McGuinn—or what was left of McGuinn—fought hard against the cold blackness enveloping him, absorbing him. But he was weak, and Ombra was strong. McGuinn had given as little as he could, but as the last spark of his being died, Ombra was satisfied that he had obtained just enough.
Now he wanted the children.
CHAPTER 80
THE METAL MAN
PETER COULD SEE THEM NOW—the shadowy shapes of men on the spiral staircase, using their boots to stamp out the remaining flames of the dying lantern fire. They would be coming down very soon.
“Molly,” he said. “We have to leave now.”
Molly took one last look at the body of McGuinn, then gestured across the room and said, “There’s another staircase over there.”
“Come on, then,” said Peter.
They started across the room, and were passing the display of medieval suits of armor when Tink sounded a soft warning.
“What is it?” said Molly.
“She says men are coming down the other way,” said Peter.
They looked ahead and saw an archway. There was light moving inside. Somebody was coming down the far staircase.
“Are there any other stairs?” whispered Peter.
“I don’t think so,” said Molly.
“Then we’re trapped down here.”
Molly looked around at the suits of armor. There were several dozen, their shiny steel plates reflecting the light from the lantern in Peter’s hand.
“We’ll have to hide,” she said. “Put out the light.”
Peter blew out the lantern. The center of the room was now nearly pitch dark. At both ends they could see men descending stairs. The searchers were moving slowly, hampered by darkness and the fact that each group had only one lantern. But eventually they would converge on the center of the room.
“In here,” said Molly, tugging Peter into the display of armor. They positioned themselves in the middle of a cluster of suits, peering out between them. The searchers at each end of the room had spread out and were moving, slowly and methodically, ever closer to where Peter and Molly stood.
“What are we going to do?” whispered Molly.
Peter had been thinking about that, and the only plan he could come up with was to try to fly out. He knew he couldn’t carry Molly far; his hope was that he had enough starstuff left in his locket to enable her to become airborne. The ceiling was high; Peter’s plan was to try to swoop over the men and get to the staircase. He knew that if—if—they managed to get upstairs, they would likely encounter more men…and Ombra. But for now he had to worry about the men closing in on them.
“We’ll have to fly over them,” he whispered, pulling the locket out from under his shirt. Molly nodded, immediately grasping the plan.
Peter put his thumb on the catch and was about to flick the locket open. Suddenly, the locket became warm—almost hot.
Then it started to glow.
“Molly,” he whispered, “the—”
“Peter,” she interrupted. “Look.”
Peter turned—and saw it. The suit of armor directly behind him was also glowing—not the color of steel, but the same color as the locket—a soft, radiant gold.
Then it began to move. As Peter and Molly watched in openmouthed amazement, the suit of armor slowly, silently, raised its right hand.
“What’s happening?” whispered Peter.
“I don’t know,” whispered Molly.
Touch it, said Tink softly.
“What?” whispered Peter.
Touch the metal man’s hand with your locket.
“What’s she saying?” whispered Molly.
“She says I should touch the hand with the locket,” whispered Peter.
Molly looked around; from both sides of the room, the searchers were getting closer.
“Then do what she says,” she whispered.
Peter raised the locket and touched it to the golden knight’s hand. For a moment, nothing happened. Then the floor began to move. Peter and Molly grabbed each other as they realized that they were sinking on a square slab of stone, about four feet on each side. Silently they descended into a dark chamber beneath the floor of the big room. Above them was the square hole through which they had descended. They could hear the searchers very close now.
“They’ll see us down here,” whispered Peter.
Get off the stone, said Tink.
Quickly, Peter stepped off the floor slab, pulling Molly with him. Immediately the knight and the slab rose back into place, pushed silently upward by a thick marble column rising from the floor of the chamber.
For a moment Molly and Peter were in total darkness. Then, suddenly, the chamber was bathed in a soft yellow light, which seemed to be coming from everywhere and nowhere. They found themselves in what looked like a large study, furnished with a long table, a dozen comfortable chairs, a writing desk, one large wall entirely covered with shelves crammed with thousands of books, and another wall covered with an enormous floor-to-ceiling map.
“Well,” said Molly, “I guess we’ve found the Keep.”
CHAPTER 81
THE SECRET
THE TWO SEARCH PARTIES—Slank’s and Nerezza’s—met at the armor display in the center of the room. They surrounded the suits of armor, then searched through them thoroughly. They found no sign of the boy and girl.
“I don’t understand it,” said Slank, standing among the motionless steel knights, frustration raising the pitch of his voice. “I could have sworn I saw a light right here.”
“You probably saw our lantern,” said Nerezza.
“No,” said Slank. “It was—”
He stopped in midsentence, feeling—as did the other men—the familiar, unwelcome coolness in the air.
Nerezza and Slank turned to face Ombra. For a moment there was silence; neither man wanted to deliver the bad news. Finally Nerezza spoke.
“They’re not here, my lord,” he said.
Another silence; the air seemed to grow even colder. Nerezza and Slank both felt the faceless stare.
“They are here,” groaned Ombra. “I saw them.”
“Yes, my lord,” said Nerezza, “but we—”
“SILENCE.”
The hideous voice echoed through the vast stone room. Not a man was breathing.
“You will search this room again,” said Ombra, softly now. “And if you do not find the children, you will search the floor above this, and then the upper floor. The boy and the girl are here somewhere, and you will find them.”
“Yes, my lord,” said Nerezza. To the men he said, “You heard him. Find them!”
The men began scouring the room again. Ombra remained where he was, facing the suits of armor. In his dissection of the fragment of soul he had managed to extract from McGuinn, Ombra had concentrated on learning, in what little time he had, the location of the starstuff, and the Return. But he’d sensed that McGuinn was holding back something else as well—another deep secret, something about the White Tower.
Ombra stared at the armor, sifting through the dreamlike swirl of images he’d seen in the last instants of his struggle with McGuinn. There was something there, something tantalizingly close….
What was it?
CHAPTER 82
THE KEEP
DOWN IN THE KEEP, bathed in golden light, Peter and Molly stood still, listening to the muffled sounds coming from the room above—shouts, boots scraping on stone. After a minute the sounds began to move away. For now, it appeared, they were safe.
“Now what?” said Peter.
“Well,” said Molly, “since we’re here, we might as well have a look around. Perhaps we can figure out where Father went.”
Peter walked over to the bookshelf. He removed a book at random; it was leather-bound and dust-covered, clearly very old. He opened it to a random page and squinted at the writing.
“It’s not in English,” he said.
Molly came over and had a look. She wrinkled her nose.
; “Latin,” she said.
“Can you read it?”
“A bit,” she said. “But very slowly. And”—she gestured at the thousands of dusty volumes—“where would I start?”
They walked over to the huge wall map. It displayed the earth—Europe and Africa in the middle, the Americas off to the left, Asia to the right. Looking closer, they saw that it was covered with hundreds of finely drawn red lines. Most of the lines converged in London; from there they radiated out all over the planet, each ending in a tiny gold star with a date next to it. Some of the dates were centuries old.
“Starstuff,” said Peter.
Molly nodded. “This is where they keep track of it. I had no idea there was so much.”
Peter moved close to the map, his eyes roaming back and forth until he found what he was looking for.
“Look,” he said, pointing to a tiny dot in the ocean, far from land, connected to London by not one but two red lines—one meandering, one arrow-straight.
Molly smiled. “Mollusk Island,” she said. She traced the meandering line with her finger. “This is us on the Never Land. What a voyage that was!” She moved her finger to the straight line. “And this is me going home, with Father and the starstuff.” She followed the line back to London, then said, “It only shows the shipments reaching London. It doesn’t show where they go for the Return from here.”
“And you’re sure the Return isn’t here?”
“Yes,” said Molly. “It’s somewhere else.” Her eyes roamed around the room, then fell on the writing desk. On it was a stack of papers. Molly went over, picked them up, and began sifting through them. But her expression quickly changed from eagerness to disappointment when she saw that they were financial documents—invoices, purchase orders, bills of lading, customs forms. She sighed.
“I suppose even Starcatchers have bills to pay,” she muttered. She was about to set the papers back down when she noticed something.
“Wait a minute,” she said.
“What?” said Peter.
“Look at this.” Molly was holding an invoice from a wine merchant listing various bottles of wine and their prices.
Peter looked. “What about it?”
“Here,” said Molly, pointing to the margin. There, in bright blue ink that contrasted with the black used to write the rest of the invoice, was the letter S, drawn in a fanciful cursive, followed by the numbers 1030 and 246.
Peter looked again, and again asked, “What about it?”
“That’s Father’s writing,” said Molly.
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely. He’s got a specially made pen that he loves, and this is the color of ink he uses. And that’s how he writes the letter S, with that odd curlicue.”
“What does it mean?” said Peter.
Molly frowned. “I’ve no idea. But this invoice is dated only last week. Father must have written this very shortly before he left.” She studied it a moment longer, then tucked it into the pocket of her dress. “Let’s see if we can find anything else that might be helpful,” she said.
Molly and Peter spent the next half hour looking around the Keep, but found nothing else that seemed remotely helpful. Finally, Molly, after having gone through the stack of financial documents for the fifth time without finding anything new, hung her head in discouragement.
“This has been a waste of time,” she said. “No, it’s much worse than that. Mister McGuinn is dead, and we’ve found nothing.”
“You didn’t kill him,” said Peter. “Ombra did.”
“But I led him here,” said Molly. “I thought I could be a hero, saving Mother. I’m a fool.”
“No you’re not,” said Peter.
Yes she is, said Tink, though Peter could tell her heart wasn’t really in it.
“What did she say?” said Molly.
“She said, um, she said it’s been quiet upstairs for a while,” said Peter.
Molly listened for a few seconds, and nodded; there were no more boot steps on the floor above, no shouting.
“I suppose we should try to get out of here,” she said. “We’re never going to find Father if we stay here.”
“How do you suppose we get out?” said Peter.
The way you came in, said Tink. The metal man.
Molly looked at Peter. He pointed to the marble column beneath the slab of floor that had carried them down to the Keep. They went over and studied its smooth, cream-colored surface, but found nothing that suggested a way out. Then Molly spotted something gleaming on the wall nearby.
“Over there,” she said.
Peter followed her eyes and saw it: a small golden star set into the stone. He went to it and again removed the locket from his shirt. As he did, both locket and star began to glow.
“Stand away from the column,” he said. As Molly complied, he touched the locket to the star. The column began to slide silently into the floor, the golden knight descending on its square slab of stone. When it reached the floor of the Keep, it raised its hand. Molly and Peter stepped onto the slab, and Peter touched his locket to the knight’s palm.
Silently, they rose into the lower room of the White Tower, hoping that nobody was waiting for them in the darkness.
CHAPTER 83
OMBRA’S PLAN
NEREZZA WAS FRUSTRATED. Slank was furious.
Where were the boy and the girl?
The men had thoroughly searched the bottom floor of the White Tower; then the middle floor, where they had come in. Now they had finished scouring the upper floor. They had checked the windows: all were blocked by close-set iron bars. They had two men guarding the tower’s only door. There was no other way for the boy and the girl to escape. And yet they were nowhere to be found.
Reluctantly, Nerezza and Slank approached Ombra, who stood alone in the center of the upper floor. The rest of the men hung back, watching, grateful that they did not have to deliver the bad news.
“My lord,” said Nerezza. “We can’t find them.”
“They are here,” said Ombra.
“But, my lord, we—”
“They are here.”
“Yes, my lord.”
“You will have the men search the tower again.”
“Yes, my lord.”
Nerezza and Slank turned to go back to the men and give the order. Slank was halted by Ombra’s groan.
“Mister Slank,” he said.
Slank turned back.
“You will get a lantern and come with me.”
“Yes, my lord.” Slank took a lantern from one of the men and returned to Ombra, who glided to the front staircase and began descending the spiral steps. He knew better than to ask Ombra what they were doing.
In fact, Ombra was not sure himself. Something was drawing him to the lower floor again, some fragment of a thought that he had extracted from McGuinn, undefined but tantalizing. Ombra had gone to the lower floor several times, drifting through the armor, trying to make sense of the murky jumble of vague images he had captured. Each time he had given up in frustration.
But something was drawing him back. He was certain the children were still in the tower. He didn’t know where they were hiding. But now, as he slithered down the staircase, he had a plan for drawing them out.
CHAPTER 84
A VOICE IN THE DARK
PETER AND MOLLY peered through the suits of armor, their eyes straining to see across the vast darkness of the lower room.
“I think they’re gone,” Peter whispered.
“From this floor, yes,” whispered Molly. “But they’re still in the tower.” Her words were confirmed by the distant echoing sounds of searchers calling to each other.
“Do you think we could make it to the front door?” said Peter.
“I doubt it,” said Molly. “They’ll have it guarded.”
“Is there another way out?”
Molly frowned, remembering her visits to the tower. “I don’t know,” she said. “If there is, it would be upstairs.” S
he thought about the front staircase and shuddered, thinking of the fallen form of McGuinn lying there in the darkness. Unable to bear the thought of stepping over his body, she pointed toward the rear staircase. “Let’s go this way,” she said.
Cautiously, they crept out from among the suits of armor and crossed the floor to the archway leading to the rear stairs. Inside the spiral staircase it was blacker than black.
“Should I have Tink light the way?” whispered Peter.
“We’d better not,” said Molly. “They might see.”
Slowly, feeling their way with their feet, they began to make their way up the stairs. They had gone four or five steps when Molly stopped, putting her hand on Peter’s arm.
“Did you hear that?” she whispered.
“What?” whispered Peter.
“Shh. Listen.”
They listened, and after a moment’s silence they both heard it.
A woman’s voice echoing plaintively across the room they had just left.
“Molly!” said the voice.
Molly’s grip tightened on Peter’s arm, so hard that he winced in pain.
“Mother,” she whispered. “Peter, that’s my mother!”
“Molly,” called the voice, closer now. “Please, help me!”
Molly started down the stairs. Peter grabbed her.
“Wait,” he whispered.
She jerked her arm free. “That’s my mother, Peter.”
“Molly!” the voice called again, closer still.
Molly was about to call out when Peter clamped his hand over her lips. They struggled silently on the dark staircase, Peter whispering harshly in Molly’s ear.
“Think, Molly,” he said. “It could be a trick.”
He felt her hesitate, then stop struggling. She nodded her head. He removed his hand from her mouth.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
“No,” she answered. “You’re right.”
“Molly!” called the voice. “Please come out! I need you, Molly!”
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