The Two of Swords: Part 9 (7 page)

“Are you drunk?”

“Pick a fucking card.”

She chose one. “Look at it.” She turned it over and her heart stopped. Four of Swords.

There is no suit of Swords in an orthodox pack. And four was her next call sign; but only the abbot knew that.

“Listen carefully,” Oida said. “Ten paces to your left, up against the wall, is a flagstone with a ring in it. Lift it up and you’ll find steps going down. That puts you in the main hypocaust, which runs right across this floor. It’ll be a bit of a squeeze and I know you’re not wild about confined spaces, but I’m sure you can cope if you try. Go precisely ninety-two yards – you’ll have to count, it’ll be dark as a bag down there, not to mention hot as hell – you’ll find another slab with a ring in it, that’ll let you down one level. There aren’t any steps, you’ll just have to drop, so for God’s sake don’t hurt yourself, because nobody can come and fish you out if you get into trouble. With me so far?”

She couldn’t speak, so she nodded.

“Now I don’t know the exact distance, so you’ll have to feel for the hatches on the wall on your left-hand side. Hatch twenty-seven is the one you want; it opens inwards, so be careful. Crawl down that exactly eighty-seven yards, directly above you will be a trapdoor like the others, a slab you can lift. That’s where it could be tricky, because you’ll be coming up into a watch chamber, and there could well be a guard on duty. Deal with him if you have to, and pull the body down the hypocaust after you on your way back. Don’t leave the knife behind, remember, it can be traced to me.”

“Just a minute,” she hissed.

Maybe he hadn’t heard her. “In the chamber, you’ll find a locked cabinet. You should be able to force the lock, or maybe you can pick it, I know you’re good at that. What you want is a ring with five keys on it, one of them almost twice as long as the others. If there’s more than one set answering that description, bring them all. Then it’s back the way you came and meet me here in one hour. Got that?”

She opened her mouth to refuse, then closed it again. Four of Swords. The hand can’t disobey the brain. Instead, she whispered, “So that’s why you came to rescue me.”

He gave her a look that stopped her in her tracks. “There are good reasons, plausible reasons and the real reason,” he said. “A beautiful girl once told me that, but I don’t think she loves me. Get moving, we’re on the clock.”

If there is a Hell, according to Saloninus in the
Third Eclogue
, it’s probably the absence of light. Far be it from her to disagree, but he couldn’t be more wrong. Hell, if there is one, is confined spaces.

That’s why they bury people; because most people lead wicked lives, and the good are enraptured from the flesh at the moment of death; and putting someone in a tight fitting box and covering her with tons of earth is the worst possible punishment any mind, mortal or immortal, could possibly devise.

At least there was no box. She could move; and if she kept moving it wasn’t quite so bad; and if she kept counting, she couldn’t think about it. But if she stopped or lost count, she knew she’d be finished – astray, off the beacon, no way back, she’d be there for ever and ever, unless you believe in a Day of Judgement and the end of the world, which she didn’t.

She couldn’t stand upright, but if she bent forward until her elbows were on her knees, she could just about get by – the top of her head brushed the roof, which was the home of many spiders, and the gentle drag of the gossamer on her hair made her flesh crawl – and she could accurately measure distance by the number of paces taken. There were columns of bricks on either side of her (she’d found that out by scraping her forearms against them) and they were accurately, regularly spaced, two feet between them. By counting them as well, she could cross-check on the distance. Ninety-two yards. Was that to the edge of the flagstone or the middle, where the ring was?

Just as well she wasn’t relying on eyesight, because the sweat in her eyes would’ve made it impossible to see.

The dress, now; at least the dress had been explained to her satisfaction. It fitted. How Oida had got her measurements she didn’t want to know, but it fitted and she could move in it, which was more than could be said for any of the other clothes at her disposal. The fabric had been well chosen, too. The hotter she got, the more it clung to her; the more it clung, the easier it was to move. Chosen by a man with a good working knowledge of women’s bodies. A smart man, Oida, the sort who knows all kinds of things.

In the event, she overshot by a good yard, realised she’d come too far by the brick-pile count, had to shuffle backwards, groping on the floor for the ring. She found it; there simply wasn’t room to straighten up enough to pull it. But it had to be possible, because the men who maintained the hypocausts could do it. Eventually, she got it figured: raise it a couple of inches and slide the knife in under it to keep it open, then get the other side of it, lie down and gradually lever it up until it slid away and clanged on the floor with a noise they must’ve been able to hear in Choris. She lay perfectly still and counted to a hundred, but she couldn’t hear footsteps on the floor above her. Would the sound carry through the marble slabs? She had no idea.

On the clock, she reminded herself. Oh, and be careful of the drop.

It was just as well she’d slipped off her boots first. Her idea had been to brace herself in the hole with her arms, grab the sides of the hole, dangle, then drop the last few inches, feet, whatever. It didn’t work like that. She slipped and caught herself from falling by her elbows, so that her full weight was supported by muscles that weren’t usually called on to do that sort of work. They objected, and she felt their displeasure; meanwhile, she was stuck. She tried lifting up again, but she wasn’t strong enough. All she could do was tuck her elbows in until she was free to fall.

For a moment or so after she landed, she was terrified that she’d broken something, just as Oida had said she would. But when she dared to wiggle her toes, she could feel them move, and she decided the pain in her ankles was just pain. A surge of relief left her too weak to move for a long time.

She tried to take a deep breath, but her lungs had got very small. But no matter. Onwards, as Oida would say.

The lower hypocaust was secondary and narrower. She could get along on her hands and knees, but she had to squeeze her way past every column of bricks. Remarkably, the fabric of the dress didn’t tear, but her skin did. The floor slabs were almost too hot to bear, would’ve been intolerable without the sweat pouring off her. Twenty-seven hatches; she decided they were evenly spaced, but her progress was irregular, short paddles and long ones. She had to feel up past the bricks to feel for the hatch frames, and was scared stiff she might have missed one.

Twenty-seven, and she was panting like a dog, her heart was the size of a watermelon, she was dizzy and sick and her back was agony. The hatches open inwards, so be careful. Be careful? What the hell was that supposed to mean?

She found out. When opened, the hatch completely filled the hypocaust, airtight, a perfect fit, a gasket. She tried to close it again, because the opening was on the other side. It wouldn’t budge, it was wedged, stuck. She bashed with the heels of her hands, shoulder-bumped it, no use. Only when she squirmed her way round and kicked it with both feet did it budge; then it slammed shut and she couldn’t claw it open again. The tip of the knife levered it free eventually. She crawled past it, then swung it back, maybe a little too hard – it was stuck again, and there was no handle on the inside, and she’d have to come back this way. But, she told herself, I’m not going to survive much more of this, so I won’t be coming back, so it doesn’t matter. Through the hatch. Onwards.

Crawl exactly eighty-seven yards. How can you measure eighty-seven yards, exactly, in the dark on your hand and knees?

The new shaft was smaller still, but there weren’t any piles of bricks. Instead, there was a pipe, dead centre on the floor, wide enough that she couldn’t quite get her knees either side of it. Needless to say, it was scalding. She backed up to the open hatch and somehow managed to squirm out of the dress. It was sodden with sweat, as wet as if she’d been out in the rain. She draped it over the pipe and slid it along with her knees as she went.

The calibration problem turned out not to be a problem after all. Someone – the builders, maybe, or some extremely intelligent Clerk of Works – had cut marks in the brick on the right-hand wall at intervals of eighteen inches. She only realised what they were after she’d come a painfully long way. She established the interval by marking off in handspans. Then she backed up all the way to the hatch and started again.

One hundred and sixty-four notches. Directly overhead there should be a slab that lifted.

The knife, in its sheath, was gripped in her right hand. She’d almost forgotten what it was there for. Oh, that. Reaching up, she laid the flat of her left hand and the knuckles of her right on the underside of the roof, and pushed as hard as she possibly could. It lifted, a little. Not nearly enough. She gave it everything she had, but she couldn’t move it any further.

Then, quite suddenly, it wasn’t there any more, and she was drowning in unendurable light. Her still-upraised left hand was grabbed, and someone incredibly strong hauled her up an impossibly long way, then set her down lightly on a hard, smooth floor.

She blinked, but all she could see was a painfully bright blur, and all she could do was pant and whimper. A voice was talking to her. Unbelievably, it was saying, “Are you all right, miss?”

Later, she saw it from his point of view. A manhole opens; he hauls it up and there’s a naked woman, trembling and squealing and sopping wet. The most extraordinary thing you’ve ever seen; but hardly a danger. What else would you do but pull her out, calm her down and try and find out how she got there?

It was pure, undeserved luck that she’d dropped the knife when he pulled her up, because if he’d seen it he might have formed a different view. As it was, she had no trouble at all drawing his sword and stabbing him in the pit of the stomach with it. Not a clean kill, but enough to shut him up; she pulled it out and stabbed him again, this time in the hollow between the collarbones. He rocked back, hit a wall and lay still. Onwards.

She stepped over him and located the cabinet Oida had told her about. Of course it was locked, and it was a great heavy thing, inch-thick oak boards with dovetailed joints. Her knife would’ve snapped if she’d tried to force it open with that, but the sentry’s sword managed it, though she bent the blade. Like she cared; she was radiantly happy, because she was out of the hole, out of the grave, risen again from the dead, her heart had stopped pounding and she could breathe.

There were, of course, three sets of five keys with four short ones and one long one. Not her problem. She looped them round the middle finger of her left hand and closed her fist on them. She’d left wet footprints on the floor, as though she’d just got out of the bath; quite possibly a fatal mistake, but she simply didn’t care any more.

Then she looked at the hole in the floor; the deep, black hole that led down to hell, where thieves and murderers go for all eternity. I can’t, she thought. She backed away from it until she met the wall, then slid down it and crouched, not moving, as though it would pounce on her if it saw her.

She woke up with a start, because a voice in her ear had just said,
one hour, we’re on the clock
. She looked round, but there was nobody there.

One hour, and she’d been asleep. She scrambled to her feet. The hole was still there, and it was going to eat her alive, but it didn’t matter. She had a job to do, and she was late.

Pulling the guard down into the hole wasn’t going to be easy; doing that and then closing the flagstone after her— Bloody Oida, she told herself, he just doesn’t
think
.

She did the geometry. If she pitched the guard down the hole first, he’d fill the available space and she wouldn’t be able to get past him. Would she? It was an assumption, but assumptions are there to be challenged. She considered the room available, her own size and shape, the alternative – go down into the hole, drag the guard down after her by the ankle, then somehow reach past and lower the flagstone – no, that wasn’t possible. So, no alternative at all.

She dragged him by one foot and fed him down the hole legs first. Luckily he wasn’t stiff yet; if she’d left it much longer, it could’ve made things interesting. It turned out that there was just enough of a gap for her to squeeze past him if she stamped on his head enough to pack him down and then pretended she was a liquid rather than a solid. She got stuck, her stomach pressed hard against the scalding pipe, and had to claw her way inch by inch, doing all the work with her hands because her legs had nothing to act against. She got through. As an afterthought, she hooked the scarf off his neck and wedged it between her skin and the pipe. It helped, a bit.

That was the hard part. All she had to do after that was drag him down a way – one hand hooked under his chin, the other with fingers hooked into one of the clever clerk’s calibration grooves, the only handhold she could find – then scramble back up out of the hole, lift the flagstone, balance it with exquisite precision so that it’d topple down exactly into the hole when she nudged it from underneath; back down again, unseat the slab, then get her head out of the way before the slab came crashing down and smashed her skull like an egg.

And then, of course, it was dark again. She crawled over the dead man’s face like a slug, then remembered the knife. She’d dropped it, she knew that, but where was it? She was guessing it was the presentation piece the garrison commander had given to Oida, and which he’d passed on to her; so of course it could be recognised and traced, and if they lifted the flagstone and shone a lantern down the shaft, there it would be. Turning round wasn’t possible, so she had to backtrack, crawling feet first, back over the dead man again. It took a long time to locate the knife by feel, not really knowing where to search, since the slab had been replaced and it was pitch dark. She found it more or less by accident; also her dress, which she’d completely forgotten about. Lucky, because the scarf on its own wasn’t really enough to protect her from the hot pipe.