City of Time (19 page)

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twenty minutes. And every time a jailer walked past, they dealt him a punch or a heavy kick.

In the end it was a relief when they dragged him by the hair and threw him on the floor of an office. On hands and knees, he looked up to see Headley sitting at a polished desk.

"What's your name and where are you from?" Headley barked. Owen shook his head. Headley called the guard back in. "I haven't time to deal with him now. Take him to the holding pen."

Owen was pulled from the office and forced down a corridor where the walls changed from plaster to damp, rough stone. The holding pen didn't sound like the place he wanted to go. He thought quickly. He started to whimper and writhe.

"What's the matter with you?" the guard said. He had a wide mouth with stained yellow teeth and his eyes were too far apart. He didn't look too bright.

"The Prisoner! The one they talk about," he wailed. "The Prisoner is here!"

"Course he is."

"They say he tortures boys like me. That he sucks out their minds and leaves them cold and empty. That he eats their souls! Please don't put me in with him!"

"Well, I wasn't going to," the guard said with an unpleasant grin, "but seeing as you ask ..."

He forced Owen down a side corridor. Owen wept and pleaded and received several cuffs to his head. It

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became colder and his teeth started to chatter. Finally they came to an iron door, squat and ugly. Owen was still crying and pleading. The guard put a key in the heavy lock, threw open the door, and put his boot to Owen's backside.

"Enjoy the soul-eater!" the guard said with a laugh, then kicked Owen hard, sending him sprawling onto a wet stone floor. He slammed the door.

Picking himself up, Owen looked around. He wiped away his fake tears with his sleeve. He was in a dungeon with cold, dripping stone walls. But just ahead was a corridor that glowed with a dim light.

The Prisoner! The one who may be able to translate what the Yeati wrote
, he thought, his mouth dry, the bruises forgotten.

Owen moved down the corridor slowly. The floor was uneven underfoot and once he tripped over something that felt unpleasantly like a skull. In the end he came to a small doorway. He had to duck his head to get through.

To his amazement he emerged into a small library. Oil lamps gave the place a surprisingly cheerful glow. There were wooden shelves packed with what looked like dense scientific texts. Across the room a man sat at a bench. He was mending the spine of a book. A pot of glue sat beside him and he had a fine brush in his hand.

"Hello," Owen said.

The man stopped what he was doing and turned round slowly. He was wearing what remained of a threepiece

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pinstriped suit and he peered at Owen through gold-framed glasses, while the lamplight gleamed off his high forehead.

"Yes, is there something I can help?" The man had the faintest of accents. The way he said
somezing ...

Owen started to speak, but he felt suddenly dizzy from the beatings. He leaned against the doorframe. The room felt very far away, and his own voice seemed to be coming from a great distance. The ground rushed toward him, and he saw and felt no more.

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Chapter 22

When Owen woke he was lying on a small hard bed. He rubbed his eyes and sat up. The man was sitting on a chair reading a book. When he saw that Owen was awake, he came over and felt his forehead and took his pulse.

"Who ... who are you?" Owen asked.

"My name is Gobillard."

"The trunk!" Owen exclaimed.

The man looked at him. "What do you know of Gobillard's trunk?" Suddenly he leapt up, seized the lamp from the workbench, and held it close to Owen's face.

"Mon dieu!"
he exclaimed, and sat down heavily. "My God!" He turned to Owen. "Your father ... you look the same as him when he was young."

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"My father?" Owen gasped.

"Your father was my friend, but I was told he was dead," Gobillard said sadly. "Together we fought the Harsh before I was captured."

Owen stared at Gobillard. A friend of his father's! A thousand questions ran through his head. "H-how did you know him?" he stammered.

"Through your grandfather--the first Navigator. Your father wanted to follow in his footsteps."

"I don't ... there's so much I don't understand," Owen said. "My grandfather? And the trunk ... the Mortmain?"

"The trunk I made for your father. We needed something to contain the evil power of the Harsh. The Mortmain belonged to your grandfather. I harnessed its power to act as a lock on the trunk." The man chuckled. "From what I hear it succeeds, no?" His smile vanished. "The Harsh were very angry. They froze me for a long time. Where is the trunk now?"

"In my room at home," Owen said.

The man's eyes widened. "So it was you that stopped the Harsh. Your father would have been very proud. And your grandfather."

"My grandfather--he was the original Navigator?"

"Yes, he made the maps."

"Like road maps?"

"He made maps of time itself! He navigated
time"
Gobillard cried. "But tell me, how is it that you are here? There has been no travel into Hadima for many years."

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"We found the way, me and my friends. We had to. Time is running out, Mr. Gobillard. Everybody is in danger." Owen quickly explained everything.

"The Harsh are so greedy for time!" Gobillard exclaimed when Owen had finished. "I think you need to find a tempod."

"My friends are looking." Owen swung his legs out of the bed. As he did so, the piece of glass he'd been carrying fell on the bed.

Gobillard seized it. "Where did you get this?"

"A Yeati gave it to my friend Rosie."

"A Yeati?" Gobillard snorted. "You say that as if meeting a Yeati was commonplace!"

"Can you read it?"

Gobillard peered closely through his gold-rimmed spectacles. "Let me see. It is a very old language ... The first part is a name, I think. ... Yes ...
'Mary' ... 'Mary White
...'"

"Mary White?" Owen almost burst out laughing. There was something very funny about the idea of old Mary having anything to do with Yeati and the like.

"She must be a very great person," Gobillard said, "if the Yeati know her. What else, now?
'It has black ...'
That's what it says, but I do not know what it means."

Gobillard darted to the shelves and started flinging books from them. Owen wondered if he had gone mad. Glancing around as if there were watchers in the half-light, Gobillard tilted the now empty shelving backward. He scrabbled in the dust underneath until his

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fingers caught the edge of a flat stone. He lifted it. Underneath the stone was a tin box, which Gobillard seized and placed on the table.

"Look!" Gobillard opened the box and took out a roll of very old, yellowed, and battered-looking maps.

"I don't understand," Owen said.

"These," Gobillard said, seizing Owen's shoulder in a tight grip, "are some of your grandfather's maps. All I have found." Owen stared. The documents were faded and stained and didn't look much like any map he had ever seen. There were no lakes or rivers or mountains, although there were lines connecting different-colored areas. Instead of names there were mystical-looking symbols.

"No one understands them now," Gobillard said. "But maybe a grandson ..."

Owen traced one of the lines with his finger. As he did so he felt a strange energy coming from the map. He shut his eyes, and although he couldn't see, his finger kept following the line. He could suddenly smell pine trees and snow and mountain air.

"That's the road we traveled to get here," he said.

"Remarkable," Gobillard said.

Owen lifted his finger and put it down at random. He felt a strong sense of salt water and sky. "The Warehouse!" he said. "These are pathways in time, aren't they?"

Before they could discuss things further, Owen heard the sound of keys in the distance and then a crash as the

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door of the dungeon burst open. Hard voices rang out, and the sound of heavy boots approached. "Take the maps!" Gobillard hissed, thrusting the maps down the front of Owen's jacket. "Keep them safe!"

"But ... how do I use them?"

"The
Wayfarer,"
Gobillard said urgently. "Find the
Wayfarer
!"

"The
Wayfarer?"
Owen said. The name struck a chord with him, but he couldn't quite place why.

But there was no time to say anything more as the light in the little room seemed to fade. Headley was standing in the doorway, his hand on his hips.

"Someone's here to see you, young lad," he said, grinning.

Rosie had spent the whole day in the district, trying to find out about the Dogs and where they lived. Most people weren't inclined to talk about them. They spat on the ground and called the Dogs thieves and vermin. One man even raised a cudgel to Rosie when she asked. It was afternoon before she reached the market. Stallholders were shouting their wares, and delicious smells of food drifted through the crowds. Rosie sat at an outdoor stall and ordered steaming hot soup with big hunks of chicken floating in it. At the corner of the counter she saw two furtive-looking men haggling over a gold ring. A stolen ring, she thought, by the way the two men kept their voices down and looked around

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them nervously, although they paid no attention to the little girl who sat opposite them.

"Where'd you get it?" she heard one say.

"From the Dogs."

"Pull the other one. Where'd you run into the Dogs? I suppose you went down in the underground for a chat with them."

"Course not. One comes and sells stuff here most mornings. Got this up near the Terminus, so he said."

"You're a good man to tell a tall tale."

"There's nothing tall about it. It's the pure truth."

The two men continued to haggle and Rosie stopped listening. But now she was determined to search for the Dogs in the underground. There were miles of derelict tunnels and all sorts of strange things living down there, but it was worth a try. She might even stumble across some forgotten magno. She bought a loaf and some cheese, then went to another stall and bought an oil lamp and some oil.

A while later she stood at the station they had emerged from the previous day. With a last look at the pale wintertime sky, she ducked under the barrier, lighting the lamp before she left the daylight behind.

For hours she walked the tunnels, going deeper and deeper. Often she heard something scuttling away, just out of range of the light. There were strange moaning noises amplified by the tunnels. Once she heard something and turned to see a terrified, ragged man standing

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in an alcove beside the track. He flinched from the light, then turned and ran. After that she kept her knife in her hand.

She saw many strange things, but no sign of the Dogs, nor did she find any magno. Eventually she sat down on a station platform to eat her bread and cheese. Her eyelids were heavy and it felt like the middle of the night, but there was no way of telling. The station clock had stopped many years ago.

When she finished eating she found the ticket office. She managed to wedge the door shut with a chair. Placing her knife carefully beside her, she turned out the lamp and went to sleep in the dark.

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Chapter 23

Wesley was still awake. It was his turn to patrol the riverbank. He didn't mind. He liked seeing the otters and nightjars, the big white moths that flew up from the grass when you disturbed it, and the bats that fluttered along the surface of the water picking up insects. He could smell wet grass and leaves, and the faint salty smell of the sea in the distance. The sky had been cloudy all day and the clouds had continued into the night, but even so the light of the huge moon was visible. Perhaps that was why it took so long for him to notice the single light that moved across the field toward Owen's house.

He hesitated. Martha was alone in the house. He wondered if he should go and wake up Pieta, but she

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had been so short-tempered recently that he decided against it. Better to look into it himself.

Wesley ran lightly across the tree trunk that bridged the river and into the field beyond. Keeping in the cover of the hawthorn hedges, he crossed the three fields quickly. He scouted the hedge at the back of Owen's house and found a hole in it. He climbed through and lay flat on the grass, alert to whatever was going on.

Yet the house seemed peaceful and sleeping. There were no lights anywhere. Wesley lay very still. The garden was full of shadows and any one of them might hide danger. Then he saw that the window to Owen's room was open and ropes were hanging in the tree outside the window. From the road he heard the sound of an engine starting. Wesley squirmed back through the hedge and ran toward the noise.

As he got closer he heard men's voices. He reached the road just in time to see Johnston closing up the rear of his truck. The man went around the side and jumped into the cab. The truck started to roll forward. Wesley looked back at the house, torn. Should he go back and check on Martha or should he try to find out what Johnston was up to?

He ducked down as the truck's headlights passed him. His impulse was to jump into the back of the truck. But Martha might be injured in the house. What would he say to Owen if something had happened to her?

He turned and ran back toward the house as