The Ghost Roads (Ring of Five) (12 page)

“Yeuch,” he said, feeling his eyes. “What is this stuff?”

“Eel guts,” Nana said. “I knew the peelers would want to see your lovely eyes.”

“Smells rotten,” Danny said. Beth gave him a cloth to wipe his eyes.

“You look good in a dress.” She grinned. Danny shot her a dirty look.

Nana waited until she was sure the police were gone; then she gave Danny a towel and bar of soap.

“Strip to the waist,” she said, “and wash yourself at the pump.”

Danny was going to protest, but a glint in her eye warned him not to. As he stood shivering at the pump, he was aware of eyes watching him from the other caravans, eyes that were neither hostile nor friendly, but simply appraising.

When he got back to the caravan, Beth was in bed on the top half of a bunk.

“You take the bottom half,” Nana said. She turned her back while Danny undressed and climbed between the clean cotton sheets, which smelled of lavender. He wondered how far he could trust the travelers and tried to stay awake to watch for any trickery, but within minutes he had slipped into a dreamless sleep.

Nana sat long into the night after the two young people had fallen asleep. She was old, and sleep did not come quickly to her. She had hidden her shock well when she had seen Danny. The ravens had warned her that there was turmoil in the other world and that the entity they called the Ring was plotting to destabilize both worlds. She had believed them, of course, but she hadn’t really expected the boy to appear. Nor, when he did come, did she expect him to look so like his parents, with his mother’s eyes and his father’s watchful manner.

CAPTAIN STRANG

I
f Les and the others had known they were being watched, they might have stood a chance. Conventional heat-seeking missiles were useless against them, as they left no trail of heat. They were small and so not easily seen. The pilots could not lock on to such tiny slow-moving objects. Clouds and rain might have assisted them, but as the war planes approached them at speeds the people of the Lower World could only imagine, the moon came out.

“Good,” Gabriel said, “it’ll help us find them.” He adjusted their course slightly so that they flew along the southern bank of a reservoir, the water gleaming silver.

“You know,” Daisy said softly, “I’d forgotten how lovely it is to fly by moonlight.”

The jet fighters approached so fast that the Messengers
had no time to take evasive action. One minute the skies were empty, the next they were full of roaring death. A howl unlike anything they had ever heard bore down on them. Gabriel’s concentration failed and he veered sharply left, tangling wings with Les in the process. They both dropped like stones. It saved their lives. Both pilots concentrated on the sole remaining target.

Daisy had been a champion flyer when she was young, and all her skill had not deserted her. She did not know what the danger was, but she reacted nonetheless, turning into a swift barrel roll so that the startled pilot of the first jet saw his hail of tracer bullets miss the target. Daisy lacked the strength and agility for another roll, so she veered sharply sideways and down. It was almost enough. Red-hot tracer bullets from the second fighter streamed by, singeing her feathers and whistling off into the darkness, save for one bullet, slightly misshapen in manufacture or by the rifling of the gun barrel. The bullet tumbled through the air, moving more slowly than the others but still quickly enough to do terrible damage. As Daisy soared clear of the other bullets, it followed its untrue path and struck her in the breast. She cried out in pain.

Les and Gabriel had gotten clear of each other. They heard Daisy’s cry and looked up. She was falling gently toward them, her wings beating feebly. As one, they rose and caught her on either side.

“Gabriel,” she gasped. “Oh, my dear.”

Behind them the jet fighters banked. The leader was furious. He wouldn’t miss this time. The jet engines
screamed. They were almost within range. The pilots grasped the gun control on each joystick.

“Please …,” Gabriel said, oblivious to the screaming jet engines.

“It was wonderful, wasn’t it?” Daisy smiled weakly.

“Wonderful?”

“To fly together in the moonlight one more time.” Daisy smiled without pain, put her head on one side and died.

Time stood still. Only a few hundred meters away, the fighter pilots lined up their targets. The lead pilot’s fingers tightened on the trigger. Just as he was about to fire, something fluttered at the corner of his vision. He could not see what it was, but Les, watching, frozen in horror, could. A flight of ravens had appeared, flying straight at the jets. At the last moment four of the birds peeled off, two going left, two going right. Without hesitation each bird flew straight into the air intake of an engine, two to the first fighter, two to the second.

The ravens were destroyed instantly, but the blocked intakes denied air to the screaming engines. The planes shuddered violently. Before the pilots could throttle down, the engines shattered, fan blades breaking off and scything through casings and piping. All thought of their enemy forgotten, the two men fought the controls of the doomed machines. At the last moment two ejector seats fired. The planes plunged downward, one catching fire as it plummeted. The pilots floated free of the heavy seats, which jetted upward. As they fell, the two men glimpsed
in astonishment an elderly winged lady being supported by a lad and an old man. Then they dropped out of sight.

“Look out!” Les shouted. A heavy pilot’s seat was falling on them. Les thrust Gabriel away. The seat plunged between them, striking Daisy and carrying her downward.

“No!” Gabriel flew after the seat and Daisy, going like the wind. But it was too late. The heavy seat carried her frail body into the water of the reservoir below. There was a mighty splash and then no more. By the time Gabriel and Les reached the surface of the water, nothing remained save for a single feather.

“Gabriel …,” Les said, appalled.

“No,” Gabriel said in a fierce, grief-stricken voice. “She would not have us wasting time mourning her. We will grieve for her when we return. We will think of her when the clouds travel across the moon at night. Now we have work to do.”

Gabriel hovered and plucked the feather from the surface. A tear rolled down his face and he dashed it away angrily.

“Now, Les, now we fly like the wind!” he exclaimed,

His wings beat the air, and Les could barely keep his position, such was their force. Gone was the dusty old Messenger. This was a magnificent creature like some angel of vengeance from an old book. Another beat of the great wings and he was gone. Les shot after him. The surface of the water, ruffled by the wing beats, stirred again and was still.

D
ixie was concerned about Pearl. She was no longer feverish, but she’d opened her eyes several times and whimpered with fear when she had seen Dixie and Nala.

“I help wounds,” Nala said.

“I know, Nala, and thank you, but it is the wounds to her mind I worry about,” Dixie told him.

She went outside. Her eyes searched the night sky. Where was Les? And where was Danny? Was he even alive? She looked through the trees to where the land sloped into the valley below. A line of torches was moving slowly but surely toward them up the slope.

“Nala!” she called out. The Cherb was beside her in an instant.

“We must go,” he said. “They be here soon.”

“We can’t, Nala! Pearl can’t be carried over this ground. But you go. I’ll take my chances with Les.”

“If you stay, I stay,” Nala said.

“You will do as I say and go,” Dixie said firmly. Nala folded his arms and looked at her, making a strange noise. Dixie realized that he was laughing.

“I don’t think it’s very funny,” she started to say, and found herself laughing as well, as the full ridiculousness of her situation took hold. Stranded in the wilderness, hunted, dirty and bedraggled, stamping her foot like a child when one of the deadly Cherbs didn’t do as she wanted. They laughed until their sides were sore, and when they were done, Dixie knew that she could never think of the Cherbs in the same way again.

“Let’s get her ready to move,” Dixie said eventually. “If … when … Les and the others come, we’ll need to go quickly.”

Nala went into a stand of willow and emerged with armfuls of flexible willow branches. With lightning speed he wove them together to make a kind of harness.

“Will hold her to Messenger,” he said. There was a great noise above the trees and Dixie ducked down, thinking it was one of the helicopters—machines she did not understand at all—searching for them. But when she looked up, Gabriel was standing on a large bough above their heads, Les beside him. At least, it looked like Gabriel, but he had changed. This Gabriel looked like a Seraphim, tall and haughty, his wings held stiffly away from his body. There was a remote look in his eyes, which looked golden, like an eagle’s.

“Thank goodness!” Dixie said. “You’re safe.” Then she saw the look on Les’s face.

“What is it?”

“Daisy. We lost Daisy.” Dixie stared at them, stricken.

“We cannot dwell on it,” Gabriel said, his voice harsh. “We still have a little time before the sun rises. Let us use it.”

Nala was thinking the same thing, his eyes on the line of torches coming up the valley. He darted into the shelter and emerged, carrying Pearl effortlessly. Gabriel floated to the ground. He examined the harness, then instructed Nala to fit it to him. He lifted off the ground to try it.

“That will do. Come, Les.” Dixie looked around. It had finally dawned on her.

“But there are three of us! You can’t carry us all. I’m not going anywhere without Nala.”

“I think Nala has made the decision for you, Dixie,” Les said. She looked around, but Nala was nowhere to be seen.

“We must go, Dixie,” Gabriel said. “You will not help your friends by dying here.”

The dawn sun spread light on the eastern horizon. It caught the edge of Gabriel’s wings and they flashed golden. Dixie bowed her head, and after a moment climbed onto Les’s back. They rose into the air and began their journey home.

It was an uncomfortable journey. They flew so low they were almost in the trees, and where there were no trees Gabriel found a ridge to fly along, even at one point flying alongside a railway viaduct. They didn’t know they were in no danger. The prime minister had grounded all military flights in the area until they had discovered the nature of the weapon that had brought down two of the most technically advanced fighter jets in the world.

Once, an old man looked out of his window as he rose in the dawn and saw—what? Winged shapes as if from a dream. A little girl went to the bathroom and saw something from the hallway window, but when she woke her parents and spoke of it, they told her to go back to bed, and when she woke in the morning, she’d forgotten what she had seen. Flitting like ghosts across the landscape, the two Messengers and their cargo reached the frontier between the Upper and Lower Worlds and disappeared over it.

A
mbrose Longford was also awake in the dawn. He was pleased by the way things had gone at Kilrootford. The foreign power had put its troops on high alert. He wondered if Danny had been consumed by his own power. He thought not. The power of the Fifth would be building inside the boy again, and he did not know how to control it. Longford had no doubt that it would be unleashed again. When it was, he would be in position to exploit it.