Fever Quest: A Clean Historical Mystery set in England and India (The Isabella Rockwell Trilogy Book 2) (19 page)

Then all became a silent and drifting darkness.

How many times had she woken and known, without a
doubt, before opening her eyes that all was not right?

She and Midge lay side by side, their hands and feet tied
with rope. She could feel the burn marks already. She felt her mind floating,
thinking of fat Freddie Hearthogg in her schoolroom who’d handed out plenty of
Chinese wrist burns in his time. There was the poke of a stick in her stomach
and her attention snapped back to the present. Her father sat cross-legged on
the ground next to her.

They were in the mine, in the Chamber of Kali, lying at
the base of the statue like wriggling larvae at the bottom of an anthill. On
the far left side of the chamber was the fallen wall, the stones now neatly
stacked to one side so the steps once again provided access to the mine. But
what she hadn’t realised was that a yawning, gaping hole, like a vast mouth
with no teeth, had split the earth beneath the collapsed wall. If she twisted
her head she could see it, a great jagged crevasse of black, seven feet wide
and as many long.

She looked over at Midge.

“Are you all right?”

Midge looked at her, one single tear making a path through
the dirt on his cheek, but he nodded nonetheless.

“I’m sorry.” His chest juddered with the sobs he wouldn’t
utter.

She smiled.

“For what? I’d have done the same in your shoes. I
couldn’t let you stay here on your own, could I? Not after I’d promised Ruby.”

At the mention of his sister’s name, Midge’s tears
overflowed.

“What did you promise?”

“I promised I’d look after you.” She paused, disgusted
with herself. “For whatever that was worth.”

There was another sharp poke in her stomach, and she felt
winded and sick at the same time.

“If I was Ruby, I wouldn’t be too pleased with you.”
Stone’s voice was like dry leaves skittering across a stone floor.

“No one’s asking you,” spat Isabella. The heavy cane came
down across her thighs, and she gritted her teeth trying to keep in her hiss of
pain.

“Stop it!” shouted Midge. “Leave her alone.”

Stone bent and moved his face so close to Midge’s Isabella
could see the pores of his skin, darkened by the brown stain he’d rubbed on his
face. A pulse bulged in his throat and his breath was rotten, as if something
had died inside him.

“If you’d stayed loyal to me, none of this would have
happened.”

“I have been loyal to you.”

Stone took Midge’s collar and bits of spit came from his
mouth as he spoke.

“You have not. You could have been my rightful heir. I
could have made you my son and passed on all the wealth here to you. You could
have inherited everything. I knew you were the one who could fulfil the
prophecy –”

“You mad old man.” Isabella was spitting rage. “He hasn’t
fulfilled the prophecy. The prophecy is all rubbish, made up by you. The Eye of
Kali isn’t here. It never has been.”

“Why, Miss Rockwell. What are these, then?” He lifted a handful
of dull and glassy stones from a bucket. Isabella was silent. “Yes, that’s
right. They are diamonds. Diamonds that have flowed from the mine ever since
Midge arrived.”

“He found one diamond, not a bucketful,” said Isabella
through clenched teeth.

“Ah, yes.” Stone reached down and stroked Midge’s cheek.
“But that was just the start. Since I rescued him from you, I can’t turn around
without finding a diamond – a river of them. As the prophecy foretold.” He
leaned closer to Midge, who shrank into himself. “If only you’d told me,
instead of Vritra, when you found the first diamond. I’d have taken care of
you. I’d have given you anything you wanted.”

“And will you still?” muttered Midge.

Stone’s face closed like a book.

“Of course not. You’ve betrayed me.” He straightened up.

“He didn’t betray you.” Isabella’s voice sounded a long
way off to her own ears. “It was me. It was always me. I took the Eye of Kali
from your cabin. I sold it.”

Midge’s wide eyes gazed beseechingly at Isabella.

“I know what you’re doing, Isabella, and it won’t work.
It’s too late for heroics. Now.” Stone looked around him. “I just need a nice
sharp knife and we can get on with the sacrifice. The Black Goddess likes a
good blood-letting. It could be my way of saying ‘thank you’.”

There was the sound of retching and Isabella looked at
Midge, but it wasn’t Midge, it was her father, no longer sitting next to her
but on his hands and knees vomiting into the shining dust.

“Not Midge,” she managed to gasp.

Stone sharpened his knife against a stone. He held it up
to a lantern and its blade glittered.

“Of course not. Only you. You’re just like your father, a
continuous thorn in my side. I can’t wait to get rid of you, like I couldn’t
wait to be rid of him. Not that it proved very difficult.”

Isabella’s blood moved like an ice floe through her veins
and her teeth started to chatter.

“He’s still alive. You didn’t ‘get rid’ of him.”

Stone put the knife in his mouth whilst he tightened his
cummerbund. Four guards moved across the stairway with their spears crossed. He
took the knife from his mouth.

“Yes, but he doesn’t know who he is, or who you are. He
can’t remember what happened half an hour before, let alone the day before.” He
smiled broadly as if he’d just told a joke. “I don’t call that living.”

Isabella swallowed and turned her head away. She had no
more defences left. She was going to die in this dark, breathing space that had
always terrified her, but she was damned if she’d let him see her cry.

“Colonel Stone.” Midge’s voice cut through the roaring in
her ears, but Stone was too busy checking her ties were tight. “Colonel Stone?”

Midge stood behind the colonel, the pieces of rope that
had tied him hanging, frayed, from his wrists and ankles. The expression on his
face was one Isabella had never seen. The childish light had gone and there was
a broken look around his eyes. He suddenly looked like Ruby.

“What is it?” Stone snapped.

The spindly form of Vritra swam into view. He had aged a
hundred years. Stone bent over her, his fingers icy on her skin as he undid her
turban.

It may have been his touch, which made her skin crawl, or
the fact that Midge looked just like Ruby had when she’d given Isabella the
food that had stood between her and starvation; or it may have been what Stone
had said about her father. Or maybe it was just the feather light touch on her
foot that told her her ankles were untied. Without thinking she pulled her leg
back and kicked out at Stone, catching him square in his groin. He doubled over
and the sound of his breath leaving his body made a quiet “oomph”.

The guards made a movement towards them and she was on her
feet in a trice but the guards had stopped their charge, their eyes fixed on a
point behind her. Isabella turned, her tied wrists held out in front of her.

Midge stood a few feet from Colonel Stone with his hand
outstretched. On a square bed of midnight-blue velvet lay a diamond almost as
big as his fist. It had been cut in the shape of a teardrop and it was so
brilliant it seemed to hum as it sat in his hand, sparkling as if it was
delighted to be home.

The Eye of Kali.

Stone lurched towards Midge, as if he’d been shot, and
transferred his knife from his left hand to his right, his raised arm a black
dragon’s shadow on the wall at Midge’s back.

“Midge, here!”

Isabella made the shape of a cricket catcher’s mitt with
her hands and the diamond flew across the space between them, light bouncing
through it like a million shooting stars. Stone’s groan of fury came from deep
inside his chest and he changed direction, still bent from the blow Isabella
had dealt. Closer and closer he came, and Isabella, her tied hands holding the
diamond tight, stepped closer to the yawning black tear in the fabric of the
ground.

“What are you doing?”

Stone had stopped. Isabella stopped too. She was ten feet
from the hole.

“Call off your guards.” Her voice was dead and the cold of
before still held her in its icy grip. “Midge, Vritra, go with them to the
surface.”

“But –” Midge’s voice rose in protest.

“Don’t argue with me.”

She didn’t take her eyes off Stone once. He stared at her
for a long moment and she stared back at him. Let him look. She had nothing to
lose.

Colonel Stone gestured to the guards, who dipped their
spears and exited through the archway, Midge walking ahead of them with many a
backwards glance. But as Vritra passed, Stone leaned in a crabbed sideways
movement and pulled the healer to him, one arm around his throat, the jagged
blade against his neck where the skin was thin as rice paper. Vritra had no
defence. There was so little of him Stone may as well have been holding a large
grasshopper.

“If you don’t give me that diamond now, I shall kill him.”
Stone pressed on the knife and a black drop appeared on the shining metal.
Vritra’s eyes were closed, his face resigned.

“I don’t care about Vritra. Why should I? You’re welcome
to him.”

Stone snorted.

“Oh, yes. Those stupid seeds – he told me about them. I
can’t understand why you believed that story, especially when it came from a
crook like Al Hassan. No.” He shook his head, laughing to himself. “You should
have finished Vritra off when you had the chance.”

She took another step towards the hole.

“Like I said, you’re welcome to do it for me.”

She didn’t move.

Stone’s face transformed into a mask of fury; his eyes
bulged and narrowed and his cheeks blazed red as his head seemed to swell. He
threw Vritra to the ground. Vritra’s insect limbs were still.

“Give me the diamond!”

Stone’s roar echoed around the cave and rumbled off down
into tunnel four. One of the torches guttered. Isabella turned again to the
hole and held out her hands with the diamond a cold, smooth weight between
them.

She smiled at Stone over her shoulder.

“This is payback for Midge and for Vritra. You’re a bad
man, Colonel Stone. You won’t be missed.”

“Nor will you,” Stone growled. “I’ll finish you the way I
finished your father.”

“You didn’t ‘finish’ my father. He was injured fighting
Russians. You just happened to come along at the right time. How easy was it,
keeping him working for you using datura leaf, so he’d remember nothing?” Her
mouth went dry.

“Ha! Injured fighting Russians? In his dreams.”

“He … he was on a secret mission for his colonel. He
went to find a missing boy …”

“Pah!” Stone spat on the ground. “He worked for me – him
and that useless bearer of his.”

Isabella spoke as if in a dream.

“He wasn’t his bearer, he was his friend.”

Stone’s eyes gleamed.

“Whatever he was, he was greedy. So was your father. I
promised them great rewards to come and work with me.”

“I don’t believe you. He’d never work for someone like
you.” But her words sounded dull.

“Why not? It was easy money for him. All he had to do was
bring some jewels over the border from Afghanistan. His search for Christopher
Jolyon was the perfect cover.”

Isabella’s head snapped up. She’d made no mention of the
boy’s name and yet Stone had known it. The words of the punka-wallah came back
to her.

“Though he is brave he is also foolish. Whatever has
happened to him is due to his own rash behaviour.”

Stone’s eyes were like those of a hypnotist.

“How extraordinary you never knew. I suppose he was better
at keeping secrets than I thought.” He stared at her face and a look of fake
sympathy flooded his own. “Oh dear. Have I given him a little nudge off his
pedestal? Suddenly Daddy’s not the hero you thought he was? Think about it,
Isabella.” The shadows leapt on the wall behind him. “How he must have been
worried about money. He was only a sergeant, not a captain. No, far too
subversive. How on earth was he going to find a husband for you on a sergeant’s
salary? You: Isabella Rockwell, the wild girl who may as well have been brought
up by wolves. Who’d want you?”

His words were daggers and yet she didn’t doubt them.

She opened her hands.

The Eye of Kali dropped silently into the hole.

Stone’s unearthly scream came from far, far away and
though he seemed to leap for the diamond, he reached for Isabella. Her body had
no breath and no weight as Stone lifted her high into the air and heaved her
into the black void. So slowly did time seem to turn that she saw black dust
and strata of red, and she had space to marvel that Stone’s wrist was thin,
like a woman’s, as she pulled him in after her. His screaming stopped as he
fell past her, as if someone had put a cork in a bottle. Her tied hands clawed
the rim of the pit, slipping in the dust; the shiny black dust that had
promised everything and nothing.

Two strong brown hands grasped her arms and hauled her
upwards onto the glittery ground.

“Isabella? Are you all right? What is going on?” John
Rockwell spoke in English. He stood with his hands still clasping her forearms.
Where his face had been slack the muscles were now taught, his mouth back in
the familiar, uncompromising line. And his hazel eyes, clear and sharp and
far-sighted as they always had been, their drugged confusion banished for ever.

“Papa?”

But Isabella couldn’t breathe and she fell onto her knees
and then the tears came from nowhere and she closed her eyes and gave herself
up to the knot of pain threatening to choke her. She had to get it out, or die
in the attempt. So she knelt, a bald little figure in dirty clothes, as her
father, too, sank to his knees and gently enclosed her in his arms, and she
rested her head against the cream and grey linen of his tunic, which smelled of
his hair tonic and of the stable. And she knelt there until she thought it was
safe to look up, to check that she had been right: that it was her father and
that he knew her.