Surface Detail

A ragged, tearing wind that seemed to have come out of nowhere howled beneath a cauldron of night-black, sky-obliterating smoke. Manically leaping, furiously rolling flames spilled everywhere; the air was full of whirling, burning debris, numerous as leaves in the first storm of autumn. The shock was almost physical, the heat on her face from the ubiquitous flames as strong as that from an equatorial sun; she slowed to a trot without realising.

She shook herself out of it, quickly looked around.

For a moment, she thought she’d lost him, then she saw him half running, half staggering in the direction of the water maze. He was silhouetted against flames for a moment and she aimed at him, nearly fired, but then decided he was too far away; the gun was for close range and she was anyway no marksman. Eight shots left.

Down a grassed bank, clattering against a chain-link fence, hidden from the mansion by the slope, running along the path, making for the gates that led to the network of channels around the lakes. The gates, the fucking gates; what if they were closed, locked? Then he saw something ahead, glinting in the flames, and running towards it found a crash-landed flier, one of the estate’s runabouts, snouted into the path and the fence at one end of a trough of ploughed-up earth; the fence had tipped, fallen, lay flat on the ground just beyond the crumpled nose of the craft. He leapt onto the flier’s stubby front canard, jumped over the fractured nose and was in the battleship ground, pumping and wheezing along the internal path beneath the towers and arches of the raised system of canals. The sheds where the ships were kept were on the far side of the grounds, away from the mansion, near the trees.

Crazy, crazy, crazy; what was he doing? The fucking sheds would be locked.

But maybe not. There were people there a lot of the time, and he’d been planning a battleship tournament in a few days, so the engineers and technicians would have been working on the vessels, testing them, readying them. It hadn’t been night when all this chaos had kicked off, even though it felt like midnight now. It had been afternoon; people would have been in and around the ships and sheds, and what were the odds in the midst of all this mayhem that they’d carefully packed everything away and locked up everything they were meant to lock up? Not a chance.

See? He’d been vindicated. This had been the right place to come; his instinct had been smack on the money.

He – not this mad bitch running after him with a miniature cannon – would come out of this ahead; he’d survive, he’d win. He was the winner, he had the history of success, he was the one who knew how to triumph. Fuck; if it really was her he’d already killed her once. What did that tell you?

A burning tree, storeys high, already half uprooted, was slowly falling, thirty metres ahead of him. It came thudding through the fence, crashing and rolling off a flying buttress in a storm of sparks and splashing into a watery channel, smothering the path with flame. The buttress seemed to hesitate then started to crumple and fall, crashing down in a welter of stone and water, creating billows of steam.

The way ahead was blocked; he ran instead for the nearest wading point leading to the first of the islands. He could see the layout of the lakes and channels in his head, knew it better than the hedge maze because he’d looked down on it so many times. The wading points, surfaced with mesh-covered slabs under the water, were located in the middle of each island’s shore line. They stretched as far as one island away from the pool in front of the maintenance area and the sheds. He could wade through the mud-bottomed pool or even swim the rest.

She saw him leap into the water maze over the front of the crashed flier, saw the great tree fall. She followed, vaulting the buckled nose of the flier, catching up as he took splashing to the water, wading from the mainland to the nearest island. Burning embers and curtains of smoke were blowing across the water maze, dark-ening and lighting the miniature landscape alternately, revealing and concealing the running, limping figure ahead of her as he headed for who knew where. Maybe he was thinking of the sheds where the ships were kept. Perhaps he saw himself jumping into one and firing all its pretend little guns at her. She followed via the wading point, the water in the channel cold round her legs, dragging at her, slowing her. It was like tying to run in a dream.In the centre of the channel the water reached as far up as her hips before shallowing again.

Veppers had crossed the island beyond and was wading the next channel to one of the larger islands by the time she hauled her protesting legs out of the water. He disappeared as a dark, rolling cloud of smoke flowed between them.

When it cleared he’d gone.