ith the Heart Stone still at her back, Lucy ran with Benissimo and Ned into the fortress, Gorrn trailing behind. The entire structure was a mixture of angular metal and black marble, its corridors cold and quiet. Down a spiral staircase and through corridor after corridor they ran, till Lucy paused, her face suddenly as white as snow. The fortress shook once more then along the floor ink-like fluid started to rise up the walls.
“I don’t understand. I can feel its hatred as though it were mine, but I can’t get a fix on where it’s coming from.”
The fortress shook so hard this time that Ned stumbled.
“Please, child, focus!” urged Benissimo.
As Ned looked at the liquid, it changed form, as though it somehow sensed him. And then Ned realised. He pulled the perometer from his pocket and it spun this way and that, from one strand of fluid to the next. The forest surrounding the fortress had had the same oily slickness at its branches and boughs. But it wasn’t, as he’d thought, an illness at all. The Darkening King had reached into the wood to feed and the oily liquid it had used to do so was the Darkening King unformed.
“It can’t be!” he murmured. “It’s in the walls, in the forest … It’s—”
“EveRryWhHere.”
Ahead of them two metal doors swung open. The perometer’s needle spun one last time and then stuck, like an arrow pointing to the opened doors. Finally its glass casing cracked and the Tinker’s device shattered in Ned’s hand.
As suddenly as it had started, the fortress’s shaking stopped.
Lucy, still ashen-faced, peered ahead through the open doors. “We’ve got time.”
Benissimo turned to them both. “Ned, Lucy – I wish I could do this without you. I wish I’d had the strength to break the curse before you were even born, but I didn’t and I’m sorry – for us all.”
Ned looked at the Ringmaster. There were a thousand things he wanted to say, and a thousand ways to say them. But in the end he took Lucy’s hand and Benissimo’s and simply said, “Together.”
Accompanied by a sometimes brave familiar, an Engineer and a Medic walked hand in hand with a Ringmaster, to face a butcher and his king.