The Mortality Principle (24 page)

No one paid Annja any attention as she slipped through the gates and out into the street. A small crowd of locals had gathered, drawn by the chaos of the evacuation.

“Annja!” a voice called through the throng. “Over here.”

She raised herself on her toes and craned her neck to see between the people who were standing in her way. Eventually she caught sight of Lars waving at her. She pushed through the press of people, none of whom seemed to want to give an inch for fear of losing their view.

“You okay?” he asked when she finally reached him.

“Yeah,” she said. “Any sign of Turek?”

“Not yet. The police have thrown up a roadblock about a couple of kilometers back, stopping people getting in and out of town. The joys of the modern world. Whenever anything happens, the first assumption is always that it's some kind of terrorist attack. Anyone hurt?”

She shook her head. There was an ambulance parked in the street, but it couldn't get any closer because of the crowd that had massed around the gates. A single police officer stood in the center of the gates, doing his best to usher them away. It was a fruitless battle.

“Have you seen Roux?”

“Nope, but then it has been a little crazy out here. I take it the explosion was our old friend's doing?”

There was no point denying it. “Come with me,” Annja said as Lars packed his camera back into its case.

They had to skirt around the crowd, working a path that took them around the back of the ambulance before they could pick up the dirt path that ran along the side of the castle wall.

Annja looked back over her shoulder more than once to be sure that no one was watching them.

The grille was still open, but there was no sign of Roux.

If he'd come out this way, surely he would have closed it behind him, wouldn't he?

She peered into the darkness, but there was nothing to see.

No. She was wrong. There was smoke.

“He's still down there,” she said, sure that she'd just lost her second friend to the maze.

Annja saw the glow of the flashlight in the darkness.

Her heart sank when she realized it wasn't moving.

“Roux,” she called.

There was no response.

She took a step toward the light and called his name again.

Nothing.

Another step, another cry of “Roux?” without response.

Something was wrong.

Annja hurried toward the flashlight.

There were shapes on the ground. Shadows. The tunnel had collapsed.

Roux was trapped beneath the rubble.

He wasn't moving.

Annja knelt beside him, and reached out to feel for a pulse, dreading what she might not feel beneath his skin.

His neck was still warm, his pulse weak and thready. He didn't flinch or stir when she squeezed his hand.

She needed to get him out of there and quickly.

His heart was beating now, but would it stop eventually? She knew his body had prodigious recuperative powers, beyond hers even, but was there a limit to what it could withstand? Could the cave-in literally crush the
life out of him? She'd always thought of him as immortal, but in the back of her mind she'd known that something surely could happen to end that.

Annja started pulling lumps of stone and rubble away as fast as she could, heaving one after the other and hurling them aside, moving faster and faster until she was clawing at the rubble like a madwoman trying to tear him free.

And all through it he remained absolutely silent, absolutely and eerily still.

Her fingers bled as she tore at the debris.

Some of the rubble was little more than egg-size, some like a football, but there were huge slabs of masonry that had come down, and one such piece pinned him across the legs. She couldn't get the leverage with her bare hands to shift it. Try as she might, it just wouldn't budge. She needed something to give her more leverage. Annja cast about the inside of the tunnel, but aside from a few spars of rotted wood there was nothing that would work. Without thinking, Annja reached instinctively into the otherwhere for the sword, knowing that she could work it beneath the huge boulder and pry it up far enough for Roux to wriggle out from under—if he would just wake up.

She heard him let out a groan.

For one heart-stopping second she thought it was a death rattle.

Then he stirred again, a deeper, more broken sound. The sound was no louder than a whisper, but oh-so-welcome.

“Roux!” Annja said, pausing for no more than a heartbeat as she reassured herself that he was still breathing, that he was still alive. She worked harder, faster, putting every ounce of strength she had into the herculean
task of getting him out from under the collapsed ceiling. She didn't even want to contemplate the mess his bones could be in, or the damage to his internal organs. Right now it was enough that he was alive. The rest could wait.

“Come on, old man,” she shouted at him, urging the life back into him. “I could use a little help here.”

Roux groaned. The groan became a grunt became a cough.

He tried to drag himself out from under the huge slab of masonry as the weight was gradually being lifted from him, but it was desperately slow-going.

“Come on,” she urged, the tension thrumming through her arms, every muscle corded and burning from the strain. She gritted her teeth against the pain, determined to hold the stone clear of the old man for however long it took for Roux to crawl free.

He clawed at the ground in front of him. The pain was evident on his face.

“Come on, Roux.”

He pulled himself forward an inch at a time. The longer it took to get him out of there, the greater the risk that the killer might return or disappear altogether, taking Garin with him.

At last he was free to kick away the remaining rubble, though his legs weren't working properly. His trousers were covered in blood, and she saw a spur of bone from his shin poking out through a tear in the fabric. She cursed, knowing she couldn't leave him there and go hunting for the beast.

“I'm going to lift you,” she said. “It's going to hurt, but we've got to get you out of here.” Annja put the flashlight in his hands. “Show me the way.” She walked into the light, each faltering step leading back toward
the shaft of light that led to the surface. He weighed nothing in her arms.

“Talk to me,” she said. “Anything, just stay with me. We'll get you out of here, then we'll have to regroup and think. This changes everything.”

“No,” he said. “Just…give me a few…”

“Your leg's a mess. It's broken. Badly. It'll need splinting. Setting. It's going to be a while before you're fit for the fight.”

Roux shook his head. He looked ghastly in the pale light, groggy, but he was hanging in there. “Just get me to the air. Then…set the bone. I'm walking out of here…under my own…steam.”

“Don't be ridiculous.”

“Don't argue with me, girl.”

It took a minute to work her way back to the shaft. She gently set Roux down, leaning his back against the wall, then tore the strips of cloth away from the bloody mess where the bone had pierced the skin. “I'm going to need something to splint it.”

“No. Just pull the bone. Get it back into place.”

It was going to be agony. And she had nothing he could bite down on. “But—”

“Just do as I say.”

Annja crouched in front of Roux, placing her hands on either side of the jagged end of the bone. It was a bad break. It would almost certainly need pinning, and he'd be walking with a limp for a long time—if not the rest of his life.

She nodded. “Ready? On three. One…” Then she pulled down hard, twisting the bone until the edges locked back into place. Roux's screams were unbearable. Raw. Broken. He gasped, panting hard, sweating, when she was done.

“Now…we…wait.”

“I can't. Garin's still out there.”

“Then help me stand.”

“Are you insane? Your leg is broken. It'll never hold your weight.”

“Then we wait. That is the choice.”

“I can't,” she said helplessly.

Roux reached up, his hand closing around the pitted iron of the bottom rung on the ladder, and with colossal effort and willpower, he began to draw himself upward, careful to put no weight on his damaged leg. Annja stared at him like he was out of his mind. Roux twisted, then reached up with his other hand for the rung above, and began to climb without using his feet, lifting himself toward the light one rung at a time.

Annja kept herself a few rungs behind him, ready to catch him if he fell.

As he approached the top, a hand reached over the edge and helped haul him out.

A few moments later the same hand reached down toward Annja, and she was glad to accept it.

Lars stepped back to give her space to climb from the shaft. From the low angle she saw Roux's leg. The skin had already healed around the wound, and the blood had dried into rusty brown flakes. The scar tissue was raw and pink. She looked up at the old man standing there, trying to understand how he could possibly be on his own two feet after what had just happened to him.

His trousers were in a worse state than his leg.

Annja shook her head. She knew her own metabolism was capable of crazy things when it came to recovery, but she'd never seen anything like this. The bone and tissue had meshed, essentially healing itself,
if not as good as new, then more than adequately, in just a few minutes.

“Can you walk?” she asked, feeling stupid as she posed the question.

“The bone will be weak for a while.”

“Okay, then lean on me. We need to get you somewhere you can sit. We need to take stock.”

The old man nodded.

“Hell of a show you put on,” the cameraman said, grinning approvingly.

Annja kicked the grille back into place and dusted herself down. It was going to take a lot more than that to make her feel clean.

“You didn't find Garin?”

“No. But I found something in the observatory—the killer's coat. It was draped over the back of a chair. There was nothing else in the room except for a bunch of tools spread out over a bench.”

“Then where has he gone?” Roux asked, leaning on her as they walked back down the bank to the main road.

“He's got to be in there,” Annja said. “He didn't go out past you, did he, Lars?”

“No,” the cameraman confirmed. “No one came out through the main gates when I was watching.”

“So that means he's got to still be inside the castle,” Annja said, as if the absence of one thing proved the presence of the other.

“No,” Roux said categorically. “He's not in there.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because cars don't drive themselves.”

He was right. There was an empty space in the row of parked cars where Garin's sports car had been.

Had it been there when she'd gone underground after Roux?

She didn't know and couldn't believe she hadn't noticed before, but now that she had, it stood out like a raw wound in the heart of the street.

“I guess I missed him,” Lars admitted, shrugging. “But I could have sworn he didn't come out this way. It was chaos out here, though, and I wasn't checking the cars. I didn't even know which one was his.”

“But you were recording?” Roux asked.

“Absolutely. Primed to get some footage of the panic. Most of the shots covered the castle, the crowd, the emergency vehicles as they arrived. That sort of stuff.”

“And the street?” Annja interrupted. “You must have got some shots that would have included the car, or lack of. We might get lucky.”

It took them only a matter of minutes to make their way to Annja's car, even with Roux leaning heavily on Annja every step of the way. Lars hooked the camera up to a portable monitor and spooled through the footage, slowing only when the street was in the frame.

“There it is,” Annja said when they caught the first sight of Garin's car still parked a short walk away from the
café. She checked the time stamp. It was only a few minutes before the explosion-driven exodus. “Keep going.”

They watched as people moved at double speed and triple speed.

A crowd began to form as if in stop-motion animation.

The camera panned across the street, following the fire truck now as it moved quickly toward the cameraman's position, coming to a shuddering halt at the gates, then disappearing through the gates after they opened with almost comic timing.

An instant later a blur of red pulled away from the curb, barely caught in the motion of the camera.

“Stop,” Annja said. Lars froze the frame, then spooled back so that they could take a closer look at it. Slowly he moved the image forward a couple of frames at a time until the Ferrari was in the center of the screen. He froze it again.

Like it or not, that was Garin in the driver's seat.

“I'm going to finish him this time,” Roux said, shaking his head.

She thought he meant Garin, but looking at the face of the passenger he could just as easily have meant him. She didn't want to ask.

“That's…” Lars said. “That face… That's the thing from your phone, isn't it?”

He was right.

Two people in the car. Garin and the killer.

There was nothing to suggest Garin was a prisoner or victim in all of this.

“I'm through with him, Annja. This is it. It ends here. No forgiveness. No wheedling his way back pretending to be friends. I'm done.”

Had Roux been right all along? The thought made
her feel sick. She'd believed in him. Even against all the evidence, she'd been absolutely sure Garin wouldn't betray them again.

“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me,” she said, and she meant it.

“We find one, we find the other,” Roux said flatly.