The Grave Robber's Apprentice Page 4

  “Peter the Hermit,” her mother said, barely able to contain herself.

  “Peter the Hermit, yes.”

  Angela’s father circled his hand for her to go on, as if hope lay in the telling of the tale.

  “Peter the Hermit said he could see angels hovering over me,” Angela continued. “He said they’d always protect me and keep me safe. That’s why you named me Angela Gabriela. Angela for the angels and Gabriela for the archangel Gabriel.”

  “That’s right,” her mother said. “Peter was such a kindly man we let him sleep in the castle haymow. After a month he left for the far mountains, where he founded a hermitage for lost souls like himself.”

  “I know, I know,” Angela frowned. “But what has this to do with me?”

  “Angela, my love—your father and I shall have you spirited to Peter the Hermit’s retreat. Hidden in the mountain clouds, you’ll be safe from discovery.” Her mother beamed, triumphant. Her father nodded with delight.

  Angela looked from one to the other. “What of the servants who’d bring me there? The archduke would torture out their secret and I’d be hunted down and killed. So would the servants, the hermits, and you.”

  A pall descended, the silence filled by the rattle of the carriage and the clatter of the horses’ hooves. Her parents squeezed Angela’s hand.

  “Angela,” her mother said, “despite how things may seem, never give up hope. Hope will see you through the darkest times when those around you are broken by despair.” Her face crumpled. She covered it with her fan.

  Back at the castle, Angela tried her best to act hopeful. It can’t do any harm, she thought, and it will make Mother and Father happy.

  “Would you like me to put on a play imagining a happy ending with the hermits?” she asked, a week after their return. Her parents were in the auditorium of the puppet theater. Before, they’d been so absent; now they were around every moment. It was awful watching them weep when they thought she wasn’t looking.

  Her father stirred. “A play? How delightful.” The croak in his throat was almost gone.

  Her mother attempted a smile. “Can we help you?”

  Angela glowed. “Would you like to?”

  In no time, the count was building the set; the countess was making hermit puppets with big pearl buttons for eyes and a shag of white yarn for beards; Nurse was knitting costumes; and Angela was putting quill to parchment, composing the noblest of speeches.

  That night she performed the piece for her audience of three. It was a romantic comedy starring Peter, his fellow hermits, the Boy—cast as a lowly goatherd—and Angela Gabriela, Avenger of God. After many adventures and a few songs, the loyal comrades destroyed the evil forces of Archduke Arnulf and his henchmen.

  Her parents laughed and applauded. Even Nurse had a good time.

  Basking in their attention, Angela thrilled at a curious discovery. The more she acted happy and hopeful, the happier and more hopeful she became. By pretending hard enough, she’d made her make-believe feelings real.

  At least in the moment. That night, her terrors returned. She dreamed she was being drowned in a tub of milk, strangled with ribbons, and tossed from a parapet.

  So it continued: days of play and nights of terror. As the archduke’s arrival drew near, the terror spilled more frequently into the light until all pretending of hope and happiness disappeared and she lived in dread from waking to waking.

  The night before she was to be taken, Angela slid into a nightmare that felt as real as it was terrifying. She was chased through a dark forest by an unseen monster. Angela fell. She couldn’t get up. The creature stood over her. It was the Necromancer. “I have what you need,” he said, and disappeared.

  Angela woke up, the dream’s meaning as clear as rain-water. Everyone said the Necromancer had potions, and that’s exactly what she needed. A potion like the one in the story her tutor had told her. It concerned two feuding families. A girl her age loved a boy from the enemy family, but was engaged to her older cousin. To avoid the marriage, she took a potion that made her appear dead.

  Unfortunately, the story didn’t turn out very well—in fact the girl and boy both died—but Angela was sure her ending would be much better. When the archduke arrived, she’d take the Necromancer’s potion and fall to the floor in a deathlike sleep. Arnulf would see her buried in her family’s crypt and go back to his palace. Her parents would untomb her and spirit her to Peter the Hermit, where she’d live in secret, happily ever after.

  Angela jumped out of bed. She had to get to the Necromancer at once. Should she tell her mother and father? No. They might try to stop her. At the very least they’d insist on coming along for protection. She’d have liked that, but she had no intention of putting them in danger.

  The clock in the corridor struck midnight. There was no time to waste. Angela tiptoed down the sleeping hallway to her father’s study, where she borrowed a gold coin from the secret compartment in his desktop, and from there up to her turret theater, where she grabbed a beggar-woman costume and Nurse’s endless woolen shawl. Then, armed only with hope, she slipped from the castle to search for the Necromancer in Potter’s Field.

  Chapter 10

  The Dangerous Mission

  Angela made her way down Castle Hill rehearsing the speech she’d prepared in case anyone gave her trouble. It was a line from one of her plays: “I have business with the Necromancer. You’d best leave me be, or he shall see you to the gates of Hell.” She skulked as she imagined a creature of the night might skulk, keeping to the shadows as she passed by the mill and on through the village. Soon she was at the churchyard. Beyond lay Potter’s Field.

  Having never consulted the Necromancer, Angela wasn’t sure how to find him. In her puppet plays, she’d imagined he’d have a little fire to guide the way, but there was none. Nurse had told her that villagers sought him out to contact the dead, or to cast spells to ruin their enemies’ crops or turn their babies into cabbages. So she hid behind a bush, intending to follow one of them.

  An hour later, she was still waiting. I could be waiting forever, she thought. I’ll have to go on my own. Angela picked herself up, imagined the field was a giant stage, and made her entrance.

  It was hard to see where to go. A blanket of cloud had blown in; the moon and the stars were tucked in bed. She swept the air in front of her to avoid running into bushes, but still stubbed her toes on brick grave markers. The biggest problem was Nurse’s shawl. The coarse knit snagged on things unseen as if fingers were reaching out of the night to pinch her. And the wool rubbing against her ears sounded like creatures whispering.

  Angela stood still. The sounds and the pulling stopped. “Who’s there?”

  Silence.

  I’m imagining things. Angela shivered. She glanced back to where the village should have been, but every last candle had been extinguished. Where was she exactly? She removed the shawl from her head and spun in a circle. Everywhere was nowhere.

  That’s when she heard it. A slow, rhythmic tapping. No, not a tapping. What then? A thudding? A thunking? Whatever it was, it was something, somewhere—and something somewhere was better than nothing nowhere.

  Angela hurried toward the sound. As she got closer, she heard murmurs and grunts, and saw a tiny light struggling against the night. She ran, catching her foot in the entrance to a weasel’s den. She cried out.

  The light disappeared. The thudding and grunts stopped too. Now what she heard was a curse and a scramble.

  “Stop! Wait! I know you’re there!” she shouted, and ran even faster toward where the light had been. The ground disappeared. She fell through the air and landed on something hard. It felt like rotting boards. Earth stretched up on either side of her. There was the most horrible stench she’d ever smelled.

  She felt up the wall of earth. How would she ever escape? The wood under her feet gave way. Her ankles sank into something squishy. Frantic, she tried to claw her way out, but only loosened the dirt. It fell in her eyes
and mouth. She feared the hole would cave in on her. “Help! Please! Come back!”

  A hand reached down and gripped her own. “Who are you?” she gasped. “What are you?” There was no answer. Angela took this as her cue: “I have business with the Necromancer. You’d best leave me be, or he shall see you to the gates of Hell.”

  “You’ve got business with the Necromancer?”

  “Indeed I do,” Angela said in her best heroic voice. “Take me to his dwelling that I might seek his power.” The line had sounded much better in her theater. Still, it had the desired effect. Whoever it was hauled her out, opened the shutter on his lantern, and gasped.

  “Little Countess!”

  Angela was stunned. “Why, you’re the Boy from the barrens!” She looked down into the hole. “I fell in a grave. Was the sound I heard you digging?”

  Hans looked a little sheepish.

  Angela gasped. “It was, wasn’t it? You’re a grave robber!”

  “No, I’m not!”

  This was true as far as it went. Hans had dug up the grave, but he’d yet to enter the Grand Society of Grave Robbers. All month, he’d slept outside the cave. He’d been soaked by thunderstorms, eaten by insects, and burned awake by the sun. Finally, he’d begged Knobbe to let him redeem himself. Tonight had been that chance. But the Little Countess had arrived and Knobbe had fled, leaving him in the worst of all worlds—a failure to his father and a villain to her.

  “It’s dangerous for you here,” Hans said glumly. “Let me guide you back to your castle.”

  “Not till I’ve seen the Necromancer.”

  From out of the night came a laugh as cold and dry as a rustle of birch leaves. “Ah, Little Countess, I’ve been expecting you.”

  Chapter 11

  In the Necromancer’s Lair

  The Necromancer floated into view, feeling his way with a long wooden staff. A wraithlike creature, hairless and pale, his willowy frame was draped in a dirty velvet shroud. His ears were withered; his nose and lips rotted. He had no teeth; no eyes. His sockets were empty caverns rippling with shadows from the lamplight.

  “How long have you been there?” Angela whispered.

  “Since the moment you thought of me,” the Necromancer replied. With long, bony fingers, he withdrew two bird eggs from his dirty shroud and placed them in his eye sockets. “I’ve been watching you since you left your castle, my crow’s eyes circling the night sky.”

  “Run!” Hans cried.

  “Run yourself,” Angela snapped.

  “Yes, run yourself,” the Necromancer purred.

  “Little Countess, please, you don’t know what he’ll do, him and his gang of Weevils!” Hans pleaded. “It was them that told him you were here, you mark my word. Vicious boys—the kind that swarm the weak and torture cats. When I was a child, they tried to lure me into the dark. They—” His eyes went wide.

  Angela looked over her shoulder. A dozen urchins lurked in the lantern light. A few held rocks in their hands; others sticks. They weren’t more than ten years old, but there was a menace in their eyes that chilled Angela to the bone: These were the devils that had picked and poked at her in the dark.

  The Necromancer’s lizard tongue darted between gray gums. “The countess and I have business, boy. Go, lest I send my pets to your cave.”

  Hans stumbled backward and ran.

  The Necromancer turned to Angela. “My lady.”

  The lantern went out. The world went dark. Angela heard low whistles from the Weevils. Why hadn’t she fled when she’d had the chance?

  “You didn’t flee because you had no choice,” the Necromancer said in her ear. “It was either me or marriage and death with the archduke.”

  Angela jumped. How had the Necromancer crept up behind her? How had he read her mind? It didn’t matter. There was no turning back. She was trapped alone in the night with a living nightmare and a gang of savage boys.

  “Necromancer, I seek . . . I seek . . .”

  “I know.”

  “I can pay.”

  “I know.”

  Angela’s flesh crawled as he sniffed the air around her. “Necromancer.” She struggled to steady her voice. “If I return to the castle alive, I shall have more gold to give you.”

  “You think I want gold?”

  “Don’t you? I thought people from the village . . .”

  “You’re not from the village,” the Necromancer said. He took her hand, and led her through the dark, guided by the smell and the taste of the night.

  “Where are you taking me?” She tried to pull away, but the grip of his claws was fiercer than the archduke’s iron fist.

  They entered a thicket; the Necromancer released her. Angela tried to run but wherever she turned she was cut by thorns. She dropped to her knees in tears. Would she ever see her parents again?

  Behind her, she heard a hollow grind; something was opening. The Necromancer reached through the dark, lifted her to her feet, and led her down a staircase into the ground. The opening scraped shut.

  The Necromancer snapped his fingers. A lamp flared overhead.

  Angela was in an earthen room. Roots grew down from the ceiling. Worms crawled out of the walls. A dozen rickety cages were stacked along the back wall, each holding a pet crow. Along the sides of the room, rough shelves held countless bowls and jars of herbs, insects, and animal parts. Piles of bones lay in the corners. Under the lamp was a small table with the top half of an upturned skull. Three rotted teeth were embedded in the bone.

  “Am I going to die?” Angela asked.

  “Not yet,” the Necromancer said.

  Angela’s eyes widened in alarm. “What do you mean, ‘not yet.’”

  “Come now, no need to be frightened. I mean simply that we all have a time and place appointed. You came to me for a potion. I’ve brought you here to receive it.”

  Angela collapsed in relief. “Thank you, Necromancer.” Her hand shaking, she produced the gold coin she’d borrowed from her father’s study. “For your troubles.”

  The Necromancer took the coin from her fingers as easily as if he had eyes. He read it with the tip of his tongue and nibbled it with his gums. He twirled his fingers. It disappeared into thin air. “Sit against the wall.”

  Once Angela was settled, he rubbed a little spit into the skull. “Now then,” he muttered, “a bit of this, a bit of that.” His hands flew around the room depositing pinches of herbs, fungi, and insect parts into his bony mixing bowl. Then he cracked the crows’ eggs in his sockets. The yolks slid down his cheeks and off his chin into the skull. He stirred furiously, cackling in ancient languages, while the crows cawed from their cages. At last he drained the lumpy mixture into a glass vial and held it to her nose.

  “A taste of my work, and you shall appear dead for twelve hours,” he said. “After that, you shall awake to your destiny.”

  Angela felt a chill. . . .

  The next thing Angela knew, she was at the churchyard. The vial was in a cloth bag around her neck. Hans was beside her.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.” Angela blinked. “How did I get here?”

  “I dragged you back from where the Necromancer left you.”

  “How did you find me? You ran away.”

  “Not far, I didn’t. I followed you by the sound of your feet. You vanished into the thistle patch. A few minutes later, he brought you out and dumped you by the dead tree.”

  “It was brave of you to come after me,” she said.

  He looked at the ground. “I’m not brave.”

  There was a haze in the air. It would soon be dawn.

  “Shall I walk you back to the castle?” Hans asked.

  “Thank you, but I can manage by myself.”

  “Don’t be so sure. The Weevils are still about.”

  Angela hesitated. “Well . . . if you’ve nothing else to do.”

  They walked in silence. Hans shot her shy glances; Angela pretended to be calm. He showed h
er the shortcut through the fields. When they reached the ditch at the foot of Castle Hill, they stopped and stared at each other, neither knowing what to say.

  “I just realized,” Angela blurted, “I don’t even know your name.”

  “It’s Hans.”

  “Hans?”

  He blushed. “Yes, Hans. A name as simple and unimportant as myself.”

  She wanted to say, But you’re not unimportant. You’re the mysterious boy from the barrens. The hero and villain in most of my plays. Instead, all she said was, “I’m Angela.”

  He nodded.

  “Well then, Hans . . . I guess I should say thank you . . . and . . . well . . . good-bye.” Before she did something embarrassing, Angela hurried up the hill. She could feel Hans’ eyes behind her, watching out for her from the ditch. A new and delicious sensation tingled across her forehead.

  “Hans.” She smiled to herself, the very sound of his name a delight. “Hans. Hans. Hans.”

  Chapter 12

  Buried Alive

  “In twelve hours I’ll wake up and you’ll rescue me from the crypt,” Angela told her parents.

  She was alone with them in their room, where she’d gone immediately on her return, thinking it wise to reveal her plan while they were still in bed. This way they’d be too groggy to be truly angry, and her mother wouldn’t bang her head on the floor if she fainted. Most important, Angela could avoid the long ears of the servants, who loved nothing better than to gossip over their bowls of porridge. Nurse in particular had a tongue that could tease a tale into tomorrow.

  She’d anticipated her parents’ shock, though she’d imagined a prettier speech from her father than: “Dear Lord, what did you do?!?”

  Angela gave her a mother a whiff of the smelling salts she’d brought along for the occasion. “The Necromancer’s potion is the only thing that stands between me and certain death,” she pleaded.

  Her parents had to admit it was true.

  “There are roles you must play for the trickery to succeed,” Angela said. “Father, to avoid suspicion, busy yourself about the estate as if preparing for a joyous occasion. Also, send for the priest to bless the archduke’s arrival. If he’s here, my burial can happen at once.”