‘They have gone, Raphael,’ said the eagle in a cracked voice.
The boy sat bowed with unhappiness. Then he said slowly, ‘There has been hunting. The truce has been broken.’
‘That is life,’ answered Empyrean. ‘They thought you were never coming back. They were hungry. They must live.’
‘Then whom can I trust?’ asked Raphael. ‘Whom can I trust, if we defeat this Sorcerer?’
Chief of All the Eagles in the Sky said nothing.
Raphael rose slowly. He would return to Cassandra and the Sorcerer and stay with them forever. Then he saw again the mechanicos marching to work. Right, left. Right, left. He heard the grinding of a million wheels. He saw a battery of buzz saws gnawing down the forest. He remembered the cold streets, the tall buildings. Bigger and better. The Go-Getter gets. Gets nothing. It would be better to be dead. He would save the world in spite of everything. He would save Cassie and himself.
‘Dismiss the council,’ he ordered Empyrean. ‘I shall destroy the city myself.’
CHAPTER XIV
THE BATTLE OF THE CITY
Raphael raised his right hand and called upon the storm. As he did this, thunder was heard and black clouds formed in the west. For a moment silence brooded over the plain, broken only by the deep roar of the machine city. The light failed rapidly and a saffron glare shadowed the hills and turned the fields to yellow-green. Great thunder-clouds rolled up like monstrous sulphur ships and advanced on the city of the Sorcerer.
At first a gentle wind rustled the still leaves of the forest and bent the grass in rippling waves as it swept forward in gusts across the plain. All the animals crept away in terror to their lairs and forms in the thickets until the boy was left alone with the eagles.