The Ghost Roads (Ring of Five) (15 page)

“Nurse Flanagan!” Danny exclaimed. Nurse Flanagan, as always, looked immaculate, bestowing polite smiles on the dozens of cameramen who aimed their lenses at her.

“The woman was arrested on the basis of evidence linking her to the head of intelligence of a foreign power. However, the key figure in the investigation is still being sought,” the newsreader said. A bad Photofit of Danny flashed up on the screen, his forehead misshapen so and his eyes shadowed so that he looked twisted and evil. Beth stifled a laugh.

The story changed then to the “newest terrorist outrage.” The smoldering remains of two fighter jets were shown.

“Experts are still examining the wreckage of the two aircraft to determine what kind of weapon was used to shoot them down. In the meantime, talks at the United Nations aimed at preventing the outbreak of war have collapsed.”

Danny watched a scrum of reporters at the door of the
United Nations in New York. They surrounded a calm figure who spoke without raising his voice. Longford!

“These talks have broken down for now,” Longford said, looking tired but kindly, “but every effort will be made to restart. We must try. The future of the world depends on it.”

From five thousand miles away, Danny, to his horror, felt his mind reach out to Longford, could feel his plans, his schemes; he could feel the mind of Nurse Flanagan brooding in prison, her thoughts like the stench of rotten lilies, and that of Rufus Ness, mired in an angry fury. Only Conal’s mind was as it had been, a dry and wicked place. Danny knew that Longford was aware of him. On the television Longford shielded his eyes with one hand as though he had felt a twinge of headache, but Danny knew that he was reaching out, trying to find Danny. Danny tried to tear his mind away, but he could not. It would take Longford only seconds to find out where he was.…

Suddenly he felt the presence of another mind, earthy and strong, but clean in a way that the others weren’t, and honest. The link to the other members of the Ring of Five was cut off.

“Are you all right, Mr. Longford?” one of the reporters asked. An aide stepped forward.

“Mr. Longford has been working tirelessly in the service of peace. He needs a night’s sleep.” The aide led him away. Danny looked at Nana.

“You?”

She nodded.

“You have chosen strange bedfellows for mind companions,” Nana said. “I thought I had better break the chain.”

“What’s going on?” Beth asked.

“Nothing, pet.” Nana ruffled her hair fondly. “Get the van ready, will you? We’ll be ready to go shortly.”

With a strange glance at Nana and Danny, Beth did what she was told.

“How did you know to do what you did just then?” Danny said. “To get into my mind like that?”

“You do know what a winged Messenger is?” Nana asked.

“Yes,” Danny said, “but how do you know?”

“Let the name itself speak to you, Danny.”

“What do you mean? Messenger?”

“Yes, Messenger. The winged ones bore messages from one world to the next, did they not? And did not those messages, dispatched by one hand, have to be received by another?”

“I suppose.… What, you?”

“People like me. The traveling people’s eyes see deep into the world. We have always been servants to those from other worlds—those who come with messages, or those, like you, who come for refuge.”

“I’m not here for refuge,” Danny said.

“No?”

“I’m here for revenge.”

“Revenge is a blade that turns in the hand of the wielder. Will you not draw back?” Danny shook his head. “Well, no one sees all outcomes. But we are servants,
though our service is free and gladly given. What would you command of me?”

“I wouldn’t command anything of you,” Danny said, embarrassed. “You’ve done enough for me.”

“Then you will grant me the boon of allowing me to accompany you on your journey. I am afeard you will not complete it without me.”

“You haven’t asked where I want to go.”

“Where?”

“Longford. I want to find Longford.”

“Then let us seek the ghost roads.”

I
t was a strange leave-taking. Once again the travelers pretended they didn’t see as Nana’s trailer, towed by a van, left the campsite. Beth recited names under her breath, naming each person they saw. The campsite faded away. To Danny, looking back, it appeared to be fading away into history.

They drove for an hour along a busy road. There were army trucks and police jeeps moving in the other direction. Danny was nervous, but Nana drove in a relaxed style.

“Most of the time the police think we’re so far beneath them that they don’t even see us,” Beth said, “which suits us fine.”

They reached a turn-off hidden in a clump of trees and drove down it. When Danny looked back, there didn’t appear to be an entrance at all.

Nana stopped at a farm gate. She got down and took a
key from under her skirts. She fitted the key to the shiny new padlock on the gate and they drove through. They found themselves on an unpaved but smooth laneway leading off through fields and woods. There was a peaceful air to the place.

“I feel like I just stepped back through time,” Danny said.

“Maybe you did step through time,” Nana said with a smile, “but not into the past.”

Danny didn’t know what she meant. They drove slowly down the road, dropping into a valley with a river running through it.

Afterward Danny could not recall how many days they spent on the ghost roads. But he remembered what seemed like many nights of stopping and pitching camp under the stars. Beth showed him how to live off the land, catching fish with his hands (“tickling” them, she called it) or setting snares for rabbits. Though it was cold, they bathed in rivers and wide pools. Nana often joined them, wearing a vast blue bathing suit. Danny was up early in the morning and fell into bed at night, his sleep deep and dreamless. Vandra was a healer, but Nana was a healer in her own way and knew that what Danny needed was to go racing through the fields with Beth, climbing trees and wrestling.

He has the weight of the world on his shoulders, she thought. The weight of
two
worlds. He must be allowed time to be himself, to be a boy.

It was odd, Danny thought; it wasn’t as if there were no people on the ghost roads. They saw houses in the
distance. Sometimes they’d see a faraway figure working in a field, and they sometimes met another vehicle, the driver raising a grave hand. But they talked to no one.

“What are the ghost roads?” Danny asked.

“They weave in and out and through and around the busy world,” Nana said. “Sometimes you will be in a busy place and there will be a ghost road passing nearby, going quietly about its business, and you will not know of it. Travelers on the ghost roads let each other pass without remark.”

She did not tell him that there were other journeys to be taken. She could feel the deep power welling up within him, and it frightened her. Her service to him would be to strengthen the part of him that was the boy Danny Caulfield.

She looked with approval on the friendship between Danny and Beth. They spent long hours sitting outside the caravan talking, and Nana did not disturb him. Though sometimes he withdrew from her, and Nana could see that Beth was hurt.

“Child dear,” Nana said, when she saw Beth looking sulky one day, “you of all creatures should know what he is going through. Every time he gets close to someone, they die.”

“I’m not going to die, Nana!”

“I know that, but take the big long face off you. He needs help.”

The weather was fine and cold, but it would not stay that way forever. Danny would not have the time he needed to heal, but Nana could see that he was, half unknown
to himself, learning to control his power. But there was another part to him that worried her. Sometimes she saw him looking at them in a sly way. Part of his nature had been twisted. She could sense a part of him that took joy in betrayal, in seeing someone else’s pain when they realized what had been done to them. And she feared for Beth.

B
runholm had to wait, fuming with impatience, to debrief those who had returned from the Upper World. Vandra, Toxique and Starling were not allowed to sleep until they had spoken to him.

“So the Cherb army is destroyed!” he declared in triumph.

“But why? That’s the question,” Devoy said.

“It’s obvious. Longford got the weather wrong. You always presume he’s smarter than he actually is, Devoy, because he outwitted you!”

Devoy did not answer, but when the others were leaving he asked Starling to remain behind, and they talked until the sun was above the trees.

Les had collapsed on the roof after he had landed. His breathing was shallow and broken. The drug that Jamshid had given him had pushed his system beyond its limits. He had been taken to the apothecary, where Vandra found him. She’d glared at Jamshid and held out her hand. He hesitated, then handed her a jar of brown liquid. Turning away from him, her cheeks coloring as though in shame, she bent her head to the jar. When she turned
back, her canine teeth protruded grotesquely and a little of the liquid ran down her chin.

“Sorry, Les,” she whispered, and plunged her teeth into his neck. Les screamed. His back arched and his heels drummed on the bed. Taut as a bowstring, his body juddered, then slowly fell back. Five minutes later he was fast asleep, snoring gently. Vandra pulled a sleeve across her mouth.

“Don’t ever make me do that again,” she told Jamshid softly, and there was something in her brown eyes that made him shudder.

Gabriel went back alone among the Messengers. There arose a great noise from their rooftop quarters when he gave them the news of Daisy. After that, no Messengers were to be seen in Wilsons.

Les slept for four days. The wounds in his neck where Vandra had injected her antidote did not heal quickly, and he would bear scars there for the rest of his life. School routine had reestablished itself. There were classes with Duddy and geography with Spitfire. They heard reports that the surviving Cherbs had been rounded up into prison camps and that Devoy had organized boats to rescue marooned Cherbs from the railway viaduct. Vandra asked the porter, Valant, if this was true, but he shook his head.

“I would have let them drown,” Smyck said.

“You weren’t there,” Vandra said, “what do you know?”

“I know that if I had Rufus Ness at my mercy I wouldn’t have let him go to rescue two freaks.”

“You weren’t there,” Dixie said.

“From what I hear, your pal the Fifth isn’t about anymore either.” Smyck said. “He’d rather spend time with his Cherb pal, by the look of things. What happened to that filthy Cherb anyway?”

Dixie bit her lip, remembering how Nala had sheltered and fed them and dressed Pearl’s wounds.

Every night before she went to bed, Dixie went to see Pearl. The agent had recovered a little, but she didn’t seem to know where she was, and shrank away from anyone who approached her. Dixie asked Vandra if she could help.

“There is no antidote for her pain—at least, not one that I could inject,” Vandra said.

Nor was there any cure for Gabriel’s pain. Dixie saw him often, flying on his own, circling the school slowly as though looking for something.

There was a strange mood in Wilsons. The cadets were aware that the Treaty Stone had been broken. Letters from home told them about the war to come—until Brunholm decided that they were getting too much information and started censoring the letters, opening the envelopes and scoring out whole paragraphs with a black pen. This made things worse rather than better. Cadets didn’t like knowing that things were being hidden from them.

“In these circumstances, it’s better to trust the cadets, I think, Marcus,” Devoy said. “Ignorance leads to fear.”

But Brunholm insisted. The cadets’ annoyance led to increased breaches of discipline, which in turn led to more punishments. The failure of the Cherb invasion was welcomed, although the pupils were aware of the Cherbs
who had made it onto the collapsed railway bridge. Both ends of the bridge had fallen in, so there was no way off unless Rufus Ness returned to rescue them, but no rescue boats turned up, and the Cherbs’ cries grew fainter every day. The pupils would sneak down to the shore in the evening to look on their enemy, but only Smyck and his allies showed any sense of triumph. The others did not want to see the Cherbs perish abandoned on the freezing ocean, even though they were the enemy. Every evening they went down to look, there were fewer.

One morning, Brunholm called the top rank of cadets into his study. His face was serious.

“The threat of invasion has receded,” he said, “but the threat to Wilsons is as great as ever. We have been infiltrated before, and there is no reason to suppose that the Ring will not attack Wilsons this way again. I propose to organize defense committees to seek out and report anything out of the ordinary back to me.

“Spy on each other, you mean,” Les muttered.

“To this end I will need a deputy from among you to organize and direct this new activity. Cadet Smyck, step forward.”

Grinning at his pals, the tall, pale boy stepped forward. Vandra, Les and Dixie exchanged glances. Having Smyck in charge of spying on his fellow pupils meant trouble.

“Cadet Smyck will be head of the Department of Internal Security. It is paramount that we know what is going on at all times in Wilsons. If you have nothing to hide, you will have nothing to fear!”

“I wonder what Brunholm has to fear,” Dixie said moments later as they walked down the corridor toward geography class.

“All this security and spying on each other. What’s it really all about? Brunholm keeping an eye on us?”

“Yes, but why now? What’s going on in Wilsons that’s worrying him?”

“I don’t care,” Vandra said.

“What do you mean?” Les asked.

“You were supposed to look after Danny,” Vandra burst out, “and now he’s gone! Maybe he’s dead.”

“He’s not dead,” Les said gently.

“I suppose you would know,” Vandra said angrily.

“No, Vandra,” Les said, “
you
would know.”

Vandra bit her lip with her long eyeteeth. It was true. Danny wasn’t dead. He was out there somewhere, beyond their help.