Soul Stealer (21 page)

Her punishment hastily finished, Pip took a deep breath to steel herself, approached the preparation room door, ignored the
notice, knocked once and went straight in.

“I’m finished, sir,” she announced.

Yoland started, quickly placing the test tube in a rack. At the same time, he attempted to position himself between Pip and
the petri dish. However, he did not move fast enough to prevent her from noticing that the dish contained one of the gold
spell keys. Above it hovered several flies, as large as bluebottles, with shimmering
bodies and diaphanous wings. At Pip’s arrival they seemed to disappear into the liquid. The retort was nowhere to be seen.

“Put it on the shelf,” Yoland said brusquely, “and go. This room is forbidden to pupils.”

Pip, glad to get out of the room and Yoland’s presence, and mindful of his army of cockroaches, immediately did as she was
told, closing the door firmly behind her.

Finding Tim and Sebastian, she recounted what she had seen.

“Do you know what he was doing?” she asked Sebastian.

“He was imbuing the key with the properties he requires it to possess.”

“And that must imply,” Tim added, “that we’re getting near to lift-off.”

At the rear of the garage was Mr. Ledger’s old mountain bike. As he no longer rode it, Tim asked if Sebastian could have it.
Permission granted, he and Pip polished the rust off the wheel rims, oiled the bearings, greased the chain, inflated the tires
and called up Sebastian.

“All yours,” Tim announced ceremoniously.

Sebastian was taken aback, saying, “This is most generous of you. I am bereft of words to…”

Approaching footsteps heralded the arrival of Mr. and Mrs. Ledger.

“So you haven’t got a bike after all,” Mrs. Ledger remarked.

“Looks good as new,” Mr. Ledger said, running his eye over the bike. “Well done, Twin Ledgers. I hope you like it, Sebastian.”

“Thank you very much, sir,” Sebastian said. “I’m exceedingly grateful to you. I have never owned such a means of locomotion.”

Tim winced.

Mr. Ledger smiled and said, “You don’t have to address me as
sir,
Sebastian. I’m not one of your teachers. Call me Steve.”

“And I’m Sandra,” added Mrs. Ledger.

Tim and Pip exchanged glances. Sebastian beamed with pleasure. “I am most touched that you have afforded me such a welcome
into your family and I am truly moved by your generosity of spirit.”

Tim grimaced and tried to explain Sebastian’s vocabulary by saying, “He reads a lot.”

“An example you could follow, sunshine!” Mr. Ledger retorted. “Try novels instead of PC
Plus
and Computer Buyer.”

When Mr. and Mrs. Ledger returned to the house, Tim and Sebastian set off for a short ride. At first, Sebastian was a little
unsteady. He had briefly ridden Mr. Ledger’s racing cycle during the summer, when he and Tim had gone into Brampton to search
for de Loudeac, but that was his only experience of riding a bicycle. The racer had been lightweight: this one was heavy,
and he had to use all twelve gears to keep up with Tim.

By the time they came to cycle home from school
the following afternoon, Sebastian was a steady and confident rider. He did not balk at oncoming traffic: even trucks and
white vans which passed very close to him did not faze him in the slightest. Potholes did not unsteady him, he anticipated
manholes and drain covers, and he learned to lean over on the corners. He even managed, if only briefly, to ride with his
hands off the handlebars.

About half a mile out of the town, they came upon Scrotton heading home to his burrow. He walked quickly, his arms hanging
loosely at his side, his head thrust forward. As they overtook him, he sneered at Pip and shouted incomprehensibly after her.
Pip waved to him in a friendly manner and smiled. This reaction seemed to enrage Scrotton further. He picked up a pat of dried
cow dung from the road and threw it at her. It flew through the air like a frisbee but, by the time he hurled it, Pip was
well out of his range, and it soared into the hedge.

Another mile further on, they arrived at the point where the track left the road to head up through the woods towards Scrotton’s
burrow. Not far past the track, two dead badgers lay on the edge of the tarmac, the grass around their heads thickly puddled
with clotted blood, the white stripes on their faces smeared with it and their snouts badly cut. Their hindquarters were pulped
where passing cars had run over them.

“At least the roadkills will give the rest of them more space,” Pip remarked, saddened by the sight.

“These creatures were not killed by passing vehicles,” Sebastian said. “Pay attention to them!’

Tim studied the nearest corpse. It had had its throat torn out.

The door into Sebastian’s subterranean lair was already open. Through it, Pip and Tim could see the oak table in the center
of the chamber, piled high with books. Some were open, others marked with thin slips of colored paper. They ranged in size
from a substantial church Bible down to a child’s illustrated paperback. Most were bound in leather.

Sebastian neither spoke nor looked up as Pip and Tim entered. He continued to pore over a book with a split spine, the leather
flaking into little piles of dust on the polished table. Every now and then he jotted a note on an oblong of parchment using
a gold-shafted pen which he periodically dipped in a porcelain inkwell.

Tim sidled over to the bookcases. Upon one shelf, he noticed a number of very modern books. Taking one down, he opened it.
It was entitled
Quarks, Quasars and the State of Light.
The author was a professor in an American university. Every page, it seemed, was as full of mathematical equations as it
was text.

“Do you understand all this?” Tim asked.

Sebastian’s only response was to raise his hand and, without looking up, say, “Indulge me a little longer, Tim, if you will.”

Pip crossed the chamber. Sebastian’s school jacket was suspended from a hook, incongruous next to his centuries-old homespun
cloak. On his bed, the lambs’
fleeces under which he slept were in disarray. His pillow sprouted the sharp quill ends of the goose feathers with which it
was stuffed.

“I am ready,” Sebastian announced at last. “Please join me.”

Pip and Tim perched themselves on stools at the table.

“The situation is thus,” Sebastian commenced. “Yoland is seeking to disseminate evil through a network of stolen souls. He
intends to achieve his aim by the use of a spell from Gerbert d’Aurillac’s book, with the assistance of Scrotton and his —
the word you use today is clones.”

“Why is he doing this?” Pip inquired.

“Consider Malodor,” Sebastian answered. “He wished to build an automaton that would do his every bidding. Eventually, he would
have built more and become a powerful man…”

“… had we not blown his boat out of the water!” Tim interjected.

“With Yoland,” Sebastian continued, “the situation is somewhat similar but, instead of creating automata, he wants to turn
humans into unquestioning serfs who will obey his command without equivocation.”

“What is it with them?” Pip remarked. “This power thing…? I just don’t get it.”

“Was it not ever thus?” Sebastian observed. “In my father’s day, monarchs and noblemen jostled for power. Today, do not presidents
and politicians follow likewise? It may be for personal pride or glory, sometimes for personal wealth, but beyond this lies
the desire for power for its own sake. However, in Yoland’s case, it is
more than this. He seeks not just personal power but to further the cause of evil, as might a priest seek to increase the
cause of good.”

The buttery light from the candles over their heads cast itself upon their faces.

“And you’ve got to thwart his plan,” Tim said.

“He cannot be permitted to succeed,” Sebastian stated tersely.

“But what if he does?” Pip ventured.

Sebastian closed the book before him and, looking from Pip to Tim, said, “It bears not thinking about, my friends. What is
more,” he continued, “I fear I may be unable to arrest his progress. The spells he plans to use are complex, exceedingly efficacious
and hazardous. To counteract them may be all but impossible.”

“But you can’t give up,” Pip said. “You’ve got to give it a go.”

“I intend to,” Sebastian said sharply, “but I shall need assistance, and there are only two people upon whom I believe I can
place my trust implicitly.”

“Goes without saying,” Pip pledged.

“We joined you in the other one,” said Tim. “We’ll be there again for you this time. Agreed, sis?”

“Yes,” Pip confirmed yet, as she spoke, a quiver of apprehension ran down her spine. That one three-letter word, she considered,
had committed her to she dared not imagine what.

“I ask you not to join me unprepared. This time,” Sebastian declared, “you will have powers.”

“Powers?” Tim echoed.

“Powers,” Sebastian confirmed gravely. “This time you will be armed as punitors.”

“Armed?” Tim queried eagerly. “Swords, shields, crossbows…?”

“Not exactly,” Sebastian said. “A weapon of another sort.”

“W
hat is a punitor?” Pip inquired.

“The word comes from Latin,” Sebastian told her, “and means one who punishes or avenges a wrong.”

Sebastian gathered up the books on the table and returned them to the shelves. This done, he placed two highly polished silver-lidded
chalices in front of Pip and Tim. They were intricately engraved with runes. He removed the lids, which chimed like minuscule
cymbals against the rims.

“I am sure you are familiar with the phrase ‘the punishment should fit the crime,’” Sebastian went on. “This you must not
forget,” he added. “Punitors do not merely punish. They do so justly. They also defend right against wrong.”

At this, Sebastian left the table and walked across the chamber to a row of shelves half hidden in shadow. Lifting down a
tall-necked flask sealed with a ground-glass stopper, he came back to the table. Directly under the candles, Pip and Tim could
see it contained a deep turquoise-colored liquid.

Carefully, Sebastian poured a small draft into each of the chalices.

“I assume becoming a punitor,” Pip ventured reluctantly, “involves drinking that?”

“Indeed, no,” Sebastian replied. “You must only dampen your lips. If you were to swallow any of the draft…”

“You mean it’s poisonous?” Tim asked nervously.

“Not precisely…” Sebastian answered evasively.

“Apart from that,” Tim inquired, “what else…?”

“You must be of good heart,” Sebastian declared, “but I consider both of you to be so.”

“What if you’re not?” Tim pondered anxiously.

A list of his more outrageous transgressions rolled over in his mind, like an autocue in a television studio — the time he
poured gin into great-aunt Joan’s aquarium tank, sozzling her angelfish; and then at his and Pip’s seventh birthday party,
he had tied Rebecca Todd’s plaits together around the bar on the back of her chair; the occasion on which he telephoned the
local pub to say that a car parked outside, numbered R2D2, was flashing its lights and making a beeping noise and the barman
had announced the fact to the customers. For the first two, his father had stopped his pocket money for two months and taken
away the TV, DVD and video remotes. The telephone call was never traced back to him.