I looked at Mother, but she said nothing. She simply reached inside her gown, as if to reassure herself that the dreadful ampule of Dark Energy was still there.
We walked on along corridors lined with stags’ heads and speckled trout in glass-fronted cases, our feet falling silently upon thick carpets woven with patterns of Gothick thistles. We passed rooms where many ladies and gentlemen lay in postures of abandon, sleeping off the effects of Snilth darts.
‘It is like Sleeping Beauty’s castle, in the fairy tale,’ whispered Charity.
Ahead loomed a great carven door, where two Snilth stood guard. They hissed a challenge when they saw us coming, and our ‘captors’ responded in the same harsh tongue and hustled us through the door into Balmoral’s magnificent ballroom, where paper-chains and Christmas wreaths hung from the stout oak beams and from the carved railings of a sort of minstrels’ gallery which spanned the room. A fire crackled cheerfully in a huge hearth and a beautifully decorated Christmas Tree reached almost to the ceiling. It should have been a scene of festive bliss, for all the Royal Family were present; I recognised Prince Albert and little Prince Edward among the various courtiers and ladies-in-waiting. But not one of them was conscious. They lay in heaps upon the floor or spread-eagled over chairs and sofas, some of the gentlemen still clutching the swords and pistols with which they had sought to defend the Family against the Snilth. Snilth warriors stood all around the edges of the room, so motionless that they might have been no more than suits of ornamental armour.
On the rug before the fire was the Mothmaker. She had made herself into human form: a tall and stately lady, not unlike Mother in her looks. But I guessed at once who she was. There was something shadowy and flickering about her still: a sense of vast power pent up inside a shape which could not quite contain it. She had raised one arm, one slim white hand, and she was pointing at Queen Victoria, who hung suspended in mid-air a few feet away.
I had never seen the Queen before, though Myrtle had of course (indeed, Myrtle once sat upon her by mistake). She is a surprisingly small and portly person, very cosy-looking in her tartan dress, and I must say she was behaving with great courage, for most people might be a trifle alarmed if a demi-god barged into their living room, rendered their whole household unconscious and lifted them six feet off the carpet by means of some unnatural science. Her Majesty, however, seemed quite unflustered. I suppose you learn how to deal with such situations if you are the Queen.
‘I do not know who you are, madam,’ she was saying, as our party entered. ‘But I am not amused! You will kindly put me down and explain yourself.’
‘Explain myself?’ cried the Mothmaker, in that voice which Myrtle has already described to you, which seemed to have an invisible choir chanting behind it. ‘I am so far beyond your feeble comprehension that I doubt it can be done! I am the Mothmaker! I am your successor, the new ruler of your empire, and all your subjects shall henceforth be my slaves. I was merely curious to see who you are and how you rule and what it is that makes them love you so and put pictures of your head upon coins and stamps and dinnerware. I think I should like pictures of my head upon such things when I rule in your place.’
Then she turned and saw us filing in. Her eyes flashed (and I do not mean that just as a figure of speech; they really did, as if some glimmer of her Shaper fire showed suddenly behind them). ‘What is this?’ she hissed. ‘How dare you interrupt me when –’
And then she recognised Myrtle.
And then her eyes slid past Myrtle and she saw Mother.
‘I am the Mothmaker! I am your successor, the new ruler of your empire, and all your subjects shall henceforth be my slaves.’
And for a moment the two Shapers stared at each other.
‘So,’ the Mothmaker said softly. She made a quick movement with her upraised hand and Queen Victoria went soaring upward as if on an invisible string until she collided with the topmost branches of the Christmas Tree, whereupon various strands of tinsel seemed to come to life and writhed about her like serpents, lashing her securely to the treetop.36
The Mothmaker forgot her royal captive then and came towards us, the edges of her skirts all blurring into fires and shadows. ‘So you lied,’ she said, still staring at Mother, as though the rest of us did not exist. ‘You lied to me, and to your creations too. Even to these children of yours. When I broke your mortal body your essence did not perish, but fled away to some hiding place and to a new form. Coward! You hadn’t the courage to die after all!’
‘Not if it meant leaving you in charge of my worlds,’ said Mother, reaching inside her gown for the Dark Energy ampule. But the Mothmaker turned to her waiting Snilth, hissing a command, and they sprang to life.
In the next instant the great ballroom had become a battlefield! Snilth darts whooshed everywhere, spiking into priceless paintings and upsetting valuable vases, instantly striking down both Yarg and Mr Grindle, whose blunderbuss went off as he fell, blasting a splendid stag’s head off the wall. It dropped on Mother, knocking her to the floor, and the precious ampule rolled from her grasp and went skittering away across the carpets. Meanwhile, Myrtle’s Snilth admirers, apologising profusely for such unladylike behaviour, shot back, but their darts could not pierce the armour of their comrades; they rebounded, causing danger and inconvenience to the rest of us.
Jack and Father dragged an armoire in front of the door to stop other Snilth coming to their mistress’s aid. Squidley, leaping to protect his fallen twin, thrashed his crackling tentacles, and six or seven of the armoured villainesses were flung aside, stunned by his electric touch. Then he too went down, positively pincushioned with darts, his tentacles sparking fitfully as he lapsed into unconsciousness. Mr Munkulus with his four strong arms sent armoured Snilth flying like rag dolls, and Mother went on hands and knees through the mêlée, hunting for the lost ampule.
Jack had his pistol out; I saw him put five bullets through the Mothmaker’s heart, and when none took effect he aimed instead at the great iron chandelier which hung from the centre of the ceiling, directly above her. It came smashing down, crushing and trapping her beneath its spokes. But she could not be trapped for long; she restored herself to her true form and came flowing from beneath the chandelier like smoke. A writhing tentacle reached out from her, its tip condensed into something as hard and dark as flint, and Jack ducked as it swept over his head. It swatted one of the Mothmaker’s own Snilth aside and hurled Mr Munkulus out of a window.
All these things I saw in flashes, like scenes glimpsed by lightning, for I was busy myself. A Snilth had seized me from behind in the first seconds of the battle and I had to struggle to break free of her. At last my flailing feet found a portion which her armour did not protect; she doubled over with a muffled, ‘Ooof!’ Then Charity Cruet, grabbing a marble bust of Nelson which stood upon a nearby table, landed a ringing blow upon her helmet and laid the Snilth senseless on the carpet.
‘Huzzah!’ I cried, drawing my cutlass – only for it to be dashed from my grasp by a swiping shadow-tentacle! The Mothmaker now filled the centre of the room like a great ghostly octopus, darting blows at us with all her flinty fists. Nipper was hit between the eye-stalks and collapsed with a clatter. I myself was batted into the path of a Snilth, who raised a vicious knife and would have cut me in two had not another Snilth struck her down with the butt of an ancient musket seized from a display on the wall. ‘I’m mosst dreadfully ssssorry,’ she started to tell her victim. Then a blow from the Mothmaker flung her with a crash against the wall, where her spiny armour quite spoiled a portrait of Queen Adelaide.
‘Art! Myrtle!’ It was Mother, beckoning us into a nook behind a large leather sofa. We crept in with her and found that we were hidden from the fray. Better yet, she had discovered the ampule! Unharmed, it had rolled beneath the sofa, and now she held it in her hand once more. But how could she use it, with those shadow-tentacles weaving just above our heads and the air above the sofa singing with flying darts? The tip of one spiked cl
ean through the horse-hair stuffing and almost scratched me.
‘This is not going as well as I might have hoped,’ Mother confided, and she hugged each of us. ‘Thank you both so much for helping to bring me here and keeping that creature distracted, but the rest I shall do alone. You stay hidden here until it is all over.’
I guessed at once what she meant to do. Why had I not seen it before? It was so like her! She meant to show herself and let the other Shaper seize her in those tentacles again. Then she would open the ampule and the Dark Energy within it would destroy both her and the Mothmaker at once.
‘Stop her!’ I hissed at Myrtle.
‘What?’
‘Don’t you see? Mother means to sacrifice herself!’
‘Oh!’
For once, Myrtle showed a flash of quick thinking. She pinched the shaft of that dart I have mentioned – the one that was sticking through the sofa-back – between finger and thumb and pulled it free. Careful not to scratch herself with its envenomed tip, she used it to prick Mother’s bare white shoulder as she wriggled past us on her way out to do battle with the Mothmaker.
‘Myrtle!’ gasped Mother, half turning, her free hand moving to the place where the dart had touched. She looked at us and understood. ‘Oh you dear, foolish children!’ She tried to rise, to lift the ampule which she clutched, but she could not. Her eyelids drooped; she swayed towards me and I caught her. ‘Blast!’ she said, as she slid down into unconsciousness. ‘I knew I should have chosen the dinosaur … ’
I raised my head and gingerly peered over the chair-back. The room beyond was full of pistol smoke, and the floor was hidden by the heaped-up bodies of friends and foes and minor royalty. The Snilth had all fallen. Of my companions, only Jack and Charity were still on their feet. Jack’s pistol was empty, but he was brandishing a massive antler which he must have wrenched from the fallen stag’s head. Charity had armed herself with some Highland clansman’s age-old shield, which was quite porcupined with the Snilth darts she had warded off. They stood side by side near the middle of the room, facing the Mothmaker, who hung above the hearthrug, rumbling and flickering like an indoor thunderstorm.
‘Where is the Shaper?’ boomed her cathedral of a voice. She lashed at Jack with a shadow-tentacle, and he sidestepped and whacked it with his antler, striking sparks from the flinty tip. ‘Where are her puny mortal children? I shall show her again what death means!’
‘Here I am!’ said Myrtle brightly, standing up behind the chair.
The Mothmaker’s dark form swung towards her. The whirling fires whirled faster. ‘Girl!’
‘Young lady, if you please,’ said Myrtle. ‘My mother is unconscious; look, here she lies, behind this sofa. And I believe those are my father’s feet I see poking up from behind that chest or ottoman. So, as my parents are both indisposed, I wonder if I may be of any help to you?’
I was reminded how jolly plucky my sister can be when the occasion calls for it. But there was not time to stand and gawp. Behind the chair, where only I could see, Myrtle was making fierce little gestures with her hands, and, though she was not using Cruet’s Universal Sign Language, I guessed at once what they meant. While she was distracting our enemy with polite conversation, I was to strike the fatal blow!
I must confess, it made me a trifle nervous. It was not the first time that the fate of our empire and solar system has depended on me,37 but always before there have been others there to help: Mother, and Jack, and the Sophronias, and people much more grown-up and capable than yours truly. Now Mother lay insensible behind the furniture, Jack was cornered and, apart from Myrtle, I was all alone. If I went wrong, the races of the Sun would live for evermore as mere serfs of the Mothmaker, and doubtless down all the miserable centuries of their captivity they would tell their children, ‘This is all the fault of that dunderhead Art Mumby.’
With trembling hands I prised the ampule from poor Mother’s grasp. Luckily, unconscious courtiers and small royal children lay in a sort of slumbrous drift beside our sofa, so it was easy for me to remain hidden as I crawled out. I quickly made my way to a quaint little spiral stair which led up to the minstrels’ gallery. I was fearful that at any moment the Mothmaker would see me with one or other of her myriad eyes and lash out a flint-tipped limb to end my games, but she did not. She had other matters to consider: namely, Myrtle.
‘I wonder that you have the gall to face me, Miss Mumby,’ said the rogue Shaper, looming over my sister like a typhoon with a sore head. ‘What shall I do with you to teach you manners?’
‘You may do whatever you wish,’ said Myrtle primly. ‘My manners are already quite perfect. Many of your Snilth think so. They have grown very tired of the way you lead them rampaging about the Universe with no regard for their feelings and no time to enjoy the refined things in life.’
‘What is this nonsense?’
‘They hate you, you know,’ said Myrtle sweetly. ‘And I think they will be rid of you in the end, however many of them you kill. Because decency and genteel behaviour always triumph over brutality in the end. And that’s what you are, I am afraid. I don’t mean to be unkind, but you are a brute.’
All this I heard as I crept along that carven gallery above the Mothmaker, and it was a wonder to me that the Mothmaker did not crush Myrtle like a fly. (Heaven knows, I have often wanted to crush Myrtle like a fly and I am not a deranged entity with god-like powers.) When Myrtle called her a brute, a great basso-profundo rumble came from somewhere deep within the Mothmaker, and I thought, This is it; now the poor, silly goose is a goner for sure.
But at that moment, Queen Victoria, peering at the gallery from her perch atop the Christmas Tree, saw me sneaking along it and cried out, ‘Oh, well done! Huzzah! Go it, noble paragon of British boyhood!’
Which was all very flattering, but not particularly helpful, since it served to draw the Mothmaker’s attention to the gallery, and to me.
‘Art!’ shrieked Myrtle.
‘Over here! Over here, furnace-face,’ screamed Jack and Charity at the Shaper, Jack jabbing his antler at her, Charity rattling her shield.
But they could not distract the Mothmaker. Perhaps she sensed the danger above her. Perhaps some Shaper instinct told her what it was that sloshed and coiled inside the ampule that I held. Her shadow-tentacles, which had been poised to pulverise poor Myrtle, lashed upwards instead. One punched through the gallery rail a foot ahead of me, another a foot behind. Others gripped the mountings which held the whole structure to the walls and wrenched it sideways, and suddenly I was falling down and down amid a storm of splintered wood, while the Mothmaker beneath me seemed to open a vast, shadowy maw!
I had just sense enough, as I plunged into her blackness, to grope with one hand for the ampule that I still clutched in the other and pull out its stopper.
‘Oh crikey!’ I heard myself exclaim.
There was a blinding light, and then only the darkness.
Epilogue
By Miss Myrtle Mumby.
I am told that the explosion was so loud that it could be heard all over Scotland and shattered windows as far afield as Edinburgh (and probably in Glasgow too, though they are used to that sort of thing there and noticed nothing untoward). How strange that such a mighty blast could emanate from such a tiny bottle, but that was no doubt down to Shaper science, which contains so many mysteries.
Naturally, you will be wondering why I was not blown into pieces? (I am very glad that I was not, incidentally, for I think it would be most impolite to have bits of oneself scattered all over the landscape, where total strangers might trip over them.) It seems that the energy released by the uncorking of the ampule was of a sort which is harmful only to Shapers, and so all that the rest of us suffered was a mild dizziness and a ringing in our ears. My brother Art, it is true, was somewhat injured by his fall from the minstrels’ gallery. As the light and dizziness of the blast faded, we found him lying in the middle of the room, clutching his ankle, which turned out to be broken, and employin
g some most unsuitable words which I believe he must have learned from Mr Grindle. However, since he had been so very brave, I decided not to chide him.
Of the Mothmaker, nothing remained except for a nasty black substance, rather like dried seaweed, which was plastered over all the walls of the room. We few who were still conscious after the dart-battle stood amid the ruin of our enemy and looked at one another: myself, Jack, Charity Cruet and poor, wounded Art. But before any of us could speak a word or unburden ourselves of the many passionate emotions which seethed within us, we became aware of a great din outside and, running to the window, looked out through a large Mr-Munkulus-shaped hole in the glass to behold extraordinary events unfolding in the sky above Balmoral.
The moths which had surrounded the castle were all taking flight, blundering into the sky in the most senseless, clumsy, mothy way you may imagine. Not all the efforts of their Snilth handlers could persuade them to stay upon the ground, and I saw many Snilth leap from their mounts’ backs as they rose, jumping down into the heather.
‘The creatures must have been controlled somehow by the mind of the Mothmaker,’ Jack reasoned, looking up from splinting Art’s ankle. ‘Now that she is no more, they are simple moths again.’
‘Well, I hope they do not eat all our clothes!’ I said sharply, placing a protective hand upon my bodice.
Jack grinned at me, his dear face flickering in the shadow of a million wings. ‘They’re leaving, Myrtle. Bound back to space, where they belong.’
And then, coming down through the flocks of fleeing insects, we beheld several of the great Snilth fish-ships, which extended skinny landing-legs and settled in the castle grounds. Their mouths opened and their hatches gaped, and out raced a veritable army of Snilth, armour shining redly in the light of the westering sun.
‘Reinforcements!’ gasped Charity. ‘Oh, they’ll kill us!’