He looked out into the corridor at the three men. He knew from their clothing that they were intruders, but he didn't want to trust them. He wanted to be sure that they would not take him prisoner. Two days in a cell had seemed like a lifetime. Next time, Lynella would not be able to create the chaos in which he had escaped. He had seen where she was, a powerless prisoner herself now. He called out, ‘Why have you come here?’
He could hear them talking quietly to each other, but they did not reply. He called again, ‘I am no friend of the Abbot. I may be able to help you. Why have you come here?’
This time the reply came in a strange accent: ‘We are friends of the Princess Lynella.’
Adam could only think of one person who was a friend of Lynella and might have an accent like that. She had mentioned his name on many occasions.
‘Are you Paul?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Then I shall take you to Lynella.’
Adam emerged into the corridor. His tall gaunt figure and tattered clothing did nothing to inspire confidence in the officers, but Paul could see from his manner that he was not from the monastery and decided to risk trusting him. Paul gave him a gas mask and, quickly realising its purpose, he put it on. A few seconds later, saying nothing, he set off. They followed a few paces behind and soon saw that he had the instincts of a hunter, carrying his weight on the balls of his feet and constantly looking for danger at every turn.
‘I think he knows where he's going. My cell was somewhere around here,’ Paul said to his companions, his voice so low that he assumed that Adam would not hear it. He was wrong. Adam froze, turned and stared at him. They stood in silence before Adam turned again and carried on even faster than before. At the next intersection, he stopped, raised his gas mask and smelled the air. Replacing the mask, he signalled to Paul to move forward and pointed up the corridor. Paul fired more gas canisters and they soon heard violent coughing ahead and Angus set off again. As they moved, the lighting globes seemed to be getting dimmer, and they finally flickered and went out.
‘The gas must have got to the men at the machine,’ Paul remarked, getting out a torch from his pack. Adam saw the torch and immediately moved to take it. Paul handed it to him and showed him how to switch it on and off. When he switched it on, Paul saw something almost resembling a smile pass across his weathered features before he sped off, flicking it on and off as he went.
Suddenly they stopped outside a door and Adam pointed to it. Paul tried the handle, but it would not move. It did not look very thick and one of the officers stepped forward and shot at the lock. Splinters flew out and he kept firing until the door swung open. Throwing in a gas canister, they soon heard coughing and moved in.
The room was a cell, bare walls, roughly cut. A guard sat helplessly wheezing on a simple chair facing a table with an unlit candle, a large key and some bread on it.
‘This was her cell,’ Adam said. Turning to the guard, he asked, ‘Where have they taken her?’
The man was coughing so violently; he could not say anything. Adam tore off his mask and pushed it up against the man's face. A few moments later, he had recovered enough to say, ‘I don't know’
As far as anybody could see, Adam did not need the mask, he had no need to breathe. His concentration was completely focused on the guard. He drew a knife from his belt, leaned down and drove it deep into the man's leg. Blood poured from the wound running down over his boot in a rivulet onto the floor. Adam withdrew the knife and held it up to the man's face.
‘Where have they taken her?’ He repeated, his voice calm and utterly controlled.
‘They have gone down to the lower level.’ The man replied, too terrified to even look at his leg. ‘to get away from the gas.’
Replacing his mask, Adam hurried out of the door and on down the corridor. Paul and the officers had no choice but to follow him and leave the guard to fend for himself. Soon they stopped at another locked door. This was far heavier, and Smith quickly produced some explosives. The report from the blast echoed down the corridor and they hurried through, down narrow steps. At the bottom, they saw that this part of the monastery was far older than the higher level. The walls were damp and the corridor dark, winding, and narrow. They saw glimpses of stone figures in deep recesses carved from the living rock. Adam was running now, seeming not to notice the danger. There was no gas at this level. The others stayed behind, looking to either side into every entrance. The passage opened out into a large space with a high ceiling and Adam ran in up a wide, straight aisle between high structures looming to either side.
Suddenly, silently, he fell to the floor. He said nothing, no cry of pain or shout for help as his feet were driven from under him. His torch rolled away.
Gardiner shone his own torch. Four men with crossbows froze in the powerful beam. Smith took quick aim and fired. Two went down. The others turned and ran. More could be seen behind them.
Paul saw Lynella and shouted out. Smith saw her and fired to either side. The men ran.
Terrified, Lynella ran with them.
Paul called out again.
She hesitated and moved on.
Paul was running towards her shouting.
Finally, she stopped; standing alone, her blonde hair illuminated by Gardiner's torch in sharp silhouette against the dark beyond.
Paul ran up and pulled her to one side. A volley of crossbow bolts flew wildly towards them, glancing off the walls, embedding themselves into the high stacks to either side. They crowded into a small alcove off the main aisle.
Paul looked at Lynella. ‘Are you hurt?’
‘No, I'm all right’
He suddenly saw the circlet around her head reflecting the torchlight.
‘What's that?’
‘It blocks my power,’ she replied brushing back her hair to reveal the network of chains that held it. ‘The Abbot put it there.’
Paul looked to see how it was secured. There was shouting, running feet, coming towards them. A bolt crashed into the wood beside them, its shaft vibrating from the impact.
‘Please take it off. I can help you’
‘We've got to go,’ Gardiner cut in.
‘We can do it quickly,’ Paul replied. Lynella knelt down in from of him and hung her head down. Using pliers that had been brought for wiring the detonators, he started cutting the fine chains.
Smith fired blindly along the aisle and ran to find Adam. A trail of blood leading to a narrow gap between the high stacks. He leaned down towards him and saw bolts embedded in his legs. Two short shafts with fine metal vanes protruded from each leg. As he watched, Adam pulled one out, revealing the broad serrated head, as blood poured from the wound.
‘Leave me.’ Adam spoke quietly but firmly.
Smith reached for his arm, but Adam drew his knife.
‘Leave me’, he repeated, ‘Rescue Lynella’.
‘Come on, you’ll be all right.’ Smith tried to sound reassuring, but the knife moved closer to his throat. The space was so narrow that there was no way past it.
He drew his handgun. Adam cowered back until he saw it was a gift. Smith showed him the safety catch and gave him the gun. Adam looked up slowly, ‘Thank you, I shall look after it,’ he said. ‘Leave me here and, one day, I shall find you again and return it to you.’ Unable to think of a reply Smith ran back, firing wildly as he went.
Lynella started to look up when he arrived but Paul placed a steadying hand on the back of her head to hold it still while he worked on the chains.
More bolts crashed into the stack above them and Smith leaned cautiously into the aisle to reply with more gunfire. ‘Get a move on,’ he shouted, ‘They're almost on us.’
Finally, Paul cut the last chain and lifted the circlet away. Lynella looked up and a blaze of light from spheres way above them illuminated the entire area. The running stopped with a sudden silence. They ran towards the steps.
They saw spheres hanging from chains on a framework of massive timbers. Each me
mber had been formed from a whole trunk of a mature tree and met with others, in joints held together with thick iron bands. The whole structure was saturated with water; it ran down the trunks, flowing off them onto others and then falling in enormous droplets, which glowed with reflected light until they fell out of sight. Around the water, lichen grew, spreading across the wood to the rusty iron, and hanging down in motionless tendrils.
The beams were arranged as bracing for massive uprights shoring up the rock, which formed the roof of the vast cathedral. Sections had fallen with unknown consequences on the sanctity below, but the remainder stood, much of it broken free from the parent rock, and supported by the structure built below it.
Damage could be seen, with some timbers bent to breaking point, splitting at the edges and opening up deep cracks along their lengths, iron bands snapped or dislodged. Some smaller members had failed completely, spreading disorder throughout the structure.
The timbers formed a circle of enormous trestles, supporting the roof from the rock floor. In the centre of the circle they ran past an ornately carved altar, green with the slime that formed on everything at this level but nevertheless so magnificent as to be avoided by the trestle builders. Not so, the surrounding structures. Fragments of broken stone lay across the floor where they had been removed. Their contents were now in crude heaps covered with pale green corrosion. Some of the copper containers had broken open and their contents could be seen as it spilled out. Skulls, bones broken, piled up and rotting. More coffins, all around. Stacked high.
‘What the hell is it all?’ Smith asked.
‘The timbers must support the machine at the next level,’ Paul replied. ‘Must have built too much and started to go through the floor into the catacomb down here.’ After a moment's thought, he added, ‘Probably dug out too much rock as well. Not much of that level looks natural like this; mostly been mined out when needed.’
They climbed higher to get a clear view of the entrance, only to see heavily armed soldiers standing motionless, looking up at the lights. They stopped, and nobody moved. Within the silence, an almost subliminal pulsing began to grow. At first it could have been mistaken for the sound of dripping water, but it was too regular, too confident. Growing to fill the entire cavern, it had no origin and no limit; it came from everywhere and stopped nowhere. Every one of the thousands of metal objects in the cavern was moving fractionally in perfect synchronism. Even the power of the lights was changing marginally with each cycle.
A scream broke the silence. Starting from high above, it echoed back and forth, seeming almost to grow rather than fade in time. It still lingered in the air as a report like a gunshot came from the roof. A section of rock the size of a horse broke free and fell lazily through the support structure, leaving shattered timbers in its path. In that instant, Paul realised what was happening. Jumping down, he saw Lynella laying on her back on the floor. Her eyes were open, but they saw nothing but the machine. He picked her up and the lights went out; the contact broken. With a stifled cry and a deep shudder, her body fell limp. Smith and Gardiner jumped down with him and they ran. A rock fell behind them, broken fragments flying in all directions.
Reaching the entrance to the cavern, they kept running. The rock seemed to be waiting for a great collapse that never came. The sound of falling boulders faded behind them. Climbing the stairs, they met others also fleeing and for the second time, Paul found himself escaping from the monastery in the midst of a mass flight of all who lived inside it. Emerging into the daylight, they fired shots into the air to clear a path through the crowd back to the edge of the source.
30
Paul placed Lynella's limp body on the back seat of the Jeep. The three men crowded round her as Gardiner checked her breathing and pulse.
‘I think she'll come round OK,’ he said, ‘but we ought to get her to the medics as quickly as we can’
‘We'd better get out of here fast anyway,’ Smith added looking back at the crowd beyond the marker stones. ‘I think they're about to see if we're in range of their crossbows.’
They set off with Smith driving, trying to avoid the worst of the rough ground, while Paul held Lynella as comfortably as possible in the back seat. They were soon well out of sight in the forest, following the tracks they had left leading back to the landing site.
‘Hold it!’ Paul shouted.
Smith slowed down. ‘What's wrong? Is she coming round?’
‘Not yet but we shouldn't be taking her this way’
‘What do you mean?’ Gardiner looked at him. ‘She needs a doctor and that's this way.’
‘Yes, but she shouldn't be here’ By this time, they had stopped and both officers were looking at Paul. ‘Their religion is all about not going beyond those stones back there. If she comes round and finds where we've taken her, she may get mad or crack up.’
‘You mean we should go back?’ Smith stopped the engine.
‘No, not back there. There should be some cover a mile or two east.’
‘What a waste of time. One bit of forest looks like any other. How's she going to know where she is?’
‘She'll know. What you saw back in the monastery was only the start of what she can do.’
Gardiner finally conceded that it was not worth the risk and they turned and soon left the source again, a few miles from the monastery. Crossing the marker stones and the road as fast as possible and hoping not to be seen by the Abbot's lookouts on the hills, they made camp out of sight in an area of dense forest overlooking the road.
Gardiner helped Paul arrange the girl comfortably on a blanket. Her breathing was steady now. ‘I guess we couldn't have kept her there anyway,’ he checked his watch. ‘Let's call the Captain and let him know where we are.’
‘Is it OK to use the radio?’
‘Fine, Atlanta will have gone below the horizon five minutes ago.’
On the radio Captain Turner listened to a detailed account of events in the monastery.
‘What do you want us to do?’ Smith asked. ‘If you send out a couple of hundred men, we'll show them the way in and blow it up.’
‘You can't,’ Paul cut in. ‘It'd be a massacre.’
‘They're trying to kill us. They're going to fire a ring at our ship.’
‘We're the ones who shouldn't be here’
‘We won't do it anyway,’ the Captain observed, ‘because of the number of our men we might lose. Wait there and let me know what the girl says when she wakes up.’
The officers went out to each side to keep watch, leaving Paul to look after her. Soon she opened her eyes.
‘What happened?’
‘I broke your contact with the machine.’
‘Why?’
‘You were going to make the roof collapse and bury us.’
‘You stopped me destroying it?’
‘I stopped you destroying yourself, and us. What about us?’
‘Who gave you the right to do that? I knew what I was doing.’
‘I thought,’ he paused. ‘It's done now, right or wrong. Now we know all about it, can't we get the High Council to stop the Abbot?’
‘It'd take weeks to get back to my family and they wouldn't believe me anyway. Can't some of your friends go in with your weapons and destroy him.’
‘No. We won't do that. We could get you back quickly though.’
‘How?’
‘In one of our small ships, the shuttles.’
‘Nobody can fly ships outside the source.’
‘We can.’
‘Can we?’ Gardiner had come back to the camp ‘The Mission Director's got rules that say we can't’
‘We could find Angus and the other men,’ Lynella said. ‘They were with me when we went in. They saw it. They would be believed.’
‘We'd be OK so long as we didn't fly while Atlanta could see us on radar,’ Smith joined in. ‘Let's call the Captain and ask.’
Captain Turner was easily persuaded. His concern for the Mission Director's r
ules appeared to be fading. ‘Stay there,’ he told them. ‘I'll send a shuttle as soon as I can.’
Smith and Gardiner went back out to keep watch. Paul and Lynella started telling each other about what had happened since their time together at the Southern Castle.
‘You really wanted to destroy the machine and die, didn't you?’
‘I had to destroy it. I should have. Mages always die.’
‘What, you mean in the books?’
‘They all died in the last battle.’
The sound of dogs in the distance interrupted them. Smith went forward to investigate and they soon realised that the dogs were moving slowly towards them, in front of a large number of the Abbot's men. The Abbot had learned fast; these were not foot soldiers in armour with swords. Each man carried a crossbow and they were moving forward cautiously, using all of the available cover.
‘Fire in the air to slow them down,’ Paul said. Switching the radio on again, he found he was unable to talk because of the sound of the gunfire.
The shuttle pilot had been listening on the open channel ‘This is shuttle 25. What the hell was that?’
‘We're in trouble. Where are you?’ Paul asked.
‘With you in 3 minutes.’
The gunfire had scared away the dogs, but it had been met by ever increasing numbers of crossbow bolts. The bolts were fired indiscriminately in their direction. The soldiers continued to press forward.
‘They have been told to kill,’ Lynella said. ‘If your ship doesn't come, they will kill us all. He no longer wants me alive.’
The shuttle had looked small when docking with Atlanta but, looming over them, it now looked enormous. The landing jets threw dust in all directions as it settled on the road.
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