Peter and the Shadow Thieves (40 page)

“Break it down!” shouted another voice, which Peter recognized instantly.

“Slank,” he said.

“Oh, no,” said Mol y. “How did
he
find us?”

“Who is it?” said McGuinn.

“He’s with the Others,” said Mol y.

“Oh, my,” said McGuinn. He jumped as a heavy body heaved into the door behind him, the crash echoing through the vast stone room. There was another crash, then another, accompanied by shouting and cursing. The old oak creaked and groaned—but remained closed.

“It’s holding,” said McGuinn grimly. “That door was built for battle.”

“Are there any other entrances?” said Mol y.

“No,” said McGuinn. “The White Tower was designed to be defended. This is the only way in.”

“Or out,” noted Peter.

There was another resounding crash as bodies heaved against the door—more cursing, more shouting.

And then a sudden silence.

McGuinn, Peter, and Mol y stood stil as statues, listening, barely breathing.

Then, from just outside the door came a faint wheezing sound. Tink made a noise Peter had come to know wel .

“Ombra,” he said.

“The door!” said Mol y, recal ing the encounter with Ombra in her room. “He’s going to come under the door!” As she spoke the cold air grew colder, and a pool of blackness began to seep through the crack at the bottom of the massive door. Tink flew to Peter’s ear, chiming urgently.

“The lantern!” Peter said. “Put the lantern near him!”

McGuinn hesitated, puzzled.

“He doesn’t like light!” said Peter. “Put the light on him!”

McGuinn brought the lantern down to the middle of the black pool coming under the doorway. Instantly it shrank back, though two dark tentacles on either side kept advancing.

McGuinn swung the lantern right, then left, driving the tentacles back. But as soon as he moved from one part of the pool to another, the part he’d abandoned began advancing again.

Mol y and Peter watched helplessly as McGuinn moved the lantern back and forth, back and forth, his motions increasingly frantic. But it was quickly apparent that his lantern was not enough to stop the thing coming under the door.

“Wait!” said Mol y. “Can’t Tinker Bel stop it again?”

Tink started to respond, but Peter cut her off: “She can stop it once, but then she’l be too tired to do it again. It wil come right back. We need something else.” He turned to McGuinn. “Are there more lanterns?”

“Yes,” McGuinn answered. “Downstairs.” He nodded to the right, not taking his eyes off the relentless seeping blackness. Peter ran along the wal and found an archway opening onto a staircase.

“Hurry!” shouted McGuinn. Peter glanced back and saw he was losing his battle with the dark shape on the floor, its tentacles protruding farther and farther into the room.

With Tink lighting the way and Mol y right behind, Peter entered the cramped staircase, which descended in a tight spiral, round and round, leading them to a landing with an archway opening to another vast room. A lantern hung in the center of the archway. Peter floated up and unhooked it, then floated down. He glanced into the room and gasped as, in the gloomy distance, he saw a dozen or so shapes…the shapes of men.

“Who’s that?” he said to Mol y.

“It’s suits of armor,” Mol y said.

“Hurry!” McGuinn’s voice, tinged with panic, echoed down to them. “I can’t keep it out!”

Holding the lantern, Peter ran back up the stairs, with Mol y right behind. As they reached the main room they saw the reason for McGuinn’s distress: Ombra was inside now, bil owing upward to his ful height. McGuinn, stil holding his lantern, was backing away from the dark shape, which was now flowing toward him.

“Don’t let him touch your shadow!” shouted Mol y.

McGuinn looked down. The lantern was in his right hand, casting his shadow to the left. Ombra was gliding that way.

“Hold the lantern in front of you!” shouted Peter.

McGuinn quickly swung the lantern forward. Ombra flinched, stopping just for a moment. The lantern was now between Ombra and McGuinn—and McGuinn’s shadow. McGuinn was stil backing toward Peter and Mol y, now standing only a few feet away in the archway leading to the landing.

“Look out!” shouted Peter, as Ombra, moving with astonishing quickness, darted to McGuinn’s left. McGuinn swung the lantern that way, but as soon as he did Ombra was swooping right, like a giant bat. McGuinn stepped back quickly toward Peter and Mol y, the three of them now moving onto the landing. With nowhere else to go, they started backing down the steep spiral staircase, McGuinn and Peter keeping the two lanterns in front of them, and their eyes on the relentless dark thing coming toward them.

Then it happened. In the jostling on the staircase—three bodies, two lanterns—McGuinn’s shadow wound up on the outside wal for an instant. In that instant, Ombra pounced.

“No!” shouted Mol y, seeing the dark shape darting to the shadow. McGuinn saw it, too. He lurched backward and, awkward in his unbuckled shoes, missed a step. As Ombra touched his shadow, McGuinn screamed and jerked away, flailing the air and letting go of the lantern. It smashed on the stairs, spewing oil, which burst into flame, fil ing the staircase with light. Ombra recoiled from the flames, detaching from McGuinn’s shadow and oozing back up the stairs; at the same time McGuinn, unconscious, went over backward and, before Peter and Mol y could grab him, fel down the steep staircase, his head hitting the stone with a sickening sound.

Mol y screamed and ran down to McGuinn; Peter, stil holding the lantern, fol owed.

McGuinn’s eyes were open, but his head was at a terrible angle.

“No,” Mol y said. “No.” She touched McGuinn’s lifeless, out-flung hand, then began to sob.

Peter put his hand on her shoulder, unable to think of anything to say.

Tink had no such problem.

We need to get out of here,
she said.

From upstairs came the sound of shouting, the thunder of feet. Ombra had opened the door; the men were inside. Peter looked back at the staircase. The lantern fire was stil blocking it, but the flames were lower now.

“Come on, Mol y,” Peter said softly but urgently, pul ing Mol y to her feet. “We have to go.”

“Where can we go?” said Mol y, her eyes stil on the fal en McGuinn.

The shouting of the men was louder now.

“I don’t know,” said Peter. “But we can’t stay here.”

“
S
ILENCE,” SAID OMBRA, in a voice that, while not loud, was heard by every man in the cavernous room. Instantly the shouting stopped. Slank, Nerezza, and the men gathered around the dark hooded figure who had just let them into the White Tower.

“Two men wil remain by this door,” Ombra said. “The boy and the girl are downstairs. They have blocked the stairs with a fire. Captain Nerezza, take four men and extinguish the fire, then search the lower floor. Mister Slank, there is another staircase at the far end of this room. You wil take the rest of the men and go down that way.” The men were divided and—eager to win the gold sovereigns—ran off in search of Peter and Mol y. They left Ombra standing alone in the center of the vast dark room. He was motionless, but not idle: inside his dark form an intense, silent struggle was taking place between Ombra and the last flickering flame of the life that had once been Senior Starcatcher McGuinn.

Ombra, forced by the lantern fire to let go of McGuinn’s shadow, had been unable to absorb it completely. The part that Ombra now possessed, unable to survive in fragmented form, was dying. It was also, in its death throes, resisting Ombra’s efforts to extract the information he most wanted: the location of the starstuff, and the site of the Return.

McGuinn—or what was left of McGuinn—fought hard against the cold blackness enveloping him, absorbing him. But he was weak, and Ombra was strong. McGuinn had given as little as he could, but as the last spark of his being died, Ombra was satisfied that he had obtained just enough.

Now he wanted the children.

P
ETER COULD SEE THEM NOW—the shadowy shapes of men on the spiral staircase, using their boots to stamp out the remaining flames of the dying lantern fire. They would be coming down very soon.

“Mol y,” he said. “We have to leave
now.
”

Mol y took one last look at the body of McGuinn, then gestured across the room and said, “There’s another staircase over there.”

“Come on, then,” said Peter.

They started across the room, and were passing the display of medieval suits of armor when Tink sounded a soft warning.

“What is it?” said Mol y.

“She says men are coming down the other way,” said Peter.

They looked ahead and saw an archway. There was light moving inside. Somebody was coming down the far staircase.

“Are there any other stairs?” whispered Peter.

“I don’t think so,” said Mol y.

“Then we’re trapped down here.”

Mol y looked around at the suits of armor. There were several dozen, their shiny steel plates reflecting the light from the lantern in Peter’s hand.

“We’l have to hide,” she said. “Put out the light.”

Peter blew out the lantern. The center of the room was now nearly pitch dark. At both ends they could see men descending stairs. The searchers were moving slowly, hampered by darkness and the fact that each group had only one lantern. But eventual y they would converge on the center of the room.

“In here,” said Mol y, tugging Peter into the display of armor. They positioned themselves in the middle of a cluster of suits, peering out between them. The searchers at each end of the room had spread out and were moving, slowly and methodical y, ever closer to where Peter and Mol y stood.

“What are we going to do?” whispered Mol y.

Peter had been thinking about that, and the only plan he could come up with was to try to fly out. He knew he couldn’t carry Mol y far; his hope was that he had enough starstuff left in his locket to enable her to become airborne. The ceiling was high; Peter’s plan was to try to swoop over the men and get to the staircase. He knew that if—
if—
they managed to get upstairs, they would likely encounter more men…and Ombra. But for now he had to worry about the men closing in on them.

“We’l have to fly over them,” he whispered, pul ing the locket out from under his shirt. Mol y nodded, immediately grasping the plan.

Peter put his thumb on the catch and was about to flick the locket open. Suddenly, the locket became warm—almost hot.

Then it started to glow.

“Mol y,” he whispered, “the—”

“Peter,” she interrupted. “Look.”

Peter turned—and saw it. The suit of armor directly behind him was also glowing—not the color of steel, but the same color as the locket—a soft, radiant gold.

Then it began to move. As Peter and Mol y watched in openmouthed amazement, the suit of armor slowly, silently, raised its right hand.

“What’s happening?” whispered Peter.

“I don’t know,” whispered Mol y.

Touch it,
said Tink softly.

“What?” whispered Peter.

Touch the metal man’s hand with your locket.