Labyrinth Gate (38 page)

“Chryse.” His voice was low as he slipped the pouch into the pocket of his coat next to his half of the cards. “You must have dropped this.”

Her attention was elsewhere; she did not respond.

As he began to push himself up, he felt a hand at his waist; the earl had returned to help him.

“Thank you,” said Sanjay once he had gotten himself balanced with the main part of his weight on his unwounded leg. He leaned back against the cold stone wall.

The earl’s expression was an astonishing mix of fierce pride and utter hopelessness. “Thank you,” he murmured, as if the words offended him. “You saved my life, and now you thank me for such a trivial—” He halted, perhaps as much surprised by the raggedness of his voice as lost for words.

“—kindness?” supplied Sanjay, smiling in the dimness.

The earl looked at him as if he had no idea of the meaning of such a word.

“There!” Maretha clutched Chryse’s free hand in a tight grip, starting forward abruptly.

Chryse held on to her and dragged her to a stop. Out of the dark recesses of the maze echoed a gunshot.

“Evidently we’re not done yet,” said Sanjay with all the dry humor of an old campaigner. He hobbled forward, the earl at his side.

“This way,” said Maretha.

Julian thought it prudent to stop back at camp to get his pistol before they went down the eastern entrance. Kate got extra lanterns for herself and the children to carry. Dusk was gathering as they started down.

Kate went first, followed closely by an unnaturally subdued Mog and Pin; Lucias came after them. He walked in a kind of stupor, his eyes wide and staring. Julian, behind him, guided him easily enough with brief words and the occasional pressure of his hand, but he never responded directly to questions. As they descended, he muttered words under his breath that no one else could quite make out, although once he said, quite distinctly, “He is not of this land.”

In the square room at the base of the staircase they found a fresco that, winding around all four walls, depicted the crowning of the young king by the young queen at the Midwinter Festival of Lights.

“Looks like you, Lucias.” Kate held her lantern close to the central figures: a black-haired young woman in a bell-shaped flounced skirt and a tight, revealing jacket and a fair young man dressed in stiff leggings and laced sandals.

“I cannot see him,” said Lucias clearly. His face showed white in the lantern light. His eyes seemed unfocused.

“Can’t see ’oo?” demanded Mog.

“Shh, stupid,” hissed Pin. “Can’t you see he’s spelled?”

“Pin,” said Julian severely, “a young lady does not use the epithet ‘stupid’ when speaking in public.”

“Cor!” breathed Mog at the same moment that Pin shrieked. Neither reaction was in response to Julian’s admonition.

In the center of the room stood a slim pillar of white stone. A small, straight, thin-bladed knife of finely-chipped obsidian rested on it.

Mog and Pin reached for it simultaneously.

“Don’t touch that!” shouted Julian, coming forward from the doorway. He held onto Lucias with one arm as he walked to the middle of the room.

“What is it?” asked Mog. He had clasped his hands behind his back as if it was the only way he knew to resist the temptation. Pin had both her thumbs in her mouth,

Julian reached out tentatively and touched it. It felt smooth and cold, a perfect blend of primitive materials and sophisticated worksmanship. He picked it up. “I don’t know. Some kind of knife.” He licked his thumb and tested the edge. “Quite sharp.”

“Nothing,” said Kate. She had walked the entire perimeter. “No entrance. What have you got?”

Julian held it out for her to examine.

“Holy Son. If I didn’t know better I’d call that a scalpel. Here.” She put out a hand to take it. “Let me see. It’s a curious design, but no less effective for that, I’d wager—”

“Look!” shouted Mog and Pin at the same moment. Kate and Julian glanced up to see the wall fell away to reveal a staircase that led down into black depths.

Lucias pulled free of Julian and moved like a sleepwalker towards the stairs. “She is veiled.” His voice was a strangled whisper. “Veiled, or not here yet. But all power is hers.”

He was on the third step before anyone moved. Kate ran after him, and Julian grabbed the children’s hands and tugged them along. It was dark, quite dark, even with Kate’s lantern a soft beacon before them, illuminating the light shock of Lucias’s hair as he led the way down. It was also still, stifling hot air untouched by freshness, and silent. Only Lucias’s muttering broke the hush. They reached at last a small circular chamber at the base of the stairs.

Kate paused, wiping her brow, to let Julian and the children catch up with her. “It’s empty, except for that painting. I don’t see a door. That looks like a very ancient version of the Physician card of the Gates.”

“No, it doesn’t,” began Julian. “It looks like the man on the ice—I can’t remember—”

Lucias had hesitated only a brief moment. Now he kept moving forward, straight into the wall.

“—it’s not a wall at all,” finished Julian, and he and Kate and the children hurried after Lucias.

They let Lucias lead them through dark corridors, Kate directly behind the youth, Julian at the rear sheparding Mog and Pin before him. Once Julian thought he heard the rustle of heavy cloth behind him. Kate paused, twice, at side corridors, but the soft noise of low, agreeable feminine laughter was, she decided, only her imagination. Mog and Pin whispered furtively to each other. Only Lucias seemed undisturbed, oblivious to the darkness, intent on some path he alone could detect.

They went further and further in, wandering a maze of tunnels until finally, as they rounded the curve of a long bend and found themselves at a branching of four corridors, Julian halted. “Do you know, Kate, I’m thoroughly lost. I sincerely pray that you are not in a similar case.”

Kate laughed, a low chuckle. “And as you are an unrepentant sinner, Julian, I fear that your prayers are unlikely to be—”

Mog screamed. Pin darted past Kate and knocked into Lucias.

A flicker of a shadow moved in one of the corridors just as the shattering explosion of a pistol shot rang in the closed space, deafening. Pin, with the instinct of a child brought up in gutters and back alleys, threw herself flat. Lucias was already off balance and now he reeled backwards from the force of some impact and collapsed against the wall.

Kate yelled and raced forward, swinging her lantern like a weapon. The steel blaze of a pistol muzzle glittered in lantern light as it came down hard on Kate’s head. She dropped as swiftly as Pin, but as a dead weight.

A second shot sounded, followed by a muffled cry that gurgled to silence. A body fell to stone and tumbled out into the light of Kate’s fallen lantern. Blood leaked out along the cracks between the stones on the floor.

“Bloody hell,” swore Julian. A barest waft of smoke drifted up from his pistol.

“Cor, guvnor,” said Mog with awe. “You took him right o’ the throat.”

“Kate!” cried Julian, propelled forward by some utterly compelling emotion. He let his pistol fall as he sank to his knees beside her. “Kate! Son’s mercy, Katie, answer me!”

She stirred, making a sound halfway between a curse and a groan, and began to push herself up, slowly.

Julian embraced her, pulling her into his chest. “Oh, Katie my love,” he murmured into her hair. “Thank the Mother.”

Kate was unsure whether she was hallucinating or simply suffering the after-effects of a blow to the head. Julian held her as tightly and tenderly as any lover might, and he trembled as he held her, as if in the throes of a fever.

“Julian,” she said in a weak voice. Her head throbbed.

He tilted her back enough that he could look into her face. With a sense of disorientation, as if the ground had dropped away from beneath her and yet she did not fall, she recognized the look of concentration melded with brilliancy in his eyes as he gazed at her for what it was: the look of a man in love.

A moment later he had controlled his expression and composed himself to look at her with cool concern. “I trust you will live,” he said. She knew him well enough to hear the effort it took for him to keep his voice calm.

“I daresay,” she replied, and was shocked by the shakiness of her voice.

“Lucias been shot,” said Pin in a fascinated undertone. “Come look, Mog. ’Spose he’ll die?”

“Bloody hell.” Kate jerked up.

“Let me help,” said Julian solicitously. He lifted her up and set her on her feet gently.

“Thank you,” she replied, a little constrained. She released herself from his grip with a delicacy brought on as much by her own confusion as by the sudden look of vulnerability about him. “We’d better see to Lucias.”

“Of course.” He toed the corpse with a fastidious nudge of one boot. “Do you know this man? He’s in typical laborer’s garb, but he’s much older than any of our people.”

Kate was already beside Lucias, one hand on the youth’s wrist. “He’s alive. I can’t tell whether the bullet went into his chest or—Do you have a knife, Julian?”

Before he could reply she grasped at her coat pocket and removed the obsidian scalpel. Carefully she cut Lucias’s shirt away from his body and peeled it, matted with blood, back from the skin. Lucias gasped and his head moved, but he did not open his eyes. The wound opened below his collarbone.

Kate touched the torn skin cautiously.

“He ain’t goin’ to die, is he?” asked Mog. His voice broke on the word “die” and he suppressed a sniffle.

“I don’t think so. Julian, come hold him down. I don’t like the look of this ball, but I think I can get it out easily enough, and then we’ll take him back to camp and wash the wound out properly.”

Julian did as he was told, and Kate, using the scalpel with a deft hand, parted the muscle just enough to slip an edge in and lift out the ball so swiftly and gently that there was scarcely any more bleeding.

“Give me your cravat,” she said, not really aware in her concentration of her tone of voice.

Julian smiled slightly, but the elegant folds were quickly destroyed and Kate used the linen to bind the wound.

“You’re really very good, Kate,” he said as she sat back on her heels to survey her work. Lucias stirred, opened his eyes, and closed them again. The deep hush, the darkness beyond, seemed to foster intimacy within the dim circumference of illumination. “I always wondered why, after your parents disinherited you, that you didn’t just study to be a physician—there was nothing to stop you then.”

She did not look up at him. Her hand cupped the light curls of Lucias’s hair. “I suppose at first I was resigned to losing it.” She shrugged. “Later, I never had the means to pay for my education and live at the same time.”

“You might have come to me, Kate,” he said, a little reproachful.

“Always as your debtor, Julian?” she asked, softly. “Is that always the only course left me?”

Silence lowered down on them like a heaviness emanating from the ceiling. Mog and Pin crept ever closer to Julian, huddling against each other. Lucias breathed evenly. On either side of him knelt Kate and Julian, each with head bowed. The flame of the lantern cast constantly moving highlights across their faces.

Julian reached out slowly and laid his hand palm open against the soft flush of her cheek. “As my wife, Kate.”

She did not even react at first, merely stared into his long-familiar eyes. His hand remained, warm, on her skin.

“Told you he love her,” said Pin in one of her hissed whispers that penetrated easily to every ear.

“Loves
her, Pin,” said Julian in a voice so quiet that it seemed almost absorbed in the rock. His gaze did not waver from Kate. “Never stopped loving her, after that summer half a lifetime ago.”

She pulled away finally, not with any rejection, but with the tiniest shake of her head, the only gesture of her real bewilderment that she could trust herself to make.

“We’re lost here, aren’t we,” she asked instead, walking to the farthest reaches of the light.

“Oh, very,” he replied, fully aware of the irony.

“Do you recognize him, our assassin?” When he shook his head, she picked up a lantern and examined the corpse more closely. “I don’t either. Do you suppose he’s the one who’s been trying to kill Lucias all along? I wonder why.”

“Someone’s coming,” cried Pin abruptly. She grabbed hold of Julian as if she had no intention of ever letting him go.

“My pistol.” He stood up, prying her loose.

“It’s Monsieur and Madame,” said Pin. An instant later Mog cried, “It’s ’er Ladyship.”

“Kate! Lord Vole!” Maretha’s voice.

Light showed at the deep recess of one of the corridors, bobbed towards them.

“Kate!” cried Chryse. She came forward through the gap of darkness into the circle of their light, her golden hair like a touch of the sun. “Thank Heaven.” She stopped short and gaped at the body. “What happened?”

Neither Kate or Julian replied immediately. Instead, they stared at the unlikely procession that greeted them: Maretha in a rumpled dress, Sanjay wounded, and, most of all, the trailing, subdued figure of the earl.

Kate shook her head. “We found our assassin. Do any of you recognize him?”

One by one they shook their heads until Sanjay frowned. “I’m sure—I remember. This is the man who came to me before we left Heffield. I think he was trying to bribe me to give him information on the expedition.”

“That doesn’t explain,” said Julian, “what happened to your leg. I hope the wound isn’t serious.”

“‘No, ’tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door,’” said Sanjay with an infinitesimal grin.

“‘Courage, man,’” replied Julian gravely, “‘The hurt cannot be much.’ Another aficionado of Shakespeare, I see. Old Anne is coming back into vogue these days.”

“But that still doesn’t explain—” began Chryse, at the same time as Kate said, “We’ve got to get Lucias back to—” They both stopped.

Maretha stood with her head cocked to one side, as if she was listening. “We must go. The door will close with full sunrise, and there are already the uninvited walking on my lands.”