Tracked by Terror (9 page)

“Yes, but Junius Midion yelled something just as I did.
‘Frater.'
What does that mean?”

Betsy shook her head. “Dunno. Maybe the name of this ship?”

“Could be. We've got to find the Grimoire. Think it's safe to climb back over now?”

“Let me go look. You're green in the face.”

Jarvey's pride was hurt, but in fact he felt happy just to cling to his ropes and rest there. How long had it been since he had eaten? He couldn't remember, but at the moment he felt that he would throw up everything he had ever swallowed in his life if he moved at all. Betsy took a cautious look over the rail, then slipped over as quietly as a sea breeze.

Jarvey tried focusing his gaze ahead on the horizon, hoping that would keep his stomach from lurching so much. He sat in the shade of the ship now, with the sun low in the sky over to his left. The day had the hot feel of afternoon about it, so with sunset to his left, Jarvey guessed they were sailing north.

A cottony pile of clouds had built up dead ahead, purple on their shadowed side, pink and white on the sun-ward one. Squinting, Jarvey could just make out a dark gray smudge of land at their base.

A moment later, a triumphant Betsy swung back over, clutching something under her left arm. “Got it! It was behind the box right in the front, wedged tight. Here.” She grimaced as she passed the volume over.

“Thanks.” Jarvey took the narrow book in both hands. “Should I open it?”

Betsy squirmed. “Dunno. What if your mother and father are here? Best to wait, maybe, until we know where we are. I'd say hold on a bit. Keep it safe.”

Safe! What if Jarvey dropped the book now, a few feet above the ocean? Carefully he tucked it into his shirt. He had become so used to carrying the thing that it felt almost like a part of him. “Well, anyway, we can't sit out here all night,” he said to Betsy. “What are we going to do?”

“Rest a while and wait until dark,” she replied. “Won't be long.”

But it felt like hours and hours as the ship responded to the winds, the men trimming the sails sometimes within earshot but most of the time not. At last the light faded, the sky darkened and stars came out, and Betsy said, “Let's go. Hold on to the book.”

She was as sure-footed as a cat, and about as silent. They climbed over the rail, and she led the way through the darkness back toward the stern of the ship. Two men stood at the wheel, just behind the middle mast, talking about the weather. In the darkness a crouching Jarvey and Betsy slipped past without their noticing.

At the stern rail, Betsy whispered, “Thought so. Here's where we stay tonight.”

A wooden lifeboat or longboat or something hung from two tall metal hooks. Betsy worked at the cords holding a canvas cover over the boat, tight as the head of a drum, until it grew loose enough for them to squirm underneath it and drop into the boat. The air trapped under the canvas felt humid and hot, stiflingly so, and Jarvey gasped as he crawled into the swinging boat. “Now what?” he asked. It was as dark as the bottom of a coal mine.

“Boats like this generally have food and water stored in case the ship sinks,” she whispered. “Can you give us some light?”

“How?” he asked sarcastically.

“You're the magician.”

Jarvey clenched his jaw. No, as he had tried and tried to explain to Betsy, he wasn't a magician, not really. Tantalus Midion, the evil master of Lunnon, had taunted him about that. True, people in his family were sometimes born with a talent for magic, just as they tended to be born with dark blue eyes and blond hair streaked with reddish tones. The magic missed some of them, though. Jarvey's dad was as ordinary as a warm day in June, and though Betsy was a remote cousin of his, she couldn't do magic either.

And while it was true that magical things sometimes happened around Jarvey, he had no idea how to control them. But Betsy kept insisting that he should be able to perform magic. He growled, “Abracadabra, I want light. See? Nothing happened.”

Betsy grumbled, “You're not even trying.” Jarvey felt her fumbling with something and then she found his hand and thrust something into his grip. “Here, make one of those strange candles, like the ones in old Junius's theater.”

“What is this?” It felt like a short round piece of wood, not like wax.

“Dunno. It's a wooden peg or something, felt it rolling around loose on the bottom of this boat. Turn it into a candle.”

“I don't know how!”

Betsy was nothing if not stubborn, sometimes annoyingly so. “Try! You made that trapdoor slam shut! And you could make people not notice you back in Lunnon, when they were hunting you! Remember how those strange candles looked and felt. Then command that piece of wood to be just the same. Picture it. Imagine it.”

“I might as well imagine a turkey dinner and a hot bath,” grumbled Jarvey. He tried, though. Holding the wooden peg, he visualized in his mind the candle he had taken from the sconce back in the theater. The candle had been lighter in weight, and the surface felt smooth and cool, not rough and splintery. The flame was a teardrop of cool yellow light. He tried to persuade himself that he was holding the candle at that moment.

“You got to say something, I think,” Betsy whispered. Jarvey took a deep breath, held it, and then said, “Let this be a candle.”

He felt something, a twitch of power, or maybe the ship had just changed course. But the darkness didn't lift.

“You want light,” Betsy said. “Not just a candle, but a lighted candle. Try that.”

Jarvey squeezed the thing he was holding. Did it feel somehow waxier, more like a candle than wood, or was he just fooling himself? He couldn't tell. “Let this candle give us light,” he said.

Nothing.

He heard Betsy sigh.

Unreasonable anger filled Jarvey, partly because he still ached, partly because he took Betsy's sigh as a sarcastic hint that she didn't think much of him. “Light!” he snarled, so loudly that Betsy shushed him.

But something happened at last. Jarvey blinked. The candle was giving a kind of glow. It was so dim that the difference between darkness and its light was hardly any difference at all, but at one end of the thing he held, a spherical red spark shone. He could barely make out Betsy's face.

“You did it!” she said, her eyes wide.

Still feeling grumpy, he whispered, “I'm the magician, remember?”

The candle obstinately refused to burn any brighter, but gradually their eyes adjusted to the feeble gleam. Betsy found a row of wooden kegs tucked under the forward seat of the lifeboat. A tin cup was tied to one of the kegs, and she undid the cord. Then she pulled a cork that plugged the nearest keg and held the cup beneath the gush of water that poured out. It was very warm and tasted of wood, but they drank it anyway. After pounding the cork back into place, Betsy squirmed toward the stern and after a few minutes came back with a bulky package wrapped in what felt like thick canvas soaked in wax. “Ship's biscuit,” she said, peeling the canvas away. “Here.”

The flat thing she handed him was nearly as hard as a rock, but Jarvey crunched it and immediately felt his hunger rise. They found that by dribbling a little water on the biscuit, they could soften it enough to chew and swallow.

“Best get some sleep if we can,” Betsy said at last, and she crept back toward the rear of the boat. “Put out the light.”

“Easy for you to say.” Jarvey couldn't blow out the flame, because the candle had no flame, just a little round red glow about the size of a marble. It didn't even feel hot. Finally he pulled the cork from the water keg, stuck the candle into the hole, light first, and shut off the glow that way.

Then Jarvey stretched out as well as he could, tried to ignore the constant movement, the pitching and rolling, and the sick feeling that he was lost.

Best get some sleep, Betsy had said.

Jarvey wasn't sure he wanted to try.

Because when he slept, he was likely to dream.

B
etsy nudged him awake. “C'mon. Almost daylight. Quiet, now!

Feeling giddy with weariness, Jarvey checked to make sure the Grimoire was still safely buttoned inside his shirt, then followed her out, worming his way under the tight canvas cover and dropping down to the deck. It was still dark, though a lot cooler than it had been. He frowned. The ship's motion felt very different, much steadier. As soon as his feet touched the deck, Betsy pulled him back into the shadowed darkness under the hanging lifeboat. Ahead, reddish-orange torches flared, and in their ruddy light, Jarvey could see that the ship had glided to a pier. Figures were busy with mooring ropes, snugging the ship up against wooden pilings. No one glanced back toward them.

“We can climb over the rail and jump to the dock,” Betsy whispered. “Be quick and be quiet, though.”

“Okay.”

He followed her, but when he poised himself on the rail of the ship, he almost turned back. Because of the curve of the deck, the rail was a good five feet from the edge of the dock, and the dock lay in almost total darkness. If he misjudged the leap, he would drop straight into the water—

“Hey! Away from there, you thievin' brat!”

Someone was rushing toward him. Jarvey didn't hesitate, but jumped out into space as hard and as far as he could. He hit the pier and sprawled flat, then scrambled to his feet and clutched at the Grimoire, still safe inside his shirt. Betsy was running away already, and he stumbled after her, hearing the man up on the ship's deck curse him and bark out, “Keep an eye out for wharf rats, men! These beggar children will get aboard and steal us blind.”

One of the crew, already standing on the pier, lashed out with the end of a rope as Jarvey raced past. The man missed, but Jarvey heard the rope hiss through the dark air and even felt the breeze of it on his cheek. He caught up with Betsy a second later. They passed the prow of the ship, and then pelted down the long pier and onto a cobbled street. There Betsy stopped short, gasping for air, and Jarvey blundered right into her. “What now?”

“Get our bearin's,” she said. “Get some food. Get some clothes.” She sniffed. “Get a bath, if we can. You need one.

“So do you,” he growled.

They were in a town of low one-story buildings, hushed and quiet in the hour before sunrise. Betsy's keen nose led them to a place where someone was cooking something. Jarvey's mouth started to water at a scent like bananas and fresh-baked bread. It seemed to be a simple kind of restaurant, with a long counter along the front and a few people inside bending over stoves and opening ovens. They walked past it, and then Betsy said, “Wait,” and slipped away. Jarvey stood in a darkened doorway as she melted off into the twilight.

The sky had begun to show streaks of dawn by the time she returned a few minutes later. “Here,” she said, thrusting something warm into his hand. “Eat this.”

“What is it?”

“Dunno, but it's loads better than ship's biscuit!”

Jarvey bit into it. It was a sweet banana bread, still warm from the oven, and he ate it voraciously. “Where'd you get it?”

“Slenked it from a little shop,” Betsy said shortly. “They've got shelves full of it, never miss a couple of pieces. C'mon, we'll find a place to hole up until we can tell where we are and whether your parents are here.”

That was something else Betsy was good at, finding hideouts. Back in Lunnon she and her gang had existed like rats, finding a way to live right under the feet of the masters of the place, and they had never been caught. By the time the sun was well up and people were stirring, Betsy had found a possible hiding place. It was just a neglected and dusty ten-by-ten-foot structure of splintered gray wood, some kind of abandoned storage building, standing right up against a fence. The door creaked open and they slipped inside.

Jarvey's nose twitched. They had disturbed years of dust. No one had used this hut for anything for ages. Three empty wooden crates had been tossed in carelessly, but even they wore a fuzzy coat of ancient dust. Betsy tugged one of these into place so it blocked the door. “How will we get out?” Jarvey asked.

“This way.” Betsy tugged and pried at the rotten boards in the back, breaking them off until she had made an escape hatch big enough for them to scramble through on all fours. The fence was right up against the back of the hut, and Jarvey pointed that out. “We can't squeeze into there. I doubt a mouse could do it.”

“We're not getting between the house and the fence. We're going
through
the fence,” Betsy retorted. Then she kicked at one of the fence boards until it creaked loose at the bottom. Finally she pushed the board aside and took a quick look.

“Lovely. Just a narrow, dark alley behind here, so we can get in and out without having to sneak by a watch-man or anything. We're set. Now all we have to do is find out where we are, and what the rules are.” She thought for a moment and then said, “Maybe we'd better hide the Grimoire. If we get caught with it...”

Uneasily, Jarvey slipped the book from inside his shirt. “You're right. If Siyamon is here, he'll take the book and destroy us. But if we're caught without it, what will we do?”

With a grin, Betsy said, “One of us'll get loose, is what, and come back and get it, and then find some way to free the other. Better to leave it hid. If we're caught, it gives us something to bargain with.

“I guess,” Jarvey said. “Where would be a safe place?”

Betsy looked up at the rafters. “Up there,” she said. “Can you reach that high?”