Worm Winds of Zanzibar (The Alex Trueman Chronicles Book 2)

by Martin Dukes

  “Give it me,” said Alex in condescending tones. He grasped the pebble, turned it experimentally between his fingertips and once more it began to glow. The metal spike re-emerged. Alex kept his fingers well clear of it.

  “Maybe it’s like a kind of knife,” said Kelly, smoothing her hair back from her face. “Try it on the door.”

  The door was made from some stout wood, several inches thick, and the little spike made no impression on it, although it showed no sign of bending or snapping. Nor were its metal hinges visible, concealed as they were by a sturdy wooden frame.

  “Try it on the bars,” suggested Henry. “Maybe it’s for metal.”

  This proved to be the case. Kelly and Henry gasped as Alex positioned the slender silver probe and sliced through the finger’s breadth of rusted iron as though slicing cucumber.

  “Whoa!” breathed Henry. “Now that’s one for the toolbox. Do it at the top as well.”

  “Hold on to it though,” warned Kelly. “We don’t want it falling out.”

  Henry held onto the bar whilst Alex sliced through the metal close to the top. The bar came away easily and Henry set it gently on the floor.

  “Now let’s do the other. This is sooo cool,” he said.

  The other bar was dealt with in like fashion and they found themselves suddenly with a window easily wide enough for any of them to squeeze through. They pushed the bed up beneath it so that Henry could climb up and brace himself against the stone frame, leaning out into the darkness and the pouring rain.

  “We’ll be stuffed if the jailer chap comes in now,” said Alex, glancing over his shoulder.

  “What can you see?” asked Kelly anxiously as Henry jumped back down, shaking rain from his hair. His face, still streaming with water, bore a grim expression.

  “No go,” he said. “Absolutely no way. It’s a sheer drop; hundreds of feet.”

  “So what was the point of cutting the bars then?” asked Alex frowning.

  “There’s a plan. There has to be a plan,” said Kelly. “Malcolm left us this stuff for a reason.”

  “What about the other items,” asked Henry, wiping his face. “We’d better give those a try. Maybe that other stone thing is some kind of levitation device. Maybe it turns itself into a bloody big rope ladder.”

  The second pebble was rather smaller than the first. Like the first, its surface was entirely smooth. Alex could do nothing with this one, however, except cause it to emit a faint glow. Each of them worked it between their fingers, but to no effect.

  “What about the hair band thingy?” asked Henry. “Maybe it makes you sprout wings.”

  With a shrug, Alex slipped it onto his head, the little plastic spikes on the inner side catching in his hair. Immediately it was in place, he felt it tremble and pull tight against his head.

  “Whoa!” he said, trying to snatch it off once more. Too late – the band was fixed firmly to his head.

  “What?” asked the others in unison, staring at him wide-eyed.

  Alex put his hands to his head as rising panic gripped him, and he felt a sensation of icy cold, of sharp pain, as though a number of small needles were piercing his flesh. He screamed, the sound drowned by a simultaneous clap of thunder, and then darkness washed over him. He slumped forward, his vacant eyes fixed on nothing at all. Henry and Kelly caught him before he fell.

  “Oh my God!” gasped Kelly. “What’s happened to him?”

  “He’s not dead, he’s still breathing,” said Henry, bending over Alex’s motionless form. “It’s like the headband zapped him or something. He’s out cold.”

  “What shall we do?” asked Kelly, cradling Alex’s head in her arms.

  Henry shrugged. “Wait, I guess. What else can we do? Maybe he’ll come round in a while. Anyway, looks like Malcolm bombed out.”

  “What if somebody comes?” asked Kelly with a nod towards the gaping window with the little stumps where the bars had once stood. “We’ll be for it then, won’t we?”

  “Ha! What are they going to do, bill us for the damage?” scoffed Henry.

  “I bet that’s what that little ball of putty’s for,” said Kelly. “Stick them back in.”

  “Jesus!” said Henry disgustedly. “What’s the point? We’re going to die anyway.”

  “Just do it, Henry!” spat Kelly, her face deadly serious in the flicker of sudden lightning.

  Alex found himself in a strange place. It was dark, but waves of energy, like ripples on a pond, seemed to be lapping against the fringes of his mind. He had no body, nothing from which bodily sensations could be perceived at least, and yet he existed. He was, just that, and it was enough. He was somehow conscious of scale – not physical scale measured in inches or centimetres but scale, nevertheless, of a kind inexplicable in any terms known to him. And by this scale he was tiny, a mere pinpoint in the vastness of a space that likewise was beyond measure. But the pinpoint that was his being began to grow, slowly at first but with increasing speed, the tendrils of his consciousness reaching out into the infinite void. He experienced no emotion, no wonder, no curiosity; existence was enough, as that existence surged out and out… and out…

  He opened his eyes and at once he knew that there was something different. His body responded to his summons, feeding sensations for interpretation by his brain. There was cool air on his face. The sound of thunder rumbled deeply around the walls, accompanied by the dank stench of foulness and decay and the warmth of Kelly’s lap as she cradled his head. All these things his senses reported to him. But there was more. It was as though another room was there, a room within himself, a space he could enter but could never describe. There were no words to describe it.

  The key scraped in the lock and the jailer’s thin face appeared around the side of the door. He sniffed, holding up a lantern to fill the cell with an uneven yellow glow. His eye fell upon Alex, still cradled in Kelly’s arms, Henry sitting at her side, back to the wall and hugging his knees to his chest.

  “He ain’t dead, is he?” asked the jailer with a nod at Alex.

  “No,” said Kelly.” What do you care anyway?”

  “Oh, I don’t care, missy,” said the jailer with a nasty chuckle. “I don’t care at all. But there’s a few people I can think of who’d have been sorry to hear it. All sorts of plans they’ve got for making you sing a pretty song, they have. All sorts of plans. Oh yes. They do like to hear a pretty voice.”

  He closed the door again with a dull thud, rattled the key in the lock and darkness returned to the cell. They could hear his footsteps and his mocking laughter fade away along the corridor beyond.

  “Here, what do you want, sonny boy?” they heard faintly as he addressed the inmate of another cell. There was a muffled exchange of words, a shouted oath and then silence once more.

  “A pretty voice, eh? He was talking about them torturing us,” said Kelly in a small, matter of fact voice. “Wasn’t he?”

  “Yeah, I guess,” said Henry after taking a while to find his voice, which had momentarily eluded him. “Unless they’ve got Dame Kiri Te Kanawa coming up here.”

  “You really do have a wisecrack for every occasion, don’t you?” said Kelly, turning to regard him solemnly.

  “Hmmm. I guess we’re going to find out soon enough,” said Henry, forcing his mouth into a grin.

  “They are held in the very last cell,” said Nahla. “The one on the end of the wing, at its narrowest point. My sister’s aunt is a friend of the chief warder’s wife. She is a foolish woman with a loose tongue. She says the milkskins are held there, but she thinks they will not be held long.”

  “We all think that,” said Rakesh grimly.

  “So we must act now,” said Jemail. “This storm will be our ally. The din of the thunder and the rain will deaden our footsteps and the sound of our tools as we cross the prison roof and break down through it to their cell. Are we all agreed?”

  He glanced around the lamp-lit faces in the dim basement room. Nahla had joined them, together
with Henry’s cricketing companion Amjad and two of his other friends. There were various grunts and nods of assent.

  “You must stay with Nahla,” he continued, placing a hand on Tanya’s shoulders. “There is no place for children in this desperate work.”

  “No way!” she said adamantly, shrugging off Jemail’s hand. “I’m coming with you.”

  There was something in the set of her small features that brooked no opposition. Jemail’s resolve crumbled.

  “We’re all in this together,” said Will firmly, standing at her side. “I’m not leaving her behind.”

  “Alright,” said Jemail with a wry smile. “I know when I am beaten.”

  Zoroaster’s tower proved to be unoccupied, which was just as well because it might have been awkward had Fajaruddin been in residence at that time. Zoroaster let the party in, relieved to find that no one had thought to change the locks, and they climbed the spiral staircase to the room on the third floor. This had once been Zoroaster’s study, a place of austere simplicity, but now it was elegantly furnished with rugs, a polished mahogany table and shelves of leather-bound books around the walls. Zoroaster looked disapprovingly at a shiny brass telescope on a stand by the side of the double doors that gave access to the balcony.

  “Ostentatious rubbish,” he sneered.

  “Ready?” asked Jemail, taking hold of the door handles.

  “Go for it,” said Will.

  The whole party were heavily laden with ropes and tools. All of them were soaked from their journey through alleys and backstreets in the pouring rain. They stood dripping onto Fajaruddin’s Persian rugs. Jemail flung open the doors and a howling gale plucked at the curtains, driving sudden gusts of rain at their faces as they pressed forward onto the balcony. Rakesh began making fast one end of a rope to the stone balustrade. The other end had a kind of simple harness attached to it, made from a length of sturdy cloth roughly sewn into shape. Jemail stepped into this cradle and it was tightened under his arms. The wind flicked at his wet curls as he swung his leg over the balcony and balanced himself on the other side, facing his companions. They took the strain on the rope, three of them, whilst the fourth, Rakesh, stood ready to pay out more from a coil at his feet. Jemail nodded and stepped back, disappearing quickly from sight as he dropped beneath the balcony, swinging crazily as the wind caught him. The rope snapped tight on the stone edge of the balcony and the three men supporting Jemail grunted, bracing themselves against the door frame as they gradually paid it out. Tanya and Will leant over the balcony to observe as Jemail descended, blown back against the flank of the tower, using one arm and his legs to steady himself against the slick, wet stone. At length he was down, standing on the narrow parapet by the side of the pitched roof of the prison wing, untying the rope and waving to the others to pull it back up, his pale face uplifted in the pouring rain. Amjad went next, taking with him a bag of tools strapped to his back. And then it was Tanya’s turn.

  “Do you still wish to do this?” asked Rakesh, untying the harness.

  “Yes,” she said in a small voice, although every fibre of her body cried out for her to run back into the comparative warmth and safety of Fajaruddin’s study.

  “You’re sure?” asked Will, borne down himself by a growing burden of fear. If Tanya went through with this there was absolutely no way he could pull out. Not that he would, he told himself. He couldn’t. Not now.

  Rakesh tightened the harness between Tanya’s legs and under her arms. He smiled.

  “Go then, child. May God protect you.”

  By this time a second rope had been attached underneath the harness. As Henry’s cricket friends took the weight, letting her go down gradually from the balcony, Amjad and Jemail pulled this one taut so that Tanya would not swing too much in the wind that tugged at her. Even so, she span, giddily, rain lashed, her mouth a grim rictus of terror as she lurched and jolted downwards. Next it was Will’s turn. He realised he was trembling with fear, his teeth chattering uncontrollably as the harness was strapped about him. He could barely stand, barely lift his weight over the balcony and onto the tiny ledge beyond, holding on desperately to the taut rope in front of him with one hand, grasping for purchase on the balustrade with the other.

  “Go on, lad. You can do it,” shouted Zoroaster above the wind.

  “You must step back, let go,” grunted Rakesh.

  “I can’t,” croaked Will, feeling as though every muscle in his body was suddenly paralysed.

  “You have to,” roared Zoroaster. “Go on!”

  Will closed his eyes. Think of something else, he told himself. He summoned into his mind a vision of a large lemon drizzle cake and stepped back, dropping and swinging suddenly sideways and coming within an ace of dashing his head against the underside of the balcony.

  “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God!” he yammered, swinging madly round and round, jerking downward and crashing once, twice, against the stone face of the tower.

  At last he was down, Tanya in his arms grinning up at him. The harness tugged away, vanishing into the pouring darkness above.

  “You did good!” she said, hugging him tight.

  The space between the edge of the pitched roof and the raised stone parapet was a narrow one, gushing with the rainwater that rushed along and out through the stone chutes that pierced the parapet at intervals along the wall. Now they gushed wind-shattered torrents of water out into space. A glance over the parapet to the jagged black rocks and the crashing sea a hundred feet below was enough to make Will cower back on the streaming tiled slope of the roof. Tanya huddled beside him. The whole building seemed to shudder as a huge thunderclap burst around them, almost simultaneously with a bolt of lightning that momentarily illuminated the whole of the palace with its roofs, domes and towers glinting wetly along the ridge.

  The harness came swaying down once more, this time laden with more tools and coils of rope.

  “Let’s go,” said Jemail, plucking at Will’s shoulder. “Come on, right to the end.”

  Crouching low, the small party made their way along the edge of the parapet, buffeted by the gale and drenched by the sheets of icy rain driven horizontally against the prison roof. Below them the Sultan’s captives shivered in their cells, hunched on their foul mattress and fearing they would imminently hear the key in the lock that would summon them to torture or death. The thunder was almost a continuous barrage as the rescuers reached the far extremity of the prison wing, where the structure itself was only as wide as the one last cell, the one window under its eaves looking out like a black, hollow eye upon the fury of the storm. Jemail gripped the edge of the parapet firmly and leaned over as far as he dared. In the irregular flashes of lightning he could make out the window, ten feet or so beneath.

  “This is it,” he said, turning back and shouting above the wind.

  “They’re in here?” demanded Tanya, pulling lank strands of windblown hair away from her eyes. “Are you sure?”

  “We’ve got to be sure,” Jemail said, reaching for the tool bag.

  “Let me down on the rope,” said Tanya, grabbing his arm. “Let me look through the window. I’m lightest.”

  “Tanya, no!” roared Will. “You’re crazy!”

  Jemail regarded her for a long moment, water trickling down his forehead and dripping off the end of his nose.

  “She’s right,” nodded Jemail at last. “There’s no point trying to break through the roof if they’re not in there. Amjad, pass me the harness.”

  Once more the harness was made fast. Once more Tanya held the taut rope in front of her and stepped backward to the edge of the parapet. This time it was different. Without the space beneath the balcony the experience was a more familiar one.

  “I did this last year with school,” she said through gritted teeth. “Abseiling on PGL.”

  But not like this; not with the rain driving at her face and the gale threatening to pluck her away like an autumn leaf and the thunderous fury of the dark skies around her. It had
been a very different matter on the abseil tower, with the cheerful instructors and her friends giggling around her. Different but the same, she told herself. Straight back, bent knees, edge yourself backwards. Whoa! Don’t lose your balance. Don’t look down – whatever you do, don’t look down. One foot at a time. Nice small steps, the rope paying out smoothly, inch by inch between Jemail’s gloved fingers. And then she was there, level with the window and to one side. She edged herself across to find a footing on the sill.

  Henry, sitting at the head of the bed casually watching lighting on the dark face of the clouds, nearly jumped out of his skin. He emitted a high-pitched squeak as Tanya’s small face swung suddenly into view. “Tanya!” cried Kelly rushing to the window, jiggling up and down with sudden, heart-stopping anxiety. “What are you doing?” Her voice was shrill, almost hysterical.

  In retrospect Tanya was to wish that she had the presence of mind to say, “Oh you know, just hanging around,” or such like, but now she merely burst into tears, groped for the bars and swung on her rope, gasping Kelly’s name. The first bar, held in place only by putty, came away unexpectedly in her hand, clanged on the sill and span into the dark abyss. Henry was suddenly there, knocking away the other bar, reaching for Tanya’s outstretched hand, missing, reaching again and making contact, grasping her slender wrist and pulling her towards him. Kelly was there too, and between them they bundled her over the broad stone sill and into the comparative safety of their cell, still in her harness, still with the rope, like an umbilical cord snaking away up through the window and into the darkness beyond.

  “Baby, my baby,” crooned Kelly, hugging her so tight Tanya thought her ribs would crack.

  “We’ve come to get you out,” said Tanya, staring into the dimness recesses of the cell. “Is that Alex?”

  “He’s okay, but there’s something wrong with him,” said Henry following her gaze. “If that makes any sense. He put this special headband thing on himself and he went all funny on us, like he was having some kind of fit. It’s come off now, but we can’t get any sense out of him. It’s like he’s in a trance or something.”