The Ghost Roads (Ring of Five) (24 page)

Toxique stifled a squeal as a black object hurtled passed him and struck the corner of the stove with great force. Vandra froze.

“What is it?” Toxique said. Vandra bent to the floor and picked up the limp body of the bird.

“It’s the raven that fetched us,” Vandra said. “Her neck’s broken. She’s dead.”

Toxique took the raven from Vandra.

“You can’t, Toxique—her babies are there!” Vandra was appalled.

“Why do you think she flew against the stove and broke her own neck?” Toxique said furiously. “She heard what we were saying. I needed a body and she gave it to me. And I’m still not sure I’ll be able to find the answers I need!”

“She didn’t ask you to be perfect,” Vandra said. “She just asked you to do your best.”

L
es didn’t know how they had found their way onto this landing. It seemed even older than the Hall of Memories. There were suits of armor, and great swords hung on the walls, notched with the signs of battle. Les touched a great dented helmet and lifted the visor, then dropped it quickly. Had he seen the gleam of eyes inside? Surely not.

“Maybe we should make our way back downstairs …,” he said. But Dixie was in a strange mood.

“We’ll just take a little look around,” she said.

“Seems to be mostly bedrooms up here,” Les said, peering through a doorway at a massive four-poster bed hung with moldering drapes. Dixie opened doors and restlessly flickered here and there, as though looking for something.

Les was uneasy. “Maybe we should—”

“Wait,” Dixie interrupted. She went into the large room at the end of the landing. Les waited a moment, then followed. Dixie held up her lantern.

It was a child’s room, or rather a children’s room. There were identical beds on either side, both with dusty blue counterpanes. There were pajamas on each pillow, and toy boxes beside the beds. And on each side there was a clothes rack filled with old-fashioned suits. Les lifted down one of the suits.

“Somebody about fourteen or fifteen, I’d say, by the size of this.”

“Look here,” Dixie said. She had opened the big wardrobe at the back of the room.

“Wow,” Les said, “great stuff!” The wardrobe was a spy’s dream. There were disguises, gun pens, poison-tipped umbrellas, devices for listening through walls, dozens of invisible inks, and cipher books.

“Cool,” Dixie said, “our two boys were spies!” They looked at each other, the thought hitting them both at the same time.

“Two boys.
The Lost Boys!
It couldn’t be!”

“Hang on a second,” Les said. “If these boys were proper spies, then this can’t be all there is to it.” He climbed into the wardrobe and started tapping the sides and back of it. He reached down and twisted an innocent-looking wooden support. There was a click, and then, in well-oiled silence, the back of the wardrobe slid open.

“Spooky,” Les said.

“More than spooky,” Dixie said with a shudder. “You go first.”

Les clambered in and gave a low whistle. The little room beyond the back of the wardrobe was covered in dust and cobwebs, but there was no mistaking that this was spying of a different order.

Les looked along one side of the room. “Poisons, darts, knives …”

“Torture instruments,” Dixie said. “Thumbscrews, pincers, electric shock machines, hot irons … Ugh! This is horrible!”

“Seems our boys had a secret life,” Les said.

“Look at this,” Dixie breathed. At the rear of the
room was a tailor’s dummy—or at least, that was what it looked like; it was hard to tell, for it was slashed, stabbed and burned with acid.

“Pretty vicious, our two Lost Boys,” Les said.

“If that’s who they were,” Dixie said with another shiver. “Les, I want to get out of here.… Les …”

Les heard the tone of alarm in Dixie’s voice and spun around. The secret door they had come through was sliding shut.

“Dixie, go!” Les knew he wouldn’t reach it, but Dixie could flicker to the door and get through easily. When she hesitated, he shoved her. One minute she was there, and the next she was gone. Les watched as the narrow opening closed.

What now? He recoiled at the thought of gas flooding the room, or perhaps water, for he had no doubt that this was a defense mechanism and that the two boys hadn’t finished with him yet. He caught a flash out of the corner of his eye and jumped. A steel blade almost ten feet long protruded from the floor where he had been standing. Another movement. Les jumped behind the stuffed dummy and a blade pierced it. Then another, and another, bright, quivering blades, razor sharp, at first seeming random … but Les soon realized that his escape routes were being cut off one by one.

A blade shot across his face, followed by another as he spun out of the way of the first, and he felt a sharp pain in his thigh. When he put his hand down, it came away wet with blood. Why not just kill me? he thought. But part of
him knew why: whoever had designed this didn’t want to just kill an intruder, he wanted to toy with him first.

And Les was tiring. His right leg where he had been wounded now barely supported him. Sometimes the blades shot at him three or four in quick succession; then there might be a lull of a minute or two. The attacks came from the floor, from the walls, from the ceiling. The entire room was now a latticework of steel. He knew had to find corners and gaps, keeping in mind that any gap might have been left deliberately so as to lure him into it. The feathers of his wings had been parted several times, but all at once a blade passed through a thick clump of feathers, pinning him against the wall. He watched weakly as the bright blades cleaved the air. It was only a matter of time, but he felt detached, almost peaceful. So much so that he quite resented the loud explosion that came next, the flame and smoke filling the air, the dust and debris.

“Come on!” Dixie shouted, grabbing him. She seized a stiletto and slashed at the feathers that held Les to the wall. Limping, half blinded with smoke, his lungs burning from acrid fumes, he took Dixie’s arm and stumbled back into the bedroom.

“What …?” he gasped.

“They had a bomb kit in the wardrobe. Took me a few minutes to work it out. I might have overdone it a bit.…” Dixie spat out a piece of plaster. The bedroom was devastated. Both beds had been upended and blown against the wall, and the ceiling had collapsed in places.

“You did a job on this gaff,” Les said shakily as he
clambered over the rubble. His injured leg gave way beneath him and he pitched forward onto his face.

“You okay?” Dixie said anxiously. “You know, I don’t like this house very much.”

“I know what you mean,” Les groaned. Then his eyes fell on something in the rubble: a leather satchel, the front of it badly burned from the explosion.

“What is it?” Dixie asked as he lifted the satchel.

“Look,” he said. Most of the name had been burned away, but five letters remained:
ARCUS
.

“
Arcus …
Marcus! At least now we know who one of the evil boys is,” Les said grimly. “Marcus Brunholm!”

“Hang on,” Dixie said, “I can smell burning.”

Les limped over to the place where the bomb had gone off. The floor had been shattered, and smoldering debris had fallen into a bedroom downstairs, landing on a huge four-poster bed. As Les looked, flames licked at it; then, with a
whoosh
, the whole thing burst into flames. Les fell back.

“We need to get out of here,” he said.

I
n the kitchen below, Toxique bent over a homemade filter system. Vandra had gathered up as many of the chicks as she could, but she realized that the birds high above in the dovecot were out of reach, too ill to fly down.

“Anything?” she asked anxiously.

“It’s hard,” Toxique said. “If this substance had been made by an expert in poisons it would be easier. This one has been put together by someone who has only a little
knowledge but is very, very clever. I think I’ve got it, but I need to test it out.”

“Please don’t start experimenting on the babies, Toxique.”

“Babies, mothers, it doesn’t matter. I have to try it on one of them.”

“Does the poison work on people?”

“I’m starting to suspect it’s even more toxic for humans.” Vandra came over to the table where Toxique was working. Before he could stop her, she picked up a piece of the poisoned potato and swallowed it.

“Now,” she said calmly as Toxique looked on, aghast, “your antidote better work.”

“Why did you do that?” Toxique asked.

“Because I’m a healer. It’s part of my job. I can’t sit here and watch you experiment with mothers and babies, even if they are ravens. So. How long does the poison take to act?”

“You should start showing signs within ten minutes. But I haven’t made enough of the antidote for a human, Vandra! I was only going to test a little on the birds!”

“Well, you’d better get moving, haven’t you? Ouch. I can feel it already. My stomach’s a bit queasy.”

Toxique stared at her, beads of sweat breaking out on his forehead.

“It’s all right, Toxique,” she said, “I trust you.”

Toxique turned back to his equipment, but there was a tremor in his hands where there had been none before.

“I wonder where Les and Dixie are,” Vandra said. “I wish they hadn’t wandered off.…”

L
es and Dixie were still in the Lost Boys’ bedroom, and they were in trouble. If Vandra had left the kitchen and looked outside, she would have seen flames starting to leap from the fifth-floor windows. The fire had spread rapidly, faster than Les and Dixie had expected. Dixie had spent several minutes trying to staunch the blood flow from Les’s injured leg. When they had tried to leave the room, it was too late. Dixie put her hand on the doorknob and snatched it away.

“What is it?” Les said.

“The handle is red hot.” Dixie wrapped her hand in a towel and reached for the doorknob again.

“Stop!” Les said. “Don’t. The fire is on the other side of the door. That’s why the handle is hot. The flames will consume you.” Dixie looked at Les’s frightened face and took her hand away.

“The Cherbs,” Les said, “they burned our house.… I remember.…”

Dixie took his hand.

“We’ll find another way out.”

“At least you can,” Les said. “You can disappear and reappear somewhere else.” Dixie shook her head.

“I can only do it for short distances. And I have to know where the fire is. I could reappear right in the middle of it. Better not to chance it.”

“I wish I could fly, but I can’t,” Les said. “This wing won’t hold.”

“Well, if we can’t go downstairs, we can go up,” Dixie
said. “I don’t know if you noticed, but it’s getting a bit hot and smoky in here.”

“Up?” Les raised his eyebrows. He knew that the farther they got from the ground, the less hope there would be. But there was smoke coming through the floorboards. At least on the roof there would be air. Les went to the window again and looked down. As he did so, one of the great windows of the Hall of Memories was blown out by a jet of flame. A thousand voices rose, the sounds melting together until all he could hear was a great sigh that swelled, then faded away, an infinity of memories lost to the night air.

“Right,” Les said, relieved that the murmurings were gone, for he had dreaded hearing the voice of a loved one, the way Dixie had. “Let’s hit the back stairs.”

They ran up the servants’ stairs, passing the garret bedrooms where the maids would have slept. The stairwell was starting to fill with smoke—another minute or two and they would have been too late—and they choked as they ran. The air cleared a little when they reached the top floor. Les spotted a small attic door and they ran through it, out into the starlit night. They paused, coughing, on the rooftop.

“Strange,” Dixie said.

“What?”

“The roof’s flat. You wouldn’t expect that in an old house. And there’s another building on it. A little hut.”

“Never mind that,” Les said, “look!” He pointed toward Wilsons. The village of Ravensdale was hidden in mist, but they could see the front of Wilsons clearly,
and the view was disturbing. A motley collection of vehicles was pulled up at the front of the school—cars, vans, motorcycles with sidecars, even an old-school charabanc. Pupils were streaming out the front door as the porter, Valant, tried to organize the flow.

“They’re evacuating the school!” Dixie cried.

“We need to be thinking about evacuating this roof,” Les said. He tried to flex his injured wing and winced.

“What’s going on?” Dixie stared toward Wilsons until a gout of black smoke erupted from the floor below them and hid the view.

“Maybe there’s something we could make a parachute out of,” Dixie said.

“Kind of a long shot,” Les said, “but we’ll take a look in that hut. There might be something there.”

Les sounded bright and brave, but they both knew it was a long way down, and there was no other way off. They made their way across the slippery roof. Les felt Dixie take his arm, and when she said it was because she didn’t want to fall, he knew she wasn’t telling the truth.

V
andra wondered if she had misjudged everything. Her stomach was taut as a drum and her forehead was bathed in sweat. Toxique did not look in control of the situation, and he had begun to mutter his old oaths of “blood and entrails,” or “pain and death.” He had knocked over his equipment several times and spilled the compound, each time starting again from scratch. The ill ravens were restless,
and to add to matters, there was a strange, smoky atmosphere in the kitchen.