Silence is Golden

46. Quaking Foundations

I screamed. The shepherd screamed. His sheep screamed (or rather bleated), and ran away up the hill. The man stumbled back and fell on his butt.

'What is happening here?' Mr Ambrose appeared behind me, gun raised, ready to shoot. At the sight of the gun, the shepherd stopped screaming, and his eyes widened to the size of saucers.

'No, don't! Don't shoot!' I grabbed Mr Ambrose's arm, pointing it away from the man. Or...no. Not a man. He was really just a boy, I realised as I studied his face more closely.

Karim appeared beside Mr Ambrose, his gun drawn as well.

'Put that away, will you?' I hissed. 'You're frightening the poor boy.'

Karim ignored me.

'What is he doing here, Sahib?' he demanded, jerking his firearm towards the frozen figure of the shepherd boy. 'How did he get up here with those beasts?'

'I have no idea,' Mr Ambrose said coldly. 'But I intend to find out!'

He snapped a few brief phrases in Portuguese. The boy stared at him uncomprehendingly. So Mr Ambrose tried again, this time in Spanish. This time, the boy's eyes lit up and he started to chatter. I was pretty fluent in Portuguese, by now, but my Spanish was still restricted to words like 'bastard' and 'donkey's arse'. I didn't understand a word of what was going on. But by the look in Mr Ambrose's eyes I could tell it wasn't going the way he expected. Not at all.

Karim didn't look too pleased, either. 'What in the name of...' He uttered a few unpronounceable words in his mother tongue. 'What is the brat rambling on about, Sahib? I thought...'

'Yes.' Mr Ambrose's voice was hard as steel. 'So did I.'

'She said...'

'Yes. She did.'

Slowly, very slowly, Mr Rikkard Ambrose turned towards me, the icy cold of the entire arctic wasteland gathered in his deep, dark eyes.

Uh-oh...

'Can you explain something to me, Mr Linton?'

His voice was deceptively calm.

'Um...I'll try to. If I can.'

'How very kind of you. Well, then, explain this to me: this boy says there is a perfectly good, easy path down the mountain on the other side. So easy to use, in fact, that the people in the neighbourhood often drive their sheep up here to let them graze. He saw us climbing up the rock cliff and was quite surprised we would risk falling to our deaths when it is so perfectly easy to get up here.'

'Oh.'

'Oh indeed, Mr Linton. And that's not all. Do you know what he also told me?'

'Not really, no.'

'He told me that to the west, in the direction of his village, it is only a few miles to the ocean. Imagine that, Mr Linton. We are only a few miles away from the sea. It makes one wonder why a certain someone would send us hacking through hundreds of miles of jungle, including a deadly warzone.'

I cleared my throat. 'The directions in the manuscript didn't say anything about coming from the west coast.'

'And were these instructions by any chance old enough to have been written before the passage to the west coast of this continent around its southern tip was discovered?'

I cleared my throat again. 'Err...they might be.'

'Ah. And you didn't see fit to mention this fact because...?'

'I, um...might not have noticed.'

His calm façade vanished. Fiery ice blazed in his eyes. He took a step towards me, a muscle in his jaw twitching.