Ladyhawke (2 page)

Now Marquet looked up at the gallows, smiling in satisfaction at the swinging bodies—three wretches who had been caught stealing grain from the Bishop’s storehouses. On his helmet golden eagle wings, the symbol of his rank, winked in the sunlight as he nodded. “That should give them a bellyful,” he murmured. The Bishop had made him captain because he could be counted on to carry out the Bishop’s orders unflinchingly . . . and to enjoy his work. He turned back to his lieutenant. “Jehan! The next three.”

Jehan saluted and led his men away across the stone-paved square toward the dungeons of Aquila Castle. Entering an underground passage, they circled down and down the narrow, slippery steps cut out of solid rock—the single, heavily guarded entrance to a prison they had come to know far too well in recent months. The air grew danker and fouler as they descended, and they began to hear the moaning of the prisoners down below.

The dungeons lay in a vast hole carved from the bedrock on which the castle sat, as deep and inescapable as the pits of hell. A gridwork of wood and iron divided the chamber into a honeycomb of countless cells and cages, all with a clear view of the dungeons’ instruments of torture. Jehan shouted as the guardsmen reached bottom. The head jailer came lumbering toward them with a torch in his hand, a ring of iron keys jangling at his belt. “Why don’t you build a bigger gibbet?” he growled. “Save me some bother down here.”

“At least you’re just visiting,” one of the guards said. He held his nose. Jehan snorted. The jailer led them along scaffolded corridors past cell after cell. The moans and cries died away as they passed; ghostly faces shrank back from the mold-slick bars. The prisoners cowered in the darkness, still believing there was something worse than the living death in which they now existed.

Jehan stopped before a cell in the deepest recesses of the pit and peered through the grate, searching with sudden eagerness for the gallows’ next victim. He remembered this particular prisoner; he had heaved him into the cell personally. The young thief who was about to hang had made fools of the Guard for months, eluding them time after time, before they had finally captured him. Jehan looked forward to watching the slippery little rat swing.

Jehan stared through the lattice of bars. It took his eyes a long moment of blinking to adjust to the gloom on the other side. He held his breath; the stench of human waste and sickness was overwhelming. As his eyes adjusted, he made out two ragged figures propped against the far wall. One of them stared fixedly ahead, as if his mind had fled this hellhole, leaving his body behind. The other prisoner hummed a tuneless song, murmuring unintelligibly under his breath. Even in the darkness, he knew that neither of their gaunt, filthy faces was the one he wanted. He pressed against the bars, searching every corner of the cell. There was no one else in it. “Phillipe Gaston?” he said, puzzled. He turned to the jailer. “Wrong cell. I want Phillipe Gaston, the one they call the Mouse.”

The mumbling prisoner began to sing audibly, “The mouse, the mouse . . . has left our house . . .”

The jailer held up his torch and peered at the almost unreadable scratches on the cell door. “One thirty-two, sir. This is it.”

“He’s run away,” the prisoner sang, “no mouse today . . .” He giggled, gesturing across the cell with a bony hand.

Jehan pressed against the bars again, looking harder into the shadowed corners of the cell. This time he saw the open drainage grate. Jehan gaped in disbelief. The hole was no more than one foot square—surely no adult human being, not even that scrawny, half-grown wretch Gaston, could have escaped through it. As he watched, a small rat scurried up out of the hole and across the reeking cell floor.

“. . . to stop the pain, he’s down the drain . . .”

“Shut up, you idiot!” Jehan snarled. He looked back at the jailer. “Open the door!”

The jailer fumbled with his keys, unlocking the door with frantic haste. Jehan and the guards pushed into the cell. “What happened to him?” Jehan demanded roughly.

The singer gazed up at him with mindless calm. “I just told you, gentle lord.” He gestured at the drain hole. “I tried to escape myself, but I couldn’t fit.” He smiled, holding up his hands. “So since he still lives, you can kill me twice.”

Jehan turned away, seeing nothing but the face of Phillipe Gaston, who was not there. He shoved his guardsmen toward the door furiously. “Search every sewer! Every drain! Find him, or Captain Marquet will hang you in his place!”
And maybe me too, damn him.
He listened to their frightened footsteps retreating down the hall. He glanced one last time at the drain hole. “Incredible,” he muttered. With a curse of frustration, he left the cell.

C H A P T E R
Two

F
ar beneath Aquila Castle the drain hole opened on another world—a world even more forbidding than the castle dungeons. The sewers of Aquila had begun with the town in Roman times, as the skilled engineers of the Empire took advantage of a natural system of caverns lying beneath the early settlement for drainage and waste disposal. Once the sewers had been part of an orderly, structured plan, like the city itself. But they had been left to fester and decay through the centuries since the Empire’s fall, as the city had spread out over the plain above them in a completely random and uncontrolled way. Now they were an unfathomable maze wormholing the underground beneath every building and street—another world, but one which no sane citizen of Aquila had any desire to enter.

That secret, subterranean world lay waiting in eternal silence, disturbed only by the occasional squeaking of rats, the drip of effluence, and the distant rushing of water. But now its dark peace was broken by new and unexpected sounds. The grunts and gasps and scraping noises were faint at first, but they grew louder, until they echoed from the drainage hole into the empty tunnel below. Suddenly an arm thrust out of the hole into the open air. It waved wildly up and down, in astonishment and triumph. After the arm came part of a shoulder. Then the rest of the lithe, small-boned body of Phillipe Gaston emerged, piece by piece, like a newborn child. Wriggling and twisting like an acrobat, the young thief dragged himself free of the drain at last and dropped to the floor.

He sat gasping for breath, hardly noticing the stench as he filled his lungs completely for the first time in far too long. He looked back at the hole with a kind of disbelief, and a small crooked smile pulled at his mouth. “Not unlike escaping Mother’s womb, really,” he murmured. “God, what a memory . . .” He looked away again, shuddering. His skin was scraped raw, the rags of his clothing were slimy with filth. His fingernails were torn and bloody from clawing his way down the drain. It had taken him hours to force his body through, hours that had seemed like years. The drainhole had not dropped straight into the sewer, but had doubled back on itself like a snake. Time after time he had thought he was hopelessly trapped in some elbow or coil of its intestines. But he had no other choice except to keep on struggling, and in the end he had won free. He had escaped from the dungeons, and the good citizens of Aquila would never see him again . . . if he could just find his way out of their sewers.

He crouched where he was, slowly looking around. The immensity of this underground world awed him. He had often been in cities the size of Aquila, but he had never been in the sewers of one; in most of the cities he had seen, the sewers simply ran down the middle of the street. At least the darkness was not complete—dim light shafted down through countless drain openings from the world above. His eyes, used to the gloom of the dungeons, had no trouble seeing.

The first thing he saw was a human skeleton, embedded in the black sludge an arm’s length away. He jerked back with a startled cry. The yellowed skull grinned in empty mirth. He answered it with a rueful grin of his own, and studied the skeleton speculatively. “Six foot two, eh?” His voice rang dimly in the tunnel. He stood up, stretching his own small body to its full height. “An ideal height for passing through the gates of heaven, my friend. But you see where our Lord in His infinite wisdom has chosen to deposit us.” He gestured around him, looked up at the dripping ceiling suddenly. “I’m not complaining, mind you,” he called out to heaven. “Just . . . pointing things out.” He shrugged. He had what he liked to think of as a personal relationship with God; it was a comfort to know that the Lord was always listening to him, even if no one else ever did. He didn’t want to seem ungrateful when his prayers were answered, even by this mixed blessing. He sighed and began to walk, his feet squelching in the ooze.

Far above him, but not as far above as heaven, the Bishop’s Guard were filling the streets of Aquila in search of their escaped prisoner. A squad entered the belfry of the cathedral at Marquet’s order and pulled the heavy bell ropes. For the first time in years, the cathedral’s enormous bells sounded an alarm through the city.

Within the cathedral, Mass still continued. But as the bells pealed out, filling the vast hall with their sound, the worshipers looked at each other in astonishment and fright. The Bishop turned away from the altar, his impassive face suddenly taut with concern. He glanced over the heads of the standing crowd and saw Marquet. The Captain of the Guard stood near the rear of the cathedral, in the doorway to a private chapel. The golden wings on his helmet flashed in the light as he nodded urgently.

The Bishop went on with the Mass, his singsong recitation more ominous than before.

Down below, Phillipe the Mouse crept through the sewer caverns like his namesake, crouching low until his back ached as he squeezed through a narrow passage into another vast subterranean chamber. He straightened up at last, out of breath, his back muscles pinched in a spasm. Grimacing, he wiped his filthy face on his filthy sleeve and squinted back the way he had come, then ahead again. He saw nothing but the same patternless maze of treacherous tunnels and caves, the same black, reeking pools and streamers of fungus stretching to infinity. For a moment the thought struck him that he might actually have died, and gone to hell.

He shook his head, shaking droplets of water and slime from his sodden hair. No . . . he was too miserable to be dead. He was still alive—but he wondered suddenly how long he would have to go on like this. Panic squeezed his chest as it occurred to him that he might never find his way out of this underground tomb; that he might wander here, alone and lost, until he died.

He sat down in the mud, wracked with sudden shivers. “Easy does it, Mouse,” he murmured softly, clenching his fists. He forced himself to take a deep breath, and another. “Steady progress . . . a peaceful Sunday walk through the gardens . . .” He pushed his mind into the hidden world of his daydreams, blocking out the endless maze of caverns, the terror of being lost in their darkness. He had always been too small, too weak, or too poor; his imagination was the one thing he counted on for survival, and the only refuge he had from reality. At last, almost calm again, he got to his feet and waded back into the oily, knee-deep water, letting his mind lead him on through his Sunday stroll.

Hours passed, as Phillipe wandered through the underworld; his fear settled slowly into weary resignation. He picked his way precariously along a ledge high on a cavern wall, edging around another outcrop of stone—and found himself eye to eye with a screeching demon. He shouted and flung himself backward, recognizing it, too late, as the face of a yowling cat. The cat hissed and bounded off into the darkness. His own feet turned him around and sent him stumbling away in the other direction. Looking back as he ran, he felt the ledge drop out from under him with a sudden, sickening rush. The mud-caked edge of the shelf had broken away beneath his feet.

He plunged his fingers into the slimy earth of the wall as he fell, and dug in desperately. After a moment of blinding panic his eyes began to focus again, as he realized he was not still falling. For the first time he really became aware of the rushing noise that filled the vast tunnel, the sound of a great river flowing past somewhere in the darkness. Barely daring to breathe, he looked down past his dangling feet. And down and down.

Below him he watched the black waters of the subterranean river roar by. Dim light falling from somewhere above showed him the enormous bleached skull of a cow, caught in the sludge on its shore. Long, slimy eels darted in and out of the skull’s empty eyesockets.

Phillipe shut his own eyes with a small moan. “Lord,” he whispered,
“I will never pick another pocket again as long as I live, I swear.”
His voice trembled slightly. “But . . . here’s the problem: If You don’t let me live, how can I prove my good faith to You?” There was no answer. Phillipe looked up; water dripped into his eye. “I’m going to pull myself up now, Lord,” he said, more firmly. His fingers were beginning to cramp. Still no answer. “If You’ve heard me this shelf will remain steady as a rock. If not, then no hard feelings, of course. But I will be
very
disappointed.”

Gritting his teeth, he kicked a foothold in the wall, and then another. He pulled one hand free of the muck, dug it in again, nearer to the broken ledge. The earth held. Inch by miraculous inch, he clawed his way back to the shelf, and dragged himself painfully up onto it. He flopped down on its solid surface and shook out his arms and legs, amazed to find his body still in one piece. “I don’t believe it.” He shook his head, getting cautiously to his feet.