Something powerful is drawing Ward back to Devil's Island. Something he thought he had forgotten. He must evade vicious lighthouse keeper George Jaggles in order to rescue it, but Jaggles will soon be the least of his worries. Because an assassin is...
He opened the pouch and tipped the dice out onto his hand. They landed on the Quill and the Bear. Ward would never get used to seeing the Bear. Nevertheless, he found himself transfixed by the pictures. In the dim blue light from the pool they seemed different. It was as if they were described upon dirty panes of glass – that he could peer through them to shadowy rooms beyond. Not with his eyes, but with his mind.
The Quill came first. That was easy. Writing.
He didn't have to look far beyond the crude picture to discover that meaning. He could sense others behind it, perhaps endless layers of meaning, but they didn't interest him. The first layer was the right one.
The Bear didn't come as fast. He felt he had to peel back several layers to get to the meaning he wanted. What he saw in there scared him, for there were terrible things hidden behind the sign of the Bear. He found what he was looking for and hurried back to himself.
Greed, he thought. The Bear is greed. Of this he was certain. As certain as he was that it was nighttime. That if he reached down into the pool his fingers would get wet.
Writing. Greed.
But he hadn't the faintest idea what it meant.
He realised that he had been nodding off as he stared at the dice – had slipped into the twilight of slumber that precedes sleep. What woke him was the sound. It was an unexpected sound.
A nine was barking.
There it was again. Was it two nines? It was hard to tell. It might have been the sound echoing through the cave that made it sound like two. If it had been coming from outside he would have thought the men from the ship had brought nines with them to track him down. But it seemed to Ward it was coming from deeper inside the island.
If there was a nine trapped in the cave he couldn't just sit here. He would not be able to sleep, for one. Now, if George Jaggles had been trapped in the cave, Ward might have considered leaving him there for a night or two, if only to mellow him out a little. But this wasn't Jaggles; it was an innocent creature.
Ward put the dice back in the pouch, the pouch in his pocket, put Fidelma back in hers, slung the bag over his shoulders, and proceeded deeper into the cave.
The light soon faded away to nothing. The tunnel narrowed and the ceiling dropped until he was walking at a crouch, brushing the walls on each side. The floor, previously fine sand, had given way to smooth rock. It seemed too flat to be naturally formed, and when he knelt and ran his hands over it he discovered that it was more like paving. Strange. The barking of the nines – and it was two, he could hear them clearly now – had grown louder and more frantic, but they seemed now to his ears happy barks, the sound of animals at play.
The tunnel began to widen again, and it grew lighter up ahead; it seemed to Ward's eyes like sunlight, which was of course impossible. The barking grew louder with each step Ward took.
He turned a corner and saw something that made him stop in his tracks.
The ring.
He recognised it at once. It filled the tunnel ahead of him, as it had filled the aisle in the library in his dream. His head reeled. Was he dreaming again?
Except there was something different about this ring. Its inside was filled not with darkness, but a bright sunlit room with a blue-tiled floor and white walls. He might have thought it was a picture if not for the two white nines that stood in the foreground, both looking at Ward and whimpering with excitement. But when he moved to the side their eyes didn't follow him, and it was clear they couldn't see him. Could they smell him perhaps? Or hear him? The smaller of the two stood up on its hind legs, and Ward had a moment to wonder if it would fall through the ring into the tunnel, but its front paws came up against a hard surface on the other side of the ring. He could hear its claws scrabbling against this invisible wall.
If he had had time to think about it, he might have come to the conclusion that it was the dice that made him do it. Or perhaps not. He might already have begun to deny, even to himself, the power they had over him. He might have blamed it on mere curiosity.
In any case, he stepped over the edge of the ring and into another world.
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For persevering with this story thus far, please accept my sincere gratitude, and this 1.5 kilogram tin of creamed corn.
