The Ghost Roads (Ring of Five) (5 page)

“Come on, Gabriel,” Daisy said, “aerial combat. I’m waiting!”

Gabriel smiled weakly. His wings stirred the air and he rose off the ground. Daisy rose as well, moving toward him slowly and menacingly; then, with astonishing speed, she shot straight up, twisting her body as she went. When she reached the top of her climb, she dived, spiraling, picking up speed. It was the Von Richtoffen dive, as Gabriel well knew, and very difficult to defend. He could see the look on Daisy’s face: she wasn’t going to pull out. Just as he was bracing himself to leap into a counterspiral, he caught a movement out of the corner of his eye. He hesitated a fraction of a second too long. Daisy’s eyes widened in alarm, and he hit the ground with a crash that drove the breath from his body.

When he opened his eyes, Daisy was gingerly picking herself up and Danny was standing over him—a different Danny from the one he remembered. The uncertain, clever boy who had first come to Wilsons was gone. This boy looked hard-eyed and sure of himself, and there was a hint of impatience in the way he was looking down at Gabriel. Painfully Gabriel clambered to his feet as Daisy hobbled toward him.

“Danny.” Gabriel held out his hand. “I’m sorry for your loss.” Danny shook his hand distractedly.

“I need your help,” the boy said.

“Of course,” Gabriel said, “what can I do?” He knew that the boy was the Fifth and that he had extraordinary powers. Other Messengers often muttered that Danny was too dangerous to have around. “Nonsense,” Gabriel told them, “we need to harness that power to defend ourselves. We should be helping him. I’m going to help him, anyway.”

Now Gabriel had the feeling that he was going to have to live up to that promise.

“I have to get to the Upper World,” Danny said, “and you’re going to take me.”

Gabriel stared at him. He had not flown to the Upper World for many years. He did not even know if his wings would carry him. He was too old and weak.

“Well, Gabriel?” Daisy was half smiling at him.

“I’ll … I’ll do it,” Gabriel said, “if I can!” Danny nodded curtly. Daisy clapped her hands.

“I’ll need you as well, Daisy,” Danny said. “Here’s what I want you to do.”

Daisy’s expression changed when Danny stood close, murmuring into her ear.

“I can’t,” she said, “I can’t! I’ll have to leave Wilsons if they find out!”

“They won’t find out,” Danny said. “I have a plan.”

“But why?” Daisy protested.

“Because I need to. You don’t have to know anything more. Are you with me?” Daisy bowed her head.

“I will help you,” she said in a small voice.

“Let’s go.”

N
ala had slept. The long pursuit had left him fatigued in body and mind. As he slept, he dreamed of Brunholm. The man was banging nails into his arms, snarling, “How many in the Cherb army? How many? How many?”

“No, stop!” Nala moaned, but the sound of the nails would not stop. Bang. Bang. Bang. Nala rolled over, holding his head, then sat up. The noise was not in his dream; it was real. They were coming for him. He squeezed into the corner of his bunk, his fists raised, then realized that the noise wasn’t coming from the door but from the window. Impossible! He had looked out the window earlier. It was many floors from the ground, set into smooth rock. But still the sound went on, and as Nala stared, a pane of glass flickered and then was gone.

“Nala!” He heard a familiar voice. “Come to the window!”

Nala crept closer and peered out. Danny!

“Help me get rid of the rest of this glass. Use this.” Danny handed him a rubber sucker and a glass cutter. Nala knew what to do with the sucker and cutter, but how was Danny managing to hover outside the window?

Quickly Nala worked at the glass, using the sucker to hold the pane while he cut around the edges, then carefully lifted the glass and put it on the floor of the cell. He stuck his head through the window. Danny was sitting on a male Messenger’s back; a female Messenger hovered a few feet away.

“That’s the last pane,” Danny gasped. “Can you squeeze through, Nala?”

Nala saw the female Messenger move into position underneath the window. She looked old and frail; a gust of wind pushed her sideways and she had difficulty in getting back into position. Nala hesitated, but his dream of torture came back to him. Wriggling like an eel, he squirmed through the small opening and climbed onto the Messenger’s back. She sank in the air a little, but then, with strong beats of her wings, she rose and banked left gracefully. With Danny and the other Messenger following, they drifted down through the darkness.

After a few minutes of flight, Nala was aware of trees around him. A branch brushed his face and then they were down. He slid off. They had landed back at the summerhouse.

“There isn’t much time,” Danny said. “I’m going on a mission in the Upper World. I need someone who can work undercover, and who can steal. I know you can do these things.”

“Steal what?” Nala said.

“Not what,” Danny said, “who. A person.”

“Why not ask your friends?” Nala said.

“Because my only friend with a talent for stealing has wings—he stands out too much.”

Nala spoke quietly. “Tell me real reason.”

“What do you mean?” Danny said.

“He means there’s something more to it,” Gabriel cut in unexpectedly, “and you need to tell him what it is.”

“All right,” Danny said, turning to face Nala again,
his voice cold. “You’re expendable. I can’t afford to lose any more of my friends, but I can afford to lose you.”

Gabriel studied Danny. He knew that the harsh words hid a world of pain and loss. But Nala merely shrugged—cruelty and mortal danger were part of a Cherb’s life. He had simply wanted to know what he was getting into.

“We’ll have to go at night,” Danny said. “We need to have a look at the place from the air and figure out a way in.”

“Then we had better start,” Gabriel said, “if we want to get there before dawn. The night trade winds will carry us quickly over, but it is a long way, perhaps too far for you, my dear?” Daisy looked at him and snorted.

“Don’t ‘my dear’ me, Gabriel. I was flying missions to the Upper World before you ever sprouted a wing feather. I can take care of myself. But I have to ask you, Danny, are you doing the right thing? The school needs you in this grim time.”

“The school did without me before, they can do without me again. I’ve lost enough. I’m not going to lose any more.”

“We’ve no time to waste!” Gabriel spoke urgently. “On my back, Danny!”

Danny clambered on while Nala leapt lightly onto the space between Daisy’s wings.

“When we cross over, where do we go?” Gabriel’s wings started to beat.

“East,” Danny said, “fly due east.”

Barely visible in the darkness, the two Messengers and their burdens rose into the air and turned, picking up
speed as they cleared the treetops. They had just reached the edge of the forest when another stealthy shape rose into the air from a copse behind the summerhouse and set off in pursuit.

Danny could not say how he knew they were above the shadowy border country between the Two Worlds, but he sensed that the almost trackless wilderness was below him.

“What’s it like?” he asked Gabriel.

“What?”

“The land below us, the border country that divides the Two Worlds?”

“Who knows?” Gabriel said. “It has the characteristics of a physical place. You can walk in it, you can drive across it, as you have done with Fairman, but there is more to it than that. Some people say it exists as much in the mind as it does on the ground.”

“You mean like a dream?”

“Or a nightmare,” Gabriel said. “There are those whose job it is to patrol it. A strange breed. They speak little of what they see and do there.”

Gabriel fell silent and Danny looked down, trying to pierce the darkness below, a darkness composed of more than mere night. It felt timeless, as though hours and minutes did not mean the same thing there. When he traveled in Fairman’s taxi across the waste, he always fell asleep, but now he stayed awake for what felt like the whole night and into the following day, and yet the darkness around him did not change, and when they reached
the other side, the moon was still high in the sky, meaning that the journey could only have taken an hour or two.

Gabriel slowed and waited for Daisy, who had fallen behind. Danny could see she was struggling.

“Do you need a rest?” Gabriel asked. She shook her head. “Due east it is, then. And the wind is with us.” The Messenger shaped his wings and caught an updraft. He soared into the sky. A second later, Daisy did the same.

T
hirty miles away a nervous official sat hunched over a radar screen in the control tower of a small airport. The airport was closed for runway repairs. The man had every reason to be on edge. A tall, shadowy figure stooped over him, a man with a gaunt face who had to be seven feet tall. He was wearing a large rucksack on his back—or at least, that was what it looked like; he was draped in a cloak, so the man couldn’t see what was making the bulge near his shoulder blades. He was accompanied by a stocky figure who wore a baseball cap low over his eyes. The tall man did not speak, but he gave off a dry, unpleasant odor.

The air traffic controller worked for a covert government agency and had been in many strange places, but this was the oddest of all, shut in a disused control tower at night with this pair who spoke only to each other, their voices harsh and guttural. They had been told to look out for two contacts that would suddenly appear in a quadrant of the sky. The man hadn’t believed such a thing could happen. Flying objects did not appear just like that.
But at 3:35 a.m., two objects had appeared on the screen in front of him, two green blips moving more slowly than any aircraft he had ever known. The men behind him muttered and pointed to the radar screen, then fell silent again, intent on the green dots.

What were the objects? UFOs, perhaps? In the world of spying the man belonged to, there had recently been many strange rumors, warnings of an unidentified threat. There was unprecedented cooperation with foreign intelligence services, which had been on high alert for weeks now. The word “invasion” had been whispered, but an invasion of what, and from where? There had been sightings of winged figures, and one terrified pilot had spoken of a flight of “cruel angels” that had cut across his flight path. Could it be a form of extraterrestrial life?

The prime minister had sent messages down through senior officials, asking for calm. He spent much time closeted with a close advisor, a quiet, studious-looking man named Ambrose Longford, who was thought to have unique knowledge of the situation. The air traffic controller sighed. He certainly hoped it was true.

“Where are they going?” the squat man growled.

“I don’t know,” the controller said, “but on that trajectory, they’ll be over Kilrootford in twenty minutes.”

The man nodded in satisfaction. The controller kept his eyes on the screen. Kilrootford was a top-secret installation that did not appear on any maps. He was amazed that these two knew anything about it.

The squat man addressed him now. “Watch them. Do not let them out of your sight!”

The controller did as he was told, feeling a drop of sweat trickle between his shoulder blades. The men made it hard for him to focus. In fact, they broke his concentration to such an extent that he didn’t see the single green dot moving slowly down the screen, ten miles behind the first two.

D
anny had known that it would be cold at high altitude, but he was not prepared for the bone-chilling winds. His coat kept his body warm, but he had long ago ceased to feel his feet, and he was sure his ears were frostbitten. He looked back at Nala. The Cherb was wearing only a light leather jerkin, but he didn’t look cold at all.

“Is it me, or is it freezing?” Danny called over Gabriel’s shoulder.

“Getting colder,” Gabriel said tersely. “There’s trouble up ahead. He pointed toward towering clouds up ahead, their edges a menacing black. “We can’t fly around or over them—too big—and even if we turned back, we couldn’t outpace the storm.”

“What do we do?”

“Hold on,” Gabriel said grimly, “hold on!”

The wind struck first, buffeting them backward and forward. Then Danny felt a terrifying lurch of vertigo as they flew into an air column, shooting hundreds of feet upward in seconds, then plunging back down. Hail came next, huge, bruising spheres of ice striking his face and hands hard enough to break the skin. As they went deeper into the cloud mass, Danny could see lightning
flashing blue in the bowels of the storm. Once, he caught a glimpse of Daisy and Nala: the female Messenger’s face fixed, her wings laboring, the Cherb motionless on her back. Then cloud swept between them and the storm closed in, rain this time, hard and black, drumming down on Danny and Gabriel, updrafts buffeting them so that they barely knew which way was up, until one violent gust blew Gabriel across the sky, his wings momentarily powerless to hold them upright.

Gabriel dipped sharply and Danny found himself holding a handful of feathers. With a cry he slipped sideways and back, unable to find another handhold on the lurching Messenger beneath him. He fell backward, losing all sense of where he was. The maelstrom of the storm above and the abyss below were one and the same, and there was nothing he could do about it. As fear paralyzed him, a firm hand caught his collar and shoved him upright. He grabbed a handful of Gabriel’s hair and regained his seat. Nala released Danny’s collar and sat back, expressionless. Daisy, panting, and with rain streaming down her face, winked at Gabriel.