Mathias could still hear the shouts of alarm, smell the bitter stinging smoke that filled the air. But suddenly it all seemed far away. Dumbly he stood up.
Leiter lay dead on the floor at the woman’s feet – his eyes were wide open, the silver-topped cane driven straight through his heart. She was standing over him, but she wasn’t looking at him. She was holding her hands in front of her face, staring at them as though she’d never seen them before. Even as he watched her, she put them hesitantly to her head, feeling for something that should be there and wasn’t.
And then she screamed.
She screamed as though every demon in hell had found her.
He started to back away, but she was too quick. She caught hold of him, her eyes staring and mad. Her grip was like iron.
‘Like – them!’ she cried.
And for Mathias the world stopped – it was Katta’s voice that he heard coming from her mouth. Broken and mad, but Katta’s voice, as though somehow she were locked inside.
She saw the look of blank incomprehension register on his face. ‘Yes! Like – them!’ she said, nodding insanely.
He felt her fingers wrap in his; they were hard and cold. She pressed his hand to her cheek. It was hard and cold too, like a doll. Her eyes never leaving his, she put his hand to her breast. It was hard and cold, but he could feel a heart beating beneath.
‘My – heart!’ she gasped. ‘Mmm-eeee!’
The words made no sense. For Mathias it was just as it had been for Katta in the crypt when she saw the dead men that she knew were alive – and suddenly the two moments connected in his mind and he realized what she was trying to say.
She was like them.
And then he knew why Leiter had laughed.
This is what Gustav really knew.
They weren’t men at all.
She could see him staring at her in disbelief – his face, the hall and the smoke – but for her it was like looking through thick windows at a world outside. She couldn’t even say the words she wanted. They were drowned by the deafening whine, like wasps in her head, of a thousand minute cogs and wheels as they wound and turned – and through it all, pounding like a drum, she could hear the hammer beat of her own heart.
Only one word came, and it sounded like a scream.
‘Mmeee!’
What happened next happened like a slow nightmare.
There were flames on the stairs behind them. Koenig lay folded against the wall where he’d fallen. Mathias couldn’t see whether he was alive or dead, but with Katta’s help he lifted him to his feet. They half walked, half dragged him through the window and onto the terrace outside.
The palace was ablaze.
Flames had leaped unchecked from building to building, and now it was all on fire. People were running and shouting – horses let free from the burning stables ran amok between them. Everywhere was smoke and burning and noise.
There was a long ornate stair that wound down from the terrace into the gardens below. Holding Koenig between them, they went down it step by step.
No one stopped them. No one questioned them. They pushed through the press of people and no one spared them a look – not at the gates, not in the streets or in the alleys. There were only eyes for the soaring flames and the bright hot embers that carried on the wind and drifted out over the frost-covered roofs of the city below.
Sometimes it seemed that she knew who she was; sometimes she didn’t. She’d put her hands to her head and scream, and then there was nothing that Mathias could do.
At last they reached the stable. It was dark now – an eerie, flame-lit dark with shadows that moved.
Mathias laid Koenig in the straw. For a moment in that darkness, the bloodless face looked like Gustav’s had done all that time before.
‘We have to get him help,’ said Mathias, but Katta didn’t answer.
She was crouching in the straw, rocking to and fro, her hands to her head, trying to shut out the noise that was driving her insane. He didn’t understand that though. All he could see was the mad woman rocking in the dirty straw.
He didn’t know what to do. He felt the world swim as the hopeless enormity of it all overwhelmed him.
Then, in the flickering of the light that fell on the wall, he saw the saddle.
Somewhere in the woods nearby there had to be Burners. If he could only find them, they would help. They would know what to do.
Looking at the mad woman and the dying man, he pulled the saddle from the wall. He heaved it across the back of the horse. It turned its head and he saw the angry white of its eye, but he didn’t care. Fumbling beneath its belly for the strap, he drew the buckle up as tightly as he could, then he bent over Koenig and shook him. Slowly, as though being called from a long way away, Koenig opened his eyes.
‘Can you ride?’ said Mathias, his face pressed close to Koenig’s. ‘You have to ride.’
If you had stood at the city gates, you might have seen them – a boy leading a huge horse by the rein – a grim, silent man in the saddle and a mad woman walking beside him, her hand upon his stirrup.
But you wouldn’t have looked.
You would only have had eyes for the fire – for the huge columns of flame and sparks that engulfed the top of the hill.
No.
You wouldn’t have seen them.
And the boy didn’t look back.