Deryni Checkmate (27 page)

Duncan frowned. He had no desire to confound local custom, but neither did he intend to disarm under the circumstances. If Alaric was in trouble in there, Duncan might have to fight a way out for both of them. His left hand moved almost unconsciously to rest on the hilt of his sword.

“I’m looking for the man who followed me when I came here a little while ago. Is he still inside?”

Haughtily: “No one has entered the shrine since thou madest thy vigil. Now, willst thou leave with thine offensive steel, or shall I be forced to summon aid?”

Duncan peered keenly at the grille, sudden suspicion of the monk flaring. Then, carefully: “Are you trying to tell me that you did not see a man in hunting leathers and a brown cap come in here?”

“I have told thee, there is no one here. Now, go.”

Duncan’s lips compressed into a thin, hard line.

“Then you won’t mind if I take a look for myself,” he said coldly, crossing to the double doors and yanking them apart.

He heard an indignant yelp from behind as he stepped through and pulled the doors shut, but he ignored the monk’s muffled protests. Bringing his Deryni sensitivity into play and casting about for danger as fully as he dared, Duncan ran quickly down the center aisle. As the monk had said, there was no one in the tiny chapel—at least not now. But with only one entrance and exit, where could Alaric have gone?

Approaching the altar rail, Duncan surveyed the area suspiciously, taking in every detail with his precise Deryni memory. No candles had been added to the rack by the altar, though there was a cracked and snuffed-out one lying close by the steps that he did not remember seeing before. But the gate—had that been closed when he came through?

Absolutely not.

Now, why would Alaric have closed that gate?

Correction:
Would
Alaric have closed that gate? If so,
why
?

He glanced back at the doors and saw them closing softly, caught a glimpse of a thin, tonsured figure in a brown monk’s habit slipping back from sight.

So: the little monk was spying on him! And he would probably return very shortly with the reinforcements he had theatened.

Duncan turned back toward the altar and leaned over the rail to release the catch on the gate. As he did so, his gaze fastened on something that definitely had not been there before, and he froze.

It was a worn brown leather hunter’s cap with a chin strap, lying crumpled and abandoned against the bottom of the railing at the other side.

Alaric’s?

Chill suspicion nagging at a corner of his mind, Duncan started to reach for the cap, but froze as his sleeve brushed the gate latch and snagged on something. Bending down carefully to inspect the latch, he spied the tiny, needlelike protuberance that had caught him. He eased the sleeve free and moved his hand away, then bent to look more closely. Tentatively, he let his mind reach out to touch the latch.

His mind recoiled violently from the contact, and he broke out in a cold sweat. Only with difficulty did he manage to control his shaking and avoid retreating as fast as he could go. He dropped to one knee and steadied himself against the railing, forcing himself to take deep, sobering breaths.

Merasha.
Now he understood it all: the closed gate, the cap, the latch.

In his mind’s eye he saw how it must have been: Alaric approaching the altar rail as Duncan had done, lighted candle in hand . . . reaching behind the gate for the latch, alert to the greater dangers the place might hold, yet never dreaming that the simple latch held the greatest treachery of all . . . The barbed latch snagging bare flesh instead of sleeve, sending the mind-muddling drug coursing through the unsuspecting body.

And then, someone waiting in the stillness of ambush—waiting to attack the merasha-weakened defenses of the half-Deryni lord and spirit him away, to what fate he knew not.

Duncan swallowed hard and glanced behind him, suddenly aware how close he had come to sharing his kinsman’s fate. He would have to hurry. The angry little monk would be back with reinforcements in no time. But he had to attempt contact with Alaric before he left this place. Because unless he could find some clue as to where his cousin had gone or been taken, he would not have the slightest idea where to look for him. How could he have gotten out of here?

Wiping his damp forehead against his shoulder, Duncan bent and pulled the leather cap through the spindles of the railing, cleared his mind, and let his senses range forth. He felt the aura of pain, confusion, growing blackness that surrounded and clung to the cap clenched against his chest; caught a hint of the anguish that had driven his kinsman to pull the cap from his tormented head.

Then he was outside, briefly touching the anonymous flickers of thought that were the myriad travelers on the road beyond. He sensed soldiers of some kind approaching with purpose in their thoughts, though he could not read that purpose at such range; caught the sinister shadow of presence that could only be the little monk, his mind filled with fury at the interloper in his precious shrine.

And something else. The monk
had
seen Alaric! And he had
not
seen—nor did he expect to see—him leave!

Duncan broke his trance with a shudder, slumped momentarily against the altar rail. He would have to get out of here. The monk, who was evidently a party to whatever had happened to Alaric, would be returning with the soldiers any minute. And if Duncan was to be any help to Alaric in the future, he dared not let himself be taken prisoner.

With a sigh, Duncan raised his head and scanned the chancel area a last time. He would have to leave, and now.

 

HE was lying on his stomach, his right cheek pressed against a cool, hard surface littered with something harsh and musty. His first awareness, as he regained consciousness, was of pain—a throbbing ache that began at the tips of his toes and localized somewhere behind his eyes.

His eyes were closed, and he didn’t seem to have the strength to force them open yet, but awareness was returning. And fiery needles stabbed at his head again with every pulse beat, making it almost impossible to concentrate.

He closed his eyes more tightly and tried to shut out the pain, trying to focus all his attention on moving some small part of his aching body. Fingers moved—he thought they were on his left—and he felt dirt and straw beneath his fingertips.

Was he out of doors?

As he asked himself that question, he realized that the pain behind his eyeballs was somewhat abating, so he decided to hazard opening his eyes. Much to his surprise the eyes obeyed him—though for a minute he thought that he was blind.

Then he saw his own left hand, only inches from his nose, resting on the—floor? Covered with straw? And he realized that he was not blind but merely in a darkened room, that a fold of his cloak had somehow fallen partway across his face, obstructing his view.

Once his dulled senses adjusted to that fact, he was able to extend his gaze beyond the hand. He tried to focus, still without moving anything but his eyes—and found that he could now distinguish patterns of light and shadow, mostly the latter.

He was in what must have been an enormous chamber or hall, all of wood. His field of vision was very narrow without changing his position, but what he could see was a wall of high, deep arches, fitfully illuminated by the guttering light of torches set in black iron brackets. In each archway, far in the recesses, he could barely distinguish a tall, motionless figure looming vaguely menacing in the shadows, each armed with a spear and holding an oval shield of some dark heraldic design. He blinked his eyes and looked again, trying to read the devices—then realized that the figures were statues.

Where was he?

Rather too abruptly, as he immediately discovered, he tried to get up. He managed to get his elbows under him, and actually got his head a few inches off the floor. But then the waves of nausea returned, and his senses began spinning worse than before. He cradled his head in his hands, trying to will the whirling to subside. And finally, through the fog, he was able to recognize the symptom he was fighting—the dizzying disorientation of merasha.

Memory returned in a rush. Merasha. It had been on the latch of the gate in the shrine. He had stumbled into the trap like a bumbling squire. The flat aftertaste numbing his tongue told him he was still under the influence of the mind-dulling drug, that whatever his situation now, he would not be able to use his powers to extricate himself.

Knowing the source of his distress, he found that he could at least curb the physical symptoms to some degree, control the numbness, stop some of the spinning. He carefully raised his head a few more inches to see a sweep of black wool robe a few feet to his right, and then a motionless gray boot not six inches from where his head had lain. His eyes darted to either side—more boots, long cloaks trailing the straw-littered floor, the tips of drawn broadswords—and he knew that he was in mortal danger, that he must get to his feet.

Each move of a cramped limb was torture, but he forced his body to obey; slowly raised himself first to elbows, then to hands and knees. As he rose, concentrating on that boot before his face, he raised his eyes also, knowing as he did that it was too much to hope that the boot would be empty.

There was a leg protruding from the boot, and another leg and boot beyond it, and a gray-clad body attached to the legs. A falcon emblem on the chest swam in Morgan’s vision. And as he raised his gaze to the piercing black eyes that glared down at him, Morgan’s spirits sank. Now he was surely doomed.

For the man in the falcon tunic could only be Warin de Grey.

DUNCAN started to turn on his heel to leave the chapel, then paused to scrutinize the chancel area again.

Something was still unanswered. Somewhere he had failed to notice some piece of evidence—information that might still save Alaric’s life. That fallen candle he had seen when he first returned to the shrine. Where was it?

Bending to peer behind the altar rail once more, Duncan spied the candle lying near the altar steps to the left of the central carpeting. He started to reach for the gate latch, froze in mid-motion as he remembered the danger there, then swung his leg over the rail and climbed in instead. Glancing nervously back at the double doors, he crouched down beside the candle and studied it in position, reached out to prod it with a cautious forefinger.

As he had suspected, the candle was still warm, the wax at the wick end still semisolid and malleable. He could feel just a whisper of Alaric’s ordeal clinging to it yet, catch the faintest hint of pain and terror just before it was dropped.

Damn!
All this pointed to something he had missed—he knew it. Alaric had to have been within the railing. The gate had been opened, and the candle lay too near the altar to have simply rolled there. But where could Alaric have gone from here?

Scrutinizing the floor around the candle, Duncan spied wax drippings on the bare wood, a fine trail of faintly yellow wax leading from the candle to a spot just left of the carpet approaching the altar. The wax was scarred and scuffed just beside the rug, as though someone had stepped on it before it had had time to congeal. One of the droplets, a large one very near the edge of the carpeting, had a faint vertical line through it, almost as though—

Duncan’s eyes widened with a sudden idea, and he bent to look more closely. Could it be that there was a crack in the wood floor there, a line not part of the floor’s intricate design, but running along the edge of the rug toward the altar?

He scrambled across to the other side of the carpet on hands and knees, sending an apologetic glance at the altar for his unseemly behavior, then squinted at the floor on that side.

Yes!
There was definitely a faint line running the entire length of the carpet from the chancel gate to the bottom step of the altar, more pronounced than the other joinings in the patterned flooring. And there appeared to be a seam in the carpet where it joined that portion covering the steps themselves.

Crawling back to the left side, Duncan inspected the crack once again. Yes, the wax had been disturbed after it hardened, not before. It was lighter on one side of the line, as though one side of the crack had become lower, had dropped from under and then returned.

Hardly daring to believe it might be possible, Duncan closed his eyes and extended his senses along the carpet, trying to fathom what lay beneath. He had the impression of space below, of a convoluted maze of slides and low corridors lined in polished wood through which a man, even an unconscious man, might slip for God knew how far. And the mechanism that controlled the opening of that space—that was a scarcely visible square in the patterned floor directly to the left of the carpeting, though he sensed that this was not the only center of control.

Scrambling to his feet, Duncan stared down at the carpeting, at the square. He could trip the device very easily. A hard stamp on the square would do that.

But did the passage lead to Alaric? And if it did, was his cousin still alive? It was unrealistic to assume that the setters of the trap, whoever they might be, would not have been waiting for Alaric when he reached the bottom, wherever that was. And if Alaric had gotten a strong dose of the merasha—and again, there was no reason to suppose to the contrary—then he would not be able to function normally for hours.

On the other hand, if Duncan followed him down, armed and in full command of his faculties—which were not inconsiderable—Alaric might yet have a chance.

Duncan glanced once more around the chapel and made up his mind. He would have to be extremely careful. He really should drop into wherever he was going with drawn sword, ready to fight his way out. However, there was the question of the maze. He had no idea how far he would be going, how the maze would twist and turn before he got to the end. If he weren’t careful, he could impale himself on his own weapon.