lightning bolts.
“But listen to me, Ashbless—you won’t die until I let you. I could cut your head off—and I may—and still keep you alive in it by magic. You probably imagine you’ll be dead by dawn. Let me assure you I can prolong your death agonies decades.”
The doorway was directly behind the two magicians, and Ashbless forced himself not to move his eye or show any reaction when he saw the monstrous forms appear in it and steal silently forward into the dim room.
But there was a flicker of motion on the shelf above the pump—one of the little dolls twitched, pointed its tiny arm and shrilled, “The Mistakes are loose!”
Horrabin spun on one stilt like a compass and, poking out his tongue until it touched his nose, produced a piercing two-tone whistle that jarred Ashbless’ remaining teeth. At the same moment Romanelli took a deep breath—it sounded like an open umbrella being dragged down a chimney—and then barked three syllables and flung his bloodstained hands out, palms forward.
One of the Mistakes, a long, lithe furry thing with huge ears and nostrils but no eyes, launched itself in a cat- like leap at Horrabin, but thudded against a barrier and tumbled back to splash in the mud of the wet floor.
“Get… rid of them,” sobbed Romanelli. Blood was welling freely from his nose and ears. “I can’t do… another one of these.”
Half a dozen of the Mistakes, including one amphibian giant with an underslung lower jaw and multiple ranks of wedge-shaped teeth, were noisily hitting and clawing at the barrier.
“Open little holes along the floor,” said Horrabin tensely. “My Spoonsize Boys will make ‘em glad to get back in their cages.”
“I… can’t,” Romanelli said in a faint whine. “If I try to alter it… it will just… break.” Blood had begun running from his eyes like tears. “I’m… falling to pieces.”
“Look at the clown’s trousies,” boomed the thing with all the teeth.
Horrabin automatically glanced down at himself, and saw by the torchlight that his baggy white pantaloons were spattered with mud from the furry Mistake’s splash in the puddle.
“Mud goes through,” the creature bellowed, prying up a fist-sized stone from the floor and flinging it.
The stone thudded into Horrabin’s belly, and he reeled gasping on his stilts until two more struck him, one on his polka dot ruffled wrist and one on his white forehead, and he folded backward, his face a mask of horrified wrath, to sit down with a loud splat in the mud.
The Spoonsize Boys bounded down from their shelf like oversized crickets, drawing their tiny swords in midair, splashed and tumbled in the mud and then bounded through the barrier, stabbing the ankles and swarming up the legs of the Mistakes.
Romanelli folded Ashbless’ ruined leg back and belted the ankle to the thigh, then, with an effort that crumbled the teeth between his hard-clenched jaws, the sorcerer lifted the dying poet and lurched across the floor to the far archway.
Every step down the hall produced further snaps and internal burstings, but Romanelli plodded on, the breath shrieking in and out of him, as crashes and shouts erupted from the hospital behind them, to the archway that led into the descending cellar.
* * *
Carrington’s men, huddled against the wall below one of the torches, had been getting increasingly impatient for the return of their chief, and swearing to each other in whispers that they would damn well go in there without him, but they blanched and stepped back when the grisly spectacle of Romanelli and his burden walked in through the arch and passed them.
“Jesus,” whispered one of them, fingering the grip of a dagger, “shouldn’t we go after him and kill him?”
“What are you, blind?” growled one of his fellows. “He’s dead already. Let’s go get the clown.”
They had just started toward the arch when a gang of the Mistakes burst hopping and slithering through, hotly pursued by a leaping swarm of the Spoonsize Boys.
Ashbless had, despite all the chemical and sorcerous consciousness maintainers, sunk into a semi-comatose state from which he roused only for moments at a time. At one point he was vaguely aware that he was being carried down a steep incline; at another he noticed that his bearer was mindlessly and in a bubbling voice singing some jolly little song; then things became confused: there was a lot of yelling behind them, and by the light of his bearer’s personal electrical storm he saw a thing like a huge toad wearing a three-cornered hat bound past on one side while a six-legged dog with a man’s head galloped by on the other, and then the air was full of leaping bugs which weren’t bugs at all but tiny angry men waving little swords.
Then his bearer had stumbled, and everyone was tumbling down the increasingly steep slope, and the last thing Ashbless glimpsed before losing consciousness one more time puzzled him even through his death-fog: he saw Jacky’s face, streaked with tears and shorn of its moustache, staring at him in surprise as he rolled past.
* * *
The sparking, flickering thing that tumbled against Jacky collided with the Eyeless Sisters too and sent them spinning away into the darkness, chittering in disappointment, and Jacky scrambled to her hands and knees in time to see that the blue-flashing thing was a man, and that William Ashbless, evidently dead, was sliding down the slope right behind him; then Jacky ducked her head and dug her fingers and toes into the mud between the stones, for a rush of barking and mewling forms, invisible in the darkness, spilled heavily past and over her, closely followed by a horde of what felt and sounded like large locusts. A few moments later the Hell’s circus rush was receding below her, and she began crawling back up the slope.
There were noises from above too, faint screams and shouts and maniacal laughter that echoed weirdly through the cavern, and she wondered dazedly what madness had struck Rat’s Castle this night.
After many minutes she felt the floor level out beneath her, and looking up she saw the distant torches and the archway. Carrington’s men no longer lurked there and whatever the action was, it was taking place somewhere else, so Jacky got up and ran madly toward the light.
When she’d got there she crouched panting for several minutes in the semicircle of wonderful yellow light, enjoying the delusion of safety it gave her, like the King’s X in the games of tag she’d played not that many years ago, and it was with reluctance that she finally got up and stepped through the arch and into darkness again.
She could hear nervous voices from the direction of the dock, so she padded silently up the corridor that led to the ascending stairway, but halted when she heard voices there too.
She decided to go back and hide somewhere until the guards returned to the surface, and then swim down the waterway to the Thames, and she’d just turned and started back when the steady shouting doubled in volume and a dim, reflected glow sprang up in the corridor. It quickly waxed brighter, as if men with torches were just about to appear around a corner ahead. Jacky looked around in panic, hoping to see a doorway she might duck into, but there was none. She flattened herself against a wall.
The yelling grew louder still, and she could hear a fast wooden knocking, and then from out of one of the farther tunnels burst Horrabin, completely ablaze and running on his stilts, flanked and followed by what seemed to be a horde of bounding, chittering rats; a moment later his pursuers skidded around the same corner and came bounding after him, flinging rocks and baying like hounds.
Jacky looked back at the stairs, and dimly saw two men crouching just outside the archway, aiming some sort of guns at the approaching rout. No help in that direction, she thought. In desperation she flung herself down against the wall with one arm over her face, in the faint hope of being mistaken for a corpse by all parties.
The two guns went off with one prolonged roar and a flash that brightened the tunnel for a full second, and as stone chips flew from the walls and ceiling, the burning clown rocked to a stop—but caught his balance, evidently
