[Agatha]

It was hard work. They were just boys a handful of years older than me, but afterwards I was totally exhausted. Moving dead weight is more difficult than it looks, and I cut my hand breaking the key. I cursed as loud as I could, and the pain somehow subsided.

Stargazer chimed in to ask if there was anything it could do to help.

Nothing, I replied. You've already done enough.

You saved me. This doesn't make us even halfway even. The Many Armed Folk is indebted to you, Agatha.

***

[Tristan]

"Wake up, dude! Wake up! What the hell, Tristan!"

Someone was shaking me vigorously. I tried to open my eyes, but they were too caked with gunk. I felt a retch welling up my throat. Bent forward and puked between my knees. Or at least I hoped it had gone like that, my eyes still wouldn't open.

I belched loudly.

"How charming."

Agatha.

I took off the goggles and rubbed my eyes, and finally managed to open them.

Agatha was grinning broadly, sitting on the seat next to mine.

"How the hell..." I wheezed.

"I'm immune to Bridge side-effects, remember? Got superpowers, me."

I tried to stand up and fell back onto my seat, head spinning and stomach in turmoil. I tasted something metallic. I touched my lips, and the gloved hand came back bloodstained.

"Take it easy, champ," Agatha said.

I didn't dare to reply for fear of throwing up again.

The light made it clear that we had left Screaming Hell behind. Bright, warm, coming from a cloudless turquoise sky crossed by four little white moons. The Little Sisters, Eridani's fellow travelers. Impossibly tall and sharp snow-capped mountains on the horizon, and luscious woods all around.

The train was negotiating a slight downward slope. In a few miles the railway would be traveling through the forest, and trees would be the only view from aboard. We were moving quite slowly, and I could hear the hissing sound of vapor being vented from the steam engine.

"Tristan, I'd hate to rush you, but do you reckon you're about to get yourself together or not? There's a couple of things I'd like to do in the next few minutes."

"What's going on?" I managed to croak.

"Seadreamer is experiencing technical problems." Agatha grinned. "The Helmsman of the train, I mean."

"Are we going to crash or something?"

She rolled her eyes. "Not at all, you moron. It's a set-up. The Helmsman is helping us run away. Seadreamer says the railway crosses an ancient commercial route called Karshvar Path that leads to Typhon Library. It can't stop, but it is faking mechanical problems to slow down to a crawl and let us get off as close to the Karshvar Path as possible. As soon as they wake up, the engineers are going to have their hands full."

The fog in my head was beginning to clear. "And how about the airmen and the Guild of Abomination people?"

Agatha's grin broadened. She showed me two key bows, broken at the shoulder. "Everyone's nice and snug in the other coach. I've had to drag the guys babysitting us all by myself, by the way. Next time around I wouldn't mind a little help. Then I locked both doors of the passenger compartment and broke the keys in the locks. Seadreamer says we are going to reach the Karshvar Path in twenty-five minutes."

"Hell of a job, if you don't mind me saying so."

"Yeah, saving the day is tough work but someone's gotta do it."

***

The airmen were not happy at all about the situation, and they were pretty vocal about it. There was an intercom connecting the coaches, and curses and threats began to stream out of the speakers as soon as the first ones came back to their senses and found out they were locked up.

The funny part was hearing the engineers tell them to shut up because they had more pressing matters to deal with, and hearing the airmen threaten dire retribution if they didn't come to their help right away.

The Guild people were the funniest of all: they just plain didn't care about us or the Stargazer crew. They had stopped to pick us up only because Castle Vostok High Command had told them so, but they weren't interested at all in the squabble between us and the airmen. If they had to spend the remainder of the voyage locked inside the coach, so be it, as long as they reached Imoogi more or less on schedule.

Jack and Saoirse came to slowly and painfully, retching and shivering and gasping. Saoirse was faster, Jack slower, and he had blood coming out of his ears, but within a few minutes they were both more or less operational.

I gave them a quick recap of the situation as Agatha examined the map of the Walk of the Gods I had liberated from Stargazer.

Out of the windows, the treetops were coming level with the train. In a few miles the railroad was going to be only thirty feet above ground level, on an embankment similar to the one on Gliese.

"Seadreamer says four minutes and we're there," Agatha announced.

"All right," Saoirse replied with her mouth full. We had just finished ransacking the small galley of the coach, and now we had our pockets full of stale biscuits and beef jerky, plus some water bottles. The bottles were made of glass and quite uncomfortable to carry around, but it was all there was.

I looked at Saoirse chewing merrily away and felt my stomach churn.

***

[Agatha]

Time to go, Agatha.

All right.

We were on the platform at the front end of the coach, under cover of the thick curtain of vapor coming from the steam engine. The back of the second tender was before us, a smooth wall of shiny steel with an armored hatch that opened only from the inside. Nobody could reach the crew compartment from the rest of the train if the crew didn't allow them to, and that was a safety measure in case the monsters started eating the minds of the passengers.

The woods were lush and verdant, and most of the trees were so tall that the roofs of the passenger coaches didn't even reach half their height. The locomotive was whistling incessantly to scare away the most enterprising deer and bears.

You have a few minutes before the train starts accelerating, Seadreamer said. The engineers have overridden my command systems, and the pressure is building. I'm not controlling the train anymore.

Tough luck my friend The One Who Dreams About The Sea has a competent crew instead of just the standard run-of-the-mill slackers, Stargazer said. I could feel a smile in its words.

Right. Thanks, dudes. Take care.

You too, Agatha. And remember, the Many Armed Folk owes you.

We were going just a tiny bit faster than a brisk walk. I snapped my fingers.

"Down we go, people. The way we agreed to do it."

They all nodded, then Tristan stepped down the boarding ladder and jumped to the ground. The ballast was made of fist-sized stones so old and weather-beaten to be almost without hard edges.

Jack helped Saoirse down the ladder and Tristan caught her by the waist and set her down. Next came Jack, with his jacket pockets full of water bottles. We had decided it was safer gathering all that glass on a single man and helping him disembark instead of having each of us run the risk of falling and getting cut with glass shards.

"You keep your hands where they belong, dude," I warned Tristan as I started down the ladder. Goodbye, guys.

Goodbye to you, Agatha, and may our paths cross again.

8

[Agatha]

Following Seadreamer's instructions, we walked on the embankment following the railroad tracks for a couple of miles. The train disappeared in the distance, clattering louder and louder as the steam engine regained operational pressure and the locomotive gathered speed, leaving a thick plume of black smoke in its wake. The next train was scheduled to leave Castle Vostok in four days, so we had the railway for us.

We reached the Karshvar Path not long before mid-afternoon. The foliage was so thick that one moment we were in the middle of the forest, the next we were looking down at the road crossing the railway.

The Karshvar Path was a dirt road wide enough to allow two wagon trains traveling in opposite directions meet and go ahead without major troubles. It ran more or less perpendicular to the railway, thirty feet below the track level and maybe a couple of feet below ground level. It was one of those ancient roads so old and worn to have progressively become more similar to canals or trenches than roads. The railway crossed it with a single-span steel truss bridge.

We negotiated the downward slope of the embankment slowly and carefully, just to keep on the safe side of the glass bottles. All around was silence, broken only by birds calling and leaves rustling.

There were shallow grooves in the hard dirt surface of the road, dug by wagon wheels, but I had no idea how old they could be.

"So, what's the plan?" Saoirse asked as we started along the road.

"Easy," I shrugged. "We walk."

"How far?"

"There's a place we have to go," Tristan explained patiently. "It's called the Typhon Library. It's full of wise and nice people. They will give us shelter and protection."

Saoirse frowned. "Why should we need protection? We are far from the monsters now."

Because the League wants to kidnap and torture me, and you and your brother are deserters and there's a firing squad waiting for you, I thought. Let's see how you deal with this, Tristan.

"Because some people think we are bad. We have just to persuade them that we are good, and everything will be alright."

I rolled my eyes.

***

[Tristan]

We walked until sunset without meeting anyone. Nobody on foot, nobody on horseback, nobody on wagons. Nobody at all, only our voices and the birdsongs to keep us company. The temperature was mild, it was the end of the spring. The forest was a uniform wall of trees on both sides, with thick undergrowth and no sign of human disturbance to be seen. According to the Walk of the Gods map, and if I had calculated the scale correctly, there was a river about twenty miles ahead. We could survive all the way to the river with the water we had, but it was likely we were going to meet minor streams along the path. The map was so large-scale that anything narrower than a mile barely registered.

We decided to stop for the night shortly after sunset. The day had begun before dawn with a battle against a horror from the Unholy Realm, had continued with an air crash and a mutiny, and had ended with a Faraway Bridge crossing and a breakout. Quite enough to leave us exhausted.

I went a few yards into the woods, hacking my way through the dense undergrowth with both hands, and found a small clearing more or less invisible from the road. As good a place for the night as any.

We ate a few biscuits and beef jerky, drank a little water, and lay down on the grass.

***

I awoke with a jump, stifling a scream. In the nightmare, the tentacles of the monster on Gliese had enveloped me, squeezing hard as the tips started gouging my eyes out.

I sat up, heart thumping. There was a moon in the sky, big and off-white and covered in craters. El Dorado, the Big Sister. Its light barely shone through the dense foliage, but enough to let me look around and see the lying shapes of Saoirse and Jack.

And Agatha, sitting with her back against a tree trunk, hugging her knees, eyes lost in the distance.

She noticed I was awake.

"Bad dreams?"

I nodded. "You? Can't you sleep?"

"I'm not really an outdoorsy kind of girl," she shrugged. "I spent my whole life in a Library. I feel lost without paper and polished wood and someone yelling at me to keep my mouth shut."

"I could volunteer for the last part."

"You'd be biting the hand that feeds you." Agatha grinned. "Wanted to perform heroic deeds? Guess you'll be satisfied now. You even managed to save an octopus while you were at it. Your reference letter for the Academy would sound awesome, if only there was someone to write it."

I nodded. "Probably even dad would grunt his approval. But I got way more than I bargained for. I'll admit I wasn't ready to have the whole Awakening League on my tail."

"Yeah, me too."

"There's still something I don't get, though. Why is the League rounding you up instead of waiting for the scientists to do their job? In the end, both the League and the Kingdom want the Bridges fixed."

"Chancellor Harcourt wants to be the master of the Bridges, so that it's the League that decides who crosses the Bridges and who is to be locked out. King Bruce wants the Bridges restored to full functionality to reunite the Lands Beyond into a single land again. That's the reason why the Kingdom protects the Order of Remembrance and has put a garrison in every Library."

"Is it true what they say about King Bruce? That he's the original King Bruce?"

"Dunno. I've heard the rumors like you. Chancellor John Harcourt is like the sixtieth of his dynasty, while King Bruce is supposed to be the very same guy who founded the United Kingdom of Chimera and Tiangong." Agatha shrugged. "Who can say. That would make him almost fifteen centuries old. Sounds a little far-fetched to me."

"And he's been fighting the League for fifteen centuries?"

"Not that long. The squabbles between the Kingdom and the League date back only to the beginning of the Age After."

"That's still almost a thousand years."

"Yeah, but until the Miracle of Finisterre, it was as slow and stealthy as possible. It's only after the Miracle that the chancellor decided to mount an all-out hunt for the Libraries. He even put Count Delauney as the head of the whole operation."

"Who?"

"Count Delauney. Practically the bogeyman for everybody at the Libraries. Chancellor Hancourt's right-hand for the dirty work. Guy's been in charge of the whole Awakening League operation concerning the Faraway Bridges and the Order of Remembrance since before I was born."

"I'm amazed that people keep enrolling kids in Order of Remembrance schools, knowing the risk."

Agatha laughed bitterly. "That's a well-kept secret. There are rumors, by the way, but you can't be too squeamish when someone offers to educate your kids for free, and learned girls and boys are a rare commodity where I come from. Besides, things have become really unpleasant only after the Miracle of Finisterre, and that happened only sixteen years ago. The year before I was born. News travels pretty slow these days"

I thought about kids being sent to a boarding school in the hope of coming back a few years later as well-educated young men and women and ending up in the labor camps on the ice fields of Adiri at the mercy of the League torturers.

I gulped.

"Anything wrong, dude?"

I shook my head. "What's this Miracle of Finisterre you keep talking about?"

Agatha shrugged. "Some kind of legend about a magical force that emerged into our world back in 4195. We don't talk about it at the Libraries."

"Why? Another secret?"

"Who knows. The official line is that the Order of Remembrance cultivates science, and the Miracle of Finisterre is just a tale. Stuff for superstitious peasants. Or so they say. Funny that the League turned rabid right after it happened, whatever it was." She yawned. "Now how about grabbing some sleep?"

"Suits me just fine."

***

NEXT UP: along the way to Typhon Library the fugitives make an unexpected encounter.