Was I the only one who thought she might have grown a little over-confident? Gingerly, I raised my hand.
‘What is it, Art?’
‘Well, Mother, it is just that last time you met the Mothmaker, she killed you. How do you mean to make sure that the same does not happen again?’
Mother laughed. ‘Oh, that,’ she said. ‘I was not ready for her last time. This time I shall go prepared.’
She waved a hand. The plates and centrepiece vanished away, along with the remains of our dinner (much to the perplexity of Father, who was reaching out for a spare bit of ship’s biscuit when it happened). In its place there stood upon the table top a sort of box, made from the wood of some tree which I don’t believe ever grew in the light of our sun. The box was open, and within it, on a cushion of some silvery fabric, there nestled an egg-shaped object which I thought at first was made of a shiny black substance. Then I realised that it was a small vial or bottle of the clearest crystal and that within it a seething darkness swirled and stirred.
‘Whatever is that?’ asked Myrtle, awed.
‘It is Dark Energy from before the Dawn of Time,’ said Mother. ‘Every Shaper who is sent to build a star system brings one of these with them. It is the means by which we are supposed to extinguish ourselves once our work is done. It is the means by which I had always intended to extinguish myself when my old body died. But now it seems to me that there may be another use for it.’
‘To kill the Mothmaker!’ I cried (for I catch on fast, you know).
Mother looked grave. It is an awful thing, I believe, for one Shaper to plot the utter destruction of another. No doubt that was what she had been contemplating while she waited in her cloud-form for Myrtle and I to meet her in that place. Perhaps she had thought she did not have the right. And perhaps our arrival had changed her mind and decided her. At any rate, she took the ampule of Dark Energy from its box and tucked it into a secret pocket of her dress.
‘Well, then,’ she said. ‘Is everybody ready?’
We were. Even Myrtle made no mention of how unladylike she would feel, rushing into battle. I believe she had been changed by her adventures and now saw that it did not matter all that much if you perspired a little, or lost your bonnet, or accidentally allowed a stranger a brief glimpse of your ankles, so long as it was in the service of Queen and Solar System. We gathered up our weapons, Mr Grindle drained a wine bottle which had been left behind when the dinner things dematerialised and Mother led us towards the door, which opened, letting in a dazzling shaft of light upon our upturned faces.
We rose through that unearthly light, and somehow it turned into the more familiar brilliance of winter sunlight reflecting from snow. I breathed in deeply the fresh, cold air of Earth, and looked about. Behind me, my companions were blinking as they stumbled out of Mother’s shining door, which now led like a miners’ tunnel into the side of a snow-speckled bank of heather. Above it a steep hillside rose, and on the summit, high above, a magnificent stag stood framed against the sky, just as if it were posing to have its portrait done by Sir Edwin Landseer.
‘We are in Scotland!’ I cried.
‘Did I not promise as much?’ said Mother. ‘Balmoral is a half-hour’s brisk stroll in that direction … ’
‘Couldn’t you have landed us a bit closer?’ grumbled Grindle, looking unenthusiastically at the steep path which she indicated, leading over the shoulder of a nearby mountain.
‘Really, Mr Grindle,’ snapped Myrtle. ‘Mother has carried you instantaneously across ever so many millions of miles of space, and all you can do is grumble.’
‘If I had been able to spare a few more days to let the machine adjust itself,’ said Mother, ‘it might have set us down in Queen Victoria’s own drawing room. But I felt speed was of the essence in this case. It is my hope that we may be here before our enemies and that we can help the gentlemen who defend Balmoral Castle to prepare themselves for the coming of the Snilth.’
Yet even as she spoke, a chilly shadow fell across the glen. The stag turned and fled, and looking up we saw a great cloud darkening the sky above us—a cloud of dusty, fluttering wings, thrashing feelers and furry insect bodies, sweeping out of space to whirl and churn above the Scottish hills! And looking still higher, we saw stretching across the high wintry blue of the western sky a pale band or arc, shining in sunlight in just the way that the Moon sometimes does on a winter morning. The Earth had rings now, like Saturn’s, and they were made out of moths! Among them we could see faintly the lumpish home-made planetoids of the Snilth and the Mothmaker’s midget star, glittering like a diamond, pitting its silvery light against the golden rays of Earth’s own sun.
Our race was lost! Despite Mother’s magical doorway, the Mothmaker had beaten us, and we had reached Scotland too late to prevent the coming of the Snilth!
Chapter Twenty-One
In Which the Reader Is Granted a Rare Glimpse inside One of Our Royal Family’s Country Seats and Witnesses Some Surprising Happenings Therein.
Perhaps there is no need for me to describe to you the scene which awaited us as we came, panting, over the shoulder of the mountain which stands behind Her Majesty’s home at Balmoral. Everyone has now seen the pictures which appeared in The Times and the Illustrated London News, showing the castle surrounded by squadron upon squadron of the Mothmaker’s winged minions. The moths which had already landed were drawn up on the heather-covered hillsides in battalions, with the cool Scotch breeze riffling their fur and trembling their feelers. They covered the landscape for several miles about Balmoral, like a sort of living quilt. And these were not the moths we had met before, but larger ones, darker in hue, for the Mothmaker had unleashed her elite battalions from deep within the Mothstorm. On the folded wings of each there was a pattern of markings which looked like a death’s head.
Down from these monstrosities were climbing hundreds of Snilth, armed with their bagpipe dart-guns, which they held ready as they moved towards the castle. We lay in the scratchy dead bracken on the mountain slope and watched them, hoping that our travel-stained clothes would help to hide us from the riders of the moths which were still airborne and whose wing beats echoed ever and again across the valleys. Everything cast two shadows: one a dark natural shadow made by the Sun, the other a pale and ghostly umbra cast by the Mothmaker’s silver sunlet. Southwards, the atmosphere was streaked with condensation trails, marking the place where Britain’s home fleet struggled against the main body of the Snilth armada in the skies above London. No help would come from there to wrest Balmoral from the enemy’s grasp!34
‘It’s all up!’ said Father. ‘We cannot hope to fight so many Snilth!’
‘They must already have overcome the Queen’s guards,’ said Mr Munkulus. ‘For I can hear no sounds of battle.’
We listened. He was right. No shot or clash of steel on steel was borne to us upon that Highland wind – only the mournful lamenting of a solitary piper playing ‘Scotland the Brave’, as if in defiance of the otherworldly invaders. And after a few seconds a dart from a more sinister set of bagpipes must have found him, for the sounds gurgled and squawked and died away, and thereafter all was silence.
Silence, but for the beating of a pair of wings mightier than any we had yet heard! We looked upward, shielding our faces from the low winter sun. Down from out the dome of Heaven a huge moth came flapping. Black as midnight were its pinions, and plates of black armour hid its head and thorax. It landed with a ground-stirring thump just in front of the castle, in a space made by the other moths, who shuffled meekly aside to make room for it. From a fortified howdah on its back there uncoiled a swirl of shadows, lit with drifting fire.
‘The Mothmaker!’ squeaked Myrtle, edging backwards.
‘What vanity!’ said Mother crossly. ‘She doesn’t need that great insect to carry her about. She is simply showing off!’
The evil Shaper was sweeping quickly up the drive towards the castle now, with squads of Snilth falling back on either side to le
t her pass, and after a second or two she was hidden from us by the trees in the gardens.
‘We must make our move,’ said Jack. ‘It is now or never.’
‘Might it be best if Charity, Ssilissa and Miss Myrtle were to remain here, safely out of harm’s way?’ suggested Father.
‘Oh no, Mr Mumby!’ cried Charity. ‘I haven’t come this far just to hide in the heather like some droopy heroine in a melodrama! I want a chance to get even with those beastly Snilth, and so does Myrtle, I am sure! We can fight as well as any man, can’t we, Myrtle?’
Myrtle looked for a moment as if she was about to say that she would be quite content to hide in the heather. But before she could, she was interrupted by an unwelcome hissing voice, which said, ‘Ssstand and show yourssselves! You are captives of the Sssnilth!’
From behind a craggy sort of boulder twenty feet away emerged a Snilth warrior, and then a dozen more, all training their blowpipes on us. I glanced at Jack to see if he thought it worth trying to fight, but apparently he did not. With a rueful look upon his face, he scrambled to his feet and threw his revolving pistol down into the bracken. The rest of us, one by one, did likewise. But how bitterly disappointing it felt to have come so far, only to be captured so easily!
The Snilth came closer, closer, and then halted, forming a loose ring about us. One stepped forward, raised her visor and said suddenly, ‘Oh, Misss Mumby!’ And then all of them began sketching clumsy curtsies and running up to hug Myrtle and saying, ‘We thought we had lossst you for ever!’ and, ‘Forgive usss for appearing in sssuch unladylike garb; She makesss usss wear it.’
I began to realise that these must be some of the Snilth who had fallen under Myrtle’s spell at Mothstorm: the ones who thought her such a treasure and had resolved to model themselves after her example. I suppose it was jolly lucky that we got captured by them, instead of by their more warlike sisters, but I still could not help thinking that they were all as mad as hatters.
Myrtle, however, flushed pink with pride. She returned the curtsies of the Snilth and began introducing us. ‘This is my father, and this lady is my mother … ’
‘Your mother?’ cried the genteel Snilthess, quite amazed, before Myrtle could even mention her dashing younger brother. ‘The other Shaper? Then she isss not dead?’ And she and all her comrades fell in the bracken at Mother’s feet, probably expecting her to blast them to ash for their impertinence in daring to invade her worlds.
Mother laughed and helped the leader to her feet. ‘No, no,’ she said. ‘I am not like your Mothmaker. I haven’t quite her power, or her love of power, and even if I had, I should not seek to harm you. But I should very much like to stop your mistress. Will you help us? I know it is asking a great deal of you, to betray your Shaper and your people … ’
‘No! It isss not!’ declared the Snilth captain passionately. ‘We hate Her! And we would be serving all Sssnilth if only we could free them from Her tyranny, so that they too may come to underssstand the joys of needlework, flower arranging, polite conversssation and other passstimes suited to young ladiessss.’
‘Then will you help us to get inside that castle?’ asked Jack.
‘But how, Jack?’ asked Mr Munkulus. ‘Even with the help of these ladies, there’s still about a thousand Snilth outside the front door, and they don’t look ladylike at all.’
‘Then we should go in at the back,’ said Myrtle. ‘If we cut through the vegetable garden there is a small turret door which leads in through the west wing.’
‘Aaah!’ sighed all the Snilth admiringly, delighted to find that Myrtle combined a keen tactical brain with her perfect manners. But the rest of us were taken aback by the notion that Myrtle had a brain of any sort. Why, even Mother looked astonished.
‘I declare, I cannot imagine why you all stare so,’ said Myrtle, sticking her chin in the air in that infuriating way she has. ‘Art is not the only one who reads journals, you know. I have been a subscriber to Young Royalist Magazine since I was little, and I remember the floor plans of Balmoral quite distinctly. It was number thirty-eight in their series of Cut-Out-and-Keep Guides to Our Royal Estates.’
Nobody had any better ideas, so we set off towards the castle, following Myrtle’s directions to the vegetable garden. At first we talked among ourselves as we went. My father said to the Snilth captain, ‘I’m terribly sorry for the rough way you were handled by our companions when they seized your ship.’ And she told him that it did not matter, none of the Snilth had been badly hurt, and the small injuries they had suffered had helped to convince the Mothmaker that they had been overpowered and done all they could to prevent the escape of Myrtle and Mrs Burton.
‘It disstresssed uss terribly to lose Myrtle, without even ssaying goodbye,’ said one of her companions. ‘But ssoon after you departed, ssomething wonderful happened. A ship returning from the battle besside the gasss-planet brought in a Ssnilth named Thsssss Sixspike, and with her came another, whom she had ressscued from an Earthlet ship … ’
‘Ssilissa!’ I cried excitedly.
The Snilth looked startled, in their Snilthish way. ‘How did the male hatchling know?’ one asked.
‘Because Ssilissa was taken from our ship,’ said Mr Munkulus. ‘She is our particular friend.’
‘We should have known she was a friend of Missss Mumby!’ said another of the Snilth. ‘She has sssuch exquisssite manners and was wearing a charming dressss.’
‘But is she all right?’ asked Jack.
‘As far as we know,’ said the Snilth captain. ‘We hid her at once, lessst the Mothmaker learns of her presssence in Mothssstorm.’
‘But why did Thsssss take her from the Sophronia?’ asked Father. ‘Was it simply misguided kindness? An attempt to reunite her with her own kind?’
‘Do you not know who your friend isss?’ asked the Snilth, wondering at our dimness. ‘Thsssss recognised her tail-club insstantly! She is of the clan of Hammertail, which was thought to have been extinguished many thousandss of yearss ago.’
Myrtle gasped. ‘You mean she is related to your brave, tragic queen from the olden days? The one who stood up against the Mothmaker? But I thought all her friends and family had been killed … ’
‘They were,’ said our Snilth friend soberly. ‘But her eggs, her unhatched eggs, were taken from her nessst and buried in the heart of a comet which the Mothmaker hurled far out across the gulfss of ssspace, sso that we could not hope for one of her hatchlings to grow up and lead a new rebellion.’ ‘Great Scott!’ cried Father. ‘But Ssilissa hatched from one of a clutch of eggs found in a comet! The others were broken, but hers was whole, and my colleagues at the Royal Xenological Institute were able to incubate it … Could it be that it was one of those same eggs?’
‘Something of a coincidence if it were not, I’d say,’ said Mother, smiling at the neatness of Providence, which must have guided that comet with its cargo of eggs through all the wilderness of space to her own sun.
‘Yesss!’ agreed the Snilth. ‘Ssilissa is one of the lossst hatchlings of Queen Zssthss! Her return is a sssign that our rebellion against the Mothmaker shall sssucceed.35 While the Mothmaker busies hersself with the attack upon thiss blue world, thousands of usss are preparing to rise up againsst her. And when it is over, we shall have a polite and ladylike queen to rule uss, jusst as you do.’
‘Ssilissa? A queen?’ said Nipper.
‘Rule over all them moths? Our Ssil?’ exclaimed Grindle.
‘Queen Ssil!’ Munkulus grinned.
The Tentacle Twins cooed with incredulity.
‘I always thought Ssilissa was a rather superior sort of person,’ said Myrtle, who had never thought anything of the sort, of course, but is always awfully impressed by anyone with a Title.
But we could talk no more of it, for we had to pass just then through a great cordon of Snilth sentries. We concealed the weapons we carried beneath our clothes, and our Snilth walked behind us with their dart-guns trained upon our persons and called out to thei
r comrades in their own fierce, hissing language, telling them that we were prisoners who they were taking before the Mothmaker for questioning. And by this clever ruse, we managed to pass through their lines unhindered, and through the avenues between the mighty moths, and were soon crunching over the frosty earth in the very shadow of the castle walls.
‘The castle is not quite finished,’ explained Myrtle to anyone who cared to listen. ‘Work on it only began two years ago. But it will be most genteel when it is completed. Over there beyond the ha-ha lies an ornamental loch which has been stocked with trout and a pair of Ganymedian water serpents. All the best Scottish lochs contain a monster.’
We looked where she pointed, but the water serpents were sensibly keeping out of sight beneath the water. Low over the pewtery waves the watchful moths hummed by.
The royal vegetable garden was sparse and bare at that season, with crusts of snow upon the dark earth in the raised beds and frost on the panes of the greenhouses. A gardener, who must have been pulling up leeks for the royal supper when the Snilth arrived, lay insensible beside his barrow, felled by a dart. Father cast his coat over the poor fellow to save him from being frozen as he slept, and we went on, through the turret door which Myrtle had suggested and up a winding stair, into a passage where soldiers in the uniforms of a Scottish regiment lay sprawled about, struck down by darts which had flown in through the windows as they leaned out to train their rifles on the attackers. A smell of powder smoke still hung in the chilly air. From somewhere ahead we heard a strange voice, both shrill and booming. It made our Snilth protectors flinch.
‘The Mothmaker!’ said Mother.
‘She is in the ballroom!’ said Myrtle, frowning as she consulted her mental map of the castle. ‘No doubt the Royal Family were gathered there when she assaulted the place. Oh, I do pray she has not harmed them!’