The Assassin Princess (Lamb & Castle Book 2) (8 page)

With a cry of dismay, Amelia rushed to the edge, almost sliding right off as well. The fierce wind pulled at her cloak as she clung to what remained of the ruined railings, and looked down into the grey abyss. The white griffin had broken free of the wyvern's grasp, and – seeing that it had met its match – fled from the City, soon lost in the mist. The wyvern pursued, intent on revenge, and Amelia had no way of going after it, not unless she could sprout wings. “No! Come back!” she shouted after it in vain, as white feathers swirled around her.

Footsteps rang on the stone steps: she'd forgotten all about the man in the streets below. Now he stood there, sword in hand, a familiar figure in a blue uniform. He stared at the white lamb on Amelia's breastplate, and grinned horribly as he recognised the White Queen. She willed herself invisible, taking a small measure of amusement from his surprise at her disappearance, and then she glanced up and down the walkway. No place to hide
there
, but the stairway leading down was as wide as the street. If she could hold her concentration long enough then she could sneak right past him and be well away, into the maze of back streets and alleyways. Her head was thundering, her heart still leaping since her near miss on the edge of the viewing platform. Barely breathing, she tiptoed down a couple of steps, and was pleased to see that he was still scanning the length of the promenade for any sign of her. She edged past him, close to the wall, moving slowly and carefully so that she might not be betrayed by the slightest jingle of a bracelet.
She was a ghost, a thought on the breeze, less than a shadow…
She was past him, and broke into a run, splashing through the puddles.

“Oi!” he shouted, running after her, but she ducked into a side street and into the empty doorway of an abandoned shop. Stealthily she climbed the stairs and, still concentrating hard on being invisible, she peered past the jagged edges of a grime-coated broken window, looking down into the street.

The guardsman stood there, casting about for the vanished girl, looking increasingly panicked to have lost such apparently easy prey. He pulled out something like a silver pocket watch and flipped it open. “All right, lads: looks like we've lost the Black Queen's ship for the time being, but the White Queen's in the City now.” He paused. “No. No I don't want to disturb His Highness before we have the girls, not this time. Find them and bring them to me.” He paused, sharp eyes darting from doorway to doorway, alleyway to alleyway. “Yes, I'm sure His Highness will be
very
interested to see her
again. And I wouldn't want to be in her shoes then.”

Awaiting the return of the tame wyvern, Meg and the others had taken shelter in a rough cave: a wide split in the hillside, overhung with dying, dripping bracken, and only slightly less damp than the drizzling open air. Suspecting that the wyvern had somehow been delayed, but ignorant of the full extent of her daughter's trouble in Ilgrevnia, Meg sat and mulled over how else she might re-join Amelia. Harold stood at the mouth of the cave, whistling loudly for the wyvern until he was alarmingly red in the face.

“Stop that noise!” Meg snapped. “We've a perfectly good hidey hole here for the time being, and who knows what you'll bring running if you carry on like that.”

“But what about Amelia?” Harold protested. “She's all by herself up there.” He'd watched in quiet envy as Amelia went off on the wyvern, and had been hoping to persuade Meg to let him ride the beast up to Ilgrevnia next.

“We'll get to her soon enough. Quiet now, boy, and let me think.” With a snap of her fingers, she lit a fire to chase back the shadows and warm herself. The flames burned fiercer than she meant them to, betraying her irritation – she'd instructed the wyvern to come back to her as soon as Amelia had dismounted, and she'd thought it tame enough to respond to such simple commands.

“Make yourself at home, why not?” Harold muttered, with a resentful glance at the two heavy suitcases he and Percival had carried into the shelter of the cave. “Have a cup of tea and some cake.”

“Look, boy,” said Meg, sharply. “There's no point us getting soaked to the bone outdoors while I figure out this mess. I'm not counting on stopping here forever, but you don't want to see me with a cold,” – nobody wanted a witch sneezing mid-spell, after all – “and it's always good to have some supplies tucked away somewhere close by.” She searched her voluminous bag for something that might occupy her idle hands while she thought. “Should've brought a broom,” she muttered to herself. “Don't get this kind of trouble with a good old-fashioned broom.” If only she'd brought her old broom, she'd have been up there in a flash…

“Ilgrevnia isn't set to leave this place for another fortnight, Meg,” Percival reminded her. “Amelia's a shrewd enough young woman to stay out of trouble until we can find another way up.”

“Look!” Harold shouted, “Up there!”

Meg hurried to join him at the mouth of the cave. A skyship had emerged from the clouds above Ilgrevnia, its sails pale and colourless in the fading light. Nevertheless, Meg thought she recognised the sleek good lines of the Argean skyship
Sharvesh –
the Black Queen had caught up with them. A jet of fire flashed forth from the City Walls, but the skyship had already passed clear out of range. A second jet followed the first, orange flame spearing into the twilight. Dragon's fire? The wyvern? Or some man-made device? At a distance, Meg couldn't tell. The skyship picked up its pace, disappearing back into the clouds.

“Perfect,” Percival muttered. “Now we have the Black Side’s marauding archers to watch out for, as well as everything else.”

“Enough of that,” said Meg. “You know Flying Cities: what did you make of the flame? Some sort of defence?”

“Not a standard defence, but I wouldn't rule it out. In days gone by, many of the Flying Cities had a flight of wyverns and riders, making the docks a safer place… or at least, in theory…”

As Percival launched into a full-blown history lesson, Meg stopped listening. Let him talk, if it took his mind off more alarming matters for a while, and it would give the boy something else to occupy his mind, too. She didn't like to think that their wyvern companion might have been caught out by some flamethrower, even without Amelia on his back. And if Meg and Percival hadn't fully considered Ilgrevnia's defences, what chance did Amelia have, up there by herself… “Where's that necklace?” she demanded of Harold. “The one she gave you with a lock of her hair. Don't gawp at me like that, boy. I'm a witch: I know all; I see all.” They'd stopped in a prosperous merchant town far back along the way, and Amelia had wanted a gift for her Paladin.

Reluctantly, Harold took off the locket and surrendered it to Meg. “Wait! What are you doin’ that for?” he protested when she prised the glass away from the twist of smooth golden hair:

“Stop fussing!” said Meg, handing the empty locket back to him, “Amelia's got plenty more of this. I reckon she'd shave her head bald if you asked her to.” She set about searching for a pool somewhere out of the rain, where she then crouched over the dark water, grumbling and trying to ignore Harold's resentful eyes on her. She'd never quite got the hang of this spell, and didn't use it if she could avoid it. “Come on then, magic mirror,” she muttered, “show us where she is.”

Harold stared glumly at the empty locket. “She said she might marry the White King.”

Meg ignored him.

“Leave her to it, lad,” said Percival. “You might as well get some rest while you can. Meg, dare I suggest you do the same presently?”

“You'd better dare not,” said Meg, not even glancing up from her makeshift dark mirror. Snatched, bleary images of desolate rain-sodden streets floated up into the glassy surface of the water, but she couldn't see the briefest glimpse of Amelia's golden braids in the gloom.

Then the ground shook, and the image in the still water scattered into shivering circles, making Meg swear. Harold jumped up at once, running to the mouth of the cave, and Percival followed more cautiously. “Meg?” he called, “The earth quaked. Come out of the cave now, in case there are any further tremors.”

Meg shook her head, staying stubbornly at the side of the pool. That had been no earthquake: something had fallen to earth, close by. And if it had any sense, it would come no closer to her.

~

Just inside the shelter of the cave, Harold sat with Stupid's cage on his knees, feeding bits of dead grass to the sizzling fire sprite. Night had fallen some time ago. Hours into her efforts to locate Amelia, Meg had taken a break and dozed off, and Sir Percival had settled down to think or to sleep. Either way he stood still and silent as if the armour was empty, the moonlight shining in and gleaming on plate metal. Harold's eyelids were just beginning to droop, when he heard the thump of hoofbeats and the shouts of men. In the distance, war drums sounded. He froze.

Meg had jumped up at the noise, and Harold looked to her for orders, but it had never been clearer that the witch had no idea what to do. By the stark light of the moon, her face looked pale and fearful. “Perce?” she whispered.

Beside her, the suit of armour stirred, reaching out one gauntlet to gently take her hand. “Here.”

The hoofbeats came closer, thundering right past the cave without stopping. If the riders had seen Harold, they hadn't cared. Meg shook herself off and crawled to the mouth of the cave, careful not to stray too far from the safety of the shadows. Those had been no war drums they'd heard, but the ponderous steps of feet the size of rowboats, and now, by the light of the moon, a huge and terrible figure loped across the moor. At a rough guess it stood twenty feet high, vaguely man-shaped, if not in the proportions of a man: a beast carved from rock and barely pretending to be a living creature. Bull-necked, with huge fists and a hide like rock, the thing had been made for destruction. In the moonlight it was the colour of lead.

Two dark-haired gentlemen, wearing fancy dark coats and riding dappled grey steeds, pursued the beast. Harold recognised them at once from the Flying City of Ilamira. As they rode away, Meg jumped up and ran after them. She hadn't a hope of keeping up with the horses, but she didn't need to. The giant creature soon came to the banks of a river running sluggish and black in the night, where the giant bounded across to the other side as easily as a boy jumping over a brook, but the gentlemen had to rein in their horses in a hurry. Seeing this, the creature crouched on the hillside, out of reach, watching his pursuers impassively as the two gentlemen walked their horses up and down, seeking a way around or across.

Meg crept up as close as she dared, with Harold at her heels, and crouched low in the shadow of a sufficiently large rock. Percival had stayed far behind, presumably for fear of his clanking giving them away.

One of the black-haired gentlemen dismounted and pulled a long, heavy steel bar from the saddlebag of his horse. Even at a distance, Harold could see the finely curling sigils that covered its surface, but couldn't begin to guess what the artefact might be. If their previous experience in Ilamira was anything to go by, it would be some sort of weapon…

The second gentleman retrieved something from the saddlebag of his own horse, and Meg craned her neck to get a better view, but it turned out only to be a kettle and teacups. The witch murmured something under her breath, and the wind changed subtly so that the gentlemen's conversation drifted towards her hiding place.

“Archmage Morel's orders were that we insert the new script and return the construction to the City as soon as possible,” said the twin without the kettle.

Meg swore. “Script,” she hissed at Harold, as if he couldn’t hear the conversation for himself. “More golems.”

One of the twins opened up his silver pocket watch.

“May I ask what you mean to do with that?” asked the twin with the kettle, struggling to light a fire in the damp and windy night.

“I intend to report our difficulties and ask for further advice, unless you have some objection I may have overlooked.” His voice was somewhat hoarse, no longer identical to that of his twin.

“It would be unwise. We absolutely must not draw further attention to our own failings.” He considered this in silence for a moment. Then, “Open your mouth and put out your tongue,” he instructed. He placed one finger in his twin’s obediently open mouth, a little like a prim old maid checking a mantelpiece for dust. Then, with his other hand, he performed the same examination on himself. “The problem with your hydration is worsening,” he said a moment later, wiping his hands on his handkerchief before folding it neatly and putting it back in his pocket. “Your temperature is also notably higher than mine.”

“We are not as we ought to be,” said the twin holding the script, looking uneasy at the thought.

“Agreed. And I have neither the skills to discern the cause of the fault, nor the means to repair it.”

Harold hadn’t known the stone men could get sick, but before he wrote it off as his own ignorance, he sneaked a glance at Meg, who looked similarly puzzled.

The gentleman attending to the kettle looked long and hard at the silent giant across the river. “We must reconsider our approach to the problem in hand,” he said. “In the meantime, please join me in a cup of tea.” Temporarily thwarted, the two gentlemen perched neatly on the riverbank, their handsome horses standing by, eerily quiet and patient, not even eating the scrubby grass.

Harold turned his attention back to the enormous golem squatting on the hillside out of reach. Its craggy face might not have much in the way of facial features, but it was looking undeniably smug at eluding its pursuers so easily. Harold couldn't fathom how it had come down to earth without breaking, let alone how the two gentlemen planned to get it back up to Ilgrevnia, especially when it obviously had no intention of going.

Meg wriggled closer across the grass like a cat after a bird. “They've got swords,” she whispered to Harold, “but if they have more of those lightning guns they used at Ilamira, I 'spect they'll be in the saddle bags. We might not get a better chance to overpower them…”

Harold lunged for her, but missed. “Miss Spinner!” he whispered as loud as he dared. “I don't think I should let you do that!”

Meg turned back to him, her eyes owlishly round and indignant behind the glass of her spectacles. “You don't think you should
let
me? I don't see how you'd
stop
me.”

Harold thought desperately hard, trying to remember what Sir Percival had taught him. Not so long ago, Meg had wanted time to think; now she was all impatience… “I reckon we're more use to Amelia if we stay hidden. If they find out
we're
here, they'll know
she
must be about an' all!”

That stopped Meg, if not for long. “Well I can't just sit down here doing nothing forever!” And she darted back off the way they'd just come.

Back at the cave, she seized the fire sprite's gilded cage, threw open its door and shook the creature out into the open air, where he floated around in sleepy confusion, trailing smoke.

“Meg?” said Percival. “What did you see? What are they up to?”

Meg shook her head. “I'll tell you in a minute.” Then she turned to the befuddled fire sprite. “Go and find Amelia, Stupid! And then you damn well better come back and tell me where she's got to!”