The Fifth House of the Heart (11 page)

Downstairs the layout was simple enough, and he understood that. The big, open rooms and high ceilings precluded certain arrangements of hidden chambers or stairways; there was a limit to what one could achieve within a stone-and-timber structure. The main salon was beneath their feet, if Sax was figuring their position correctly. He had no confidence in this whatsoever, but it would have to do. If he was correct, the corridor would pierce a load-bearing wall just ahead of them. The portcullis that blocked their access in the opposite direction had come down out of a similar wall.

There was a good chance they would be crushed like beetles by another of these when they passed through the bearing wall, or by some other evil trap hidden within the thickness of the masonry. Bearing walls in a building of such size could be eight feet thick or more: plenty of space to conceal all manner of death-dealing machinery.

Sax thought of the blade that descended from the window frame. He was certain no local ruffians had built that thing. It was part of the original design of the château. He considered how amusing a family of high blood would have found it to employ the guillotine, that weapon of the common people, to execute would-be trespassers in their domain. These defenses might have originally been built to foil an external attack mounted by the peasants. It was clever: make the architecture do the work of a defending army.

All of which suggested to Sax that there had to be a concealed passage somewhere close at hand. What good were such brutal, automated defenses, if not to buy time for the inhabitants to flee? It was some small comfort to consider that he and Gander might find an escape route—not outward, but inward, into the heart of the place. He prayed to his unconvincing notion of a deity that it might be true.

They flung themselves through the space demarcated by the thick
ness of the bearing wall. Wood paneling clad the piers; there was only the slightest intrusion of architecture into the hallway—an arch overhead. When no traps sprang and killed them, Sax ventured to explore the woodwork with the point of his sword. Gander lit a fire with a match and a scrap of tapestry he tore from the wall. Sax was almost, but not quite, at peace with the destruction they had so far wreaked on the contents of the château. It was a terrible loss, even the chair Gander had been chucking about. But Sax could not erase from his mind's eye the hideous shape of the man pulverized by iron jaws up in the ceiling of the bedroom. He didn't want to meet a fate like that. Or any fate.

“If there's a secret panel,” Sax said at last, “I can't find it.” They had pressed and pushed every knob in the carved paneling, twisted the nearest sconces and candlesticks; Gander had even stumbled his way back through the darkness to manipulate the suit of armor, in hopes some switch might be concealed within it. Nothing changed. They stared at each other in the smoky, red light of the fire. Gander had wrapped the tinder around the end of the halberd for a torch. It threw frantic shadows on the walls, like ravens mating in flight.

“There
has
to be a secret way out of here,” Sax said, and believed himself for once.

Maybe the space was concealed not in the transverse wall they were examining, but in a bearing wall that ran parallel to the corridor. That would mean the gimmick was in either the left-hand or right-hand passages alongside the main corridor. Sax was reaching the limits of his frustration. The disaster had begun less than an hour ago; an hour before that, they had started loading furniture into the trucks. So it was not even noon, and the situation had become one of murder and destruction. When night fell, would he and Gander still be creeping around dark passageways, or would they have been killed by some hidden rat trap scaled up for human victims? Or would those who
knew the place steal through the secret ways behind them and slit their throats in the darkness? Sax needed to stop thinking, but he could not. He tried to focus his mind on the problem at hand.

“Gander,” he said.

“Gorn,” Gander replied, his pink face wobbling in the firelight.

“Have you any cigarettes?”

“You smoked 'em all yesterday, sir.”

“Terribly sorry. Gander?”

“Sir.”

“I'm sorry about all this, really.”

“Can't be 'elped,” Gander said. Sax was grateful. If their positions had been reversed, Sax might have strangled himself by now. He took a long breath and let it out slowly, the air shuddering between his lips.

“Right,” Sax said.

They sat in silence, backs against the wall. The château was quiet around them, but it was the muffled quiet of massive enclosure through which sound cannot penetrate, not the silence of empty space. The important distinction between a tomb and a graveyard, Sax thought. Then—

“Douse the light,” Sax whispered, gripping Gander by the meat of his upper arm. Gander wrapped the burning rags in his cap, snuffing them out. The stink of scorched wool made Sax want to cough, but he held his breath against the leaping of his diaphragm. He dragged his assistant into an alcove.

There had been a sound.

It was now absolutely dark where they crouched; the faintest pallor showed the way they had come, but to eyes not adjusted to the darkness it, too, would have been invisible. Sax was clutching Gander's arm with such force his fingernails ached, but he didn't let go.

There it was again. A high, thin squeal, the sound of wood on wood. Somewhere back the way they had come, someone was opening a door.

A light glimmered beneath one of the doorways halfway along the right-hand side. The door eased ajar in careful increments. A glow of candle flame was cast through the opening, yellow and oily. The light hung there, warping. Then a slender arm emerged, bearing up a candlestick. It hovered in the air, then drifted forward.

A woman emerged. It must have been a trick of the light, but Sax could have sworn he was looking at Therese Minette Vrigne du Pelisande Magnat-l'Étrange from the portrait downstairs.

She turned her head slowly upon its axis, like an automaton. But her eyes were active, glossy and black. Her nostrils arched. She was sniffing at the air. Her eyes studied the shadows in which the men were huddled.

She didn't see Sax or Gander, apparently, because she turned away. Her floor-brushing dress swayed down the corridor in the opposite direction, the old silk rustling with the sound of dead leaves. Moments later, she pressed her ear to another door. Satisfied, she opened it, again with great care. She disappeared into the space behind the door, and the yellow, fatty light went with her. The door closed and it was dark again.

Sax released Gander's arm. Something convinced him the candle was made of human fat.

They had to do something. The woman might come back. They could dash out her brains, Sax supposed, or flee in the opposite direction.

Or—they could exit the way she had entered.

Half a minute later, feeling along like blind worms, they found the door through which the woman had arrived. Sax located the doorknob and turned it and the latch sprung quietly. He knew the trick for opening creaking doors without the creak, because he hated that sound, and old cupboards always creaked. He pressed one hand against the hinge side of the door and lifted up on the doorknob; pressing and lifting,
he swung the door open silently. He took Gander's wrist and led him into the even deeper darkness, where the veins inside the eyes lit up for lack of sight. If there was a trap inside the space they entered, they would die of it; there was nothing else they could do.

Sax stretched out his arms and found that, at the extent of his fingertips, there were walls. He reached through the darkness and touched Gander's sleeve and took hold of it, then felt his way down the wall of what he now knew was one of the smaller connecting passages of a suite. He was following the smell of hot candle wax, stronger this way, dissipating in the other direction. He followed the soapy reek until his outstretched hand met an obstacle. He touched it, his fingers describing a tall wooden panel. There was a candle stand mounted just above the height of his shoulder. It was a dead end in the hallway—but if his estimation was right, the space terminated at the bearing wall they had been exploring in the larger corridor.

His heart was racing. There might, after all, be a way through. He would try the candle stand: if there was a secret lever to operate a door, it would be concealed inside that.

Sax gave the thing a firm pull. It came off the wall, fell into two pieces, and toppled with a tremendous clash of cymbals to the floor. The very darkness vibrated with the noise. Sax cringed. Their presence had been announced.

“Gerrahtavit,” Gander said, and pushed Sax aside. There was a splintery thump in the darkness, then a second, and with the third kick Gander knocked the panel clean out of the wall and into the cold, stone-dank space beyond.

A door slammed somewhere out in the broad hallway. They were seconds from a confrontation with the woman, who might or might not be physically dangerous. Sax didn't want to know.

He squeezed around Gander, who was panting fragrantly in the dark, and stepped through the broken paneling into a cool current
of air that came from somewhere far below. He felt with his feet and found a step; his fingers met a coarse rope suspended along the wall through metal rings. Sax guided Gander's fist to the rope. Both men took hold.

The air was whistling through Gander's nose, the first indication that he was in any way alarmed by the situation. Sax took heart. He didn't like to be the only frightened person in a crisis.

He started down the stone steps, and once his feet had the rhythm of them, he all but ran, pitch blackness or not. The stair descended a long way.

They came out into a big, dimly lighted space with a groin-vaulted ceiling borne up on stout stone pillars. It had to be the cellars beneath the house; they had certainly come down far enough, four switchbacks in the dark before the first gleam of light showed them the doorway below. The door itself, when closed, was disguised as an inset cupboard. Gander swung this shut, then jammed an oaken chest up against it.

The floor of the cellar was of well-trod flagstones. Broad deal tables were ranked in the center of the space, where long ago the kitchen staff would have prepared enormous banquets. There was a hearth at one end of the room, corresponding, Sax guessed, with the foot of the fireplace in the salon where the portrait hung. Dust-dimmed copper pots and pans lined the walls and there was a legion of serving dishes along the shelves of deep cupboards built between the columns. Nothing had been touched, it appeared, in decades, if not centuries: a thousand knives had quietly turned black with rust in their wooden slots, ten thousand implements, whisks and rolling pins and sieves and ladles and every conceivable manner of tool for the preparation of food, rotting quietly in their pots and jars.

“Just like my mum's kitchen at home,” Gander said, puffing breathlessly. Winded and half doubled up, he crossed to one of the racks of
knives and drew out a carver with a fourteen-inch blade, the edge worn hollow with sharpening. He had left the halberd in the narrow corridor upstairs. Sax still had his sword, though, and now he realized the armaments weren't properly distributed: he liked right things in their right places. So he offered Gander the hilt of the sword. Gander took it and smiled at it, his eyes glittering. He in turn handed Sax the knife.

“Fair enough,” Sax said, and they hurried toward a broad doorway at the top of a short flight of stone steps.

Jean-Marc's description of the place suggested there was at least one further level below this one, of storerooms and cellars, where the riverboats could glide right under the roots of the château to deliver goods and presumably shuttle lovers to their assignations unobserved. They were halfway up the steps when Sax paused, catching Gander by the sleeve. He eyed the ample doorway and didn't like the look of it.

“Gander, can you swim?” he asked.

“Course I can, my brothers was always drowndin me,” Gander replied, offended. He lurched his weight forward to get to the top of the stairs, but Sax pulled him back.

“Only I'm not too keen on stepping through there,” Sax said. “Look at the ceiling.”

Gander followed Sax's eyes. Just beyond the doorway at the top of the stairs was a low, plastered ceiling, instead of the intersecting concave barrels of the groin vaults found throughout the rest of the cellar. There were slots cut into the plaster, the size and shape of a bay leaf. Dozens of these apertures punctured the ceiling in a grid pattern.

“It's nothing,” Gander said, desperate to get out of the place, into the real light and air of the world again.

Sax held up a finger of warning. “Indulge me.”

There was a wooden cask at the foot of the stairs. Sax hefted it. Something the consistency of mud sloshed inside. Sax moved past Gander to
the topmost step, prayed nothing would happen—because if nothing happened, he was going to beat Gander to the front door upstairs by ten seconds at least—and lobbed the cask into the middle of the landing at the top of the stairs. The response took less than a second from start to finish. There was a kind of grunt that came from a hollow beneath the flagstone upon which the cask landed; the small barrel wobbled on its belly like an American football. There was a metallic
thwack
, very much like a huge trigger releasing. Then a forest of heavy iron spears dropped through the slots in the ceiling, struck sparks from the floor, and transfixed the cask. The little barrel burst into kindling and the red-black sludge within it ran down into the cracks between the flagstones and dripped into the hollow space beneath.

“Lumme,” Gander said.

The spears, their shafts and tips barbed, formed an iron gate twenty rows deep. Sax and Gander were alive—but their way was blocked.

The cellar had rung with the din of the spears striking the stone; now, in the silence that followed, they could hear echoing footsteps, coming closer. Down the secret stairs.