A wave of chittering laughter swept over the Yglhfm horde. As Yorik listened, he felt a tremor in the air, and a lambent blue light flickered through the cavern.
Come, Yorik, said Master Thomas, sweeping forward. Lord Ravenby has broken at last. Everything changes now.
Dark Doris approached too, murmuring sweetly, her teeth bared in a maniacal smile. She and her brother glistened with new strength. The darkness beyond, full of Dark Ones, was deepening. There were more and more of them each moment, the floor of the cavern slowly filling like a pond in a downpour.
Dark Doris reached her small white hands for his.
Then Yorik spotted a faint red glow, a space on the floor of the cavern where there were no Yglhfm. The broken stone tablet lay there.
With a leap, Yorik was astride the tablet, one foot on each broken half. Power tingled in his feet.
Master Thomas chuckled, then cleared his throat. When he spoke, he sounded almost human again. “Give in, will you, Yorik? My father has. Let us take back what is ours.”
“Erde isn’t yours,” said Yorik. “And you’re not Thomas.”
Dark Doris’s pretty laugh echoed through the cavern, piercing the sea of Yglhfm whispers. “Oh, dear Yorik. Erde was ours for many millennia, more than you can imagine. Long before the humans came and spoiled things. For ten thousand years, we longed to draw her back into us, to embrace her, to drain and diminish her, to bring her back into bondage.” She licked her lips. “And now we have.”
“You can’t take her completely,” said Yorik, his eyes casting about for a means of escape. “You’re still scared of the Princess.”
“Dear Yorik,” sighed Dark Doris. “Our masters have nothing to fear anymore. Look!”
She gestured to the portal. Yorik saw that it was no longer small enough to be blocked by the tablet. Now it dwarfed even the mammoths. With faint pops, giant Yglhfm were bubbling out, one after another. Ignoring Yorik, they rumbled toward the cavern entrance, stretching to fill it completely with their vast bodies, squeezing up toward the surface.
Thousands more of the tiny Yglhfm surged around them. The cavern was filling, pools of Dark Ones flowing in swift currents all around the tablet but never close enough to touch it. He felt their hunger grasping for him, as it had outside the mews. And as before, he felt a crawling sensation of panic and fear. His head filled with nightmare images of Erde enslaved by the Yglhfm, her defenders lying dead around her.
No, Yorik thought. It’s them. The Dark Ones do this. He concentrated on Susan and the clear lament she’d sung in the attic. He hummed a few bars, and the nightmares receded.
Master Thomas growled and edged closer, grimacing as he eyed the tablet.
“Yorik,” he began—but Yorik darted forward with ghostly speed, his right hand flashing into Thomas’s pocket. Then he was back on the tablet. He opened his hand and revealed Erde’s last two mud-balls.
Master Thomas hissed and spat.
“I wanted these back,” said Yorik.
Dark Doris laughed like tinkling glass. “Yorik, Yorik, poor little ghost. Two muddy bits against a million Yglhfm? Now that Lord Ravenby has succumbed, we can consume you quite easily, you know. Why don’t you come and take my hand?” As she reached toward Yorik, she began to change. Her face hollowed, her eyes became voids, and her skin smeared and faded. Master Thomas, too, seemed to be melting.
You will ssserve usss, they hissed, reaching out with their spindly arms, the remains of their flesh blackening and burning.
“I’m not anyone’s servant any longer, ever again,” said Yorik, and he jumped.
He clung with one hand to a mammoth’s rib jutting several feet over his head. Yglhfm pooled around Doris and Thomas, then boiled up into a mound, bearing them regally upward.
Yorik mounted the rib, then slid down to the mammoth’s spine, but Yglhfm were flowing onto that too. He leapt to the next skeleton and the next as Yglhfm tumbled after him. He spied a pile of mangled and broken bones with another skeleton lying on top of it, the highest point in the cavern, its ribs poking up toward the ceiling. In three swift, vaulting leaps, he landed on the pile. All around him the dark tide rose, lapping at his feet as he ran to the final skeleton and climbed its last rib.
A cluster of small Yglhfm blocked his path.
Ghost …, they began, their formless mouths gaping.
A mud-ball struck the cluster, bowling them aside. They fell into the swirling pools below. Yorik heard children’s laughter behind him.
At the tip of the rib, Yorik leapt, his hands thrusting into the stone ceiling. Like swimming, he reminded himself, hoping. And it worked—up and up he went, swimming into the stone, swimming up as fast as he could, the chaos of the cavern passing into silence as stone became dirt. He swam until his fingers broke into clear air and he emerged from the grass under the light of Pale Moon Luna.
He pushed himself up onto the Manor lawn, which was crawling with tiny Dark Ones.
Oke and Dye raced by in their green spirit forms, snarling and biting, seizing one Dark One after another in their teeth and ripping them to wisps. But there were far too many now, and Yorik knew the valiant hounds had no hope of fighting the enormous Yglhfm rumbling up from below the Manor.
He heard crashes and shouts from the Estate’s far meadow. Turning as he raced across the lawn, he saw the black shadow of the Indomitable against the flame-blue clouds. The dirigible’s cabin was half lit, and the ship was listing nose down away from its mooring tower, crewmen hanging from dangling ropes. It swerved against the dock, and the gangplank fell, crashing into the meadow, followed by splintered beams from the tower.
Yorik sprinted toward the aviary glade, evading the dark voids gliding everywhere. He dodged through the forest and along the wooded paths. Horses were running free, and shots could be heard, along with the screams of men and women. The deadly pale light of small fires sprang up all around.
As he neared the glade, he glimpsed through the trees what looked like a wall. It blocked his way, and he was forced to stop before it, puzzled. The wall was broad and made of nothing at all, and for an instant he felt again as though he were gazing into the black void of the universe. He reached for it, and his hand grew cold. He pulled back. He could see what this was now—a blockade of Yglhfm, thousands of them having joined the wide circle around the glade. They were piling up as he watched, already nearly up to his shoulders. This time there was no opening in the line. He gauged the height carefully. He thought he had jumped at least that high in the mammoth graveyard—an apparent advantage of weighing almost nothing. He raced back, turned, and charged the darkness, leaping up and over and landing within the safety of the glade.
He found the Princess sprawled facedown beside the grass cradle. Erde had dwindled to the size of an acorn at the bottom of her bed.
“Princess, Princess,” he said, shaking her shoulder. “You have to get up!”
The Princess raised her tear-streaked face to look blearily at Yorik. “No,” she said. Her face plopped back onto the grass.
“Please,” begged Yorik. “I know what Thomas did. I know how the Dark Ones managed to return. There’s a portal under the Manor. It had been sealed with a tablet, but the Dark Ones made Thomas break it. The tablet had runes on it. I think they had the red lion’s blood in them—”
The Princess lifted her head again and sniffed. “Runes? What runes?”
“I don’t know, I’ve never seen them before—”
“Draw them,” ordered the Princess. She waved her leafy twig, and a patch of dirt appeared on the grass.
Yorik used his finger to draw what he had seen on the tablet. His whole hand tingled as he drew.
“Hmph,” the Princess said, sitting up. “That’s a powerful spell. Humans did that? I’m impressed. Those were the old humans, though. These new ones are worthless.” She gestured toward the world generally.
“Can the runes help? Can I fight the Dark Ones with them?”
“Too late,” the Princess said. “And anyway, you’d need a new lion, and … oh, it’s completely beyond your capacity to understand.”
“Then you have to fight them,” said Yorik. “You have to leave the glade and fight them! You’d only be doing it to save Erde. Your father would forgive you.”
Her eyes filled with silver tears. “No, he wouldn’t,” she croaked. “You don’t understand. Gods don’t think like humans. I can’t defy him!” The Princess dropped her twig and threw herself into the dirt, sobbing again.
Yorik was about to reply when he was interrupted by a rackety, droning sound in the sky overhead.
He looked up. The Indomitable loomed directly above.
The rackety sound was wrong. The dirigible normally purred as it prowled the sky, flying straight and proud in the service of Lord Ravenby and his guests. Now it careened over the trees, and Yorik could see people running through the cabin brandishing weapons. Flame burst from an engine, and then the ship disappeared from view.
Yorik stood, counting the seconds. Susan, he thought. Lord Ravenby’s last loyal servant would surely be on board.
Even the Princess had looked up from her sobbing. “Now that is the most ridiculous way to travel I have ever—”
The aviary glade shook with the power of a massive explosion.
The speed and direction of the dirigible told Yorik the terrible news. “The topiary garden,” he said to the Princess, and then he was running.