Second Night (44 page)

Blue padded to the door, hackles raised.

‘She's too young, I tell you!' said Alan desperately. ‘It's too dangerous!'

‘Your sentiments are admirable but they are a luxury we cannot afford. You are a Guardian and sworn to uphold and defend the oath. Has the Master said anything to you about his Will?'

‘Only what he told us all in Council, that he wouldn't neglect his duty. We must trust him to do as he says.'

‘Then you must step up your surveillance. I want regular reports on Jemima's progress. And what of her brother?' The abrupt change in tone was unmistakable. ‘Was he casting at full moon? Was there any sign of visitation? There's nothing on the footage.'

‘Then there's nothing I can tell you. You know as well as I do that phenomena don't show up on film.'

‘The situation is becoming unworkable! We must have more control. We should never have given that boy access to the security room! You must override the command to shut down the system when he is in the forest.'

‘How can I do that when I'm out there with him myself?'

‘Install a console in the tunnel. He will never know.'

‘There's no time left for extras,' said Alan wearily.

‘This is a necessity. Make time.'

The dog began to growl. Something crashed to the floor in the kitchen. Alan heard raised voices.

‘I've got to go,' he said.

‘I'll await your report.'

Alan slammed down the receiver.
Our Mister Charles has lived on his own too long,
he thought grimly.

The battered saucepan lid lay on the floor between Caz and Sir Jonas. Whether it had been dropped or thrown, Alan couldn't say and it was neither the time nor the place to ask. Sir Jonas had obviously been out to the yard. He was wearing his hat and thick winter overcoat, and had forgotten to change out of his slippers. His cheeks and nose were scarlet.

‘I insist that you cancel the arrangements for tomorrow!' he shouted. ‘We will hire a lorry and undertake to deliver the colt to the new owners at our own expense! I will not tolerate further intrusion into our affairs!'

Caz was jabbing the saucepans back on the rack suspended over the kitchen table. ‘You're talking five hours' drive away! Add it up! Five hours there and five hours back! Right now, who has ten hours to take out of a day to go halfway up the country and back?'

Sir Jonas looked momentarily nonplussed.

Caz pressed his point. ‘Go on, tell me!'

‘Our security is of paramount importance!' the old man blustered. ‘We will suspend our customary work schedule for the day. Your mother will drive the lorry and you will accompany her.'

‘Great! So what are you going to do? Go into hibernation for the day so that Sara can get all the work done by herself? I don't think so!'

‘I am perfectly adaptable!'

‘Okay, we'll tell that to Daisy when she gets out of hospital. You can tell her you'll stop ringing the bell every time you think she might be two minutes late with your tray!'

Alan walked between them and picked up the saucepan lid.

‘The hunt grooms will to be here with their lorry at nine o'clock tomorrow morning, Master,' he said soothingly. ‘We'll all be on hand to see to it. There'll be no harm done.'

‘We'll have the colt loaded and on his way before you've even bothered to get yourself out of bed,' said Caz.

Sir Jonas rapped his stick on the floor, raising his voice again. ‘I cannot, and will not, tolerate further exposure of our prime bloodstock to the prying eyes of the equestrian confederacy!'

‘But it'll cost a fortune to change everything now, Master,' Alan pointed out.

‘I don't give a hoot about the cost! We simply cannot afford to have such people setting foot on the estate! Our position must be made quite clear!'

‘Hunt servants don't need telling about position!' snarled Caz.

‘They are spies! They are all spies! Those whores were just the first move in their vile conspiracy to snatch Valkyrjan from our midst!' He jabbed his stick at Caz. ‘You have been unforgivably careless in her management!'

Caz grabbed the stick. ‘Take that back!' He forced the trembling old man up against the wall with the stick against his neck. ‘You take that back! Do you hear me? Take it back!'

Blue yelped and slunk under the table, snarling. Sir Jonas felt bitter breath on his face and a burning blade at his throat. A cold voice rasped:
‘She holds to her own exalted purpose, old fool. There is only one Master.'

He screamed, terrified. ‘I am his servant!' The grip loosened and he bolted down the passageway to the study.

Caz threw the stick to Alan. ‘Freyja doesn't deserve to have to do Hag Night with
that
,' he spat the word, ‘on her back!'

‘Calm down, boy. I'll go and set him to rights. There's nothing that a good shot of brandy won't soften. The colt will be gone in the morning and that will be the end of it. Meantime, get your gear on and go and fetch the pretty lady. Meet me in the garden by the old shed on the east wall in about twenty minutes. There's something I want to show you.'

CHAPTER 75

The lights were on in the shed and the double doors were wide open when Kyri led the mares along the garden path. Alan closed the doors behind them and hung the key up on a hook on the wall, pointing it out to Caz as he did so.

‘Just so you know where it's kept,' he said.

He shut off the light and pulled a heavy lever. Freyja snorted and stamped, and Rúna pressed close to Kyri as the solid wooden cladding against the wall slid away to reveal a brightly lit, underground passageway.

‘What's all this?' asked Caz.

‘You'll see,' replied Alan. He showed Caz a similar lever on the other side of the partition. ‘Make sure you always close up as you go.'

‘Another Guardian thing,' said Caz.

‘Yes.'

The mares followed Caz into the passage. The heavy panel slid silently back into place behind them. The wide space at the bottom of the slope was no longer empty. A mountain bike and a small two-wheeled cart, purpose-built to be towed behind it, were parked against the wall. Several bales of hay and straw were stacked in one corner. Caz noted the tethering rings set into the walls… the long harness hook let into the ceiling… the water bucket under the tap. There were no stalls.

Why would horses be tied up here?
he wondered.

Alan took the bike. ‘This is my transport. You might want to make use of yours, but you'll have to keep your head down. They didn't reckon on producing the likes of the pretty lady in those days. The password's easy.'

He tapped
V-A-L-K-Y-R-J-A-N
on the security screen. An almost invisible door opened in the far wall.

Caz sprang onto Kyri's back. ‘This is Sir Saxon's old tunnel, isn't it? The one you told me fell in?'

Alan nodded and laughed. ‘Welcome to the Medustig!'

‘The what?'

‘The Path to the Mead Hall in the old language, or the Mead Hall Path or just the Path, whatever you fancy calling it.'

The mares surged forward into a brick-lined passageway lit at intervals with cleverly concealed strip lighting. Just before it turned the first corner, Alan pointed to a section of the wall on the right-hand side of the passage with a door and another panel beside it. ‘I'll give you a passkey to get in there. It goes straight into the security room.'

‘How come?' Caz asked, surprised.

Alan grinned. ‘The wall opens up behind the screens, where the first Guardians' old door from the vault used to be.'

The tunnel bent around another corner and the lights went out. Alan stopped to turn on the big headlamp on the front of the bike. ‘This is where the hard graft begins. All the rain we've had this summer has given me a chance to get down here and finish what I've been fiddling about with these last ten years. I'm not sorry to see it done. It's been a tough job mining it all out.' He grinned. ‘Maybe I'm getting soft in my old age.'

‘Why Medustig?'

‘Not all the staff were Guardians when this was dug out, and understandably Sir Saxon didn't want them cottoning on. So, in the interests of security, the word
tunnel
was knocked out of the Guardians' dictionary and
Medustig
put in.'

He leaned forward over the handlebars and began peddling hard, keeping ahead of the horses. The brickwork gave way to rock and the tunnel began to slope steadily upwards. Every move they made echoed in the underground passageway. Sometimes the roof dropped lower and Caz laid along Kyri's neck, following the stocky figure clearly outlined in silhouette against the light in front of them… the hilt of the seaxe in the scabbard on his back… the even rhythm of his legs pumping the peddles… the edges of the heavy bag of practice weapons strapped to the rack behind him.

They came to a long, straight section where there were no signs of cracking or recent repair in the rocky walls. Caz tried estimating the distance they had already come. He called out. ‘Are we under the Beech Walk?'

Alan shouted back over his shoulder. ‘We're just to one side of it. Sir Saxon never let any tractors go through there while the earth was settling and the horses always had to be walked. It worked right enough. This bit was always good. The trouble came further up, as you'll see.'

The tunnel became steeper and rougher under foot. Alan was sweating when he got off the bike and turned the light into a dark opening where a large underground cave had been hewn out of the rock.

‘This is where we take a breather,' he said. ‘The old Guardians called this the Selerest, literally the ‘rest in hall'. It's a bit more than halfway up the line but we regulars call it the Halfway House, one of those old-style, high-quality establishments that still caters for horses. You'll need to dismount and take care on the step down.'

He parked the bike and lit a hurricane lamp, hanging it on an overhead, central hook. An iron stove on a wide hearth stood in one corner, next to a stack of seasoned firewood. A kettle, an iron pot and more hurricane lamps hung on two other hooks let into the wall. A big metal water bucket had been filled under a tap attached to a long pipe connected to an underground spring. Several bales of hay and straw were stacked up under a flight of wooden steps that disappeared into a narrow chimney of rock in the roof.

Kyri's eyes were glowing. She drank from the water in the bucket under the tap. Caz broke open one of the bales and gave each of the mares a wedge of hay. He refilled the bucket. Freyja drank deeply. Alan filled it again for Rúna, and smiled. ‘Looks like they're set straight for the evening, doesn't it?'

Caz grinned. ‘So where's the bar?'

Alan pointed to the new feed bins next to the steps. ‘Full menu. Specials on request.'

‘I meant for us, not the horses.'

‘It is for us. Old Dais had me get all this sorted. She had a notion of coming up here with us when I showed it to you, but she didn't reckon with breaking her arm just as it was all finished.' He lifted the lid on the nearest bin. It was packed full of tins and boxes and bottled preserves.

Caz was astonished. ‘It looks like the old man really is getting ready for a war!'

‘No, it's for you. It was Daisy's idea. You need never fret about getting caught out up here again. You can feed yourself, stretch out on a couple of bales for a nap and the pretty lady can put herself down right beside you. You could lie up here for days and no one would ever know.'

‘It's amazing!' Caz climbed the steps and put his head into the narrow opening. There was a big wooden trap door at the top.

‘Is this another way out?' he asked.

‘Yes, and it's well tucked away. Even your brother at his best would have to be pretty canny to nose out this one.'

‘Where does it come out?'

‘It opens up in one of the copses below Thunderslea and well out of the way of all the tracks and pathways. I put it in when I realised that there was still a good stretch of the old workings that we could use, at least as far as the house. But we could never figure out why the old Guardians had gone to all the trouble to make the tunnel as big as they did, or how they got rid of the ballast while they were doing it.'

‘Didn't the old man know?'

‘Surprisingly, no. We only realised that they must have been putting horses and carts through here when he decided on having the office done out and we found the old trapdoor under the lino in the butler's pantry. It had been nailed down and the passage underneath it had been bricked up. The work looked as though it had been done in an almighty hurry and a good long time back too. I would hazard a guess and say that it had something to do with Sir Edmund refusing the oath. The cave-ins followed soon after.'

‘So you know when the tunnel collapsed?'

‘That much is recorded, and that they tried repairing it, but it didn't hold up. The whole thing was abandoned in Year 67 and stayed that way until I came along and started poking around it all again.'

‘When do I get to see these records?'

‘That's for the Master to decide. They're his responsibility and we have to respect that.' Alan picked up the lamp. ‘Come on, the tour's not finished yet.'

The tunnel veered to the right, sloping steeply upwards, following the gradient of the hill. Whole tree trunks had been used to shore up the roof at regular intervals, and long sections of the walls on either side had been rebuilt with rock and cement. Parts of the old brickwork appeared and the Medustig ended in an open space, similar to the Selerest but smaller and more basically equipped. A long rack against one wall had been crammed with freshly made up torches. There were several bales of hay, a bucket and a water barrel that could be filled from the spring.

Caz recognised the back of the planked door that opened into the tunnel to Thunderslea. He jumped down and investigated the contents of the single feed bin while Alan parked the bike and unhooked his bag.