The Gate of Bones (15 page)

 

Bailey caught her lower lip in her teeth and tried to think, for a moment, where she could possibly be. That gave her pause, for—d'oh—where else could she be? Trouble was, as nobody knew better than she did, she could be almost
anywhere.

In the blanketing darkness, her eyes slowly adjusted, and she reached out for thoughts of Ting or her naughty little Lacey and found . . . nothing. It was as if nothing existed but herself and this space beyond the revolving wall. Surely, if she ducked her head and took a step or two, she'd run into the Three Stooges or
Dumb and Dumber
or
someone
as stupid as she was!

“No, no,” she said to herself, happy to hear her voice if nothing else. “Think of it as charmed, not stupid. Serendipity! Look what I fell into, Watson.” Bailey took another deep, steadying breath. She slipped one foot ahead cautiously, almost swearing she could feel a slant in the floor, stepping ahead slowly in case everything should drop out from under her. Nowhere in her thoughts could she sense Lacey in her frenzy to hide the sparkly she'd stolen, or even Ting, who was usually buzzing about somewhere close to Bailey's mind, even when they were separated by great distances.

This did not bode well.

“All's well that bodes well?” Bailey muttered to herself, as she inched cautiously through the dark room. She raised her voice a bit. “Hello? Ting? Anyone here?”

Her voice sounded dead and muffled. Bailey brushed her fingers across her crystal and tried to awaken it, but something took the Magick out of the very air, and nothing happened. It couldn't be, but it was. She cupped her amethyst tightly. It still warmed to her and yet not a thought, not a bit of Magick could she send through or take from it. She was well and truly lost, and trapped, by everything she could tell.

“Okay.” Bailey inhaled slowly. “What goes up, must come down . . .” If the wall had swung in, there must be a way to get it to swing back out. All she had to do was find the tripping mechanism. That meant she had to find the wall and search every splinter of it. Moving as cautiously and slowly across the floor as if she wore ice skates on a skating rink, Bailey slid and glided back to a wall. She ran her palms over it. Smooth, polished paneling, with no end and no beginning. She thought another moment.

Kicking off one boot, she pushed it up against the base, to mark where she began her search, for as her eyes got used to the near total darkness, she could see a little but not much more, and the wall looked endless. She didn't want to be searching the same area over and over. And as for places taller than she could reach . . . Bailey tilted her head back and looked up the wall at the shadowed ceiling . . . she'd have to hope that whoever wanted to get out hadn't put the levers out of reach!

She knocked, thumped, and rubbed every inch of wall she could touch from her outstretched arms down to the tip of her toes . . . one booted, one in a sock, down the room she inched. A snail would have made faster progress, she told herself, but then, would a snail have gotten itself into this predicament? She didn't think so!

Down the long, dim corridor she went without success until she found herself in a corner. She moved across the end panel to the other wall and thought of marking it with the second boot, then thought again. After all, it was a corner! How many corners could there be in this room? She started off again, swearing that her fingertips were beginning to get blisters as she stroked and poked every square inch of the very odd room. Then, just when she had decided to give up and take a nap, she found something. A small inlay of wood that wiggled a bit.

“Eureka!” Bailey readied to do whatever she had to, to open, turn, poke, and prod it.

 

“Okay,” Gavan said patiently, his clear blue eyes fixed on Ting, his brows furrowed as he tried to understand. “Take it a little slower, and someone explain to me what you mean by ‘Off the radar,' please. Am I to understand that Bailey is missing?”

Rich shifted his weight, his tool belt slung low on his hip, but the pockets of his belt, crudely stitched and put together, held herbs and bandages and ointments, not tools. “Bailey missing? Oh, that's new! What's the likelihood of that, hmmm? She was only missing . . . what, twenty-four hours ago?”

Ting wrinkled her nose at him. “Stop it. Yes, she's missing.”

Stef had sat down on a tree stump, and he crossed his thick arms over his chest. “How lost can she be? I mean, it's what, a seven-story building with two wings?”

“I mean she's lost, Stefan, really, really lost.”

“As in off the radar,” Gavan said quizzically, watching her face. “What did you mean by that?”

Ting looked at him, and could no longer hide the stricken feeling inside her. “As in, I can't feel her at all. She's gone.”

“Mmmmm. You're usually connected a bit, then?”

“Always. Aren't we . . . supposed to be?” A little defiantly, Ting brushed a soft wing of black hair from her eye.

Gavan smiled gently. “We had hoped, but one never knows. It is a camaraderie some of us never feel, and some of us feel almost instantly.” He put his hand out and patted Ting. “And, as Stef so aptly put it, how far could she have gone?”

“Then you don't think it's Jonnard or anything?”

He shook his head vigorously. “Not with the wards we have set about. We'd have heard an intrusion, believe me. No, it's more likely to be . . .” Gavan paused, and then a thought seemed to cross his mind. His mouth twitched. “Yes, I think I know just where Bailey might be.”

“Where's that?”

“Where the most trouble is. I can only hope she didn't pull
that
lever . . .” Gavin motioned to Rich and Stefan. “I want you two up and down the north wing, and we'll take the south. Crystal me if you find any sign of her, or that pesky little rodent of hers.” He swung around, his cloak swirling like a great wing about them. “Ting, come with me, and hurry. I have a suspicion. I just hope we can find her in time!” Concern colored his words.

 

A broken nail and long minutes later, Bailey figured out how to pry out the end of the small piece of wood. It took not one but three different pressure points, pressed in exactly the right combination, to pop it out of place. That, she found out quite by accident, and by listening carefully. She could hear clicks when she pressed on one corner or the other, but nothing seemed to loosen the inlay properly. It was rather like half unlocking a door with a key.

She found a wooden ring secured into the space behind it. It had a metallic feel to it, as if it might be bronze or an alloy, but it was definitely circular and big enough for her to curl two fingers into. A ring which she then pulled out. It seemed to snap into place. Bailey thought a moment, then twisted it. A noise of tumblers turning and inner workings working and other ominous sounds followed immediately. With a
whoosh!
the floor under her disappeared. Bailey let out a shriek and dropped into space.

 

The whole building rumbled. Timbers shivered and groaned, and the stairs vibrated heavily underfoot. Ting immediately thought of an earthquake, having grown up in an area where the earth moving was a fact of life. But they weren't anywhere near the San Andreas fault! “What is that?”

“That,” said Gavan grimly, “is what I feared.” He abruptly switched directions, from heading upstairs, to thundering down. Ting flew along in his wake, the stairs booming around them like cannon fire. They flung headlong down, down, down, as Ting wondered if the academy had a dungeon hidden somewhere (and if so, why?) and then they burst into the vast root cellar storage room where her grandmother and Rebecca were preparing shelves and barrels to store goods in, and Qi was patiently saying, “This dust will keep ants and most other insects out, very old but very good remedy,” as she sprinkled a whitish powder around the edges of the room.

Both women looked up in surprise. “Ting!” Rebecca's eyes widened. “Is something wrong?”

Gavan took them both by the elbows, saying, “Move
here
NOW,” and looking up with a face creased in great worry.

“Yeeeeoooooowwwww” echoed all about them, descending out of the ceiling, and with the shriek, a corner of the ceiling opened up and Bailey slid through, landing with an unceremonious thump and grunt where her mother and Ting's grandmother had just been standing.

Gavan nodded his head. “I think I need to work on the landing site a bit.” He extended his hand to Bailey. “Congratulations, lass, I think you've broken the all-time Magicker curiosity mark.”

Bailey sat up, coughing, the wind knocked out of her, and blinked. Finally she managed, “What was that?”

“That, if what happened is what I think happened, was my panic room, where all sounds and Magick are nullified in case of extreme attack, and my escape chute.” Gavan stood patiently, waiting for her to grasp his hand. “I had planned a field trip there when everything was worked out, but you seemed to have jumped the schedule.”

“Bailey, hon, are you all right?” Rebecca grabbed her daughter by the shoulders and stood her up, then began dusting her off. Any answer Bailey might have made was interrupted by an outraged piping and as they all looked up, a tiny ball of fur fell out of the ceiling chute and into Bailey's quick-thinking grasp.

Lacey let out an aggrieved sneeze and promptly hid her face in her paws. “Troublemaker,” Bailey said affectionately, looking down at the pack rat, not seeing much the same look on her mother's face as she looked at her daughter.

“All's well, then. I'd better call off the boys before someone else stumbles onto something.”

Bailey rounded on Ting. “See? I told you!”

The headmaster stopped abruptly in the root cellar doorway, and looked back over his shoulder. “Told her what?”

Both girls smiled innocently and chimed together, “Oh, nothing.”

“I can only imagine.” Gavan made a gesture that trailed sparks through the air as he left. Words lingered behind. “That should also help keep the cellar free of insects.” The sparks rained down upon the ground and lay twinkling, dewlike for a moment, before being absorbed.

W
HAT YOU'VE TOLD me about the wolfjackals saddens but does not surprise me,” Tomaz Crowfeather said heavily. He squatted by a ward fire, warming his thick hands carefully, the fire's light adding much depth to his already time-carved face. Gavan sat on one of the three-legged stools the children . . . no, not children anymore, he corrected himself . . . delighted in making. The day's ride had tired him more than it should, and he chided himself for that, as well. To go and then do nothing chafed at him like a badly fitting and overly starched shirt. He wanted to pull and then rip the other day away from him, but could not.

“I didn't think the Dark Hand was making use of them anymore.”

“They are torn from Chaos and have a need to return to it. Can you think of any force more chaotic than that which Jonnard and Isabella use? No?” Tomaz nodded to himself as if answering his own question when he heard nothing from Gavan. “So. They will go where they must just as we go to fire for warmth, regardless of its danger. We, however, know how to control fire. Usually.” He stood, and hooked a thumb in the loop of his hammered silver belt. The conchas, the round disks of metal from which it was made, rattled faintly at his touch. “Do you condemn them for that?”

“Condemn, no, but I'd gladly corral them if I could. I think somehow the Dark Hand feeds off them as well.”

Tomaz raised a squared eyebrow. “In addition to the Leucators?”

“Just a theory. One I was hoping you could solve.”

Tomaz grunted. “I was, as well.” He reached for a crude poker and stirred the ward fire up a bit, watching the shower of orange sparks shoot upward hike fireworks, and sputter out. “What else bothers you?”

Gavan halted in mid gesture of rubbing his eyes. He dropped his hand. “Shows, does it?”

Tomaz shrugged. “We know each other well.”

“I couldn't
feel
her, Tomaz. If she was there, and she should have been, both her and FireAnn, I couldn't feel her! I had no lingering touch, no sense, no . . . hope.”

“Yet you went back and found the fortress a decoy, did you not?”

“So it seemed.”

“So you told Renart and the boys.”

“I hadn't the strength left to try and pierce the curtain if it had been hidden. So I decided it was an illusion, and I think it is. I think Isabella has taken the actual workings of her little garrison and laid it over the ruins of a similar one, in a ruse to hide their location. Eleanora forgive me if I'm wrong.” Gavan looked away from the firelight, into the night.

“How does that explain Jonnard cornering Bailey?”

“That's the question, isn't it? How does that explain that? He could have sensed someone tripping the trap's perimeter and come to take a look. He's capable of Crystaling for long distances, I should think.”

“But why would he? Unless he were already in the region.”

“Damnit!” Gavan's left hand gripped his cane tightly. “I don't know! I don't know.”

Tomaz looked at him almost mildly and raised his index finger. “We have to remember that things are often more simple than they seem. If not, they would have attacked us before now and driven us off, or even killed us. They cannot do it any more than we can attack them as long as they're holding hostages. The question is . . . what is holding
them
back?”

Gavan shook his head wearily. Then he raised his head, brushing his hair from his eyes and locking his gaze onto Tomaz. “That's it! We have a Gatekeeper. They don't.”