Light flared atop the lighthouse, light magnified a thousandfold by the best lenses ever ground by the glass masters of Corvere. The beam shone out on two sides, bracketing the Dead on the balcony. They screeched and shielded their decaying eyes. Desperately, the young naval officer slammed the clockwork gear into neutral and leant on the capstan, to turn the light around. It had been designed for this, in case of total mechanical failure, but not to be pushed by one man.
Desperation and fear provided the necessary strength. The light turned to catch the Dead full in its hot white beam. It didn’t hurt them, but they hated it, so they retreated, taking Kerrick’s way, out into the fog. Unlike Kerrick, the Dead Hands survived the fall, though their bodies were smashed. Slowly they pulled themselves upright and, on jellied, broken limbs, began the long climb back up the stairs. There was Life there, and they wanted the taste of it, the annoyance of the light already forgotten.
Nick woke to thunder and lightning. As always in recent times, he was disoriented and dizzy. He could feel the ground moving unsteadily beneath him and it took him a moment to realise that he was being carried on a stretcher. There were two men at each end, marching along with their burden. Normal men, or normal enough. Not the leprous pit workers Hedge called the Night Crew.
“Where are we?” he asked. His voice was hoarse and he tasted blood. Hesitantly he touched his lips and felt the dried blood caked there. “I’d like a drink of water.”
“Master!” shouted one of the men. “He’s awake!”
Nick tried to sit up, but he didn’t have the strength. All he could see above was thunderclouds and lightning, which was striking down somewhere ahead. The hemispheres! It all came back to him now. He had to make sure the hemispheres were safe!
“The hemispheres!” he shouted, pain spiking in his throat.
“They’re safe,” said a familiar voice. Hedge suddenly towered above him. He’s got taller, Nick thought irrationally. Thinner, too. Sort of stretched out, like a toffee being fought over by two children. And he had seemed to be balding before, and now he had hair. Or was it shadow, curling across his forehead?
Nick shut his eyes. He couldn’t think where he was or how he had got here. Obviously he was still sick, more seriously ill than before or they wouldn’t have to carry him.
“Where are we?” Nick asked weakly. He opened his eyes again but he couldn’t see Hedge, though the man answered from somewhere close by.
“We are about to cross the Wall,” replied Hedge, and he laughed. It was an unpleasant laugh. But Nick couldn’t help laughing too. He didn’t know why, and he couldn’t make himself stop till he choked and had to.
Beyond Hedge’s laugh and the constant boom of thunder, there was another noise. Nick couldn’t identify it at first. He kept listening as his stretcher bearers stolidly carried him forward, till at last he thought he knew what it was. The audience at a football game or a cricket match. Shouting and yelling at a win. Though the Wall would be an odd place to have a game. Perhaps the soldiers at the Perimeter played, he thought.
Five minutes later, Nick could hear screaming in the crowd noise and he knew it was no football game. He tried to sit up again, only to be pressed back down by a hand that he knew was Hedge’s, though it was black and burnt-looking, and there were red flames where the fingernails should be.
Hallucinations, Nick thought desperately. Hallucinations.
“We must cross quickly,” said Hedge, instructing the stretcher bearers. “The Dead can keep the passage for only a few more minutes. As soon as the hemispheres are through, we will run.”
“Yes, sir,” chorused the stretcher bearers.
Nick wondered what Hedge was talking about. They were passing between two lines of his strange, afflicted labourers now. Nick tried not to look at them, at the decaying flesh held together by torn blue rags. Fortunately, he couldn’t see their ravaged faces. They were all facing away, like some sort of back-to-front honour guard, and they had linked their arms.
“The hemispheres are across the Wall!”
Nick didn’t know who spoke. The voice was strange and echoing, and it made him feel unclean. But the words had an immediate effect. The stretcher bearers began to run, bouncing Nick up and down. He gripped the sides and, on the peak of one of the bounces, used its extra momentum to sit up and look around.
They were running into a tunnel through the Wall that separated the Old Kingdom and Ancelstierre. A low, arched tunnel cut through the stone. It was packed with the Night Crew from beginning to end, great lines of them with their arms linked and only a very narrow passage in between the lines. Every man and woman was glowing with golden light, but as Nick got closer, he saw that the glow was from thousands of tiny golden flames, which were spreading and joining, and the people further inside the wall were actually on fire.
Nick cried out in horror as they entered the tunnel. There was fire everywhere, strange golden fire that burnt without smoke. Though the Night Crew were being consumed by it, they did not attempt to flee, or cry out, or do anything to stop it. Even worse than that, Nick realised that as individuals were consumed by the fire, others would step into their places. Hundreds and hundreds of blue-clad men and women were pouring in from the far side, to maintain the lines.
Hedge was struggling ahead, Nick saw. But it was not exactly Hedge. It was more a Hedge-shaped thing of darkness, limned with red fire that fought against the gold. Every step he took was clearly an effort, and the gold flames seemed almost a physical force that was trying to prevent his crossing through the tunnel in the Wall.
Suddenly a whole group of the Night Crew ahead blazed, like candles collapsing into a final pool of wax, and disappeared completely. Before the people on either side could relink arms or new Night Crew rush in, the golden fire took advantage of the gap and roared out all the way across the tunnel. The stretcher bearers saw it, and they swore and screamed, but they kept on running. They hit the fire like swimmers running from the shore into surf, diving through it. But though the stretcher and its bearers made it through, Nick was plucked off the stretcher by the fire, wrapped in flame and tumbled down on to the stone floor of the tunnel.
With the golden fire came a piercing cold pain in his heart, as if an icicle had been thrust through his chest. But it also brought a sudden clarity to his mind, and sharper senses. He could see individual symbols in the flames and the stones, symbols that moved and changed and formed in new combinations. These were the Charter marks he’d heard about, Nick realised. The magic of Sameth... and Lirael.
Everything that had happened recently rushed back into his head. He remembered Lirael and the winged dog. The flight from his tent. Hiding in the reeds. His conversation with Lirael. He had promised her that he would do whatever he could to stop Hedge.
The flames beat at Nick’s chest but did not burn his skin. They tried to attack what was in him, to force the shard from his body. But it was a power beyond the magic of the Wall, and that power chose to reassert itself even as Nick tried to embrace the Charter fire, grabbing at flames and even attempting to swallow flickers of golden light.
White sparks spewed out of Nick’s mouth, nose and ears, and his body suddenly uncurled, went ramrod straight and flipped upright, elbows and knees vertically locked. Like some inflexible doll, Nick tottered forward, the golden flames raging at every step. Deep within his own mind he knew what was happening, but he was only an observer. He had no power over his own muscles. The shard had control, though it didn’t know how to make him walk properly.
Joints locked, Nick lumbered on, past countless ranks of burning Night Crew, as more and more of them poured into the tunnel from the far end. Many of them hardly looked like Night Crew at all but could almost be normal men and women, their skin and hair fresh and alive. Only their eyes proclaimed their difference, and somewhere deep inside Nick knew that they were dead, not just sick. Like their more putrescent brethren, these new arrivals also wore blue caps or scarves.