Grailblazers (24 page)

Come on, Bedders, pull yourself together, this isn't getting you anywhere.

He hauled himself on to a step, rubbed his head to make sure he wasn't bleeding, and breathed in a couple of times. Nothing broken, as far as he could tell. Splendid.

Down below, there was the most appalling racket, rather as if a lot of people were falling down on top of each other and swearing a lot. Grinning ruefully, Sir Bedevere got up and began walking carefully down the staircase.

 

 

The Queen had emptied her bag out on the floor. It must be here somewhere. She always had one, for just such emergencies as these.

Lipsticks. No. Nail varnish. No. Purse, credit cards, tissues, calculator, notebook, diary. No.

Ah...

She took the small jar of cold cream, drew back her arm, and let fly...

 

Von Weinacht had, apparently, knocked himself out cold on the stone pillar at the foot of the staircase. Under him, squashed flat and moaning slightly, was a PA. Various semi-conscious hackers lay about untidily. Bedevere smiled, feeling ever so slightly superior, and stepped over them.

‘Turkey?' he called. ‘You there, Turkey?'

‘Over here,' came the reply, and Bedevere followed the sound of the voice under a low doorway. There was Sir Turquine, sitting astride a large oak chest, trying to lever off the lid with von Weinacht's sword.

‘Not now, Turkey,' said Bedevere. ‘I think it's time we left, don't you?'

Turquine shook his head. ‘Haven't got it yet, have we?' he replied. The sword broke.

‘What makes you think it's in there?'

‘What makes you think it isn't?' Turquine replied, hammering at the padlock with the sword-hilt. ‘I'm just being thorough, that's all.' The padlock broke.

‘Well,' said Bedevere, ‘is this what you're looking for?' He produced the notebook and held it up. If Michelangelo had ever wanted to do an allegorical statue of Smugness, he couldn't have found a better model.

Turquine looked up and grinned. ‘That's it, is it?' he said.

‘Reckon so.'

‘Good lad.' He got up off the chest and threw back the lid. ‘Might as well have a look in here anyway, while I'm here,' he said. ‘Good Lord, it's full of diamonds and things. There's a turn-up.'

Bedevere shook his head affectionately. ‘Hurry up, then,' he said, ‘and then we'd better be off. And don't take any gold.'

Turquine nodded. ‘Because of buggering up the earth's axis, I know,' he replied. ‘Load of old socks if you ask me. Just the sort of thing you'd expect from a lot of bankers. Want some?'

Bedevere thought of twenty thousand gold-mine shares and nodded. ‘Why not?' he said. ‘Just to show willing, you understand.'

‘Exactly,' Turquine agreed. He scooped out a double handful of emeralds and handed them to his friend, who stowed them away in his pockets.

‘Ready?'

‘Almost,' Turquine replied, scrabbling about in the chest. ‘I think this one's rather nice, don't you?' He held up an enormous ruby, then kicked the lid shut.

‘It's not stealing,' he added, ‘because in return, they can have this back.'

He threw down a piece of paper and stamped on it. Bedevere recognised it, and smiled.

‘Lyonesse Goldfields?' he asked.

‘Worse,' Turquine replied. ‘Lyonesse Capital Growth Trust Income Units. When I told my dad what I'd done he nearly flayed me alive.'

The knights grinned at each other.

‘Time we weren't here,' said Turquine. ‘Now then, this way.'

Bedevere shook his head. ‘Not unless you want to see the boiler room,' he replied. ‘Follow me.'

‘But I think there's a short-cut—'

‘Follow me.'

As they walked, Bedevere asked Turquine what had kept him.

‘I like that,' Turquine replied. ‘Honestly, Bedders, you've got a nerve. If it hadn't been for...'

Bedevere shrugged. ‘I knew I could rely on you, Turkey. You just cut it a bit fine, that's all.'

Turquine nodded. ‘I know,' he said. ‘As soon as you didn't follow, I guessed something was up. No, finding the spanner was easy, it was just finding a jar...'

‘You tried the kitchens?'

‘Yes, and ...'

‘You stopped for a sandwich.'

Turquine blushed. ‘I was starving, Bedders. It wasn't like this in the old days. There were always pages and squires and things you could send down to the baker's while you waited for the dragon to come out. I don't hold with progress, personally.'

‘It's a bit overrated, certainly,' Bedevere replied. ‘Now then, left here, and we should be...'

They stopped. The Queen was standing in the doorway, and behind her were about seventy heavily armed clerks.

‘Hello, boys,' she said.

Bedevere blinked. ‘How the hell did you get here?' he said.

‘Simple,' the Queen replied, ‘I used the lift. Grab them, somebody.'

‘Well,' said Turquine, ‘this is extremely jolly, isn't it? Right, who's going to be first?'

There was something about his tone of voice which the clerks seemed to find quite remarkably eloquent. They just stood there, in fact, listening to him, as if he were Maria Callas.

The Queen made a little clicking noise with her teeth, rather like someone loading a rifle. ‘Come on, boys,' she purred. ‘Let's not be all tentative about this. Grab them.'

That was even more eloquent; as if Maria Callas had been elbowed out of the way by Elizabeth Schwartzkopf and Joan Sutherland. The clerks shuffled forward in an unhurried but determined phalanx, while Turquine reached behind him and, as if by magic, wrapped his hand round thirty inches of scaffolding pipe. It made a soft, heavy sound as he patted it against the palm of his left hand.

‘Excuse me,' said Bedevere.

Nobody was paying the slightest attention. One does one's best to take the heat out of the situation, and one might as well have stayed in bed. He frowned, and then pulled something out of his pocket.

‘Excuse me,' he repeated, and this time everyone stopped what they were doing and looked at him. It was so quiet you could hear a pin drop. And, shortly afterwards, they did.

‘It's all right,' Bedevere went on, displaying a grenade prominently in his left hand. A rather superior example, admittedly; if Fabergé had ever made grenades, they would have looked like this one. ‘So long as I don't let go of this lever thing,' he said, trying to sound extremely reasonable, ‘it won't go off. Now...'

Turquine nudged him so hard that he nearly dropped the bomb, and whispered, ‘Where in God's name did you get that from, Bedders?'

Bedevere turned to him and smiled gently. ‘You gave it to me, Turkey. From that big chest you broke open, remember? Now then...'

Turquine's hand flew to his pockets, which clinked faintly. ‘Mine aren't,' he said. ‘Mine are all diamonds and sapphires and...'

‘Really?' Bedevere clicked his tongue. ‘You always did have rather a limited imagination, though.' He turned back to the clerks, just in time to stop them drifting away.

‘Now then,' he said, ‘playtime's over, so if you all pay attention we can get this all sorted out and then we can get on with what we're supposed to be doing instead of playing at cowboys and Indians. Happy?'

Happy probably wasn't the word Flaubert would have chosen, but at least he had the audience's attention. He held up his hand - his other hand - and cleared his throat.

‘Gather round now, please,' he said. ‘Thank you. Right, first things first. This is indeed a real hand grenade, which I made out of a diamond about ten minutes ago, with the help of ...' he dipped his right hand in his inside pocket and pulled out the leather-bound book. ‘This. The Personal Organiser of Wisdom. Note the tiny gold clasp; made, of course, from Gold 337; hence the transformation from a decorative but useless form of carbon to a highly practical firework. Neat, yes?'

The clerks shuffled their feet. If it's possible to be scared out of your wits and ever so slightly bored at the same time, they were.

‘Second,' Bedevere went on, ‘we mean you no harm, honestly. All we want is this little notebook thing. It's not for us, it's for a friend. I know it'll mean removing a minute quantity of Gold 337 from Atlantis, and yes, that'll mean a slight wobble in the earth's axis. So what? By my calculations, it'll mean a small contraction in the orbit pattern, and we won't have to bother with leap-year any more, and that'll—'

‘Hey,' Turquine interrupted, ‘it so happens I was born in a leap-year.'

Bedevere turned to him irritably. ‘So what?' he said.

‘So I'm still four hundred and sixteen,' Turquine replied. ‘Just thought you might be interested, that's all.'

Bedevere nodded, and turned round again. ‘Be that,' he said, ‘as it may. If we leave, it'll be no skin off your noses and you can get back to fleecing the greedy and making money, we can press on with our job, nobody gets hurt, big anticlimax but really the best solution in the circumstances. If you try and stop us leaving, we'll throw this bomb at you. Anybody here feeling lucky?'

Nobody, apparently. Bedevere nodded, and pointed to the Queen. ‘Right,' he said. ‘To make things easy, you lead the way.'

The Queen gave him a look you could have put on dandelions and started to walk. She didn't get very far.

With a roar like the sound of a dinosaur having a filling done, the Graf von Weinacht appeared in the corridor behind them.

‘Oh drat,' Bedevere sighed. He released the handle of the grenade, counted to three, shouted ‘Catch!', and tossed the grenade at the Graf, who caught it one-handed and popped it in his sack. A moment later there was a soft, distant thump.

Followed, shortly afterwards, by a louder, nearer thump as Turquine wiped the smile off his face with the scaffolding pipe and bolted, followed closely by Bedevere, the Queen and the clerks.

For the record, Klaus von Weinacht woke up about ten minutes later, looked at the footprints all over his cape and the scorched hole in the side of his sack, and decided to call it a day. He produced a fireplace, climbed up it and vanished. When, many hours later, the Queen went to bed, she found on her bedside chair a large stocking filled with scorpions and a card with ‘Happy' crossed out and replaced with ‘Really miserable'; both of which she placed in the waste-disposal system.

‘I liked him,' Turquine said as they ran. ‘No mucking about, straight to the point. If he had better reflexes he'd be quite handy.'

Bedevere had no breath with which to reply, which was probably just as well. They were in another corridor; but this one was carpeted and there were doors with frosted glass windows in them leading off it at regular intervals. In other words, they were back Topside again.

‘Let's try this one,' Turquine suggested.

Bedevere, who could run no further in any case, nodded, and they leant heavily on the door and fell into a small office.

If they'd had time they would have seen the writing on the window, which said:

The Atlantean financial services industry prides itself on the fact that it has never yet received a complaint from one of its clients. There are three reasons for this:

‘Turkey.'

‘Yes?'

‘It was you who said Let's try this one, wasn't it?'

‘Yes.'

‘Fine. I was worried there for a moment that I was losing my grip.'

‘No, it was me.'

‘Fine.'

A rat hesitated in the doorway of its hole, lifted itself on to its back paws, and sniffed. Something didn't smell right.

With a flick of his tail he retreated, demonstrating that animals are far more sensitive to atmosphere than human beings. If he had been so foolish as to go much further, there can be little doubt that Turquine would have caught him and eaten him.

‘I'm famished, Bedders,' he said for the seven hundredth time. ‘I mean, prison's one thing, you can't really squeal when you land up in a dungeon, it's all part of the game. They capture you, Dad comes up with the ransom, you go home, finish. But they're supposed to feed you while you're here. It's in some convention or other.'

Bedevere stirred uneasily. He had tried to keep his friend off the subject of why they were there, for fear it might upset him.

‘Turkey,' he said quietly, ‘I don't think you quite realise what's going on. I don't think this is the sort of dungeon you're meant to get out of.'

Turquine laughed. ‘Don't be an ass, Bedders,' he replied. ‘There's no such thing as a dungeon you're
meant
to get out of. That's the whole point about dungeons. They're containers for the thing contained, like shoe boxes.'

‘Up to a point,' Bedevere replied, staring up at where the roof should be but seeing only darkness. ‘Only, with your ... your conventional dungeon, you're only kept there for a limited time - you know, till the ransom's paid or until you've served your time or whatever. Somehow I don't think this is one of those.'