Moist didn’t even look up when he heard the creaking of wood overhead, but ran forward and went down the steps five at a time. By the sound of it, a large amount of the entire building smashed on to the floor just behind him, and sparks roared down the cellar passage, burning his neck.
Well, there was no going back, at least. But cellars, now, they had trapdoors and coal shutes and things, didn’t they? And they were cool and safe and—
—just the place where you’d go to lick your wounds after being smashed in the mouth with a sackful of pins, right?
An imagination is a terrible thing to bring along.
A vampire, she’d said. And Stanley had hit ‘a big bird’ with a sackful of pins. Stanley the Vampire Slayer, with a bag of pins. You wouldn’t believe it, unless you’d seen him in one of what Mr Groat called his ‘little moments’.
You probably couldn’t kill a vampire with pins . . .
And after a thought like that is when you realize that however hard you try to look behind you, there’s a behind you, behind you, where you aren’t looking. Moist flung his back to the cold stone wall, and slithered along it until he ran out of wall and acquired a doorframe.
The faint blue glow of the Sorting Engine was just visible.
As Moist peered into the machine’s room, Tiddles was visible too. He was crouched under the engine.
‘That’s a very cat thing you’re doing there, Tiddles,’ said Moist, staring at the shadows. ‘Come to Uncle Moist. Please?’
He sighed, and hung the suit on an old letter rack, and crouched down. How were you supposed to pick up a cat? He’d never done it. Cats never figured in grandfather’s Lipwigzer kennels, except as an impromptu snack.
As his hand drew near Tiddles, the cat flattened its ears and hissed.
‘Do you want to cook down here?’ said Moist. ‘No claws, please.’
The cat began to growl, and Moist realized that it wasn’t looking directly at him.
‘Good Tiddles,’ he said, feeling the terror begin to rise. It was one of the prime rules of exploring in a hostile environment: do not bother about the cat. And, suddenly, the environment was a lot more hostile.
Another important rule was: don’t turn round slowly to look. It’s there all right. Not the cat. Damn the cat. It’s something else.
He stood upright and took a two-handed grip on the wooden stake. It’s right behind me, yes? he thought. Bloody well bloody right bloody behind me! Of course it is! How could things be otherwise?
The feeling of fear was almost the same as the feeling he got when, say, a mark was examining a glass diamond. Time slowed a little, every sense was heightened, and there was a taste of copper in his mouth.
Don’t turn round slowly. Turn round fast.
He spun, screamed and thrust. The stake met resistance, which yielded only slightly.
A long pale face grinned at him in the blue light. It showed rows of pointy teeth.
‘Missed both my hearts,’ said Mr Gryle, spitting blood.
Moist jumped back as a thin clawed hand sliced through the air, but kept the stake in front of him, jabbing with it, holding the thing off . . .
Banshee, he thought. Oh, hell . . .
Only when he moved did Gryle’s leathery black cape swing aside briefly to show the skeletal figure beneath; it helped if you knew that the black leather was wing. It helped if you thought of banshees as the only humanoid race that had evolved the ability to fly, in some lush jungle somewhere where they’d hunted flying squirrels. It didn’t help, much, if you knew why the story had grown up that hearing the scream of the banshee meant that you were going to die.
It meant that the banshee was tracking you. No good looking behind you. It was overhead.
There weren’t many of the feral ones, even in Uberwald, but Moist knew the advice passed on by people who’d survived them. Keep away from the mouth – those teeth are vicious. Don’t attack the chest; the flight muscles there are like armour. They’re not strong but they’ve got sinews like steel cables and the long reach of those arm bones’ll mean it can slap your silly head right off—
Tiddles yowled and backed further under the Sorting Engine. Gryle slashed at Moist again, and came after him as he backed away.
—but their necks snap easily if you can get inside their reach, and they have to shut their eyes when they scream.
Gryle came forward, head bobbing as he strutted. There was nowhere else for Moist to go, so he tossed aside the wood and held up his hands.
‘All right, I give in,’ he said. ‘Just make it quick, okay?’
The creature kept looking at the golden suit; they had a magpie’s eye for glitter.
‘I’m going somewhere afterwards,’ said Moist helpfully.
Gryle hesitated. He was hurt, disorientated and had eaten pigeons that were effluent on wings. He wanted to get out of here and up into the cool sky. Everything was too complicated here. There were too many targets, too many smells.
For a banshee, everything was in the pounce, when teeth, claws and bodyweight all bore down at once. Now, bewildered, he strutted back and forth, trying to deal with the situation. There was no room to fly, nowhere else to go, the prey was standing there . . . instinct, emotion and some attempt at rational thought all banged together in Gryle’s overheated head.
Instinct won. Leaping at things with your claws out had worked for a million years, so why stop now?
He threw his head back, screamed, and sprang.
So did Moist, ducking under the long arms. That wasn’t programmed into the banshee’s responses: the prey should be huddled, or running away. But Moist’s shoulder caught him in the chest.
The creature was as light as a child.
Moist felt a claw slash into his arm as he hurled the thing on to the Sorting Engine, and flung himself to the floor. For one horrible moment he thought it was going to get up, that he’d missed the wheel, but as the enraged Mr Gryle shifted there was a sound like . . .
. . . gloop . . .
. . . followed by silence.
Moist lay on the cool flagstones until his heart slowed down to the point where he could make out individual beats. He was aware, as he lay there, that something sticky was dripping down the side of the machine.
He arose slowly, on unsteady legs, and stared at what had become of the creature. If he’d been a hero, he would have taken the opportunity to say, ‘That’s what I call sorted!’ Since he wasn’t a hero, he threw up. A body doesn’t work properly when significant bits are not sharing the same space-time frame as the rest of it, but it does look more colourful.
Then, clutching at his bleeding arm, Moist knelt down and looked under the engine for Tiddles.
He had to come back with the cat, he thought muzzily. It was just something that had to happen. A man who rushes into a burning building to rescue a stupid cat and comes out carrying the cat is seen as a hero, even if he is a rather dumb one. If he comes out sans cat he’s a twit.
A muffled thunder above them suggested that part of the building had fallen down. The air was roasting.
Tiddles backed away from Moist’s hand.
‘Listen,’ Moist growled. ‘The hero has to come out with the cat. The cat doesn’t have to be alive—’
He lunged, grabbed Tiddles and dragged the cat out.
‘Right,’ he said, and picked up the suit hanger in his other hand. There were a few blobs of banshee on it, but, he thought light-headedly, he could probably find something to remove them.
He lurched out into the corridor. There was a wall of fire at both ends, and Tiddles chose this moment to sink all four sets of claws into his arm.
‘Ah,’ said Moist. ‘Up until now it was going so well—’
‘Mr Lipvig! Are You All Right, Mr Lipvig?’
What golems removed from a fire was, in fact, the fire. They took out of a burning property everything that was burning. It was curiously surgical. They assembled at the edge of the fire and deprived it of anything to burn, herded it, cornered it, and stamped it to death.
Golems could wade through lava and pour molten iron. Even if they knew what fear was, they wouldn’t find it in a mere burning building.
Glowing rubble was hauled away from the steps by red-hot hands. Moist stared up into a landscape of flame but also, in front of it, Mr Pump. He was glowing orange. Specks of dust and dirt on his clay flashed and sparkled.