Storm Child (19 page)

Isaac had seen violence on the
streets, far more than a boy of his age ought to have seen, but nothing could
have prepared him for the scene that met them in the chamber they had so
recently escaped from. There was now only a dim light from three remaining
torches in brackets, but it was still possible to see enough to make his skin
crawl.  Blood washed the walls and it was hard to tell what used to be
people and what
was the remains of wolf
.  But the
eerie silence of a battleground where the battle was long over filled the room,
only punctuated by the quiet weeping of children huddled together in their
cages.  Isaac gagged at the carnage, and then looked across at
Polly.  She stared straight ahead, breathing heavily but stoic and
undeterred. He should have known that she would not have needed his comfort and
he was never prouder of her strength than he was at that moment.

‘We need to get them out,’ Polly
said quietly. Isaac nodded and then looked over the floor.

‘The keys could be anywhere.’

‘You’re right. Grab a sword or a
knife. We’re going to have to bust the locks.’

Isaac reached for an ornate
dagger abandoned by his feet. With a grimace he wiped blood from its handle on
his trousers.  Holding it up to inspect, he suddenly realised that this
was the very same dagger that had nearly killed him.  It was a beautiful
thing: a bone handle decorated with intricate carvings of symbols that he had
never seen before, a precise blade that seemed to prism the light bouncing from
its surfaces into a rainbow of colours.  Despite this, the sight of it
sent a chill into his bones and a sickness into his heart.  He wondered
how many children this object of beauty had killed during the years of terror
spent in search of the right infant witch.

It was then that he suddenly
noticed the humming.  Not like the menacing chant that had greeted them
the first time they entered this chamber, but more like Annie’s soulful,
soaring notes. But these were from a higher, purer, more hesitant voice than
Annie’s. They weren’t notes in an ordered form, but primal, instinctive lilting
melodies that shifted and changed like the wind across fields of wheat.
 His gaze was drawn towards the birdcage and he could see that Georgina
was still lying curled up on the base of it, but now she was weeping gently and
moving her lips at the same time, small movements that were hard to make out in
the gloom. But Isaac was now in no doubt that it was Georgina holding the
enchantment on the wolves.  As he gazed up at the cage where she sang, he
was awestruck by the wonder of it.  And just as he did whenever Annie wove
her spells, he could feel the music bewitch his own senses, as though he was in
some between-worlds place and not quite with his own mind.

‘Isaac,’ Polly said, cutting into
his thoughts.  He turned to see that she was staring up at the cage too.
‘This isn’t the time,’ she continued, still watching Georgina herself.

Isaac shook himself. ‘I know…
It’s just…’

‘…beautiful,’ Polly finished for
him.  She turned and smiled at him. ‘
Ain’t
she
clever?’

Isaac returned her smile and
fought the impulse to sit himself down on the floor and listen more to
Georgina’s song. Instead, he headed for the nearest cage. ‘I don’t suppose any
of you have the keys to this infernal thing?’ he asked the silent
occupants.  When no reply came he shrugged. ‘Looks like I’ll have to do
some damage then.’

While he worked at the lock with
the point of the dagger, trying to get the catch to spring, Polly walked the
floor, searching for a sign of any keys. Isaac shot her the occasional glance
and marvelled at her fortitude; not once did he see her flinch as she picked
her way through the corpses.  Then there was a little cry of triumph, and
she raced over waving her prize.

‘Pulled it from a belt,’ she
said. ‘Move out of the way and let me try it in this one.’

Isaac moved aside and Polly tried
the key.  It wouldn’t turn and she muttered a curse under her breath as
she moved to the next cage.  This time there was a click and the door
opened.  The children inside stared dumbly at her. 

‘Go on,
yer
bunch of silly urchins, what are you
waitin
’ for? Run
for your lives!’

‘No!’ Isaac shouted suddenly.
‘The wolves, Poll. They might still be outside.’

Polly twisted around to look at
him and then back at the children. ‘Right… in that case stay there for now.’
She ran back to Isaac who was still working his lock. ‘Do you think the wolves
will let them pass?’ she whispered.

‘We’ve no way of knowing. But
there are so many of them now that I don’t know what it will do to distract
them. We can’t be sure how strong Georgina’s hold is.’

‘As soon as we take her from the
cage, won’t it break the spell? Now she’s singing because she’s sad but if we
get her out she might forget she’s supposed to be singing.’

‘In that case we’ll have to get
them all up the stairs into the safe rooms.’ He handed Polly the dagger and
reached for one of the torches.  ‘I’ll lead them and you keep trying these
locks.’ He turned to the children in the open cage. ‘Follow me…’

There was a brief hesitation, and
then Isaac beckoned them again. ‘Come on, you’ll be safe with me, I promise.’

Gradually, they began to file out
and Isaac led them as best he could, through the bodies on the floor and
towards the giant wooden doors.  They followed him up the two flights of
stairs, up to the floor where Annie and Charlotte waited, but he led them along
the corridor to another room, mindful that Annie might need peace and safety
from any germs the other children might bring with them.  He told them to
wait, closed the door, and then dashed along the passageway, halting for a
moment at the door of the room that contained Annie and Charlotte.  Torn
between reassuring Charlotte and making sure that Annie had not taken a turn
for the worse, and fretting about Polly down in the cellar trying to get the
rest of the children free, he finally decided to run back to help Polly. 

Down in the sacrificial chamber,
the scene was no less shocking the second time he viewed it than the first. But
this time he swallowed the feeling of nausea and rushed to Polly, who had
already opened the second cage.  She turned to him and waved a hairpin.
‘One of the girls had this…’ she shot a dark look at the cage with the open
door. ‘It might have been useful if she’d told us before I messed around with
the knife and nearly sliced my fingers off.’

Isaac noted she now had the
dagger stowed in a belt that looked to be stolen from one of the Brethren,
fastened around her waist. With a cry of satisfaction the third cage door
opened.  Polly turned to Isaac with her hands on her hips and a grin.

‘You are good, Poll,’ Isaac said
with a grin of his own.

‘I know. Take ‘
em
upstairs and I’ll see about getting Georgie down.’

‘You know as soon as we get her
out the spell might break?’

‘The door is closed,
ain’t
it? The wolves can’t get in?’

‘Yes. But if they don’t move on
we can’t get out either.’

‘One problem at a time. Get these
ragamuffins upstairs and quick.’

Isaac beckoned the remaining
children, taking the stairs a second time and depositing them in one of the
rooms with instructions to stay put before racing back to Polly. 

As he entered the chamber for
what he hoped would be the last time, he saw Polly open the birdcage and take
Georgina into her arms. She looked up at Isaac with the widest, most beautiful
smile he had ever seen on her. He felt his heart would burst with pride.

And then, from amongst the mass
of bodies on the floor, he saw a figure prop itself up and raise a hand. 
He saw the pistol and the rest was a blur.

‘POLLY!’ he yelled.  The
smile slid from her face as she saw what he saw, and she turned with Georgina
to run, slipping and tripping over the limbs and blood that littered the
floor.  The gunshot echoed around the chamber as Isaac threw himself onto
the figure.  As he wrestled to get control, he saw with horror that the
face beneath the blood and matted hair was Mrs Brown, somehow still
alive.  Despite the fact that she must have been half dead she was strong,
and Isaac struggled to hold her as she tried to get another shot at him. There
hadn’t been time to see if Polly or Georgina had been struck by the first one,
and Isaac strained to prevent her from getting a second chance, but he was
losing the fight as her strength seemed to increase unnaturally with every
passing moment they fought. Before he knew what was happening Mrs Brown had
flipped him onto the floor beneath her, pinning him down and holding the gun to
his head with a manic, bloody grin. 

‘I’ll teach you to meddle with
what you don’t understand,’ she hissed as she cocked the trigger. Isaac closed
his eyes…

And then her weight slid to the side
and onto the floor.  Isaac looked up to see Polly standing above them, the
bone-handled dagger that had been in her belt now in the back of Mrs
Brown.  She stared down at him, her eyes full of fire.

‘Are you hurt?’ he panted as he
lay, shaking and trying to catch his breath.

‘No. Georgie’s fine too,’ she
said as she scooped up the tot from a space on the floor and held her close.
‘Are you?’ she added.

Isaac shook his head weakly.
‘Just give me a minute…’

‘We
ain’t
got a minute. Annie is
dyin
’ up there and you’re
lying around on the floor like you got
nothin
’ better
to do.’

Isaac grinned up at her. His
heart was thumping madly in his chest and his limbs felt like they were made of
paper, but he pushed himself up and stood.  Georgina was clinging to Polly’s
neck and sucking her thumb. As they feared, she had stopped singing. 

‘Let’s get out of here,’ Polly
said, nodding at the doorway.

‘What do you think will happen
when all this gets discovered?’ Isaac asked as they made their way back through
the room and to the stone staircase.

‘I don’t know. But we’d best be
far away when it is.’

‘Do you see Finch anywhere
amongst them?’ Isaac asked.

‘No. But I
ain’t
searching for him now. I want a warm fire and a decent meal.’

‘And where are we
goin
’ to get that? We
ain’t
exactly made of money and we
ain’t
got anywhere to
live now.’

‘Who
ain’t
made of money?’ Polly winked as she pulled a purse from a pocket in her skirts.

‘Poll! You stole from a corpse!’

‘They tried to kill us, the least
they could do was buy us a pie to make amends. It weren’t like they were going
to miss it.’

‘You’re a bad ‘
un
,’
Isaac grinned.

‘That’s why you like me.’

They stopped at the outside door.
Behind it the wolves had stood sentry only moments before.  Isaac pressed
his ear to it and listened.

‘I can’t hear
anythin
’
either way. Do you reckon they’re still there?’

Polly shook her head. ‘I think
they’ll have gone when the enchantment broke. But we’ll have to look out the
windows and check. I daren’t risk the door just in case.’

‘What are we going to do with all
the children?’ Isaac asked as they continued up to the first floor. ‘We can’t
just send ‘
em
out onto the streets and there
ain’t
another orphanage until Ringwood.  Even then I
don’t like the idea of who might be running it after what we’ve seen here.’

‘We’ll walk them to the convent
and leave them there.’

‘People will ask questions.
They’ll find out what happened here and they’ll blame us or even them. We’ll
have to get them far away from here or we might find we saved them from the
altar and sent them to the gallows instead.’

‘First they got to find us. None
of them know who we are or where we came from. Besides, who would have thought
that a lot of weakling orphans could have caused what lies on the floor of that
cellar? They’ll think the wolves got in and did it.’

‘The wolves got in and killed
only the adults who happened to be dressed in long black robes and have a load
of swords with them? It won’t take long for people to work it out, Poll. I just
worry about what, exactly, they will work out. It’s bound to be wrong.’

She waved a hand irritably. ‘We
ain’t
got time to worry about that now.’

‘I’m just saying –’

‘Will you stop your yammering?’

Isaac fell silent as they arrived
at the door of the room where Annie and Charlotte waited.  Many of the
freed children lined the passageway, watching as they arrived and talking in
hushed tones. 

‘What’s going to happen to us?’
one girl asked.

Isaac looked at Polly.  ‘We
need to think about that,’ she replied. ‘But first we got something important
to do.’

She turned and opened the
door.  Charlotte shot from the bed where she had been tending Annie. 

‘Thank God!’ she cried, running
to Polly and taking Georgina from her. Georgina squealed in delight, flinging
her arms around Charlotte’s neck.  Charlotte covered her face in kisses,
laughing and crying all at the same time. ‘I thought I would never see you
again.’

‘How’s Annie?’ Polly asked.

Charlotte turned to her. ‘Much
the same.’ She squeezed Georgina a little tighter. ‘It’s such a pity, she would
have been so happy to see her sister safe at last.’

‘I’ve been
thinkin
’
about that,’ Polly said slowly. ‘Isaac, go and check the window. Are the wolves
still there?’

Isaac peered out onto the path
below. ‘I can’t see them,’ he said.

Polly turned to Charlotte. ‘I
think
Clotpole
over there was right for once. I think
Georgie was weaving an enchantment on the wolves. I don’t think she knew what
she was
doin
’ or how she was
doin
’
it but…’ Her gaze turned to Annie, still unconscious on the bed. ‘Perhaps we
can get her to do it again.’