The Ghost Roads (Ring of Five) (18 page)

“A Cherb,” Les almost snarled. “Gabriel’s got a Cherb on his back.”

“You sure?” Toxique asked.

“I can smell it from here.”

“What’s Gabriel doing helping a Cherb?” Vandra said.

“And what was that Cherb up to?” Les said.

They ran across the gardens, around the front and
into the entrance hall, where an excited crowd had gathered. Brunholm was slumped in a chair and Duddy was feeding him brandy from a flask. Les muttered to himself and ran off. Behind Brunholm a slender throwing knife protruded from the wooden paneling.

“Didn’t even see the little devil coming at me,” Brunholm said, gasping for breath. “I told you so. I told you, you can’t drop your guard for a moment around here.”

Devoy appeared and strode across the hall. He plucked the knife from the paneling, examined the hilt carefully, then handed it to Toxique. Toxique sniffed the tip. His nose wrinkled.

“Attar of black orchid. Deadly and evil. It works by stimulating dreams of such horror that the body can’t tolerate the fear. Usually the heart fails, long after the mind has been destroyed.”

“A Cherb weapon, then!” Brunholm declared.

“I don’t know …,” Toxique began.

“Of course it is!” Brunholm roared. Detective McGuinness appeared in the doorway. He looked tired, and there was mud on his raincoat. He took the knife from Toxique, frowning.

“No one should have touched this. Any evidence is ruined now.” He stared at the knife for a long time, then took a bag from his pocket and carefully slipped the weapon in.

“But why?” Vandra said, trying to piece something together in her mind. Everyone in the hallway was trying to talk at once, and Dixie was the only person to hear her.

“What do you mean?”

“Why set out to kill Brunholm in the most public of places? Why not ambush him somewhere quiet, or ambush any of us, for that matter?”

“They … they were trying to create a diversion …,” Dixie said slowly.

“A diversion so they could do what, though?” Vandra said. The answer came to both of them at once. Scattering cadets, they ran like the wind, out of the entrance hall, down the corridor, past the ballroom and past the Gallery of Whispers, Les and Toxique straining to keep up with them. As they mounted the stairs they heard a fusillade of shots from the apothecary.

“Too late!” Vandra gasped as they ran into the apothecary. The light was dim, and they didn’t see the body on the floor. It was just as well, for as the two of them tripped over the form and went flying headlong, another fusillade rang out, the shots whistling over their heads and hitting a row of bedpans with a series of dull clangs.

“Stop!” Les’s muffled voice could be heard from the floor. “Mr. Jamshid, it’s me and Vandra and Dixie.”

“Come out very slowly with your hands in the air,” Jamshid said. The friends stepped out. Jamshid was training an old-fashioned tommy gun on them. His face glistened with sweat.

“Someone was here,” he said hoarsely.

“Is she hurt?” Vandra asked in alarm. Before Jamshid could answer, a figure stepped out of the shadows behind him.

“Hurt? No. At least, not by whoever or whatever was here tonight.” Pearl was pale and ghastly, her long
white nightgown making her look like a phantom that had emerged from the darkness behind her. The bruises had faded, although there were bandages on her hands. The memory of what had happened to her had not disappeared—her eyes were haunted by torment and by loss—but her voice was calm and measured.

“I thought they might come for me. When I heard the commotion I warned Mr. Jamshid. He protected me.”

Jamshid gave her a gallant, if shaky, bow.

“But why would they come for you?” Vandra asked.

They all looked at each other. Even the skeleton of the Messenger hanging above them seemed to be waiting for an answer.

“Danny,” Pearl said. “The only reason they want to harm me is to get at Danny.”

“Then we’d better make sure nothing happens to you,” Jamshid said, straightening up and running a hand through his hair.

“It seems that we know nothing,” Pearl said, “that everything is a mystery.”

“You may be right,” Jamshid said, “but my advice as your physick is to get yourself back into bed. I know that much.”

Jamshid gave his assurance that Pearl would be guarded, but it wasn’t enough for Vandra.

“I’m going to stay here tonight,” she said. “Have you noticed something? No cameras around the apothecary. Somebody didn’t want the attacker to be seen.”

Vandra accompanied Les, Dixie and Toxique downstairs.
As they passed the ballroom, a camera swiveled to follow them. Dixie stuck out her tongue at it.

“How did you know, Dixie?” Vandra asked. Dixie shrugged.

“Just felt like a diversion is all. If they’d wanted to kill Brunholm, they would have killed him. Cherbs don’t miss.”

“So what do we say about what we saw?” Vandra said.

“About Gabriel and the Cherb? We need to tell someone,” Dixie said.

“Tell who, though?” Les said. “Not Brunholm.”

“Devoy?” Vandra said.

“We tell no one until we talk to Gabriel himself,” Toxique said firmly. “We’re forgetting everything he’s done. If it comes out that he brought a Cherb into Wilsons, he’ll lose everything, maybe even his life. Of all our friends here, Gabriel has proved himself most honest and brave. He deserves a little trust from us.”

“Okay,” Dixie said, “we’ll talk first.”

Vandra watched them go. It would be difficult to talk to Gabriel, she thought. The only time they’d seen him, he’d been flying high, almost a speck in the distance. Vandra wondered if he ever touched down. She thought he had gone from being an earthbound Messenger to a creature who lived on the wing. She wondered which Gabriel she liked best: the cold, remote one or the shabby one.

Les, Dixie and Toxique gathered on the balcony outside the Roosts. There were two cameras trained on
the balcony—“for your own safety,” as Smyck put it—making sure that the male and female cadets could not talk without being overheard. Les looked at the cameras, then took a notebook out of his pocket.

WE NEED TO FIND OUT WHO S & G ARE, he wrote. Dixie nodded but spread her hands, looking up at the camera. How would they do it without being under surveillance? As Dixie’s gaze rested on the camera, a raven appeared from nowhere and landed on the device. It stood on the top of the lens for a second, then took off and landed on a branch a foot away.

“Look!” Dixie breathed. The lens of the camera was streaked with white. The raven opened its beak and cawed loudly. It sounded remarkably like laughter. Les scribbled quickly on his notebook and held it up.

TOMORROW NIGHT?

The raven nodded its head rapidly; then the branch shook and the bird was gone into the night.

Les checked his bed for listening devices before he got under the sheets. Vandra had warned him to do so, as she had found one on the back of her headboard the night before. Les felt carefully along the bed and was rewarded when he felt a small disc on the metal frame. He reached into his locker and fumbled around until he found an old referee’s whistle. He got into bed and wrapped the blankets around him to muffle the noise as much as possible, then blew a sharp toot into the bug. He was rewarded with a gasp of pain from Smyck’s bed.

W
hen Vandra got back to Pearl’s bed, the agent was awake.

“Do you want something to help you sleep?” Vandra said.

“Something you could inject into me?” Pearl asked.

“That’s only for really serious things,” Vandra said. “But I can get a pill from Jamshid.”

“No, it’s okay, I feel like talking. There’s a phrase that keeps going through my head. They kept asking about it when they were interrogating me, whether Agent Stone had found any references. When I said no, they didn’t believe me and they kept on hurting me.”

Pearl shuddered and fell silent. Vandra took her hand where it lay on the covers.

“What was the phrase?”

“Kind of an odd thing: ‘The Lost Boys.’ ‘What do you know about the Lost Boys. Tell us about the Lost Boys.’ I told them I’d never heard of them, do you hear me, I’ve never heard of them!”

“It’s okay,” Vandra said, “it’s okay.”

There was no pill or injection to heal such fear. Instead, Vandra held Pearl tight, afraid to move as the woman clung to her. Late into the night, Vandra realized that Pearl was asleep, but she dared not move.

The Lost Boys. The phrase ran through Vandra’s mind, gathering mystery to itself. Who were they? How would she find out? In the end she fell asleep lying across the bed, still holding Pearl.

The following evening the ravens gathered in the trees at the front of the school, silhouetted against the
reddening sky as the sun went down. Les had puzzled all day as to what they should do. In the end he wrote ASK THE GALLERY OF WHISPERS on a sheet of paper and held it up to the others. They all nodded.

That evening each one pleaded tiredness and went to bed early (although Les thought Dixie overdid the elaborate yawning and stretching). They would use the time-honored method of putting pillows in their beds to imitate their sleeping forms so they could visit the gallery. Vandra produced four little boxes and gave them one each.

“They’re Slugs of Somnolence,” she said. “They’re quite vicious and hate being enclosed in the boxes, so they growl all the time. The thing is, their growls sound exactly like people breathing. But whatever you do, don’t open the box. They’ve got teeth.”

When the time came, the cadets placed the Slugs of Somnolence under their pillows and sneaked out.

“Ravens got the message, then,” Les said, looking up at the white-coated lenses of the surveillance cameras. The cadets were all wearing dark clothing, and Dixie produced a tin of camouflage blacking. They were barely visible as they made their way toward the front of the school.

“What’s going to happen when Brunholm notices that all the cameras are going out? He’ll smell a rat.”

But the ravens had thought of that as well. Les picked the lock of the front door and they went into the hallway. Brunholm had insisted that two cameras would do the work of the porter, Valant, so despite his protests, he had been given duties in the archive. The way would be clear
if the cameras were dealt with. Vandra nudged Les. Each camera had a raven sitting on top of it. They had folded their wings downward so that the lens of the camera was covered. The cadets hurried through, and the minute they were clear the ravens lifted their wings and flew ahead of them. If Brunholm even noticed what had happened, he would have thought it a temporary glitch with the cameras. The same thing took place with the cameras along the corridor and the ones outside the darkened ballroom.

The Gallery of Whispers was in shadows. Moonlight through the windows at the top of the gallery cast long shadows on the marble floors.

“What do we ask?” Dixie said. “We can’t just say ‘What’s going on.’ ”

“I know,” Les said, putting his cheek against the wall. “Who is trying to kill Pearl?”

They listened as the whispers traveled around the gallery, rising and falling, until in the end, Les’s voice, low and distorted, emerged from the other side.

“Still he waits.”

“ ‘Still he waits,’ ” Dixie said, almost crossly. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I haven’t a clue,” Les said, looking glum. “Doesn’t get us very far.”

“It does get us someplace,” Toxique said. “It tells us that someone
is
trying to harm Pearl. We were only guessing beforehand.”

“I suppose,” Les said, not sounding convinced. “Come on, we’d better get back.”

“Wait,” Vandra said. “I have one more question. Something Pearl said.”

She put her face close to the wall and whispered, “Who are the Lost Boys?” The sound traveled around the gallery, the whispering rising and falling, but this time the whispering sounded agitated. The cadets exchanged glances. The whispers reached the center of the gallery but would not travel any farther. The voices became more and more discordant, distressed. Les put his hand against the wall and could feel the stone itself vibrate. The sound became louder and louder now, less a murmur of voices than a roar. A few chips of masonry fell from the ceiling and the cadets backed away. They could feel the vibration through their feet now, a resonant shuddering force. The walls were vibrating so hard they were making a singing noise. A raven flew across the room in alarm. One of the great high windows cracked and then shattered. Broken glass rained down on the stone floor. The cadets cowered against the wall, holding their ears. It felt as if the whole building was going to collapse. Then, suddenly, the sound stopped.

There was a long silence, made all the more eerie by the noise that had come before. Into the silence came an exhausted voice, not even a whisper, but a gasp.

“Brothers.”

The cadets looked at each other, shocked. It felt as if what had just happened in the gallery should have ended in words of clarity and wisdom.

Then the alarms went off.

The cadets took to their heels, the ravens flying in
front of them and covering the cameras. As they ran down the ballroom corridor, they could see piles of dry plaster on the floor and cracks in the walls.