“I appreciate that,” said the director. “There won’t be much happening here until the current session is finished. We have a few hours, so I suggest we go get some dinner and put our feet up for a while. Then we’ll come back and hit it fresh later on tonight. Have you got a room yet?”
“Not yet,” replied Tony. “I thought we’d just find a motel in Socorro.”
“Oh no,” said Segler. “You’ll do no such thing. You two will stay with me—Linda will be delighted to see you. She’s making her carne asada tonight and would love some company around the table. But I’m warning you—if I don’t get to sleep, then you don’t either.”
“Sleep is overrated,” Tony told him.
“Right.” Segler laughed. “Tell me that this time next week.”
CHAPTER 9
In Which Contempt Breeds Confrontation
Burleigh heard the now-familiar metallic clank sounding from somewhere down the underground corridor and groaned. It must be Wednesday, he thought. Market day: the day when the insufferable German baker brought them food and drink he had purchased in the square. What a fool! His continual meddling made no sense, no sense at all that Burleigh could see—unless, and this was the view Burleigh doggedly maintained, the fat baker nursed an ulterior motive of an extremely subtle and devious kind. That Burleigh lacked evidence for this assertion, and indeed had never been able to discern even the faintest whiff of guile on Stiffelbeam’s part, did not matter and was not, ultimately, important. He despised the baker; no other proof was needed.
In a moment, he heard the shuffling slap of shoe leather on the damp stone outside the door, and realising he had been holding his breath in anticipation of the sound, he exhaled and slumped back against the mildewed stonework of the dungeon cell. He closed his eyes and waited for the humiliation to begin anew.
Revenge, reprisal, retaliation—these motives the earl could understand. That the baker would retaliate for the savage beating Burleigh had given him was only natural. It was, after all, exactly what Burleigh would have done in his place. The other theory, sometimes ventured by one or another of the Burley Men, was that Engelbert brought them food for the reason that he said he did: because that was what his Jesus would do. Jesus—who apparently exerted an inordinate influence over His slavish minion—had died preaching love for everyone, including one’s enemies. The love of enemies was, to Burleigh’s mind, nothing more than an open invitation to be victimised by any and all, not least those self-same enemies. Had not this Jesus been executed precisely for saying such absurdly irrational things? Far better to believe, as Burleigh did, that people only ever behaved in ways that would satisfy some basic desire, whether for power or pleasure or personal gain. Ergo, Engelbert the baker was only seeking to advance some nefarious aim of his own. Bringing food to his tormentors was only a means to an end; Burleigh allowed himself no doubt that the object of the exercise was his complete and utter destruction. That was Burleigh’s way. And that was the way of the world.
There were voices outside the cell door, followed in a moment by the click of the lock and a grating whine as the door swung open. As before, as always before, the lumbering oaf stood in the doorway, a little pause before entering. Burleigh raised his eyes to his unwanted visitor. “You again,” he intoned in German. “Always you.”
“Yes, always me,” replied Engelbert, stepping into the cell. The gaoler, who had ceased taking an interest in these visits, closed the door behind him. “I have brought some special things today. The summer sausage is now ready, and many farmers are selling it in the market. I brought one for each of you.” He swung the bag off his shoulder, opened it, and proceeded to dig around inside. As he bent to his work, the loathing Burleigh always felt in the baker’s presence rose up once more—this time it was so strong and virulent he thought he would vomit. “Your presence sickens me,” Burleigh said, his voice thick, almost strangled. “The very sight of you sickens me.”
“Perhaps it does,” agreed Engelbert affably, “but my absence would soon sicken you much more. I think so, yes.”
This produced a snicker from Tav, the only one of his men who had more than a snatch of German. Burleigh whirled on him. “You think that funny? You think that hilarious, do you?”
“No, boss,” Tav replied, suddenly solemn. “But why insult him? You want to drive him away?”
“Yeah, boss,” agreed Con. “If t’weren’t for the baker, we’d ha’ starved to death by now. The big lunk’s the only reason we’re still livin’.”
“You call this living?” Burleigh shouted.
“Easy, boss,” said Con, raising his hands. “Didn’t mean nuffin’ by it.”
Burleigh glared at his two henchmen so hard he thought his eyes might burst. Across the cell, Dex and Mal had risen from their rancid nests; the two said nothing, but it was clear from the looks on their faces that they shared the prevailing sentiment of their mates.
Meanwhile, Etzel pulled the sausages from his bag and began handing them round. “This one for you,” he said, passing Con an oblong muslin-wrapped bundle. “And this for you,” he said and proceeded to deliver the provisions to each man in turn.
When he got to the earl, Burleigh refused to take the proffered item. After holding it out for a time, the baker simply gave a little shrug and placed the sausage at His Lordship’s feet. “You will enjoy this later, I think.” He then turned and continued unloading the bag of food. There was bread in dense, dark hemispheres, cheese in pale, flattened globes, a few bunches of carrots and celery, small jugs of beer, knobs of butter, and handfuls of hard biscuits from the Grande Imperial’s larder. All this he stacked carefully on the folded sack and then announced, “Summer is good this year. The crops are growing. We will be having apples and pears soon, and blackberries, vegetables, and new cheese. I will bring them as soon as I can.”
“No,” Burleigh told him, stepping forward. “Do not come here again. I do not want your food . . . your good works. Do you hear? I do not want anything from you!”
At the sound of raised voices, the indolent turnkey shoved open the door and poked his head into the cell. “What is happening here?”
“Get out!” Burleigh screamed. “Get out, do you hear? Get out and never come back.”
The gaoler took a step into the cell. “Etzel, is all well?”
“All is well,” Engelbert assured him. “I am just leaving.”
As he stepped to the door, Tav moved to intercept him. “Pay him no mind, sir. Boss is . . . ah . . .” He fumbled for the German word. “He’s sick, see. He don’t mean what he says.”
“Tav!” shouted Burleigh. “What are you doing? How dare you apologise for me!” Burleigh surged forward. “I am your master, you dog. Shut your fat gob and get away from him!”
“Boss, it ain’t his fault. Fella’s only trying to help,” said Tav, putting up his hands and edging away.
“Ease off, boss.” Con moved to interpose himself between Burleigh and Engelbert. “Calm down. He don’t mean nuffin’ by it.”
“Calm down!” roared Burleigh. He balled his fist and swung hard at Con, striking him on the side of the head. Con took the blow and staggered backward. “You presume to tell me to calm down?”
Burleigh, blind with fury, bulled past Con, who tried to hold him back. The earl shook him off with another blow and reached for Tav. The gaoler, stepping in, shoved him roughly aside and, pushing Engelbert out of the cell, quickly slammed the door in Burleigh’s face. “Never come back!” shouted Burleigh in a voice of strangled rage. “You hear me? Never!”
The footsteps retreated down the corridor, and Burleigh, strength and anger spent, slumped against the door and slid to the floor. Tav bent near to help him to his feet. “Get away from me, traitor!” snarled Burleigh. “Leave me alone. All of you just leave me alone!”
Later that day he got his wish when his men, his very own Burley Men, were removed from the cell and taken to another part of the dungeon. He heard their footsteps recede down the corrid
or, followed by the creak and slam of a door farther on. He would not see them again.
In the days to follow, Burleigh’s unreasoning rage subsided and he had plenty of time in the solitary silence of his cell to think. He told himself that his anger was warranted. It was nothing more than a reaction against the frustration of his present situation—though, in thinking long and hard about it, he could not seem to account for this mysterious sense of unfairness that he felt. Whatever its source, it was this keenly felt sense of injustice that had triggered his outburst. He concluded that his native tolerance had reached its limit and he had lashed out.
This explanation satisfied him and allowed him to sleep at night. However, as explanations go, it proved insufficiently robust. For as the sting of the incident receded, he began to grow hungry and, though he resisted the temptation for as long as he could, need eventually overcame his resolve, and he allowed himself to eat from the allotment of food that Engelbert had provided. While he was gnawing on his bread and sausage, the notion occurred to him that injustice alone was not a sufficient cause for his anger. While his persistent feeling that he was being treated unfairly may have been a contributing factor, the provocation, the root cause of his rage, went far deeper.
Ordinarily, his thoughts were of an angry, retaliatory nature, enflamed by a seething sense of injustice at the callous unconcern exhibited by a bunch of dim-witted, officious lackeys in the service of a legal system that allowed such deplorable treatment of its detainees. This led him into a meandering meditation on the nature of fairness and why he should feel the sting of injustice so acutely in his present circumstances. After all, he was a man who had chosen to live his life outside the bounds of righteousness, beyond the commonly accepted norms of fair play, if not moral rectitude. Yet feel the lash of unfairness he did. And it hurt. Moreover, the prick of injustice produced a slow-simmering anger and a hunger for a benevolence, a pardon, a deliverance he knew in his inmost heart that he did not deserve.
Still, as often as he told himself that he had no right to expect anything but the pitiless indifference of an ultimately heartless universe, the rage and hurt he felt could not be denied. Nor was it lost on him that he, who had so often shown this same pitiless indifference to the plight of his victims, had no reasonable right to rage against it now. He did rage, however; and he did suffer the hurt.
He hurt. There was no denying that. Yet, try as he might, Burleigh could not fathom how he had acquired this gritty, unrelenting insistence that he was owed something better than what the random workings of a coldly impersonal, chance-driven universe had allotted him.
CHAPTER 10
In Which Panic Is Postponed
Blasted by the icy wind and blinded by sleet, Wilhelmina threw her arms around her chest and tried to work out what had gone wrong. The portal had saved her life, probably, but had deposited her on a glacier in the middle of a blizzard in some place known only to God alone, and in a condition for which she was wholly unprepared. The wild gale ripped through her clothes; she had only minutes to figure out a survival plan before the cold began to steal the life from her warm body.
Then she heard a muffled growl. She turned warily. Baby had made the leap with her. Her stomach tightened at the sight of the cave lion crouched in the snow behind her, ready to spring.
Outrunning the creature would be pointless, and fighting it was out of the question: the enormous cat weighed four times as much as she did. What was not muscle was teeth and claws. Mina had no weapons . . . What now? Shivering, she stared at the cave cat, and the cave cat stared back with baleful yellow eyes. However, something about the young lion’s posture—its feet under its body and oversized head tucked back against its massive shoulders—gave Wilhelmina a glimmer of hope.
“Oh, Baby,” she said, keeping her voice low. “What’s the matter, old thing? Are you cold?”
The cat continued to stare.
“I’m cold too.” Mina took a slow, deliberate step closer to the crouching cat. “Maybe we can keep each other warm.” She took another step and extended an open hand. “What do you think? Shall we keep each other warm?”
The lion’s ears flattened to its head and it spat a savage hiss, just like a threatened tabby that knows it has wandered into the wrong garden.
“No need to get stroppy. Everything’s going to be all right.” The big cat hissed and then spun in place and leapt away. “Then again, maybe not,” sighed Wilhelmina.
She watched the frightened animal streak away over the snow-driven ice, its chain trailing along behind, clinking as it went. The creature was soon lost in the snow haze kicked up by the blizzard. Oddly, Mina felt more vulnerable than ever; she definitely felt more alone. The shriek of the wind howling through icy heights mocked the hopelessness of her situation. Tears of cold and desperation welled in her eyes and froze on her cheeks.
“Get a grip, Mina,” she muttered, mostly just to hear the sound of her own voice above the howling gale. “You can panic later. Right now you’ve got work to do.”
She cast a quick look around. The mountains in the distance presented an extremely familiar profile; she had the distinct impression that she had seen them before . . . maybe many times before, though, half obscured by blowing snow and freezing fog, she could not say where. There was no time to wonder about this; likely she would freeze to death before solving the mystery. Continuing her survey, she examined the surface of the glacier, looking for any signs of ley activity. She circled the area, spiralling out in an ever-widening radius, keeping her eyes on the wind-scoured ice. The surface of the glacier was glare ice—deep blue with flecks of green and grey. Snow drifted here and there in restless streams, unable to find purchase on the surface of ice and hardpack.
Mina saw a crevice that looked promising, but it was merely a crack, not a ley line, and it petered out after a few dozen paces. Colder now, shaking uncontrollably, she resumed her circling, growing more desperate with every step.
Time was running out. She could not feel her toes or fingers anymore, ice stuck to her hair and eyelashes, and she was shivering so ferociously that standing upright was becoming difficult. Even if there was a ley line nearby, she concluded gloomily, she would not be able to see it.
The thought jolted her. She did not have to see it; she might be able to feel it. Returning quickly to where she had started, she stretched out her hands. They were so numb and shaking so violently, she despaired of feeling anything at all, not least the subtle tingle of ley energy.
“Oh, please,” she gasped, “don’t let me die like this. Please, God.”
With that prayer on her lips, she crisscrossed the area where she had landed and saw a small pool of water in a slight, bowl-shaped indentation in the ice. The pool, little more than a large puddle, was quickly scumming over, turning to slush, but that it was there at all was, Mina decided, remarkable given the subzero temperature. This has got to be it, she concluded. Please, God, let this be the spot.
Extending a frozen hand over the slushy pool, she felt nothing to indicate ley activity. Her slender hope vanished in the scream of the wind. She stared at the dull water and wondered if this would be the last sight she saw. Doubled over in a futile effort to conserve the little warmth she had left, she stared at the pool.
Something was keeping that puddle from freezing . . .
With difficulty, Mina straightened and stepped into the puddle. As cold as she was, the water was even colder—but not as cold as it should have been. She felt like a prize idiot. Was it not enough to be stranded on a glacier freezing to death, now she had to go and jump in a puddle?
The thought brought a smile to her face. She put back her head and laughed, but it was not a happy sound. It was the sound of someone beginning to become muddled and punchy with the cold—a sure sign of hypothermia. She had read that somewhere . . . in a magazine? Or was it a book? It seemed very important to recall the source . . . but . . . What am I doing?
Wilhelmina dragged her raddled thoughts together a
nd, standing in ice water up to her shins, she raised a shaking fist into the air. At first nothing happened, but since she had no better plan, she decided she would persist until her last breath—which would not be long in coming.
Quaking with killing cold, her eyelids almost frozen shut, Wilhelmina stood in the icy pool and held herself upright. The grey-white world around her grew muzzy and indistinct. The numbness in her feet had moved steadily up her legs and thighs. Consciousness slipped away, and yet somehow she still stood. The world around her faded, and she sank into the ice water and down.
But she did not stop. She continued sinking—down and down, through the ice, deeper and deeper still. In her confused state, Wilhelmina imagined that a crevasse had opened up and swallowed her, taking her down to a cave of ice that would be her tomb.
That she did not feel the glacial walls sliding past, bumping her, jostling her, failed to register in her awareness at all. It was not until her stiff and unfeeling feet struck bottom that she felt even the least sensation—though for one brief moment everything went black—and then she thumped down with a shock strong enough to rouse her faltering brain from its stupor.
She landed at the bottom of her descent in a heap and lay where she had fallen. Curiously, it seemed brighter here . . . and warmer. No doubt everyone who froze to death imagined what they craved as their internal organs shut down. Past caring, she simply lay for a time, luxuriating in the light and warmth. Some little time later, it occurred to Mina that the sunlight burning her skin was real and not a hallucination conjured by a dying brain.
Opening her eye, she looked up and saw a long and familiar double row of sphinxes lining an avenue of broken stone: Egypt.
The momentary shock was swiftly swallowed in a rush of relief. She rolled onto her back and gazed up at the bright, empty blue sky and breathed a heartfelt thanks. “I owe You one,” she said. “And I won’t forget.”
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