Cassie shook her head. ‘It must have been something urgent. What was he looking for?’
‘What did he find?’ murmured Ranjit darkly.
‘We’ve got to go after him,’ said Cassie, turning to go.
‘Hang on, Cassie. Can’t do that till we find where he went.’ Ranjit touched her arm. Even in the circumstances Cassie felt her skin prickle and her blood leap in response. Glancing at him, she met golden eyes that were as shocked by his own reaction as she was by hers. Gently she shook him off. There was no time for this.
‘There’s got to be something here.’ Richard yanked out a desk drawer.
Isabella heaved a deep sigh. ‘Let’s start looking.’
Cassie bent to lift a discarded pile of documents, flicking through them as she dumped them on the desk. All the others had taken sheaves of paper, barely taking time to read each heading before moving on to the next. Isabella sat cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by files, her expression hopeless.
‘Wait. Look,’ said Jake, lifting a lined notebook and flipping it open. ‘A bunch of notes about the Tears.’ He peered at it, and Cassie saw a shadow flit across his face.
‘What? What’s it say?’
‘Nothing. Doesn’t help.’ Still, Cassie noticed, he stuck it in the back pocket of his jeans. Well, he must be curious about the liquid that had saved his life.
‘If it doesn’t help, don’t waste time on it,’ she said sharply. ‘Keep looking, everybody.’
Calm down, Cassie told herself. Calm down. We just have to look till we find.
The state of the room disturbed her, if only because of the likelihood that Sir Alric was responsible for the mess. This desperation wasn’t like him – he was trying to find something, and quickly. What had Marat told him? Thinking about it now, Cassie was sure there was no one else who would have tried to burgle Sir Alric’s office at the start of term. No student she knew of – not even the most arrogant of the Few – would have dared. That must have been Marat’s first abortive attempt to steal the artefacts. She remembered his quiet satisfaction, his perfectly calm demeanour as he reordered Sir Alric’s office after Cassie’s burglary. Why had he done that? Why cover for her when he so disliked her?
Because, perhaps, she’d done his job for him?
But Marat, for all his sinister nature, never struck Cassie as the sort to act alone. He’d want a leader. And who else could that be but the Svenssons, given what had happened … ?
Her foot knocked against something solid, half-covered by the papers on the floor. The phone handset from Sir Alric’s desk. Picking it up, thumbing buttons, she pressed it to her ear.
‘Guys – the phone’s completely dead. Not just off the hook, dead.’
A shiver ran down her spine at the thought of Sir Alric, alone in Marat’s company out in the bush. Suddenly she stood up.
‘That little git Marat’s done something. He’s in cahoots with Brigitte and Katerina, I’m sure of it. He’s tricked Sir Alric, somehow, he must have. Nothing else would drag Sir Alric away if he was still searching his files, still unsure of exactly what he was looking for.’
Just as she said it, Jake was sweeping his arm across the papers on the desk, sending them tumbling to the floor in a disordered mess.
‘Like that’s going to help,’ drawled Richard.
Jake just leaned on the desktop, staring at it. ‘But it is,’ he said, pointing down. ‘There’s a map.’
They clustered round the desk. Sure enough, beneath the papers, pinned flat under a protective glass top, was a large-scale map of the slopes of Mount Kenya. As they examined it, something caught Cassie’s eye in the scattered papers Jake had just tossed aside, and she picked it carefully off the floor, narrowing her eyes.
‘This looks pretty old,’ she muttered, rubbing the document lightly with a thumb.
Ranjit peered over her shoulder. ‘Something about a temple.’ He took the fragile yellowed sheet from Cassie, laid it against the map beneath the glass. ‘Same symbol. Look.’
‘Not one I ever saw on the Ordnance Survey,’ observed Richard. Sure enough, it was familiar to Cassie only in one respect: it resembled the broken symbol branded into her shoulder blade. As if to confirm her thoughts, Richard loosened his collar further and tugged his shirt down, turning so that they could all see the brand on his shoulder.
‘Yes,’ breathed Ranjit. ‘It’s the Few symbol.’
They all looked at each other. Jake worked his fingers underneath the desktop glass and yanked it up, pushing it away until it slid on to the floor with a crack like a gunshot. It hadn’t shattered, but a clean crack ran from corner to corner.
Jake loosened the map from the desk, picking at the edges that had stuck to the wood. When it was free, he folded it carefully to show the patch of contours with the unfamiliar symbol at its centre.
‘Mount Kenya,’ he said. ‘You think that’s it? Where he’s gone?’
‘We’re never going to get a better clue.’ Richard said.
‘We’ve got to go for it,’ said Ranjit. ‘Come on.’
Ranjit, Richard and Isabella were already out of the door, but uncharacteristically Jake hung back, and Cassie paused to urge him to hurry.
But just as she opened her mouth, she saw him snatch a small container from a side table and stuff it into his pocket. His eyes met hers, and she shut her mouth. She wasn’t going to ask. They didn’t have time.