‘Two,’ said Perkins, eyes tightly closed, concentrating hard.
‘Two,’ said Addie.
The Hollow Men all advanced a pace. There were so many of them I could see nothing but black suits and white shirts in every direction.
‘Three,’ said Perkins.
But Addie didn’t get to say three. Wilson jumped forward with surprising agility, and knocked Addie’s and Perkins’ hands apart – and replaced Addie’s hand with his own.
‘Three,’ said Wilson, and Perkins summoned up every available second of his life and let fly. There was a high-pitched wail, a sudden bright flash and a pulse of blue light that moved rapidly outwards as Perkins and Wilson vaporised, the spell squeezing every last vestige of mortality from their souls. A moment later, Addie and I and the Princess were left standing there quite alone, the Hollow Men every bit as alive as before.
‘This isn’t good,’ I said.
The Hollow Men charged, and the three of us, our tempers up, did the same and met the first wave head-on with an angry clatter of swords. I had expected a swift end but a second later and the first rank of Hollow Men seemed to falter and collapse inwards, quickly followed by the second row and the third. Within a second or two swords were falling to the ground and Hollow Men were collapsing like deflating parachutes, their clothes quite literally falling apart around them.
Perkins did not have the power to defeat drones, but he had the power to turn the complex co-polymer in nylon stitching to its component parts: gaseous nitrogen, carbon dioxide and quite a lot of hydrogen. If I’d had nylon stitching, my clothes would have fallen off too, but I didn’t. I was sensibly dressed in cotton.
Addie and I looked around at the sections of clothing blowing in the wind. They were twitching as the three hundred or so drones attempted to make sense of their fate and develop a countermeasure of their own. But Hollow Men don’t to do magic, they are magic, and short of their acquiring several hundred seamstresses in the next ten minutes, we’d won.
The last stand
Correction: we’d sort of won. Perkins and Wilson were no longer with us. On the ground where they had been standing were merely their dog tags, the change in their pockets and a few zips, gold fillings and Wilson’s gallstones. I also noted the swords stuck in the drive sprocket of the track were now made of ice and were melting. Perkins had excelled himself. We were back in the game.
‘I’m thinking we shouldn’t be hanging about,’ said Addie, pointing to where the Hollow Men in the most distant ranks of the surrounding army were not quite as dismantled as the rest – they were not dangerous, but already we could see more Hollow Men popping into life in the distance and heading our way. I jumped into the driver’s seat and fired up the engine with Addie joining me in the passenger seat. We looked at one another. Someone was missing.
We found her crouched on the ground behind the half-track. She was cradling her arm and looked up at us with an apologetic smile.
‘I took a hit the second before Perkins did his stuff,’ she said, showing us the wound. Her right hand was severed cleanly at the wrist, and bleeding badly. If we didn’t do something pretty soon, we’d lose her to blood loss.
Luckily, Addie had dealt with this sort of thing before on the tourist trail, and pulled a bandage kit from one of her pouches.
‘This will hurt,’ she said.
‘It already hurts,’ said the Princess. ‘Do it.’
Addie bound the stump tightly with several bandages, which seemed to help, although I could see that the Princess was in considerable pain. But there wasn’t time to commiserate. We quite literally threw the Princess into the back of the half-track and I jumped back in the driver’s seat.
‘Hurry,’ said Addie, ‘they’re redeploying.’
And so they were. All the Hollow Men that hadn’t been affected by Perkins’ spell – and those few that had, but were just about functional – were moving to cut off our escape by the river at the only place we could cross. I noted also that even though the swords jammed in the tracks were no longer a problem, the clothes also wedged into the tracks were impeding progress. I was flat out in second, and we were barely making the pace of a jogger. Even if we were to retreat back to the mountain, we’d still be overtaken by the drones, and to be honest, I wasn’t big on retreating, and I didn’t suppose Addie and the Princess were either.
Addie grabbed her sword and returned to her place on the bonnet. The battle was not yet over. The Princess climbed in next to me and stared forlornly at her stump.
‘Laura Scrubb will be pissed as hell when she finds I’ve lost one of her hands.’
‘I’m sure you can make it up to her.’
‘Before I was useless but with a sword,’ added the Princess. ‘Now I’m double-useless without one.’
‘Maybe not,’ I said as I had an idea. I rummaged in my bag and passed her the Helping Hand™. It was a sound idea. A Helping Hand™ was memory preloaded with every dextrous act imaginable, from mending barometers to building box-girder bridges. With a pair of them you could even play Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto, which is seriously hard. More relevant to the here and now, a Helping Hand™ can wield a sword as expertly as it can conduct open heart surgery – which are not as remotely related as one would have supposed.
‘There’s some duct tape in the toolbox,’ I said, pointing in the back. ‘Get a couple of lengths and I’ll tape it on.’
She did, and pretty soon the Princess had two hands again, even if her new one was too large, four decades older then her, hairy, and had ‘No more pies’ tattooed on the back. She didn’t waste any time, either. The Helping Hand™ grabbed a sword and she and it joined Addie on the bonnet.
We covered the next four hundred yards in less than a minute, the engine labouring to overcome the drag of the clothes stuck in the tracks. We plunged down the slope into the shallow ravine and forded the river, barely glancing at the decaying bones of the massacred. We made it another hundred yards beyond this, and just as the engine temperature was nudging into the red, the Hollow Men closed ranks and presented an unbroken wall in front of us. There were fewer of them – Perkins had depleted their numbers by at least two-thirds – but even as we watched, more were streaming from Shandar’s Guanolite facility, quite literally dropping their droppings to assist in this, the most important of tasks: protect the secret.
The half-track slowed to a walking pace, then stopped entirely with a clatter as it overheated.
We were less than three hundred yards from the Hollow Men, who were standing about an equal distance between us and safety. As their ranks swelled with their identical compatriots, they began walking slowly towards us, the outer edges of the long line curving around in readiness to attack on all sides.
I grabbed a sword and joined the others on the bonnet for what was now a last-stand defence. The Hollow Men would be upon us in thirty seconds, and unless we could each take down between sixty and seventy drones before succumbing ourselves, the end would not be long in coming.
‘It’s funny what runs though your mind when the end is near,’ said Addie, ‘and all I can think about is how annoyed I am that my sums didn’t add up. With Perkins and Wilson dead we’ve lost five out of eight, and that’s one more than the fifty per cent I’d calculated.’
‘I was thinking of odd stuff too,’ I replied with a half-smile, ‘like who was going to look after the Quarkbeast – Tiger, I guess.’
‘I was thinking about walking one more time in the Palace gardens,’ mused the Princess. ‘The fountains are very cooling in the summer.’