by K. J. Parker
She tried to take a deep breath, but her lungs had got very small. But no matter. Onwards, as Oida would say.
The lower hypocaust was secondary and narrower. She could get along on her hands and knees, but she had to squeeze her way past every column of bricks. Remarkably, the fabric of the dress didn’t tear, but her skin did. The floor slabs were almost too hot to bear, would’ve been intolerable without the sweat pouring off her. Twenty-seven hatches; she decided they were evenly spaced, but her progress was irregular, short paddles and long ones. She had to feel up past the bricks to feel for the hatch frames, and was scared stiff she might have missed one.
Twenty-seven, and she was panting like a dog, her heart was the size of a watermelon, she was dizzy and sick and her back was agony. The hatches open inwards, so be careful. Be careful? What the hell was that supposed to mean?
She found out. When opened, the hatch completely filled the hypocaust, airtight, a perfect fit, a gasket. She tried to close it again, because the opening was on the other side. It wouldn’t budge: it was wedged, stuck. She bashed with the heels of her hands, shoulder-bumped it, no use. Only when she squirmed her way round and kicked it with both feet did it budge; then it slammed shut and she couldn’t claw it open again. The tip of the knife levered it free eventually. She crawled past it, then swung it back, maybe a little too hard—it was stuck again, and there was no handle on the inside, and she’d have to come back this way. But, she told herself, I’m not going to survive much more of this, so I won’t be coming back, so it doesn’t matter. Through the hatch. Onwards.
Crawl exactly eighty-seven yards. How can you measure eighty-seven yards, exactly, in the dark on your hand and knees?
The new shaft was smaller still, but there weren’t any piles of bricks. Instead, there was a pipe, dead centre on the floor, wide enough that she couldn’t quite get her knees either side of it. Needless to say, it was scalding. She backed up to the open hatch and somehow managed to squirm out of the dress. It was sodden with sweat, as wet as if she’d been out in the rain. She draped it over the pipe and slid it along with her knees as she went.
The calibration problem turned out not to be a problem after all. Someone—the builders, maybe, or some extremely intelligent Clerk of Works—had cut marks in the brick on the right-hand wall at intervals of eighteen inches. She only realised what they were after she’d come a painfully long way. She established the interval by marking off in handspans. Then she backed up all the way to the hatch and started again.
One hundred and sixty-four notches. Directly overhead there should be a slab that lifted.
The knife, in its sheath, was gripped in her right hand. She’d almost forgotten what it was there for. Oh, that. Reaching up, she laid the flat of her left hand and the knuckles of her right on the underside of the roof, and pushed as hard as she possibly could. It lifted, a little. Not nearly enough. She gave it everything she had, but she couldn’t move it any further.
Then, quite suddenly, it wasn’t there any more, and she was drowning in unendurable light. Her still-upraised left hand was grabbed, and someone incredibly strong hauled her up an impossibly long way, then set her down lightly on a hard, smooth floor.
She blinked, but all she could see was a painfully bright blur, and all she could do was pant and whimper. A voice was talking to her. Unbelievably, it was saying, “Are you all right, miss?”
Later, she saw it from his point of view. A manhole opens; he hauls it up and there’s a naked woman, trembling and squealing and sopping wet. The most extraordinary thing you’ve ever seen; but hardly a danger. What else would you do but pull her out, calm her down and try and find out how she got there?
It was pure, undeserved luck that she’d dropped the knife when he pulled her up, because if he’d seen it he might have formed a different view. As it was, she had no trouble at all drawing his sword and stabbing him in the pit of the stomach with it. Not a clean kill, but enough to shut him up; she pulled it out and stabbed him again, this time in the hollow between the collarbones. He rocked back, hit a wall and lay still. Onwards.
She stepped over him and located the cabinet Oida had told her about. Of course it was locked, and it was a great heavy thing, inch-thick oak boards with dovetailed joints. Her knife would’ve snapped if she’d tried to force it open with that, but the sentry’s sword managed it, though she bent the blade. Like she cared; she was radiantly happy, because she was out of the hole, out of the grave, risen again from the dead, her heart had stopped pounding and she could breathe.
There were, of course, three sets of five keys with four short ones and one long one. Not her problem. She looped them round the middle finger of her left hand and closed her fist on them. She’d left wet footprints on the floor, as though she’d just got out of the bath; quite possibly a fatal mistake, but she simply didn’t care any more.
Then she looked at the hole in the floor; the deep, black hole that led down to hell, where thieves and murderers go for all eternity. I can’t, she thought. She backed away from it until she met the wall, then slid down it and crouched, not moving, as though it would pounce on her if it saw her.
She woke up with a start, because a voice in her ear had just said, one hour, we’re on the clock. She looked round, but there was nobody there.
One hour, and she’d been asleep. She scrambled to her feet. The hole was still there, and it was going to eat her alive, but it didn’t matter. She had a job to do, and she was late.
Pulling the guard down into the hole wasn’t going to be easy; doing that and then closing the flagstone after her—Bloody Oida, she told herself, he just doesn’t think.
She did the geometry. If she pitched the guard down the hole first, he’d fill the available space and she wouldn’t be able to get past him. Would she? It was an assumption, but assumptions are there to be challenged. She considered the room available, her own size and shape, the alternative—go down into the hole, drag the guard down after her by the ankle, then somehow reach past and lower the flagstone—no, that wasn’t possible. So, no alternative at all.
She dragged him by one foot and fed him down the hole legs first. Luckily he wasn’t stiff yet; if she’d left it much longer, it could’ve made things interesting. It turned out that there was just enough of a gap for her to squeeze past him if she stamped on his head enough to pack him down and then pretended she was a liquid rather than a solid. She got stuck, her stomach pressed hard against the scalding pipe, and had to claw her way inch by inch, doing all the work with her hands because her legs had nothing to act against. She got through. As an afterthought, she hooked the scarf off his neck and wedged it between her skin and the pipe. It helped, a bit.
That was the hard part. All she had to do after that was drag him down a way—one hand hooked under his chin, the other with fingers hooked into one of the clever clerk’s calibration grooves, the only handhold she could find—then scramble back up out of the hole, lift the flagstone, balance it with exquisite precision so that it’d topple down exactly into the hole when she nudged it from underneath; back down again, unseat the slab, then get her head out of the way before the slab came crashing down and smashed her skull like an egg.
And then, of course, it was dark again. She crawled over the dead man’s face like a slug, then remembered the knife. She’d dropped it, she knew that, but where was it? She was guessing it was the presentation piece the garrison commander had given to Oida, and which he’d passed on to her; so of course it could be recognised and traced, and if they lifted the flagstone and shone a lantern down the shaft, there it would be. Turning round wasn’t possible, so she had to backtrack, crawling feet first, back over the dead man again. It took a long time to locate the knife by feel, not really knowing where to search, since the slab had been replaced and it was pitch dark. She found it more or less by accident; also her dress, which she’d completely forgotten about. Lucky, because the scarf on its own wasn’t really enough to protect her from the hot pipe.
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?”