Peter and the Shadow Thieves (41 page)

“What’s she saying?” whispered Mol y.

“She says I should touch the hand with the locket,” whispered Peter.

Mol y looked around; from both sides of the room, the searchers were getting closer.

“Then do what she says,” she whispered.

Peter raised the locket and touched it to the golden knight’s hand. For a moment, nothing happened. Then the floor began to move. Peter and Mol y grabbed each other as they realized that they were sinking on a square slab of stone, about four feet on each side. Silently they descended into a dark chamber beneath the floor of the big room. Above them was the square hole through which they had descended. They could hear the searchers very close now.

“They’l see us down here,” whispered Peter.

Get off the stone,
said Tink.

Quickly, Peter stepped off the floor slab, pul ing Mol y with him. Immediately the knight and the slab rose back into place, pushed silently upward by a thick marble column rising from the floor of the chamber.

For a moment Mol y and Peter were in total darkness. Then, suddenly, the chamber was bathed in a soft yel ow light, which seemed to be coming from everywhere and nowhere. They found themselves in what looked like a large study, furnished with a long table, a dozen comfortable chairs, a writing desk, one large wal entirely covered with shelves crammed with thousands of books, and another wal covered with an enormous floor-to-ceiling map.

“Wel ,” said Mol y, “I guess we’ve found the Keep.”

T
HE TWO SEARCH PARTIES—Slank’s and Nerezza’s—met at the armor display in the center of the room. They surrounded the suits of armor, then searched through them thoroughly. They found no sign of the boy and girl.

“I don’t understand it,” said Slank, standing among the motionless steel knights, frustration raising the pitch of his voice. “I could have sworn I saw a light right here.”

“You probably saw our lantern,” said Nerezza.

“No,” said Slank. “It was—”

He stopped in midsentence, feeling—as did the other men—the familiar, unwelcome coolness in the air.

Nerezza and Slank turned to face Ombra. For a moment there was silence; neither man wanted to deliver the bad news. Final y Nerezza spoke.

“They’re not here, my lord,” he said.

Another silence; the air seemed to grow even colder. Nerezza and Slank both felt the faceless stare.

“They are here,” groaned Ombra. “I saw them.”

“Yes, my lord,” said Nerezza, “but we—”

“
SILENCE
.”

The hideous voice echoed through the vast stone room. Not a man was breathing.

“You wil search this room again,” said Ombra, softly now. “And if you do not find the children, you wil search the floor above this, and then the upper floor. The boy and the girl are here somewhere, and you wil find them.”

“Yes, my lord,” said Nerezza. To the men he said, “You heard him. Find them!”

The men began scouring the room again. Ombra remained where he was, facing the suits of armor. In his dissection of the fragment of soul he had managed to extract from McGuinn, Ombra had concentrated on learning, in what little time he had, the location of the starstuff, and the Return. But he’d sensed that McGuinn was holding back something else as wel —another deep secret, something about the White Tower.

Ombra stared at the armor, sifting through the dreamlike swirl of images he’d seen in the last instants of his struggle with McGuinn. There was something there, something tantalizingly close….

What was it
?

D
OWN IN THE KEEP, bathed in golden light, Peter and Moly stood stil, listening to the muffled sounds coming from the room above—shouts, boots scraping on stone. After a minute the sounds began to move away. For now, it appeared, they were safe.

“Now what?” said Peter.

“Wel ,” said Mol y, “since we’re here, we might as wel have a look around. Perhaps we can figure out where Father went.” Peter walked over to the bookshelf. He removed a book at random; it was leather-bound and dust-covered, clearly very old. He opened it to a random page and squinted at the writing.

“It’s not in English,” he said.

Mol y came over and had a look. She wrinkled her nose.

“Latin,” she said.

“Can you read it?”

“A bit,” she said. “But very slowly. And”—she gestured at the thousands of dusty volumes—“where would I start?” They walked over to the huge wal map. It displayed the earth—Europe and Africa in the middle, the Americas off to the left, Asia to the right. Looking closer, they saw that it was covered with hundreds of finely drawn red lines. Most of the lines converged in London; from there they radiated out al over the planet, each ending in a tiny gold star with a date next to it. Some of the dates were centuries old.

“Starstuff,” said Peter.

Mol y nodded. “This is where they keep track of it. I had no idea there was so much.”

Peter moved close to the map, his eyes roaming back and forth until he found what he was looking for.

“Look,” he said, pointing to a tiny dot in the ocean, far from land, connected to London by not one but two red lines—one meandering, one arrow-straight.

Mol y smiled. “Mol usk Island,” she said. She traced the meandering line with her finger. “This is us on the
Never Land.
What a voyage
that
was!” She moved her finger to the straight line. “And this is me going home, with Father and the starstuff.” She fol owed the line back to London, then said, “It only shows the shipments reaching London. It doesn’t show where they go for the Return from here.”

“And you’re sure the Return isn’t here?”

“Yes,” said Mol y. “It’s somewhere else.” Her eyes roamed around the room, then fel on the writing desk. On it was a stack of papers. Mol y went over, picked them up, and began sifting through them. But her expression quickly changed from eagerness to disappointment when she saw that they were financial documents—invoices, purchase orders, bil s of lading, customs forms. She sighed.

“I suppose even Starcatchers have bil s to pay,” she muttered. She was about to set the papers back down when she noticed something.

“Wait a minute,” she said.

“What?” said Peter.

“Look at this.” Mol y was holding an invoice from a wine merchant listing various bottles of wine and their prices.

Peter looked. “What about it?”

“Here,” said Mol y, pointing to the margin. There, in bright blue ink that contrasted with the black used to write the rest of the invoice, was the letter S, drawn in a fanciful cursive, fol owed by the numbers
1030
and
246.

Peter looked again, and again asked, “What about it?”

“That’s Father’s writing,” said Mol y.

“Are you sure?”

“Absolutely. He’s got a special y made pen that he loves, and this is the color of ink he uses. And that’s how he writes the letter
S
, with that odd curlicue.”

“What does it mean?” said Peter.

Mol y frowned. “I’ve no idea. But this invoice is dated only last week. Father must have written this very shortly before he left.” She studied it a moment longer, then tucked it into the pocket of her dress. “Let’s see if we can find anything else that might be helpful,” she said.

Mol y and Peter spent the next half hour looking around the Keep, but found nothing else that seemed remotely helpful. Final y, Mol y, after having gone through the stack of financial documents for the fifth time without finding anything new, hung her head in discouragement.

“This has been a waste of time,” she said. “No, it’s much worse than that. Mister McGuinn is dead, and we’ve found
nothing.
”

“You didn’t kil him,” said Peter. “Ombra did.”

“But I led him here,” said Mol y. “I thought I could be a hero, saving Mother. I’m a fool.”

“No you’re not,” said Peter.

Yes she is,
said Tink, though Peter could tel her heart wasn’t real y in it.

“What did she say?” said Mol y.

“She said, um, she said it’s been quiet upstairs for a while,” said Peter.

Mol y listened for a few seconds, and nodded; there were no more boot steps on the floor above, no shouting.

“I suppose we should try to get out of here,” she said. “We’re never going to find Father if we stay here.”

“How do you suppose we get out?” said Peter.

The way you came in,
said Tink.
The metal man.

Mol y looked at Peter. He pointed to the marble column beneath the slab of floor that had carried them down to the Keep. They went over and studied its smooth, cream-colored surface, but found nothing that suggested a way out. Then Mol y spotted something gleaming on the wal nearby.

“Over there,” she said.

Peter fol owed her eyes and saw it: a smal golden star set into the stone. He went to it and again removed the locket from his shirt. As he did, both locket and star began to glow.

“Stand away from the column,” he said. As Mol y complied, he touched the locket to the star. The column began to slide silently into the floor, the golden knight descending on its square slab of stone. When it reached the floor of the Keep, it raised its hand. Mol y and Peter stepped onto the slab, and Peter touched his locket to the knight’s palm.

Silently, they rose into the lower room of the White Tower, hoping that nobody was waiting for them in the darkness.

N
EREZZA WAS FRUSTRATED. Slank was furious.

Where were the boy and the girl
?

The men had thoroughly searched the bottom floor of the White Tower; then the middle floor, where they had come in. Now they had finished scouring the upper floor. They had checked the windows: al were blocked by close-set iron bars. They had two men guarding the tower’s only door. There was no other way for the boy and the girl to escape. And yet they were nowhere to be found.

Reluctantly, Nerezza and Slank approached Ombra, who stood alone in the center of the upper floor. The rest of the men hung back, watching, grateful that they did not have to deliver the bad news.

“My lord,” said Nerezza. “We can’t find them.”

“They are here,” said Ombra.

“But, my lord, we—”

“
They are here.
”

“Yes, my lord.”

“You wil have the men search the tower again.”

“Yes, my lord.”

Nerezza and Slank turned to go back to the men and give the order. Slank was halted by Ombra’s groan.

“Mister Slank,” he said.

Slank turned back.

“You wil get a lantern and come with me.”

“Yes, my lord.” Slank took a lantern from one of the men and returned to Ombra, who glided to the front staircase and began descending the spiral steps. He knew better than to ask Ombra what they were doing.

In fact, Ombra was not sure himself. Something was drawing him to the lower floor again, some fragment of a thought that he had extracted from McGuinn, undefined but tantalizing. Ombra had gone to the lower floor several times, drifting through the armor, trying to make sense of the murky jumble of vague images he had captured. Each time he had given up in frustration.