Rise of Allies (The Gryphon Chronicles, Book 4) (7 page)

Jake nodded. It sounded simple enough.

“Any questions?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Good luck, then. They’re all yours.” Lady Oriel handed him the speaking trumpet and marched back to her seat.

Heart pounding, Jake turned to face the Field of Challenge. This didn’t seem too difficult. At least dealing with ghosts did not drain him, like using his telekinesis did.

Clutching the speaking trumpet, he walked across the sunny green toward the nearest ghost of the five he saw arrayed around the field. She was a rather familiar sort of ghost—a Gray Lady in medieval garb, as could often be found haunting old castles.

Like all the waiting ghosts, she had generated her own little setting out of the ectoplasm mists that spirits could manipulate, acting out a scene. In her case, she had created a spiral staircase inside a castle tower. Several feet off the ground, she kept gliding up and down the tower stairs.

She stopped and stared at Jake as he warily approached. “Pardon, ma’am. Might I ask your name?”

She gave him a dirty look then ignored him and kept going up and down her misty stairs.

“Please? It’s rather important.”

“Why do you want to know?” she countered.

Confused, Jake turned toward Dame Oriel. “I thought these ghosts were supposed to cooperate.”

“What ghosts?” Dame Oriel answered with a pointed smile.

Jake nodded with understanding, then cast the Gray Lady an imploring look. “Help me out here, please? I’m under enough pressure already.”

“Fine,” the ghost huffed. “What do you want?”

“I need to know your name.”

“I am the Lady Rachel, who was called fair,” she whispered, her spectral voice sounding hoarse with tears.

Staring at her, Jake realized why she had been rude. The Gray Lady seemed distraught. “Um, are you all right?” he ventured.

“Of course I’m not all right. I’m dead, you fool!” she snapped. “Snuffed out before my time, at the height of my beauty—or haven’t you noticed I’m a ghost?”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to offend—”

“Do you really think I’d bother haunting anything if I were sitting on a cloud playing a harp somewhere? Instead, I’m stuck here, going up and down these steps all day long. Am I all right, he asks. What a stupid question. But what else should I expect from a male?”

“I beg your pardon,” Jake uttered, taken aback. He glanced uncertainly at Dame Oriel, but her face gave nothing away, offered no clues about how to proceed.

He looked at the Gray Lady again, recalling Oriel’s instructions about how he was to inquire if the ghosts had a message or a simple task he was to perform, so he could prove he was not just talking to thin air.

Lady Rachel had turned her back on him and was gliding slowly back up her tower stairs once more.

“Um, my lady, do you have any message for me?”

“Only one.” She glanced bitterly over her shoulder. “All men are faithless swine. Chivalry is
deeeeaaaaad!
” she shouted, leaping out the tower window at the top of the steps.

She disappeared, and her ectoplasm with her.

Jake blinked. “Well, then.”

Turning toward the Elders, he lifted the speaking trumpet to his lips. “Ah, that was Lady Rachel the Fair. Kind of a shrew. I think she had a falling-out with a knight or something.”

“Why do you say that? Did she have a message?” Dame Oriel called.

“Yes, ma’am. She said all men are faithless swine, and chivalry’s dead.”

Dame Oriel nodded at her colleagues, confirming his accuracy. “The boy is correct.”

“Bravo!” Sir Peter started clapping for him in approval, and the crowd followed suit.

Jake headed for the second ghost, surrounded by its cloud of spectral mist, and mused that this all must have looked very strange to the audience.

Some of them were surely psychics and mediums like him, but for most, it must have looked like he was standing in the middle of a field talking to himself, like an escapee from the lunatic asylum—or like Archie muddling his way through an especially hard equation.

Ah, well. His Assessment was too important to bother much about his dignity. Nevertheless, the next ghost rather startled him when he spotted it hopping about in the cloudy scene it had created.

Jake peered into the ectoplasm, searching the wispy ship’s deck for any
other
figure he was supposed to talk to, but no.

There was only the one.

“Something wrong, Jake?” Sir Peter called amiably from his chair.

Hesitating, Jake lifted the speaking trumpet to his lips. “No, sir, it’s just… Well, um, it’s…a parrot.”

The audience laughed, and Jake jumped as the large, showy, but quite dead bird let out a shrill squawk.

“Je m’apelle Pierre!”
It swooped straight at his head.

He ducked instinctively, though he knew a ghost-parrot could hardly peck him. He glanced again at the Elders. “It speaks French. Problem is, I don’t. But I think it might have just told me that its name is Pierre. Maybe it belonged to a French pirate or something?”

“Just report on whatever you hear it saying, Jacob,” Dame Oriel instructed from her seat in the shade.

He nodded and turned to the ghost bird again.

It cocked its head and looked at him from its perch on the ship’s ectoplasm rails.

“Come on, say something,” Jake muttered. “I haven’t got all day.”

The parrot spoke, and when Jake repeated the “message” aloud in French as best he could, he realized it was a foreign swear word by the audience’s mixed gasps and laughter.

“Sorry about that,” he added through the speaking trumpet as his cheeks turned red.

The rascally ghost parrot flapped away and dissolved, along with the deck of its old pirate ship.

Well, that’s that.

Jake took a deep breath and headed for the third ghost near the middle of the field. As he approached, he could already hear the music coming from the ornate theater stage the spirit had created. No orchestra was visible, but the tune seemed familiar—although once again, Jake did not understand the words. This time, they were in Italian.

An opera.

A dark-haired, bearded ghost of rounded proportions was walking about on the stage, rehearsing a song, as he must have so often done in life.

“La dona e mobile,

Qual piuma al vento,

Muta d’accento—e di pensiero…”

As Jake approached, he could see the man’s smile and his dark, expressive eyebrows working up and down as he practiced the playful tune.

“Pardon, sir!” he called. “Sorry to interrupt, but I’m in the middle of my Assessment, so might I ask your name?”

The opera man glanced at him in surprise, then sang his response:
“I am Constanzio, the King of the Tenors!”

“Oh, thanks,” Jake started to say, but the King of the Tenors was not done.

“CONNNNNN-stanzio! Zio, zio, zio, zi-OOOOOO! Constanzio eees my naaaaaame!”
he finished with a grand Italian flourish.

Jake waited.

Constanzio bowed.

Right.
Jake turned to the Elders. “His name is Constanzio,” Jake reported through the speaking trumpet.

“The King of—” the opera star insisted.

“King of the tenors,” Jake dutifully added.

“Ahem!” Constanzio coughed. “Boy, bring me my wine. I must wet these golden pipes.”

The large man gestured impatiently to the small ectoplasm table at the edge of the stage. It held a misty platter laden with grapes, cheese, bread, and cold cuts of meat. Beside it sat a bottle of ghost wine with half a goblet poured. Jake went over to the table and “picked up” the wispy ghost-goblet as best he could and carefully brought it over to Constanzio.

To the audience, it must have looked like he was just pretending.

“Grazie!” The ghost swigged with gusto.

“Er, Mr. Constanzio, is there any message you have for the living today?”

He swallowed the rest of the wine with a thoughtful gulp, then nodded vigorously. He had a deep, resonant speaking voice and an infectious laugh. “You tell that rogue, Sir Peter, that he still owes me twenty guineas over the wager we made shortly before my death.”

“What sort of wager, sir?”

“Ha! That skinny fellow bet me that I could not eat a whole double-chocolate almond cake by myself, and I did! Though, in hindsight, maybe I really shouldn’t have. Go on now, take yourself out of here,
ragazzo
. As you can see, Constanzio must practice his art. I have a huge concert in the Afterworld tonight. Greatness doesn’t grow on trees, you know.”

“Break a leg, sir,” Jake said, and as Constanzio disappeared, he passed along the message to Sir Peter, who had apparently been great friends with the opera star before his demise.

The wizard Elder laughed aloud to hear his old chum was alive and well, in a fashion, on the other side of the Veil. The crowd clapped uncertainly, realizing by Sir Peter’s reaction that Jake had been successful once again.

Glancing around the field, he saw there were two more ghosts to contend with—or was it three?

Jake wasn’t sure what to make of the shapeless blob hovering in the shadows under one of the bleachers. He narrowed his eyes and studied it briefly, puzzled.

The being appeared to be made of a denser sort of ectoplasm, so it must have been a spirit of some kind. He did not doubt that the Elders would happily throw in some sort of a trick to challenge him. But given that the creature was lurking under the seats rather than joining the other ghosts on the field, he wasn’t sure if it had anything to do with his Assessment, after all, whatever it was.

It had no face and did not act like any ghost he had seen before, showing no signs of turning itself into an orb or one of those little spiral shapes that spirits sometimes took to conserve their strength. (It took a huge amount of energy for a ghost to manifest itself as a full-bodied apparition, Jake had learned.) But not this one.

If anything, the mysterious blob reminded him of those tiny amoeba creatures that Archie had showed him under his microscope once, only it was about three feet tall and floating in midair.

Weird. Well, this is Merlin Hall,
he thought with a shrug.
Anything might happen.

Putting the blob creature out of his mind for now, he moved on with his Assessment.

The next ghost tried to terrify him by transforming into ghoulish shapes when he asked its name: a ragged skeleton with flesh still hanging off the bones here and there; a huge, growling black dog; a cloaked grim reaper that swung its scythe at him.

“Look, I’m only trying to find out your name!” he insisted, taking a backward step for caution’s sake, though he wasn’t really scared at all.

It was only a test.

Finally, the ghost gave up the game and materialized in the form of a simple farmer. “Did I scare you?” he asked hopefully.

“Not really. Sorry. Please, I need to learn your name for my Assessment.”

The ghost sighed. “Very well. They call me the Cantankerous Caretaker. I worked here at Merlin Hall on the grounds for many years. Lived in a nice cottage and minded the acres assigned to me. Kept the woods nice and tidy for the unicorns. Dredged the brook every spring for the water nymphs. Ah,” he sighed, “it was a very good life.”

“Then why were you so cantankerous?” Jake inquired.

“Bad feet,” he said. “No arches. Bunions, too.”

“Ahhh,” Jake said. “But you still haven’t told me your actual name.”

The old, rugged farmer-ghost chewed a length of hay. “Aye, I’ll tell ye. But first I’ve been instructed to make you carry out an action so the Elders know your talents are real.”