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“They sent him into the Forbidden City to try and find us! It’s a tracker! It must be!” said Finn.
“Why haven’t they been tracking us then?” said Carla.
She found the catch and took the whole collar off. “Maybe it ran out of power?” she said, examining it more carefully. “Or maybe it’s not a tracker. Maybe it’s some kind of comms device, or—”
But before she got any further …
YAP!
Yo-yo was off his haunches, nose high in the frozen air, stump of a tail curled like a tongue in concentration.
“Bear …?” asked Carla, fear returning.
“No,” said Finn, hearing a distant buzz. “Machines …? PEOPLE!”
Carla shoved the dog collar into her top and scrambled down the steep snowfield, Yo-yo bounding ahead of her, crossing the tree line and disappearing into the forest.
“BE CAREFUL!” yelled Finn.
“Yo-yo, come back here!” ordered Carla and the dog yapped back, already lost.
She ran into the forest after him, the last rays of the setting sun needling through the pines to light the dog’s progress through the snow. The further Carla ran, the darker it got, but the more they could hear the noise – engines, definitely the sound of engines, somewhere ahead.
Yap!
“Yo-yo!” said Carla, changing direction, heading for the bark, till …
“ARRRGGHHHH!” – the ground fell away. Nothingness. She shot out a hand and grabbed a sapling, then clung on hard and closed her eyes and felt the tiny tree take her weight, its roots clinging to the earth.
She gasped. Her eyes adjusted and she saw she’d just saved herself from running straight off a steep drop.
Yo-yo appeared and yapped at her, as if she was an idiot.
“No more short cuts,” said Finn at her ear, then before she’d had time to catch her breath, he shouted: “Look!”
There beneath them, headlamps slicing through the darkness, three snowmobiles slaloming through the trees, tacking their way up the slope.
“HERE! OVER HERE!” Carla cried.
“They’re climbing this way,” said Finn. “They must have seen us on the pass.”
Finn looked across at the silhouette of the ruined monastery through the trees. Surely it was the only spot they could have been seen from? As Carla pulled herself back up, he looked down at the snowmobiles again. It was hard to tell in the fading light, but all three carried a driver and a passenger, and slung across the back of each passenger … an automatic rifle with a distinctive curved magazine.
“AKs …” said Finn.
“UP HERE!” yelled Carla.
“OWOWOWW!” howled Yo-yo, to help her out.
“SHUT UP!” said Finn. “They’re carrying AK47s!”
“What?”
“The only place anybody could have seen us from is the monastery. Who would live there? Who would hide there? Who would send out men with guns?”
“Hunters?”
“You don’t shoot bunnies with AKs,” said Finn.
Carla looked back down at the whizzing skidoos. “That would be cruel …”
“Baptiste fell to his knees when he saw it,” said Finn. “Kaparis has headquarters all over the world …”
“You think it’s where he’s been headed all this time?”
“Want to find out?”
Carla answered by turning to run in the opposite direction down through the forest.
Finn could hear the skidoos climbing towards them, beams of light starting to flick through the trees.
“They’re coming!” said Finn, lashing himself into place in the hair just above her forehead, poking out like a tiny tank commander.
Carla slogged on, but the skidoos were cutting through the forest like a wind, engines raging, lights strobing. In a flash of white light, they were spotted—
“DA! ESTE!” went up a foreign cry. Carla dived out of the beam.
“ACOLO, ESTE!”
Again she ran, but all three were closing in. Before she could be spotted again, Finn’s yell matched her instinct: “HIDE!”
She dived forward and buried herself in the snow, clutching Yo-yo to her.
VROOM! VROOM! VROOM!
The three skidoos overshot.
“Stay down!” said Finn.
Carla hugged the panting dog closer and he licked her face.
The skidoos stopped. Finn and Carla could hear voices.
“Don’t come back … Don’t come back …” begged Finn.
Then – DRDRDRDRDDRDRTT! – muzzle flash lit the iced canopy as shots tore high through the trees in an attempt to flush them out – DRTRRTRTRT!
Yo-yo took violent fright, bursting out of Carla’s arms to bite back. YAP YAP YAP YAP!
“ACOLO!” went up the cry. Yo-yo barked and, as headlights wheeled once more, Carla launched herself into the darkness, running without hope or direction, running into …
Nothing.
Suddenly she found herself falling like Alice – but not like Alice, as she hit (and hard) a slide of ice and flew down it, a toboggan run of hellish thumps and spins and whacks that sent her winded and flying – WHAM! – into a blue-black final darkness …
THREE (#ulink_8016aea2-e068-505e-949d-a9e596cc1601)
FEBRUARY 20 00:00 (GMT+3). Carpathian Mountains, Romania-Ukraine border
Is she dead?
Finn woke upside down, still lashed into her hair.
Is she dead?
He struggled and turned himself round. Saw stars in a slice of night sky above, saw fast-moving clouds, heard the wind. Where the hell were they?
Is she dead?
She couldn’t die. She had carried him through hell, they had come too far … He untied himself and dropped to her scalp. At once he could feel her pulse beneath his feet, feel her warmth. Alive …
What a girl, Finn thought, and not for the first time.
How long had he been out of it? Hours? Minutes? He pushed through to examine her scalp. There seemed to be no blood, no great crush of her skull.
Had they fallen down the cliff? He looked up. The slice of night sky was sandwiched between slabs of blackness. Were they inside the mountain? Inside some kind of split in the rock?
The skidoos had gone. So had Yo-yo …
“CARLA!” Finn yelled, as much to force back his tears as to rouse her.
“WAKE UP!”
Then from above – movement – a scratch – a thump.
Chunks of dislodged snow and ice fell towards them.
Wolves? A bear?
“CARLA!”
WHAP! – with a slap, the end of a heavy wet rope nearly knocked Finn clean off his perch. He clung on and looked up as a huge leg appeared over the edge of the crevasse, then another, then a squat muscular figure slid straight down the rope.
Every hair on Finn’s tiny body stood on end as the figure blotted out the last slice of sky. He braced himself.
The figure stopped dead. Grunted. Struck a match.
Light stung the darkness and a figure from a nightmare squinted at Carla. A boy, medieval in dress and form, with a huntsman’s bow across his back, dark face scarred and twisted, a misshapen thing. His bulging eyes looked at Carla and absorbed her.
Carla, as if in response, briefly opened her own, beautiful eyes.
They widened in momentary shock then lapsed back into unconsciousness.
“Esti …?” the boy started to say, and tried to shake her a little.
When he got no response, he fed the rope around Carla’s back and secured it. “Yes!” said Finn. “Get us out of here …”
The boy braced himself against the walls and hauled on the rope.
Back out on the rock face, Finn saw no sign of skidoos. The starlit sky was clouding over and sharp flecks of snow were whipping in on the wind.
He felt himself flip upside down as Carla was picked up and slung over the shoulder of the extraordinary boy, who did not pause as he picked a treacherous mountain-goat’s path down the slope without slipping or stopping. By the time they’d reached the valley floor, a blizzard was blowing. The boy dropped them on to a toboggan and jumped on behind them, steering them through the forest. After a few minutes, the ground began to rise again. The boy hopped off and pulled the sledge along until eventually they stopped before another rock face.
The snow was wild around them.
Finn saw the boy work away at something, pulling a rope that disappeared into the darkness above. It could only lead to one place – they must be beneath the ruins, beneath the castle in the air. As the rope began to run free in his hands, the boy jumped back and – WHUMP – a great basket dropped out of the darkness.
The boy tipped Carla unceremoniously over its side and leapt in after her. Again he hauled on ropes, and Finn felt the basket rock and sway as they began to rise. In a short time, the boy’s hauling became easier; a great falling counterweight passed them, then the rope was running through his hands as they rose relentlessly. Finn saw they were rushing up towards a perfect square of light, a trapdoor in the floor of heaven. Finn gasped as the basket thumped home into a blindingly torchlit timber wheelhouse.
As Finn’s eyes adjusted, he could see their saviour more clearly – a hunchback half-man clothed in rags. Again Carla was thrown over his shoulder and he set off on a mad rocking run, almost too fast for Finn to make sense of where they were. There was a long, narrow stone passage, lit by dim oil lamps, with many passages and doorways leading off. After a minute’s run, the boy veered off into a much broader passage, then shouldered through a large oak door, and they arrived in the peace and sanctuary of …
Books.
Candle-light.
Words.
Thousands of pages, rotting and reused, torn and shredded, lining the floors and jamming the gaps to keep out the cold. Fuelling tiny fires.
A library. Finn knew it was from the smell, the musty, trusty smell of books. But he had never seen a library as tragic or as strange as this. A huge high ceiling topped ranks of splintered shelves lining damp walls that seemed to run from earth to heaven, an illusion reinforced by the religious decoration on the smoke-blackened pillars and frescos, saints’ faces, red and gold and ruined. An ornate, crumbling wedding cake of a library transformed into a slum, its desks and furniture upturned and adapted, knocked and nailed into an encampment of shanty shacks, out of which devilish and dead-eyed children stared and shivered, dressed in grey sackcloth and buried like hamsters under the piles of yellowing pages. A dormitory of the damned. And at the far end, on a raised dais with a commanding view over the whole cavernous room, was a large desk on pillared legs, where sat, surrounded by bells and dangling tubes, a striking young man.
Their deformed saviour headed straight for him, letting Carla down off his back to offer her like a cabbage to a king.
“Draga … Primo?” said the boy.
Primo? thought Finn. He could see his face in shadow – handsome, sherry-skinned, dark eyes with a thousand-yard stare. He had seen the dangling tubes around him before, in old war films, speaking tubes used to communicate on ships and submarines.
“Ce facut?” asked the Primo, suspicious.
“Santiago find,” the boy explained in English.
He lifted Carla higher and the Primo reached out a hand. His fingers sought and gently traced the detail of Carla’s face as Finn looked again at the Primo’s black eyes … and at the same moment, Carla came round, shocked at the touch of the sculpted youth staring straight through her. She drew breath to scream—
“No! He’s blind, Carla!” shouted Finn, running to her ear.
Carla caught the scream, and flinched from the hand, turning away, only to see the mashed-up face of Santiago for the first time.
“ARRRRRRRRGGGH!”
