Garment of Shadows (30 page)

A spark is merely a very rapid rust.

I had in my hand a million potential sparks, in the form of steel. The necessary flint, however, was stuck beneath a massive mud-brick pillar.

As I sat forward to lace up my boot, a tiny
ting
drew my attention to the blessed scrap of brass. I retrieved it, folding it into my shirt pocket, then set off on a crawl around the pillar, using the point of my knife to explore the stone foundation slab for cracks. Three-fourths of the way around, I found one.

A corner of the stone the size of my palm rose up a fraction of an inch, suggesting an ancient crack. Digging it free would be laborious, but with the knife, not impossible. I opened my mouth to tell Mahmoud what I was doing.

Then I sat back on my heels.

God, I was being stupid.

I thrust my right hand into its pocket, then changed hands, finding in the left side the small, chalky stone I had picked up on the road on Thursday, that Nurse Taylor had preserved for me on Friday, that I had not been able to bring myself to drop by the wayside Monday. Holding tight, I crawled back to where I had begun, felt around for the padlock, and prayed that the universal laws of physics held sway in this Mediaeval underworld.

The first try gave nothing but a dull scratching sound. The second, a clean tap, but no light. Was I, in fact, blind? Had this entire charade, from sneeze to crawl, been rooted in the delusion that the world was dark, when it was not? Raisuli was known for laying hot coins upon the eyes of displeasing messengers: Had his followers come up with some method of blinding that did not cause pain?

No—damn it, that was absurd. I palmed the stone and rubbed it about on the foundation-block for a minute, to scrape away the chalky surface, then grasped both objects as best I could, took aim, and slammed my hands together.

The fragile instant of light would have been invisible in a dim room; here, it was a miracle.

“Ehiy ’or!”
I cried aloud. “Let there be light!”

And it was good—though not much assistance in seeing, when the spark was directly before my eyes.

I got to my feet. Facing the direction where I thought Mahmoud’s voice had come from, I held my iron-and-flint over my head, and cracked the pieces together.

The flash left an impression of great distance, a less impressive height, and rows of moth-eaten pillars radiating into the darkness. I took a step to the side, and bashed my primitive firestarter again, then again. And saw a man’s foot.

When I reached Mahmoud, I knelt in the darkness, laying my tools on the ground. My hands hesitated, fearful of what they might encounter, until I forced one to reach out and touch him. I found a corpse.

But the corpse reacted to my touch—or had it? Fumbling my way up his arm, I located the hollow of his neck, and pressed. I felt something … no, it was only my own pulse. I held the pose for a long time, my entire being focussed on the two fingers of my left hand, until at last I perceived a rhythm that was not my own. It was weak, and the motion of his chest was no deeper than a bird’s, but he was alive. Barely.

I worked my way back down to his hand, taking it in mine, cradling my arms around the hard skin and broad fingers. The joints were flaccid and it was as cool as a corpse, but the skin on its back betrayed the greatest threat: so dehydrated, it had the texture of half-tanned leather.

“Don’t you die, Mahmoud,” I commanded again, and sprang to my feet.

Each click gave me an instant of infinitesimal energy, so brief that only after many hours of darkness did it actually qualify as light. The sparks had the effect of a vastly slowed cinema projector, each one taking me a few steps closer to the sound of the drip. As I went, I scuffed a wide trail through the dust and fallen débris, terrified of losing my way. I had a bad moment when my tiny flare revealed what I thought was my own trail, running crosswise to my path. Several desperate sparks later, I realised that I had found the route of our captors. Towards the exit.

But I would investigate that path later. Now, I made for the steady sound, eventually rounding a pillar to find a dripping stalactite half as long as my arm. The pool at its base was small and malodorous, but when I had sopped my torn-off, cut-up, bloodstained sleeve in the water, I sucked up the result with more pleasure than I had ever taken from chilled water in a glass.

Although I could have done with the glass. Or a screw-top canteen. Even a medina water-seller’s musty goatskin would have done nicely. Here, I could either see, or I could carry water—unless … Yes, my boots were old, but I had kept them oiled, which meant they were more or less waterproof. After soaking my swollen hands in the frigid pool, I managed to tie together the laces of one boot. With it dangling around my neck, I succeeded in transporting a good cupful of the precious liquid back to Mahmoud.

I vowed that if I ever got back to Sussex, I would make a shrine to those boots.

Working blind, I wrenched off a small scrap of the sleeve and dribbled some water into his slack mouth. I did it again, and again, and when at last he actually swallowed, I felt as if a chorus of angels had burst into song. I put down the cloth and picked up his hand, rubbing his extremities for a time before starting the process over again. It was probably an hour later that I squeezed the last of the water into him, and he gave a faint groan.

“Mahmoud?” I said. “I’ve given you some water, there’s more available, then we’ll see what we can do about getting your— Ack! Stop!” My patient had gone from comatose to aggressive in an instant, his convulsive grab sending a bolt of pain up from my already throbbing hand. “Mahmoud,
ow!
” but my other hand had already knocked loose his grip. His response was to bring his other arm around—only this time he fastened onto my knee, which was uncomfortable but not actively excruciating.

“It’s all right,” I told him, “you’re not blind, you’re not alone, you have water. I’m here. You’re not alone.”

The grip on my leg seemed to pause. “Miri?”

“Right. I got my shackles off and found a pool of water dripping out of the ceiling. When you’re ready, I’ll go fetch some more of it, and then we can see about getting you free as well.”

At the word
go
, his fingers clamped down to keep me from carrying out the threat to walk away. I kept talking, as if I had not noticed. “I managed to turn one of the brass hooks on my boots into a shim and opened the padlock. It took me a while, and I’m afraid my hands may be too swollen to repeat it on yours, but once you’ve had some more water, we can let you try. I can also see the direction we were brought in, so we won’t have to wander around looking for the door.”

As I spoke, his grip lost its intensity, until, with an effort I could almost feel, he forced his fingers from my knee.

“Are you injured?” I asked him.

“No.” Which only meant that whatever had been done to him, it stopped short of broken bones.

“All right, I’m going back for some more water. Oh, but first—” I retrieved the larger of the two rings I wore around my neck and pressed it into his hand, folding his nerveless fingers around the warm gold. “This is yours. I’m sorry it got a bit nicked; I needed it to flatten the boot hook.”

The ring had been in Mahmoud’s family for three centuries. The newer ducal signet ring, created a mere two generations ago, remained with the child duke; this one Mahmoud had kept, his only possession from his former life.

With the boot around my neck again, I retraced my steps to the pool, drinking more myself, soothing my hands in the cold puddle, sopping up another cupful in my boot. Back at the pillar, Mahmoud was sitting up, and this time he could summon enough control to raise the sodden cloth to his lips and suck—taking his time, at my urging. While he did so, I set out to quarter the immediate area, one spark at a time, in search of anything that might prove useful. A padlock key, for example. A keg of ship’s biscuits. Surely this enormous space hadn’t sat here for three centuries without drawing the attention of smugglers?

No key, but I did find the keg.

Well, not really a keg, and certainly no biscuits, but scraps of wood from what had once been some kind of a crate, half-buried under the collapse of a wall. I gathered them by touch, wary lest the rest of the wall come down, and secreted a doubled handful inside my garments. Enough to start a fire, pushing back the dark and cold, allowing me to cease this exhausting method of illumination before my agonised hands failed altogether.

Back at Mahmoud’s pillar, I emptied my pockets of the wood, chose one piece that felt a fraction dryer than the rest, and drew my knife to carve it to slivers, cursing under my breath as splinters joined the accumulated damage to my half-numb fingers. When I had a handful of scraps, I sorted them by feel (more jabs) into fine below and very fine on top. A frayed snippet from my shirt-tail added fibres. I took out my flint and padlock again, wondering if this could possibly work—and then I laid them aside, and dug through my pockets.

The scrap of onionskin paper, Mahmoud’s map and Idir’s writing, was the driest thing I had. I crumpled it, laid it atop the fibres, and knelt over the would-be fire.

“Say a prayer, Mahmoud,” I told my companion, then: “Sorry, what was that?” I leant forward, straining to hear his threadbare words.

“Truly,” he breathed, “Allah has cursed the Unbelievers and prepared for them a blazing fire.”

I laughed aloud, in surprise but also in pleasure: His earlier mumble had not been wordless, after all. It had been Arabic, I thought, the beginning of
Al-Fatihah
, the Opener of the Qur’an—poetic phrases a Moslem recites numerous times every day, a song of God’s greatness: “In the name of God, the merciful, praise be to God, the Lord of all being, the beneficent, the merciful, Master of the Day of Judgment.”

Mahmoud had regained his habit of quotation.

I replied, “Mahmoud, from your lips to God’s ears.”

I struck a spark from my makeshift firestarter, then another, and half a dozen more.

The tenth try resulted in a brief thread of orange crawling across the paper, but it died before my breath could coax it to life. After a dozen attempts, I sat back on my heels.

“I need to rest my hands for a minute.”

“Shall I try?” came his voice, low, but stronger.

“Are your hands steady yet?”

“No.”

“We’ll wait a bit, then. Have you any idea who put us here? Other than it being a supporter of Raisuli?”

“Someone within the Maréchal’s camp.” A five-word sentence, with only one slight break in the middle: definitely an improvement.

“Yes, I agree. But how did
you
know about the ambush?”

“When I came—” His voice broke off with an audible shudder: He had retreated far enough from death to be feeling the cold. “Ali and I came down the
wadi
. When we stopped—”

His teeth chattered, unable to finish the sentence. My hands had rested long enough. I bent back to work. This time, driven by the desperation of the man at my side, the sparks flew: directly onto the paper, which caught in a tiny dot—and this time my breath reached it in time to cause a flare. The paper burned; cotton fibre caught; the flame edged onto the small shreds of packing crate. I blew steadily, and the tinder reached greedily for the oxygen, spreading to the wood beneath. There was even a hint of a crackle—but no. The sound came not from the ground before me, but from the distance, off in the direction that the multiple foot-prints had led in.

I looked up to the firelight gleam of Mahmoud’s eyes, my first clear sight since the Dar Mnehbi guest-room had faded the day before. He, too, heard the noise, and ill as he was, his reaction was faster than mine.

He dropped the damp cloth over the flames. It did not even create a hiss as our infant fire died.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-FOUR

I
snatched up the knife and padlock as Mahmoud fell forward across the dead fire, scraping the bits of firewood beneath him. I retreated towards my own pillar, given form by the light of an approaching lantern, and arranged myself across the slack chain.

Voices rang out, joking in the foreign language, and at least three sets of feet tramped across the beaten soil floor. The noise and dancing brightness were a shock. When they paused, about fifty feet away, there came the all-too-familiar rattle of chains. I lay still.

As I suspected, when they had finished, they came to check on their earlier prisoners. Mahmoud’s motionless form, the shackles clear on his ankle, was cause for amusement; one of them gave him a solid kick. He did not react—either that, or his exertions had made him pass out again—and they turned to me.

I lifted my dust-smeared face from the ground and snarled feebly; they laughed, but came no nearer.

When they were halfway to the entrance, I fell upon the trio.

The flattened-walnut stone I had been carrying all these days cracked off the unpadded top of one man’s head. He stumbled, dropping his rifle, just as the clean-shaven man beside him went down with my thrown knife between his ribs. I followed the stone with the heavy padlock, and the first man collapsed.

That left the other bearded man with the lantern.

As I’d hoped, he was more terrified of the dark than he was of me, and took care to set the light down before grabbing for the gun in his belt—both with his left hand. As he turned, I saw the reason for his clumsiness: His right arm rode in a sling. The revolver was not clear of his belt when I hit him in the face, following the blow with a harder one to his exposed neck.

I stood over the three unconscious men, panting—with fury more than effort—and gloating over my arsenal and the undamaged lamp. Run me over and plunge me into confusion, would you? Kill my friend with darkness?

I stepped forward to rip the sling off the last man, pushing back his sleeve. Bloodstained bandages lay heavy about his upper arm; my left hand tingled with glad awareness.