The Ring of Five (19 page)

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push past him. She knelt beside Smyck, her face even whiter than usual. Ignoring the terrible noises he was making, she rolled up his sleeve to expose his wrist. She slapped the inside of his arm hard several times, and Danny could see the vein under the skin swell upward. Vandra's two sharp incisors had grown longer, curving down over her lower lip.

"Hold my hair back," she instructed Danny. He leapt forward and held her hair away from her face as she bent to Smyck's wrist. Without hesitating, she plunged her teeth into his arm. Smyck writhed as if some new agony was being visited on him. Vandra kept her head bent, and Smyck thrashed violently from side to side.

"It's not working, Vandra," Les whispered, his voice hoarse. But the physick kept her teeth firmly sunk in Smyck's arm. Gradually, very gradually, the spasms grew less. The black started to fade from his lips. The agonized sounds were replaced by gasps, and then deep breathing. Kneeling close to Vandra, Danny realized that her breathing had become shallow and labored, and he could feel tremors running through her body. A violent shudder almost loosened her teeth from Smyck's wrist, and she grasped Danny's arm hard, her fingers twitching. Danny put his other arm around her shoulders, which were heaving.

"Enough!" Les called out. "Enough, Vandra--he's coming round. Let go!"

For a moment Vandra did not seem to have the strength to break free. Then, with a great wrench, she flung herself backward and lay on the ground, wracked by

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spasms. To his horror, Danny saw that her lips were now black and that blood trickled down her chin. When he saw her hands claw at her throat Danny started toward her, but a voice rang out.

"Leave her!" It was Brunholm. The master moved swiftly to Smyck's side. The boy's face was pale and his breathing shallow, but there was color coming back into his cheeks.

"Never mind him," Les said, "what about Vandra?"

"Leave the physick alone. What if you go near her and she coughs some of the poison toward you? You have to give her body time to absorb it." He peered at Vandra's face and swollen, blackened lips. "It's the way of the physick. They have to take on the poison or the illness, endure it and vanquish it if they can."

"She looks pretty bad," Les said. It was too much for Danny. Vandra wasn't going to fight the poison on her own. He slid across the floor to her and took her hand.

"Boy!" Brunholm warned, but he dared not approach.

"It's okay, Vandra, I'm here," Danny said soothingly. Her eyes opened and met his and he felt her grip momentarily tighten before another spasm wracked her body. Les came over and knelt beside Danny, followed by Dixie, who appeared from nowhere.

For two hours they knelt beside her, with no one else coming near. Valant had slung Smyck unceremoniously over his shoulder and carried the groaning boy upstairs to the apothecary of the second landing, as instructed by Brunholm.

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With agonizing slowness the black faded from Vandra's lips, the spasms became less frequent and her breathing slowed. By midnight she was able to sit up, looking frail and dazed, and only then did Brunholm act.

"Take her up to the apothecary," he commanded. "Use the lift if you must."

"And then I would thank you to leave, Mr. Brunholm," another voice put in. McGuinness was standing in the doorway. "This is a crime scene," he went on, hunkering down to lift crumbs from the floor with a pair of tweezers and putting them in an envelope.

With Vandra's arms draped over their shoulders, Les and Danny made their way to the lift.

"You do realize, of course," Dixie said to Danny, "that the poisoned biscuit was intended for you."

"I know," Danny said, grimly.

"And that whoever it is has only got to be lucky once. You have to be lucky every time they try," Les added.

"I know that too," Danny said. "The problem is I don't know what to do about it."

A button on the control panel with a bubbling flask on it indicated the apothecary. As the lift creaked and groaned upward, Dixie spoke again.

"You've never been to the apothecary before, have you?" Danny shook his head.

"Is it like a clinic or something?" he asked, thinking of the clinic at home with its clean examination rooms and kindly nurses.

"Er, it's something like that," Les answered as the

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doors of the lift clanked open. They stepped out into a dark corridor lined with wooden cases. Danny peered into them. Each one was stacked high with glass jars. He looked closer. They were full of murky fluid, and things were floating in them, strange fleshy things. Could that gray whorled object possibly be a brain? And could those discolored leathery objects connected by a tube be a set of lungs? Danny wasn't watching where he was going, and recoiled as he collided with something hard and bony: a skeleton hanging from a stand--but not an ordinary skeleton. This one was small and could have belonged to a child, but for the way the bones of the face were slanted.

"Is that a ... a Cherb?" Danny asked.

"It is indeed," Les said. "Could be a relation, eh?" Danny glared at him.

The corridor widened into a large room dominated by a table made from white marble with drainage channels down either side. It looked like the kind that was used for dissecting dead bodies. On one side of the room were large metal drawers like the ones in which cadavers were kept in on television.

At least the rooms where bodies were cut up on television were clean, Danny thought. Here the white tiles were stained and broken, and there was what looked like dried blood on the floor and nameless dried-out gobbets of matter under the table. Danny shuddered and tried not to think of what they might be. The air smelt of chemicals, but there was an underlying odor of decay....

Dixie and Les didn't look at all worried by the place. Dixie crossed the tiled floor and pushed through swinging

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doors, holding them open so that Les and Danny could help Vandra through.

The room they entered next was much cozier than anything Danny had seen so far. Beds and divans were scattered about. There were thick rugs on the floor and Middle Eastern hangings on the walls. A fire blazed in a stone fireplace. Smyck was in a bed at the far end of the room. The man who stood over him straightened as they entered and rushed over. He was wearing a coat that might once have been white, but was now covered in nameless stains. He had lank gray hair, a domed skull and huge black-rimmed glasses.

"What do we have here?" he cried. "Goodness, a physick, such a specimen!" He whipped a tape measure out of his pocket and put it around Vandra's head.

"Fourteen point three," he said. "It would be the biggest physick skull in my collection!" Then he spotted Danny.

"Aha, the sham Cherb--I've heard about you--let me see ..." He whipped an enormous magnifying glass out of another pocket and set to examining Danny's face.

"Er, Mr. Jamshid, we got a poisoned girl here," Les said.

"Nonsense," Jamshid said, glancing at Vandra, "she's a physick. She'll be right as rain in the morning. Just needs some sleep. Put her in the bed by the fire."

"By the way, I'm not a sham anything," Danny said, annoyed.

"Don't take offense, boy," Jamshid said, "it's an

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anatomical description--you'll find it in all the textbooks. It's very difficult to tell the difference. Perhaps if I were permitted to examine your buttocks, there are points of difference between--"

Dixie snorted with laughter as the magnifying glass was angled hopefully downward.

"No, you can't!" Danny felt his face go red. Les looked the other way, trying to hide the grin on his face. The two boys carried Vandra to a bed and put her down.

"Thanks," she managed to murmur.

"You're welcome," Les said.

"Now, let me have a look at her." Jamshid pushed them back and bent over Vandra, looking in her ears and nose and eyes.

"He's a bit strange," Les whispered, "but he's a brilliant doctor. Vandra's in good hands."

"You reckon," Danny said, a bit sourly. "You sure we're not going to come back here tomorrow morning and find her head in a jar?"

"Now, now," Les said, "don't be bitter."

"Just because Les is too weedy to put in a jar," Dixie said.

"Not like him," Les said quietly, looking upward. Danny followed his gaze. At first in the gloom he could just barely see huge, outstretched wings; then he began to discern a gray outline in the darkness. As his eyes grew accustomed to the shadows he took a step backward. Hanging from the ceiling was a skeletal Messenger, wings spread, fully twenty feet from tip to tip, still covered in feathers, although the flesh was long gone. Its empty gaze

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was severe and mournful. The bony arms seemed poised to seize them, and Danny had to tell himself that the Messenger was fixed in place and would hang there forever, magnificent but melancholy.

"Not sure if I approve of the ancestors being hung from the roof," Les said. In the distance a bell tolled. Suddenly Jamshid was pushing them out of the room.

"Quickly, quickly--leave now! Come see your friend in the morning." Before they had a chance to protest he had hustled them out of the room and through what Danny thought of as the dissecting room. Glancing back, Danny saw a small door in the wall open, the front of a trolley carrying a prone, bloodied figure being wheeled in by unknown hands.

"Must have been a skirmish with the Cherbs tonight," Les said as Jamshid shoved them into the hallway and slammed the door behind them without further comment.

Danny felt light-headed. He couldn't quite take in that someone had tried to poison him earlier on, and the smell of chemicals and decay from the apothecary still stung his nostrils. They got into the lift, Dixie yawning as they did so, sparking off matching yawns from Danny and Les.

"I'm dead beat," Les said.

"No wonder," Dixie said. "It must be past one in the morning."

But if they thought bed awaited them, they were wrong. As the lift doors slid open, they found Brunholm standing in the cold and dark hallway.

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"Devoy needs to talk to you. Now."

Devoy and McGuinness were waiting for them in the library of the third landing. Devoy paced up and down restlessly in front of the fire as Danny, Les and Dixie filed in after Brunholm.

"Mr. McGuinness will brief us on the unfortunate events of this evening," he said without preamble. McGuinness moved to the center of the room.

"You all know that an attempt was made to poison Cadet Caulfield tonight. I have managed to isolate the poison used, but I have not been able to identify it. Cadet Toxique is assisting me in working on it. I have questioned possible witnesses. Nobody saw anything untoward regarding the poisoned biscuits."

"Thank you, McGuinness." Brunholm nodded none too subtly at the door. McGuinness inclined his head to Devoy, then left. Nothing was said until the door closed behind him.

"If it had not been for the swift intervention of the physick, we would have lost Cadet Smyck," Devoy began. "Your presence in Wilsons is a danger not only to yourself, Danny, but to those around you, until the person or persons who are trying to kill you are identified."

"What are you going to do?" Danny said worriedly. "I mean, are you going to send me home or something? I want to go on the mission!"

Devoy's empty gaze rested on him for a long time before he spoke. Danny was aware of the fire crackling, of a rook moving in the rafters above his head.

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"I am glad," Devoy said eventually, "that you show so much enthusiasm, though you obviously have not been listening to anything I have told you, if you are so eager. However, we have decided that the best plan for the moment is to bring the mission forward."

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A SECRET

The three cadets looked at each other. The fire threw long shadows on the library walls. Rain spattered against the window. Suddenly the walls of Wilsons seemed strong and comforting, and the mission they were to go on, an act of folly.

"We had intended to give you as much training as possible," Devoy went on, "but circumstances have changed. Cadet Caulfield, you will go to the city separately from your companions. They have trained in blending into alien surroundings. They will each be given a new identity, a cover story and false documents."

"What will I do?" Danny asked.

"Mr. Brunholm will take you into Westwald and infiltrate you into the counsels of the Ring."

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"But what am I supposed to tell them? I don't even know who they are!"

"I cannot give you that information," Devoy said.

"Don't worry. The great art of telling a lie is to stick as close to the truth as possible." Brunholm curled one end of his mustache with a finger.

"But ...," Danny cut in. "You can't just send me in there.... Longford will never believe that I'm, I'm ..."

"What?" Brunholm looked amused. "That you're wicked enough to be in the Ring of Five? He'll believe you--everyone can be wicked if they want. They only have to release it in themselves. Now. It's very late and you've all behaved with great courage and all of that. Time for bed!"

And before the puzzled cadets could react, they were being hustled out the door.

"What was that all about?" Les asked as the door slammed shut behind them.

"Doesn't matter." Dixie danced up and down, hugging herself. "We're going on a mission, a real live mission!"

Les saw the look on Danny's face.

"Don't worry, mate," he said, "Devoy's pretty smart. He'll have things worked out. And we'll be there keeping an eye on you. Old Longford won't know what hit him."

Danny grinned weakly. He felt more confused than at any time since he had arrived at Wilsons. And he had seen the look that passed between Devoy and Brunholm when he had asked what he should say. It was different for