The Storm Tower Thief

by Anne Cameron

  The deadly white missiles hurtled past, crashing and pounding, pummeling the surface of the lake into watery dips and hollows.

  “Look out!” shouted Angus as the iceberg closest to them took a direct hit. It rolled and flipped, sending a wave up and over their snow boots.

  SMASH!

  They’d been hit! He was knocked off his feet. For several seconds, there was a confusion of white, and then suddenly he was sliding, headfirst.

  “Argh!”

  His whole body slithered over the edge of the iceberg and down toward the freezing lake.

  “Angus! Hold on!” Indigo shouted from somewhere above him.

  “I can’t! There’s nothing to hold on to!”

  “Dougal, quickly, grab his ankles!”

  “Hurry up!” Angus yelled.

  His nose was almost touching the choppy waters; he tried to force his body back up the icy slope. But he was gathering momentum, like an escaped bicycle wheel rolling down a mountainside. He was seconds away from sinking to the bottom of the lake.

  Above him, there was a desperate scuffling of feet.

  “Gotcha!”

  Hands grasped him by the ankles, yanking him away from the churning lake and back to safety.

  “Next time you feel like taking a plunge, just give us some warning, okay?” Dougal stared down at him, ashen faced. Indigo looked equally pale and shaken. Angus lay on his back, breathing heavily, feeling extremely grateful that he had such amazing friends.

  By the time they finally reached the far shore, the blizzard had blown itself out at last. Angus checked his weather watch. They had eight minutes before the next one struck. He glanced over his shoulder. The cloud of glittering spores was closing in from all directions, cutting them off from a clear route back to the changing rooms.

  “There’s another way out here, an emergency exit!” he said suddenly. “Jeremius told us about it during our first lesson in the Rotundra, remember? It’s got to be on the far side of this obstacle course. It goes straight back to the changing rooms. We can get to the snow dome from there and find the lightning heart. It’s the only way we can stop the ice diamond storm and save Jeremius and Gudgeon. Come on!”

  Ahead of them, thickets of giant icicles poked up through the ground like a hall of frozen mirrors. Angus led the way, weaving between the slender towers of ice as fast as his legs would carry him. On the far side, they were met by a sheer wall of frozen sea ice, thirty feet tall.

  “It’ll take far too long to run around it,” Indigo said, standing back to get a good look at the problem. “I think we’re supposed to climb it. Or— No, wait, up here!” She pointed. “There’s a chute running right through the middle like a wormhole.”

  They climbed up to it, with the aid of some handy footholds cut into the ice. Indigo slid inside the hole, feetfirst, and disappeared. Angus followed, and suddenly . . . he was hurtling through the very center of the giant petrified wave, sliding over rippled sheets of sea-green ice. He gawped at the large schools of silvery fish accidentally frozen within its depths. There was a pair of knitted mittens, a solitary sock, and a packet of emergency survival stew with its contents spilled in a cometlike trail of icy gristle . . .

  Thump.

  He shot out the other end of the hole without warning, landing on his elbows. Indigo helped him onto his feet again, and Angus brushed himself off quickly. They were on the edge of a frozen marsh. Raised tussocks of snow-covered grass were scattered across it like random stepping-stones. The snow tuffets looked positively tame compared with the dangers they’d already faced.

  “This is the last obstacle,” Angus said as Dougal suddenly flew out from the hole beside him and landed with an “Ow!”

  On the far side of the sprawling marsh, he could see solid ground. Beyond that was the back wall of the Rotundra. And set deep into the rock was a large, brightly lit door marked EMERGENCY EXIT.

  “All we’ve got to do is get across this marsh,” he said.

  He placed a tentative foot on the tuffet closest to him. The frozen grass seemed solid enough, so he took a deep breath and jumped onto it with both feet.

  “It’s okay,” he said, relieved. “Come on!”

  Indigo stepped onto a tuffet beside him and dashed across the marsh at double speed, making it look like a simple game of hopscotch. Angus, however, found it far more difficult, and he moved cautiously. It wasn’t until he’d reached the middle that he realized something was deeply wrong.

  “What’s going on?” he shouted as the tuffet beneath his feet stirred in a most unsettling manner.

  “Oh no.” Dougal gulped. “I don’t think these are normal tuffets. I should have realized. They’re clumps of polar sinking grass!”

  “What?”

  “They usually hibernate over the winter, but we must have woken them up. If anything lands on them, they pull up their roots and literally sink into the marsh. It’s a defense mechanism, in case anything tries to eat their blades of grass. So if you’re standing on one of them when it decides to sink . . .”

  “RUN FOR IT!” Angus yelled as the grass beneath his feet suddenly gave a small shiver and promptly disappeared under the ice with a plop!

  Angus leaped from one frozen tuffet to the next, barely hanging on by his heels as each one vanished at the mere touch of his boot. He launched himself off the last tuffet as it disappeared, landing on solid ground and temporarily knocking all the air out of his lungs.

  “Dougal!” Indigo’s voice was suddenly loaded with fear.

  Angus looked up, still struggling to catch his breath. Dougal had taken a different route across the marsh. He was hurtling in from the left, but he was never going to make it. The last clumps of sinking grass were already shivering, getting ready to pull up their roots and submerge.

  “Oh no!” Dougal shouted, valiantly trying to leap over two clumps of grass at once. “Oh no . . . ARGHHHHHH!”

  The last tuffet disappeared, dragging Dougal down with it.

  “DOUGAL!” Angus scrambled to his feet and ran to the edge of the marsh.

  “I can’t see him!” Indigo wailed, scanning the icy surface in a panic.

  “I’m going in after him!” Angus had already removed his snow boots, desperately hoping that the sinking grass wasn’t carnivorous, that Dougal would bob to the surface at any second like a popped cork and float over to them. But there were no air bubbles rising from the deep, nothing to prove that Dougal was still alive.

  Angus ripped off his coat.

  “Wait!” Indigo grabbed his arm. “Look!” She pointed to a disturbance on the icy surface, like a tiny whirlpool. The swirl grew rapidly, getting bigger and bigger, as if a plug had just been pulled from the bottom of the marsh. Suddenly there was a great belch of boggy water . . . and a bedraggled Dougal was expelled from the depths with the force of a cannonball.

  Thump!

  He landed beside them in a soaking heap.

  The polar sinking grass, clearly vegetarian after all, had decided to spit Dougal out again.

  “What’s wrong with him? Is he breathing?” Indigo bit her lip, looking tearful. He lay on the ground between them, twitching in his kitten pajamas, his coat soaked through. “Should we give him the kiss of life?”

  “W-what? No! No way!” Dougal sat upright, spluttering and coughing, gulping down great gasps of air as the color rushed back into his cheeks. “Yuck!” He pulled a clump of sinking grass out of his pajamas. “This stuff smells like rotten eggs.”

  There was no time to be grateful that his friend was still alive. Angus glanced over his shoulder at the advancing cloud of diamond-shaped spores.

  “We’ve got to get out of here and find that lightning heart, now! We’ve got to save Jeremius and Gudgeon!”

  He dragged Dougal up by his soaking pajamas. All three of them tumbled through the emergency exit and into the curved stone passageway beyond. Indigo slammed the door shut behind them. They had escaped the ice diamond storm at last.

  They ran until
they reached the empty changing rooms. It was clear that Catcher Castleman had been forced to take the rest of the lightning cubs back up to the Exploratorium without them, to raise the alarm. Dougal peeled off his soaking wet coat and grabbed a dry one, rescuing Cid, his soggy lightning moth, from his pocket first. And they set off again, darting straight down into the dark passageway that led to the snow dome.

  It felt creepily quiet after the howling wind in the Rotundra. Dougal squelched beside him, leaving a wet trail of footprints. Angus checked his weather watch, panic rising in his chest once again. It had now been at least thirty minutes since the ice diamond storm had erupted. They’d wasted loads of time getting across the emergency training course. But there was still a slim chance. If they found the lightning heart in the snow dome, if it could somehow stop the spores and unfreeze everything in the Rotundra, including Jeremius and Gudgeon, before the unthinkable happened . . .

  “I don’t believe it!”

  Indigo had skidded to a halt behind him.

  “What?”

  She pointed to a figure slumped on the ground. He’d clearly been knocked unconscious. Angus had run straight past him without even noticing.

  “Hey, that’s Catcher Greasley,” he said, taking a closer look. “I recognize him from the dirigible weather station.”

  Dougal frowned. “What’s he doing here?”

  “He must have been trying to escape from the ice diamond storm,” Indigo said. “It looks like he’s fallen and hit his head.”

  “You stay and make sure he’s okay,” Angus decided quickly. “Dougal and I will grab the lightning heart. Wait here!”

  He hurried on, around a bend in the passageway. Three more strides, and they’d be outside the heavy snow dome door. It would take both of them just to tug it open. He skidded to a halt again.

  “What now?” Dougal blurted out from behind him.

  Angus swallowed and pointed.

  The door was already open.

  Ten feet inside the door, something small and heart shaped rested on a neat, round table.

  “Wow! The lightning heart! We’ve found it!” Angus rushed to the table and paused. He took a deep breath and picked it up.

  Smooth and warm to the touch, it fitted easily into the palm of his hand, like any tumbled stone or rock he could have picked up from the beach. But Angus knew, the second his fingers touched the marbled surface, the second he traced the bloodred veins and fissures that ran deep within the lightning heart, that he’d never seen anything like it before. He swayed dizzily. Was it the stone that was suddenly making him feel light-headed or their frenzied escape from the Rotundra?

  “This is weird. I thought we’d have to tear this place apart to find it!” Dougal said.

  “Yeah, me too.” Angus glanced around the snow dome for the first time. Aside from the light fissures along the walls, several lamps had been lit, filling the cave with deep, eerie shadows.

  Angus frowned. He’d been expecting some sort of trouble, or an elaborate system of booby traps. This was too easy.

  “The lamps!” he gasped, suddenly understanding. “Somebody lit the lamps before we arrived.”

  Dougal frowned. “But nobody knew we were coming down here. We’ve only just figured out where the lightning heart is.”

  “Look, we’ve got to get back up into the Rotundra before—”

  Thud, clunk, clink!

  Angus spun around on his heels.

  “NO!” Dougal yelled as the steel safety door swung shut.

  Angus ran, grabbed the largest bolt, and tried to slide it back again, but it refused to budge.

  “I can’t move it,” he said as the horrible truth dawned on him. “We’re locked in! Indigo!” He hammered on the door, pounding it with his fists. “It’s no use. She can’t hear us!”

  “INDIGO!” Dougal joined in, pummeling the steel loudly. “Why isn’t she answering?”

  “It doesn’t matter. We don’t need help!” Angus pointed to the set of stone steps in the corner. “They lead straight up to the fake snowman and out into the Rotundra.”

  He raced across the cave. He was already wondering how to activate the lightning heart when a flicker of movement caught his eye, and he stopped dead in his tracks. A tall figure was coming down the steps toward them. The man was wrapped in a sweeping emerald coat. A hood was pulled down low over his face, leaving just the tip of his dark goatee visible.

  “Listen,” Angus began urgently, “I don’t know who you are, but—”

  “My name is Adrik Swarfe.”

  “S-Swarfe?” Angus stared at him, astounded. None of this made any sense. They had come tearing into the snow dome to save Jeremius and Gudgeon and had somehow run straight into Dankhart’s right-hand man instead.

  The man lowered his hood. Both his shoulder-length black hair and goatee were flecked with gray. His eyes were inquiring and intelligent. He looked nothing like the villain Angus had been imagining. He could easily picture Swarfe walking the halls of Perilous and arguing with the other lightning catchers about the best way to tackle icicle storms.

  “What are you doing here?” Angus demanded. The glass dome above their heads was already covered in diamond-shaped spores; fierce winds howled around the Rotundra. They were wasting precious time.

  “We are both here for the same reason, Angus—for the lightning heart.”

  “The lightning heart belongs to Perilous and the storm prophets,” Angus heard himself saying, without really understanding what the words meant. “You betrayed the lightning catchers. You fled to join the monsoon mongrels, to work for Dankhart!”

  “I am flattered that you know so much about me,” said Swarfe, keeping his distance from them both. “But you are quite wrong, Angus. The lightning heart does not belong to the storm prophets. It belongs to my family.”

  Angus glanced at Dougal, who was quivering from head to toe.

  “When the lightning tower was struck, on the night of the Great Fire, it fused with the blood of my own ancestor, Benedict Swarfe, to create a heart-shaped stone of untold power—an illustrious family heirloom.”

  “Your ancestor?” said Dougal.

  “The lightning heart has been passed down through my family for hundreds of years since that terrible day. It allowed my ancestors to perform powerful deeds beyond the ability of any normal storm prophet. It enhanced their natural talents and made them formidable. But when the last of the storm prophets in my family died, so too did the power of the stone. Nothing could be done to revive it, and it has lain dormant ever since, a relic of our past.”

  “So it’s broken?” Angus gasped. “It won’t stop the ice diamond storm?”

  “It has not been easy to lure you down here this evening, Angus,” Swarfe continued shrewdly. “It has taken months of meticulous planning. I had help, of course, from within these very walls.”

  Angus stared at Dougal, and he knew they were both thinking the same thing—if Swarfe had an accomplice, it had to be Valentine Vellum.

  “But I knew exactly how to start. I deliberately staged a conversation in the dungeons at Castle Dankhart. I spoke of a plot to cause mayhem and chaos with a series of icicle storms around the globe. I made sure your parents overheard. I allowed your father to smuggle a secret message out of the castle to his trusted brother, Jeremius. Jeremius would have recognized a forgery instantly. So I let Alabone send a real and urgent message inside a Farew’s qube. Jeremius set off for Budleigh Otterstone the instant he received the message, in order to remove you to the safety of Perilous—the only place he could be sure to protect you, and the very place that I wanted you to return to.”

  “Oh no.” Dougal gulped, as flushed as his pink pajamas. “A Farew’s qube! I should have worked it out sooner.”

  “What?”

  “If you change the letters around, Swarfe spells Farew’s. It comes from his name. He invented it!” Dougal pointed a shaky finger at the monsoon mongrel.

  “I then had another Farew’s qube placed car
efully in your bedroom, Angus, on Christmas morning—a mysterious, anonymous, tantalizing gift sure to gnaw away at the edges of your imagination. An object that refused to reveal its secrets, but that surely contained something wondrous and important. I knew that once you’d discovered Jeremius had been sent an almost identical qube containing a secret message from your father, you would instantly assume your own Farew’s had a similar note inside.”

  Something explosive was happening deep inside Angus’s brain, the truth suddenly crashing down upon him like another snow bomb bombardment.

  “You wrote the message inside my qube!” He glared at Swarfe, hope sinking fast.

  Swarfe had tricked him. The message had been a clever forgery, designed to make him believe that he was acting on his dad’s urgent wishes when all the time . . . He’d been guided and used without ever realizing what was happening, and now he’d put them all in terrible danger.

  “I waited until the lightning catchers were preoccupied with icicle storms and ice diamond spores. I forged a note from Dark-Angel. I knew you had received similar notes, that you would not question the appearance of another. It showed a very distinctive thumbprint that you’d seen for the first time on the message from your father . . . which could have no possible meaning until you saw it again, on a map. It was the key to solving the mystery of the lightning heart at last!”

  Angus swallowed, feeling sick.

  “A well-placed ice diamond storm was all that was needed to send you scurrying down here, so courageously, to find the lightning heart and rescue your uncle Jeremius and Gudgeon. I brought the precious stone back to Perilous and broke into the Rotundra, meeting very little resistance on the way.”

  Angus thought of Catcher Greasley, slumped in the passageway outside. He bet Swarfe had knocked him unconscious.

  “I placed the lightning heart on the table, where you could not fail to find it. For there is only one thing capable of reviving it from its dormant state, Angus . . . and that is the touch of a living storm prophet.”

  Angus squeezed the stone tightly in his hands. He felt nothing but a vague tingling in his fingers. Was Swarfe wrong about the stone? Or was it, too, a fake, just like the note from his dad. Would it fail to stop the ice diamond storm? Or were his own storm prophet skills simply not strong enough to bring the lightning heart back to life? Fake or not, he had to try!