“True,” said Pier, stroking his small beard. “His father, Ymro Radetsky, was a brilliant man but had a very unstable temper; and the boy inherited not only the strength, but the weakness. I’ll watch over them.”
“Thank you, Uncle,” said Michel. Bart, at Marta’s urging, sat down at the table on the hassock that had just been brought for him. “Oh, by the way, Emma, where’s your brother?”
“He’s here,” answered Emma.
She offered no further explanation; but a faint, transitory frown on Pier’s face was enough to tell Bart that while Emma and Bart might be welcome at his table, that welcome did not include just any slave, Emma’s brother or not. Bart wondered fleetingly if Arthur had already begun exhibiting his usual lack of charms.
“Then, I’ll be back shortly and we’ll leave as soon as I get here,” said Michel. He went off.
Left behind, Bart, between mouthfuls of breakfast, gave Pier and Marta a more detailed account of how the conference with the Emperor had gone; since Michel had only told the older two that permission had been granted for all of them to go to the surface. Breakfast over, Marta took Emma off with her for some last-minute addition to the luggage they would be carrying; and for the few minutes that were left Bart was left alone in the sitting room adjoining the breakfast parlor, with Pier.
“Sit down with me, my boy,” said Pier, taking a chair. Bart pulled up a hassock and seated himself. Pier’s face was concerned —almost embarrassed in its mingled look of affection and worry.
“Bart,” he said with an effort, “there’s something I’d like to say to you. There’s been such a short time to know you, and particularly Emma; but our hopes were raised rather unusually high, after all these years, and . . . well, what I mean to say is, neither Marta nor I want to lose touch. You will indeed be marrying, once you get up there and off by yourselves, I understand?”
“You can count on it, Grandfather,” said Bart almost grimly. The grimness was real enough. He had been telling himself for some time now that he had given in to Emma’s wishes all his life; but if they ever got out of this glorified hole in the ground, there was going to be no more nonsense about her responsibility toward her brother standing in their way. It was ridiculous, the best part of their lives slipping away from them . . . .
He was abruptly so caught up in his own emotion that he missed something Pier was saying, and it was something the old man had been trying to tell him in strongly emotional fashion.
“. . . if you would stay in touch,” Pier was saying. “You see, we’re reconciled to never seeing you again; but it’ll mean a great deal to us to know when you’re finally safe and settled; and particularly about any children, when you have them, and their names and so forth . . .”
Bart would have assured him immediately that they would keep in touch, somehow, but Pier was going on talking, giving him no time to break in.
“At your age, it may seem like a foolish, old-people’s whim,” he was saying, “but even though we’ll never see them, either, it would mean a great deal to us to hear about them. I mean, not only their names and the dates of their birth, but how they do as they grow up . . . and so on.”
“Grandfather,” said Bart, finally getting a word in, “I promise you, somehow we’ll find a way—”
“Now, that’s what I was going to talk about,” said Pier, “the means you could use to contact us. What you must do is write us letters, and keep in touch with Michel. Pass them on to him. I promise you, he’ll find some way of passing them to Hybrids he knows up on the surface, and they can pass them on from hand to hand, or otherwise see that they’re carried back down here and delivered to us. Whoever handles them will just make sure that he does so with a letter from some other Hybrid above who writes that he found the letter in the possession of someone who had been killed—”
“Killed—” began Bart.
“—The letter will merely say that, only so that any Hybrid found carrying it by someone who shouldn’t see it, would have no way of tracing it back to you. What I mean to tell you is, merely write the letters and entrust them to Michel. No one but the Emperor or the Regent would dare open a letter addressed to me personally, in any case. Most people handling it will assume it’s a perfectly correct sort of message for them to carry.”
“I see. Of course,” said Bart, “we’ll write regularly; and if it’s possible for you to write us back—”
“Oh, we will if at all possible,” said Pier. He coughed. “You won’t mind, of course, if the letters seem to be in a number of different hands, and unsigned? You’ll know by what they say, who they come from.”
“Of course,” said Bart. He was still trying to think of something more to say that would reassure Pier that such a correspondence would be certain, when the door to the sitting room opened behind him without any of the customary preliminary scratching, and Michel strode in, carrying something that looked like a leather suitcase, but with twin straps attached to one side, so that it could possibly be carried like a shoulder pack.
“That’s going to rub your shoulders raw in the first mile,” said Bart critically, looking at the burden, which Michel was carrying at the moment by a handle in the same position as that on the ordinary suitcase.
“We won’t have to walk a mile, or even half a mile,” said Michel, putting the suitcase down and opening it, “to get to storeroom seven of warehouse twenty-nine. I’ve brought some rough clothes of mine for Emma’s brother. They’ll do until we can find him a regular outdoor outfit. What you’re wearing, Bart, ought to do well enough until we run into our first help station. Uncle, would you order Emma’s brother brought in here?”
Arthur was duly brought in and outfitted in what seemed a tweedy, knee-breeches and boots outfit like some of the easterner hunting costumes Bart had seen worn on rare occasions by visitors to the frontier, down in Montana.
As soon as Arthur was dressed—so immediately in fact that they could have been suspected of waiting outside the door until he was decently clothed—Marta and Emma appeared. Emma was dressed in a heavy tartan wool skirt, and a thick gray sweater under a leather jacket, clothes of which Bart heartily approved. What he did not approve of was that she and Marta were between them lugging two suitcases which seemed more heavy than light.
“Emma—,” he began; but she cut his protest short.
“Bart,” said Emma, “you take the one Marta’s been carrying. I can manage this one alone. Now, don’t argue. It’s not going to be as easy for me to find things to wear—especially personal things—out there, as it would be for you, Arthur and Michel; and from what I gather, I’m not likely to have the time to sit down and make them, even if the makings were available.”
“In any case,” said Michel, “we’ve no time to argue. Not only is the time short, but I don’t trust the Emperor. He could change his mind at any minute, and we don’t want to give him the chance to set up any barriers in our way. Add to that the fact that we’re best off if we get where we’re headed before most of the day’s foot traffic is up in the corridors.”
In fact, Michel hurried them out of the Guettrigs’ quarters faster than any of them, particularly Pier and Marta, were ready to see them leave. But Bart had to admit to himself that his half-brother was correct as far as the need not to waste time.
The suitcase Emma had given him to carry—though the larger of the two by a good margin—was a little heavier than he would have expected of one filled with women’s clothes, but it was no real burden to carry the short distance Michel had insisted was all they needed to cover. In fact, after a half a hundred steps his conscience began to bother him, and he offered to take the one Emma was carrying, as well.
“Certainly not!” she said. “This has all my personal and precious things. I wouldn’t trust you with it. Besides, it’s a lot lighter than it looks—not like yours.”
The route they followed took them by corridors that became progressively more barren of ornamentation in the way of floor and wall coverings a
nd more empty of other human beings; until at last they trudged down ways that held no one but themselves, wide enough for seven or eight people to move abreast, but with plain rock ceiling, floor and walls. They had also come up several levels from the level of the normal day-to-day traffic areas of the Inner World.
The sound of their footfalls was loud in the stillness on the hard surface and their voices were instinctively hushed, so that they said very little at all to each other. Even Arthur, who usually had too much to say for the comfort of his companions, was uncharacteristically silent.
Warehouse twenty-nine, Bart discovered, was not really a warehouse in the above-ground sense at all, but merely a grouping of storerooms. In spite of its relatively high number, it was no farther than Michel had promised it to be. They came to it at last; and to the door marked “STOREROOM SEVEN.” It was a solid door, closed by a solid, square brass lock inset in its wooden— thick-looking, by the appearance of it—body below an ordinary brass doorknob. Michel put down his suitcase, which he had carried most of the way by the handle, after all, and took hold of the knob. But when he tried to open the door, it did not budge.
“Locked,” observed Bart. He examined the keyhole below the knob. “And the Emperor didn’t say anything to us about a key.”
“Hmm.” Michel looked at his watch. “We’re a couple of minutes early, and there could be remote, electric control of that lock. Let’s wait for the time he set for us.”
They waited. At the end of a hundred and twenty seconds, Michel tried the knob again. This time, it turned and the door swung open before them—not without a small groan, as if such movement was not frequent for it.
Light had gone on inside the room with the opening of the door. But as Bart, the last to enter, stepped over the threshold, there was another faint groan from behind him and they all turned to see the door swinging shut. Bart immediately tried the knob.
“Locked again,” he announced.
“I’m not surprised,” said Michel. Arthur, however, had gone quite pale; and his pallor was all too obvious in the stark glare from the ceiling globes that shone over them.
“You mean we’re trapped?” Arthur demanded.
No one bothered to answer him.
They looked about. The room was utterly bare. Walls, floor and ceiling were all rock; the room, like the corridors outside, had obviously been carved out—whether there had been a natural, smaller cavity here to begin with, which had been later enlarged, or whether every square inch of it had been excavated from the solid stone, was impossible to tell.
“Now what?” said Michel, half to himself. “He can’t mean to lock us up in here and simply leave us to die of thirst or starvation. He’s too intelligent not to know we’d have to let other people know we were going; and that one at least of them would be Pier, who’ll be doing some unobtrusive checking within the next forty-eight hours to make sure we got off safely.”
“Pier also knows which room we were sent to,” said Bart. “I suppose the Emperor would guess that he’d know that?”
“Yes. Of course!” Michel looked disgusted with himself. “Come to think of it, Pier knows the ways out as well as the Emperor. If there’d been anything unusual about us being sent to this particular place, Pier would have said something at the time he first heard that was where we’d been told to go. This must be all right.”
“It doesn’t look all right to me,” said Arthur.
“Hush, Arthur!” said Emma. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Oh, it’s all right for you!” he said, rounding on her. “As long as Bart thinks it’s all right, it’s all right for—”
“Arthur!” said Emma, the unusual tone of her voice cutting across his and effectively silencing it, “I’d watch my tongue if I were you!”
He stared at her, obviously stunned. It was clear he was not used to hearing such words from her. He gave Bart a sudden quick glance and did not try to speak again.
Bart, meanwhile, had been paying no attention. He was prowling around the empty room, literally sniffing the air from time to time, like an animal. The fact that he could smell the air and yet isolate nothing to quell the tenseness inside him, did nothing to relieve him of his uneasiness.
“What are you up to, Bart?” Michel asked finally. Clearly his nerves were also on edge.
“I’m not sure,” said Bart.
There was nothing he could point to as evidence to confirm his inner feeling. But he had trapped enough animals in the woods himself so that their present situation reminded him uncomfortably of a live trap, one designed to capture prey unhurt.
“I haven’t any real reason for this,” he said finally, “but I can’t help feeling there’ve been other people through here in just the last few minutes before we were let in. As I say, I’ve no proof; but it’s the kind of feeling I’d pay attention to if I was out in the woods alone and got it.”
“You must have some reason for thinking something like that,” said Michel.
Bart shrugged, still prowling, more by instinct than anything else.
“It could be the air in here has a smell my nose can’t quite identify, or something about the floor or ceiling lights. It could be anything—”
He was interrupted by a grating sound. They all turned to its source, the wall in the back of the room, opposite the door by which they had entered. A section of the stone there, about three feet wide and perhaps six inches thick, was dropping downward into the floor to expose a corridor beyond, widening off to the right and lit, but dimly, at long intervals, by the same sort of lighting under which they stood at the moment. A breath of cold damp air blew to them from the opening.
The descending slab disappeared completely into the floor. The corridor beyond was no wider than the door itself. It stood waiting for them.
chapter
twenty-four
“Will you step into my parlor?
Said the spider to the fly . . .”
quoted Emma, putting into words the uneasiness that now affected all of them, whether springing from the same causes as Bart’s or brought about in them by his pacing and sniffing. None of them so far had made any move toward the waiting tunnel.
“Nonsense!” burst out Michel in the same English in which Emma had spoken the bit of children’s verse—as the silence and motionlessness which had followed it now began to stretch out uncomfortably. “Our friend is capable of anything, of course. But trying anything while we’re still safely in the Inner World and where people know we’ve gone makes no sense. Let’s go!”
He led the way, shrugging his arms into the straps of his suitcase, so that he now carried it for the first time like a knapsack, from his shoulders. Bart and Emma followed him and Arthur hurried to get ahead of his sister, whom Bart had let go ahead of him, so that the male Robeson was now a good three places from being at the end of the column.
They went into the tunnel.
As with the door to Storeroom Seven, the stone slab that had descended into the floor to let them into the tunnel began closing again, rising upward the moment Bart was through it, and it continued up with a rumble of noise in the echoing tunnel until it clashed at last into place against the ceiling behind them, and was silent.
Now, there were only the loud echoes raised by their footsteps on the stone floor beneath them as they made their way along the tunnel. As they went, the reason for its meandering progress became apparent. The rock through which it was driven was pierced by fissures; and the tunnel had evidently been made by widening the larger of these which went in the general direction at which it was aimed.
Large cracks were visible in the side walls as they went along; and where the tunnel had been made to follow one of these, the crack ran down the center of the floor under foot, showing a glimpse of darkness that promised to be bottomless, except in those cases where a burbling and murmuring of water could be heard from far below.
After some distance they came upon the first of a series of steps, broad and low, carved
out of the stone; and for some distance they alternated between stretches of level tunnel and climbs of six to ten feet.
The air in the tunnel was laden with moisture, presumably from subterranean waters; it stood in beads on the raw stone wall, and slowly began to work its moisture in through the warmth of their clothing.
The tunnel was longer than any of them had expected; and Bart became curious that Michel still wore his suitcase on his shoulders, which must already be rubbed uncomfortably raw by the case. He also noted that Michel was carrying both hands out of sight in front of him; and, struck by a sudden suspicion, he pushed past both Arthur and Emma.
“Stay in line!” he whispered as he passed.
He caught up with Michel, and pushed past him. Now, as he suspected, he could see that Michel’s hidden hands were not empty. One held a six-shot revolver, the other a heavy, woodsman’s belt knife with no less than an eight-inch blade.
Michel glanced at him. There was no need to do more than exchange looks. Bart pressed himself against the tunnel’s wet wall and stood still until Arthur and Emma had passed him again.
“What is it?” asked Arthur, in hushed tones that nonetheless echoed and reechoed along the tunnel.
“Nothing,” said Bart out loud. He fell in behind Emma and they continued.
The tunnel was longer than any of them had expected. It came at last, however, to an open stretch which widened at the end to accommodate a door very much like the one at the entrance to Storeroom Seven. As they approached to within some two dozen feet of the door, it swung silently open, outward; folding itself back toward the wall upon which it was hinged, so that they looked out on a ledge perhaps thirty feet in width, as best Bart could judge from the section he could see through the open doorway.
The Earth Lords Page 34