His thought was never finished. It was knocked from his head by the roar of a thousand lions mixed with the shriek of five-hundred harpies and carried along by the burning breath of sixty dragons on the wing, and he was thrown insensible into the muddy drink, sinking down into the realm where the reptiles coiled and twisted safe from the evils that men did.
Thirty
A HAND gripped the back of Matthew’s coat and jerked him up from the water. He sputtered and coughed, spewing liquid from mouth and nostrils. Night had turned to day, and he had to squint against its glare. Hot winds rushed through the swamp, bending trees and tearing leaves loose in green flurries.
“Keep moving!” Minx shouted, for shouting was the only way to be heard above this symphony of the cataclysm. She, too, had taken a spill into the soup. Her face and the curls of her hair were darkened by muddy slime. She started off and pulled Matthew along as he fought to find his balance.
He looked back and saw nothing but white flashes and red centers of flame. It appeared as if the main wall of the fort had been blasted down. The Cymbeline’s thunder was deafening; Matthew’s ears rang like seventeen Sabbath bells and he could feel the continuing detonations in the pit of his stomach. He saw something on fire fly up into the air, and then it too exploded with a bone-jarring report and a flash that nearly burned the eyes blind. Another object rose up, burning, and also exploded in the ash-swirled sky. The barrels, he thought. Some were being blown out of the magazine and detonating overhead. A rain of pieces of flaming wood and chunks of scorched stone was falling around them, splashing heavily into the swamp. “Move! Move!” Minx shouted, up against his ear so he could hear her above the din.
He did not have to be told a third time.
He staggered on, as birds flew for their lives from burning branches. Minx slipped and fell and he pulled her up as she had saved him. A flaming barrel came down on the left and blew trees up from their roots and a geyser of water when it exploded. Part of the thicket over on that side was already burning, and still the barrels were coming down to blast their Cymbeline across the tortured landscape. The heated winds blew back and forth and the shockwaves knocked Matthew and Minx hither and yon as if they were made of flimsy paper. Gray smoke whipped across this battlefield. Perhaps twenty yards ahead of the struggling pair they caught sight of something hanging in the upper branches of a burning tree that might have been a human torso, black as a fistful of coal.
More explosions ravaged the night. The barrel bombs were flying, some to blast their flaming innards overhead and others to crash into the swamp and forest before they detonated. The noise was like the collision of three armies using triple-mouthed cannons, firing in confusion to the north, south, east and west. Another massive blast and belch of red fireballs rose up from the wrecked fort, and suddenly part of a burning wagon came crashing down in front of Minx and Matthew so close their eyebrows were singed.
“This way!” Minx shouted, and grasping his arm she guided him at an angle to the left. He realized she was looking for the road to get them out of this fiery morass, and he followed her gladly and yet still a bit woozy in the head.
They sloshed through the muck with flaming comets whirling overhead and the thunder of explosions making the earth shiver. Matthew looked toward the fort and saw nothing but a pall of smoke with red fires burning within. Good, he thought. If the chemical works was not totally destroyed, the next shipment of Cymbeline surely was. And there had to be enough damage in there to make rebuilding a costly and time-consuming task. Good, he thought again, and narrowly missed getting tangled in thornbranches that had a snake coiled amid the stickers.
They came out upon the road after what seemed a trek of fifteen or twenty minutes. Was the first shade of light showing to the east? It was hard to tell, for Matthew’s eyes were still dazzled. Fires growled and crackled here and there amid the thicket, burning underbrush and trees.
“Can you hear me?” Minx shouted at him, and he nodded. Her face was both stained with mud and ruddy with heat. She stared back for a few seconds at the smoke-covered fort, her eyes glittering with wild emotion between terror and exhilaration.
It was Matthew, then, who first saw the two men with torches stagger onto the road before them. One held a cutlass with a chopping blade about fourteen inches in length. Both men were bloodied by scrapes and cuts, their clothes dirty and dishevelled. Matthew’s first thought was that they had been atop a watchtower that the blast’s winds had knocked to the ground; they looked more fearful than fearsome, yet the sword meant business.
“What happened?” the man in the lead demanded. It was a foolish question, so he asked another: “What are you doing here?”
Minx regarded the men with a tight smile. “What do you think, you idiot? We blew the place to pieces.”
“What?”
“You don’t get anymore questions,” she said, as she reached into her waistcoat for the second knife that was hidden there.
The swordsman took a step forward to strike at Minx, who brought the blade out and started to throw it, but in the next instant all thoughts of edged combat were ended.
The ground shook under their feet.
It was not just a tremor. It was a side-to-side motion that made true the name of Pendulum Island. It was so severe both the two men and Matthew and Minx were knocked to their knees, and in the eerie stillness of its aftermath there was a shrill keening of wind whipping through the trees and in the distance the urgent howling of dogs.
With the second agony of the earth, a crack winnowed along the road and engulfed a shower of gravel and crushed oyster shells.
The man with the sword gave a bleat of terror. He struggled up, dropping his cutlass and torch, and ran along the road in the direction of Templeton, perhaps to see to a wife and child. The second man sat on his knees for a moment more, stunned and blinking, and then he too stood up and, following his torchlight, began to shakily walk away from Matthew and Minx as if strolling through a dreamscape. Or rather, a nightmare, for he hadn’t gotten very far where there was a ghastly low rumble of stones grinding together in the troubled guts of the island and he was whipsawed down again as the ground shifted under his boots. This time the shaking went on for perhaps six seconds, an eternity, and when it was over the man stood up again and continued determinedly walking away until his torchlight was only a faint glow.
Minx got to her feet, and so did Matthew. Her voice was choked with tension when she said, “We’ve got to—”
“Yes,” he answered, for the devil’s breakfast was being served early this day. He picked up the swordsman’s fallen torch and cutlass, thinking that both might be useful in the hours ahead.
They reached the end of the road, where the skulls had hung before the earth’s shaking had dislodged them, and they spent some time retracing their path and searching for the horses that had obviously torn loose from their moorings and were no longer there. They had no opportunity to go to Falco’s house; either the captain was already getting the Nightflyer in order, or he was not. Matthew was betting his life, and the lives of others, on Falco being true to his word. They therefore began walking toward Templeton as quickly as they could manage, and both noted the fissures—some the width of a hand—that had opened in the road. From time to time small tremors shook the earth, and it was clear to Matthew that the blast of Cymbeline had awakened the foul spirits of Pendulum’s past.