The Unknown Spy (25 page)

“It’s going, of course,” Danny said, “but won’t it be back?”

Lily shrugged.

“According to Louis, it won’t be back for eighty or ninety years, maybe more.”

Danny stared at the castle. The full realization of his betrayal of Dixie came crashing down on him. If he had not put out a hand to steady himself he would have fallen. Nausea gripped his stomach. He had given her to the dead. He would never see his friend again.

“What is it, Danny? Are you okay?”

“I have to go back,” he said, his voice thick and strange.

“Are you crazy?” Lily asked. “It’ll take you with it. I’ll never see you again.”

“I have to go.”

“Don’t,” she said despairingly. “Really, Danny! Don’t forget. We stole from them!”

“If we go now,” he said, “we’ll have time to get Dixie out.”

“No … I can’t.” Lily’s face was white. She clutched the Treaty Stone tightly to her chest.

“Lily, come on.…”

“I can’t.”

Danny moved toward the door as another shudder sent snow cascading from one of the roofs.

“Wait here for me, then.”

“Danny. You have to come with me. We’re a family. We don’t have room for anyone else.”

“Dixie is my friend. That’s important too.”

“Not as important as family. She’ll come between us. She doesn’t like me.” Lily took hold of Danny’s sleeve and looked imploringly into his eyes. One large tear ran down her cheek, then another. She held Danny with her gaze, daring him to drag himself away. As her eyes brimmed, their color turned milky, and a single blue tear ran down her cheek. One brown eye emerged, its true color revealed by the salty tears that destroyed the membrane she had said she wore, like Danny, to disguise her half-Cherb nature. One brown eye and one blue, Danny thought, as it should be if she was his sister … except that there wasn’t one brown and one blue.

As Lily’s tears flowed, Danny found himself staring into a pair of liquid brown eyes. She saw the expression on his face. She used her sleeve to wipe her eyes, and it came away blue. She stared at it, then looked up at Danny. Danny stepped back. At first Lily looked shocked; then a
smile spread across her face, a smile he had never seen before and did not like.

“Well,” she said softly, “it had to be, didn’t it, Danny. I really had you fooled.”

Her voice was different too; the gentle girlish tone was gone. This was a woman’s voice, sure of itself. Danny felt as if an abyss had opened at his feet.

“Lily—” he began.

“Is not my name,” the other said, looking him up and down. “So you are the Fifth. You’re not very cunning, if you don’t mind my saying.”

“Who are you?” Danny asked, feeling sick.

“It doesn’t matter now. The important thing is that I have the Treaty Stone. I had hoped to string the whole thing out a little more.”

“What whole thing?” Danny said.

“You and me, Danny,” she said, in Lily’s voice once more. “We can do anything we want. We can control the treaty.…”

“Stop,” Danny said, holding his head.

“Yes, I’ll stop.” It was the woman’s voice, harsher this time. “After all, I have the Stone. I’ll be able to hold both worlds for ransom.”

“I thought you were working for the Ring,” Danny said. She laughed.

“So did they. They inserted me and Nala into Morne. But they are interested in conquest and I am interested in myself. Longford and Ness think it is good enough to keep their agents in poverty and send them into danger
time after time. No more! They will have their Stone, but I will set the price!”

Behind Danny the kingdom walls shook again, and more snow was dislodged. From high up the valley came a low rumbling sound. He stared at the girl in despair. She had taken everything, every scrap of trust he had in the world. He did not know what she saw in his eyes, but she took a step back and a gun appeared in her hand. For the first time her voice was uncertain.

“I’m not afraid to use this, you know.” Danny said nothing. He kept on staring at her. There was a low buzzing coming from Morne—or was it coming from inside his own head? With all his being he wished that she would disappear, that it would be as if she had never existed.

“I warn you!” The woman’s voice rose to a scream. “I’ll shoot if I have to.” Danny said nothing. All he knew was that he wanted her destroyed. The buzzing noise in his head became a wild roar. He was dimly aware of the trigger being pulled, of a shot flying past his head. Then he was staring into her eyes, and they were filled with terror. He knew he had the power to obliterate her, and that he would. The gun fell from her hand.

As he began to unleash the terrible power that had gathered within him, a small voice spoke, asking if he could live with killing Lily for the rest of his life. At the very last second, a force he could not understand burst from him, and he struggled to control it, tried to contain the lethal impulse. He did not have the strength. There was only one place to focus.

The Treaty Stone in the girl’s hands vibrated. She cried out as it began to warm, became hot, then white-hot. She dropped it, and a great cloud of steam rose from the melting snow. There was a loud cracking sound.

Without looking, Danny knew that the Treaty Stone was broken.

They both stared in horror as the snow cleared and the Stone emerged, sitting in a pit in the bedrock where it had melted through, smashed into many pieces.

Danny was numb, stunned by the enormity of what he had done. The Treaty Stone was smashed; the Upper World lay helpless to invasion from the Lower. Countless lives were in danger. And he had done it all because someone had lied about being a member of his family. He felt weak. The surge of power he had felt moments before had drained him. Lily, or whatever her name was, backed away from him, afraid that this time he really would kill her.

The rumbling from the mountain was increasing. More snow fell from the roofs. Danny looked up the mountain and saw a vast plume of white moving toward them, traveling faster than a man could run, picking up speed as it came. He shouted out to Lily, but she couldn’t hear him. He beckoned to her, but she shook her head. She would not approach him. He shouted again and again, her betrayal forgotten, a single word.

“Avalanche!”

She turned too late. The avalanche was almost on her. She had time to turn back to Danny, her face a mask of horror; then the snow struck. Danny pressed himself
against the wall as fine, powdery snow filled his nose and his mouth. There was a roar as if a hundred express trains were thundering down the mountain, and through it all he heard a distant shriek. The power of the avalanche threatened to suck him away from the wall, and he clung to the door handle behind him for hours, it seemed, his whole world white and cold and full of noise.

T
he silence, when it came, was almost louder than the avalanche. Danny blinked and rubbed snow from his face. The landscape in front of him was piled high with new snow. There was no sign of Lily. And there was no sign of the fragments of the Treaty Stone. For a long time Danny sat by the door, waves of remorse and of loss running through him. He had been given a sister and had her taken away. He had betrayed his friend and failed in his mission. Worse, he had destroyed the very thing he had been sent to save. The wall he leaned against shuddered and shuddered again, and once he thought he felt it lift from the bedrock and settle down. He slumped back against it, and as he did so, iron formed in his soul. He had failed at everything, but he would not let Dixie go to a living death. If he could not stop it, he would go with her.

He straightened, his mind hard and cold. No one would get past his defenses again. But he had betrayed a friend, and that was a wrong that had to be righted. He grabbed the door handle and wrenched it open.

Danny ran through the empty storeroom and up the stairs. To his surprise the courtiers of Morne wore
working clothes and were busily engaged in packing away exquisite objects and fastening paintings to the wall with wire. Furniture was being secured and the pillars checked. Danny ducked into a side room and found a pair of overalls and a cap. He put on the overalls and pulled the cap down over his eyes, put his overcoat on again, then moved stealthily along the corridors. He saw Camroc coming toward him, so he scooped up a piece of statuary and carried it in front of himself to hide his face.

He got to the museum, and for the first time in Morne, he had a stroke of luck. The dead girl he had stolen the key from was standing by her desk. It had been turned upside down and ransacked. She was crying as she went frantically through a pile of paper and files.

“What’s up, love?” he said, making his voice deeper.

“Nothing’s up,” she said, “only lost the most important key in the place. They’re threatening to send me to the Crypts forever!”

“What would you do to get it back?”

“Anything,” she said, crying bitterly. Danny leaned close to her so that she could see his face. He lowered his voice.

“I can get it for you. Key for a key.” She looked at him, then recognized him.

“You! You took the key!”

“Shh,” Danny said. ”Will you do it?

“Depends,” she said. “What key do you want?”

“The girl,” he said, “the one the vizier sent as a servant to the dead. I want the key to her cell.”

“Her … I don’t know.…”

“What are the Crypts like, anyway?” Danny asked. “I have no problem if you want to spend ten or twenty years there for losing the key.” Something hard in his voice caught the girl’s attention. “Well?” he said.

“Okay,” she said in a small voice. “I hear she’s not much good as a servant anyway.”

The entire building gave a lurch, which almost threw Danny off his feet.

“Quickly,” he said. The girl followed him. A raven flew overhead. If it had any opinion on how the slight boy had so cowed one of the dead, it did not say so.

They opened a small metal door and began to descend a spiral staircase. Down they went, the air getting colder, an odd musty odor in the air. There were lanterns to start with; then the only light was supplied by an unpleasant green mold on the walls that gave off a sickly glow. A mold, Danny thought, that you might find on the inside of a coffin. They were in the realm of the dead now, and everything in the darkness spoke of it. There were rustlings and slitherings and foul odors and sickly-sweet-smelling flowers growing in niches in the wall. How could he have let Dixie be brought here?

At last, when he had despaired of ever reaching his destination, he heard a distant voice singing in quavering, reedy tones.

Dixie! Danny hurried forward, pushing the dead girl in front of him, then snatching his hand back as it touched the damp suppurating bullet wound in her back.

The passage opened into a row of old cells with iron doors. Dank water ran down the walls.

“Hello?” A voice came from one of the cells. “Is anybody there? Can a dead person be anybody? I’ll rephrase: Is nobody there?”

“Unlock the door,” Danny said.

“The key …,” the girl said.

“Unlock it!”

The girl took an iron key from a hook in the wall. Danny could feel the building shudder.

“Hurry!” The cell door was flung open. Danny stepped forward. Dixie was sitting on a low bed. She was filthy, and her hair hung lankly about a wan face. She peered up at Danny.

“Not another trick, is it?”

“No, Dixie,” he said, “it’s not another trick. We’re going home.”

He grabbed her by the arm. It was cold and clammy, as if contact with dead flesh had contaminated it.

“The key!” the dead girl demanded.

“When we get out!” He dragged Dixie down the corridor. As he did so, something made him glance through
the spyhole in one of the other cells. Nala sat inside on a bench. Danny began to walk on but stopped. He couldn’t leave Nala to the mercy of the dead, even if he was a Cherb and an enemy. He seized the key from beside the door and unlocked it. Nala looked up.

“Come on,” Danny said. Nala stood up. His expression didn’t change, but he rose and followed.

The climb up was a nightmare. The building swayed from side to side with grinding and rending noises as it began to tear itself loose from the mountains. They were flung from one side of the stairs to the other so much that Danny thought the dead girl was losing lumps of flesh here and there. When they got to the top, he threw her the key to the Ring of Five room. She took it without speaking and ran. Danny looked around. The floors were tilting. Morne folk were hastily lashing themselves to the nearest solid object with belts and bellpulls. Dixie faded a little, as if she was trying to disappear, then reappeared, looking even more exhausted. Danny lifted her in his arms and raced toward the storeroom, Nala keeping pace.

As they reached the storeroom the whole building shot upward four or five feet. Dust flew from the floor and the walls.

“The door, Nala!” Danny yelled. The Cherb threw the little door open and held it as Danny charged toward it and dived through, Dixie in his arms. He hadn’t realized that the kingdom had already lifted off. They were fifteen feet from the ground. Danny tumbled down, losing hold of Dixie. He landed in a snowbank, Dixie beside
him. Nala fell but landed lightly on his feet. They gazed upward in awe as the massive bulk of the kingdom of Morne rose above their heads and hovered there, gigantic chunks of masonry and slates and huge slabs of ice and snow falling from it. It filled the entire sky for what seemed like an eternity; then it started to whirl faster and faster, growing smaller and smaller until it took on the dimensions of a dollhouse and finally disappeared, leaving them alone in the frozen landscape.

FLIGHT