nave, never taking his eyes from St. Ives’s face.
“Place the basket on the pew, directly beneath Edward’s revolving ghost,” Narbondo said. “We’ll send my mother’s beloved son to kingdom come, where he longs to be.”
St. Ives did as he was told and stepped away, looking up at the gondola, lodged in the roof. Now that the power of the storm had diminished, the gondola was still, held tight astern, the glass ball caught in the crotch of a bent iron strut.
“I want to make one last experiment,” Narbondo said, “and it must be completed while the souls of the dead haunt the streets roundabout us. I assume that my mother told you about the door I mean to open when she summoned you to Hereafter Farm?”
“She did,” said St. Ives evenly, his voice sounding mechanical in his ears. “The idea flies in the face of reason.”
“My brother’s ghost flies in the face of reason, Professor, and yet there he stands, undeniably. You’re a man of great learning; surely you trust your own eyes not to lie.”
The ghost was no longer spinning, but seemed to be looking down at them – or particularly at Eddie, St. Ives thought, if that were possible. Narbondo was correct. Everything about the phenomenon flew in the face of reason. St. Ives watched for his chance, some distraction, the creaking of the gondola or the shattering of a piece of falling glass. “Even if this door exists, how can you say that it be worth opening, or what lies beyond?”
“What care I for its worth? A door is but a convenient symbol for the way between here and there, a mere poetic figure until it’s made real. We cannot begin to come at its worth until we see with our own eyes what lies beyond. I bid you, sir, to cast off the fetters that enslave your mind.”
“There are a wide variety of fetters,” St. Ives told him.
“Alas, you and I speak different languages, sir. I’ll make myself clear, however. I am going to set young Eddie on the floor now, where he must sit passively like the swamis of old and contemplate the pending wonder. Do you hear me, boy? Will you sit on your backside and be still?”
“Yes,” St. Ives said for him, recognizing the cast in Eddie’s eye, the same cast that appeared there when his tin soldiers had had enough of his sister’s mechanical elephant. St. Ives shook his head warningly.
Narbondo shoved the pistol into the belt around his cassock and drew a fat, pistol-like weapon out of his coat, a bulbous thing with a vastly wide bore, as if it was meant to shoot cricket balls as bullets. He pointed it at the wicker basket and pulled the trigger. A flaming orb of white fire blew out of the barrel, igniting the basket and the pew cushion and the white disk atop the device, which flared up brilliantly in the brief moment before an explosion ripped upward out of the iron cone in a burst of fire and smoke and flaming wad.
Edward’s ghost disappeared within the flame and smoke, and in that moment St. Ives, half-deafened by the blast, threw himself forward, grabbed Eddie, and flung him across the dust-slick floor, Eddie sliding away as if he sat on a block of melting ice. A strange banshee wail arose in the air, finding its way through the ringing in St. Ives’s ears, rising in pitch. Narbondo held his pistol again, having cast away the incendiary weapon.
“It wants a blood sacrifice,” Narbondo shouted at him, cocking the pistol. “You’ll do as well as the boy.”
St. Ives threw himself forward, clipping Narbondo’s legs out from under him. Narbondo slammed down onto his side atop the compass rose, rolled out from under St. Ives and sprang into a crouch, aimed hurriedly downward, and pulled the trigger even as St. Ives was scrambling out of the way like a crab. The bullet punched into the marble floor, blasted-out fragments hammering St. Ives on the side of his head and face as he pushed himself to his knees, fully expecting to be shot with the second bullet.
Narbondo, however, was staring fixedly at the marble floor, which had split open along a seam defined by the north-south axis of the inlaid compass rose. The stones of the floor snapped and cracked, the fissure running outward in both directions from the flattened bullet, which was lodged in the center of the rose. Narbondo watched it fixedly, his face glowing with wonder and triumph.
St. Ives felt blood flowing into his collar and discovered that his ear was partly severed. What had begun as a banshee’s wail was now a harmonic vibration that filled the cathedral with a single note, circling around them, seeming to emanate from all points of the compass and rising slowly in tone.
Narbondo raised the pistol and pointed it at St. Ives from six feet away – a fatal distance – but still he didn’t shoot it. He nodded up at Edward’s ghost, which still had a human shape but was composed entirely of swirling sparks. The crack in the floor was widening, more quickly now, dust and fragments of stone falling into it, soil visible below, the very ground itself opening. St. Ives looked for Eddie and saw him within the several pillars that held up the arched ceiling of the portico, well back toward the wall. Alice and Finn were coming along down the pews, both of them looking anxiously upward at the gondola.
The iron framework of the cathedral sang now. The glass panes vibrated visibly, like square pools of water into the centers of which stones had been dropped. The whirling, densely packed stars that filled the void that had been Edward’s ghost glowed ever more brightly as the sound and vibration increased. Narbondo nodded with apparent satisfaction and cocked the pistol. Then, like the crest of a wave pitching over onto a beach, the swarm of stars fell out of the air and inundated him. He staggered forward, throwing his hands up. The pistol fell into the line-straight rift in the ground and flew out of sight. Narbondo, glowing within the whirling nebula of sparks, clutched at unseen things, his hands opening and closing spasmodically as he reeled at the edge of the chasm, several feet wide now. With an inhuman shriek he was dragged forward by the elemental particles of Edward’s ghost and cast into the depths in a shower of sparks. St. Ives saw him strike the sloped bank of the fissure, making a failed attempt to stop himself and rolling pell-mell downward into the darkness. In the moments before they winked out, the descending sparks illuminated a geometric field of pale structures far, far below, appearing to St. Ives to be a subterranean graveyard, perhaps, or the ruins of an ancient subterranean city, which vanished a moment after he perceived it.
The rift was closing in on itself again. The harmonic vibration had reached a crescendo, awakening St. Ives from his rapt attention on the spectacle before him. Debris fell from above, the marble beneath his feet shuddered, and the panes of glass in the roof and walls shivered themselves to pieces as he turned and ran toward the portico, ducking under the domed roof as if out of a hailstorm. There sounded the screech of rending metal high overhead. The gondola fell nose-downward, hung for a moment by the stern, and then dropped, the glass orb in the bowsprit carrying it straight downward into the narrowing chasm, which closed on it with a vast exhalation of air, shattering the craft utterly, the rudder and propeller skittering away across the floor amid a confusion of broken sticks.
Within moments, the cathedral walls and roof had been reduced to an iron skeleton. The south wind blew across the floor, stirring up little whirlwinds of coal dust from beneath the pews. The great window depicting the death of the Oxford Martyrs still stood, however – perhaps the only glass remaining entire. Rays of light beamed through it in a myriad of colors, the morning sun showing in the heavens through broken clouds.
FORTY-FOUR
The afternoon weather was particularly fine – a warm breeze out of the west, perfect for eating outdoors. St. Ives contemplated birthdays, his own having come round again, time passing away. They’d had some shrewdly hard knocks, including a cool and bewildered acknowledgement from the Crown. There would be no recompense for the destroyed airship despite the arrest of Guido Fox, betrayed by de Groot along with Lord Moorgate, who was assumed to have fled.
But there was much to celebrate, most of it assembled before his eyes at this very moment. Eddie practiced throwing a boomerang that was a gift from Bill Kraken, who had carried it out of Port Jackson when he had fled Australia. He had given Cleo a kite decorated with a grinning moon face and with an immensely long tail. The kite rode above the broad lawn in front of the hopping huts, rising and swooping on the breeze, the sun high overhead and the sky a deep, luminous blue. Next week the huts would be full of workers, bringing in the harvest.
Eddie held his boomerang now, readying himself, squinting toward a platoon of enemy soldiers that stood in neat ranks on a distant crate, threatening the peace of the quiet afternoon. He threw the boomerang smoothly, and instead of wheeling off into the roses and smashing blossoms as it had the habit of doing, it described a neat circle, rising and then dipping toward the ranked enemy troops, falling upon them soundlessly and destroying them. St.
