Suddenly, my hands slipped in muck and the acrid stench of ammonia pierced my lungs. The tunnel disappeared—at least, the ceiling and the walls disappeared. I looked up.
And quickly looked down. The ceiling was crawling with bats, packed tightly as bees in a hive, bright eyes staring downward. As the light hit them, they launched into a cloud whirling and screeching overhead. I knelt in the muck, eyes closed and hands over my ears until gradually they began to settle again.
And then I realized that the muck was moving.
Not muck. Guano. It was alive, squirming with crickets, centipedes, and spiders, transparent and blind.
As fast as we could, we scrambled through the cave on all fours, trying not to feel the scurry of insect feet below, the whir of bat-stirred air above. It was not a large space, only ten or fifteen yards long; soon we came to another tunnel heading deeper into the hill. We had to climb up some boulders to reach the opening. I ducked in and sat against the rock wall, breathing hard.
“You want to stop?” asked Matthew.
In the darkness, I saw Dr. Sanderson and Mrs. Quigley, and Athenaide. Follow where it leads, whispered Roz’s voice. But I could not bring up Roz’s face. I shook my head and got back to my feet. “Let’s go.”
This passage was high enough to walk through at a stoop, one hand on the ceiling, turning my head so that the light swept the floor. The guano was sparse here and soon petered out altogether. The bats did not come this deep into the cave.
The passage twisted and turned. My hand shot up into open space, and I halted. Before I could stop him, Matthew slipped past me and suddenly he was teetering and slipping off a ledge. Grabbing for him, I caught his arm and we both fell backward into the passage. For a moment, we lay there, panting.
Matthew sat up first.
“Don’t do that again,” I said through clenched teeth. “I stop, you stop.”
“Fine.”
“I’m serious. Fail to respect a cave, and it will kill you quick. Or if you’re really unlucky, slowly.”
“Okay. I’m sorry. But have you seen this?”
I sat up and looked.
Before us was no fissure into the fathomless deep, but a drop of three feet into smooth mud that sloped up and away like polished marble. We seemed to be at the end of an immense room. I had no idea how large—except that the dark here was emptiness, not pressure. The earth was without form, and void.
But that was not true. The stretch of wall I could see was covered in what looked like rippling curtains of molten glass, glowing red and orange and rose, yellow and marigold, in my headlamp: all the hues of the sun that this chamber had never seen.
“Helloooo!” called Matthew, and the sound reverberated in a thousand crannies, swelling as it swirled into the open space of the cavern.
In answer, all we heard was a single splash of water, also magnified and repeated, a sharp plop that was a hammer stroke, the action by which this place had been building since long before humans dropped from the trees and fanned out into the African savannah.
Matthew pointed. A little ways ahead, a trail cut into the room from the left. Someone had walked here before.
Gingerly, I lowered myself from the ledge. I sank to my ankles in mud. It was blessedly smooth and still. I moved a few steps forward, keeping close to the wall, and realized that we had entered the space from the back of what resembled a small bay—a tiny shrine hollowed into the side of a cathedral’s nave. Before and behind, pillars of wet, gleaming stone soared higher into the darkness than my light could follow.
Across our path went another trail of footsteps. It was the trespasser we were after, not the temple, so I stepped out of the alcove into the main space. However high the ceiling had been before, now it was immeasurable. I bent to look at the footprints.
Boots. Two pair—but then I bent closer. Two people had gone in, but only one had come out. No—the same pair of boots had gone in twice, across the same trail. The same person had gone in twice. But had come back only once. For a moment we stood before that trail in silence. Then I turned up into the cave.
We kept carefully to the side of the earlier trail. For the most part, it hugged the main wall, skirting pillars of stone. But behind one as vast as an ancient sequoia, a single line of tracks veered into the dark. I glanced once at Matthew and followed.
We did not have to go far.
I saw the skull first. He lay propped as he had died, leaning against the back of the pillar, his clothes slowly falling to tatters around his skeleton. A Colt revolver lay nearby. But it was the belt buckle we knew him by. JG.
Jem Granville.
There was no obvious reason why he should have died. No bullet hole in the skull or arrow protruding from the body. There were no books. A quick check through his pockets turned up no papers.
“Damn,” said Matthew. “Now what?”
Another drip resounded through the cavern. “Forward,” I said grimly.
As fast as we dared, we followed the line of his tracks—now one set in, and one set out—across the hall. At the far end of the chamber, we came to a slope of rubble leading up toward the ceiling. Muddy boot-prints led upward. I stepped onto the scree, clambering upward. A largish rock underfoot gave way, and we threw ourselves flat as a small avalanche of gravel and clattering rock slid down into the mud. We lay still as the sound died around us. That had been stupid. Colossally stupid. Especially after my little lecture to Matthew. One turn of a boulder, and an ankle would wrench, a knee would twist, and one or both of us would be immobile deep beneath the surface of the earth.
After that, we moved upward almost on all fours, going slowly, testing every rock. Finally, maybe sixty feet up, we reached the ceiling. What we had taken for a shadow turned out to be an opening. Two flat planes of stone had split at some point, leaving a V-shaped passageway whose bottom was filled with rubble.
Muddy footprints trailed ahead into the dark. We followed them, twisting and turning as the air dried around us and the footprints grew pale and powdery. We found ourselves halfway between the floor and ceiling of a smaller room—the “sacristy” to the “cathedral” behind us. At our feet, a fall of rock tumbled downward. To the left, it spilled onto a wide ledge, five or six feet high, running along one side of the room. Lined with pillars, its walls hung with the same rippling stone that draped the grand cavern’s walls—but here, the stone was dry and dead, as desiccated as mummies or old moth wings. To the right, the rock fall had spilled farther, tumbling across the lower cavern floor. Out in the middle, though, someone had imposed a little order amid the rubble: A circle of sooty rocks enclosed the remains of an old campfire. Beyond that, atop a heap of bones, the skulls of two horses leered at us. How had they come here? Beyond, the room ended in a cluster of huge boulders. There looked to be no other way out; this room was a dead end.
I headed down toward the left, picking my way toward the ledge. Matthew followed. Our headlamps threw long, dancing shadows behind the pillars. Beyond them, near the back of the ledge, lay several heaps of stone. As we drew closer, I counted five of them. They’d been shaped into oblongs by some hand more careful than nature. And each was topped with the upswept sharpened curves of a helmet. The helmet of the Spanish conquistadors.
“This is a tomb,” I whispered, and the walls seized the word and sent it spinning around us.
At the foot of each cairn lay a pile of equipment—a sword, a mail coat, a rotting leather bag. Matthew sank to his knees at the first and began carefully looking through the hoard. I passed on, looking at each grave in turn, wondering about the soldiers who lay beneath them.
Hidden beyond a pillar at the far end, I came to a sixth grave.
The last man, for he’d had no one to cover him with stones. Nor had he possessed a helmet to mark his grave. He had laid himself out, though, stretched on his back, his arms crossed on his chest. He wore a gray robe with a hood that had been drawn up around his head so that I could just see the skull staring out beneath it. He
would have looked like Death, save that his bony fingers held a large wooden crucifix rather than a scythe.
Was this the golden youth of whom the sonnets had sung?
Beneath his feet lay a double-pouched bag. A set of saddlebags.
I knelt and opened one side with shaking fingers. In it was a book. Slowly, I drew it out and opened it.
EL INGENIOSO
HIDALGO DON QVIXOTE DE LA MANCHA
Compuesto por Miguel de Cervantes
Saavedra.
Tucked into the back was a sheaf of papers. I unfolded them. They were written in a cramped hand. Secretary Hand. At the top of the first page was one word:
Vardenno
Beneath that, the words were in English: Enter the squire Sancho and Don Quixote.
I groped my way to a seat, my heart pounding and my throat dry. The lost play. It had to be.
The play opened, as Cervantes had, with the old don and his squire discovering a ragged portmanteau in a mountain wilderness. In the bag was a handkerchief tied full of gold, and a richly bound notebook.
You keep the gold, friend Sancho, said the don. I’ll keep the book.
It was just what Jem Granville had said it was: a Jacobean manuscript of Cardenio…Shakespeare’s lost play.
“Matthew,” I called softly. “Look at this.”
He didn’t answer.
I looked back. He was not at the grave where I’d left him. My headlamp, I realized, was the only light in the cave. Rising, I took a few steps back. “Matthew?”
But the cave was empty. Then I felt the prickle of watching eyes. All around me, echoing off walls and pillars and fallen stone, I heard the hiss of a blade being drawn from its sheath.
44
I RAN. At the end of the ledge, I bent to scramble up the slope of rock toward the exit on all fours, but I was caught by one leg and dragged back downward. My helmet came off, rolling away and coming to rest with its light pointed almost uselessly toward the wall.
I twisted, swinging, and the saddlebag hit my attacker with a thud. I heard a sharp intake of breath and a curse, and I wrenched away. He sprang after me, and I stumbled to one knee. Kicking backward with my other leg, I connected with something. But he lunged again, and this time he caught me by the waist, slamming me into the ground with such force that the saddlebag flew from my hand into the darkness. Before I could move, he thudded down on top of me, his hands around my throat.
It was Matthew. “Enter Lavinia,” he said, “tongue cut out, hands cut off, and ravished.”
In disbelief, I clawed for his face, but he grabbed my wrist and forced it back down. In the dimness, I saw a glint of metal, and then I felt a knife against my cheek, its point pricking into the skin just below my right eye.
I went still.
“That’s better.” Letting go of my wrist, he reached down and grabbed my jeans. “Ravished first, I think.” He ran a hand down my thigh. “Not the stage I’d planned for it, but it’ll do.”
There was a thud, and the knife clattered loose to the ground even as Matthew was lifted and tossed to the side. He sprang at his attacker and was knocked back down. I rolled away and pushed myself to my feet, gasping.
A ways off, my helmet lay forlorn on the ground, its headlamp casting an eerie light through the cavern. Matthew lay sprawled at the base of one of the graves. He still wore his helmet, though its light was switched off. Ben stood over him, his gun pointed at Matthew’s chest.
“What are you doing?” I gasped.
Ben answered without taking his eyes from Matthew. “Giving you a hand.”
“But how—”
He cut me off. “By tracking you. Are you all right?”
I reached up to my cheek. I was bleeding, but the cut seemed minor. “Yes. I thought you were him—the killer, I mean.”
“I gathered that,” said Ben.
“But you’re not.”
“No. I’m not.”
“Don’t you two make a bright monosyllabic pair,” said Matthew.
I glared at him, my whole body flooding with loathing. Every last shred of the sweetness he’d so recently showered me with had been a lie—all the sweetness, and the promise of security. “All this time, it was you—you and Athenaide?”
“Vero nihil verius,” he said with a faint sneer. “Truer than truth.”
I frowned. “But Sir Henry—”
He laughed. “That was unexpected, wasn’t it? He probably thought you’d killed the old bat. Maybe he thought you were me. Who knows? But I owe you for that piece of work. One less problem to worry about. The rest of it was mostly me. On the river stairs, in your flat—”
“That was you? The man in the shadows was you? In the library, at the Capitol…”
“Bravo, sweetheart. You’re finally catching up. Though not without significant help.”
“She’s bested you by herself at least twice,” said Ben. “So I’d watch the boasting, unless you actually want to look pathetic.” Matthew scowled.
“You’re Wesley North, too, aren’t you?” I asked.
He laughed. “Don’t go running away with things, Katie. Caesar at the Capitol was my work, all right. But I’m not the precious Professor North. That was Roz.”
Roz!
“North, Wes T.,” he said. “As in mad, north by northwest.”
My mind was reeling. “Roz was an Oxfordian?”
“Hell, no. She wanted the money. And Athenaide was offering plenty of that.”
No, I thought. He might be partly right—but Roz would have liked the dual challenge of argument and masquerade even more.
“I’d have been happy just to expose her as the fraud she was,” said Matthew, “but then I discovered that she’d actually gone and found something. I gave her more than a few chances to share, but she wouldn’t. Christ, I’d played the devoted fan for years, the shoulder to lean on after you left, but still, when she needed a colleague, she shut me out and went running to you.”
“After driving me away.”
His eyes glittered with malice. “By questioning your scholarship? That was me, Kate. Roz never thought you were any less than brilliant. Not legitimate scholarship…I invented that little slice of criticism. And then I set loose the whispers that it was hers. Easy enough, in the rumor-filled halls of academia.”
I took a step forward, my fists clenched. “Why?”
“I was tired of her always keeping me a rung or two below her. The last thing I wanted was to get kicked even farther down the ladder, to make room for you. She’d been the reigning authority on Shakespeare for long enough. It was time for her to go, and I should have been her successor. I was already tenured at Harvard, for Christ’s sake. But she was maneuvering to pass me over and crown you.”
“You’re talking about reputation, Matthew. That’s not transferable, any more than integrity or honor. She couldn’t pass it on to you, or me, or anyone.”
“Maybe not. But I opened up a space center-stage, didn’t I? And no one’s better poised to fill it than me.”
“Debatable point, at the moment,” said Ben. “Why kill Athenaide? Your partner?”
Matthew’s eyes narrowed. “Roz wouldn’t share her treasure. I found I didn’t want to either.” His gaze slid to me, flicking from my face down to my still-undone jeans, and back to Ben. “Any more than you want to share yours.”
Ben’s hand tightened on the pistol. He spoke to me without shifting his eyes from Matthew. “Kate. Get whatever it is you came here for. And if you can find anything to tie this piece of shit up, that would be good too.”
I slid off the ledge, dropping into the dimness of the lower cave. The saddlebags lay near the fire ring. One of the covers had ripped almost clear off, and the volume of Quixote lay a little ways away, papers spilling out of it. As quickly as I could I gathered them up, scanning the cave floor to see if any had gone astray.
Shoving everything back into the bag, I turned, wondering what we had that might work as rope. Up on the ledge over my hea
d, Ben still stood over Matthew.
Behind them, a shadow moved. I went still, and Sir Henry stepped silently out of the darkness.
That was not possible. I had killed him.
But there he stood, and in his hand, something glittered. A needle. A needle at the end of a syringe.
Roz had been killed with a syringe…a syringe full of potassium.
He raised his arm, and I yelled.
Ben whirled, hacking at Sir Henry’s arm, and the syringe flew from his grip across the floor. Matthew sprang up at the same time, going for Ben. I heard Ben absorb the blow, and the pistol fell to the ground.
Sir Henry bent to pick it up, but Ben kicked and the gun went spinning away out of the light. Again, his split-second attention to Sir Henry cost him a blow from Matthew.
Matthew struck again, but this time Ben ducked, and when he came back up, he had the knife. Both Sir Henry and Matthew backed off a pace or two. But then they pressed in again.
Step by step, they drove Ben relentlessly backward. Defending himself, Ben slashed first at one and then the other. The knife flicked out, and Matthew would pull out of range, but Sir Henry would get in a jab or a kick. Bit by bit, Ben moved back.
I hesitated to go for the gun. I saw what Ben was doing; he was drawing Matthew and Sir Henry away from the cave opening. And with every slash of his knife, he was pulling their focus away from me. He was also moving steadily toward his gun, lying somewhere behind him on the floor of the ledge. From what I could tell, in a few more steps, it would be in his reach.
For me to go for the gun would ruin his efforts for both of us.
I began slipping toward the rock slope that led up to the opening out of the cave, keeping as much as possible in the shadow of the ledge. Reaching the foot of the tumbled rocks, I began to climb. I heard a whoosh and looked back. Up on the ledge, Matthew had found a long bit of wood or metal at the foot of one of the graves and was swinging it like a stave. Ben had lost his advantage of reach.
Interred with Their Bones Page 36