The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives (54 page)

He pushed himself to his knees, feeling Hasbro’s grip on his elbow, and he peered up into the shadowy gloom above. There, leaping from perch to rocky perch, was a man with wild hair and beard—Hargreaves, there could be little doubt. Hasbro drew his revolver, steadied his forearm along the top of a rock, and fired twice at the retreating figure. His bullets pinged off rocks twenty feet short of their mark, but the effect on the anarchist was startling—as if he had been turned suddenly into a mountain sheep. He disappeared on the instant, hidden by boulders.

St. Ives forced himself to his feet, pressing himself against the stony wall of the path. Hasbro tapped his shoulder and gestured first at himself and then at the mountainside. St. Ives nodded as his friend angled away up a rocky defile, climbing slowly and solidly upward. He watched Hasbro disappear among the granite boulders, and for a moment he felt the urge to sit down right there in the dirt and wait for him.

He couldn’t do that, though. There was too much at stake. And there was Alice to think of. Always there was Alice to think of. If revenge was the compelling motive for him now, so what? He had to call upon something to move him up the path; it might as well be raw hatred.

He sidled along carefully, grimly imagining himself following the course of the rock that had plummeted over his head moments ago. Icy dirt crunched underfoot, and the hillside opened up briefly on his right to reveal a wide, steep depression in the rock—a sort of conical hole at the bottom of which lay a black, silent tarn. The water of the tarn brimmed with reflected stars that were washed with the blue-red light of the aurora. It was a scene of unearthly beauty, and it reminded him of the alluring darkness of pure sleep.

Abruptly he jerked himself away and climbed farther up the trail, rounding a sharp bend. He could see high above him the mouth of the smoking crater. Perched on the rim and hauling on the coils of a mechanical bladder was the venomous Dr. Narbondo, the steamy reek of boiling mud swirling about his head and shoulders. Hargreaves capered like a lunatic beside him, dancing from one foot to the other like a man treading on hot pavement.

They were too distant to shoot at, but St. Ives compelled himself to take the pistol out of his waistband anyway. Calmly and with a will, he began to sing “God Save the Queen” in a low voice. It didn’t matter what song—what he needed was a melody and a set of verses with which to sweep his mind clear of rubble. Narbondo worked furiously, looking back over his shoulder, scanning the rocky mountainside. There was nothing for St. Ives to do but step out into the open and rush up the path toward the two of them. It might be futile, exposing himself like that…He sang louder, but the thought that Hargreaves would simply kill him caused him to scramble the words, and for a moment he considered going back down to where Hasbro had cut off into the rocks, maybe following his friend’s trail. But that would be a retreat, and he couldn’t allow that.

He cocked his pistol and stepped forward in a crouch. Hargreaves grappled now with a carpetbag, pulling out unidentifiable bits and pieces of mechanical debris, which he fumbled with, trying to assemble them. His curses reached St. Ives on the wind. Narbondo raged beside him, turning once again to survey the rocks behind and below him. He looked straight down into St. Ives’s face. Despite the distance, his expression was clear in the moonlight; hatred and fear and passion played across his features, and for a moment he stood stock-still, as if he had seen his fate standing there below him.

A pistol shot rang out, echoing away somewhere among the rocks, and Narbondo spun half around, grabbing his shoulder and shouting a curse. He worked his arm up and down as if testing it, and then pushed Hargreaves aside, tearing at the contents of the bag himself and shouting orders. Hargreaves immediately disappeared behind a tumble of rocks, and St. Ives scrambled for cover as the anarchist popped up almost at once to shoot wildly down at him. Another shot followed close on, and for an instant St. Ives saw Hasbro leaping across a granite slope, only to disappear again when Hargreaves spun around and fired at him.

St. Ives stood and darted up the path, breathing heavily in the thin air. There was the sound of another gunshot just as a spatter of granite chips sprayed into his face, nearly blinding him. He blinked and spit, creeping along until he could see Hargreaves above him, looking down. Hargreaves dropped like a stone, then stood up at once and fired again twice, the bullets pinging off the rocks beside St. Ives’s head.

St. Ives yanked himself down, the smell of powdered granite in his nose. He smiled grimly, wiping at his watering eyes, the sudden danger surging over him like a sea wave, washing away his muddled doubts. He stood up to draw Hargreaves’s fire, ducking immediately and hearing two shots, one after another, from Hargreaves and Hasbro both. He stood again, resting his forearm across the cold stone and setting up to fire carefully now. Hargreaves set out at a run, down and across the rocks. But he was too far away and moving too fast, and St. Ives was no kind of marksman. He waited too long, and his man again disappeared.

St. Ives stepped at once out onto the path, half expecting a bullet and half expecting Hasbro to provide covering fire. There sounded two more shots, from roughly the same direction, but St. Ives forced himself to ignore them, intent now on Narbondo, who worked madly, casting futile glances down at him and bellowing for Hargreaves, the roar of the falls drowning his words before they reached St. Ives, who ran straight up the path, leveling his pistol. He hadn’t bothered to reload after the last couple of shots, but somehow it didn’t matter to him. What he wanted now was to put his hands on Narbondo’s throat. He had failed once before; he wouldn’t fail again.

There was a warning shout, though—Hasbro’s voice—and St. Ives turned to see Hargreaves scrambling toward him, ignoring Hasbro, who stood like a statue, his pistol raised and pointed at Hargreaves’s back. Narbondo was oblivious to them all, as if he would cheerfully die rather than give up his loathsome dream. He peered suddenly skyward, though, his forearm thrown across his brow as if to shade his eyes from moonlight. St. Ives followed Narbondo’s gaze, and there, below the moon, dropping past the pale blue wash of the aurora, drifted the dark ovoid silhouette of a descending dirigible.

St. Ives bolted forward, as if the sight of it had brought the world to him once again, had reminded him that he wasn’t a solitary man facing a solitary villain, but that there was such a thing as duty and honor…He heard the crack of Hargreaves’s pistol almost at the same time that the bullet struck him in the shoulder. He cried out and dropped to his knees, his revolver spinning away into the void on the opposite side of the path as he scuttled like a crab down again into the shelter of the rocks.

A shriek followed, and St. Ives looked up to see Hargreaves dancing next to Narbondo now, the two of them shouting and cursing. Hasbro stepped determinedly toward them as Narbondo furiously worked a mechanical detonator. It was too late for him, though, and he knew it. He hadn’t had enough time. St. Ives was full of something like happiness, although it was cold and cheerless, and he stepped out onto the path again, gripping his bleeding shoulder.

Hargreaves raised his hand to shoot at Hasbro. But there was no sound at all, even though the man continued to pull the trigger. He pitched the gun away from him in disgust, picking up the carpetbag as if he would fling it into Hasbro’s face. He turned with it, though, and slammed Narbondo in the back, roaring nonsense at him. Hasbro stood still twenty feet below them, his arm upraised, and shot Hargreaves carefully and steadily.

The anarchist lurched round, teetered for a moment on the edge of the crater, and then toppled off,
disappearing into the mouth of the volcano as Narbondo made one last futile grab at the bag clutched in Hargreaves’s flailing hand.

There was an instant when no one moved, all of them waiting, and then a thunderous explosion that rocked the mountainside—the volatile contents of the bag having been detonated by the fires of Mount Hjarstaad. The three men pitched to the ground as the explosion echoed away, replaced by the low roar of rocks tumbling toward the plain below. Hasbro was up at once, stepping toward the crater’s edge, leveling his pistol at Narbondo, who stood still now, hangdog, his head bowed like that of a man defeated at the very moment of success. He raised his hands in resignation.

Then, without so much as a backward glance, he bolted down the footpath toward St. Ives, gathering momentum, running headlong at the surprised scientist. Hasbro spun around and tracked him with the pistol.

“Shoot!” St. Ives shouted, but a shot was out of the question unless he himself backed away, out of the line of fire. He scrambled back down the path toward the bend in the trail as Narbondo leaped along in great springing strides behind him, wild to escape, his face contorted now with fear and wonderment as he hurtled uncontrollably toward St. Ives. The scientist stopped to face him, but saw at once that Narbondo would run him down like an express train.

St. Ives turned and hurried downward, hearing Narbondo’s footsteps slamming along and knowing he would be overtaken in seconds. The path widened just then, but turned sharply at the edge of the cliff, and St. Ives saw below him the waters of the starlit tarn, deadly still in the moonlight. In an instant he took it all in—Narbondo was moving too quickly. He would plummet off the edge of the path where it turned, hurtling into the abyss below. There was no hope for him.

And good riddance, St. Ives thought. But then, almost instinctively, he braced himself against two rocks, and as Narbondo raged past, St. Ives reached out to pull him down. He bulled past like a runaway express, though, and St. Ives, meaning to grab him by the arm, was slammed sideways instead, back into the rocks, managing only to knock Narbondo off-balance. His feet stuttered as he tried to stop himself, and then with a shriek he catapulted forward, away from the abyss, head over heels, caroming against a rock and then somersaulting like a circus acrobat across the steep scree-slippery slope until he plunged into the black waters of the tarn. The reflection of the moon and stars on the surface of the water disintegrated, the bits and pieces dancing wildly. But by the time Hasbro had made his way down to where St. Ives stood staring into the depths of the pool, the surface was lapping itself placid once again.

“He’s gone,” said St. Ives simply.

“Will he float surfaceward, sir?”

“Not necessarily,” replied the scientist. “The fall must have knocked the wind from him. It might have killed him outright. He’ll stay down until he bloats with gasses—until he begins to rot. And the water, I fear, is cold enough to slow the process substantially, perhaps indefinitely. We could wait a bit, just to be certain, but I very much fear that I’ve done too much waiting in my life.”

Hasbro was silent.

“I might have saved him, there at the last,” St. Ives said.

“Very doubtful, sir. I would cheerfully have shot him. And there’d be no use in saving him for the gallows. He wouldn’t escape Newgate Prison a second time.”

“What I wanted was to grab his arm, pull him down. But it seems I gave him a shove instead.”

“And a very propitious shove, to my mind.”

St. Ives looked at him tiredly. “I’m not sure I understand any of it,” he said. “But it’s over now. This part is.” And with that St. Ives nodded at the horizon where glowed a great arc of white fire. As the two men watched, the flaming orb of the comet crept skyward, enormous now, as if it were soaring in to swallow the puny earth at a gulp.

Hasbro nodded quietly. “Shall we fetch their equipment, sir?”

“We’ll want the lot of it,” said St. Ives. “And to all appearances, we’ll want it quickly. We’ve a long and wearisome journey ahead of us before we see the mountains of Peru.” He sighed deeply. His shoulder began suddenly to ache. He turned one last time toward the tarn in which Narbondo had found an icy grave. His confrontation with Narbondo had rushed upon him, the work of a confused second, and had found him utterly unprepared, his actions futile. It almost seemed choreographed by some chaotic higher authority who meant to show him a thing or two about confusion and regret and what most often happened to man’s best-laid plans.

Hasbro stood in silence, waiting, perhaps, for St. Ives to come once again to life. Finally he set off up the path toward the summit, to fetch Narbondo’s apparatus and leaving St. Ives to welcome Jack Owlesby, whose hurried footfalls scuffed up the trail behind them.

London

Bill Kraken leaned against the parapet on Waterloo Bridge and grinned into the Thames. Four pints of Bass Ale had banked and stoked the fires of good cheer within him. Tomorrow would see the return of his companions; tonight would see the ascent of the diminishing comet. It was nearing midnight as he finished reading the last half paragraph in his ruined copy of Ashbless’s
Account of London Scientists,
happy to note that although the Royal Academy had never publicly recognized the genius of his benefactor, Ashbless had devoted the better half of his book to accounts of St. Ives’s successes and adventures.

Kraken closed and pocketed the book. The adventure of Lord Kelvin’s machine had ended nicely, if strangely, three afternoons past. The mice and snakes that had rained on Leeds like a Biblical plague had mystified the populace, from the unbelieving Lord Kelvin to the man in the street, taking flight in wondering speculation. The newspapers had been full of it. Every reporter with, perhaps, the exception of Beezer had set out to investigate the incident, but the Royal Academy had put the cap on it—had hushed it up, had hauled away the clogged machine in the night to dismantle it in secret.

Poor Lord Kelvin, thought Kraken, shaking his head. The odd sight of the rocketing beasts had rather unnerved him—perhaps more so even than the ruination of his device. And the muck clogging the tube just before the explosion…Kraken giggled. But his success wasn’t entirely a cause for celebration. There were questions of a philosophic nature to be asked, for sure—questions concerning his lordship’s manufactured failure and the sleepless nights of vain speculation that failure would engender, questions of the expendability of dumb animals for the sake of saving mankind. Kraken wasn’t sure he liked either notion, but he liked the idea of a mutant future even less.