Aria’s blade rose up and slashed. A cut streaked across Minx’s forehead. She countered with a strike into Madam Chillany’s left shoulder that brought forth a shrill cry of pain. Then they were flailing and staggering, striking at each other as best they could. Aria’s teeth snapped at Minx’s left ear and then sought the flesh of her cheek. Minx hit the other woman in the jaw with her free hand and as Aria fell back she stepped forward into another swing of Madam Chillany’s blade that missed opening her throat by a half-inch.
The chill madam’s eyes flashed with murder, as blood stained her mouth. She feinted once, twice and then drove in again when Minx tried to counter the second move. Instead of retreating, Minx measured Aria’s stride and also stepped forward, bringing her knife up for the blow. They crashed together, Aria’s blade seeking an eye but instead slicing a cut across Minx’s left cheek and into the hairline, and they spun around in a mad circle for a few seconds like dancers at a bedlam ball.
Minx knew.
She felt her adversary falter. Felt her legs start to give way. And then the circle of the death dance ceased, and Aria stared at Minx with a yellowed face, her mouth opening in a gasp of shock. The sapphire eyes moved to look down upon the knife that had found her heart, and the blood that was streaming out upon the gray gown.
Minx twisted it.
Just because she could.
Aria’s knife rose up in a trembling hand, to thrust itself into the hollow of Minx’s throat.
Before it could find its target Minx reached up and grasped the wrist, and she said in a rasping voice, “You are done.”
Aria smiled thinly. She spat bloody foam into Minx’s face.
And then Madam Chillany’s eyes began to recede into their sockets, and in another few seconds she was just a dead woman who had not yet given up her soul to that which waited on the other side of the partition. Minx let her wrist go. The knife fell free to the floor. Minx placed her hand underneath Madam Chillany’s chin and pushed her backward off the cliff of life. But she left the blade in her heart for good measure.
Jack was a nimble climber. He came up over Matthew’s back and hooked an arm around the throat, at the same time clawing at Matthew’s eyes.
“You bastard,” said Fancy, and some certainty in her voice made Jack look at her. In time to see the torch she had stretched for and retrieved from the floor smash itself into his face. “Lick this,” she told him.
Sparks flew around Matthew’s head and bit his scalp. He heard some of his own hair crisp. Heard also Jack Thacker’s scream as the torch flamed his eyes out and seared his lips like pieces of grilled beef. Then Jack’s arm was off Matthew’s neck and his fingers were tending to his own blinded orbs, and with a shrug of his shoulders Matthew pushed the remaining Thacker brother off his body and away. Matthew looked back as the Irish rowdy slid down onto the sagging balcony, Jack’s face scorched red under the orange hair with the sprig of gray in it and the swollen eyes sealed shut. With a cry that might have been both pain and defiance Jack went over the edge, and as he went the rest of the balcony crumbled after him with a similar noise. As a last comment upon the life and death of Jack Thacker, Pretty Girl Who Sits Alone flung the torch toward his watery grave.
Thirty-One
HOLD on,” Matthew said. He could smell his own sweat and burned hair. He felt a hundred years old, but now was not the time to give in nor give up. He had said this because he felt, also, the hand of Pretty Girl Who Sits Alone trying to open the fingers that had seized her arm.
“Matthew,” she said quietly, tasting the name for the first time.
He tightened his grip both on her and the cutlass. Above them the ceiling of clouds and cherubs had begun to resemble a ravaged Hell rather than the repose of Heaven. Around them the burning books flamed and at any other moment Matthew might have wept for them.
“I can’t go home,” she said, quieter still.
“We can get up there.” Matthew saw places in the splintered planks that might serve as hand and foot-holds to climb up to the door. The ceiling was beginning to fall in. The clouds were heavier than they looked. Time was quickly running out, for tremors still disturbed the cracked walls and tilted floor. “Come on,” he said. “We have to go.”
“No,” she said. “That way is for you, not for me.”
He peered into her face. The blood crawled along her cheek, but she seemed neither to notice nor care; her soul had already turned away from the flesh that contained it.
“We’re both going up,” he vowed, aware that it was only a matter of seconds before either the ceiling collapsed upon them or the cutlass’s blade pulled loose.
“I came to your room,” said the girl, “to give you the only gift I could. Now I need you to give me a gift. Let me go, Matthew.”
“I won’t. No.”
“You must. I want to go dreaming now. I want to wash myself clean. Don’t you understand?”
“You’re alive!” he said.
But she shook her head, sadly still.
“No,” she answered, “I am not.”
And he did understand. He hated the understanding of it, but he did. She was part of nature, had been defiled and debased, and she wished to return to what she had been. Perhaps her feeling about death was completely contrary to his…or perhaps she just believed in a better afterlife than he. Whatever, he knew she wanted this gift…and yet…how could he open his fingers and give it to her?
“There’s a ship waiting.” He prayed to God it was still waiting, for the gray light was strengthening and the first ruddy glow had appeared to paint the waves. The sweat was on his face, his shoulders and back were cramping, and he couldn’t hold this position much longer. To emphasize the danger and lack of time, a piece of the ceiling as big as a kettle crashed down upon the tilted floor a few feet beyond the girl.
“It waits for you,” she answered, her face calm, her eyes soft and yearning for peace.
“No,” he said. “No, we’re both going.”
“Matthew…whoever you are, and whatever you are…you must know that being free means…I make my own choice.”
“The wrong choice.”
“Mine,” she said.
Her fingers began to work again, at his. Hers were strong. She stared into his face as she worked, and he resisted. Yet as his fingers were pushed away, he began not to try so very hard.
“I will find him,” she said. “I will tell him about you. He will be very glad to hear.”
“Who?” Matthew asked.
“You know,” she told him, and then Pretty Girl Who Sits Alone smiled.
And slid away.
As she went toward the edge she turned her body, and Matthew saw her go into the air as if diving into a new life, one he could not possibly understand. She went silently and beautifully, even as he cried out as if struck to the heart. Which he was.
She disappeared in a billow of dark green, like an arrow returning to a forest unknown. And perhaps her forest did lie beyond the blue silence of the deep, and in that awesome place beyond the comprehension of Matthew Corbett she would return to who she had been, proud and innocent and clean.
He did weep. Not for the burning books and the ideas of men that flew away on their wings of ash, but for the Indian girl who had just taken flight from this world to the next.
“Climb up! Hurry!”
Matthew looked up toward the door. Minx Cutter stood there, with a bloodied piece of bedsheet pressed to her forehead. Another cut on her left cheek leaked red. She wavered on her feet, her strength nearly gone. Matthew reasoned that Aria Chillany had gone to a reunion with Jonathan Gentry, which would be her small and nasty room in the diseased mansion of Hell. It appeared to him that Minx was holding herself up with willpower alone, and on that account she was a formidable figure.