The Two of Swords: Part 9 (8 page)

When she passed from the pipe channel into the hypocaust it felt like coming home; just those extra few inches of space. There was, of course, the matter of the wedged-open hatch, jammed against the hypocaust wall. Nothing would shift it, and she felt the panic building up again; just in time before it swamped her, she thought of sticking the knife into the hatch frame as hard as she could, then looping the scarf round the handle and pulling on it. To her great surprise, that actually worked. She slithered through the hatch into the main hypocaust and burst out laughing.

Enough of that. She now had room enough to pull the dress back on – God only knew what state it was in, but at least the hot pipe had dried it out a bit, and it wasn’t like wearing algae. She tried to stand up, but the soles of her feet had got burned on the pipe – she hadn’t even noticed, at the time – and it took a substantial effort of will to put her weight on them, crushing the fat blisters and feeling the pus move as she bent her foot. But the keys were still looped round her finger, and she could walk again, instead of crawling. Onwards.

Forty careful paces, cross-referenced with the brick piles, and then she stopped. She couldn’t remember. Was it ninety-two yards or ninety-six? For a moment, she panicked and lost her nerve, until she realised it didn’t matter. Try both, and one of them will be right. And pull yourself together, for crying out loud.

Ninety-two, as it happened. She put the back of her head against the slab and heaved; it started to move, then disappeared; light, brighter even than the last time, and Oida’s voice, hissing, “Where the
hell
did you get to?”

“You’ve made it very difficult for us,” he said, lifting her foot. She was flat on her back. “Getting yourself in that state. Just look at you, for crying out loud. We’ve got that presentation tomorrow.”

She tried to tell him it hadn’t been on purpose but her voice didn’t seem to be working. He unhooked the brooch from his cloak, took a firm grip on her foot and burst the blisters with the brooch pin, one after another. “Right,” he said. “Can you stand?”

Only one way to find out. Turned out she could.

Oida knelt down and unlaced his boots. “You’ll have to wear these,” he said, “and I’ll just have to slop along in my bare feet, there’s no time to get anything from the rooms. God, what a shambles.”

Time was short, he explained, as they limped down the colonnade, because there was an incredibly small window of opportunity between the evening watch and the first night watch, most of which she’d dissipated by being late. Any moment now, the night watch would come on duty and the whole place would be swarming with guards.

“Where are we going?” she managed to ask.

“Work to do” was all he said. Then he tightened his grip on her elbow and made her walk faster. “Where’s the knife?”

“Left it behind.”

“Oh, you didn’t.” He sounded so disappointed in her. “It just keeps getting better. Well, if we run into trouble, you’ll just have to rend our enemies with your teeth. Try and keep up, will you?”

She wanted to cry, but she knew she couldn’t. Further or in the alternative she wanted to cut Oida’s throat, but crying would be better. “Where are we going?” she repeated, but he didn’t seem to have heard. He was getting ahead of her and she had to run to keep up.

“This is now all incredibly dangerous,” Oida observed, opening a door at the far end of the colonnade. “If we aren’t caught it’ll be a miracle. For God’s sake try and keep quiet, I don’t want to have to slaughter half the garrison.”

There was a long corridor, which came out in a small, dark courtyard which led into a narrow alley, at the end of which was an arch, past which was a gate with a small wicket set into it. Oida fumbled with the keys for a long time, until she heard a lock click. It was too dark to see his face, but he paused for a long time before opening the door very gently and peering through the crack. “Fool’s luck,” he whispered. “Come on.”

It was too dark to see anything inside, but the floor under her feet felt like boards rather than slabs. “Carefully,” Oida whispered, too softly for her to be able to place where he was or, by implication, which direction she should take to follow him. So she did the only thing she could, and stopped dead. “Keep
up
,” she heard him hiss, loudly enough to give her a fix on his position; she hurried towards him and heard the floorboards creak slightly. She reached out on both sides and the fingertips of her right hand contacted what felt like unplastered brick. Now it made sense; he was following the wall. Reasonable enough, but he might have mentioned it.

She heard keys in another door, then he said, “Stairs”. She shuffled forward, but in his boots, with blistered feet, she had real trouble feeling for the change between flat floor and stair. When it came she stumbled and was only just able to steady herself by clawing at the wall.

She counted sixty-five stairs, going down.

“Stop,” she heard him say. She stopped. More keys. A click, and then he whispered, “Probably guards on the other side of this door.” Then he opened it, and light hit her in the face.

Another gallery – it reminded her of mineshafts she’d been in, not her happiest memory; there were props every yard, supporting rafters, but the floor was paved with brick and there were lanterns hanging from hooks. The roof was rock, not earth. “We’re in luck,” he whispered. “There should be a guard here. Arrangement was he’d be paid to be somewhere else, but I didn’t get a confirmation on that. Looks like Division got something right for once.”

She counted a hundred and twenty-five paces, and then they came to another door. Oida had the key. He inserted it, then turned back to her.

“Look,” he said, “I’m sorry for being a bastard, it’s because I’m so scared I can hardly breathe, it makes me irritable. There may be a guard the other side of this door, or there may not. From now on, guards and fighting are your business, while I do the rescuing. All right?”

She nodded, too startled to speak. “Thanks,” he said, and turned the key.

Just another corridor, also with a propped roof. “Oh, God, right or left?” he moaned, then turned left. Soon they were passing heavy oak doors, with small sliding panels at eye level; so, probably not the wine cellars. The doors were numbered, in chalk; some of the numbers had been rubbed out. “Sixty-two, we want,” he whispered. “Trouble is, they’re not in bloody order.”

True; forty-one was next to twenty-seven was next to a hundred and sixty-six. The corridor was so narrow that if a cell door opened it would block and seal it, like the hatch in the hypocaust. She glanced up at the roof and tried to remember if Blemya had a history of earthquakes.

Sixty-two; he’d gone past it. She grabbed his elbow, pulled him back and pointed. “Shit,” he said. “Just as well one of us has got a brain.” He handed her the keys. “Right, you stay here, and when I say the word, unlock the door and pull it open. It’s the longest key.”

Now she understood the reason for the bizarre architecture. It took two men to unlock a cell; one man couldn’t do it on his own, he’d be blocked by the door and the prisoner could bolt. “Right,” he said. She turned the key and hauled on the door, and was suddenly alone.

Presumably the door had a handle on the inside. It moved away from her, and she saw Oida. He had his elbow round the throat of an impossibly thin, bald young man – she assumed he was alive, but he could easily have been dead, the way he was propped up against Oida’s body.

“He’s completely out of it,” Oida said sadly. “This is going to be no fun at all.”

They ended up carrying him, because he couldn’t or wouldn’t move; she had his ankles, while Oida held him under the arms. They had to keep stopping so Oida could adjust his grip. The young man’s feet galled the blisters on her ribs. “This is hopeless,” Oida said, several times, and then they reached the first door.

Getting through it was complicated; they had to prop the young man up against the wall, and she kept him steady while Oida did the lock. Then it was Oida’s turn at the feet end, and hers to do the heavy lifting. The young man wasn’t exactly a burden. She realised, in the small, detached part of her mind that still gave a damn, that she was probably stronger than Oida, or at least better educated in managing heavy weights.

The stairs were all manner of fun and games. Oida seemed to have forgotten about the possibility of guards; he made a lot of unnecessary noise and barged through the door at the top of the stairs without looking. But the luck held, or the plan worked better than anticipated; surprisingly quickly, they made it out into the alley that led to the courtyard, and there Oida stopped.

“Got to get my bearings,” he muttered, breathing heavily. “Fifth stable yard, it’s where they keep the horses for the garbage carts. How’s your sense of smell? I haven’t really got one.”

But she had, and it led them across the courtyard, through an unlocked gate to the main palace midden. “Needless to say they work a night shift,” Oida whispered, as they peered round a corner. “But it’s dark as a bag, and they don’t light lanterns, for fear of spoiling the sleep of the nobs on the upper floors. Just imagine you’re the kitchen staff and we’ll be fine.”

Leaning against a wall were big stretchers, wide as doors, for carrying trash to the midden. They got the young man on one of these, carried him across the yard and dumped him in a heap of cabbage stalks and turnip peel. Then they put the stretcher back where they’d got it from and retraced their steps to the alley; from there to the colonnade. “What I should’ve done,” Oida muttered, “is leave a change of clothes for us just inside the door here. I never thought we’d get this filthy.” He went to the edge of the colonnade and peered out. “Coast is clear,” he said. “We need to nip smartly across to that door there—” He pointed, but so briefly and vaguely she couldn’t tell what at. “That’s the servants’ access to the state rooms on the fifth floor. From there we can take the kitchen stair down to the third floor and make a dash for it from there. Game?”

She nodded wearily. She hadn’t had any strength left for a long time. “Fine,” he said. “With me.” Then he darted across the open hall, and she followed as best she could.

Many years earlier she’d watched a battle. It started at dawn and went on till sunset, and the thing she remembered most was watching the survivors of the shattered centre turning their backs and walking away from the enemy cavalry – walking, not running, because they were too exhausted to run and too drained to care. Now she knew how they felt. She followed him up and down various stairs, but she’d lost track of where she was and couldn’t be bothered to try and figure it out. When they stopped outside a door, she didn’t recognise it as her own.

“On second thoughts,” Oida said, “you’d better come in mine. What you need is a bath.”

While it was filling she stripped off the remains of the dress without a thought. Oida, however, was shocked. “For God’s sake look at you,” he said. “How many guards did you have to fight?”

“One,” she said, “and it wasn’t a fight.”

“You got in that state just strolling down a few passages?”

She didn’t answer. Instead she got into the bath. It hurt like hell, but she was past caring.

He fetched clothes from her room. “The veil’s a blessing,” he said, “it’ll cover those burns on your face, and you can wear gloves, so that’s all right. What about shoes? Will you be able to get them on?”

She was wrapped in a towel but made no effort to dry herself. “I don’t know.”

He leaned back in his chair. He had a few smears of brick dust and cobweb on his cloak and robe, and a few swabs of her blood, and his hair needed brushing. “In a little while, all hell’s going to break loose,” he said. “But not officially, thank goodness.”

She realised she was supposed to ask for amplification. “What?”

He smiled. “The man we rescued isn’t supposed to be in prison,” he said. “Officially, he’s retired to his country estates. If the Queen found out what they’ve been doing to him, there’d be blood on the floor. Division believes she’s in love with him, but personally I think they’re just friends; which is rather more significant, since he’s the only friend she’s got.”

She pulled the towel round her. Unbelievably, she was starting to feel cold. “Who is he?”

Oida hesitated. “I’m not supposed to tell you, but what the hell. His name is Daxin, and he was the chief minister or grand vizier or whatever you want to call it. If you remember, he was the one who made such a muck-up of the first expeditionary force against the nomads, before Forza slaughtered their army. The ruling faction on the Council nabbed him and stuck him away down there – it’s a sort of unofficial prison, nobody’s supposed to know about it – and he’s been there ever since, poor bastard. We’re going to give him to the Queen for a birthday present.”

She forced herself to take an interest. “Will he be all right?”

Oida grinned. “At this moment he should be on a garbage cart underneath two tons of kitchen waste on its way to be sweated down into pigswill. The farmer will dig him out, brush him off and put him in a fast chaise to the coast, where a ship will whisk him far, far away. Her Majesty’s birthday isn’t for three months, so they’ll have a chance to put some flesh back on him. Anyway,” he went on, “it’s all good for us, because the bad boys won’t tear the place apart looking for him, since officially there’s been no jail break and no crime committed.” He paused and rubbed a mark off the back of his hand. “They’ll know perfectly well we did it,” he said. “But we’re quite safe, at least until we’ve paid our respects to Her Majesty tomorrow evening, and after that I suggest we get out of town sharpish. But they won’t do anything to us, I’m too high profile and besides, where’s the point? It’s done now, and killing us would just risk drawing attention. They’ll be too busy packing small items of value in case they have to leave in a hurry.”

She let her head loll forward. “Job done, then.”

“I think so, more or less.” A long silence, and then he said, “How are you feeling?”

“Not too bad.”

“How are you feeling?”

She turned her head and looked at him. “You might have told me,” she said.