‘You won’t hurt the Earl, Master,’ the soldier said. ‘And my orders are clear. The Prisoner dies.’ His finger twitched and Finn crashed as Keiro shoved him aside. The blast detonated with an explosion that threw him against the side of the table and stunned him, so that the shouts and smashing cups as Ralph and Jared heaved the table over and dragged him behind it seemed like objects inside his own head falling and breaking, the pool of wine like his own blood, trickling along the floor.
And then as the door was flung open, in all the stamping and shouts, he knew the blood was not his but Keiro’s because his brother lay still and crumpled beside him in the uproar.
‘Finn! Finn!’ Jared’s hands raised him. ‘Can you hear me?
Finn?’
‘I’m all right,’ he said. But the words came out thick and groggy and he dragged himself out of Jared’s grip.
‘Our men heard the shot. It’s all over.’ Finn’s hand touched Keiro’s arm. His heart was thudding; he gripped the blue velvet sleeve.
‘Keiro?’ For a moment there was nothing, no movement, no answer, and he felt all colour drain away from the world, his life shrivel to a terrible fear.
And then Keiro jerked and rolled and they saw that his hand was wounded, a slashed burnmark across the palm. He lay on his back and his body convulsed.
‘You’re laughing?’ Finn stared. ‘Why are you laughing?’
‘Because it hurts, brother.’ Keiro pulled himself upright and there were tears of agony in his eyes. ‘It hurts, and that means it’s real.’ It was his right hand, the metal thumbnail stark in the scorched flesh.
Finn shook his head and croaked out a laugh with him.
‘You’re mad.’
‘Indeed he is,’ Jared said.
But Keiro looked up at him. ‘It’s worth knowing, Master.
Flesh and blood. It’s a start, anyway.’ As they helped him up Finn looked round and saw Caspar under guard, the other men being hustled out.
‘Get that tunnel sealed,’ he hissed, and Soames bowed.
‘Immediately, my lord.’ But as he turned he stopped dead, and in that second something terrible happened to the world.
The bees stopped buzzing.
The table dissolved into worm-eaten dust and collapsed.
Patches fell off the ceiling.
The sun went out.
31
My Realm will last for ever.
Finn lurched to the casement and stared out.
He saw a darkening sky, clotted with clouds that built up and blotted out the daylight. The wind had risen, and the day was far, far colder than it should have been.
And the world was transformed.
He saw horses in the courtyard collapsing into twitching cybernetworks of limbs, their skin and eyes shrivelling and shredding. He saw walls crumbling into holes, a stinking moat where nothing grew, parched acres of arid grassland.
Flowers withered as he gazed on them; the swans rose and flapped away. All the glorious beauty of the honeysuckle and clematis was dried into spindly crisp bines, the few weak petals blown away by the wind.
Doors were flung open; a guardsman came running down the steps, his fine livery a mismatched moth-eaten suite of grey.
Pushing in next to Finn, Keiro stared. ‘What’s happening to it all? Are we still in the Prison? Is this one of Incarceron’s clean-ups?’ Finn’s throat was dry. He couldn’t answer.
It was like a spell dissolving. All around him Claudia’s paradise of the Wardenry was coming apart, the house a slipshod ruin, its golden-stoned splendour fading even as he watched, colour washing from the mews and the stables, even the maze twisting to a dank thicket of brambles.
Jared murmured, ‘Perhaps the Prison is in us.’ Finn turned. The room was a shell. The fine velvet hangings were rags, the once-white ceiling a mass of cracks.
Jared bent over the wreck of the table, searching in its dust.
The fire was out, every bust and portrait showed patches and crude repairs. And worst of all, on every wall, their illusory holoimages dead, hundreds of cables and wires were revealed in all their naked, ugly uselessness.
‘So much for Era.’ Finn grasped the red curtain and it fell to shreds in his fingers.
‘This was how it was all the time.’ Jared straightened, the Glove in his hand. ‘We fooled ourselves with images.’
‘But how …’
‘The power is gone. Completely.’ Jared gazed around, calm. ‘This is the true Realm, Finn. This is the kingdom you’ve inherited.’
‘So you’re telling me this whole place is a trick” Keiro kicked a vase over and watched it smash. ‘Like one of Rix’s tacky stage routines? And you knew? All along?’
‘We knew’
‘Are you all mad?’
‘Perhaps we are Jared said. ‘Reality is hard to bear, so Era was invented to shield us from it. And yes, most of the time it was easy to forget. After all the world is what you see and hear. For you that is the only reality.’
‘I might just as well have stayed Inside.’ Keiro’s disgust was complete. Then he turned, caught by the truth. ‘This destruction is the Prison’s work!’
‘Of course it is.’ Finn rubbed his sore shoulder. ‘How else—
’
‘Sire.’ The guard captain burst in, breathless. ‘Sire! The Queen!’ Finn shoved him aside and raced up the corridor, Keiro close behind. Jared paused to slip the Glove in his robe and then followed, quickly. He climbed the great staircase as fast as he could, over rotten treads and mice-gnawed wainscots, gusted at by the wind whipping through the windows where plastiglas had vanished. He dared not think about his Tower — but at least all the scientific equipment there was genuine.
Or was it?
Stopping with one hand on the bannister, he realized that he had no way of knowing. That nothing he had taken for granted could now be trusted.
And yet this disintegration didn’t devastate him, as it had Finn and his wayward brother. Perhaps it was because he had always felt his own illness to be a tiny flaw in the Realm’s perfection, a crack that could not be patched up or disguised.
Now everything was as marred as he was.
In the unsilvered mirror he caught a slant of his own delicate face, and smiled gently at himself. Claudia had wanted to overthrow Protocol. Perhaps the Prison had done it for her.
From the battlements, though, the terrible vista drained his smile away.
The Wardenry was a wasteland. All its meadows were scrub, all its rich woodlands mere naked branches against the grey winter sky.
The world had turned old in an instant.
