Child of the Gryphon

by David Lugsden

  Due to the reduced number of trips across the lake, the boat was full to capacity as the Boatman cast off and ferried his passengers back toward the school. The boat floated low in the water. On several occasions, waves that would normally have caused little more than a light spray as they rocked the hull, poured over the bow soaking those students unlucky enough to have chosen to sit upfront. Among them were several senior year nymphs who squealed in horror when they discovered their newly purchased outfits had been drenched in sea water.

  ‘Pretentious show-offs,’ Tamera hissed, ‘serves them right if you ask me.’

  Gabriel and Seth looked at her in astonishment.

  ‘Don’t look at me like that,’ she said defensively, ‘you should hear them all in the girl’s toilets – talking down to students from lower years, making fun of how others dress behind their backs, staring lovingly at themselves in the mirrors. It’s about time they got knocked down a peg or two!’

  Soon the ferry reached the opposite shore and the students disembarked. Again Gabriel, Seth and Tamera positioned themselves at the centre of the pack, to avoid any unwanted attention. As the rabble of students piled through the main doors of the school, the three friends slowed their pace and filtered off from the rest. The crowd of students dispersed to various different parts of the school and Gabriel, Seth and Tamera were left alone in the lofty entrance hall. They had never seen it so empty. It was eerily quiet.

  Without saying a word they started off towards the Grandmaster’s office. Each of them was on high alert, their senses primed. They listened intently for the sound of anyone approaching. If only Master Procyon could see us now, Gabriel thought to himself.

  Grandmaster Bysonn’s office was located on the fifth floor. The most direct route was to take the central staircase all the way up and then walk down the long corridor off of which the dark passageway, which led to his office, was located. Unfortunately, the central staircase also led to the Central Dormitories and the Wingtail Grand Library. They reasoned that this would be the route that most students (and possibly teachers) would be using to go about their weekend routines and so it was best to be avoided. There were numerous different routes to and from different parts of the school, many of which Gabriel could thank his time spent with Daws for learning of. They decided to head to the rear of the school, an area rarely frequented by students, and work their way up from there.

  For the most part, they had chosen their route wisely. The only sounds they could hear were the soft tiptoeing of their feet and their own breathing, which, unfortunately, in the silence that surrounded them, sounded deafening. As they stepped onto the third floor they suddenly froze. From the right came the clip-clopping sound of approaching hooves. With nowhere to hide they pressed themselves up against the staircase wall, wishing they could somehow phase through it. The clip-clopping grew louder still as its source got steadily closer. None of them dared move, or even breathe. The noise of the hoof-steps was now so close, and dominating what would otherwise have been silence so completely that it felt as if it were shaking the very wall they were pressed against. All of a sudden the source of the clip-clopping emerged. It was a young female satyr, with legs equally as hairy as Sattan’s. The young satyr continued onwards never breaking stride, engrossed in the book she was reading, failing to notice the three friends attempting desperately to become one with the wall. As the sound of her hoof-steps receded and finally disappeared, Gabriel, Seth and Tamera relaxed their stance and let out a huge sigh of relief.

  ‘That,’ Seth said, ‘was too close!’

  ‘Almost there now,’ Tamera said, having fully recovered her composure, ‘just two more flights of stairs and three corridors to negotiate.’

  ‘We have hugely different interpretations of “almost there,”’ Seth moaned.

  The rest of the way the trio went virtually undisturbed, hearing nothing more than the faint chattering of students and the occasional tap-tapping of footsteps on the echoing stone floor. Though never did anyone come close enough to cause any major worry for them.

  And then there they were. Standing at the end of the passageway leading to Grandmaster Bysonn’s office, which looked even more insidious than it did during the week. The lanterns at the entrance had not been lit which made seeing the door at the far end nearly impossible. The passageway had become a diabolical black hole, sucking all light, heat and even hope into the cruel depths of oblivion. The sinister aura was intensified further by the piercing silence that engulfed the entire corridor.

  ‘OK, we’re here,’ Gabriel said fighting to control his anxiety, ‘let’s just get on with it so we can be done as soon as possible. We remember our positions, right?’

  Seth and Tamera nodded solemnly, never taking their eyes off of the dark passageway.

  ‘Let’s go then.’

  Tamera remained at the entrance whilst Gabriel and Seth stepped tentatively into the dark passageway. They knew that every second they wasted was a second closer to Bysonn returning (if he wasn’t inside already) however neither of them was in any rush to reach the office. Negotiating the passageway was hazardous enough when lit. In pitch black, the uneven floor combined with stalactites threatening to slash mercilessly at intruders like sentient knives made the passageway lethal. Surviving their ordeal, Seth assumed his position, hidden near to the doorway, but still in sight of Tamera. Gabriel stood before the mighty doors, held his breath and wrapped his knuckles sharply on the wood three times.

  No answer.

  He took the metal door knocker and clanged three more times, harder this time. The sound echoed around the passageway like a church bell.

  No answer.

  He exhaled slowly and glanced towards Seth who shrugged his shoulders in response.

  Slowly, gently Gabriel took the circular knocker again and twisted it a quarter turn clockwise. The catch of the door opened with a heavy metal clunk, shattering the silence of the cave again. Thankfully it had been left unlocked, Gabriel thought, before reminding himself that locks were not customary in Sanctuary. The hefty door creaked open. Hesitantly, Gabriel called out to the Grandmaster.

  Still no answer.

  ‘I guess he’s not here,’ Seth whispered.

  Gabriel peered around the door and scanned the room. ‘OK, I’m going in,’ he whispered back.

  Seth nodded in acknowledgement.

  Gabriel’s pulse was racing. His stomach somersaulted making him feel uncomfortably nauseous. They had set up an early warning system in case of Bysonn returning, but realistically they all knew that this would do little to help. There was only one way in and out of the office that they knew of, so even with a warning it was extremely unlikely that any of them would have enough time to escape without being spotted. If there was indeed anything incriminating in the room, Gabriel would have to find it quickly. The task was made even more unsettling by the imposingly large portrait of the Grandmaster scrutinising his every move.

  The most logical place to begin, Gabriel thought, is the desk. Almost every time he had been summoned to the office, Bysonn had been busy reading through various papers. He would start with those. The oak panelling of the desktop was meticulously well-maintained apart from one glaring flaw: vicious shards of wood protruded like misaligned teeth in a gaping mouth, from Gabriel’s first encounter with the Grandmaster. One side of the desk was also propped up on a pile of old books from where the legs had been smashed. A rusted, archaic lantern stood on the edge of the desk casting a dim ochre glow over the rest of the desk’s articles: an ornate, cylindrical container with several tattered quills, a near empty bottle of black ink, an ancient, carved, wooden globe with countries marked out in an unrecognisable language and an impeccably arranged stack of documents. Gabriel rifled through the documents hoping to find anything of interest, but for the most part they were written in overly swirly and illegible handwriting and as best as he could tell, contained mostly student details. He made sure to leave them as neatly stacked as he had found them.
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  On either side of the desk, hidden away from visitors were a set of three drawers. Gabriel opened each in turn and rummaged through the contents but all he found were more unreadable papers on past and present Wingtail students and more quills and bottles of ink.

  From here Gabriel moved onto the bookcases at the edges of the room. Hundreds of books of all sizes and thicknesses filled the shelves, covering all manner of topics from school subjects to various aspects of Colony life, old and new. He pulled a few out randomly to examine them further but soon gave up as it would have taken him all day to check them all. The situation was becoming desperate. Bysonn could return at any moment and he had still found nothing, not even the school blueprints. The portrait continued to glower down at him, but with each passing failure, Gabriel could have sworn it grew smugger. Almost out of options, Gabriel inspected each of the weapons cabinets, removing, examining and replacing each weapon in turn. Nothing was out of place nor raised an air of doubt or suspicion.

  That was, however, until he opened up the cabinet by the right-hand corner of the enormous picture frame and attempted take out a medieval mace. Gabriel pulled on the handle yet the head of the mace remained affixed to the back of the cabinet. He heard a muffled click followed by a low grinding in a recess off to the left.

  It was the sound of a latch unlocking, but in the silence it resonated like a gunshot.

  Gabriel’s heart was in his throat.

  If that was the sound indicating someone was entering the room now, he had absolutely no hope of concealing himself. Yet he remained alone in office. Gabriel’s breathing accelerated. He could feel his heart thumping away in his chest, so hard in fact that it threatened to burst through his ribcage. With great foreboding he edged forward. He reached an arm cautiously into the terrifying blackness of the recess and felt... a light breeze. How is that possible? The office has no windows and only one entrance. Or does it? He stepped inside.

  Gabriel found himself in a narrow passageway. So narrow in fact that he had to move sideways along it. He could see nothing in front of him. He reached out ahead of himself and felt the wall curve around to the right. Could this be how the mystery person had exited the office without being spotted? He followed the passage onwards.

  He emerged in a small circular alcove, dimly lit by one small lantern mounted high on the wall above a ragged copy of what appeared to be blueprints. Gabriel noticed immediately that in the corner of the plan was scrawled in fading print “W.T.A. #XXXVII (III) cir. 1974”. The missing blueprint from the library.

  Two other passageways led off from the alcove. To investigate further, Gabriel was going to need help.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  THE MEETING

  We’ve got him!’ declared Seth triumphantly.

  ‘Afraid not,’ Gabriel informed him, ‘this only reinforces what we already knew: he loaned the school blueprints from the library.’

  ‘But... but...’ Seth stammered, his confidence deflated, ‘He’s hiding them in this secret annex!’

  ‘And he’s not breaking any laws in doing so,’ Tamera said. ‘Now we really need to get out of here! We’re taking a huge risk with no one standing guard!’

  ‘No,’ Gabriel said, ‘we need to check out where these passageways lead to.’

  ‘But they could lead anywhere! How will we be able to meet up again?’

  ‘How about we just agree on a time and place? What say, the last boat back across the lake?’

  ‘OK...’ Tamera agreed reluctantly.

  ‘What if I take this one,’ Gabriel said pointing to the left-hand passage, ‘and you two take that one?’

  Both openings were identical, pitch black with a faint breeze wafting in from them. The three friends wished each other good luck and stepped once again into darkness.

  After only a few short metres, the dark corridor Gabriel had chosen spiralled sharply down and to the left. The drop in the floor was so sudden that Gabriel stumbled and almost fell. Blindly grasping out towards the walls he felt nothing but smooth stone. By wedging his arms against the walls on either side of the tight space he managed to regain his balance. Crouching down, he ran his hands back and forth over the surface of the floor to detect what had caused him to trip. Steps. Without warning, and still in total darkness, the floor had dropped away to form a steep spiral staircase. Ever cautiously, he proceeded downwards, steadying himself against the smooth, curved wall. Down and down the staircase spiralled. Gabriel had no clue as to how many steps he had taken, nor how many times he had in fact spiralled round. With the constant corkscrewing round and round he had become utterly disorientated, he couldn’t even imagine how far down he had travelled. The suffocating blackness only increased his confused state further.

  Finally, after what felt like hours of walking in circles, the stairwell relinquished its dizzying onslaught. He emerged into a vast open space. A dank, stale odour hung inertly in the thick, still air. Even though the room was only dimly lit by its sparsely placed lanterns, after so long in the darkness the light stung his eyes. It took several moments of rubbing and blinking his eyes before they adjusted to his new surroundings.

  With his vision restored, Gabriel was able to take heed of where he was. After three weeks of touring the school whilst in detention with Daws the caretaker, he had familiarised himself with certain parts of the labyrinthine caverns quite well. He recognised his current location as the basement storage area, the gloomiest part of the immense room. Almost a quarter of a mile away, on the opposite side of the enormous cave, much too far away to provide assistance if needed, was Daws’ cramped quarters. No matter what happened from that point on, Gabriel was alone.

  The most infrequently used part of the basement, it was also the least welcoming. In contrast to the area of the basement in which Daws resided, here the floor was rocky, covered in a fine film of slimy cavemoss and entirely treacherous underfoot. Supporting pillars and columns, some as thick as tree trunks littered the cavern, formed from merging stalactites and stalagmites over aeons. Decades-old school equipment, much of which from Physical Potential lessons, was leant up against the cave walls or had been stacked into once neat piles. Over time, however, the disused equipment had been claimed by the pervasive cavemoss, spreading over and smothering the equipment like an irrepressible disease. As with most caves, there was an ever-present and rhythmic drip-drip-dripping from water leaching through the ceiling of the cave. Here, however, it was almost entirely drowned out by the bubbling water contained within the two dozen glass tubes, each of which fed into the flooded passageways and water channels of the school. The tubes were each almost two metres in diameter and made from twelve inch-thick reinforced glass. They were arranged in six rows of four towards the back of the cave, on a specially smoothed out section of the cave floor. The glass casings, Daws had explained on one of his and Gabriel’s few ventures into the basement, were an ingenious invention devised years ago by another of Flattail’s ancestors, although Gabriel had forgotten which. The tubes were impervious to the advancing cavemoss and remained as pristinely clean to this day as they had been when they were first installed (although the occasional leak was another matter entirely). It was from behind these glass water pipes, that Gabriel now heard the unmistakeable sound of people talking.

  Gabriel crept forward, taking care not to slip on the slimy floor and trying to make as little noise as possible. He crouched down silently behind stacks of old, empty, rotten barrels. Someone had left a portable lantern on top of the last barrel. Whoever had left it clearly hadn’t done so very long ago, as it now gave out its last few dying puffs of smoke from its extinguished flaming heart. Gabriel guessed that whoever had left it was most likely one of the people talking quietly amongst the pipes. He identified two definitive figures, albeit distorted by the thick curved glass. For a brief moment he thought he detected further movement in the shadows off to the side of the pipes, however, after straining his eyes and failing to see anything, he dismissed the notion. One of t
he two figures, the larger, bulkier-looking one was speaking quietly to the other. Even though the individual spoke at a whisper Gabriel had had enough dealings with him to identify the voice immediately.

  Grandmaster Bysonn.

  A shiver of dread so violent that it almost threw him off balance hammered down Gabriel’s spine like a seismic quake. Then the second figure, much smaller and skinnier-looking, responded. The whiny, high-pitched squawking sounded much different to the husky, rasping, mystery voice that Gabriel had heard in Bysonn’s office, but he reasoned it must have been the same person. He adjusted his position slightly as to hear what the pair was discussing more clearly. A denser patch of moss gave out a soggy squelch as he stepped on it.

  Instantly Hookbeak’s head shot out from behind one of the glass pipes. ‘What was that?’ he said in his scratchy voice.

  ‘Nothing,’ Bysonn’s deep voice whispered back, ‘Now can we get back to business? And might I ask you to keep your voice down?’

  ‘I thought you said we wouldn’t be disturbed here!’

  ‘We won’t be. Nobody ever ventures into this part of the school unless there’s a problem with the internal water pressure. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t exercise caution.’

  ‘Fine. As I was saying, I’m taking a huge risk in meeting here, do you realise? If the Council were somehow to find out about this-’

  ‘They won’t. Precautions have been taken. Now, I am assured that you are capable of doing what is needed. Is that correct?’

  Gabriel couldn’t see clearly through the glass pipes, but he thought Bysonn shifted his gaze momentarily to the same area of shadow where he himself thought he had detected movement only moments before.

  ‘I wouldn’t have agreed, if I wasn’t,’ Hookbeak replied.