The Dark Flight Down by Marcus Sedgwick Read Free Book Online Page B

ruins of the Tower, brooding.
    “Boy!” he said to the thick dark air. “This wasn’t supposed to happen. Not yet. But your fate is mine now. You will be mine.”
    He pulled the lens from his pocket and held it tight in his fist.
    “And I have this, at least. . . .”

3
    For a long, long time Boy saw nothing, heard nothing. It was as if he had become deaf and blind, and panic began to well up inside him. Finally he could stand no more, and as much to prove he had not gone deaf as anything else, he shouted into the darkness.
    “Hello! Hello?”
    His voice fell dead around him, with a short, curtailed echo. It reminded him of those dank underground tunnels where he had been pursued by Valerian, and he didn’t like the memory one bit.
    “Please! Please don’t leave me here!”
    The heavy silence covered him the moment his voice was killed by the close stone walls and low damp ceiling. He was about to cry out for a third time, when he caught a whiff of the smell he had sensed before. His heart beat faster, but he heard nothing. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to be calling out into the nothingness.
    He put his head back on the cold stone floor, and still trussed up like a slaughtered beast, he lay motionless for a while.
    He must have slept.
    He was woken up by being pulled roughly by his ankles from where he lay.
    Hands seemed to be everywhere, grabbing him, but he still couldn’t see anything, dazzled by the light from several oil lamps.
    “What . . . ?” he tried to say, but was winded as he was thrown over someone’s shoulder.
    “Get on with it,” said a voice. “He’s in a foul mood. And he wants it all now.”
    “As usual,” said another voice.
    In an instant Boy was swung away down a low, gloomy tunnel, but he felt that they were rising this time, headed up to the real world. He was glad of that, at least. Maybe there would be someone he could talk to, to explain things and get himself set free. It all had to be a silly mistake; he couldn’t
really
belong to the emperor. Like most people in the City, Boy knew little of the emperor, just vague stories about him, that he was very old, and maybe a little crazy. No one knew anything for sure.
    As his eyes grew used to the lights bobbing ahead of him, he saw that he was being carried by one of a long line of men, each with some burden or other. He was hanging upside down, and it was hard to be sure, but as the file of carriers made its way into a larger and this time torchlit tunnel, he saw what it was they were carrying. Valerian’s things. All of them.
    Before he had time to wonder what was going on, Boy sensed something else. That smell again. He twisted around to see its source, and in the dim light could just make out a small, rough-cut entrance to a flight of stairs leading down from the corridor they were in. It was barred by an iron grille, with a padlocked chain holding it shut.
    Beyond the grille, Boy could see that the stairs were narrow, and hideously steep. It made him feel sick merely looking at them. They plunged down into darkness and there was no sign that they ever ended.
    “Stop wriggling, you monkey,” snarled the man carrying Boy. He let himself hang loosely again and they moved past the entrance to the dark flight down.
    They were still trudging upward, and now turned and climbed three stone steps. Then there was a doorway, and suddenly the light was brilliant all around them.
    They were in a long and ornate corridor, with a polished wooden floor. Bright morning daylight poured in through tall leaded windows. Along the walls hung huge, elaborately framed portraits of people in royal attire.
    The corridor seemed to stretch forever, and when they finally left it, they turned and the long file of men made their way down another identical gallery.
    As they went, taking a flight of stairs here, and entering and leaving countless golden-glimmering rooms and passages, Boy finally understood that he really was in the Imperial Palace.
    He