Return of the Emerald Skull (15 page)

I glanced out of the window of the headmaster's study. It was difficult to believe that, only four short weeks earlier, a massive wooden pyramid had dominated the whole quad. Now it was gone – the broken cabinets and tables used to stoke up the school boilers – and brand-new desks, dining tables, cabinets and doors had been brought in to replace them. They were the very finest the city workshops could provide. And I should know; I had just placed the final invoices and work-orders on the headmaster's new mahogany desk.

My new friend, Will Farmer, had helped me with the mass of paperwork that refitting the school had entailed. He was a quick learner and not without talent. The lad would go far.

The headmaster passed me a cup of tea, which I stirred slowly. He ran a finger over
the polished surface of his new desk.

‘Bit of an extravagance, I know. But I couldn't face the thought of the old one, not after …’ Archimedes Barnett shuddered.

I nodded and took a sip of the warm sweet tea. I knew how he felt. The sight of poor Thompson will always haunt me. But could I have handled things differently?

‘It was all my fault,’ said the headmaster. ‘If it hadn't been for me and my stupid bird collecting—’

‘You mustn't blame yourself, Headmaster,’ I said, putting down my cup. ‘You might as well blame the archaeologist who dug up the skull in the first place. Or me, for delivering it—’

‘You have nothing to reproach yourself for, Barnaby,’ said the headmaster hotly. ‘Why, if you hadn't been here, I shudder to think what might have happened.’

We were silent for a moment, both lost in thought.

I had a pretty good idea what might have happened. After all, I'd had four weeks to look into it – during late nights spent poring over dusty volumes from the shelves of Underhill's Library for Scholars of the Arcane.

Catincatapetl – Emerald Messenger of Darkness, Master of the Underworld and Lord of Chaos – was at once one of the most feared and one of the most revered gods of an ancient jungle civilization.

Mysterious and mystical, this civilization's ruined cities, with their great stepped pyramids, had drawn archaeologists and treasure hunters over the years, like anteaters to a termite mound. Most came away with little more than a few shards of pottery and a bad case of jungle fever.

The real jewels of the jungle weren't mythical treasures buried beneath ancient ruins at all, but the exotically coloured birds of the forest, with their magnificent plumage.
Collectors like Archimedes Barnett couldn't get enough of such specimens as ‘the blue-crested bird of heaven’, ‘the vermilion hummingbird’ or ‘the emerald messenger’, and were prepared to pay handsomely for them. Supplying exotic birds proved a neat sideline for any enterprising archaeologist.

Professor Rodrigo de Vargas was, from what I gathered in my research, one of the most enterprising. He was an expert on the savage cult of the god Catincatapetl. According to legend, Catincatapetl's followers offered up human sacrifices of such number and with such barbarity that the neighbouring tribes finally rose up in revulsion and destroyed their civilization.

Catincatapetl disappeared into the mists of time, remembered only as a name given to a rare and beautiful bird of the jungle, ‘catincatapetl, emerald messenger of darkness’. Until, that is, Professor Rodrigo de Vargas made the discovery of his career,
digging in the ruins of a forgotten jungle pyramid.

The fabulous jewel-encrusted skull that he uncovered from beneath a heavy stone slab gazed up at him with glowing eyes of ancient malevolence. De Vargas was the first of a chain of mortals to fall under the skull's evil influence. A year ago, according to newspaper cuttings, Professor de Vargas's treasure hunting came to an abrupt end when his body was found in the gutter in the port of Valdario.

Of course, a jewel-encrusted skull from an ancient civilization would have created a sensation on the international art market, but Catincatapetl had other plans …

Not long after, a Captain Luis Fernandez of the SS
Ipanema
offered up for sale a rare specimen of ‘the emerald messenger of darkness’ to interested bird collectors on the open market. Strangely, although many lucrative offers from bird collectors from that part of
the world were not slow in coming, the captain would accept only one – from the headmaster of a private school in a far-off country, for which he set sail. It was a country that, the almanacs revealed, would soon experience a total eclipse of the sun. The hapless captain and his crew were never seen again …

The rest, as they say, is history.

We were all pawns in the evil scheming of Catincatapetl as he sought to regain power after untold centuries buried beneath a jungle ruin. But thanks to Mei Ling, and the art of yinchido that she'd so expertly taught me, I had managed to break free from its evil stranglehold for an instant. It was all I'd needed …

Finishing my tea, I followed the headmaster as he walked me across the quad towards the playing fields.

‘I don't suppose,’ said Archimedes Barnett, frowning as we approached a discoloured
stain in the corner of the quad, ‘that you have had any luck tracing our missing water butt?’

I shook my head. In the turmoil and confusion following the solar eclipse, nobody had noticed the two workmen arriving to help with the clear-up. Along with the wrecked desks and cupboards, the water butt had ended up in the back of a cart.

‘Disappeared on its travels,’ I said grimly. ‘Searching for another eclipse …’

Archimedes smiled. ‘Which, according to my almanac, Barnaby, won't be for another seventy-one years. By which time,’ he added with a nod towards the playing fields, ‘we should be well and truly prepared for it.’

I looked across the field. There on the pitch was a raised mound, on which eleven boys – fives mallets held high – were attempting to tackle a twelfth, who dodged and dived past them. Reaching the far end of the mound, he grasped a ball the size of a head from a set of
wooden stumps, and hurled it with all his might towards a net on the other side of the pitch, while members of his own team cheered from the sideline.

‘Green skull!’ they cried out as the ball landed in the net.

‘What are they playing?’ I asked, turning to the headmaster.

‘Our new school game,’ he replied, beaming back at me. ‘We call it “Grimes”.’

LEGION of the DEAD

Turn the page for an exclusive peek at the
first chapter of the new Barnaby Grimes
book, in stores Winter 2010.

Excerpt from
Legion of the Dead
by Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell
Copyright © 2008 by Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell
Published in the United States by David Fickling Books,
an imprint of Random House Children's Books,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York

have heard people exclaim that they'd be better off dead — weary washerwomen on a midnight shift in the steam cellars, ragged beggars down by the Temple Bar, fine young ladies snubbed at a Hightown ball … But if they had seen what I saw on that cold and foggy night, they would have realized the foolishness of their words.

It was a sight that will haunt me till my dying day — after which, I fervently hope and pray, I shall remain undisturbed.

This was not something that could be said for the ghastly apparitions that stumbled through the swirling mists towards me, their
arms outstretched before them, as though their bony fingertips rather than their sunken eyes were guiding their lurching bodies through the curdled fog.

A wizened hag, there was, with a hooked nose and rat's nest hair. A portly matron, the ague that had seen her off still glistening on her furrowed brow … A sly-eyed ragger and a bare-knuckled wrestler, his left eyeball out of its socket and dangling on a glistening thread. A corpulent costermonger; a stooped scrivener, their clothes – one satin and frill, the other threadbare serge – smeared alike with black mud and sewer slime. A maid, a chimney-sweep, a couple of stable-lads; one with the side of his skull stoved in by a single blow from a horse's hoof, the other grey and glittery-eyed from the blood-flecked cough that had ended his life. And a burly river-tough – his fine waistcoat in tatters and his chin-tattoo obscured by filth. Glistening at his neck was the deep wound that had taken
him from this world to the next.

I shrank back in horror and pressed hard against the cool white marble of the de Vere family vault at my back. Beside me – his body quivering like a slab of jellied ham – the Colonel was breathing in stuttering, wheezy gasps. From three sides of the marble tomb in that fog-filled graveyard, the serried ranks of the undead were forming up in a grotesque parody of a parade-ground drill.

‘They've found me,’ the Colonel croaked, in a voice not much more than a whisper.

I followed his terrified gaze and found myself staring at four ragged figures in military uniform, who were standing on a flat-topped tomb above the massed ranks. Each of them bore the evidence of fatal injuries.

The terrible gash down the face of one that had left his cheekbone exposed and a flap of leathery skin dangling. The bloodstained chest and jagged stump – all that
remained of his left arm – of the second, splinters of yellow bone protruding through the wreaths of grimy bandages. The rusting axe, cleaving the battered bell-top shako, which was embedded in the skull of the third. And the bulging bloodshot eyes of the fourth, the frayed length of rough rope that had strangulated his last breath still hanging round his bruised and red-raw neck – and a flagpole clutched in his gnarled hands.

As I watched, he raised the splintered flagpole high. Gripping my swordstick, I stared at the fluttering curtain of bloodstained cloth, tasselled brocade hanging in filthy matted strands along the four sides. At its centre was the embroidered regimental emblem – a snake and a bear – framed in a golden oval, and set off beneath with the
rd
words
33 Regiment of Foot
written in an angular italic script. The ghastly standard-bearer's tight lips parted to reveal a row of blackened teeth.

‘Fighting Thirty-Third!’ he cried out, his voice a rasping whisper.

The corpses swayed where they stood, their bony arms outstretched before them and tattered sleeves hanging limply in the foggy air. I smelled the sourness of the sewers about them; that, and the sweet whiff of death. Their sunken eyes bored into mine.

We were surrounded. There was nothing Colonel de Vere or I could do. The standard-bearer's voice echoed hoarsely round the graveyard.

‘
Advance!
‘

Watch out for

LEGION OF THE DEAD

in Winter 2010.