The Unknown Spy (9 page)

“You have to keep your eyes peeled,” McGuinness said, lowering his voice confidentially. “Until we know what motivates this person, everyone is in danger.”

“Time for tea,” the school announcer Blackpitt said,
his voice booming from a speaker hidden in the tree, making them jump.

“It really is a wonderful day,” Blackpitt said.

“What’s he so cheerful about?” Les growled.

They went off to tea in a gloomy mood, not helped by the sniggering at the other end of the table from Smyck and the others, accompanied by warnings to each other to “watch the game pie” in case it was poisoned and the like.

After tea Danny found himself wandering on his own in the woods. Without thinking about it he made his way toward the summerhouse. The summerhouse had not been used for many years. Its curtains hung in tatters, but its old planks retained a sense of sun-warmed days and balmy evenings, and sitting there always lifted his spirits.

He’d brought a slice of cake from Ravensdale, and he wrapped himself in a blanket and sat on the window seat, watching the sun lower in the west, the bare black limbs of the trees silhouetted against it.

He wondered about his parents. He hated to admit it, but he missed them. They had always been there, and now there was nobody. They were secret agents, but who were they working for? Why did he have to be guarded? Danny already knew that he was the Fifth, the link between the Cherbs and ordinary people, and that the Ring of Five sought him as their missing member. Was that the reason? Did some secret service want to keep him from joining the Ring?

He sat in the summerhouse for an hour, his mind swirling. When he finally stood up, stiff and cold, it was
dark. He felt in the pocket of his coat. The coat had many pockets that weren’t immediately apparent. He found lockpicks, a comb, a pen with a secret compartment in it, a broken spy camera and a foldable grappling iron before he finally put his hand on the old-fashioned-looking but reliable flashlight.

As he pulled the flashlight out something clinked against it—the “S” and “G” ring he’d been given in the Butts. He studied it in the light. Who were S and G, and why had the hand of the Unquiet slipped this into his coat?

Returning the ring to his pocket, he started to walk back toward Wilsons, keeping the light shaded with his hand so that he wouldn’t be too visible, not so much because there was a killer at large, but because he had started to acquire a spy’s habit of secrecy. There were noises in the darkness, night creatures starting to move about, but they didn’t disturb him. Then he heard something different—not like a badger scuffling in the leaves, but like people struggling. As he got nearer he could hear groans and panting from somewhere to his left. He switched the torch off and listened. A voice in his head told him to leave it, walk back to Wilsons, that it was none of his business.

I can’t leave it if they’re in trouble, he said to himself. And a quiet cold voice in his head said,
Go to whoever it is. Anybody about this time of night is up to no good. They might be useful to you!

He put the torch back on, shading it again, then picked his way through the undergrowth, pausing every
few steps to listen. Whoever or whatever Danny had heard was growing tired—the sounds had become feeble—but there was no sign that he had been detected. Then the noises stopped altogether. Instead, Danny heard someone sobbing. Whoever it was didn’t sound dangerous anymore. Danny straightened and took his hand away from the torch.

He had found Vicky the siren. She had been caught in a trap and was hanging in a net from a tree branch. Below her, sharpened spikes had sprung from the earth. Whoever had set the trap had clearly taken no chances. Vicky’s dress was torn and her hair was full of leaves, but when she saw the torchlight, without knowing who was holding it, she cried out in a breathy girlish voice.

“Oh, thank goodness, kind stranger! I have been caught in this dreadful trap. I was just getting some medicine for my poor sick mother and some evil person left this awful thing here. If you could just help me I would be so grateful.…”

“It’s all right, Vicky. It’s me.” Danny angled the torch so it showed his face.

“Oh,” she said, bad-tempered and sulky. “You. I suppose you lot helped Brunholm build these traps. My dress is ruined.”

“No!” Danny said. “I wouldn’t help Brunholm build something like that. Course I wouldn’t.”

“You wouldn’t?” she said, surprised. “Well, maybe you could just step over here for a second and cut one or two strands of this net.…”

“Why would I do that?” Danny said, feeling the
cunning part of his brain taking over, deep in the forest at night with a trapped creature.

“I could do things for you,” Vicky said with a coy smile. “I could help you.”

“I don’t think there’s anything you can do for me,” Danny said, pretending to turn away.

“Wait, wait, don’t go, there must be something. If Brunholm gets his hands on me …”

Danny waited. Brunholm had been setting traps for Vicky for months, ever since Danny and Les had been fooled into releasing her from her cell in Wilsons.

“You’re probably better under lock and key,” Danny said. “All you do is make ships run aground on rocks by beguiling sailors.”

“I’ve given up beguiling, honestly I have,” Vicky said. “I’ve put all that behind me. I’m a very respectable siren now.” She put on an innocent face, which Danny didn’t believe for a moment.

“Besides,” Danny said, “you’d promise me anything to get free and then you’d try to double-cross me.”

“I swear I wouldn’t. I’ll take the siren’s oath. The Unquiet come for you if you don’t keep it.” Vicky shivered at the mention of the Unquiet, and something about her reaction made Danny think her fear was real. As far as he could see, nobody joked about the Unquiet round Wilsons.

“Okay then, let’s hear the oath.”

“You have to tell me what you want me to do.”

“I want you to be my eyes and ears when I need you, to find out any bit of information I ask.”

“Is that all?” Vicky said. “You sure you don’t want more? I could throw in some theft if you like. A little assault could be in the deal as well.…”

“No thanks,” Danny said quickly, “the eyes and ears will do very well. Now, what about this oath?”

“Oh, the oath.” The siren closed her eyes, put her head back like a child in school about to say a poem and began to recite in a high-pitched voice:

“I want you to be a spy in the school for me when I ask you,” Danny said. The siren listened gravely, then replied:

She opened her eyes. “That do?”

“That’ll do.”

“Well then, cut me loose!”

It was difficult to get Vicky out without dropping her onto the spikes below. Finally Danny realized that he still had the Knife of Implacable Intention, a knife that did exactly what its owner wanted of it. Vicky watched him closely as he weighed the knife in his hand.

“What are you going to do?” She eyed him nervously. For answer Danny threw the knife. It ripped through the side of the netting on the way out. The siren shrieked as she tumbled sideways out of the net, the tips of the spikes glinting in the torchlight beneath her. Describing a lethal arc in the air, the knife swung back toward her. She went silent as it plunged through the shoulder of her dress, pinning her to the trunk of the tree behind her.

Dangling from the tree, the siren examined the place the knife had struck. She fingered the ruined fabric and gave Danny a dangerous look.

“If you swing round to the branch on your left,” Danny said, “you should be able to get down.” Vicky did as he said, and just as she reached the branch the knife fell from the tree trunk into Danny’s waiting hand.

“Don’t forget,” he told her. She looked at him through narrowed eyes.

“I won’t,” she said, and for a moment there was something strange, almost sad in her tone. Then she dropped from the branch and disappeared into the woods.

As he walked back to the Roosts, Danny didn’t feel very good about himself. He had recruited a valuable ally and bound her to him, but the way he had gone about it felt dishonest and sneaky. He should have just released her. He had earned an advantage over her, but he had the worrying feeling that she might turn on him.

The forest path opened out into the lawns of Wilsons and the building sprang up in front of him. For all the danger lurking in it—the assassin, the Unquiet roaming the Butts, the devious games of Brunholm—the building
looked welcoming with its many lights blazing, and Danny’s heart leapt. This was where he belonged, he thought as he hurried toward it.

I
n another world, the woman whom he had once known as his mother fed another piece of broken furniture into the fire. She was afraid of going outside to get fuel in case the winged creatures returned. They had terrified her, no matter how delighted Agent Stone was to confirm his theory that there really was a Lower World. All she could remember was their burning eyes and their foul stench. During the attack she had fallen unconscious, but she had seen the Seraphim fleeing before the ravens, and she felt a little bit safer when she looked out the window at the ravens in their ragged nests in the bare trees outside. Most of them flew off to find food during the day, but some remained behind.

Agent Stone was getting better, but since seeing the Seraphim he had spent most of his time in the library, barely pausing to eat. Pearl was on her own during the day, and she spent hours in Danny’s room sitting on his bed. For years she had pretended that they were a family, and now she felt she was being punished for it. She prayed that Danny was safe and that the Seraphim had not caught up with him, for surely they had been after him when they’d come here. And she hoped that, wherever he was, he would be able to forgive her.

PECULIAR GEOGRAPHY

T
he following morning Danny, Dixie and Les went up to the apothecary straight after breakfast. Vandra was sitting up in bed. She looked ill and her voice was faint, but, as Dixie said, “At least she had her eyes open.” They only stayed for a short while. Vandra was always gloomy when she was recovering from poison, and barely responded to their questions. They knew she would get better as the days went on, and that was enough for them.

Classes had started, and the halls had been full of pupils when the group went up to the apothecary, but now they were deserted. Dixie looked at her schedule.

“Oh dear,” she said, “we’re late for geography!” Les and Danny glanced at each other and they all broke into a run. They tried to slip in quietly at the back, Dixie disappearing and reappearing at her desk, but it was no good.
The wooden-backed blackboard eraser whistled through the air, glancing off Les’s head with a dull sound. A rattled Dixie disappeared from her desk but mistakenly reappeared beside the teacher’s, where a flung textbook of
Bottomless Lakes of the Lower World
just missed her. Spitfire, the geography teacher, was brilliant at her job, and the pupils liked her, but she had a hot temper and didn’t suffer fools gladly. Danny got a raised eyebrow, which meant that she would talk to him later.

“Now, class,” Spitfire said, “back to the exam topic of this term—the geography and history of the Upper World.”

It was odd sitting there listening to his world being described in the same way someone might describe a foreign country they didn’t know very well. It was clear for a start that Spitfire had no idea what religion was. She said that people could only guess at what the strange buildings that dominated so many towns and cities were for, but that in some of them there were paintings and statues of Messengers, which meant that they may have been communication centers between the Upper and Lower Worlds before the treaty.

Spitfire turned the lights out and began to project some photographs and paintings of Danny’s world onto a screen.

“Our limited contacts with the Upper World have enabled us to get some idea of what modern life is like there,” she said.

The trouble with Spitfire’s photographs was that there was no way of telling what era they were from, so that a
photo of a modern building was followed by one of a steam train.

“The steam engine appears to be the only mode of transport,” Spitfire said. “Unlike us, they do not have any automobiles.”

Danny opened his mouth to say something, then closed it again. Spitfire had moved on to people. A black-and-white photo of a man in a top hat and tailcoat was described as wearing “everyday work clothing,” whereas a girl in a bikini represented “normal leisure clothing” for women.

“What are you laughing about?” Les whispered as Danny snorted. A “typical schoolchild” wore a cap and shorts and carried a slingshot in his pocket. A picture of an airplane on the ground bemused Spitfire and Danny suddenly realized there were no airplanes in the Lower World.