The Thief's Apprentice Read online

“I’ve seen you before!” Mr. Gaunt said. “You’re one of—”

  “Hello, Mr. Gaunt,” said Dr. Mikolaitis. “Or should I call you Mr. Scant the Younger, now? You’re looking well. The truth is that I am your brother’s man on the inside. Ah—you are going to ask how you can know I am not the Society’s man on the inside here. You must trust me. And think to yourself—would I really be here, doing what I am doing, if I am on their side?”

  “Well, I suppose there’s not a lot of point standing about arguing about it, is there?” said Mr. Gaunt.

  Mr. Scant turned to his brother. “Where’s Winifred?” he asked.

  “She insisted we bring Lady Hortensia. The cat. Putting the poor creature into her handbag. She won’t be—ah, there she is.”

  Mr. Gaunt’s wife had stepped out of the house and strode toward us with purpose. I looked with pity at the brown handbag swinging from her arm.

  Mr. Scant again addressed Dr. Mikolaitis. “How long?”

  “Still ten minutes. Should I set off the flares?”

  “Not yet. They’ll catch on and start shooting into the air.”

  Mrs. Gaunt reached us at the barn, demanding, “Here, what have you done with our gate?”

  “Knocked it down,” said Mr. Scant. “Please lower your voice. We are watched.”

  Mrs. Gaunt’s eyes widened, and she clutched her handbag tightly. It let out a faint yowl.

  “What exactly is the problem?” asked Mr. Gaunt.

  “We need more time to get the balloon ready. We need a distraction.”

  “Hmm. Could always use the horses,” Mr. Gaunt said. “Get some old clothes and stuff them with straw and set the horses loose.”

  Dr. Mikolaitis and Mr. Scant looked at him for a few seconds, then at one another. Mr. Scant nodded.

  “I’ll go and grab some clothes, then,” said Mr. Gaunt.

  “Please hurry,” said his brother.

  Inside a small stable a matter of yards away, Mr. Scant found and quickly saddled three horses. Mrs. Gaunt followed him around, making a fuss but ensuring the straps were all properly fastened as she went. Mr. Gaunt appeared with some old clothes, and we all set about stuffing them with straw. The Scant brothers then strapped the improvised mannequins to the horses, posed like riders bent low.

  Mr. Scant led the horses to the stable door and turned to the rest of us. “Take these flares to Dr. Mikolaitis,” he said, distributing them among us. He stayed where he was as we stepped out, and Dr. Mikolaitis beckoned us over. “Not a moment too soon,” he said, nodding toward the smashed gates. A shiny black motorcar had appeared there, and two men with greatcoats stepped out to regard us from under the brims of bowler hats. A moment later, a number of other men in the same coats dropped down from the walls of Mr. Gaunt’s grounds.

  “Get in the basket of the balloon,” said Dr. Mikolaitis, taking the flares from Mr. and Mrs. Gaunt, who both looked happy to be rid of the things. “Boy, stay here and help me.”

  Dr. Mikolaitis lit the first flare with a match, and then the others, directing me to place two of them a few paces away. I hurried to do as he said, and as smoke began to spread, the men began their advance. They were still quite some distance away, and walking with the caution of men expecting to tread on booby traps, but they would be upon us in a minute or less.

  Dr. Mikolaitis grabbed my wrist and led me back toward the stable. Mr. Scant waited there with the horses, and once we were clear of the risk of being trampled, he set them running through the smoke in all directions. With any luck, the Society men would chase the effigies, thinking that we had tried to make our escape on horseback. As a final measure, Mr. Scant guided us through the smoke to where the steam traction engine still stood, climbed up, and set it running in the approximate direction of the motorcar.

  “Good-bye, steam traction engine,” said Dr. Mikolaitis, in a grand tone. “You served us well, but now we take to the skies!”

  Cries of confusion began to ring out from all around us, and we hurried to join Mr. and Mrs. Gaunt in the balloon’s basket. Mr. Scant helped me in amongst various boxes, cylinders, and capsules. We started to heft sandbags over the side, and Mrs. Gaunt let out a yelp as the basket lurched forward, bumping along the ground once or twice before it took to the air—narrowly missing the roof of the barn. A faint meowing emerged from Mrs. Gaunt’s handbag, so she shushed it, running a hand comfortingly over its straps.

  “We’re going! We’re going!” I cried, unable to restrain myself. I pulled the scarf back over my mouth and tried to see the ground, but there was nothing below but grayness. However, as we burst out of the smoke, I felt my legs go weak: we had ascended much higher than I had expected, and much more quickly.

  “What’s the matter?” Dr. Mikolaitis said as I slid down onto the floor of the basket.

  “Everything’s so small,” I whispered. “I don’t think I like flying very much after all.”

  “Which way are we going?” Mr. Gaunt yelled.

  “It doesn’t matter very much,” said Mr. Scant. “The wind will take us.”

  “What the devil do you mean, it doesn’t matter?”

  “Any way is as good as the next, really. What matters is that we move the things in the basket aside when we know what direction the harpoon will come from.”

  “Harpoon?” Reginald and Winifred Gaunt cried together, in the perfect unison of two people who had been married a very long time.

  “Yes,” Mr. Scant said. “Any sighting?”

  “Not yet,” Dr. Mikolaitis said, scanning the skies with a small telescope. “Probably not for some minutes.”

  “Keep looking. Master Oliver, you’d best stand. You don’t want to be impaled, so be sure to be quick on your feet.”

  The best I could do was get to my knees and peep over the edge. Eventually, I noticed the round shadow we were casting on the ground, and the sight amused me somehow. “I can see our shadow!” I said. “Come and see!”

  “Not on your life!” said Mrs. Gaunt.

  “It’s not so scary once you’re used to it,” I remarked, as casually as I could. Then I noticed something else. “What’s that other shadow?”

  Dr. Mikolaitis leaned over me. “Ah. Upwards,” he said, before going to the other side of the basket and pointing his telescope up toward the sun. “There she blows.”

  I didn’t need a telescope of my own to see what he meant. Descending upon us, with a shadow that would soon swallow us up entirely, was an immense, dark dirigible—very much like a great sea monster swimming toward its helpless, drifting prey.

  XV

  Harpooned

  lear this area here,” said Mr. Scant, pushing me and his twin aside, then shifting some of the small boxes. This made the gondola hang in a slightly lopsided way, but Mr. Scant didn’t seem worried. As the dirigible came closer, we made no attempt to escape. Our balloon’s steering method was rudimentary—but even with state-of-the-art controls, any attempt to escape would have been futile.

  The reason Mr. Scant had cleared part of the basket soon became evident. The dirigible shot several harpoons at us, and while most missed, dangling forlornly until they were wound back in, one hit. It burst through the side of the basket and then through the bottom as well, sending splinters in all directions.

  The great airship did not reel us in, as I had presumed it would. Instead, it very slowly began to turn. After a time, I realized that the ship had started propelling itself away from us: we were being towed. Dislodging the harpoon would be our only way to escape, but that would only invite the firing of another. Judging from his folded arms and the pointed way he ignored Mrs. Gaunt’s stream of accusations, though, Mr. Scant was not worried. His brother stayed silent, but if Mr. Gaunt was afraid, he hid it far better than I would have expected.

  Mrs. Gaunt eventually ran out of breath and sat down, then struggled to keep poor Lady Hortensia inside her handbag as she fished about for a paper fan. After some time drifting, Mr. Scant raised his voice over the hum of the dirigible�
�s engines. “You can see the Thames. We’re being taken out toward Gravesend.”

  “An appropriate name, maybe,” muttered Dr. Mikolaitis.

  Mr. Gaunt let out a heavy breath. “It’s bringing us to the Cobham Mausoleum. One of their places.”

  Mr. Scant nodded, his face growing grimmer, which scarcely seemed possible. When it became clear nobody was going to explain any further, I had to speak. “Whose places? What’s happening?”

  “Reginald means that this mausoleum has been taken as a playground by the rich men who fancy themselves magicians,” Mr. Scant said.

  “Mages,” his brother said. “They say they’re mages. If we’re being precise, what they’re really doing is trying to convince each other they want to be mages. Daft. All of them quietly complain about how absurd the whole thing is, how it’s all ridiculous and childish and they know it—but when they gather together en masse, not one of them will admit it.”

  “Do you remember my little display of legerdemain with my claw, Master Oliver?” asked Mr. Scant.

  “When you turned that claw made of scraps into the real one? I remember.”

  “Perhaps now would be an appropriate time for some more,” Mr. Scant said. He showed the palms of his white gloves—the claw still being in its bag—and then clapped them together. When he opened them, a small pencil had appeared, with strip of paper wrapped around it. After licking the lead, Mr. Scant wrote a short message. Then he looked back to me. “Magic trick number two: producing a dove.”

  Mr. Scant opened one of the boxes in the basket just enough to draw out a bird from within. He put the message into a tube attached to the bird’s leg, while Mrs. Gaunt moved her handbag a little further away. Then Mr. Scant sent the messenger bird flapping out into the open air.

  “Abracadabra!” he said.

  “Glad you’re enjoying yourself,” said Mr. Gaunt, as Dr. Mikolaitis snorted a little laugh.

  As the dark dirigible continued to pull us along like fish on a line, the two Scant brothers stood side-by-side to look for landmarks ahead of us. Soon they were teasing one another about magic tricks they had learnt as children and laughing as though they had never been apart—as though they’d both remembered they were family. Mrs. Gaunt sniffed and told Lady Hortensia how silly they were, but I could see her smiling too. The few other times I had heard Mr. Scant laugh, the sound had seemed an aberration of sorts, but now it came entirely unforced. For a moment, in the middle of the sky, I witnessed an affectionate normalcy return to two men’s very strange lives.

  Dr. Mikolaitis was standing alone, so I went to his side. “Not afraid to look any longer?” he asked.

  I peered out of the basket. “We’re a lot lower now.”

  “Yes. Slowly, we are descending. Does it make you less afraid, like this?”

  “I suppose it wouldn’t make any difference—falling out from here, compared with falling out when we were higher.”

  He stuck his bottom lip out thoughtfully. “Maybe you have a few seconds fewer for enjoying the view.”

  “There is that.”

  “Look, you can see the mausoleum now—there, you see it?”

  “Where?”

  “There.”

  The winter mist had made a bumpy gray quilt of the countryside, but after a few moments, I found the particular piece of gray Dr. Mikolaitis was showing me: a large square building with columns all about it, set in a circle of stone, with a pyramid for its roof. More on the scale of a townhouse than a palace or a museum, the Cobham Mausoleum nevertheless stood grandiose and forbidding from its lonely place on a hill, amongst skeletal, winter-stripped trees.

  “They call it a mausoleum, but no one has ever been laid to rest there,” Dr. Mikolaitis said. He had produced another cigarette and already looked bored with smoking it. “Possibly it was always built as a place of magicks. The earl who lives, ah . . . hereabouts, he owns this place. But once the Lice showed an interest, he wanted no more to do with it.”

  “What do you suppose they will do to us?”

  “Oh, I would not like to guess at this. Perhaps their rituals are in need of body parts for magic spells—I imagine young ones are the best kind.” His cigarette flared for a moment before he hungrily sucked down the smoke. “But you know, I would not worry too much.”

  “Well, that certainly sets me at ease,” I said.

  Dr. Mikolaitis grinned. “You remind me of myself as a boy. You want to sound brave, so you make a joke. It makes it sound like you are not afraid.”

  “I’m not a coward!”

  “No. I do not think that you are.” Stubbing out his cigarette on the corner of a wooden box, he produced a toothpick to worry at his teeth. “But only a madman is afraid of nothing. It is the man who accepts his fear and still acts who is brave. But to laugh at fear to hide it away is a means to fool other people. As a coward would.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that, so I nodded slowly. Dr. Mikolaitis took that as the end of our conversation and flicked his toothpick over the edge of the basket. By then, the dirigible had pulled us close enough to the ground that Mr. Scant said we ought to get to the business of deflating the balloon.

  “The man in charge will want to drag the whole thing inside the building,” Mr. Scant added. “That’s his way. We must be sure that he gets it.”

  “You know who’s in charge, I assume,” said Mr. Gaunt.

  “I do.”

  The dirigible landed first, and from inside its large gondola came none other than the Valkyrie. She stalked over to us with a cheery cry of “Special service!” and sliced the rope attaching us to the dirigible with her cleaver. “Whoopsie!” she cooed, grabbing the rope before we could drift away. With that in hand, she hauled our hovering basket, and us within it, to the doors of the mausoleum. Once we were close enough, the Valkyrie hauled us through the doors and cut away the ropes that attached the basket to the balloon, sending us crashing to the floor. That left me, Mr. Scant, and the rest of our party rather absurdly gathered in a little basket inside the grand mausoleum.

  Though this tomb was empty of the dead, the living had gathered around us. Mysterious figures in monks’ habits stood with their faces hidden in shadow. A multitude of candles had been laid out in intricate patterns and strange circles drawn on the floors. From the pillars, grotesques leered down at us with their ugly faces.

  “I don’t like this one bit,” Mrs. Gaunt said, clinging tight to her husband. I wouldn’t have minded Mother or even Father being there for me to cling to, but I stood alone, wanting to look brave. Not merely to look brave, but to be brave.

  And then one of the men stepped forward and pulled down his hood. In my shock, I actually pointed my finger and cried out, “It’s you!”

  So unexpected was the sight that I couldn’t help myself. I had to state the obvious.

  “You’re Mr. Binns!”

  XVI

  Inside the Mausoleum

  Binns had no time for me. Instead, he pointed at Mr. Gaunt and barked, “Gaunt! You traitor!”

  Mr. Gaunt gripped the edge of the basket. “My name is Gaunt now, but I was born a Scant. This is my brother!”

  “Argh!” A frustrated Mr. Binns reached up as if to tear his hair out. “You’ve just lost me another five pounds.”

  Another figure stepped forward and lowered her hood: Mrs. Binns, wearing a satisfied smirk. “Another win for me. So obvious, when Gaunt made a fuss about going to the Diplexito house. I’ll make a note of it in the book.”

  Mr. Binns preferred yelling at us to acknowledging his wife. “And here’s the Diplexito boy! And Mrs. Gaunt! And even Dr. Mikolaitis. Oh, you Russian turncoat!”

  “Lithuanian,” Dr. Mikolaitis replied.

  “Ah, Gaunt, Gaunt. I knew you were dishonest, Gaunt. I gave you everything you asked for, and this is how you repay me? And you, the ever-infuriating Claw! Burning that pathetic burrow of yours wasn’t enough, eh? You should have run while you had the chance. Always the gentleman, weren’t you, Scant? Ther
e by Sandleforth’s side, watching me, waiting to steal away my property.”

  “My brother is not your property,” Mr. Scant said.

  “Oh, but he is! Isn’t he, Thomasina?”

  “He is,” said Mrs. Binns, smiling very sweetly. “He made a blood pledge.”

  Mr. Binns laughed. “And you thought you could run away in one of my company’s balloons. You weren’t expecting us to give chase in the Indefatigable herself, though, were you now? That put a stop to your little adventure. Oh, the Claw. The Claw, the Claw. You’ve been a real thorn in my side these past months. Every time I reclaimed one of the order’s relics, you stole it from us.”

  “Their importance to you was clear from how long you waited to sell them on.”

  “Well, we must maintain relations with our brothers in the East,” Mr. Binns said. “Your actions were bad for business. Did you really think it wise to damage our standing as the world’s foremost hidden mystical society?”

  I thought I heard Dr. Mikolaitis stifle a laugh.

  “Nothing I returned ever belonged to you,” Mr. Scant said. “Not a thing. Nor does my brother. I am taking him back. He will have no more part in your petty burglaries.”

  “Burglaries, he says!” Mr. Binns pantomimed shock. “When we are only reclaiming what is ours.”

  His wife nodded. “You know nothing of the truth of this world,” she said, stepping toward our basket with eyes like a snake’s and a grin like a jackal’s. “The artifacts of the great men who founded this order should be with those who . . . best appreciate them. And you. What are you doing here, little Oliver?” she asked. “The young accomplice we heard so much about—could that really have been you?”

  When I didn’t answer, her look soured.

  “I asked you a question.”

  “What you are doing is wrong!” I shouted.

  “It was him! I can see it in his eyes, my darling. Ah! If only we’d had a wager on that,” Mrs. Binns said, turning away sharply. “The problem with children is they repeat what their parents and priests tell them and imagine that means they know right from wrong!”