“Matthew? What…”
“No more time for lies. Stand up and take this in your black heart.”
Aria Chillany came up off the floor. Her eyes were wild. With a sweeping motion she grasped the leather handle of the bag on the bed and swung it at Minx, who stepped back out of its way. Then Aria’s hand went into the bag and came out with a short but deadly blade of her own, and flinging the bag at Minx she followed it with her body and the knife flailing at the other woman’s face.
“Come on, boyo,” Mack Thacker taunted, as the broken glass sliced Fancy’s cheek. Matthew strode toward him with the sword upraised, and suddenly Jack Thacker threw his bottle at Matthew’s head and instead hit his left shoulder as Matthew dodged aside. Then Jack gave a strangled cry of rage and, his face swollen with blood, rushed across the room at Matthew.
Fancy—the pretty girl who had sat alone for so very long—came to life. She grasped Mack’s arm and sank her teeth into his hand, and he shouted in pain and grabbed a handful of her hair. The broken glass lodged against her throat. She kicked into his shin and tore loose from him, as brother Jack collided with Matthew and fought him for both the sword and the torch. A knee rose to smash into Matthew’s groin and the orange-haired head thrust forward to bust against Matthew’s skull, but Matthew avoided the blows he’d known were coming and swung Jack away from him with the strength of desperation.
“Kill him! Kill him!” Mack hollered, as the Indian girl leaped upon his back and locked an arm around his throat from behind. He flung her off and came at Matthew with the broken bottle.
But before Mack could reach him Pendulum Island, in its agonized throes, shifted once more. This time the library’s planked floor shook beneath their feet like—as Toy had said—the end of the world. There was a cracking noise like the bones of a behemoth being broken to pieces. Something deep in the guts of the castle made a hollow ringing noise like an exotic gong. The balcony windows shattered. The faces of the cherubs in the ceiling’s clouds fell away, exposing ugly gray plaster. Matthew was knocked to his knees and both brothers skittered to the floor. The torch rolled away from his fingers, setting fire to the scattered volumes.
And then the truly horrific happened, for in this quaking of tormented earth the very foundation of Fell’s castle was loosened, the seams of broken stone could not hold, and suddenly the entire library room pitched at a twenty-degree angle toward the cliff’s edge and the sea below and the books flew off the shelves like the flapping of paper bats.
Matthew, the Thacker brothers and the fallen Fancy slid along the crooked floor through the battlefield of burning books. The balcony itself began to split away from its stone bindings with the noise of small cannon fire and plummet piece by piece into the ocean. The window curtains were whirled away and downward as if into a vortex, but they snagged in the hanging balustrade. Fell’s castle had become a construction of torn parchment and forgeries, for all its strength against the earthquake. The gray morning became an open mouth ready to swallow Matthew, the Thackers and Fancy. Matthew saw the remaining stone seahorse topple down on its last ride. The library’s furniture and burning books tumbled around the sliding figures, and the problem-solver from New York reached for the bloodied Fancy as she scrabbled for a grip on the splintered planks. He caught her right arm with his left hand, but together they were going over the edge.
When the worst of the earthquake hit, Minx Cutter and Aria Chillany were locked in combat. They staggered around the room, grasping at each other’s knife hands and trying to get their own blades free. As the floor heaved and the walls cracked, their battle did not falter for death had entered the room and must be satisfied.
Madam Chillany spat into Minx’s eyes and tried to trip her but Minx was too nimble for that. They kicked at each other as the deadly blades were checked in stalemate. Then Minx drove her enemy backward against the dresser so hard the breath burst from Aria’s lungs and pain stitched her face. Aria pushed back with frantic strength and tried to wrench her knife hand free, but Minx had it gripped. With a scream of rage Madam Chillany took the risk of releasing Minx’s wrist to scratch at the gold-hued eyes and drew blood across the cheekbone. The knife came at her, a wild and unaimed blow, and grazed Aria’s shoulder.
Then the two women separated and, as Fell’s castle groaned and shrieked in its agonies, they searched for an opening the better to stab the other to death.
Matthew used the cutlass.
He got his boots turned to give himself some friction on the floor, and with the strength of the damned he chopped the sharp edge into one of the floor planks. With the other hand he held onto Fancy, stopping their slide toward the hanging ruins of the balcony and the sea below.
Then a weight grasped his ankles and nearly broke his arm from its socket as he held onto the sword’s leather grip. Matthew looked backward to see the sweating red visage of Jack Thacker as the thug crawled up over his legs. Mack had caught himself on an edge of broken plank and had hold of one of Jack’s ankles. For a moment Matthew thought his spine would break as the weight pulled on him, and he was near losing his grip on the cutlass. The sweat had burst out like a mist around his face. He was close to letting go…he feared he couldn’t take the weight an instant more, his shoulder was about to be pulled from its socket and the cutlass was starting to work free.
Fancy kicked Mack in the face with a sturdy shoe. She did it a second time and then a third and a fourth, into the nose and mouth. Mack’s features became rearranged. He spat out a mouthful of blood and a couple of broken teeth and reached with one arm for Fancy’s legs to pin them. She squirmed away from him and kicked him once more, in the throat, as he flailed at her. He made a garbled, hideous noise that sounded like Brother spoken from the depths of despair, and then he blinked heavily and wearily as he lost his grip on Jack’s legs and slid away, through the fiery pages of torn books, through the glitter of broken glass from the windows, and out upon the tilted balcony.
“Brother!” Jack screamed in response, the voice of human agony.
Mack Thacker gripped hold of one of the curtains that hung from the balustrade. He swung back and forth for a moment, as much a pendulum as Fell’s island. Then he was betrayed by the bitch called Fate, perhaps a female he had alternately wooed and scorned during the course of his dissolute life. She had the last laugh, for the curtain tore and with his fingers still locked in the fabric Mack fell toward the sea trailing a piercing cry. Upon his head followed several pieces of stone balusters, a nasty conking to be had while broken-toothed, bloody-mouthed and throat-mangled.
“Brother!” Jack called again, and Matthew saw tears burst from the dazed green eyes.
But then the elder Thacker righted his senses and refound his rage, and he began to crawl up Matthew’s back as the cutlass quivered on the edge of breaking loose.
Aria Chillany grasped a handful of Minx’s hair and flung her back against a fissured wall. This time the breath burst from Minx’s lungs, and then Aria came at her with the knife. Minx had forgotten that Aria’s usefulness to Professor Fell also involved murder, and perhaps she too had been trained in the bloody arts by Lyra Sutch. The knife flashed out and caught Minx’s waistcoat as she twisted aside, but she could feel the blade kiss her ribs. Then Minx struck out but Aria had already retreated. When the women came together again it was a blurred and confused battle of life and death, all artistry of knives forgotten and nothing in its place but the savagery of survival.