“My daughter will go with you to bring the cauldron back,” she whispered, forgetting she had a microphone off the corner of her mouth.
“What was that?” asked the crew chief. “We’re all one comms circuit back here, and I don’t want to know anything I’m not supposed to, okay?”
“Sorry,” said Susan.
Merlin looked at her, smiled, and made a zipping motion across his mouth. Susan nodded. She didn’t want to talk anyway. She leaned her head on Merlin’s shoulder and back against Vivien. Merlin reached into his yak-hair bag and pulled out a book.
Susan started to read over his shoulder, recognizing the character of Harriet Vane, though she hadn’t read this particular one of Dorothy Sayers’s books. Merlin kindly tilted the book to make it easier for her, though she thought it irked him a little—she didn’t like people reading over her shoulder herself—but she found her eyes very heavy and her head started to roll forward and before Merlin had even turned the first page she had fallen sound asleep.
She woke rather groggily sometime later—Susan wasn’t sure how long—to hear the pilot’s voice again, crackling in her ears.
“Hi, back there. We’re coming up to RAF Northolt, but we’ve been instructed to land you a little over to the east at Totteridge Green in Barnet, we’ve received ATC clearance for that, I’m told the LZ will be secured by police and LIBER MERCATOR elements, whatever they are. I also have a message to relay, which is as follows: Southaw locus is Totteridge Yew, Barnet. I say again: Southaw locus is Totteridge Yew, Barnet.”
“Copy that,” said Merlin. “Uh, did they give you a particular approach, pilot? We’ll want to avoid flying over or near the . . . uh . . . locus.”
“Uh, no information on that. We’ve got the LZ. We’re about five minutes out.”
“If you see any weather or other unusual phenomena, I strongly advise . . . er . . . turning away from it, or whatever the technical term is.”
“We’ve got a strict corridor from ATC, have to conform to that. I’ll recheck.”
Susan leaned forward to look out the window, which was flecked with streaks of rain. She couldn’t see much more than gray sky without undoing her belt and getting up to improve the angle, which she thought would be frowned upon by the crew chief and a bad idea anyway.
“Uh, we are seeing something unusual ahead, a localized drift of fog between us and the LZ, but we’ll clear it by a few hundred feet. We’re landing on the other side.”
“Go around, pilot!” snapped Merlin. “Viv! You sense anything?”
“Old One,” said Viv. She pointed down. “Southaw.”
The helicopter wasn’t changing course.
“Pilot, go around!”
“We’re well above it now, no prob—”
White blanketed the windows, thick as if cotton wool had been plastered on in an instant. A few seconds later everyone jumped at the sound of a heavy impact, like a thrown brick hitting the side of a car, and then there was another, and another, sharp and loud even over the helicopter’s own noise.
There was confused and muffled talking through Susan’s headphones, then the pilot came on again clearly, her speech more clipped now, but without panic.
“Bird strike! We’re going down! Prepare to—”
The fog split apart as a bird smacked straight into the window opposite Susan, smearing it with blood and feathers. There were thuds and bashing noises all over the helicopter now. The engine noise changed, whining higher, and the rhythm of the rotors became uneven.
Merlin ripped off his headphones and tightened his seat belt, Susan copying his actions. She could feel Vivien doing the same thing behind her.
“Lean forward and clasp your knees!” shouted the crew chief, who was pulling her straps tight and crossing her arms to grip the upper straps, her thumbs along the belt.
There were more and more bird impacts, smacking into the helicopter like heavy hail. The windows were almost completely obscured in blood and feathers, and fog blurred whatever might have been seen through the gaps.
“Can you do anything, Viv?” shouted Merlin. It was almost impossible to hear him.
The engines suddenly emitted an awful asphyxiating cough and stopped entirely. The rotors changed rhythm yet again, sounding slower and somehow less confident. The helicopter started to spin around on its axis, the tail sweeping around like a clock’s second hand.
“No! It’s too heavy!” shouted Vivien.
“We’re autorotating!” shouted the crew chief. “Brace! Br—”
The helicopter hit the ground and slid forward with a terrifying screech of tortured metal before it smashed into something, stopped with a deafening bang, and rolled over on its right side. Susan was thrown into Merlin, who was holding on to one of the bench struts with his left hand and was steady as a rock.
Everything stopped. There were no more bird impacts, no engine noise, no whup-whup-whup of the rotors. Only the low, sad groan of stressed metal and composites and the sound of a piercing, high-pitched alarm.
Merlin was the first to move. He looked swiftly around, saw Vivien was hanging down but had braced her feet against the buried door, and was already moving to undo her seat belt. Susan was lying back but also wrestling with her belt. The crew chief, hanging sideways in her harness, was shouting into her helmet mike, trying to raise the pilots.
The bookseller undid his restraint and pulled himself upright to stand on the back of his seat. He slid open the left-side door, which was now above their heads. The right-side door beneath Vivien was buckled in and broken, with clumps of grass and earth visible through a long gash in the hull.
The crew chief half fell out of her harness as she tried to get a footing to reach up as well, managed to get her boots on the back of the bench, and helped Merlin with the door. She began to cup her hands to give him a boost up and out, but he simply jumped, pulling himself over the edge. He crouched there and leaned back in, offering a hand to Susan. But she passed up the bag with the sword first, which he took and hurled safely away, before Susan climbed out and up.
Tendrils of smoke were beginning to drift into the passenger compartment. Even more smoke was eddying around the hull and rising up to join the fog. Part of a rotor stuck straight up in the air, like a drowning person’s arm raised for help.
Visibility was no more than a dozen feet, but as far as Susan could tell the helicopter had crash-landed in a grassy field, one littered with small rocks.
“Jump down and move away!” shouted Merlin, leaning down again to help Vivien out, and then the crew chief.
Susan jumped down, but didn’t move away. Instead she circled around to the front of the helicopter, flinching as she saw the craft had slid front-first into a huge outcrop of stone. The nose and cockpit were smashed beyond recognition, pushed back to the bulkhead that separated it from the passenger compartment. There were pieces of metal and composite hull and Plexiglas strewn everywhere, all smothered in blood and feathers.
Some of the blood was not from the birds, Susan realized, and she had to look away. There was no chance the pilots had survived.
The crew chief came panting up next to her, and stared. She stood there, staring for several seconds, until Susan touched her arm.
“Mel . . . isn’t it? There’s nothing we can do.”