The Mapmaker's Sons (2 page)

The chapel roof was old, older even than Mortimer Lost. Slate pieces, affixed to the roof with tiny rusted hooks, rattled beneath his feet as he crept across them. A few brittle squares creaked beneath him, but that couldn't be helped. Tom was a bit taller than average, but on the slim side. With his dark hair and eyes, and dressed as he was in jeans and a black hooded sweatshirt, he imagined he looked like nothing more than a shadow drifting across the roof.

Just as he lifted his knee to climb again, a sound coming from a few yards away caught his attention. The sharp snap of a
piece of slate. Over the last year or so of prowling the rooftops of the Lost Academy, Tom had learned a few things about slate. It was hideously slick in the rain, it was unbearably cold in the winter, and it didn't break under the weight of a chipmunk, a squirrel, or even a cat. It took the force of an object his size or greater to snap a piece of slate. That could mean only one thing.

Someone was on the rooftop with him.

Tom whipped his head around. Nothing but shifting shadows and murky darkness surrounded him. Yet fear curled around the edges of his thoughts like wisps of smoke, carrying with it a faint awareness of being watched, of something dark and sinister just beyond his line of sight. An icy chill that had nothing to do with the coming storm swept down his spine.

Before he could decide what to do, he heard the shuffling of bodies below and felt his friends' impatience. Mistaking his hesitation for fear, they stage-whispered shouts of encouragement.

“Do it! Don't stop!”

“You're almost there!”

“Get the bells, Tom!”

Their shouts brought him back to his purpose. “Quiet!” he hissed. He scouted the grounds for signs that a night watchman or staff member had been alerted by the noise. Then his gaze swept the roof again. Nothing. He shook off the unease that had stolen over him moments earlier.

Anxious now to reach the belfry, Tom crab-walked up the roof to the main joist. The bell tower sat at the roof's apex, a structure twelve feet square and twice as tall, crowned by an ornate copper cupola. Tom pulled himself through one of the arched recesses in the exterior wall and slipped inside.

A beam roughly eighteen inches deep ran around the interior of the tower. From that ledge were suspended a pair of
wooden boards that crisscrossed from one side of the belfry to the other, pitched over a sheer drop of at least six stories. Laid down for the workmen adjusting the bells, Tom supposed. It would be insane to try to cross them without a safety harness. Fortunately, he wasn't even considering it. He eased along the ledge and made his way around the interior walls until he reached his objective.

The main bell, an enormous cast-iron thing, hung from an axle in the center of the tower. A set of four smaller bells flanked it from the east and west. Above them all were a series of gears that looked to Tom very much like the gears of a clock enlarged a hundredfold. His plan was simple: shove a discarded two-by-four into the central cog, jam the works, silence the bells. Quick, dramatic, and entirely anonymous—his favorite type of prank.

He reached for a length of board he'd noticed on an earlier foray to the tower, left behind after some previous refurbishment. But as he lifted the board, a high-pitched squeal of protest tore through the blustery night air. Tom jerked around, scanning the space, his pulse racing. He clutched the board tightly and drew it closer, holding it defensively in front of him. Another high-pitched squeal—louder this time, angrier. From somewhere within the dark recesses of the cupola, a flutter of movement caught his eye. A flash of red. Tom's breath caught in his throat as an enormous black shadow rose and exploded straight toward him.

Bats. Dozens of them. Ugly, hairy, fluttery, shrieking bats, woken from their slumber when he had moved the board, darted all around him. They lapped the bell in a chaotic mass, emitting high-pitched squeals of protest at having been disturbed. He dove down low, covered his head, and waited for the swarming and screeching to stop. Finally the bats flocked out of the tower and disappeared into the night. Tom released a shaky laugh and stood.
Bats in the belfry.
How pathetic. He'd been frightened by a stupid cliché.

He reached for the board he'd dropped but abruptly froze,
peering into the darkness. The flash of red he'd seen seconds earlier was still there. Only now it was closer. More distinct. A single red eye, floating in the shadows.

The scrape of a boot sounded against the rough wooden ledge, and the eye drew closer. Now Tom could make out more. It wasn't a floating eye at all, but a tall, muscular man dressed in black boots and a flowing black cape that was held in place at the man's left shoulder by a metal clasp in the shape of a glowing red eye.

A second boot scrape sounded behind him. Tom sensed, even before he turned, that the man had a partner. A quick glance confirmed it. Shock and denial coursed through him as his mind fought against what he was seeing. The sheer
impossibility
of it froze him in place for wasted seconds.

“We've spent two years looking for you.”

Tom's mouth went dry. Natural questions—who were they, how did they get there, why were they looking for
him—seemed
somehow irrelevant in the face of the overwhelming threat of their presence. Self-preservation took over. His gaze darted to the two-by-four he'd dropped.

The man didn't miss it. A thin smile flickered across his face. “Try it and things will go very bad for you. Worse than you can ever imagine.”

However badly Tom wanted to reject what he was seeing, there was no denying that the danger was real. Instinctively he edged away, inching backward along the ledge of the bell tower, knowing even as he did that he was headed straight for the man positioned behind him. His mind whirled, calculating options, as he searched desperately for an escape.

A sharp gust of wind tore through the tower as a clap of thunder boomed around them. The split-second distraction
was all Tom needed. He twisted to the right, vaulting away from both men, and launched himself onto one of the narrow planks that traversed the bell tower.

The force of his jump caused the board, already unstable, to skid beneath him. His arms swinging wildly, Tom shot across the sheer six-story drop like a surfer riding a rogue wave, barely managing to stay upright.

The ride abruptly ended as the board tipped, teetering on the narrow ledge. Tom pitched forward into the abyss, groping blindly for anything to stop his fall.

A brush of something soft and feather-like swept across his hand: a badly frayed length of rope tied to the bell's clapper. Fueled by equal parts adrenaline and desperation, he grabbed it, hanging on with all his strength as the board he'd been riding careened off the ledge and plummeted into the gaping chasm beneath his feet, splintering with a loud crash on the stone surface below.

Tom shot straight down, jerking to a shoulder-wrenching halt ten feet beneath the base of the bell. But he didn't stop moving. The momentum of his fall carried him forward, sending him swaying across the dark void like an oversized pendulum. He hit the opposite wall. The clapper slammed against the inside of the bell.

The resulting noise was so intense that the vibration echoed through Tom like an electric shock. It was all he could do to keep his grip on the rope. All around him, the night came alive. As the earsplitting echo of the bell faded, he heard the shrieks of his friends as they sprinted across the green to the safety of the dorm.

Tom flew back in the opposite direction, the force of his weight causing him to swing to and fro, clanging the bell over and over. The clamor was so intense, he was convinced he'd never hear again. If he lived to hear anything.

The two men in capes, furious that he'd managed to evade them, set up a plank to cross the tower chasm and grab his rope.
Tom swung wildly, hoping to deter them until help arrived or he could figure a way out, but then he felt a quick jerk and shot downward again. He swallowed hard and looked up. His rope was fraying, the hemp unraveling under the combined stress of his weight and the constant swaying.

Tom felt another jerk and looked up to see that one of the caped men had succeeded in grabbing his rope. As he hit the wall again, he frantically searched it for some kind of purchase. Nothing. Nothing but sheer wall, worn slick by a century of rain and wind, surrounded him.

Suddenly his rope went momentarily slack. The man was gone. The sound of fighting—of grunts and groans, of fists meeting flesh, of bodies slamming against walls—reached his ears. Tom peered up into the darkness above him. A third man was now there, the three brawling figures randomly silhouetted by flashes of lightning. They lurched back and forth over the gaping pit, locked in brutal hand-to-hand combat.

Then, abruptly, the clash ended. A shattering stillness fell over the tower. Tom caught his breath as he looked upward. A solitary figure stood on the tower ledge.

Pirate.

That was the only word Tom could think of to describe him. A rough, sturdy man dressed in a ruffled shirt, knee breeches, and buckled shoes. Or buckled
shoe,
rather, for below his right knee, the man sported an old-fashioned wooden peg leg.

A hallucination brought on by stress and terror—that was the only reasonable explanation Tom could summon for the man's presence. He blinked, fully expecting the pirate to be gone the moment he opened his eyes. But he wasn't. Instead, the man strode out onto the plank from which he'd single-handedly bested the two caped men, and stared down.

“Looks like you're in a bit of a spot there, lad.”

Tom stared up at him wordlessly. Then his gaze darted around the cupola for the other men.

“It's all right. They're gone—for now.”

“Gone? Gone where?”

The pirate gave a loose shrug and gestured vaguely into the night. “If they survived the fall—and their ugly skulls were thick enough that they just might have—I've two of my men stationed below to make certain they won't bother you again.”

“Then, they're … then, you …,” Tom stammered, unable to order his thoughts. “You're not with
them?”

A dark look crossed the man's face. “I'd rather be boiled alive in the spit of a thousand plague rats.” The man lowered himself onto the plank and lay on his belly, leaning down to offer his hand.

Tom stared at the pirate's hand, frozen in uncertainty. The hemp cracked, fraying a bit more. He dropped another two inches.

“I'm here to help you, Tom, but that's hard to do if you're dead. Trust me. I know a thing or two about death. That's a ship that only sails in one direction.”

Astonishment that the pirate knew his name, coupled with the fact that the rope was failing, decided for him. Tom reached up and grabbed the man's hand. The pirate tugged him up, pulling him onto the relative safety of the tower ledge. He beamed at Tom in approval. “There's a good lad. Well done.”

“How'd you get up here?” It wasn't the most important question, of course, just the first one that tumbled from Tom's lips.