The Mortality Principle (29 page)

He crouched and ushered her over to take a look as he brushed away more of the sawdust.

“What am I looking for?” she asked, then saw what was wrong with the picture. The detritus didn't move as he brushed his fingers over it.

“I don't…”

Roux held a finger to his lips, and with his other hand felt around until he eventually found the edge of what appeared to be a piece of carpet.

As he lifted the edge, the sawdust didn't move. There was a thin polyurethane glaze across the surface, gluing it in place. As he drew the carpet aside, he revealed an iron rung set into the stone floor. There was a square outline where the hatch of the trapdoor had been recessed. It looked incredibly heavy. Heavier than would have been comfortable for an average guy like the librarian to lift. But not heavy for a brute like the killer. She noticed a thin filament thread attached to the carpet and looped through the iron rung and realized that whoever was down there could easily have drawn the rug back across the stone door from the inside to hide it after they sealed themselves in down there. Unless someone was looking for it, he or she would never notice it. And who came into a place like this looking for a secret door? She looked around again, seeing the thin patina of dust on the tools and the disarray of the jumbled furniture, and realized it was very unlikely a
carpenter ever worked in the room at all. There was something about it that smacked of abandonment. She was used to abandoned places; they had a certain air about them. This room had that quality.

Roux touched a finger to his lips again and shuffled back so that he could tug at the ring. He winced as he knelt, favoring his broken leg. Again she was amazed at his ungodly powers of recovery. That bone should have kept him off his feet for months, not hours. She'd seen it sticking out through his skin. Ordinary people didn't just get up and walk away from that kind of damage; but then Roux wasn't an ordinary person, was he?

Annja didn't need to be told what she needed to do.

She braced herself, closing her eyes to focus on the outline of the sword in her mind's eye as she flexed her fingers and concentrated. The sword was ready for her, as eager to feel her touch as she was to close her fingers around the hilt.

Annja drew the blade gently from the otherwhere.

The metal felt alive in her hand.

It was so much more than a length of cold steel. It was so much more than a weapon designed for dealing out death. It was part of her soul, that immortal timeless thing that existed inside her and bonded Annja to this universe. It was fire to her ice. It was steel to her silk. It was faith to her doubt.

“Ready?” Roux whispered, the word barely above a breath.

She nodded.

He grasped the iron rung and, with two hands, heaved, gritting his teeth against the stab of pain as he drew the heavy stone out of its setting. It came away easier than he expected, because it was on some kind
of elaborate hinge mechanism that took most of the weight. The device lifted it clear of the hole and dropped it smoothly on the other side, making a doorway wide enough to allow Annja to pass through. Roux shuffled his feet, stepping back from the aperture. Sweat beaded his brow. His skin looked pale, waxen. She wasn't used to seeing him like this; he looked lessened. Weak.

Annja nodded. “You okay?”

“Don't worry about me.” He was breathing heavily. “I won't be far behind you.”

A flight of stone steps led down into the darkness. The middle of each was worn smooth and dipped more than an inch below the sides. A rope had been strung down the wall to act as a handrail.

She could have used Roux's flashlight, but even without it she could make out just enough to see where to place her feet. Before she reached the last step, Annja could see the faint glow of a light along the passageway leading away from the stairs. She paused on the bottom step and listened for an unseen threat.

The darkness was alive with creaks and groans.

The light from above disappeared as Roux lowered the trapdoor in place above him. Suddenly cut off from the world above, the darkness took on another quality; it felt like a grave.

Roux felt his way down in the darkness.

Annja stepped off the last step and moved to the side to allow him down.

Once he was beside her Annja took a step toward the light.

She held Saint Joan's sword in front of her, a two-handed grip on the hilt. The dim light flickered along the length of the blade, adding to its ethereal
other-worldly quality. Her breath came in slow, calm, deep breaths. She had no idea what was going to happen in the next few minutes, but knew that everything she knew and accepted was on a knife's edge and could fall either way. Garin could be proved to be the friend she knew in her heart he was, or the foe Roux seemed determined to prove he had always been.

And then there was the killer.

Annja scoped out the narrow passage, which was much like the warren beneath the castle at Benátky, she realized.

Unlike the state of the workshop above them, the tunnel was free of clutter once they were away from the worn steps.

Despite the fact there was no debris underfoot and the ground was flat and smooth, Annja moved carefully.

They weren't creaks and groans, she realized as she moved closer to the source. They were clicks.
Click, click, click.

She'd heard that sound before.

Her eyes adjusted gradually to the meager light spilling into the tunnel from up ahead. It drew her on like a moth. Annja lengthened her stride, covering the ground quickly, but still placing her feet down lightly, careful to make as little noise as possible.

She had to bite back a startled gasp as Roux placed a hand on her shoulder.

She stopped in her tracks and turned to look at him.

“Let me,” he said. “This is my fight, not yours. Don't argue.”

But she
wanted
to argue with him. He was in no fit state to fight, but before she could open her mouth
to object, Roux took a step past her and was between Annja and the light.

She wanted to say, “Stop being a fool. I'm the one with a weapon. Let the thing come for me. I can handle myself,” but someone else beat her to it.

“Finally. I was beginning to think I'd die of old age before you got here,” a voice from beyond the light said. “You're only just in time.”

“In time for what?” the old man asked the light.

“Don't be shy. Come in and take a look for yourself. You've come all this way. A few more steps won't make any difference.”

Roux waited, then took a single step inside.

Annja edged a little closer—close enough to make out a few more details in the room and what lay closer to the source of the light.

“You, too, Annja. Join the party,” Garin called.

She didn't move a muscle.

“She's not here,” Roux said. “She's flirting with the librarian.”

“Ah, dear old Frederick. He likes to think that he's God's gift when we all know that's me. He's just a glorified cleaner. As far as I can tell, all he does is dust the books. I'm amazed he managed to see you at such short notice given all the dusting he has to do.”

“Let's stop this silliness, Garin. You've got about thirty seconds to convince me not to kill you, and a good twenty-nine of them are already gone.”

“Why is it always a fight with you, old man?”

“There are two types of people in this world—mice and snakes. And you are no mouse.”

“There's a compliment hidden in there somewhere, I think.”

“I wouldn't bank on it. Okay, Garin, time's up. This ends now.”

“Here's the thing. I don't see a gun or a sword. Now me, I've got a gun. I mean, who would go to a gunfight empty-handed?”

“I don't need a gun to kill you, Garin. Not when I've got these.” Annja saw the shadow shapes on the ground move as Roux lifted his hands. “Now, where's your murderous friend?”

“Friend? Oh, right, you mean
Joe
.”

“Joe?”

“It seemed as good a name as any. The poor fellow is mute, can't read or write, and has absolutely no way of contradicting me when I call him that.”

“Good for you. Where is it?”

“
He
is resting,” Garin said, stressing the personal pronoun to emphasize the difference in how he considered the brute compared to how the old man did. “He's rarely up and about during daylight hours, you recall? Give it half an hour or so, and he'll make an appearance.”

“You've got one chance to explain this, Garin. You've had us chasing you across Europe…”

“That's a slight exaggeration, Roux. You only had to cross
one
border. I'd forgive the poor grasp of geography if you were from another continent, but from a European, and no less, a Frenchman? I expect better.” Garin let out an exaggerated sigh.

“No need to be so damned pedantic,” Roux snapped. “I really don't care what you have to say. I'm just offering you the chance to explain yourself, to make your peace with God, before you finally meet Him.”

“No one's going to die here today, Roux. At least, neither of us.”

“I wouldn't be so sure about that.”

“You really are a drama queen, aren't you? If you must know, I needed you here because of
who
you are, Roux, or rather
what
you are, even if I don't understand what that is.”

“And Annja?”

“Irrelevant. This is just between you and me, like the old days. She doesn't belong with us, not here. This goes back to when we were much younger. Days, dare I suggest, when you were like a father to me.”

Annja bit her tongue. It might bruise her ego to be discounted so easily, but with six centuries between them the men were connected in ways she couldn't even begin to imagine. There was no point getting bent out of shape over it.

“Then why go to the sham of making us think that we were chasing you, when you were leading us here all the time?”

“Ah, you're getting better at this, Roux.” She could hear the smile in Garin's voice. “You have no idea how much it cost me to outbid you with Owen. Well, I suppose you do. He certainly made a killing. I needed him to sell you on the idea you were being clever. Tracking the car rather than the phone, though, I'll admit I hadn't expected you to think of that. I rather imagined you'd turn my own cell phone tracker trick back on me, so I had to make sure the old GPS was beaming my location out just on the off chance you decided to double down. You have no idea how hard it is to appear to be cautious and yet deliberately drop as many bread crumbs as possible. So what gave me away?”

“You were driving too slowly. I know you. No way you'd stick within the speed limits in an expensive, top-of-the-line sports car unless the cops were on your tail. But when you hit the autobahn and didn't open her up? That set off all sorts of alarm bells. Don't just look for the extraordinary, look for the out of the ordinary, anything that deviates from normal behavior. I don't think you've driven so slowly in your life. That must have
hurt
.”

“Ha! Believe me, you have no idea,” Garin said.

The voices fell still. Annja watched the shadows. She could imagine Roux standing there in a silence that he was not prepared to fill. He would want Garin to do the talking. There was no point in wasting breath in asking questions. Garin would still only tell him what he wanted him to hear. Like the old man said, he kept his truths close to his chest.

“I worked out what Joe was,” Garin said, breaking the silence eventually.

“Apart from being the sadistic killer we tracked across the Old World, you mean?”

Garin grunted. “Being a killer has
nothing
to do with what he is, or what he was.”

“Just stop talking in riddles, will you? I really don't have the patience to deal with you today. What do you
think
you've discovered and why do you think it has anything to do with me?”

“Oh, it has everything to do with you, my old friend. Everything.”

“We buried that killing machine years ago. It was over. Dead. Gone. And then Annja's life was in danger. I couldn't walk away then. Not knowing everything I know about the golem.”

“You know nothing, Roux. Less than nothing. Everything you think you know is wrong. Annja wouldn't have been in any danger if she had only left it alone.”

“You could have told her that yourself.”

“I did,” Garin said. “In my own special way. I tried to distract her, but you know that damned woman. She wasn't interested. She had the bit between her teeth. She wanted the story. It's always the story with her.”

“That's what it always comes down to with you, isn't it? Distractions? Lies. Anything to take you away from being responsible.”

“Really, Roux, if that's what you think of me after all this time, I'm not even going to try to change your mind. You're so stubborn, but even you couldn't have done differently in my place, not once I knew the truth.”

“So now you're claiming a moral compass? Will wonders never cease?”

“I wasn't going to leave that poor creature to the dangers that a modern world presents. I couldn't do it. Joe's a work of genius, Roux. Unadulterated genius.”

Annja heard a sound from somewhere along the tunnel—the
click, click, click
. Louder now. The acoustics of the tunnels made it impossible to judge how close it was, but the two men had to have heard it, too. They fell quiet.

Roux stumbled out of the room, his face locked in a grimace. Annja saw his hand go to his thigh. The knitting bone was causing him pain.

He winced, eyes going instinctively toward Annja a second before Garin followed him out of the room. She didn't have time to fade into the shadows.

“Ah, looks like we've got the band back together then, after all,” Garin said as he pushed past Roux. He
found a switch, suddenly flooding the tunnel with light. This was not the rough-hewn stone of the tunnels beneath the castle at Benátky, but a whitewashed brick that had been cared for over generations. These were passageways that had been used by the monks back in the days when the old castle had served as a monastery. She saw scratches on the walls where ancient scores had been settled, counting out whatever the monks had stored down there. The electricity was a more recent addition obviously. The gray cable was roughly tacked in place, looping from one bulkhead lamp to the next.