Charles Ingrid - marked man 02 The Last Recall (22 page)

He had stood looking at it a long time. "He's been back," the Protector said, "a couple of times. Not too recently, by the looks of it."

"Who?" several boys had asked, jostling to read the mysterious signs that Sir Thomas could read and seeing nothing remarkable except perhaps a deer trail.

"Someone," the man replied enigmatically, "we're not quite ready to meet yet. But it looks like Watty here has found a way down. There'll be a tunnel mouth at the other end of this trail."

Watty remembered smiling in triumph then and when they'd clambered down and found an entrance. He did not smile when Blade had numbered them off by ones and twos and he was in the party left behind. Sir Thomas had clapped him on the shoulder.

"Someone," he'd said, "has to stay back. We'll need an anchor in case there's trouble."

But the girl had gotten to go. Watty's mouth quirked as he watched her walking to the rear of the party. He liked her, but he didn't think it was fair she could be included in the count just like anyone else.

Bottom sat down next to him on a sun-warmed boulder, just missing squashing a lizard. As the creature skittered off, the cook said, ' 'What's happening?''

"Nothing yet. Everybody just got down to the creek bed."

The burly boy squinted a little. He grunted, "I can see that well myself."

Watty was not about to accept insult with injury. "Look, Blade's scouting the entrance out first."

Bottom smelled like bacon grease and woodsmoke. Rivulets of sweat ran off him. The climb to the butte where Sir Thomas had placed Watty as a lookout was not that bad, but the big young man had had trouble making it. Watty knew that Bottom wouldn't leave without a reward of some kind. If not interesting information about the exploration, then a mean tweak of some kind to Watty.

He put the brass telescope to his eye again. "Thomas has got the tunnel cleared. Wow. Looks like he's got to crawl in. He's putting the rope around his waist and there he goes."

"Yeah?" Bottom mopped his face. The rest of the left-behinds were policing camp. He didn't seem inclined to rejoin them.

Watty counted off the bodies crawling into the foot of the hillside. Alma was next to last. He watched as she began to bend over.

"What's that?" Bottom said.

"What's what?"

"A puff of dust from the top of the hill there," the cook began, but as he pointed, there was an ominous rumble. Suddenly, the mountaintop began to slide down, tons of dirt and gravel raining on the dry creek bed below.

"Shit!" Watty rocketed to his feet. "Bottom, run get the others. Bring the latrine shovels. There's been a slide."

As the heavy boy rolled to his feet and lumbered away, Watty collapsed the telescope and began his own frantic out of control slide down die butte toward the opposite cliff face.

Alma had jerked upright and thrown her hands over her head. She disappeared under dust and rock as he watched in horror.

Chapter 16

Thomas crawled forward in the soft, giving darkness of the tunnel, fighting his desire to stand in spite of the limited nature of the shaft. He felt as much with his Intuition as his hands as the weak beam of his light peered into the gloom. Every crawl of the way, he could feel the greasy presence of the man hed known only as the Dean of the College Vaults. The man's aura had rubbed off onto this tunnel and its crumbling soil like slime off an eel-snake smothered anything it touched. He caught himself breathing through tightly clenched teeth. He knew the man had been here, and far more frequently than the trail outside indicated. And Blade knew that the dean had left death for him wherever he could.

He was startled but not surprised when his ears suddenly popped, and then he heard a low moan registering through the mountain.

"What is it?" Stefan yelled at his heels, his voice gone shrill with fear.

"I don't know. Explosion of some kind is my guess. Pass it down—see if we're caved in somewhere back there." He fought a momentary panic against being trapped. But he wasn't trapped, the innards of the Vaults lay before him and if the dean had survived in salvaging the installation, he would, too. He lay still in the tunnel, listening to his heart beat and feeling the sweat form on his brow.

Stefan crawled up to wrap an iron hand about his boot ankle.

"We've lost Jenkies and Alma in a slide. We think we're being dug out—we can hear the shovels and the dirt keeps shifting."

His heartbeat skipped a measure. "How bad?"

"Nobody knows. They're just—gone."

Lady had pulled Alma out of death in this mountain. It would be ironic if he'd brought her back only to lose her again. He scrabbled about on his elbows, slipping
a
hand inside his jacket to see if he could find a light crystal as the torch fastened to his hat grew yellower and weaker in beam. His fingers slipped about finger bones instead.

Gillander oozed out of the dirt walls. He absorbed the waning light and grew more solid.

"Thomas, my boy," the ghost said, pleased.

"Go away. I've no time for you." Thomas searched frantically for another set of rechargeable batteries before he lost all illumination. He found them and snatched his hat off, fumbling for the flashlight.

"Don't go waving your mustache about at me." His mentor sat nester-style upon the tunnel floor. His thinning hair wavered about his bony pate as if it were a halo. "I'll not take your temper, youngun."

Thomas slid the fading batteries out and quickly dropped the newer ones in place. The ghost lit up the tunnel in the absence of actual light. He screwed the flashlight back together quickly and replaced it in the loops of his hat band. The newly restored light shone out brilliantly. Gillander paled in its strength. He looked, Blade reflected, ghastly.

"Use the ghost road," the specter said, sympathetically. "Neither boy nor girl is dead, but they are buried. Only you can get to them in time."

"No," Thomas said shortly. The Vaults were resonant in hatred and death. The ghost road would be well fueled, but he knew he could not control it.

"You've got no choice," hissed Gillander.

The man took a deep breath. "I've every choice in the world," he answered.
If he was willing to lose Alma and Jenkies.

He could hear a muffled noise behind him, then Stefan shook his leg to get his attention.

"They're being dug out," the young man called to him. His voice was stiff with emotion. "Alma's all right. Jenkies has a broken arm, probably."

"We'll back out as soon as the mouth is clear. Pass it down." Thomas swallowed a hard lump in his throat. He closed his eyes. "Get out of here, Gillander."

He could feel the ghostlight burning through his eyelids until they were as thin as paper.

"Never you mind," his old teacher said. "I'll have my time."

The tunnel went black. His flashlight sputtered as if the specter had sucked out the juice of its batteries, then the beam came on strong again. It scarcely mattered. He would crawl backward before he could crawl forward again.

Alma sat, holding onto Jenkies' arm, while Trout wrapped the splints into place. Thomas paced.

"Who set it off?" Drakkar asked. He was combing his feathered crest with a peculiar instrument, preening himself of dust and dirt.

Thomas knew only that he had not, though he had been expecting trip wires. Bottom, his face mottled with the flush of excitement and exertion, said, "I saw it—I saw a puff of smoke from the top of the cliff face."

"Where?"

The sweaty boy drew him by the elbow out into the creek bed until he could point upward. Thomas saW the fresh exposure of the cliff face. "Blasting cap," he said.

"D'you think so?" The cook took a deep breath. "Watty never saw anything."

"I can't be sure, but that's what I would have done." And, he would have done it with a remote. He looked around, scanning the creekbed and opposite butte. Brush and drought dulled evergreen met his eyes. He hoped for a flash of metal but saw nothing.

If the dean had been watching them, he was gone now.

"Jenkies, you and your brother and Alma go back to camp. The rest of you stay here and keep this tunnel mouth shored up while the rest of us go back in."

The mappers whooped. Thomas put a hand up. "That doesn't mean you'll be coming in with us. That slide was just a welcome present. He'll hit us again and hit us hard once we're inside. You can count on it."

Watty had the brass telescope slide inside his belt. "And you can c-count on us." He blushed at his stammer of excitement.

Alma said softly, "We'll be all right."

"Okay, then, let's split up. Get some deadwood to use for shoring planks, nothing fancy."

Bill helped his brother to his feet. Trout finished knotting a sling and tugged it into place. "That should do you."

Jenkies was so pale his freckles had bleached out. He nodded. Alma put a hand gently on his shoulder. The boy's color evened out.

Bill said, "Let's hike it." The three of them started up the dry creek bed as it curved toward camp.

It was so easy it was pitiful. The dean picked off the two boys with his dart gun and the girl stood alone, shockstill, as the boys dropped. They convulsed on the ground, green foam coming to their lips and then they were still, curled at her feet.

The girl let out a choked sound. She looked up in horror as the dean left the shelter of the shrubbery. He smiled as he checked the fletch of his last dart before firing again. It would be a pity to use the wrong dart on his quarry.

She turned to run. As the dart buried itself in her flank, he said, "I doubt anyone would hear you scream."

She dropped to her knees. As the mild poison invaded her bloodstream, the cords on her throat stood out. No amount of effort would bring out the scream she tried to issue.

He swept her up before she keeled over to the ground. She had large, luminous eyes, he thought, as the poison glazed them over. She fought to keep her lids open, watching him in trapped silence.

He smiled. "Don't worry, my dear. I don't intend to use you as bait to bring Thomas Blade to his knees. He won't survive what's ahead of him. You're the one I want."

She understood him, he thought in triumph. He was sure of it. He had seen the look of utter terror in her deep brown eyes just before they had rolled back in their sockets in unconsciousness. He hoisted her light weight a bit more comfortably in his arms and took care not to leave tracks leaving the camp.

He found himself humming, in a slightly off-tune voice. Every cloud had a silver lining. He had a lot of ground to put behind him before sunset.

She awoke, stiff and sore, a pain in her ribs as though she had run hard and gotten a sideache. Her mouth felt dry and gummy. Her eyelids stuck together when she first tried to open them.

Then, before she could actually see, she remembered the sight of Jenkies and Bill toppling in foaming agony, their death throes at her feet. The breath in her chest caught now as she remembered the man who'd emerged from the brush and the shadows, overlapping with that same man's image as she opened wide her eyes.

He had his head turned, unaware she'd awakened, but she knew him, though he'd lost his mountainous flesh. The hooded eyes, looking away from her, she could never forget. The years of exile from his underground retreat had sculpted a new man out of his corpulent body. He was lean and looked hard muscled under his shirt and jeans. His salt-and-pepper hair, thinning in middle age, had been pulled back and was French-braided to the nape of his neck where a nester clasp held it in place. There was an aura of power about him that she had not seen in many men besides Sir Thomas. But this power was corrupt.

He was polishing a piece of equipment balanced on one muscular thigh. She did not recognize it except that she'd seen similar equipment in the Vaults the months she'd stayed there. She knew him—would he know her? He'd taken her in reluctantly, a breeder to join the dozens of other women breeders, unskilled and useless to him in general because she did not have a College education nor did she want to obtain one. Her outside bloodlines had been suspect. She had been kept in virtual isolation and quarantine despite testing negative for the mutating eleven year plague. Stefan had been the one who'd appreciated their captivity, not she.

She glanced about the campsite quickly, trying not to betray herself. The sky was a purple-gray. They were in a thickly wooded area. Her hands were bound in front of her and she lay on a coarse blanket over boughs of some kind—pine she thought, their bruised scent was thick about her. She could smell woodsmoke and the man's scent as well, his sweat mingled with citrus.

He moved. She shut her eyes quickly and went limp despite her fear. There was a moment of quiet and then the dean said, "You're awake, my dear. I can tell the difference. While you slept, you purred like a kitten. Did you know that?''

She had no idea what he meant. She opened her eyes and saw him watching her. Dark, flat eyes, with no human expression in them that she recognized. Gooseflesh rose on her arms and crawled through her scalp.

The man smiled. It was only a drawing of the mouth and cheeks. No warmth opened the eyes. "But you wouldn't know what a cat was, would you? I believe the wolfrats killed them off some time ago. Perhaps up north, in the mountains, we might find a big cat, a cougar, or two. Perhaps not."