The Comeback of the King Page 11

  “This is actually quite hard to do. While you’re awake your mind is drowned out by all the other waking minds but when you’re asleep the Hunter can fine-tune the search. Tomorrow you really should just leave Salisbury. Get out of range.”

  “Don’t you start!”

  Ted’s friend shrugged.

  “Well, if you really want to help yourself, the least you could do is wake up.”

  *

  Ted’s lifted his head up from his folded arms and blinked sleepy gum-filled eyes around the office. It was still lit by the computer screen but there was an outline of grey daylight around the door to the front of the shop. He winced because his back ached like someone had been cutting into it with a rusty saw. He had spent the night slumped at the desk.

  He groaned and straightened and stretched, and felt everything click back into place. His mouth tasted foul – he hadn’t been able to clean his teeth the previous night – and his head was itchy and the rest of him just felt grimy and sticky in all the wrong crevices and badly in need of a shower. On the computer screen the high score table recorded the humiliating fact that Mr Furry had edged Ted out and the cat would be going into the semi-finals up against Robert.

  He got up from the chair and walked around the room a few times, twisting his back, flexing his knees. Then he sat back down, logged back on and went through the tedious routine of disguising who he was and checking the text email service.

  “Yes!”

  There was one message, from Sarah, replying to his question of the night before.

  you bet!!

  Chapter 11

  Ted lurked in the clothes shop, pretending an interest in the row of t-shirts for eight- to ten-year-olds that he really didn’t have (though it did remind him that he hadn’t bought presents for his siblings yet), keeping one eye on the window and the view outside. He had bought himself a baseball cap which he had pulled low, even though the shop security guy wouldn’t let him keep his hood up indoors. The rack of shirts was next to the plate glass window, which gave him a good view of the Poultry Cross. The ancient monument outside was a fifteenth-century stone shelter on pillars, open to the wind but giving protection from the rain. Just in front of it, Silver Street turned sharp left with the traffic into Minster Street. Behind it stretched the pedestrianised Butcher Row, running parallel to New Canal behind a row of shops.

  Unlike his employer, Ted thanked God for Sunday trading. On the last Sunday morning before Christmas Salisbury was alive and jammed solid with shoppers, and the crowd gave Ted plenty of space to hide in.

  And here came Sarah, as discussed. His stomach marked the occasion with an extra loud rumble, just to remind him that the contents of the Agora’s biscuit tin really were not the same as the full fry-up Barry liked to cook on a Sunday morning.

  meet me poultry cross 11oclock dont tell anyone…

  The pink padded coat and even pinker sparkly backpack stood out a mile in the crowds. She had probably told their mum she was just going out to a friend’s around the corner from home. Ted had gambled that her curiosity would win out over her honesty and he tried not to feel ashamed he had made her lie. Needs must.

  And her curiosity had won … hadn’t it? That had been the other, bigger gamble. Would Sarah really keep this to herself, or was Ted being out-cunninged into a trap? He shuffled as close as he dared to the window and craned his neck left, then right. There was no sign of any police anywhere: no dark blue uniforms hidden among the crowd. But they didn’t always wear uniforms, did they?

  Sarah was leaning against one of the pillars of the Poultry Cross and peering down the row for any sign of Ted. She was looking in the wrong direction to see him twenty feet away.

  He retreated a little further into the shop and took out his new phone. It was pay-as-you-talk, not registered in any name, bought with Malcolm’s cash half an hour ago.

  teds new number, do you have any money?

  A moment later he saw Sarah startle and check her phone. She thumbed the keypad for a moment …

  yes

  buy a hotdog from teh guy down street then call me

  Sarah scowled at the fresh text, then took a final look around and set off down Butcher Row to the hotdog seller, who seemed to be doing a roaring trade. Ted sidled out of the shop, pulled his hood up, peered round the corner. The flash of pink was disappearing into the crowd.

  He darted across the Row and into the small alley that led to New Canal. He would have plenty of time here because there was a couple of minutes’ worth of queue in front of the hotdogs. He hurried across New Canal, dodging between the traffic that crawled beneath the Christmas lights, and installed himself just inside the department store across the way from the Agora. He could plainly see the front of the bookshop.

  Soon after that his phone rang.

  “I’ve got the hotdog.” Her voice sounded strangely muffled.

  “Cool!” Ted’s stomach rumbled again at the thought of some hot, filling food. “Come to the shop. I’m in there. It’s open.”

  He had left the shop unlocked – another calculated gamble, but the ‘Closed’ sign was in the door and he hadn’t intended to be out of it for more than ten, fifteen minutes.

  “Okay.” A pause, just long enough to swallow, and Ted suddenly realised with shocked indignation what she was doing. “See you in a–”

  “Hey! Are you eating it?”

  “Um … yes?”

  “That’s my breakfast!”

  “Oh. You should have said.”

  “Just bring it …”

  But instead of hurrying over to the Agora to meet her, Ted hung up and resumed his watch. This was the final test. If this was a set-up, if Sarah was working with Inspector Stewart, this would be where squads of cops descended on the shop. Helicopters would roar overhead; SWAT teams would swarm down from the roof going “Hut! Hut! Hut!” (redundant in a two-story building, but Ted liked to imagine); cars blazing with blue and red lights would screech to a halt from different directions in front of the shop …

  Nothing like that happened.

  Soon Sarah appeared out of the alley and walked along to the Agora. She paused, tested the door, then disappeared inside.

  Still no police cars; still no hue and cry. Ted dashed across the road and felt his phone start to ring as he did. He ignored it and barged into the shop where Sarah was still waiting with her phone pressed to her face.

  “Where were you? That wasn’t funny!”

  Ted locked the front door from the inside, then plucked the mostly intact hotdog away from her with one hand and gave her a gentle push with the other.

  “Into the back–”

  Mmm, hotdog … It was warm and filling and Ted was prepared to overlook the fact Sarah hadn’t got onions with it because she didn’t like them. He perched on the desk edge in the shop’s inner sanctum while Sarah sat on a chair and impatiently watched him chew the hotdog into sausage- and tomato-flavoured mush. Finally he had to swallow and it sent a happy, warm trail all the way down.

  “Did you–” (Burp) “–bring it?”

  “It’s really heavy,” Sarah complained. She opened her bag and pulled out his laptop.

  “Come to mama …!” The click of the latch as he opened it; the texture of the casing; the just-right resistance of the keys; the warm plastic smell – they were even more of a comfort than the hotdog had been. An element of normality had just slotted into an empty space in his life. He set it to one side to let it boot up. He could almost hear TEDLISH crying out from the hard drive for attention, but he forced himself to concentrate on even more important things.

  “So, how’s home?”

  Sarah shrugged.

  “Mum cried a lot last night.” Ted’s hotdog-induced benevolence towards the world burst like a balloon. “This morning she’s just unhappy. Barry’s grumpy. Robs is being all clingy to Mum. And you’ve still got to see the King.”

  Ted hadn’t forgotten that Sarah would still be taking that line and he was prepared
for it – in fact, he welcomed it.

  “Yes I do!” he agreed with forced cheer. “And you’re going to come with me!”

  She looked sideways at him.

  “That had better not be a lie.”

  “Hey, I bet you lied when you told Mum where you’re going.”

  She shrugged. “I said I was going to Millie’s house. And I did. I mean, I biked right past it. But you lie much more than me.”

  Ted was shocked.

  “I do not!”

  “You do! All the time! You’re always saying things that aren’t true!”

  “Look, I–” Ted tried to pin down what he meant with vague gestures in the air. “Sometimes … I just understand things better than Mum and Barry, and if they understood them too then they’d know how it is, so I tell them … uh … how things would be … if they understood them too–”

  “Still lying,” Sarah mumbled and Ted dropped the subject.

  “Before we go to see the King–” he said, trying to make his voice enticing. He could see it just made her more suspicious so he went back to being just matter-of-fact. “Okay, before we go to see the King, we’re going to make–” He couldn’t resist it and he leaned forward, dropping his voice. “A sacrifice!”

  She blinked blankly at him.

  “What’s that?”

  Okay, so much for suspense. Ted rolled his eyes.

  “I talked to Zoe about this. She said sacrifice is giving up something really valuable to you that you will never get back, and because of that, if you use it in a ritual or a prayer it can be really powerful. Zoe says in the Bible there’s all these really rich people who gave a few quid to God and that wasn’t a sacrifice at all, and one old woman only gives a few coins, but Zoe says that was a sacrifice because it was everything she had. Or you can give up food, or drink, or time, or … uh–”

  On the phone last night, Zoe had even said that a vow of celibacy was a kind of sacrifice, which was why so many religions went in for it. Ted wasn’t going to talk about that to his little sister and with the best will in the world he wasn’t sure it was a promise he could keep.

  “ … Or … well, some ancient civilisations sacrificed people, like, cut their hearts right out of them while they were still alive, but we’re not going to do that. Or it could just be an animal.”

  Sarah gasped. “Not Mr Furry?”

  “No-o-o! Not Mr Furry! The point is, a sacrifice has to be really valuable.”

  “So what are we sacrificing?”

  “I’ll come to that. But I told you I was going to tell you about last summer, didn’t I?”

  Sarah clapped her hands and her face lit up.

  “Yes!” But almost immediately she reverted to dark suspicion. “How do I know you won’t just make it up?”

  “Because I’ll tell you something you didn’t tell me. You told me your dream had flying, and the cathedral …?” She still looked sceptical, but also tentatively eager. “I bet there was this old person too. At least one old person, but there might have been two, a man and a woman, and they were wearing these weird, fancy robe things, and their hair–”

  Sarah’s face began to shine as he described the thief and the witch. When he got to the hair, she actually held her breath. He illustrated what he was saying by pulling at his own head.

  “… It was shaped like a V, with the point hanging down here, and the rest of the head was shaved–”

  “That was them!” Sarah breathed. “They were there!”

  “So I’d better tell you what it’s all about, then–”

  Sarah was actually quiet for about five minutes while Ted outlined what had happened that night.

  There were things he glossed over, because she didn’t need to know and because he had no desire to revisit them. But he concentrated on the main point, which was that the thief had come to Salisbury to steal ancient knowledge of incredible power, and Zoe’s task had been to track down the small group of guardians who were meant to stop him. The problem was finding those guardians in the first place. They weren’t meant to know themselves who they were – their power would only activate when and if the Knowledge was stolen – and there were a lot of candidates to choose from. They would all be descendants of the original magicians who created the Knowledge, but that had been a long, long time ago.

  “Sometimes there’ll be several generations within a bloodline and no one will be a guardian,” Zoe had said. “Then several guardians might suddenly appear in a cluster of siblings, or cousins. Think of it like a very recessive gene–”

  It turned out the thief had found the guardians first, but he hadn’t killed them because then more guardians would appear to fill the vacancy. Instead he had just broken them, disabling their power. The witch had made a few running repairs as best she could but it hadn’t been quite enough. The guardians had faced the thief a few feet away from where they were now, outside the shop in New Canal at three in the morning, and they had been totally owned in a short, sharp battle that trashed the street from end to end. The thief had killed one of them – and that had been the turning point. A new guardian had appeared to replace the old one: one who hadn’t been tampered with and who had the full range of powers that a good guardian was meant to have. And that guardian had been Sarah, possessed by the guardian spirit.

  It had all been bottled up inside him for so long – it was so tempting to let it all out. But he stuck to the plan and only let out what Sarah needed to know. Epic battle had ensued, dog fighting around the cathedral with blasts of power. But when it came to:

  … I got stranded on top of the cathedral spire with a tiny fragment of the Knowledge inside me, which I’ve never used except once to get down from the spire and then to recompile Robs’s mind and reinstall it in his head …

  –that was unnecessary detail and he left it out.

  Sarah didn’t say anything until he had finished.

  “So … we’re descendants of these magicians?”

  “Yup. You, me, Robs … at least one of Mum and Dad too. But you’re the one with the power. Like I said, not everyone’s a guardian – but you are.”

  “Why don’t I remember any of it?”

  Sarah didn’t remember any of it because the witch had made sure she didn’t – only, apparently the witch wasn’t as good as she thought she was.

  “Well, you do, don’t you? In your dreams. I don’t think you’re meant to remember it, day to day. It might be kind of distracting. Plus it’s meant to be a secret. But that power’s still in you, right? I mean, someone else might steal the Knowledge again. You still need to be a guardian.”

  He could tell from Sarah’s expression that she was back into suspicious, spot-the-catch mode.

  “So why are you telling me all this now?”

  “Because we’re going to try and wake the power up again.”

  *

  On the phone last night, that had been the point where Zoe had gone ballistic. Summarised, the conversation had gone something like:

  Ted: So, who is this King?

  Zoe: Don’t know.

  Ted: Okay, how can we fight him?

  Zoe: Don’t know. Obviously some kind of magic going on. Might be able to fight back with a ritual, something like that, way outside my experience though … (That had been where sacrifice was mentioned.)

  Ted: We do know someone who could fight back, though, don’t we? And I mean, fight back, kick his ass and wipe the ground with it afterwards.

  Zoe: Ha-ha (nervously) – true, but not what the guardians were intended for.

  Ted: Balls to that. We can use them.

  Zoe: … and anyway, the guardians are too well hidden. They emerge in response to the Knowledge, that’s all.

  Ted: But can we kind of kickstart the process? You said something about ritual …

  Which had led to:

  “Ted, no! That is the stupidest, most utter … Look, Ted, just – no. Okay? No. You have no idea of the kind of power you’re playing with … Anyway, it won’t
work. Why not? Well–”

  He could tell she was trying to think up good reasons.

  “Any kind of ritual, any kind of prayer, anything like that is like … like dialling a phone, right? Where you have no idea who’s at the other end and going to answer. I was very, very lucky. I did this really stupid thing, this ritual I got out of a book, because I thought it would be cool if weird spiritual powers got in touch with me – as it was, I just opened myself up to anything that was passing and as it happened, thank God or whoever, it was herself who got in touch, and recruited me to work for her, and made sure no one else came in. But if you do this, if you can make it work – look, I don’t know what’s happening in Salisbury at the moment but there’s obviously weird stuff flying around and any of that could pick up on what you’re doing, treat it is an invitation to come in … Ted, you don’t want that to happen–”

  That last bit had been the one point where Ted and Zoe agreed. He didn’t want this to happen. But unlike Zoe, he was pretty sure he didn’t have a choice.

  Anyway, he would be addressing the guardian spirit, and that was in Sarah, who would be right in front of him. It wasn’t like he was issuing an open call to every spiritual power for miles around. He was gambling that the guardian would want to answer the phone, because it was loyal to the people who created it and in the King it would see just as much a threat as the thief.

  Watching Sarah go into battle with the thief had been the worst thing ever. When the building had fallen on top of her it had been like the end of the world, until Sarah emerged, unscathed and protected by her own magical forcefield. If Ted thought there was the slightest chance of sending her into harm’s way then he wouldn’t be doing this. But the King didn’t seem to work on the zapping principle – his power was more subtle than that. He might even be completely clueless when it came to zapping whereas a guardian could zap for Britain.

  No – Ted really could not see another way of doing this.

  *

  “What do we do?” Sarah asked.

  “Sit,” Ted said, “on the floor.”

  He slid down and sat there cross-legged. After a moment, Sarah got down off the chair and sat opposite him. Ted reached for the laptop and put it down between them before tapping out his password.