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!”
“It’s OK, Carla! The freaky kid rescued us!” Finn insisted in her hair.
“Stop!” demanded the Primo, quelling her at once.
“I don’t know what’s going on, but we’re in the castle, I think they’re OK!” said Finn. He could feel her pulse thumping through her scalp.
“Romana? English? Deutsche? Française?” demanded the Primo.
“What’s happening?” Carla managed.
“Santiago found you. You should not be here,” said the Primo.
The deformed boy, Santiago, shuffled.
“What do you mean?” said Carla.
A bell rang on his desk. Then two bells. Distant orders began barking out of the speaking tubes.
“Hide her!”
FEBRUARY 20 01:52 (GMT+3). Monastery of Mount St Demetrius of Thessaloniki
Carla felt no fear – she felt warm for the first time in months.
They’d been hurried out of the library as the main doors opened to three brutal-looking adults in black, AK47s slung across their backs, “Siguri” the ragged children called them, as they were smuggled down to a cell-like storeroom, where Carla had been urged to hide in a wooden chest.
They’d heard a fair amount of crashing and yelling, then nothing for a long time.
“Finn,” Carla whispered.
“Shh!” Finn said, listening hard in her hair – then “AHH!” as he found his legs being tasted by a pair of snout-headed lice the size of fat cats, their organs visible beneath their maggoty skin. “GETAAWAYAYYYY!” Finn grabbed the spike that never left his side, but before he could swing, the lice were off through Carla’s hair, roadrunner legs whirring like outboards.
“Are you OK?” said Carla.
“Bookworms,” said Finn.
“Worms in my head?!” she hissed.
“No, not ‘worms’ – that’s just what they’re called. They’re bugs that feed off mould – and me—”
Finn stopped. He could hear something.
Footsteps.
“Someone’s coming!”
The lid of the chest lifted and candle-light revealed a scrap of a girl with