The School for Thieves, page 18
As gruesomely fascinating as the wall was, however, Tom’s eye was drawn to a series of high dividing barriers erected across the cobbled crescent to create six individual channels, each around fifteen feet wide, leading toward the wall. A curtain—color-coded for each house—hung over the six channel entrances.
Tiago Mordechai, the explosives master, stood before the curtains. Master Mordechai was handsome and olive-skinned, with hair swept into a ponytail and a dusting of stubble covering his jutting chin. He looked, in many ways, like a younger version of the Corsair. Tom could smell, even at a distance, his signature scent of cordite.
Mordechai clapped his hands, and the Tenderfoots lined up in their houses, their hands clasped behind their backs, their attention his.
“Time to use your imaginations,” said Master Mordechai, flashing them a smile. “We are not standing at the Red Wall. No. We are, in fact, standing in the courtyard of Castello a Mare in Crete. I believe you know of this place?”
Around him, the students nodded. They had spent the previous week in Leopold Fabergé’s vault-breaking class, studying a famous robbery at the Castello in 1902. The Shadow League had been hired to carry out the theft of the Lion of Knidos from the British Museum in London on the orders of Stelios Kapsis, a Greek trade magnate. Kapsis had paid the thieves handsomely for their trouble, but he was unaware that the League had had a wider agenda in play. A group of Shadow Thieves, led by the renowned lock-picker Gene Narraway, had smuggled themselves into Kapsis’s island fortress, Castello a Mare, inside a replica of the Lion of Knidos.
Once inside the vault, the thieves selected the most precious—and transportable—items there, filling several large canvas bags with treasure before breaking out (the technical details of which had taken two double periods for Fabergé to explain) and making it through the fortress to the outer courtyard. The challenge that they then faced—and that had now been re-created at the Red Wall—was to escape across the guarded courtyard, over the high outer wall of Castello a Mare, and away to safety with the loot.
The guards, Mordechai explained, patrolled the Castello courtyard at roughly six-minute intervals, so that was all the time the students had, from the moment they started the exercise to finishing it.
Dogs also patrolled the yard, and parts of both the wall and the yard were booby-trapped.
The crescent and the Red Wall had been divided into six sections, one for each house, with each section rigged up in the same way.
“On the other side of your curtain, you will find six canvas bags that need to be transferred across the courtyard and up over the wall,” said Mordechai. “You must not be seen. You must not leave anything or anyone behind. You may discuss a plan for how to escape in your groups, but only three students from each house will actually take on the challenge. You are to decide who these three will be.”
The students murmured among themselves.
“If you are caught, or even spotted by the guards, your house will receive zero points,” Mordechai continued. “If you leave anything behind, you will be docked points depending on the item’s value. You have ninety seconds to choose your three representatives. When I blow my whistle, the challenge begins.”
He began to draw back the curtains covering the six paths to the wall while an old lady with a stepladder wandered around the crescent, extinguishing each of the gas lamps. Within minutes the whole place was cloaked in darkness.
Tom could make out very little at first, his night vision poor after the brightness of the lamps, but slowly his eyes began to adjust. He could see six large canvas bags laid out just beyond the blue Guile House curtain. They were bulging and looked very heavy.
The Guile House Tenderfoots pulled themselves into a tight huddle.
“Right,” whispered Cleo, taking charge, “whoever goes has to be strong as well as fast. And it’s not going to be as simple as it looks. I reckon there will be pressure pads under some of the cobbles, maybe some trip wires too. Master Mordechai mentioned dogs—that means there will definitely be dogs. They’ll unleash them almost as soon as the exercise begins. If we want to avoid them, we’ll have to get across the courtyard and onto the wall before they appear. The wall will be booby-trapped. Can anyone remember anything about that from the original robbery?”
“Yes,” said Jaroslav. “Fabergé said that Narraway and his gang almost set off pressure pads on the wall. These activate spikes. We need to watch carefully for large ledges and handholds.”
“Right,” said Cleo. “Small handholds only.”
“That’ll be tough if the bags are heavy,” said Angus.
“They will be heavy,” said Allegra. “And we’ll have to carry two each. It will make the climb really hard.”
“I’m going to be too big to do this,” said Michael, sounding disappointed. “I’d need to use the larger handholds and ledges.”
“I think we should go with Neha, Genevieve, and Tom,” said Cleo, speaking quickly. “They’re all strong and fast. Everyone happy? We don’t have much time to decide this.”
Tom was surprised that she had nominated him. Zhu and Jaroslav clearly felt the same.
“He’s not good enough!” cried Zhu.
“He’s a good climber,” countered Cleo. “He’s totally got the hang of Mischief Walls—you saw that on the last two morning runs. He beat both of you. And he’s stronger—he’s a year older!”
“He’s not stronger than me,” protested Jaroslav.
“Everyone’s stronger than you, Jaro.”
“Ten seconds!” called Mordechai, staring at his wristwatch. “Nine. Eight—”
“We don’t have time to argue,” said Cleo. “Tom’s in. If he mucks this up, it’s on me.”
“You buy us all something if he’s rubbish,” said Zhu.
“Yes, new throwing knives,” added Jaroslav. “They have a new design at the Cutting Edge. I saw them yesterday.”
“All right, fine,” said Cleo, exasperated. She turned to Tom and whispered sharply, “Don’t muck this up. You do, you’re paying for the knives.”
“I didn’t make the deal—” began Tom in protest, but before he could say more, he, Neha, and Genevieve were being pushed to the head of their corridor until they were standing just in front of the bags.
Calls of “Good luck!” were hissed from behind them.
Tom steadied himself, scanning the cobbles. It was so dark…. How could he possibly see anyth— There, was that a trip wire? And those cobbles, did they rise a little higher than the others around them? He nudged Genevieve and pointed toward them. She nodded. She’d seen them too. She whispered to Neha, who also nodded.
“Fast, light,” muttered Genevieve. “Get to the wall as quickly as we can.”
“Three. Two. One.” Mordechai blasted his whistle.
The Guile House three leaped forward in unison with their competitors, all snatching up the bags and swinging their thick straps over their shoulders. They were cumbersome and extremely heavy. As soon as they stepped into the corridor, the other competing pupils disappeared from sight behind the dividing walls. There could be no copying, no cheating to see where someone in another group might set off a trap.
Tom moved as quickly and lightly as he could, his toes and the balls of his feet barely touching the ground as he sprinted, leaping trip wires—imaginary or real he didn’t know—skirting suspicious-looking cobbles, all the while trying to avoid colliding with Genevieve and Neha in the narrow channel. The girls had practiced movements like this dozens of times during the morning training runs and they flickered like the shadows cast by a candle flame. He, meanwhile, was trusting to instinct and blind luck.
Somewhere to their right there was a loud bang and a cry of voices. A flare went up, momentarily lighting the crescent.
“Captured!” roared Master Mordechai. “Zero points for Janus House.”
There were loud mutterings of disappointment from the Janus House Tenderfoots, an outraged cry of, “A trapdoor! How did they miss that?,” but Tom barely heard any of it. The blood was rushing in his ears, and his sole focus was on the task at hand. A leap, a skip, a skid, a small pirouette to avoid Neha, a hop over a trip wire, an awareness that something large was approaching him from behind, a darting jump and he was up on the wall. Genevieve was already climbing a few feet above him; Neha was right beside him. Below, he could hear the growl of the dog, its paws scrabbling on the stone, its searching jaws just out of reach of the climbing feet.
There was loud barking to their right, followed by the sound of a boy crying out.
Mordechai’s whistle blew. “One man down in Artemis House!” Then, a few seconds later, the whistle sounded again. “No… all down in Artemis House! Zero points.”
The musket-shot pockmarks in the wall were all that Tom trusted to hold his weight. He inserted his index fingers as far as he could into two holes, let them take his weight, and then pulled himself up. One finger out, find another pockmark, take the weight, remove the other finger, find a new handhold, rise, repeat. It was staggeringly hard work, the bags wrenching him back toward the ground with their weight, his muscles screaming, the joints of his fingers and wrists on fire. But they were climbing.
A ledge appeared at his eyeline. A wonderful ledge half a foot wide that he could rest his full weight on, perhaps even stand on for some respite. It was certain to be booby-trapped.
He swung away and circumnavigated it, kept on climbing, blocking out the pain, refusing to succumb to fatigue. He dipped into the anger that had been roiling inside him for weeks and used it to energize his movements, to give strength to his limbs. He crept past a barely concealed opening within which he could see the cruel tip of a blade—some kind of spike or javelin that would erupt out of the wall if triggered. But it remained in its housing undisturbed as Tom eased into the rhythm of his climb.
Above him he could hear Genevieve’s labored breathing, could just make out Neha’s grunts of effort. “Keep going,” he heard Neha call hoarsely. “We’re nearly there.”
He counted the seconds off in his head. They wouldn’t have long before the guards came around on their patrol.
Every limb, muscle, and joint felt like it was on fire.
They didn’t have much time left.
Keep going, keep going, don’t let your concentration slip. Keep going, keep focused, keep going…
He was nearly there. He could see the top of the wall. Tom peered up carefully, looking for guards on the battlement, his eyes scanning the brickwork for pressure pads. No, there weren’t any— Yes, there was one. He breathed out slowly and moved his hand from where he had nearly rested it on the lopsided stone, and then carefully pulled himself up onto the wall beside Genevieve and Neha, all three of them too exhausted to say a word.
Chapter Seventeen RECONCILIATIONS
The Guile House Tenderfoots ran, shrieking with joy, all the way back to Half Moon Street, thrilled by their triumph and desperate to tell the rest of the house that they had secured some valuable points—and, almost as importantly, to relay the news that Artemis and Janus Houses had picked up none—while also finding out how all the other groups had done.
In their absence, Locke had started to decorate the house for Yule. Candles now burned in holly-wreathed sticks all around the entrance hall, and an enormous fir tree adorned with baubles and silver trinkets had been erected near the fireplace. It was the first time Tom had seen anything like it outside the window displays of some of the grander department stores in London.
One by one the ranks of students began to gather in the drawing room, announcing their results as they arrived.
“That’s so fantastic, you guys!” whooped Connie, upon hearing the Tenderfoots’ news. “We got max points as well—and so did the Initiates. The Apprentices picked up nearly full points, and I think the Fledglings and Greenhorns got some as well.”
“Yeah, we did!” Jericho was at the front of the second-grade Greenhorns coming into the hallway, and he was beaming. “We didn’t get max points, but very nearly. And Arthritis was rubbish this morning. I reckon we’ll have closed the gap on them loads!”
There was a happy buzz in the house and a magical feel to the place with the Yule decorations going up—and for the first time in weeks Tom’s spirits lifted. But then he caught sight of Maxine in the crowd. His expression collapsed, and he stomped to the stairs, leaving the hollering celebrations behind.
* * *
They were due to have a late breakfast that day to celebrate the end of the Michaelmas semester, at which point there would be an announcement on where each of the houses stood in the House Challenge league table. Tom was hungry, but he wasn’t sure he could face sitting through a celebratory meal with the rest of the students. He wondered if he might try to persuade the cooks in the kitchen to give him some leftovers.
Alone in his room, he sat at his desk and tried to ignore the roar of the party down below. He pictured Bernie in the Guttknot’s bone yard, crushing up the dried bones of horses, dogs, and other animals for fertilizer and animal meal, hour after exhausting hour, day after brutal day, receiving a beating from the wardens if he was slow or took a break or thrown into the isolation hole if it took their fancy. Tom could still taste the dank and fetid air of the Rawlock’s hole, feel the crawl of the damp stone against his skin.
He blinked back into focus, then stared down at the heavy metal object lying on his desk. After saving up enough money from his shifts at Morgenstern’s, he had sent details of a very specific cast-iron drainage cover to Jessica Chaffinch. The package had arrived from London the previous afternoon. He turned the grille around for a while, contemplating it from every angle, measuring its depth and width, scrutinizing the screw fixings, and examining the drainage openings.
He puffed out his cheeks and sat back. The adrenaline high and the thrill from competing in the Yule Challenge had completely vanished now. He could hear the thud of footsteps and excited voices as the other students returned to their rooms nearby, having a laugh together in the corridor and chatting loudly, and he felt suddenly trapped. He wanted to get away from everyone, but where could he go without being seen?
Then he remembered something the Corsair had said to him when he had first arrived—how in the past, pupils had been locked in their rooms at night but would regularly break out to meet their friends in town, or simply hang out together on the roof.
He opened his window, letting in a blast of freezing air, and used his forearm to clear the sill of snow. He used the heel of his hand to bash off a thick layer of ice and then climbed out onto the ledge. There, as he had hoped, he found old handholds whittled into the stone wall of the tower. Picking his way carefully up this old rat run, he climbed, passing icicles that hung from the eaves like huge glass spears. It took some effort to overcome the overhang and pull himself onto the roof, and he had to clear away some of the deep snow from the slates before hoisting himself up.
He collapsed back into the drift on the roof and stretched out his tired limbs. Propping himself up, he stared out over the snow-covered town and the surrounding mountains blanketed in white, the air eerily silent, his breath clouding thickly around him. He breathed in, letting the clean, crisp air fill his lungs and clear his mind, ignoring the cold on his backside, then stared for a while at the peak directly across the valley, his thoughts on little more than the spiraling, hypnotic swirls of the falling snow.
Eventually he became aware that a light mist was drifting overhead. Confused, he turned to find the source.
Enzo and Jericho were sitting nearby, their breath clouding thickly on the air. He hadn’t heard a sound from them approaching. It was just like his first meeting with the Corsair.
“What’re you doing up here?” he asked, too surprised to be tetchy.
“I saw you climbing past my window,” said Enzo apologetically. “Went and got Jer. Thought we’d see how you’re doing.”
“Yeah, not had a chance to speak with you in ages, mate,” said Jericho. “How are you doing? Well done in the Yule Challenge this morning, by the way. Heard you did a great job.”
Tom wanted to say something dismissive or cutting, but the cold air and the silence seemed to have cleansed his mind so completely that he couldn’t dredge up the energy required to be angry.
“Thanks,” he muttered, and turned back to face the town.
There was an awkward pause, and then Enzo and Jericho shuffled down the rooftop and sat on either side of him.
“You know we’re sorry about everything, don’t you?” said Enzo.
“I know we’ve said it a hundred times, but we really mean it, mate,” added Jericho, giving Tom a playful nudge with his elbow. “Are you going to stay angry with us forever? It’s going to be a long slog sharing a corridor if you are. We’ve got years ahead of us here. And, you know, we like you, so it feels a bit of a waste.”
Tom let out a long sigh. This, he realized, was going to be a turning point, one way or another. He could tell them where to go and keep playing the role of the angry loner—and that would probably be it for their friendship. He would be an angry loner forevermore. But Jericho was right; they had years ahead of them at the school. And in the League.
“I know you’re sorry,” he said at last. “It’s all right. I know none of it was your fault. I just didn’t take it very well.”
“You can say that again!” cried Jericho.
“We’re all in this together, you know,” said Enzo. “For life. Shadow Thieves have to stick together. I’ve got your back, you’ve got mine—that’s how it works.”
Enzo’s words reminded Tom of the way things had been back in the warehouse.
“Plus we’ve got the potential to be pretty good mates, which helps,” added Jericho, throwing his arm around Tom’s shoulders.
Tom couldn’t help smiling. It felt good. He hadn’t been close to a genuine smile in weeks. “Yeah, you guys are all right, I suppose. When you’re not making a fool out of me.”
