Young Sherlock Holmes: Knife Edge (31 page)

Holding the halberd two-handed, Sherlock desperately scythed the blade diagonally down from his right shoulder to his left knee. Kyte sprang backwards to avoid being slashed. There were two
curved projections behind the blade – probably used to hook riders and pull them from their horses, Sherlock realized – and he managed to lunge
forward and entangle one of them in
Kyte’s shirt sleeve. He pulled the halberd back, jerking Kyte off balance, but Kyte twisted, and the blade attached to his right arm slid under the shaft of the halberd, ripping straight
through Sherlock’s shirt and drawing a line of fiery agony along his ribs.

He felt blood trickle down from the wound as he pulled away rapidly, scraping his back against
the tunnel wall.

Kyte’s lips were twisted in fury, and his eyes blazed in the same fanatical way that Maupertuis’s had, but he seemed to have no interest in talking. He just wanted to remove
Sherlock’s head from his body. Drawing back and rearing up to his full height, he lashed out at Sherlock with one blade after another, like a boxer raining punches at his opponent but with
swords instead
of fists. Sherlock desperately backed away, parrying the blows with his halberd, wishing that fate had given him something less clumsy than the long and heavy weapon.

His foot caught on a rock projecting from the tunnel floor, and he stumbled backwards. Kyte was on him in a flash, right arm extended like a spear. Sherlock rolled sideways and the blade sparked
as it hit the rock that had,
just moments before, been beneath him. He scrabbled backwards on hands and feet, still somehow holding on to the halberd, hearing it clatter against the tunnel floor.
Kyte followed, lunging time after time with his blades but just missing Sherlock as the boy jerked from side to side.

Glancing quickly over his shoulder to make sure he wasn’t going to bump into anything that might halt his
progress, Sherlock noticed the lantern that had been silhouetting Kyte earlier.
Like the previous one, it was balanced on an old crate. Without thinking it through, Sherlock reached out over his head with the halberd and caught its handle with one of the curved spikes on the
back of the axe blade. He jerked it hard, pulling it over the top of his body and flinging it towards Kyte.

The
big man jumped backwards, but too late. Instead of hitting him, the lantern smashed against the tunnel wall, sending oil splattering over him. The wick, still alight, caught his shirt.

And set it alight.

Flames flashed across Kyte’s chest and beard. Sherlock heard the hairs crackling as they burned. A horrible smell filled the tunnel. Kyte flapped at the flames with his hands, trying to
put them out, but the blades came perilously close to his eyes and he had to stop. Instead, he threw himself to the tunnel floor and rolled around, using the sand and the dirt that had drifted in
over the years to smother the fire.

Sherlock rolled over, pushed himself to his feet and ran down the tunnel in the opposite direction to the cave mouth. The halberd in his hands seemed heavier
than ever, dragging him down, but he
wasn’t going to abandon it now. Lanterns attached to hooks in the walls now lit his way. Presumably Maupertuis’s thugs had kept them going, for their own convenience. Either that, or
smugglers were still operating there, and Sherlock had a feeling that the Paradol Chamber would have cleared them all out. Or paid them off.

The tunnel twisted and turned,
but he kept pounding away. He thought he could hear Kyte’s heavy footsteps behind him, but that might just have been the pounding of his heart. He
wasn’t going to stop to find out. He wasn’t even going to look over his shoulder, just in case he stumbled and fell again. If he was caught, then it was all over. He was dead.

If
Kyte was still chasing him.

Dark openings started appearing
in the tunnel walls: caves leading off in other directions, deeper into the cliffs, or towards the beach. He was so tired and so disoriented that he
couldn’t tell. The breeze was still in his face, though, so he kept following the main tunnel.

It came to an abrupt end, far ahead, in a curved wall of dark stone, just like the one he had seen a few days before. Patches of moss were spread
across the tunnel walls and ground in front of
it, like the marks of some terrible disease.

He kept running, but there were no tunnel openings off to either side between him and the wall. He could turn around, he supposed, and go back, but he was worried that Kyte was only a few yards
behind him, blades extended towards his back.

He knew where he was. The wall was the wall of the pumice-stone
folly, continuing underground. He’d seen it from the other side, when he investigated the cellars beneath the castle.

He heard a grating noise behind him. It was the sound of Kyte’s blades banging against the tunnel wall as he ran, arms swinging wildly. There really was no way back, but there was no way
forward either.

His frantic gaze caught sight of something – a darker patch on the
wall of the folly, half disappeared beneath the floor of the tunnel – one of the window openings. It got smaller as
he watched. The folly was actually sinking into the ground! Somehow, someone was operating it!

He knew what he had to do.

Still holding the halberd, he raced towards the wall, so fast that if he ran into it he would knock himself out. Breathing was like inhaling fire. In
some strange optical illusion caused by
tiredness and pain, the door at the far end seemed to be receding rather than getting closer. He forced himself to a final burst of speed, feet thudding into the patches of moss and squishing them
before he could slip on them.

This was just like the race to the tower door against Niamh, up on the castle battlements. In his head he started to count
down ten seconds again.

When he got to
eight
, and the dark shape of the window had reduced to a third of its normal size, he leaped and, when he landed, let his feet skid on the moss, shooting him towards the
gap, the halberd clutched to his chest with its shaft running down to his knees and the blade dangerously close to his face. He slipped over, taking the impact on his shoulder, and
started sliding
on his back. His feet passed through the gap and inside the tower room, and for a terrible moment he thought his hips or his chest would stick and the descending folly would cut him in half, but he
grabbed the edges of the tower window with both hands and pulled himself through, falling into the tiny circular room. His back hit the floor hard, knocking the wind out of him for the
second time
in three seconds. He twisted to look at the gap, which was now no bigger than a plank of wood. A dog would have problems squeezing through. As he watched, the gap narrowed to the height of a
clenched fist, then a wooden ruler, then . . .

A sharp blade slid through the gap, heading straight for his right eye.

It stopped an inch away, the hand behind it – Kyte’s hand – having
hit the top of the window outside. The tower continued to drop, and with an echoing
chink
the blade
snapped at the far end, and fell into the room with him.

He was alone, in total darkness.

He knew he couldn’t afford to waste time recovering. He seemed to remember that the next set of windows were set at right angles to these, meaning that there was likely to be another set
of corridors
coming in from the sides, but eventually another window would line up with the tunnel that Kyte was standing in, and he would enter the tower. There were gaps in the floors between the
tower rooms – he had used the gaps the day before in order to climb up to the top. He wasn’t sure if Kyte would be able to squeeze through the gaps, but he wasn’t going to wait
around to find out. He had to
get moving.

Down.

Before the thought could even complete itself he was scrabbling across the invisible floor, looking for the hole. He found it by almost falling in, then turned around, threw the halberd through
and heard it clatter on the stone floor below, slipped his legs through and slid down into the next room, and then the next, and the next.

The fourth room had no hole in
the floor, and it took him a moment to see that there was a faint light coming through the two windows. He crossed to the one opposite the one he had slid through,
and looked out . . .

Into a circular natural cavern, illuminated by beams of diagonal light that had filtered their way through cracks in the rock from the surface.

He climbed out of the window, and on to a narrow, circular
platform of pumice stone on which the tower had been built. The platform floated on a calm underground lake of sea water. The beams of
faint sunlight reflected off the surface of the lake and cast rippling turquoise shadows across the rock. Cave mouths around the edge of the cavern had been plugged with thick doors of wood. The
doors could be pulled up or lowered using ropes that led up and
vanished inside holes that had been cut into the roof of the cavern. These must be the dams that he had theorized about earlier. By
raising or lowering them, the water entering the cavern from the sea could be contained or released, raising or lowering the level of the lake and thus raising or lowering the folly.

Several of the doors had already been raised, and Sherlock could see that water
was pouring out of the lake and into the caves, where presumably it would rejoin the sea. Someone, high above, had
obviously decided to lower the tower. He wondered who. It seemed like an odd time to do it, given that Quintillan and Maupertuis were dead, the Baron’s thugs were presumably in custody, and
Mr Kyte was here, with Sherlock. Who else was there?

He gazed up in wonder, to where
the folly was still dropping out of a perfectly circular hole in the ceiling of the cavern with only inches to spare around its circumference. How that hole had
been created he would probably never know. It was a miracle of engineering. The whole thing was a miracle – an unseen, unsung wonder of the world hidden beneath the soil and rock of
Ireland.

Before he could marvel too much at the
work that had gone into creating the tower, something fell from a higher window and hit the surface of the lake, entering with an almighty
splash!

Mr Kyte, it appeared, had given up on trying to get through the holes in the floors of the tower rooms and had dived from one of the windows.

Sherlock backed away from the edge of the platform. He still had the halberd, and he clutched it
in both hands now, holding it in front of him like a protective barrier. Not that it was going to
be much use against the unstoppable force that was Mr Kyte.

He was tired. No, he was exhausted. He had used up all his reserves of energy, and he knew that he couldn’t fight any more. There was nothing left to fight with.

No
, he told himself. If you give up, you die. If you want to see Virginia
again, if you want to see Matty, and Rufus Stone, and Mr Crowe, and Mycroft, then you
will
fight.
Somehow you will find the energy.

He straightened his shoulders, brought the halberd up so that it was parallel to the ground, and waited.

He could hear splashing from the lake as Mr Kyte swam back to the pumice platform.

Pumice
. Something in his brain had latched on to the word ‘pumice’
and wouldn’t let go.

Pumice
. It was less dense than water, thanks to the minute holes filled with air that ran through it, and so it floated. It was brittle, fragile. He still had shards of it in his
pocket.

Brittle. Fragile.
That
was it!

He only had a few seconds to act before Mr Kyte swam to the edge of the platform.

Whirling around, he grabbed the halberd by the axe head and
used the spear point at the top of the wooden shaft to jab at a pumice block in the tower – one that was about chest height. The
tip of the spear began to gouge out splinters of pumice. He kept at it, hacking away as fast as he could.

He glanced over his shoulder desperately. A large hand appeared on the edge of the platform, and then another. They rested there for a moment, as if gathering
their strength.

Sherlock redoubled his efforts. He had carved a hole – a tube – going deep into the pumice-stone block. Fortunately he hadn’t gone deep enough to go through to the other side.
That would have ruined things.

Glancing over his shoulder again, he saw the top of Mr Kyte’s head appear above the edge of the platform.

Sherlock only had a few seconds.

He turned the halberd
around and shoved the far end of the wooden staff into the hole. It hung there at chest height, spear end pointed outward, bending slightly with the weight of the axe
head.

Sherlock moved in front of the halberd. He stood, facing the place where Mr Kyte was hauling himself out of the underground lake, with the point of the spear pressing into his back.

This was going to require split-second
timing, otherwise he was going to run himself through with his own weapon.

Shaking, partly with cold and partly with fear, he waited.

Mr Kyte pulled himself on to the platform and straightened up to his full, bear-like height. His red hair was plastered down over his scalded head and his shoulders. His eyes were like little
red sparks in the twisted mask of his face.

He had retracted
the remaining blade attached to his arm, but with a quick knocking together of his wrists he activated the spring mechanism and the blade slid out to its full, lethal
length.

‘There are countries in this world that have caused us less trouble than you,’ he said in a deep, rumbling tone. ‘But now, finally, there is nowhere else to run. Just accept
your death, Sherlock Holmes.’

With
that, he began to run at Sherlock, blade extended before him. His mouth opened and he howled a deep, guttural war cry, obviously intending to pin Sherlock against the tower, flattening him
and running him through at the same time.

Just before the tip of the blade touched his chest, Sherlock dropped to the ground and rolled beneath the horizontal halberd.