His order was echoed all around the walls of the bastion and out across to the bastions on either side, picked up and repeated by officers and NCOs.
‘You had best get to the Star Fort now, sir,’ said Dusk. He spoke very quietly, close to Arthur’s ear. ‘I do not think we will hold them this time.’
‘I’m not going,’ said Arthur. He looked at the crocodile ring on his finger and thought of his home and family. They all seemed so distant now, so far away. He could not easily even summon up their faces or voices in his memory. ‘I will use the Key against them. We will prevail.’
He held up the baton and it caught the last light of the sun, transforming not into the unwieldy sword of Sir Thursday but a slim, needle-sharp rapier that caught the sunlight and reflected it back in a coruscation of beams that lit up all the bastions with a clean brilliance that cut through all smoke and dust.
‘The Army and Sir Arthur!’ shouted Dusk. Once again, his cry was picked up across the bastions, but it was louder now, more heartfelt.
‘Sir Arthur! Sir Arthur!’
The Nithlings below answered with their drums and their shouts. Rank after rank began to march towards the bastions, all abristle with ladders and hooked lines and smoking firepots to hurl.
‘Sir Arthur!’
It was not a war cry. Captain Drury was tugging at his elbow. But he was not holding the phone. He was pointing to the far west, where the disk of the sun had finally disappeared, though some of its light still lingered in the upper sky.
‘Sir! Look!’
Arthur blinked and blinked again. Through the drifting smoke, in the dim twilight, he couldn’t at first make out what Drury was pointing at. Then he saw it. The sky-line had changed. There was a mountain range immediately to the west, perhaps three miles distant.
A cheer rose up amid the shouts of ‘Sir Arthur’, the wild cheer of unexpected hope.
‘The spike,’ said Marshal Dusk. ‘Sir Thursday lied. He did destroy it.’
‘No,’ said Arthur. ‘I think maybe I did … I threw a sorcerous pocket in it.’
‘A what?’ asked Dusk.
‘Never mind,’ said Arthur. For a moment, he savoured an intense feeling of relief. The pocket was destroyed and the Skinless Boy with it. His family was safe. But the relief was very brief. Arthur looked out the embrasure and, though he had not held much hope, was unsurprised to see that the New Nithlings, though they might have lost some of their reinforcements to tectonic strategy when the tiles moved, were unfazed.
I wonder what I can do with the Key, Arthur thought as he looked out at the solid tidal wave of New Nithlings. I suppose I can use it to make me stronger and quicker and tougher than any Nithling or Denizen. But there’s just so many of them, it won’t make a difference in the end. They just keep coming … it is like being in a natural disaster. There’s just nothing that can be done … and those New Nithlings just want to be farmers, it’s all so crazy –
A hand suddenly jerked Arthur back behind the merlon.
‘Pardon,’ said a familiar voice. It was followed a moment later by the sight of a barrel flying over the battlements, two burning fuses trailing sparks as it went past. Four seconds later, there was a huge explosion near the base of the wall.
‘A grenado,’ said Sunscorch, Wednesday’s Noon, with a wide grin. ‘Biggest we could make. And there’s plenty more where that came from.’
‘Sunscorch!’ exclaimed Arthur. ‘You came!’
‘Aye, me and a few others,’ said Sunscorch.
Arthur sat up as more explosions boomed beyond the walls. The bastion was suddenly packed with Denizens. There were blue-jacketed sailors lighting fuses on barrels of Nothing-powder and firing them out of squat wooden mortars they’d set up at the back. There were Commissionaire Sergeants and Metal Commissionaires forming up in ranks alongside the soldiers. Midnight Visitors flew overhead, raining long metal darts down on the New Nithlings.
A crowd of buff-coated Artillerists rushed past, wheel-barrowing smaller barrels of powder and piles of canister shot, discussing how low they could depress the bastion’s cannons, ecstatic that they could once again use their weapons.
‘Dame Primus is preparing to sally below,’ said Sunscorch. ‘She’s going to use the Keys, and she’s got the Monday superior Denizens and Wednesday’s Dawn and old Scamandros and everybody we could bring who’s ever fought a Nithling or who says they have. About five thousand, all told, though they’re still coming through.’
Sunscorch paused to look over the side.
‘This lot don’t look much like no Nithlings to me.’