Toadspit and Bonnie stared at Goldie in horror. Blessed Guardian Hope, the woman who had tried to sell Goldie into slavery! The woman who, along with the Fugleman, had nearly destroyed Jewel.
‘But she’s dead!’ said Bonnie. ‘She drowned six months ago, her and the Fugleman.’
Mouse
‘Ssshhh! No one ever found their bodies.’
‘No, but—’
‘We have to get away from here,’ said Goldie. ‘She’ll realise something’s wrong soon and come looking for us.’
‘Where can we go?’ said Bonnie.
Toadspit scowled. ‘Back to the sewers. I’m going to wring Pounce’s neck.’
‘We could still try the wharves,’ said Goldie. ‘Maybe there really are ships leaving for Jewel. Maybe that bit was true.’
‘How will we know if they’re safe?’ said Bonnie.
Goldie and Toadspit looked at each other. ‘We won’t,’ said Toadspit. ‘Not if Harrow’s really got people all over the place.’
‘We’ll have to go by land,’ said Goldie. ‘It’ll take a lot longer—’
‘You want us to walk?’ Bonnie’s voice rose in a squeal of disbelief. ‘All the way to Jewel?’
‘Sssshhhh!’ hissed Toadspit and Goldie together.
But it was too late. In the still of the night, Bonnie’s voice rang out like a signal. There was a shout from inside the stableyard – and feet pounded out the gate towards them.
The children turned and ran. Back past the empty houses with their gaping windows. Around a corner. Across a gushing stream – a leap almost too much for Bonnie. Past a knacker’s yard, past a row of boarded-up shops, with the cat galloping beside them, its tail high, its ears flat against its skull.
As they ran, a single question rattled in Goldie’s head like a pebble in a tin. What was Guardian Hope doing here?
Most of the streetlamps in this part of town were broken, and there were places where it was so dark that Goldie could barely see five steps in front of her. Once she nearly ran straight into a wall. Watch out! cried the little voice, and she swerved just in time, with a cry of warning to the others.
They ran down street after street. They ducked around corners and dived through alleyways. But try as they would, they could not lose their pursuers. Before long, Goldie’s heart felt as if it might explode in her chest.
She saw a narrow lane between two buildings. The cat leaped into it, and the three children followed. Behind them, someone howled with excitement, like a dog that has sighted a hare.
At the end of the lane, Goldie looked around wildly. ‘Which way?’ she said to the cat.
In the wall beside her, a battered tin door swung open. A small hand beckoned urgently.
‘Mouse!’
Toadspit grabbed Goldie’s arm. ‘No. We can’t trust him.’
‘They didn’t go this way, Cord,’ shouted a voice from the mouth of the lane. ‘I’m not right on their tail. Woohoo!’
Goldie wrenched her arm out of Toadspit’s grasp and leaped for the doorway, with Bonnie right behind her. Toadspit hesitated, then jumped after them.
They raced through the derelict rooms and down a flight of stone stairs to a small damp cellar. In front of them was the entrance to a tunnel with a barred gate across it. Goldie could hear running water.
‘Another – old sewer?’ gasped Toadspit.
Mouse nodded.
‘Is there a way – out – the other end? No lies!’
The little boy nodded again.
The gate was rusted into position, but there was a gap that Bonnie and Mouse could slip through easily. It was more of a struggle for the two older children. Goldie heard Smudge’s heavy feet pounding down the stairs towards them.
‘Quick,’ she said, and she squeezed through the gate after Toadspit.
The tunnel was pitch black and narrow. The children felt their way down it, sliding their hands over the brick walls and brushing spider webs from their faces. They had not gone more than ten paces when the tunnel turned a corner. They hurried around it – and ran straight into a rockfall.
Mouse yelped. Toadspit and Bonnie shouted with the shock of it. Goldie fumbled at the pile of rocks and broken bricks, trying to find a way past them. But they filled the tunnel from top to bottom. There was no escape.
She leaned against the wall, trying to catch her breath. Toadspit turned on Mouse. ‘It’s a trap,’ he snarled. ‘You brought us here on purpose.’
Somewhere near Goldie’s feet, the cat hissed a warning.
‘Listen,’ whispered Bonnie. ‘It’s Smudge. He’s trying to get through the gate!’
Smudge grunted and swore, but the gap was too small and the gate would not open wider to let him past. After a minute or two he gave up. Goldie heard him shout, ‘Hey, Cord. I think I ain’t got ’em trapped.’
There was an answering shout from Cord. ‘How many?’
‘I didn’t see four.’
Cord’s feet thumped down the stairs, and the glow of a lantern seeped into the tunnel. ‘Ha! They don’t keep multiplyin’.’
‘Where’s Flense got to?’ said Smudge. ‘Don’t tell her that it were me who caught ’em!’
Bonnie was shivering. Goldie put her arms around the younger girl. ‘Don’t worry, Princess Frisia,’ she whispered, ‘Morg’ll find us. She’ll get into the building somehow. She’ll chase them away.’
Toadspit grunted. ‘They’ll be expecting her this time.’
‘We’re not going to give up, are we?’ said Bonnie.
‘No,’ whispered Goldie. ‘Harrow’s far too dangerous.’
Mouse nodded and drew his finger across his throat in a gesture that made her skin crawl.
‘Goldie, are you sure it was Guardian Hope you saw?’ whispered Toadspit. ‘It doesn’t make sense. What would she be doing here? Why would she be working for someone like Harrow?’
‘I don’t know—’ Goldie stopped. All the things she had seen and heard over the last few days tumbled through her head, making unexpected patterns . . .
She let go of Bonnie. ‘The bomb!’
‘What bomb?’ whispered Bonnie. ‘You mean the one in the Fugleman’s office?’
‘Yes. That was Harrow. At least, someone told me it was. But why would he do such a thing?’ The patterns shifted. The bits clicked into place like pins in a padlock. ‘Who gained from it?’
‘No one,’ said Toadspit.
Goldie shook her head. ‘Don’t you remember? Before the bombing, there was a rumour that the Protector was going to halve the number of Blessed Guardians. And everyone was really pleased. But after the bombing, they were so frightened that they wanted more Guardians, not fewer. They almost doubled their numbers overnight.’
‘But—’ said Toadspit.
‘Listen,’ breathed Goldie. ‘Guardian Hope is Flense. I saw her! So who’s Harrow? Who would she work for? Who is the only person Guardian Hope would work for?’
For a moment there was complete silence except for the sound of running water. Then Toadspit said, in a shocked voice, ‘It’s— It’s the Fugleman! It must be. He’s still alive. He had Bonnie stolen. He bombed his own office!’
At the entrance to the tunnel, someone cleared their throat. Iron shutters scraped and lantern light splashed across the children’s faces.
The blood froze in Goldie’s veins.
‘Well well,’ said Guardian Hope. ‘Have you noticed, Cord, how these old sewers magnify the slightest whisper? If a person happened to be listening, a person could hear the most interesting things.’
The Fugleman was having trouble with all this humility. It rubbed against his skin like sacking. He loathed it.
He loathed the dungeons too. And so, last night, he had set out to persuade his guards to let him sleep in the office for a change. He had smiled his charming smile, and twisted the truth this way and that like toffee. Before five minutes had passed, the guards were smiling back at him. Before ten minutes, they thought the whole sleeping-in-the-office thing was their idea.
It was wonderfully easy when he put his mind to it.
As a result, he was dozing in a comfortable chair when the runner from the semaphore station arrived. He heard his guards jerk upright. He raised his own head more slowly.
‘Your Honour,’ said the runner. ‘An urgent message has come through.’ She thrust an envelope into his hand.
The message was coded, of course, like all the others he had received. It was a simple code, one that he had worked out with Guardian Hope several weeks ago.
‘Think we have found children’ meant ‘Have brats under lock and key’.
‘Closing in on villains’ meant ‘All goes according to plan, no one suspects us’.
They had allowed for things to go wrong. But he had never seriously expected to see the message that now lay before him.
‘Children not sighted since last report. Believe they are still alive, but extremely ill. Please advise.’
His gorge rose, so that he felt as if he might vomit. He forced himself to be still.
‘Are you sure of this wording?’ he asked the young woman. ‘I know the semaphore is difficult at night. Perhaps not all of the lamps were lit.’
‘They ran the check code, Your Honour, just to be sure. All the lamps are working.’
‘Is there a problem?’ said one of the guards, leaning over to peer at the bit of paper.
‘Read for yourself,’ said the Fugleman, keeping his face blank only by an enormous effort. A terrible fury was growing inside him and he wanted to leap out of his chair and scream at the man.
Of course there’s a problem, you moron! The brats escaped! They’ve been recaptured, but somehow they have discovered the truth. The WHOLE truth!
The guard read the message out loud. ‘Extremely ill? I don’t like the sound of that.’
‘Neither do I. But we must— We must not give up,’ muttered the Fugleman. He grabbed a pen and paper and began to scratch out a coded reply, his hand pushing so hard on the pen that the nib broke.
He took a new one and started again. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘I’ll read it aloud as I write.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Use all available resources. Rescue . . . them . . . tonight. Repeat . . . tonight. Repeat . . . rescue.’
He blotted the ink, put the message in an envelope and gave it to the runner. She ducked her head and mumbled, ‘I just wanted to say, Your Honour, we all appreciate your efforts to save the children.’ Then she dashed out the door.
As the sound of her footsteps receded, the Fugleman leaned back in his chair. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘it is up to my informants – and the will of the Seven Gods.’
The guards flicked their fingers. ‘It was good, Your Honour,’ said the youngest one, ‘the way you repeated bits of it. That’ll get them moving.’
‘I certainly hope so,’ murmured the Fugleman.
In his mind, he was replaying the message he had sent. ‘Use all available resources.’
That was the important part, the bit that would set his back-up plan in motion. He was glad now that he had decided to have a back-up. Of course, it would have been so much more satisfying to do the whole thing by his own wits, and the Southern Archipelago mercenaries were appallingly expensive. But they were about to prove their worth. With luck he would be free within a day or so, and the city of Jewel would be under his heel at last.
The second part of the message was really just an afterthought. But it was important to tie up loose ends. And the children were a very loose end.
He chuckled silently to himself, his rage entirely gone. The youngest guard would be surprised if he knew what the real message was. The one that Hope would act on.
‘Kill them tonight. Repeat – tonight. Repeat – kill them.’