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“And if I refuse?” asked Carla.
“Then they will find your body at the foot of the cliff,” the Primo stated matter-of-factly.
Carla’s temper flared.
“You’re threatening to kill me?”
“I’m making you an offer – honour or death. I must protect the Carriers. If Santiago talks, he puts them all in danger,” the Primo stated.
The Carrier kids watched and waited. A curious bunch – all sizes, shapes, colours and ages, dressed in the same sackcloth as Carla.
“Keep him talking. Buy some time,” said Finn at her ear. “We need to weasel a way out of this.”
“I choose honour,” Carla answered.
“I said stall!” complained Finn.
“Santiago must live,” repeated the Primo. “Go!”
“Go!” answered Olga, and she pulled Carla in a skinny grip towards the exit.
Finn climbed through Carla’s hair, still complaining as they left the library and hurried up a main passageway that curved up through the building, its flagstone floor polished smooth by centuries of footsteps.
“We need to get out of here,” said Finn.
“And leave him to die?” said Carla.
Olga scurried through some doors ahead of them and suddenly they were in cavernous kitchens, dead at this hour, but with a great black iron furnace at its heart. Olga opened the furnace door to reveal a nest of large stones, white hot, like dragon’s eggs. She lined up a pair of iron buckets and with some huge tongs grabbed and dumped a glowing stone into each one – donk, donk. Then she handed Carla a thick glove and indicated towards a bucket.
“Go!” Olga urged and picked up her own shimmering load.
Carla followed suit and Olga led them out of the kitchen and into the black heart of the complex—
The Forum.
Carla stopped dead at the sight. For Finn with his gamer head on, it was like a new map revealing itself.
Lit by flaming torches, it was a courtyard hollowed out of a hotchpotch of buildings, a core three storeys deep. A single round opening in the centre of the roof let in curls of snow and huge filthy banners proclaimed the words Honour, Obedience and Master. Doors and entranceways, some ancient, some more recent concrete, peppered the four sides of the courtyard, and a rising irregular spiral of stairways and open walkways connected them all together. It was like something out of a painting by Escher.
“Freaky …” said Finn.
“Go!” Olga scolded and led the way, little legs rushing up the mad spiral. Carla set off after her and tried to keep up. The hot bucket swung and she could feel her gloved hand starting to burn.
Halfway up the spiral was the entrance to a great concrete space hidden beneath the ancient monastery roofs, hundreds of bunks in serried ranks, full of sleeping teenagers.
“Tyros …” said Finn at Carla’s ear. “This is some kind of hive. We need to make a phone call, now.”
“Olga! Where is there a phone?” Carla called and mimed a handset. “A telephone?”
Olga just looked perplexed. “Go!” she said, and they were off again, climbing past another dozen entranceways.
“Tell her!” yelled Finn. “We have to find a phone or a computer, or … the collar! That thing on Yo-yo, whatever it was. Have you still got it?”
Carla grabbed her pocket. Nothing. Had she taken it off Yo-yo? She could barely remember.
“I must have lost it somewhere on the mountain.”
“ARRRGGHHHH!” – the sound of screams was coming from the top floor. Olga hurried them through an arch guarded by Siguri, then on through a huge door into a church of crumbling beauty … and the screams of Santiago.
“AARRRRGGHHHHHH …”
He lay stretched out on a rack in the centre, the heart of the High Chapel, face down, his arms being pulled up behind his humped back by the Siguri chief, a thickset Turk. The screams echoed off the painted saints and gilded icons. Looking down on him was the Abbot, the leader of the monastery and the Siguri, a man in Roman robes, with a face so badly burnt it resembled the surface of a planet.
Half a dozen Siguri and a severe female secretary looked on.
The secretary flicked her head at Olga and Carla, indicating an iron stove.
“WHERE is the STRANGER?” raged the Siguri chief.
Carla wobbled the last few steps to the stove, but almost dropped her bucket as she became aware of a strange sound.
It was a sound Finn knew only too well.
Schlup-schlup-schlup – dinner time.
“Yo-yo!” said Finn, hardly believing it. “I think Yo-yo’s here.”
He could feel Carla’s heartbeat spike through the scalp beneath his feet.
“Oh no, if he gets a sniff of me …” said Finn, becoming suddenly worried.
“It is all quite simple,” the Abbot said, wearily looking down at Santiago. “You like it out in the woods. It’s where we found you. It’s where you belong.”
“Yes, Padre …”
“We know there was a trespasser, a stranger. We spotted him. We found his dog.”
He gestured to the far corner of the chapel. There, unmistakably, was Yo-yo’s rear end, his head buried in a pan of stew which he was transferring to his stomach in great wild gulps.
“It was very clever of you to find them.”
“No, Padre …”
“Yes. You left your toboggan out. Did you bring the stranger in? Did you hide him?”
“Santiago no bring dog!” he answered.
“No. We found the dog,” the Abbot reassured him. “In the woods. But you were in the woods too.”
“Pine cones. For the fire …”
“You were gathering aromatic fuel? In a snowstorm?”
Santiago wriggled an approximate nod, ashamed to be lying.
At the stove, Olga used some tongs to drop off their hot stones, taking her time as Carla watched Santiago on the rack. Finn could almost feel the morality rising through Carla’s scalp, but counselled – “Don’t do anything. We have to figure something out.”
“Who was it, do you think, that the lookout and the searchers saw then?” the Abbot asked Santiago, letting the question hang. Santiago could not help but fill the silence.
“An … angel, Padre?”
“An angel?” said the Abbot. “With a dog?”
Santiago shook in disagreement. “NO DOG, Padre – dog run away! Crazy dog!”
“Could it be a stray?” the Abbot asked the Siguri chief.
“No, sir. A stray would have starved by the time it got up here. This dog has been regularly beaten; its master must be the stanger.”
Olga started to lead Carla back out.
The Abbot waved, the rack wheel turned, and Santiago cried out again in excruciating pain.
“Arrrrrrrrrrgggghhh!”
The cry stopped Carla in her tracks – at the very moment Finn’s scent finally rang a big bell in Yo-yo’s tiny brain – YAP!
Yo-yo whipped round. There! There was the good girl! There was the Finn smell!
YAP YAP YAP! YAP!
The Siguri chief, the Abbot, even Santiago, turned to look.
“It has the scent of its master!” said the chief.
Yo-yo was straining at the rope that held him, pointing only one way: at Carla, halted before the great door, ready to turn and declare herself.
“Let the dog go!” ordered the Abbot.
“No, Yo-yo! PLAY DEAD!” Finn yelled uselessly from Carla’s hair.
The Siguri holding Yo-yo released him and he sprang towards Carla like an accusing finger, all skew-whiff as the stew sloshed about the wire rack of his body, until … BANG!
The doors behind Carla burst open and in came the severed head of Baptiste, ravaged by bears and dangling from a Siguri gauntlet.
HOWWWLLL! – Yo-yo cowered back in fear.
CLANG! – Carla dropped her empty bucket in shock.
“Stupido!” cried the secretary, and slapped her so hard Finn had to cling on as she fell.
The Abbot was shaken. “Bring it closer!”
Baptiste’s head was marched up and dangled before him.
There was one lidless eye, the other was missing, as was the top quarter of his skull. A wafer edge of white bone stood proud of the blood and brain on what was left of his brow. His skin was ghostly, ghastly pale, and his black mouth gaped open. A section of collarbone dangled from ligaments at his neck. Here was the master. Here was the stranger.
The Abbot recognised him at once. “Oh, my dear boy …”
FIVE
Santiago was released and led back through the labyrinth, held between Carla and Olga like a broken bird, eyes tight shut, muttering some mad, grateful, polyglot incantation (“Fo me ca Maria – fo me ca Primo – fo me ca Jesu – fo me ca Master – fo me ca Dei”) while Yo-yo strained at the end of a rope just ahead, anxious to put as much distance as possible between himself and the severed head.
They arrived back in the library to exclamations in a dozen tongues. Carriers crowded round. Excited, Yo-yo began to yap, then – just like it would in the playground – a handbell broke up the scene – Ding-a-ling!
“Quiet! Do you want the Siguri back?” demanded the Primo.
Santiago limped over to him.
“What did you tell them?” the Primo asked.
Santiago recounted what had happened in a breathless, dramatic babble.
At the end of it, the Primo asked, astonished, “Baptiste?”
“His head – just his head,” Carla confirmed. “He dragged me here from Shanghai. When I got away from him, the bears got him.”
Santiago grunted confirmation. There was murmuring among the Carriers.
“They know him … They’re impressed,” Finn said at her ear. “Make the most of it!”
“I did what you asked,” Carla told the Primo. “I brought Santiago back. Now I must make contact with the outside. I must call for help.”
“There is no means. We are not meant to exist,” the Primo said. “There are no phones, no electric. Even fires do not burn by day. We are made to live as of old.”
Finn looked at the bells and the speaking tubes hanging around the dais and started to understand. This place was undetectable.
“There are NRP machines in the infirmary, but nothing else,” said the Primo.
“What are NRP machines?” asked Carla.
“Neuroretinal programming,” explained the Primo. “A probe is put through the eye into the brain, to program Tyros with expertise, strength, character.”
“That’s what made you blind …” Carla realised, appalled.
“The Master searches care institutions across the world for children of exceptional intelligence. I am from a local orphanage, but others are from the farthest corners of the earth. If we are suitable for NRP, we become Tyros and begin our training. If NRP fails, but we are still of use, we are put to work with the Carriers – local unwanted children,” the Primo said. “If we are not of use, we die.”
Finn felt Carla give a shiver.
“Your Master is a monster,” she said.
“We are here. Nowhere else,” said the Primo, dead simple.
At Carla’s ear Finn said, “These NRP machines must use computers of some kind, they must be connected to something?”
“Primo, these machines, are they computers? Do they have electricity?”
“They are connected by wire to the Caverns, but no Carrier can go there.”
Finn’s ears pricked up.
“What caverns?” asked Carla.
“Beneath us. Great halls within the mountain.”
“What is in them?”
“We cannot know. But flying machines go there at night sometimes.”
“Flying machines?” said Carla.
“We have to get out and tell someone about this,” insisted Finn. “We have to get off this rock!”
“In the morning, I have to leave, I have to get help,” Carla told the Primo.
“You will never make it. First you have to escape the Siguri, then the peasants – who all depend on the Protectorate – then the elements themselves.”
“Santiago gets out,” said Carla. “How else did he find me?”
“They know Santiago will never leave. He was the unwanted runt of some peasant girl. As a babe he was left to die in the snow, but an old crone heard his cries, rescued him from wolves and nursed him back to health. Later, when she was dying, she brought him here. He knows nothing else.”
“I got dragged across half the world by a mad Tyro – I’ll make it,” said Carla.
The Primo, not used to being challenged, tilted his perfect chin and turned his blind eyes on her. She felt as if they were staring through her.
“For every runaway the Siguri catch, they let the Tyros kill another five Carriers for sport. To set an example.”
Finn sank back against Carla’s scalp, challenge fading in the face of such cruelty. A lump rose in Carla’s throat.
“Baptiste was the worst,” the Primo added, more conciliatory. “We are grateful he is dead. He would have killed me, but the tutors stopped him.”
“Why?”
“They need me. For the Carriers to be effective slaves, they must be led,” he said simply.
Carla looked around at the ragged Carrier kids. They were all shapes and sizes, all colours, all abilities and disabilities. They certainly needed someone.
“This place is like an evil fairy tale,” Finn said in Carla’s hair.
“We’ve got to help them,” Carla insisted. “Primo, if I can get one message to the authorities, important people – and soldiers – will come, will stop this.”
The Primo silently considered the matter and Carla stared at his face and wondered what it must be like to be without sight in such a place, a darkness within darkness, and yet be so strong.
“Nothing can be done before the spring melt.”
“Before spring?!”
“Follow Olga. Tomorrow we will make you a Carrier. Live as she lives, do as she does. As long as you work hard, you will be safe.”
FEBRUARY 20 03:17 (GMT+2). Hull of the Shieldmaiden, Mediterranean Sea
Kaparis did not by nature sleep.
He seethed.
Usually Heywood would knock him out with a powerful sedative, but Kaparis had refused, wishing instead to pickle himself in fury and self-pity. He considered that he had got everything he had in life through application, imagination and sheer hard work. But never once had he had any luck – despite having inherited his vast wealth, good looks, charm and a brain the size of a small planet.
It wasn’t fair. Other people got lucky all the time, while he had to slog his guts out. Or at least other people’s guts, which was frankly messy.
Nothing was fair …
Then Heywood interrupted his musings and said, “Sir? The Abbot is on the line.”
“At this hour?”
Moments later, coloured bars of data danced on his life-support monitor, like nymphs in spring, and Kaparis ordered: “Bring me the head of Baptiste!”
On the screen above him, the Abbot presented the gory remains of the Tyro’s head on a cushion, like some precious jewelled thing.
“We retrieved it from a bear den on the Kalamatov Ridge!”
“HAAAHH!” Kaparis laughed, baring his teeth like a hyped primate.
“And where is she? Are you keeping her back as a surprise? Oh, I can barely stand it!”
“Who, Master?”
“THE SALAZAR GIRL!” Kaparis roared.
The Abbot was clueless.
“Three of them disappeared in China,” he explained to the Abbot, as if to a fool. “Baptiste, Carla Salazar, and, very likely, Infinity Drake. If Baptiste walked all that way, do you think for one moment he would have left them behind?”
“We carried out an extensive search, Master …”
“RUBBISH!”
Fools. Morons. Scum. Could they not FOR ONCE match the scale of his intellect? He gurgled with rage, unable to speak a moment, as the Abbot whimpered …
“We scoured the mountain! We can assure you he was quite alone. All we found was a dog …”
Kaparis almost suffered a seizure.
A dog?
A dog?
A dog with a supernatural sense of smell that had successfully traced its 9mm master before? A dog idiot enough and faithful enough to follow that scent for three thousand miles?
“Get me a picture of Infinity Drake’s dog!” snapped Kaparis.
An image flashed up on the screen array. Yo-yo. A vision of joyous furry idiocy.
“Was it, by any chance … this dog?” asked Kaparis.
The Abbot gulped. It was a thousand times cleaner than the one they’d found, but it was the same dog.
“We thought he must have picked it up along the way …” the Abbot tried to explain.
“WHERE IS IT?”
The Abbot’s mind was blank. He dimly remembered someone kick it aside. He scrabbled around for some consolation. “Perhaps the Carrier children have it? They have value as rat catchers. We will have the whole complex searched! If there is a dog – if there is a girl – we shall slay them!”
The Siguri chief beside the Abbot was nodding vigorously, but Kaparis slammed on the brakes—
“NO! Don’t you see what this means?”
His mind was a spinning Catherine wheel. If the dog was there, then Drake was there. If so, where? If Baptiste had brought the girl with him then was Drake somewhere on the girl? But where was the girl? On the mountain? In a bear?
“Find the bears, slice them open. The Salazar girl has to be somewhere—”
“Or Santiago found her!” exclaimed the Abbot.
“Santiago?”
“The idiot boy. The trapper.”
“The hunchback?” said Kaparis, vaguely remembering the wretch.
“Sometimes he finds lost souls. He was out late on the mountain – we questioned him. But not about a girl …”
“Brilliant!” gasped Kaparis.
“Really?” said the Abbot.
Kaparis’s voice fell to a rasping conspiratorial whisper. “If Drake is hidden somewhere in the monastery, we’ve caught him, with or without the girl.”
No one was dumb enough to ask the obvious question: how? How do you catch someone 9mm tall in a complex the size of a cathedral? Nobody asked, because they knew the Master always came up with an answer more fiendish than they could ever conceive.
Nano-radar4, thought Kaparis. They could scour the buildings, scour the mountain. But Drake could hide from it behind steel, behind rock. But why would he? If he didn’t know they were looking for him, he would have no reason to hide. We must do it by stealth, thought Kaparis, we must lure him out into the open.
“We must set a trap, we must bait it …” Kaparis thought aloud.
What did Infinity Drake want more than anything in the world?
His father …
With a blink, Kaparis wiped the image of Yo-yo from his screens and directed his optically controlled cursor to retrieve a file marked ARCHIV23874378KAP-ENCRYPT. The title read: “Intel. report 498090bb – Drake, E.”
It was the report Kaparis had commissioned thirteen years before into the mysterious disappearance of Ethan Drake, father of Infinity, during an experiment at a lab in Cambridge. He opened it across the screen array. Kaparis knew it almost by heart, though it had always posed more questions than answers, always deepened the mystery.
Ethan had built a machine – the forerunner of the Boldklub machines – a machine that proved his genius. It was not just a masterpiece of science and engineering, it was a work of art. It was more than the sum of its parts, more than all it was designed to be. It reached out beyond the boundaries of physical laws into the unknown. Kaparis had been furious. How could he compete? First he had lost the love of his young life to Ethan, now he had lost the future. Why? It made no sense. Kaparis considered himself the supreme applied human intelligence. Perhaps you could be too perfect?
Or did Ethan Drake simply have all the luck? If he did, it ran out the day he attempted an unwise experiment in quantum teleportation. He had thrown himself into the subatomic magnetic vortex at the heart of his machine … and disappeared without a trace. Not an atom of him remained. No one understood why.
Kaparis had taunted Infinity Drake with the existence of this report when their paths had crossed in Shanghai, taunted him too that Ethan had chosen suicide over life with his wife and newborn child. The boy had been enraged; he was clearly obsessed with his father’s disappearance.
Here was the bait.
Now for the trap. If the boy was in the monastery, then …
Then out of nowhere it finally happened.
Luck.
As Kaparis turned his rational mind from nano-radar to all the practicalities and complexities of designing a trap, and a miniature jail, his eyes and his subconscious mind drifted across Ethan Drake’s original notes. The notes were rough – fast, shorthand equations, sketches like cartoons, thoughts caught and set down as they happened. Numbers and letters and symbols that danced down the page, all the way down to the final mysterious biro scribble: L = Place? Mysterious because, in conventional physics, L represented locomotion. And “Locomotion = Place?” was an impossible and perplexing statement. But because on this occasion he wasn’t concentrating, Kaparis suddenly saw with his subconscious what the scribble really was: Ethan Drake had written the L lopsided. Because the L was actually not an L at all. The two lines of the L were in fact the crudely drawn hands of a clock—
Time! In Ethan Drake’s hand, the cockeyed L was Time.
L = Place? became Time = Place?
Kaparis convulsed. His mind overloaded. Suddenly Ethan’s notes began to come to life, growing and taking shape in three dimensions and glorious Technicolor. The whole system sprang to life in his head, the genius of Ethan Drake, dancing for him, only him …
Time = Place? The fabulous conclusion changed everything.
It had been there all along. Yet only he, Kaparis, had finally seen it.
The Boldklub fractal equations that he had so long sought, for which he had spent years terrorising and blackmailing Al Allenby and the G&T, were now blindingly obvious.
And there was more, so much more … The implications …
It was as if he had climbed out of a propeller plane and strapped himself onto a rocket.