The Shadow Lantern

by Teresa Flavin

  Slowly the tethered ships groaned and began revolving like a huge merry-go-round. The apprentices were straining hard, as if they were physically pushing the vessels, when a whirlwind came out of the sky and whistled through the rigging.

  Ahhhhh. The wind passed round Blaise’s head as if it were checking him out, then gave Sunni a ringing blast, sending her hair straight up and nearly knocking her off the staircase. He got his arm across her back just in time.

  “That was Ishbel!” Sunni said helplessly. “How did she get in?”

  “Those other ghosts got in too,” Blaise said.

  “I wonder. When we did the Ouija board, Mandy told us that on Halloween the barriers come down between worlds,” said Sunni, “so now spirits can cross into the projection too.”

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “And the barriers between Corvo’s worlds are already messed up.”

  The whirlwind gusted towards the neighbouring ship and sent Marin shaking in the rigging. He cried out, about to lose his footing, when the wind turned and hugged him close. When he was safe it pushed the tethered ships with an almighty howl. His face blank with surprise, Marin hung on tight as the ships revolved faster and faster. And powering it all from behind him was Lady Ishbel’s spirit, taking human shape with her arms round his neck and her hair streaming.

  “I can see her now,” Blaise breathed.

  “Me, too,” said Sunni. “I hope she leaves me alone.”

  But Lady Ishbel’s help came too late. The thirteenth boat, Soranzo’s, had already attached itself to one of the ships in the circle like a parasitic insect. Sailors fastened ropes and scrambled aboard, jumping from ship to ship, roaring and laughing, while the spectres buzzed around them.

  “Find Corvo and bring him to me!” Soranzo commanded.

  As the ring of ships sped round and round, Blaise and Sunni clung to the window frame at the top of the staircase.

  “Any ideas to get us out of here?” she gasped.

  “I’ve got to get back down on the deck or I’m going to puke.” He dropped to his knees and crawled down backwards, his shoulder close to the wall. Sunni shakily did the same until they staggered onto the deck, feeling about for anything solid to grab hold of.

  She rolled into a corner, sheltered by part of a wall, and urged Blaise in. A couple of sailors were already stomping unsteadily through the ship, their weapons clattering.

  “Fausto Corvo!” Soranzo’s sonorous voice came from somewhere unnervingly close to them. “If this is the best sorcery your apprentices can conjure, we will soon be upon you! You are already finished.”

  Blaise nudged Sunni further into the corner, trying to block out her white figure with his darker clothes. Soranzo threaded his way across the deck like a victorious commander, taking hold of walls and ropes to keep him steady, and speaking to two spectres in Italian. They hovered around him, their hideous faces intent.

  When they had met him before Soranzo had not looked unhinged, but he did now. There was something too wide and sparkly about the ice blue eyes, as if they had spent too long hunting for Corvo and his paintings. His hands twitched from too much grasping for riches and secrets.

  Once Soranzo and the phantoms had vanished round the next wall, Blaise whispered, “Time to bail out of here. Soranzo’s boat is only two ships down from us. If we can get to it, maybe we can untie it and sail it back to shore. We’re not that far out. Mr B might be on board too.”

  “How can we sail a ship by ourselves?” Then Sunni’s eyes brightened. “If we could let Marin know we’re trying to leave, maybe he’d use his magic to help us.”

  “The minute we call out to him, we’re as good as caught.”

  “Okay, then we just go!”

  With ears trained and eyes sharp, Blaise and Sunni inched out of their hiding place and crawled along the deck, which at times became a cobbled lane. They were going against the flow of the ships’ movement, like walking backwards on a merry-go-round, and trying to watch out for enemies, when Sunni hissed, “Look up!”

  Marin, with Lady Ishbel still clinging to him, took a sheet of parchment from inside his shirt and closed his eyes. He uttered something and a new raven zoomed out of the night. It whipped the parchment from his hand and carried it away, vanishing in the direction of the sea stack.

  “Keep going,” Blaise urged, unconvinced that Marin had the power to change anything. “It doesn’t matter what he’s doing. This is our chance to get off.”

  They crawled over the hull of their ship and climbed onto the next, which was just as cluttered with sections of buildings and unmoving people. It even had a few motionless cattle on the poop deck. Soranzo’s sailors had spread out across the wheel of thirteen ships and Blaise could hear their voices on the other side of the sea stack.

  “There’s no one here.” He was almost gleeful, even though he still felt as if he was going to be sick.

  Sunni smiled hopefully and kept crawling. When they had reached the next tethered ship and could see Soranzo’s vessel bobbing beside it, Blaise’s heart was in his mouth. Almost there.

  But as he made his next move, the dome of the sky lit up with a criss-crossing grid of lightning. Blaise rolled onto his back and pulled Sunni down beside him. The lightning bolts seemed to strike everywhere at once, emanating like fireworks from one dark source in the centre of the magic circle: the sea stack. But the tall stone tower had grown limbs and a head, morphing into the active shape of a bearded man. His fingers drew with lightning bolts, all ten fingers working simultaneously. Planets appeared high overhead and hundreds of constellations in the shapes of humans and animals.

  The hands never stopped drawing, covering the sky with symbols and ciphers, mythical beasts and ancient goddesses, all cracking and sizzling into place. When the silhouette turned to work another part of the darkness, it showed its monumental face to them and Blaise shuddered in awe. This was a man-constellation, a network of blinking, moving stars that formed a face, hands and the outline of a body, but was completely wired in to the heavens. Even in this bizarre form, it could be none other than Fausto Corvo.

  “Now what?” Mandy plonked herself down on the bench next to Munro.

  The Mariner’s Chamber was silent and dark, except for the Oculus’s low beam. Dean was staring at the projection, trying to make out what was happening to it. Pieces of it were disappearing and other patches were appearing.

  “Him.” Dean pulled his attention away from the wall and pointed at Munro. “Time to sort this guy out.”

  He leaned over the spirit photographer and shook him by the lapels. Munro muttered and shook his head.

  “Wake up,” said Dean. “They’re gone. Hear that? Gone.”

  But Munro was in a world of his own, his fingers drumming incessantly, as he murmured unintelligible words at no one in particular.

  “I think he might be gone, too,” said Mandy. “Maybe if you got those crazy glasses off him…”

  Dean unhooked the clockwork spectacles from behind Munro’s ears and examined them. “Violet-coloured lenses.”

  “Weird.”

  Munro’s eyes were tightly shut, so Mandy leaned over and said in a gentle voice, “Mister, you’re all right. The spirits have gone to the other side. Well, another side anyway.”

  Munro’s eyes popped open and rolled around. He let out a gigantic sigh of relief and pinched the bridge of his nose hard with his thumb and forefinger. “Splitting headache.”

  Dean twirled the clockwork specs in his hand. “Maybe you need a new prescription.”

  “Put those down!”

  “Okay, okay.” He went to the Oculus’s table and laid them down with care. “You’re lucky we came in.”

  Munro sat up, still clutching his nose, and said sharply, “How did you get in here?”

  “We have ways.”

  “Who knows about this?”

  “Nobody. Our little secret,” said Dean. “That’s if you tell us what happened to Sunni and Blaise.”

  “I haven’t the s
lightest idea,” said Munro.

  “Really?” Dean snorted. “What were they doing in here this afternoon then? And tonight!”

  Munro frowned. “I’ve been putting on shows for the public all day.”

  “But Sunni and Blaise came back here tonight,” said Dean. “Didn’t they?”

  “You were the one spying at the door, weren’t you?” Munro folded his arms across his chest. “I don’t owe you any explanation.”

  “The sign outside says no one’s allowed in and the door was locked,” said Mandy, petting Lexie. “So how come Sunni and Blaise were here?”

  Munro glanced at the Oculus, then the wall. Alarm crossed his face at the changes in the painting, but he said nothing.

  “Well?” asked Dean, his mouth set in a line. “I’ve got time to wait for an answer.”

  “So have I,” said Mandy.

  “I haven’t. I have a Halloween show to get ready for.” Munro stood up and brushed down his leather coat. He glanced at his pocket watch, then picked up his hat, broken camera, glasses, the remains of the Ouija board and the indicator, and stuffed them in his pockets. He began to walk stiffly towards the door. “Come on, time for you to go.”

  A burst of lightning came from the projection on the wall and crackled in mid-air. As the Oculus’s golden beam of light met the jagged pops of blue-white light, the atmosphere in the Mariner’s Chamber shifted.

  “What is that?” Dean jumped up and put his hands out to Munro, looking for answers. “Come on, you know what’s going on!”

  “No, I don’t!” The spirit photographer’s mouth hung slack as he hurried over to the Oculus and stared at the projection, which was now a flashing rectangle of changing shapes and marks. “I truly don’t know what’s going on.”

  “Your spirit friends are in there,” said Mandy sarcastically, joining them at the table. “That projection opened up and they went in. We saw them. So what gives?”

  “You saw them?” Munro covered his gaping mouth with his hand. “This… this is beyond me.”

  She gave him a scorching look as though this didn’t surprise her.

  The projection was now spitting blue-white bolts and the wall behind it began to throb. Hairline cracks radiated out from behind The Mariner’s Return, running up to the ceiling and down to the floor. The painted ceiling beams shuddered and dust fell in a fine shower, lit up like a snow flurry by the Oculus’s beam.

  “My stepsister and my friend are in there!” Dean shouted, pointing at the chaotic maelstrom of symbols and signs on the wall, while looking in horror at the loosening beams overhead. “You’d better have an idea how to get her out, because I don’t!”

  Chapter 22

  Fausto Corvo’s stellar hands erased and redrew, changed and added to the panorama above them, seemingly oblivious to the people and creatures on the revolving wheel of ships below him. The sky was his celestial blackboard, covered in a formula of deep and strange complexity.

  Sunni lay on her back next to Blaise, pressed to the deck. The ships were circling this manifestation of Corvo at a swift pace, making it difficult to move, but she was also mesmerised by what was taking place overhead.

  “Are you all right?” she whispered.

  “Not sure,” Blaise answered. “I think my brain is about to overload with what’s going on up there. The sky looks like all the maths problems I’ve ever seen in my whole life, with dragons and centaurs and astrology symbols thrown in.”

  “I recognise some of this stuff,” she said in a low voice. “The walls of the palace in Arcadia were covered from top to bottom in these types of symbol. Corvo memorised all of them so that he could draw down the power of the stars to create living worlds from his paintings.”

  “It’s code then, like DNA,” Blaise said. “This is his drawing board and it looks like he’s making some changes.”

  “We’ve got to go while we still can!” Sunni rolled onto her side and carefully got up on all fours. “I hope Ishbel slows down the wind power or we’ll never get off this merry-go-round.” She crawled a few feet and turned round. “Come on!”

  “Um, Sunni…” Blaise was staring, open-mouthed, at Corvo’s astral entity whose arms swept across the heavens, seemingly finished with its work. The whole dome sparkled as a million crystalline marks and symbols settled into a mind-boggling, heavenly mural.

  Suddenly, over the city, a sun that had bled through from one of Arcadia’s under-layers fell from the sky like a melting blob of orange sorbet and vanished. The gold and terra cotta surfaces of the medieval houses’ walls began to be stripped away, layer by layer, from the ships’ hulls, until all that was left were skeletal under-drawings. The colours came away in ribbons and sheets and the charcoal drawings came apart like twigs, all caught up in Lady Ishbel’s powerful whirlwind.

  “Everything’s coming apart!” Blaise said, scrambling to his hands and knees, ducking the flying swathes of colour.

  “Let’s go!” Sunni gasped, as she crawled under the belly of a stationary cow, whose brown and white hide flew off it, leaving just a sketch underneath. The charcoal lines burst apart like an explosion of bones and joined the tornado overhead.

  One by one the crazy patchwork of houses, streets, motionless animals and inanimate people was being unravelled and sent by Corvo to where it belonged. The boat was returning to its original dark state, with several tall masts, billowing sails and high decks at front and back. She could just see Marin with Lady Ishbel, Dolphin and Zorzi, sentinels in their high perches watching their master undo his creations.

  But where was Soranzo? No time to find out.

  Feeling increasingly exposed, Sunni sought refuge behind one of the few remaining pieces of wall still attached to the main mast. Blaise was behind her, crawling on hands and knees.

  She curled into a ball to avoid flying debris and rolled in behind the wall, only to bump into someone who was already hiding there. He grasped her shoulder with a powerful grip and pulled her backwards against his knees. Sunni grimaced as she fought to get away. Her captor stank to high heaven.

  “Sunni,” Angus said sharply. “Relax. I’m not going to hurt you.”

  Blaise, his face burning with a look of utter contempt, hurled himself at them and started punching Angus’s arms and shoulders.

  Angus batted Blaise away with a sinewy brown arm and held out his finger in warning. “Truce! I’m not your enemy here.”

  “Oh, really?” Blaise sputtered, looking ready to pounce again. “What about your offer to help Soranzo crush us? Because we have unfinished business!”

  “All right, so you overheard me lying,” said Angus, his sour breath close to Sunni’s ear.

  “Nothing new there,” she said, squirming at the sight of Angus’s dirty fingers holding her fast.

  “Yes, Sunni, I had to lie.” Angus released her with a push towards Blaise. “Go on. I told you, I’m not here to hurt anyone.”

  “Tigers don’t change their stripes,” she spat, taking in his long shaggy hair and bleached, shredded clothing. “You told Soranzo that your own cousin means nothing to you.”

  Angus screwed up his bearded face as if in pain. “You’ve got me all wrong. Seriously, all I want is to get out of Corvo’s crazy world and go home – with Lorimer. I’ll turn myself in to the police when I get back, even if I go to jail for knocking out that guard at Blackhope Tower. Hey, at least I’ll get three meals a day.”

  “What about the magical paintings?” Blaise asked suspiciously. “You’d do anything to get hold of them. You’re as bad as Soranzo.”

  He shrugged. “Right now, I’d take being in a jail back home over all the magical paintings in the world.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Blaise, pulling Sunni away by the shoulder. “Good luck.”

  “No wait, you’ve got to believe me,” Angus exclaimed, getting to his knees and putting his hands together as if in prayer. “I have a proposal.”

  “Get lost,” Blaise replied scornfully, urging Sunni to move as the wall Angus ha
d leaned against began to disassemble and shoot off into the wind.

  “I guess I can’t blame you. The thing is, I know where Lorimer is and I want to get us both out.” He glanced around as their sheltering wall came away from the mast and flew off, leaving the trio sitting on the empty deck. “And if we don’t move fast, I’ll get sucked back onto the island Corvo banished me to.”

  Blaise stopped dead. “Where is Mr Bell?”

  “He’s here,” said Angus. “But he’s a bit beaten up and out of it. I don’t know if he could figure out the way back. That’s where you’d come in.” He hung his head. “But it’s okay, you go on ahead and save yourselves. I’ll get Lorimer home somehow.”

  “This is garbage!” Blaise laughed bitterly. “Where’s Soranzo? Waiting to jump us the minute we help you?”

  Sunni kept quiet, watching every change of expression on the man’s face.

  “No, he’s over there.” Angus pulled himself up and fought against the wind to reach the railing overlooking the centre of the magic circle of ships. On one of the furthest ships, Soranzo and his followers were gathered, defiantly holding their blazing lanterns in the air against Corvo’s celestial display. “And so is Lorimer.”

  “I can’t see him,” said Blaise, as he and Sunni clung to the hull.

  “Well, pal,” said Angus, “if you can’t see him then I must be lying again, eh?” He turned his back on them and began pulling himself along the railing.

  “Would you take an oath that you’re not lying?” Sunni asked quickly, ignoring Blaise’s furious glance at her. “On Mr Bell’s life?”

  “Of course,” he replied.

  Blaise jumped in. “What about an extra oath on your pigs’ graves?”

  Angus’s shoulders slumped. “What do you know about my pigs?”

  “They were taken by predators from Arcadia,” Sunni answered, astonished to see the man’s stricken face. “But it was quick. I don’t think they suffered.”