FORTY-FIVE

The Last Stand

Correction: We’d sort of won. Perkins and Wilson were no longer with us. On the ground where they had been standing were their ID tags, the change in their pockets, and a few zippers, gold fillings, and Wilson’s gallstones. The swords stuck into the tracks had been transformed into ice and were melting.

Perkins had outdone himself. We were back in the game.

But there was no time to reflect. “I’m thinking we shouldn’t be hanging around,” said Addie, pointing to where the Hollow Men on the distant ranks of the surrounding army were not quite as dismantled as the rest. They didn’t seem dangerous, but already we could see more Hollow Men popping into life and heading our way.

I jumped into the driver’s seat and fired up the engine while Addie joined me in the passenger seat. We looked at each other. Someone was missing.

We found the princess crouched on the ground behind the half-track, cradling her arm. She looked up at us with an apologetic smile.

“I took a hit the second before Perkins did his stuff,” she said. Her right hand was severed cleanly at the wrist. If we didn’t do something soon, we’d lose her to blood loss.

Addie had dealt with this sort of thing before on the tourist trail, and pulled a bandage kit from one of her pouches. “This will hurt,” she said.

“It already hurts,” said the princess. “Go ahead.”

Addie bound the stump tightly, which slowed the bleeding though didn’t lessen the pain. We quite literally threw the princess into the back of the half-track next to Rubber Colin, and I jumped into the driver’s seat.

“Hurry,” said Addie. “There are more, and they’re redeploying.” She grabbed her sword and returned to her place on the hood.

The princess climbed in next to me and stared forlornly at her stump. “Laura Scrubb will be pissed when she finds I’ve lost one of her hands. Before I was useless but with a sword. Now I’m double-useless without one.”

“Maybe not,” I said. I rummaged in my bag and passed her the Helping Hand^™. A Helping Hand^™ is Memory Pre-Loaded with every dexterous act imaginable, from mending barometers to building box-girder bridges. With a pair of them, you could play Rachmaninoff’s third piano concerto, which is seriously hard. More relevant now, a Helping Hand^™ can wield a sword as expertly as if it were conducting open-heart surgery—which are not as unrelated as one might think.

“There’s some duct tape in the toolbox.” I gestured toward the back. “Get a couple of lengths and I’ll tape it on.”

She did, and soon the princess had two hands again, even if her new one was too large, four decades older than her, hairy, and had No More Pies tattooed on the back. The Helping Hand^™ grabbed a sword, and the princess joined Addie on the hood.

We covered the next four hundred yards in less than a minute, the engine laboring to overcome the drag of the clothes still stuck in the tracks. We plunged down the slope into the shallow ravine and forded the river, barely glancing at the decaying bones of the massacred. We made it another hundred yards, and just as the engine temperature was nudging into the red, the Hollow Men closed ranks into an unbroken wall in front of us. There were fewer—Perkins had depleted their numbers by at least two-thirds—but more were streaming from Shandar’s Guanolite facility, quite literally dropping their droppings to assist in this most important task: protect the secret.

Overheating, the half-track slowed to a walking pace, then stopped with a clatter.

The Hollow Men were standing between us and the safety of the forest. As their ranks swelled with identical compatriots, they began walking slowly toward us, the outer edges of the long line curving around to attack on all sides.

I grabbed a sword and joined the others on the hood for what was now a last-stand defense. The Hollow Men would be upon us in thirty seconds, and unless we could each take down seventy drones before succumbing ourselves, the end would not be long in coming.

“It’s funny what runs through your mind when the end is near,” said Addie. “All I can think about is how annoyed I am that my numbers didn’t add up. With Perkins and Wilson, we’ve lost five out of eight, and that’s one more than the fifty percent I’d calculated.”

“I was thinking of odd stuff too,” I replied with a half smile, “like who will look after the Quarkbeast. Tiger, I guess.”

“I was thinking about walking one more time in the palace gardens,” mused the princess. “The fountains are very cooling in the summer.”

I looked behind us at Cadir Idris. I could see the Jeep and the rock-hewn stairway. We’d be safe there, but only to die of starvation, or be attacked if we again attempted escape.

“We’d never reach it in time,” said Addie, “and I don’t run. Not from anything.”

“Me neither,” said the princess. “Fleeing for one’s life is so very . . . unregal.”

So we stood together on the hood of the half-track, swords at the ready, awaiting our fate. I wasn’t thinking only about the Quarkbeast. I was thinking about the Eye of Zoltar, and where it might be. I was thinking that I had failed to find the Eye, and that the dragons would die. And I was thinking about Perkins.

Then I had no more time to think, for the Hollow Men had charged.

With her new old hand, the princess was now the most skilled with her sword, and Addie was not far behind. They dispatched three each in quick order, keeping the drones from climbing upon the half-track. I simply swiped where I could with my sword in both hands.

It was desperate, but we were not so much fighting as postponing the inevitable. I sliced through a drone that had jumped on the hood, then ducked as Addie cut down another behind me. I could feel my muscles begin to tire. When I could no longer swing a sword, it would be over.

And that was when we heard a loud rushing noise. It was like a distant express train, but ahead of the noise was a call, like the sharp bark of a seal. The noise increased to a thunderous roar, and a moment later the Hollow Men in front of us scattered like playing cards, disrupted by a foe whose form was wobbly and indistinct.

Almost instantly the drones regrouped to fight the new, larger, mysterious enemy, and we were once more on our own. I had a cut on my thigh, had lost part of my boot, and I think my little toe. I could also feel the salty taste of blood in my mouth from a cut lip, but we were still alive.

We heard the whooshing noise again, mixed with a faint Ook, ook!, and then saw the indistinct outline of a Cloud Leviathan as it executed a steep hammerhead turn in the air and dived down for the second attack, its large mouth open. As the rushing sound increased again, we could see that the Leviathan was not alone—he was being ridden.

But the rider was not a pirate—it was Ralph, standing on the Leviathan’s back, surfing the creature without any apparent fear.

The second pass was more devastating than the first. The drones not gathered up in the Leviathan’s massive mouth were blown apart by the high-pressure air venting out of its underbelly. We jumped off the half-track after the second pass to lend a hand with slicing the lingering Hollow Men to ribbons. But there was no need; it was an enemy in rout.

Ralph and his new friend conducted six passes before the Hollow Men had fully retreated or simply collapsed back into parcels of clothes. The drones were powerful, but even they knew when to call it a day. This time the battle was truly over.

We looked at one another, a picture of exhaustion, stress, and relief. I wasn’t the only one who had taken some damage. The princess had two nasty cuts on her arm and chest, and Addie was wrapping her arm with a bandage.

The Leviathan parked itself nearby in a low hover and Ralph jumped down to join us, still carrying his large ladies’ handbag in the crook of his arm. Smiling in his odd Australopithecine way, he greeted us with clasping of our hands and a soft chuckle. We had not been enamored with Ralph when we first met, but after Perkins devolved him, it was we who had cared for him. Clearly, friendship and loyalty went back a long way, before we were truly human. We’d looked after Ralph, and he’d looked after us.

“Thank you, Ralph,” I said.

“No Ralph,” he said, his mouth contorting as though chewing the words together before he spoke. “Name . . . Pirate ’aptain Ralph.”

“Ralph . . . Wolff?” Why not? “But a pirate?”

“Only f’good,” said Sky Pirate Ralph with another semi-grin, before looking around. “Others?”

“All gone, Captain.”

“Sorrow f’all,” said the Australopithecine, “’cept Curtis. Glad dead, ’natius too. Wilson, ’erkins—liked. Sorry.”

“We’re sorry too,” I said. “Who’s your friend?” I nodded toward the Leviathan, whose chameleonic skin blended in with the scrubby grassland he was hovering above. Pirate Ralph looked at the Leviathan, smiled one of his ancient smiles, and touched all our hands again.

“Friend,” he said, and rummaged in his oversized handbag before handing me a small object carved out of Leviathan tooth and attached to a gold chain. It looked like a whistle. The pirate captain pointed at it, made a blowing gesture, then pointed at himself, the Leviathan, and me.

“I understand,” I said, and he smiled again, snapped the clasp of his handbag shut, climbed back upon the body of the beast, and they moved off and up as one. By the time they were a thousand feet up, the Leviathan’s underbelly looked like the clouds, and a second later we couldn’t see it at all.

We stood there for some moments in silence.

“Well, Addie,” said the princess at last, “looks like your fifty percent fatality rate was correct after all.”

Addie frowned as she counted up the numbers in her head. Eight had come out, and four had survived.

“Yes,” she said sadly, “but I wish I’d been wrong. Without Perkins and without Wilson, all would have been lost. Jenny, I’m truly sorry.”

And we hugged, spontaneously and in silence, while the tattered remnants of the Hollow Men were blown by the breeze across the scrubby grassland.