But that wasn’t what he saw now. Sir Thursday ascended the glowing step he’d drawn and then his head disappeared as if it had been suddenly erased, and then his shoulders too and, all too quickly, the rest of him. The Piper’s child following gasped as her arm disappeared, then shut her eyes and was dragged onwards, apparently into disintegration.
It was hard being last, though the line moved very quickly. Arthur noticed that not one of the Piper’s children held back, though most of them turned their heads at the last second as if to avoid something happening to their faces. And their eyes were closed.
Arthur kept his eyes open. He wanted to be aware of any tricks Sir Thursday might try on the Stair.
He should have been relieved to find himself surrounded by white light, with the marble steps under his feet and a curling line of soldiers ascending the Stair ahead of him. But he wasn’t.
The Stair had not been a spiral when he’d climbed it before. Now it was tightly coiled.
Arthur realised he’d stopped for a second when he was jerked forward. For a horrible instant he thought he was about to lose his grip on Fred’s belt. But his fingers were jammed through and he closed them again tightly, looking only at the steps as he staggered forward.
‘Hang on!’ exclaimed Fred as quietly as he could while still being emphatic. ‘Sir.’
Arthur hung on and concentrated on the steps under his feet. For the first twenty or thirty or so he kept expecting Sir Thursday to do something, but then he remembered how hard it had been for him to lead just Suzy Blue up the steps. The Trustee wouldn’t be able to do anything unless he put himself at risk of falling off the Stair as well – and in the case of the Improbable Stair a fall meant ending up somewhere you’d almost certainly not want to be.
This realisation allowed Arthur to start worrying about what was going to happen when they came out at the other end. Even if Sir Thursday did only need five or six minutes to destroy the Nothing spike, a lot could happen in that time. In the battle at Fort Transformation, scores of Denizens and New Nithlings had been killed or wounded in the first thirty seconds, let alone the first five minutes.
There was also the possibility that something would happen to Sir Thursday. If he wasn’t able to lead them into the Improbable Stair, then they’d be trapped, easy pickings for the New Nithlings.
Unless I can lead everyone back into the Improbable Stair, thought Arthur.
He wondered if using the Stair would increase the sor-cerous contamination of his blood and bone. The crocodile ring was in his belt pouch, but there was no point thinking about it, or about the contamination. Arthur knew he would have to do whatever it took for them to survive.
Something caught Arthur’s eye, and he looked up. The Stair stretched on forever, disappearing in a haze of bright white light. But Sir Thursday was gone, as were the two Piper’s children behind him. The third was disappearing, in mid-step.
‘We’re coming out!’ said Arthur. ‘Hold on!’
He felt a bit silly as he said ‘hold on’ because almost everyone had disappeared by the time he said it, so only Fred heard, and he knew Arthur was the one who hadn’t been holding on properly.
Then Fred was gone, and this time Arthur did instinctively shut his eyes. When he forced them open only a microsecond later, he saw the line of Piper’s children ahead of him, with Sir Thursday at the head. Only a few feet beyond Sir Thursday was a huge, rapidly spinning cone of utter darkness, shot through with occasional coruscations of blinding white.
It was the spike – and not only was it spinning, it was bigger than Arthur had thought it would be. The part he could see was about thirty feet high and twenty feet in diameter at the top, but it looked like it was half-buried in the ground, the point having long since bored its way through the topsoil and into whatever material lay beneath the organic layer of the five hundred/five hundred tile.
‘Let go!’ roared Sir Thursday. ‘Take up defensive positions.’
Arthur let go and looked around. They were on an earthen ramp reinforced with cut timber that had been built to emplace the spike. It was ten feet wide and perhaps sixty feet long. The raiding party was at the top of it, right next to the spike.
The other end of the ramp joined a dusty, well-trodden road lined with white rocks that stretched to the tile border, half a mile away. On either side of this bare road there were rows and rows of bright-yellow, bell-shaped tents. Hundreds and hundreds of tents, each one about twenty feet in diameter, occupying a forty foot by forty foot square.
There was also a parade ground, a square of bare earth two hundred feet long on each side. A unit of one thousand New Nithlings was drawn up there, in the process of being inspected by a very tall, very imposing New Nithling – or perhaps even a Denizen, because he was human-shaped and was wearing a pale-yellow uniform greatcoat of many toggles and considerable gold braid, topped by a Napoleon-style hat worn sideways over what from a distance Arthur thought was either his own metal-masked head or some kind of horrible metal replacement. This very tall commander was trailed by a dozen officers, or superior Nithlings, and in the mere second that it took Arthur to look down at the parade ground, he realised that this must be the mysterious leader of the New Nithlings.