For a moment, there was silence and stillness.
Then blood issued from Harper’s neck.
There was a flash of lightning, which stabbed through the canopy and struck the white tower, cracking its foundation and blinding the plaza in green. A boom of thunder followed, so loud that the tenement’s plaza-facing windows shattered.
Varia was screaming, a long, wordless grief.
The scream sounded like nothing to Pontis. His own fury drowned it out. His mind emptied of thoughts and filled only with a crackling rage. There was no consideration as he charged forward, the coat propelling him at immense speed toward the eyeless man. The eyeless man cast Harper to the ground, drew his knife back and swung at Pontis. But Pontis was inside the arc of the blow. He collided with the eyeless man and drove him backwards into the trees. The trees split and snapped as the eyeless man crashed through them, coming to rest finally against a massive oak, which rattled with their impact, scattering leaves. Pontis did not need to confer with Varia to use Tetragrammar. It exploded from the coat with as of yet unseen power. It obliterated the oak into sawdust and sent the eyeless man’s body ragdolling across the forest floor.
Pontis's fury boiled through him, blinding, so that all he could see was the eyeless man, a target to obliterate. Then he remembered Harper, and his fury morphed to panic. The sudden shift drew another lightning strike through the canopy, which again pelted the white tower, opening another crack along its side.
As thunder boomed, the people of Lowood Den blinked around, bewildered.
Pontis glided back toward his sister. Her small body was crumbled on the ground. He was nearly to her, his arms already outstretched, when something seized him, jerking him abruptly to stop.
The eyeless man, his skin caked in wood dust and dirt, held him firmly by the ankle. His mouth twisted as he flung Pontis back into the trees. Pontis collided with a trunk, bouncing and colliding with another. He tumbled across the dirt and came to rest on his back, his vision swimming.
The eyeless man landed on top of him and plunged his knife into Pontis's chest.
Pontis expected rending pain. He expected his life to flash before him. He expected an eruption of blood from his heart. But none of that came.
He looked down, finding that the coat had folded itself over Pontis, its faintly glowing material shielding his body from the knife’s blade. The eyeless man tried again, this time aiming for Pontis's throat. Again the coat interceded, deflecting the knife like a bird off glass.
The eyeless man snarled with anger, his tongue wagging like a worm from a hole. Without thinking, Pontis reached up and grasped the tongue in his fist. It was dry and coarse, allowing Pontis to get a firm grip—a grip compressed by many hundreds of pounds of force by the coat.
The eyeless man’s eye sockets widened. He gouged at Pontis with his knife, the coat deterring each strike.
Pontis pulled on the tongue, stretching it grotesquely. The eyeless man recoiled, overwhelmed perhaps by an instinct to escape. The tongue stretched further, drawing thin. Pontis gritted his teeth and yanked, and the tongue ripped at its base—its dry, rutted flesh tearing in long strips—and came free in his hand.
The eyeless man stood abruptly, dropping his knife to the ground. He brought a hand to his mouth, from which black dirt leaked and spurted, and stumbled, groping out with the other hand—blinded, it seemed—and lurched away through the trees.
Pontis looked at the tongue in his hand. Before his eyes it shriveled and dessicated, breaking into chunks of soil. He sneered and wiped his hand on the ground. A second later he was up and flying through the trees.
The white tower had two enormous cracks down its sides, one larger than the other. Through the doorway, Pontis saw the fates of those he’d been too late to save: A pile of heads and bodies, their blood seeping out beneath them across the dirty floor.
He found Harper unmoving, her pajamas stained red, and lifted her into his arms. The people of Lowood Den stumbled, dazed, around the plaza. Some blinked up at the lightening sky. Others peered at Harper and Pontis, their brows furrowed, as if attempting to solve a difficult riddle.
Pontis's Ma turned in a circle, her hands opening and closing at her sides. She looked directly at her son, and then at her daughter bleeding in his arms. She blinked twice, and for a moment Pontis thought he saw a flash of understanding, and of horror, in her face. Then she looked off into the trees and wandered away.
‘They can’t help us right now,’ Varia said. ‘But we need to get Harper to a one who can. Now.’
Pontis stood, his sister’s limp body cradled in his arms. Blood runneled from the slit in her neck and onto his shirt. Her skin was bluish, just like Varia’s had been.
Pontis hugged her to his chest and closed his eyes, bringing up an image in his mind, a place they needed to be.
‘We’re going,’ Varia said, and a moment later the coat closed around them, and they were gone.
#
The man in the long mask watched the boy destroy his outpost and break his invocation.
He watched the boy maim Antigon, render him as useless as a rotted log.
He watched the boy wrap the bleeding girl in his arms and disappear.
The boy in green.
He watched these things from the shadow of a tree near the base of his outpost. He could have intervened, but he was too distraught, too appalled, and too shocked at what he saw. It was impossible, after all. It was impossible because he had seen to it, deep long ago, that this interruption would never come again. He had taken every precaution. It was impossible. What he saw there in the shallow woods of that boring little city was impossible. It was impossible.
The man in the long mask razed his outpost and paused at the edge of the hole to sneer at the wandering idiots of this little city, blinking and turning in circles. It grieved him, the flesh left behind. It was Granmama’s flesh. A waste. But he would reclaim it. He would return. There was no interruption so great as to stop his course. Not anymore. He stepped into the hole and alit to his fortalice.
He made sure to close the entrance behind him. If what he saw earlier was what it appeared, the only explanation was that he had been careless. He had forgotten to close the door to his home, and thieves had taken advantage of his oversight. If what he saw was what he thought he saw, there was no one to blame but himself.
But it had not been.
It could not be.
He hurried down the spiral staircase, his robes trailing behind him. He needed no light to navigate the fortalice in which he had dwelled deep long. It was as easy for him as navigating the rooms of his own mind. He passed through the mantle and into the grove. Mist roiled through the white beeches, and the animals that roamed the place peered out at him from behind the trees with their wide, frightened gazes. Antigon should not succumb to anyone, let alone a child. Yet he had, and now wandered through the streets of that flimsy city, disarmed, disgraced and impotent. Was it possible? What other explanation could there be? He would know soon enough. He pushed open the door to his tower proper, entered into the foyer, and froze dead in his tracks.
The seatback of the chair at his table—burdened deep long by that despicable machine—was bare.
The man in the long mask stood for a long time. Thoughts hemorrhaged through his mind, thoughts about the past, and the future.
He recalled everything he had gone through to remove that machine from its original operator, to ensure that it would never again interrupt the course of events. It was deep long ago, but felt like just the day before last. The War on the Mountain had been lost, and the man in the long mask’s allies were mostly dead. Granmama Nonk’non was imprisoned, Casshawn thus reposed. People, in all their filth and perversion, were again multiplying. It was a dark time.
But the man in the long mask was determined not to crawl away and die. Not like the others had. He believed—he still believed—that there was hope for resurgence. He had lured the machine’s operator to his fortalice under the guise of reconciliation, of mutual understanding, of a joint path forward. He showed the operator his rooms, and spoke candidly about his past. He was so convincing in his act that he almost started to believe it himself. The operator for his part did believe it, and took pity on the man in the long mask. It was a ploy that was too simple to fail; twist at their fleshy human sympathies, and their hard defensive instincts would crumble.
They dined together, drank proof and shared stories about life before Nonk’non, before Casshawn and the Plangent Age and the glorious fields of death. The man in the long mask feigned nostalgia for a world he found, in his heart, detestable, rampant with the illness of humanity. He pretended to have regrets, to long for a return to things before.
The operator—a stupid man in a brilliant machine—swallowed every lie. It took only a few hours until he let down his guard. He removed the machine and draped in over the back of the chair, a gesture of vulnerability in return for the same he believed the man in the long mask showed him. That was when Antigon, heeding his careful instructions, crept from behind a pillar and drove his knife into the man’s soft skull.
It was a humbling moment for the man in the long mask. A profound historic victory won in private, with no one to share in its glory. But it had to be that way. For all anyone knew, the machine and its operator had abandoned them. Their heartbreak at their savior’s perceived betrayal hastened the process of forgetting.
For all that deep long the machine remained draped over that chair. He had tried to move it—on numerous occasions over the centuries—but when he touched it he was scalded by a shock of energy. He instructed Antigon to move it, but the same thing occurred. He figured it was programmed for handling only by a single operator—a man now dead in the chancel, the first sacrament of many to come—and so he left it there, unafraid of further interruptions, and set about the lonely, grueling work of freeing Granmama.
But he had been wrong.
The machine’s reappearance, now when Granmama’s freedom was imminent, felt almost preordained. But the man in the long mask knew that such conditions did not exist. Choices were made, labors were undertaken, and outcomes depended on action. He had taken preparations. He was prepared for action. Just because he could not touch the despicable machine did not mean he could not observe it. He had learned things. He started back toward the mantle to refashion Antigon. He had learned a great deal. Nothing was going to impede the course of his will.