ the woman called. She glanced up the street. ‘I can hear something coming.’
Leaf heard it too: the low, ground-vibrating growl of very large vehicles. She quickened her step, getting into the house just as a tank came around the corner at the far end of the street, its left track locked, the right bringing it around. Leaf stared through the window in the door, surprised by how loud the tank was and how much the house around her shook as it passed.
Six more tanks followed the first, all of them fully buttoned up, no one sitting up out of the turret or peering out through open driving hatches. Leaf had never seen real tanks before. These were twice the size of the light armoured vehicles she’d seen the Army and FBA using.
‘What’s your name, then?’
Leaf turned around. The old woman was very old and quite hunched over, but she moved deftly and was very alert.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Leaf. ‘I was distracted. Thanks … thanks for warning me. My name’s Leaf.’
‘And mine is Sylvie,’ said the woman. ‘You’ve been in the wars, haven’t you? You’d best come into the kitchen and I’ll clean up your head.’
‘No, I have to … I have to …’
Leaf’s voice trailed off. She didn’t know what she had to do now. Get back into the hospital? Even with full-on tanks heading there now?
‘A cup of peppermint tea, some cleaning up, and a bandage are what you need,’ said Sylvie firmly. ‘Come on.’
‘What’s going on?’ Leaf asked as she obediently followed Sylvie down the hall and into the kitchen. ‘Those were tanks… ’
‘There’s been some sort of biological attack at the hospital.’ Sylvie got a first-aid kit down from the top of the fridge and reached over to flick on an electric kettle. ‘Though I haven’t really been keeping up with all the developments. They re-established the city quarantine this morning. We can go and watch the television in the lounge room, if you like. Just sit near the window, so I can see what I’m doing with your head.’
‘Thanks,’ said Leaf. ‘I would like to know what’s happening. You said they re-established the city quarantine?’
‘About two hours ago, dear. This way.’
‘But you let me in,’ Leaf pointed out as she followed Sylvie into a small but comfortable living room. There was a screen on the wall. Sylvie clicked her fingers and it came on, the sound too low to hear, but Leaf could read the scrolling type across the bottom. It said RED LEVEL QUAR-ANTINE IMPOSED ON CITY. ARMY AND FBA SEAL OFF EAST AREA HOSPITAL. PSYCHOTROPIC BIOWEAPON BELIEVED TO BE BEHIND FIRST ATTEMPTED BREAKOUT, ANOTHER IMMINENT.
There was a picture of perhaps a dozen people coming out of the hospital doors. They weren’t walking properly, with their legs trailing in weird ways and their arms flailing about. The camera panned away from them to the soldiers and FBA agents, who were shouting and waving their hands and then lowering their weapons, the turrets on their armoured vehicles traversing. Then they started shooting. It took Leaf a moment to realise that she could hear that shooting, the sound coming in distantly from outside, not on the television.
It was live coverage.
‘Yes, I know I shouldn’t have let you in,’ said Sylvie, who wasn’t watching the television. She lifted Leaf’s hair and started swabbing the cut on her head with a stinging disinfectant. ‘But I’m very old, you know, and I didn’t want to see a young girl be shot in front of me. If you do have some nasty disease, I daresay I shall catch it and die quite quickly without causing much trouble to anyone.’
‘I don’t have anything,’ said Leaf quickly. Then she looked at her hands.
Except that’s a lie. I do have something. You can’t catch it from me, though. Only from the Skinless Boy. But soon he’ll know what I know, and I’ll be a puppet. Like those poor people he must have sent out, the ones killed to keep the quarantine.
On the television, two FBA agents with flamethrowers were walking forward now. Leaf looked away as long jets of flame gushed out, towards the people who had just been shot.
‘Keep still,’ admonished Sylvie. ‘More of a bruise than a cut. You probably should have your head scanned. When did you do it?’
‘About an hour ago, I think,’ said Leaf. ‘Maybe two hours. Ow!’
‘I’ve put a little anesthetic gel on,’ said Sylvie. ‘And a skin-seal to keep it clean. You should have that scan, though.’
‘Are you a doctor?’ asked Leaf. ‘Or a nurse?’
‘I’m retired,’ said Sylvie. ‘But I was a pharmacist. Sit there. I’ll get the peppermint tea.’
Leaf looked back at the television. A senior military officer was being interviewed. A general. Behind him, Leaf could see the tanks that had rolled past her. Now they were moving into positions facing the hospital, and other troops were preparing positions between the tanks. Leaf held out her hand, palm up, waited for the television to calibrate on her, then lifted her finger. The volume came up and she could hear what the general was saying.
‘We don’t know what it is. It may be related to enFury, the waterborne psychotrope that caused so much trouble in Europe two years ago. But it’s clearly widespread in the hospital and, as we have just seen, some of the infected are no longer capable of rational thought and are highly dangerous. Our task is to contain this outbreak. We will carry out our task, by whatever means are necessary.’
‘Has there been any further communication from Dr Emily Penhaligon?’ asked the unseen interviewer.
‘Dr Penhaligon and her team are trying to slow the effect of the bioweapon by various means, and are profiling it and computer-modelling agents that will counter it. We are doing what we can with our people and the FBA’s inside the hospital to ensure that the labs and the upper isolation wards remain sealed from the rest of the hospital, where the infection is widespread.’
‘General, is there any information on how the bioweapon was deployed, and by whom?’
‘It’s clearly a terrorist action,’ replied the general. ‘I have no further comment at this stage.’
‘A number of commentators have said that it is most likely to be –’
The sound suddenly went down again. Leaf turned her head to see Sylvie wiggling her fingers. She’d just put down two steaming c
ups.
‘The television noise annoys me so,’ said Sylvie. ‘Drink up your tea, dear. We must have a little talk.’
‘Thanks,’ said Leaf. ‘But I don’t want to –’
‘Oh, I don’t want to know what you were doing climbing out of the underworld,’ said Sylvie. ‘But I think we should call your parents. You do have parents? Well, then we should call them and let them know that you are here and will be sitting out this quarantine with me.’
‘I can’t do that.’ Leaf had just realised what she did have to do. Or rather, had thought of something that might offer a way back to the House. ‘I have to go somewhere.’
‘You can’t go anywhere,’ said Sylvie. ‘Not by foot and not by car, even if I was silly enough to drive you. No civilian traffic of any kind allowed.’
‘I have to get to a house in Denister,’ said Leaf. She told Sylvie the address. ‘As quickly as I can.’
It was Arthur’s home she wanted to go to. The House might be above the hospital and essentially unreachable, but Leaf remembered something else Arthur had told her, long ago in his hospital room. It was only yesterday to everyone else, but Leaf had been months at sea in that time. Even so, she clearly remembered Arthur talking about his phone. A phone in a velvet box that could be used to call Denizens in the House.
‘That’s out of the question,’ said Sylvie, rather severely.
‘It’s incredibly important,’ Leaf insisted.
‘Why?’
Leaf was silent. She couldn’t tell Sylvie the truth. The old woman wouldn’t believe her and it would only make things worse.
I can’t tell her, she thought suddenly. But perhaps I can show her.
‘Do you have a window that looks towards the hospital?’ Leaf asked.
‘Yes, upstairs,’ said Sylvie. ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’
Leaf hesitated for a moment. Sylvie was very old, and a shock might kill her. But Leaf needed the old woman’s help. Arthur was depending on Leaf to get the pocket back to the House so it could be destroyed. Not just Arthur but everyone else too. What if the Skinless Boy kept spreading its mind-control mould everywhere? There might be other things the Nithling could do as well …
‘I want us to go upstairs, then I want you to look at the hospital through these glasses. It’ll be a shock, I warn you. But after you take a look, I’ll tell you everything.’
Sylvie looked cross, but then a smile slowly undid her frown.
‘You are being very mysterious, and I’m sure you’re also wasting my time. But what do I have to waste but time? Come on.’
The window that faced the hospital was in Sylvie’s bedroom, a spare, tidy room with nothing personal about it. The old woman crossed it quickly and pulled back a drape.
‘There’s the hospital,’ said Sylvie. ‘Complete with helicopter gunships, I fear.’
Leaf looked through the window. There were three sharp-nosed helicopter gunships doing slow orbits around the hospital buildings, about six hundred feet up. She pushed the glasses farther up on her nose, then quickly took them off. It made her head hurt to see the helicopters apparently flying into the solid buildings of the House, and then come out again.
‘Please look through these,’ said Leaf. ‘But be prepared.’ ‘I doubt I’ll see anything,’ said Sylvie as she took the glasses. ‘These are cracked!’
‘You will see something and then I’ll explain.’ Leaf frowned as a pain shot through her head again. It was different from the pain she’d experienced before. It felt like there was an odd pressure building up inside her skull. Like a sinus pain but in the wrong places.
The mould! It must have gotten into my head already!
‘I really can’t see a thing,’ said Sylvie. She had the glasses on but was not looking out the window.
‘The window!’ urged Leaf, but she suddenly felt desperate and uncertain.
What if Dr Scamandros’s glasses only worked for her?
Thirteen
LIEUTENANT CORBIE LOWERED his perspective glass and rubbed his right eye. It was sore from looking through the telescope for so long. For a whole afternoon, he and his troop of Borderers had been watching and counting the enemy column as it advanced through the pass below them.
‘Add another five thousand to the tally,’ said Corbie to his sergeant, who was keeping count in his notebook. ‘More of the regular Nithlings, arrayed in units of one thousand.’
‘That’s more than twenty-six thousand today, sir,’ said the sergeant. ‘All on the one tile.’
‘It’s scheduled to go east and north at sundown,’ said Corbie, tapping the Ephemeris in its pouch at his side. ‘Shift a few more of them out of the way.’
‘There must be a million of them in the Maze by now,’ said the sergeant quietly. ‘What happens when every tile is full up with Nithlings? No point moving them around then.’
‘That’s defeatist talk, Sergeant, and I won’t have it,’ snapped Corbie. ‘Anyway, there are still plenty of empty tiles, and the Nithling invasion is being broken up very successfully. Tectonic strategy, as always, is working. And I heard the Second Battalion of the Regiment won another battle yesterday.’
Corbie did not mention the fact that the XIXth Cohort of the Legion had almost lost a battle the day before yesterday. While the Nithling forces were being broken up every sundown when the tiles shifted them away, there were many tiles where there were very large numbers of Nithlings. Sometimes these tiles had to be cleared or retaken because they were scheduled to come close to GHQ or one of the other fixed positions.
It was six weeks since Corbie and his troops had left the Boundary Fort. That was in Nithling hands now. Though Colonel Nage had been killed with his entire garrison, he had managed to hold the switch room for twelve hours, and the gates had been closed. But not before four to five hundred thousand Nithlings had come through. And then, a month later, the gates had somehow been opened again, even though this was supposed to be impossible. Tens of thousands more Nithlings had marched in.
Still, as Corbie had reassured the sergeant, the time-honoured tectonic strategy was working. With the tiles moving every sundown and the enemy unable to concentrate its forces, the Army was able to battle the Nithlings piecemeal, winning most of its direct confrontations.
Not that this was enough for Sir Thursday, Corbie had heard. Never even-tempered at the best of times, Sir Thursday was supposed to have become angrier than usual.
Apparently he had even lost his temper with Marshal Dawn and had seriously injured her, after Dawn had questioned some aspect of the Army’s response to this unprecedented invasion and the wisdom of changing the campaign in the first place, so radically and so late.
Corbie reflected that Dawn had been right, of course. It was very strange that the plan had been changed only hours before it commenced. Major Pravuil had been an odd messenger too. He hadn’t seemed quite right to Corbie, like he held some kind of special commission and wasn’t a regular officer at all. It all stank of politics and interference from higher up.
Corbie hated politics.
‘More movement near the tile border,’ called one of the Borderers. ‘And I reckon we’ve been spotted. There’s an officer … superior Nithling, or whatever we’re supposed to call it … directing a squad our way.’
Corbie peered down from the hill. He and his fellow Borderers were concealed among the tumbled rocks at the top, but some movement might have given them away. Or the reflection from his own perspective glass.
Instinctively he looked to the sun. It was near the horizon, making its rickety way down, but there was still half an hour at least till sundown. The tile border, visible to his trained eye as a slightly different tone of colour in the earth, was a hundred yards below them. If the Nithlings did attack, they’d have to make it past that border before dusk, when the tiles moved. Which was possible, Corbie estimated.
He wasn’t that troubled, though. His forces were in the corner of their current tile, and a quick sprint in any one o
f two directions would get them on tiles that were moving to fairly safe areas.
‘Something strange about that column,’ muttered the sergeant. ‘Looks like they’re transporting something. They’ve got a whole chain of Not-Horses.’
Corbie raised his perspective glass. Not-Horses were valuable livestock, creatures that had been copied from Earth horses and then half-bred and half-manufactured in the Pit by Grim Tuesday. Since Grim Tuesday’s fall, there had been no new supplies of Not-Horses, much to the annoyance of the Moderately Honourable Artillery Company and the Horde.
But down below, the Nithlings had more than two hundred Not-Horses harnessed up to a giant twenty-wheeled wagon that was at least sixty feet long. On the wagon was … Corbie lowered his glass, rubbed his eye again, and took another look.
‘What is it?’ asked the sergeant.
‘It looks like a giant spike,’ said Corbie. ‘A sixty-foot-long spike made out of something very strange. It’s dark, and it doesn’t reflect light at all. It must be some kind of –’
‘Nothing?’
‘Yes, I think so. Sorcerously fixed Nothing. But why transport it into the Maze? What would be the point, since they’re never going to know where it will end up –’
Corbie stopped talking, put the telescope on a rock, and quickly opened his Ephemeris, flicking through the pages till he found the appropriate table, cross-indexing the day with the tile the Nithling Not-Horse train was on.
‘That tile moves right to the centre of the Maze tonight,’ said Corbie. ‘Grid five hundred/five hundred.’
‘There’s nothing special there,’ commented the sergeant.
‘Not that we know of. But I’ve heard mention of a famous problem they set at Staff College called ‘The Five Hundred/Five Hundred’ … the Nithlings must know where that tile is going. And they must have known where all the other tiles have been going, to get that thing this far.’