The Royal Ranger

Forty-one

He heard them before he saw them.

There was a faint sound of movement through the long grass and low-lying bushes behind him. Instantly, he froze. He lowered his breathing rate so that no movement or sound was perceptible.

He resisted the almost overpowering temptation to turn and look. Instead, he strained his ears, listening to the faint rustling and swishing of clothes through the grass. Two of them, he thought. He couldn’t say how he knew that. It was just the result of years of experience, years of stalking and waiting for prey.

The men, assuming they were men, were only a few metres behind him now, and several metres off to one side. Their attention would be focused on the Carter house, he knew. The odds were well against their seeing him, sitting huddled in the cloak. The wind was sending clouds scudding across the sky, alternately concealing then revealing the moon.

The men paused for a few seconds, presumably studying the house and the village itself.

“No one around,” said a voice. It was startlingly close to Will, and only his discipline and training stopped him from starting in surprise. The voice couldn’t be more than two metres away.

They were on the move again and they slid past him, almost close enough to reach out and touch. There were two of them, as he had guessed. One was wearing a dark cloak. The other was all in black. As he moved, Will saw that there were long, uneven strips of diaphanous black cloth trailing from his arms and shoulders. They swirled and stirred in the wind, giving him the appearance of a tattered, unearthly being—a creature from the graveyard.

As the cloaked man crouched, the tattered figure produced a tight-fitting hood and pulled it over his head. He glanced sidelong at his companion and Will could see that the mask covered his face and was marked with lines of white paint, delineating what looked like a skull. Finally, he donned a wide-brimmed, floppy black hat, looking for all the world like some tattered, ghostly scarecrow. He bent low and began moving through the long grass towards the house. He would be a terrifying sight to any child who woke and saw him. Will imagined the throat-closing fear that would assail young Violet in the next few minutes. He was tempted to stop this abduction, and save her the horror of it all. But he knew that if he caught these two, the rest of the gang would fade away—with the children they had already abducted. Much as he hated the idea, he had to let poor Violet endure the next few hours. The slaving gang must have a hideout somewhere. If he could track them to it, he and Maddie could release all the captives and destroy the gang once and for all.

The black figure was by the house now, almost lost in the shadows. Will wondered if Maddie had seen the two men and hoped that if she had, she wouldn’t try to signal him. They had devised a simple signalling method, but it could only be used when the kidnappers were not placed where they could see Will or Maddie. The evil-looking intruder was standing at the side window of the house. Mentally, Will nodded, although there was no actual movement of his head. He had reconnoitred the house the previous evening, looking for possible points of entry. The side window was the most suitable. Its lock was weak and primitive and the window itself was shielded from the sight of any passer-by in the village high street.

The cloaked man, crouched only five metres away from Will, moved nervously, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. Obviously, he was keyed up, watching and waiting for something to go wrong.

The black tattered figure eased the window open. He put one leg over the sill and slipped inside the house. Again, his companion shifted nervously, waiting for a shout, a scream of fright, an uproar from the darkened house. But there was nothing.

Minutes passed. Will focused on the open window—now a dark square hole in the side of the house. Then he saw movement. A small figure in a white nightshirt clambered over the sill, followed by the black, predatory scarecrow. He held her by one arm, never letting her loose. As they made their way across the field to where Will and the Stealer’s companion waited, Will saw her stumble. Her abductor heaved her to her feet and Will could see she had a sack over her head.

The cloaked man stood to greet them. He uttered a low laugh as he saw the frightened girl stumbling awkwardly in the grip of the tattered figure.

“Get that sack off her head,” the Stealer told him. “We’ll move faster if she can see where she’s going.”

“How did it go?” his friend asked.

The black figure shrugged. “She had a brother who woke up as I went into the room. But once he saw who I was, he shut up quick smart and pretended to go back to sleep. I told him if he raised the alarm, or told anyone what he’d seen tonight, I’d come back for him and cut out his eyes. Scared the living daylights out of him.”

The cloaked man was busy undoing the sack and removing it from Violet’s head. She was a pinch-faced little girl, with badly cut brown hair. She was gagged with a thick piece of cloth and Will could see tears running down her face. But she remained silent, her large, frightened eyes moving from one man to the other.

The Stealer was dragging off his skull mask now. He let out a sigh of relief as he shook his head to loosen his hair, which had been matted down under the tight mask.

“That’s better,” he said. “I must say, Victor does a good job getting those kids scared of the Stealer. That’s the third time I’ve had one wake up and just freeze in terror.” He laughed softly.

Scum, Will thought. Victor, he assumed, was the name of the Storyman, who sowed such terror in the hearts of the children of these villages.

“Full marks to you. The Storyman idea was yours, after all. He’s just doing what you told him to do, Jory.”

In spite of all his discipline and training, Will’s head snapped round at the name. Fortunately, the two men were facing away from him and the movement went unnoticed. But then the Stealer turned back, running his fingers through his hair and scratching his scalp. At the same moment, a cloud that had been obscuring the moon scudded away on the wind and the pale light fell on his face.

It was a face Will had never forgotten. He had seen it only once before, as he stood, helpless with rage, on the edge of a river, and watched a punt slide away from the bank. But it was burned into his memory as if with a hot iron.

The Stealer in the Night was Jory Ruhl.

Beneath the concealing folds of the cloak, Will’s hand moved to the hilt of his saxe, closing around it. A savage rage filled his heart and he wanted to leap to his feet, throw back the cloak and strike at the man who had been responsible for Alyss’s death, but he held himself back with an enormous effort. Deliberately, he slowed his breathing and gained control of the blind, unreasoning fury that threatened to overwhelm him. He had finally found Ruhl—ironically, when he was no longer looking for him. And Ruhl had no idea that he had been discovered.

But if Will killed Ruhl here and now, he would never find the missing children from Danvers Crossing, Boyletown, Esseldon, and who knew how many other villages in the fief. Will knew he could track the kidnapper back to his base. Presumably, it would be somewhere on the coast, where an Iberian ship could embark the captured children and take them off to the Socorro slave market.

Will would follow Ruhl to the coast, release the children and, if possible, destroy the ship.

Then he would kill Ruhl.

As the red rage slowly abated, he became aware of what Ruhl and his assistant were saying.

“Well, she’s the last one,” Ruhl said, jerking his thumb at the weeping little girl. “That makes ten and that’s how many we contracted for with Eligio. We’ll collect the others and head for Hawkshead Bay. The ship is due in three days.”

His companion nodded assent. “It’s been a successful month,” he said. “We only drew a blank in two villages.”

“It would have been a better month if that Ranger hadn’t started snooping. That wasted four days of our time.” The Stealer produced a length of rope from his pocket, pulled the girl’s hands behind her back and began to tie her wrists together.

Liam, Will thought. If he’d had any doubts that the slavers were the ones who had killed the young Ranger, they were dispelled by Ruhl’s words. That’s something else you’ll pay for, he promised.

“And I still wonder what happened to Benito. He was supposed to scare off that girl but he’s disappeared,” Ruhl continued.

The cloaked man shrugged. “I always thought he was unreliable. He’s probably drunk somewhere, or in jail. He was always getting into trouble.”

“Well, it’s one less to share the profits with,” Ruhl said. He tugged the rope around Violet’s wrists, testing the knot. The girl gave a small cry of pain. “Be quiet,” he ordered her. Then he continued to his companion: “Let’s go. We’ve stood here long enough.”

He grabbed the young girl’s arm and dragged her along beside him as he jogged across the grassy field to the dark line of the trees. The other man followed.

Will waited until they had disappeared into the forest. He’d have no trouble tracking them and besides, he knew they were heading for a place called Hawkshead Bay. He wondered briefly about the man they called Benito.

“Probably the one who tried to kill Maddie,” he said to himself.

When he was sure they were gone, and he could no longer be seen, he stood up from his hiding place. His knees ached with the movement, having been bent in one position for several hours.

“I’m getting too old for this,” he muttered. He had no idea that he was repeating a sentiment that Halt had expressed many times.

He took his flint and steel from his belt pouch. Turning his back to the direction Ruhl had taken, he spread his cloak wide to form a screen. Then he struck two sparks from the flint in quick succession.

It was the signal he had devised with Maddie before they began their vigil. Even though the spark was tiny, it showed up clearly in the darkness. The spread cloak shielded it, in case Ruhl happened to still be in sight and glance back at the house.

A few moments later, he saw a dark form slip out of the alley where Maddie had been concealed. Staying in the shadows cast by the eaves of the buildings on the far side of the street, she moved quickly to the left for about twenty metres. At that point, she became lost to his sight. Minutes later, she crept silently out of another alley, parallel to the one beside the Carter house. She made her way to where Will stood, waiting.

“I saw them,” she said. “Did they take the girl?”

Will nodded. “Yes. And now they’re heading back to their lair. It’s at a place called Hawkshead Bay.”

“Do you know where that is?”

He shook his head. “Not yet. We’ll check the map and see if it’s marked there. If not, we’ll simply follow Ruhl’s tracks.”

She looked at him, slightly puzzled, her head to one side. “Ruhl? Who’s Ruhl?”

“He’s the Stealer,” Will told her. But something in his voice caught her attention.

“Do you know him?” she asked.

Will nodded grimly. “He’s the man who killed my wife.”