by Ben Tripp
Sax stretched out his arms and found that, at the extent of his fingertips, there were walls. He reached through the darkness and touched Gander’s sleeve and took hold of it, then felt his way down the wall of what he now knew was one of the smaller connecting passages of a suite. He was following the smell of hot candle wax, stronger this way, dissipating in the other direction. He followed the soapy reek until his outstretched hand met an obstacle. He touched it, his fingers describing a tall wooden panel. There was a candle stand mounted just above the height of his shoulder. It was a dead end in the hallway—but if his estimation was right, the space terminated at the bearing wall they had been exploring in the larger corridor.
His heart was racing. There might, after all, be a way through. He would try the candle stand: if there was a secret lever to operate a door, it would be concealed inside that.
Sax gave the thing a firm pull. It came off the wall, fell into two pieces, and toppled with a tremendous clash of cymbals to the floor. The very darkness vibrated with the noise. Sax cringed. Their presence had been announced.
“Gerrahtavit,” Gander said, and pushed Sax aside. There was a splintery thump in the darkness, then a second, and with the third kick Gander knocked the panel clean out of the wall and into the cold, stone-dank space beyond.
A door slammed somewhere out in the broad hallway. They were seconds from a confrontation with the woman, who might or might not be physically dangerous. Sax didn’t want to know.
He squeezed around Gander, who was panting fragrantly in the dark, and stepped through the broken paneling into a cool current of air that came from somewhere far below. He felt with his feet and found a step; his fingers met a coarse rope suspended along the wall through metal rings. Sax guided Gander’s fist to the rope. Both men took hold.
The air was whistling through Gander’s nose, the first indication that he was in any way alarmed by the situation. Sax took heart. He didn’t like to be the only frightened person in a crisis.
He started down the stone steps, and once his feet had the rhythm of them, he all but ran, pitch blackness or not. The stair descended a long way.
They came out into a big, dimly lighted space with a groin-vaulted ceiling borne up on stout stone pillars. It had to be the cellars beneath the house; they had certainly come down far enough, four switchbacks in the dark before the first gleam of light showed them the doorway below. The door itself, when closed, was disguised as an inset cupboard. Gander swung this shut, then jammed an oaken chest up against it.
The floor of the cellar was of well-trod flagstones. Broad deal tables were ranked in the center of the space, where long ago the kitchen staff would have prepared enormous banquets. There was a hearth at one end of the room, corresponding, Sax guessed, with the foot of the fireplace in the salon where the portrait hung. Dust-dimmed copper pots and pans lined the walls and there was a legion of serving dishes along the shelves of deep cupboards built between the columns. Nothing had been touched, it appeared, in decades, if not centuries: a thousand knives had quietly turned black with rust in their wooden slots, ten thousand implements, whisks and rolling pins and sieves and ladles and every conceivable manner of tool for the preparation of food, rotting quietly in their pots and jars.
“Just like my mum’s kitchen at home,” Gander said, puffing breathlessly. Winded and half doubled up, he crossed to one of the racks of knives and drew out a carver with a fourteen-inch blade, the edge worn hollow with sharpening. He had left the halberd in the narrow corridor upstairs. Sax still had his sword, though, and now he realized the armaments weren’t properly distributed: he liked right things in their right places. So he offered Gander the hilt of the sword. Gander took it and smiled at it, his eyes glittering. He in turn handed Sax the knife.
“Fair enough,” Sax said, and they hurried toward a broad doorway at the top of a short flight of stone steps.
Jean-Marc’s description of the place suggested there was at least one further level below this one, of storerooms and cellars, where the riverboats could glide right under the roots of the château to deliver goods and presumably shuttle lovers to their assignations unobserved. They were halfway up the steps when Sax paused, catching Gander by the sleeve. He eyed the ample doorway and didn’t like the look of it.
“Gander, can you swim?” he asked.
“Course I can, my brothers was always drowndin me,” Gander replied, offended. He lurched his weight forward to get to the top of the stairs, but Sax pulled him back.
“Only I’m not too keen on stepping through there,” Sax said. “Look at the ceiling.”
Gander followed Sax’s eyes. Just beyond the doorway at the top of the stairs was a low, plastered ceiling, instead of the intersecting concave barrels of the groin vaults found throughout the rest of the cellar. There were slots cut into the plaster, the size and shape of a bay leaf. Dozens of these apertures punctured the ceiling in a grid pattern.
“It’s nothing,” Gander said, desperate to get out of the place, into the real light and air of the world again.
Sax held up a finger of warning. “Indulge me.”
There was a wooden cask at the foot of the stairs. Sax hefted it. Something the consistency of mud sloshed inside. Sax moved past Gander to the topmost step, prayed nothing would happen—because if nothing happened, he was going to beat Gander to the front door upstairs by ten seconds at least—and lobbed the cask into the middle of the landing at the top of the stairs. The response took less than a second from start to finish. There was a kind of grunt that came from a hollow beneath the flagstone upon which the cask landed; the small barrel wobbled on its belly like an American football. There was a metallic thwack, very much like a huge trigger releasing. Then a forest of heavy iron spears dropped through the slots in the ceiling, struck sparks from the floor, and transfixed the cask. The little barrel burst into kindling and the red-black sludge within it ran down into the cracks between the flagstones and dripped into the hollow space beneath.
“Lumme,” Gander said.
The spears, their shafts and tips barbed, formed an iron gate twenty rows deep. Sax and Gander were alive—but their way was blocked.
The cellar had rung with the din of the spears striking the stone; now, in the silence that followed, they could hear echoing footsteps, coming closer. Down the secret stairs.
“We wait for the woman and we kill her,” Gander said, a murderer’s smile on his lips. He’d have been stuck full of rusty spears, pinned to the floor, if not for Sax. That much he knew. He wanted revenge.
“Do you really imagine she’s alone?” Sax implored. “I think she may have been sent up there for this very purpose, to draw us out—perhaps even down here where we’d be trapped, or killed by that ghastly portcullis.”
“So . . . we take her prisoner and use her as a hostage,” Gander said. He was revealing an unexpectedly agile mind for criminal solutions. Sax would have to remember that, if he survived the day. He shook his head, pulling urgently now at Gander’s clothes.
“This way, I think,” he said, and made the biggest gamble of his life to date. There was a low doorway beside the stairs, itself reached by a flight of four or five steps sunk down into the floor. The door stood open. He dragged Gander by main force toward the stairway into the earth. Gander resisted, throwing a red-faced, angry scowl across the kitchen at the cupboard concealing the hidden stairs. He clearly wanted a chance at that witch. But Sax was right, and starting to whimper.
The approaching footfalls clattered toward them, magnified by the stone passage so they sounded like the iron shoes of the devil himself. Sax and Gander ran down the steps, deeper beneath the château, beneath the earth.
VIII
Sax had a feeling he’d made a fatal mistake. He’d hoped this subterranean way had been abandoned for centuries. But there were lamps burning in the tunnel through which he and Gander descended. Somebody frequented this pl
ace. They might be waiting just ahead.
The oil-fueled lanterns, archaic but functional, were spaced at intervals of twenty feet, their mantles radiating reeking heat. Narrow openings in the stone overhead drew up the smoke. After four of these lanterns, the tunnel became another vaulted room. The chamber was mostly in shadow. Only two lamps burned there, hung beneath tall iron tripods. Immense barrels, gutted by rot, stood in the middle of the floor. The walls were entirely lined with racks, and the racks entirely filled with bottles. This was the wine cellar. Despite everything, Sax had a tremendous urge to see what vintages were stored there. Two-hundred-year-old? Three hundred? Bottles for long-dead kings might be glinting amongst those cobwebbed rows.
In one corner, the lamplight found a simple chair, soggy with mildew, and beside it a crooked table with legs that had rotted half away. On the table stood a stemmed glass of cut crystal, webbed and opaque with dust. It was like something from the Mary Celeste: in happier times, the butler had come down for a drink in the cool quiet. He’d been called away. He never returned.
“We need another way out,” Sax said.
Gander was poking into the shadows with his sword. “You better block that door, sir,” he replied.
Sax spun around. Of course—the woman was right behind them somewhere. She would come bursting through at any moment, no doubt with twenty armed men behind her. The idea of the men didn’t frighten Sax, though; it was the woman with her black, lightless eyes. The way she scented the air, nostrils flared, like a wolf. The fact that she had no fear of two big men but came after them implacably. He could almost believe she was the creature in the portrait after all, still waiting. A ghost, avenging the desecration of her resting place.
These thoughts swarmed in Sax’s mind like angry bees; meanwhile, in a blind panic, he was running around looking for something to block the opening. Gander clapped a hand on Sax’s shoulder and guided him aside, then muscled a tall barrel, oval in section (Sax hadn’t seen one of those in ages—a lost art, making barrels like that) into position. He shoved it until it tipped over, its narrow end wedged into the doorway. Anybody who wanted to get past it was going to have a hell of a squeeze, and given the purposeful way Gander retrieved his sword, Sax thought they wouldn’t make it halfway through.
“There,” Sax said, and pointed at the back of the room. Behind the stacks of barrels was a large door on rails, like a barn door, but immensely thick and studded with iron nails. Three massive padlocks of rust-black iron depended from chains coiled through rings in door and wall. There was no getting out that way. Sax fancied he could hear the subterranean river lapping just beyond the damp-swollen wood, but it was only the pulse in his ears.
Gander took up the bail of one of the lanterns, burning his fingers. He wrapped an immense plaid handkerchief around the wire and held the light aloft.
“There,” he said, and pointed to the darkest corner, where a doorway had been cut into the living rock of the earth, only five and a half feet high and very narrow.
Behind them came the footsteps, flat and sharp in the confines of the tunnel leading down to the wine cellar. They negotiated the labyrinth of kegs and ducked through the small, dark doorway, heading yet deeper into the ground.
They ran, bent low, down the burrow that ran crookedly beneath the ground. It was cut into bedrock. Water leaked from the walls and snickered at them from channels cut into the floor, outrunning them. There were rats, hunchbacked and bristling. Sax despised rats: they were amongst the enemies of old things hidden away in attics, shitting little vandals with chisels for teeth. Gander’s lantern carved a small pit of light from the darkness around them.
They had gone as far as Sax could run without gasping for breath, a fair distance but not as far as he would’ve liked to have gotten—he was thinking Minneapolis—when there was a tremendous crash from the wine cellar. It would have taken dynamite to smash the barrel Gander had jammed into the doorway, but it sounded like that had just occurred. Men with hammers, perhaps. He suddenly had a vision of the white-haired, black-eyed woman flying at them down the tunnel, arms outstretched, teeth bared, her feet dangling above the stone floor, borne toward them by supernatural forces.
Fear gave him speed. He shoved at Gander’s back.
“Hurry, man! They’re on us!” he cried. Gander redoubled his loping pace. The shape of the tunnel changed, becoming irregular and rough walled, now tall, now wide, the cut surfaces falling away into natural outcroppings of stone. The floor began to slalom up and down and twist between hulking carcasses of rock. They had entered into a natural cavern to which the tunnel was connected.
Their feet splashed through icy puddles and pools. The rock was slimy now, limestone slick with calcium secretion. Droplets of water bitter with minerals slapped at their faces. This was a true labyrinth. There were caverns and fissures coiling out in all directions. If they went wrong in here, they might as well starve as be captured, or plummet into some bottomless pit in the darkness.
“Oh, sir,” Gander said, and stopped running.
“Don’t stop for anything,” Sax said, but also halted. Gander raised the light.
The cavern was full of human skulls.
There were thousands of them, heaped like cannonballs, slowly merging into the slime of the stone. The two men stared, and then, at the same moment, they ran onward, feet flying.
There was light ahead, the cloud-colored glister of daylight on wet stone. It was above them. They charged along the poorly sketched path, stumbling and clambering. Gander threw his lantern aside and the light flared up and died with a clatter amongst pale spires.
They were climbing now, as much with their hands as their feet. Sax’s eyes ached in the unaccustomed light that grew above them. There was a square opening up there above the bright-lit rims of jagged stone. Their feet found rude steps cut into the rock. Gander went first, hauling up his exhausted bulk with difficulty, so that Sax was leaping with terror below him, shoving at Gander’s backside, sure that skeletal claws would reach up at any moment and drag him with the strength of evil back down into the inky dungeons of raw stone.
After an eternity of slipping and grabbing their way up the steps, they reached an iron-framed opening and tumbled through. The light was unbearably bright, vivid with tall figures that glowed like jeweled gods, their heads surmounted with blazing golden suns. Sax knuckled his streaming eyes and stumbled across a smooth, dry floor of laid stone. He blinked away the pain, looked again, and found himself in a chapel. The gleaming figures he’d seen were icons set into the stained glass of a dozen magnificent church windows. Gander was retching, totally out of breath, his hands on his knees, his knees on the floor, head drooping. He had dropped his old sword on the stones and almost appeared to be praying over it.
“We’ve got to get to the trucks,” Sax said, and was racked with coughing. If he survived this, he was going to quit smoking.
He crossed to Gander and grabbed him by the collar, pulling the big man to his feet. They were both filthy and soaking wet, with rivulets of clean skin showing where the water had run. Sax shoved Gander toward the doors of the chapel, then just as quickly pulled him back.
There was the scrape of a seldom-turned lock, the boom of an iron latch, and then with a juddering groan the doors swung open. A woman was standing there, her features plunged into shadow by the bright daylight that spilled across her white shoulders.
Madame Magnat-l’Étrange had arrived.
Sax was frozen. It was Gander who burst into motion. He scooped up the sword and, in the same gesture, rushed at the woman in the doorway between the rows of medieval pews. He was shouting obscenities in a half-nonsensical stream, the weapon held out before his chest at the full reach of his arm. Then his sword hand swung back, and he was two strides from her, propelling his weight into his arm to slash her head off her shoulders, the blade whickering through the air like a striking snake.
; With a speed that Sax’s eyes could not follow, the woman’s own slender arm shot out and Gander jerked in his tracks, his feet flying up level with his head on their own momentum, and he slammed to the floor, unconscious. Blood burbled from his broken nose as if from a spring. The sword tumbled through the air and whacked into one of the pews, where it quivered grip upward, swaying.
The woman stood there, her hand still outstretched, the palm outward as if in benediction. There was a rosette of blood there. She put her hand to her mouth and kissed the blood away with a thick purple tongue. Sax’s heart was beating at frightening speed and with nearly unbearable force.
“How dare you,” said Madame Magnat-l’Étrange. She spoke without anger. It was merely a question to which she did not have an answer.
“I’m terribly sorry,” Sax said in a faint, strangled voice that sounded like it was coming from the end of a drainpipe. “You see, I was misinformed. I thought—”
She stepped fully into the chapel. Her skin was so pale that the whites of her eyes were undifferentiated; the black irises shone like chips of obsidian set into a marble bust. Her white hair, brows, and lashes and the absolute tranquility of her features increased the effect. She was a thing of white stone, draped in a rust-red silken gown, staring at Sax without blinking.
“My letters,” she said.
“Who is Alastor?” Sax asked, randomly picking the question to keep her talking. He was racing through escape scenarios in his mind, none of which were the least bit plausible. If this woman knew judo or whatever she’d used on Gander, Sax was no match for her at all—nor would he have been in any case, he admitted to himself. He tried to appear calm, even amused, as if he had another trick up his sleeve that would end this game at the time of his choice. The effect didn’t seem to be working.
“Alastor is here,” she said. She pointed past Sax into the back of the chapel.
Madame Magnat-l’Étrange’s voice was hypnotic, like the sound of the ocean carried on the wind. It sounded, Sax realized, like she only exhaled, all her words flowing from a single, endless breath requiring no inspiration of air. The breeze that soughed from the mouth of a cave.