The Mortality Principle (20 page)

Without Lars there'd be no footage, and no footage meant no salvation.

It was over. All that was left was facing up to that fact.

Annja was the last out of the car.

She didn't lock it. She followed them up the hill to
the grille at the castle wall. Garin pulled a handgun from his waistband, checked the mechanism, then replaced it. Roux appeared to be unarmed save for the flashlight they had used to peer into the darkness before. In the distance the sky was beginning to glow, a stark reminder that dawn was not far away.

“You got a weapon, Roux?” Garin asked as he lowered himself onto the first rung.

Roux tapped his jacket, his free hand resting lightly on a bulge that Annja hadn't noticed before.

“No need to ask you, madam,” he said to Annja. “Here goes nothing,” Garin announced as he started to make his way into the darkness.

“You next,” Roux said, playing the light over the iron rungs. “Don't do anything heroic down there. In and out, let's just get this over with.”

“I'm not big on stupid,” Annja told him.

“Then maybe it will all end here,” Roux said. There was something fatalistic about the words that Annja didn't like.

Annja stumbled back into Garin's arms when she reached the bottom of the shaft.

“Thanks,” she said, the sound of her voice echoing down the tunnel. Garin winced as the darkness multiplied the word a hundredfold. Annja glanced back up the deep shaft to see the dull light disappear as Roux made his way down.

Garin had his gun out, the muzzle pointing the way ahead into the darkness. The last time he'd been down there he had had a single shot from his flintlock. Now he could just about cut the brute in two with bullets before it could charge them. Times changed, and with them man's ability to kill.

Despite everything that the two men had told her, Annja realized that she had begun to think of the killer as human. Strange and deformed, yes, but still human. How else could it be alive? Even her memories of that childish sketch of a face couldn't change that. The rest, living for two hundred years or more? Well, her companions were proof that there were more things in heaven and earth than the mundane philosophies she'd believed for so long before she met them.

When the three of them stood together, Roux turned on the flashlight again.

He played the beam into the tunnel. The damage to the walls from the explosions and fire was still readily apparent, though it looked less like a raw wound now and more like ancient scar tissue.

“Left or right?” Annja asked.

“Right,” Garin said. “Some things you remember like it was only yesterday when they happened.”

“And sometimes it was yesterday when they happened,” Roux said, still not prepared to believe Garin had nothing to do with the brute's resurrection.

“Draw your sword,” Roux told her. It wasn't going to be comfortable to wield it in the confines of the tunnels. “And be alert. There are many twists and turns down here. It was a labyrinth then. There's no telling what it is like now, after the explosions. It was a warren with plenty of dark places to hide.”

“And there's no guarantee the creature will have taken refuge in the same cellar,” Garin said. “So, eyes and ears open. If we're lucky, we'll hear it coming.”

That didn't sound very lucky to Annja, but she didn't need to be told twice.

She closed her eyes, summoning the familiar image of Joan's mystical blade to mind, and reached out for it as the two men moved ahead of her. As ever, she sensed the sword's presence in the mists of the otherwhere before she felt its familiar grip in her hand. Its weight there was reassuring, the thrill of elemental magic as she felt its pull, drawing it from the otherwhere in a smooth slow action. The move was part of a dance long since preordained.

As she had feared, there was precious little room to
swing the sword and to test her muscles after the fall, but simply holding the weapon was enough to make her feel whole again. It was as if she had found part of herself that she had almost forgotten had existed.

It didn't matter what lay ahead of them in the darkness, human or something else; she was ready for it.

The flashlight cast weird shadows as they walked through the tunnel in single file.

Garin led the way unerringly, not faltering even once as he kept them off the wrong track, which he promised dead-ended, through to where the tunnel had collapsed. The ground was still littered with rubble from the cave-in. The walls were charred black.

Annja stumbled more than once as she picked her way through, reaching out with her free hand to the wall to stay on her feet.

The air was foul.

As they made their way farther along the tunnel, Annja couldn't see any evidence that the killer had come this way. The rubble was undisturbed. She listened hard in the darkness, but heard nothing beyond the echo of their footsteps and the sliding stones as they dislodged them.

Before they reached the cellar where Roux and Garin had fought and thought they'd killed the brute all those years ago, their path was blocked.

There was no way through the cave-in.

Roux climbed on the debris, clawing at it in search of a gap to try to shine his light through. There was no point. Nothing had come that way. Either now or then.

“Anything?” Garin asked from the rear, but Roux just shook his head.

Annja said, “No,” knowing that there was no way Garin could have seen the gesture.

“You could be right about a second killer,” Roux admitted, staring at the stones.

“I'm not that worried about being right or wrong,” Annja said bluntly. “I just want this to be over.”

“We all do,” Roux promised her.

Garin started to retrace his steps back along the passage to the last branch in the tunnel. Annja followed him a couple of paces behind.

“Did you feel that?” she asked as a chill breeze brushed against her cheek.

“Feel what?”

“Air, like there's another way out.”

Garin shook his head. “This place is a maze. It wouldn't surprise me if we'd missed a secret entrance years ago. There are a million places to hide, why not a million and one?”

“I felt it back then, too,” Roux said.

Annja held up a hand. Both men stopped, silent. She listened for any sounds in the dark, knowing that there was every chance the killer could move around behind them and escape while they were still down in the tunnels chasing it fruitlessly.

Roux pushed his way to the front with his flashlight, playing it over the ground as they picked their way back through the rubble. Garin, reluctantly, stepped aside to let him through.

The flashlight's beam picked over the rock dust and rubble, but the only signs of disturbance were their own.

As they walked she heard movement.

At first Annja thought that it was a groan from the
ceiling, their presence somehow disturbing the delicate balance that held what remained in place.

But it wasn't that.

Garin reacted first, moving like lightning between her and Roux.

She hadn't even realized there was a fork in the tunnel. By the time she did, he was gone.

“Garin,”
Roux whispered uselessly after his back.

Garin was already stumbling through the darkness, making far more noise than they had done since they'd descended into the network of tunnels. If the killer hadn't already known they were down there, it had to now.

Annja hurried after him, stumbling more than once before she was clear of the last of the rubble. She couldn't see Garin anywhere, but she equally couldn't see where he could have gone. She hurried on into the darkness, reaching a point where the tunnel branched into three separate passages.

“Garin!” she called out, giving up all pretense of stealth.

There was no reply.

“This way,” Roux said, starting off down the right-hand tunnel.

“Are you sure?” she asked.

“No,” he said, without turning. “But any decision is better than standing here doing nothing.”

Annja resisted the urge to snap back at him that she wasn't doing nothing, and instead followed the old man into the tunnel. Roux played his flashlight in front of them, picking out a path.

Before they reached the end, the unmistakable sound of a gunshot echoed through the tunnel behind them.

Annja spun on her heel, ready to face down an invisible foe, but before she could move, a second shot and a third rang out, followed by an agonizing cry that filled every inch of the tunnels.

It was the sound of death.

“Garin!”

They ran.

The beam of the flashlight roved across the ground and walls as they raced back to the main tunnel. Over and over they called Garin's name, but there was no response. Annja knew that there was something wrong. Garin had the gun. That meant Garin had fired the shots. But that scream… That had been Garin's voice, and now he wasn't answering them.

Roux was thinking the same thing.

He had drawn his own gun, ready to take on the killer himself.

But if three shots hadn't been enough to bring the killer down, why should five, six or seven be enough to do the trick? Roux's insistence that the killer was inhuman haunted Annja. What if he was right? What if there was no way to stop it?

There was always one way.

Cold steel.

Annja gripped the hilt of the sword, the blade across her chest so that it was both at the ready should the brute go for them but safe from sliding between Roux's ribs if she should stumble.

The echo of the gunshots and the cry had long since
faded by the time they came to what had to have been their source. They moved quickly but carefully, checking the two cellar rooms into which the passageway opened. There was no sign of Garin or the killer. No sign that anyone had been down there at all.

“There must be more rooms, more branches we missed somehow,” Annja said. “They can't have escaped the tunnels.”

“Not without leaving a trail,” Roux agreed. “One or both of them are hurt. Bleeding. Garin's strong, but there's no way he could lift the creature without help. So if he put it down, it'd still be down.”

“But if it was Garin, who fell?” Annja asked, even though she knew the answer without needing to hear it.

“Then God help him. This way.”

Roux followed another turn, almost missing an opening in the tunnel as something came barreling out of it.

The figure slammed the old man against the tunnel wall, driving the air out of his lungs and sending the flashlight flying from his grip. The light died as it hit the ground, plunging them into darkness.

Annja held out her sword, more in defense than attack.

It wasn't as if she could swing it, and risk slicing into Roux as much as their unseen assailant.

“Roux,” she called, and heard his groan coming from the ground. That was enough.

“Stay down,” she commanded, taking a step forward, feeling her way in the darkness with the tip of her weapon. A toe nudged Roux's body. She felt him shrink from the contact. She swung tentatively, the sword slicing through air until it made contact with stone and sent a shower of sparks to the ground.

She took another step forward and swung again.

Still nothing.

She heard Roux scrambling for his flashlight. It wouldn't help. Switching her grip to one hand, Annja slipped her left hand into her pocket and pulled out her cell phone. All it took was the touch of her thumb on the screen and it lit up.

There was nothing between her and the curve in the tunnel.

“You can get up now,” she told Roux as she increased the intensity of the glow from the phone and switched it over to the flashlight function.

The battery needed charging, but it would last long enough to do what she had to do. “Come on,” she said. “But this time, stay behind me.”

Roux didn't argue with her.

She took a breath as they reached the bend, and pressed herself against the tunnel wall, listening to a strange sound coming from around the bend. She strained, expecting to hear breathing, or even the sound of gurgling as pain ripped through the man around the corner. But the sound was neither of those. It had an even rhythm, but it was not the sound of a living thing. All she could hear was a steady
click, click, click
.

She took another breath before stepping around the corner, knowing that the killer was almost certainly only a matter of feet away.

Annja pushed herself away from the wall and took the step.

She held out her sword in one hand, her phone in the other as if its glow was a shield.

The light was enough to startle the thing that was waiting for her on the other side.

Thing.

She stared at that strange, incomplete face, lit by the light from the phone as the killer raised its hands to shield its eyes from the bright glare.

At first she thought that it was going to turn and run, but then it staggered forward, striking out at Annja. Its great fists slashed at the light, the creature seemingly ignorant of the threat her sword presented. Annja pushed the blade as hard as she could, feeling it slide through its heavy coat and into the softness of the flesh beneath.

Strangely so much of the thing was in front of her that was far less than she had expected. She expected a blast of foul breath but none came, a waft of stale sweat, but there was nothing. She expected a heat against the coldness of the tunnel, but there wasn't any.

She noticed a faint smell, an aroma she could not quite place. And a vibration that ran the length of her blade all the way into her fingertips.

Most surprising of all was that there was no pain in its childlike sketch of a face, no change in the thing's expression despite her sword plunging into its body.

Annja pulled at the hilt to free the sword, but as she did, the thing swung a fist at her.

The impact of the blow sent her sprawling.