Thief (26 page)

By lunch time the trot had become a jog. By mid afternoon it was a run and by evening a full blown never ending sprint. Dimly he wondered about it, but his goal was all that he could hold in his mind at once. Free the prisoners, be with Sherial. It was that simple. He simply ran as though the devil was on his tail, a naked man with a pack in the middle of nowhere, but his destiny lay before him and all else was irrelevant.

Where was the energy coming from? It was perhaps the only question that ran through his mind that day. And he had no true answer. But he knew it was deep. He felt it coming from depths he’d never known he had, resources beyond that which he’d ever been able to access before. But they were also finite. He felt it. And when they ran out so did he. Permanently.

It wasn’t only his own resources he was using. Somewhere by the end of that second day he understood that. For on his back, around his kidneys, he could feel the warmth from where Sherial’s hands had held him to her, where she’d given to him the strength to endure the flames of their passion. It was as though her hands were still holding him, supporting him, and burning him with that love.

It wasn’t important. Nothing, no pain, no fear, no doubt could be important to him that day.

He kept on running through that day and the night that followed. Visions beset him like street signs did cars on the highway, but he understood them not at all, and paid them no mind. Pain and fear were always with him, and he welcomed them as old friends. At least he knew what they were. Guilt and shame rode him, providing all the power he could ever need, while the awesome love of Sherial, the need to be with her, and the soul-destroying fear of never being with her again, swamped everything else.

By the morning of the third day he was nearing his destination, never understanding how he even knew where he was going. Nor did it matter. He was travelling in the right direction and he was getting closer.

He crested one final small hill and then stopped in shock. Finally it was there in front of him, standing like an ugly blot on the landscape. He had arrived.

For the first time in days he stopped. He stopped running, he stopped thinking, planning or even aching. For in front of him lay evil, and it shocked him down to his toenails. He could sense it, though he couldn’t have described how or what he sensed. It was like an assault on his very soul.

For a start there was the castle. A building out of nightmare itself. A black castle, the black of death and suffering rather than that of mere nightfall. While in size it was no bigger than a fort or manor house, and he could see no sign of guards or defences, every instinct in him screamed at the sight of it. Every hair on his body rose in protest, while his nose instinctively blocked up at the sight. He knew it would reek of sulphur.

He hadn’t expected a castle. He’d been expecting a cave. A hole in a mountain filled with blackness. But still he knew this was it.

The land around it was distorted, in some way twisted, blackened and disturbing. It was as though the trees, the grass and the land itself had been squeezed by the hand of the devil himself, and all the goodness, all the life had been wrung out of it, leaving this bone dry, dead relic in its place.

It screamed of Hell, of demons and of evil. And yet in it he knew lived the innocent. Creatures trapped and mutilated in this horror, creatures he was honour bound to free from this prison.

Could he do it? For the first time he understood the magnitude of the task. For the first time he understood he was heading deep into the unknown, testing his skills and wits against he knew not what. And he knew he was alone. Sherial he loved with his entire heart and soul, and knew she loved him in return. But there was no hope of her coming here. Even if she could have come, even if she had been permitted to attempt this nightmare, he wouldn’t have let her. The thought of her suffering as had those other poor souls was too horrible to bear.

“I am a thief.” For the first time in ages, the words of his new mantra finally made themselves known to him. Instead of using them to push himself beyond his limits, or to protect himself from what he neither needed protection from, nor could have prevented, he listened to them. He was a thief, and a damn good one. He could steal anything, given time and a plan. What others thought was impossible he had done before, and would do again. That was why he had been chosen.

“I am a thief”. He had stolen gold from the most impenetrable of Swiss banks. He had tricked the very worst monsters man had ever spewed up into jail, and separated their fortunes from them in the same act. He had led the entire world’s security organizations in one wild goose chase after another, and taken and then given away more money than many countries took in tax. In all the world there was no one to match him, there probably never would be again. Every one of those jobs had been a holy terror the first time, and each one he’d pulled off more easily then than the last. This would be no different.

“I am a thief”. Above all Sherial thought he could do it, and that thought alone gave him the courage he needed. For her he would walk into hell itself and do the impossible. He couldn’t let her down. Besides she had chosen him because of his skill. Therefore it must be possible.

But in truth there was one thing finally more important in his mind than that. He knew that until he had done this, until he had freed those prisoners, he could not be with Sherial again. And he had to be with her again, forever.

And so he used that need, making it his energy as he prepared himself for the impossible. For the rest of that day, he used it to focus his energies, to clear his mind, and to heal his body as best he could.

And when finally the time came, that need too was the strength that drove him forwards, into the black castle of dread.

Crawling on his belly in the dark, Mikel approached the dark citadel, silent as a frightened mouse. Every blade of grass he carefully brushed aside and flattened gently, though there were precious few of them after the first dozen yards or so. Something in the soil deterred the growth of anything living. Much as it deterred him. Only will power and need kept him going.

He should be invisible he kept telling himself, the suit perfectly pitch black in the night, designed to conceal him from every known form of detection. He must surely be unseen. Yet all the hairs on his body were trying to stand painfully upright underneath the stretched neoprene.

He was certain he was being watched with every millimetre he moved, though he could see nothing. The specially designed contacts he wore magnified light levels nearly a hundred times and turned night into day; a green day. In theory he could see better than a cat with them in. His hearing was also boosted with an ultrasonic amplifier attached to miniature hearing aids. If a pin dropped in fifty yards he should hear it. He saw and heard nothing. There was not a trace of movement ahead, not the slightest sound. But the hair on his body still stood on end and his skin crawled.

Despite his foreboding there was not a sign of anything untoward and he forced himself to move on, his pitifully slow progress even more painful on his nerves than the strain of the movement on his body.

Fifty minutes after he had begun, Mikel reached the door, and there was still no sign that he had been spotted. He congratulated himself, silently, on having met his first objective. Things were going exactly according to plan. Why he wondered, didn’t it make him feel more confident?

The lock on the door proved to be a tumbler type arrangement, but nothing like he’d ever seen on Earth. Then again why should it be? Using his kevlar lock picks he carefully inserted them and started feeling for the tumblers. Immediately he knew satisfaction. The lock might be complex. It might have far more tumblers than anything outside a bank safe should. But he acknowledged no master when it came to picking locks. A few minutes later and the tiniest click in the night told him he had success.

The door opened, silently, swinging inwards. A few drops of penetrating oil on the hinges made sure of its easy movement. He crawled inside, after carefully looking for traps. No wires, no infra red beams, no movement sensors could he see. And the sonic and heat detectors couldn’t find him in theory anyway.

Inside the front room proved to be an alcove of some sort. In a normal home it would have been the entrance hall leading to the lounge and public parts of the house. Here it had more the feel of a dungeon path leading to the cells. The walls were dark grey, probably granite, worn smooth by the passage of time. The floor too was dark stone, again worn smooth by feet over time. He wondered how many years, how many centuries it took to wear a path in the rock, and shuddered thinking of the feet that had done it.

The lighting too was poor, a few flickering candles here and there, as if the owners didn’t want to see the conditions they lived in. Then again perhaps they didn’t like light. In which case the starbursts should be even more effective. That too boded well for his mission, and he didn’t like it at all.

Crawling silently, the very stone under him seemed to take on its own malevolent life, the coldness somehow penetrating even his insulated suit, burning him. It was horrible, but he knew that if he rose he’d probably set off countless alarms, and perhaps even be seen. Willpower alone kept him down and moving.

Slowly and with infinite care he passed through the hall, looking for the doors to the dungeon. At each door he came to he listened first with the stethoscope he’d brought specifically for this purpose. He listened for any sound that could tell him of life within these walls. Breathing, movement, even a heartbeat. Yet he couldn’t help but wonder; did any of those things exist here?

The first door told him nothing other than silence. It was massive, built of more of the same dark stone that seemed to be the only material used here. On an impulse he ran a fibre-optic cable through the gap under the door and peered through the tiny monocular sight. Nothing. And that was wrong. The system was light enhanced, as were his eyes. If there had been the slightest trace of light on the other side he should have seen it as clear as day. Which meant there was no light on the other side. Deep within he felt a shudder and suppressed it.

He moved on down the passage way.

The next door too told him nothing. It was silent and dark as the tomb, and for the first time he wondered if he knew what he’d gotten himself into. Still he had come this far and the entrance door now forty feet behind him was starting to look a long way away. Through the crack where it didn’t quite shut he could see light, starlight, and it looked so good to him. So pure, so clean. He would have fled if it hadn’t been for the thought of those poor trapped souls below and the question of how he would ever tell Sherial of his failure.

Sherial. Just the thought of her brought a smile to his face. It was as though a part of her was still with him even in this nightmare land. The touch of her was all that gave him the courage to keep going, but it was enough and he moved on.

Door number three proved to be very different from all that had gone before, and yet he almost wished it hadn’t. For there in the room through the tiny fibre-optic cable he saw a traditional Victorian lounge complete with reclining chair and fire place. But the creature that sat in that chair was like no Victorian gentleman he could have ever imagined.

It was evil, pure malice in the flesh. He could see nothing of it except the back of its head over the top of the recliner, and he knew it was evil. It also wasn’t human. People just didn’t have hair that spiked like bone in all directions, nor bald skin between the spikes that oozed black oil. Nor did they smell like something long since deceased. It took all of his self-control not to scream and run at the sight. Infinitely carefully he pulled the cable out of the slot. He didn’t want to see any more of that monstrosity, ever.

Doors four and five were like the original ones, silent and black as the grave, but at least he saw no occupants. Silent and black were preferable.

The sixth door proved to be the one he had hoped for. Through it he could here the moans of the prisoners, even though he could see nothing other than grey walls. With infinite patience he oiled the hinges, checked for traps and carefully opened the door a crack. There was nothing there. He slithered in.