Labyrinth Gate

by Kate Elliott

  “Sanjay!” Chryse stood up. “What is it?”

  He sat down in the third chair, laughed, and stood up again. “Come on.” He extended a hand and lifted Maretha to her feet. “We’ve got to go down to the excavation.”

  “What have you found?”

  “The treasure!” Charity started up with an animation she had not shown in days.

  “A whole room of gold and jewels!” Sanjay laughed again. “No, nothing so mundane. This is much better: I think we’ve found some kind of cache, beneath the floor. There’s a loose stone slab that can be moved, but we thought you should be there, Maretha.” As he said this one hand drifted back to clasp Chryse’s.

  “I’ll come too,” said Charity. She followed her cousin out the entrance.

  Chryse pulled on Sanjay’s hand, holding him back for a moment. “What if it is the treasure, hidden under there? What do we do?”

  In his look she could see the same lack of answers that she felt in herself, but he merely shrugged. “Let’s not count our bridges until we come to them.” When she chuckled, he grinned. “Isn’t that right? You Occidentals have the most peculiar sayings. There might be trouble, though.”

  “Why?” They went outside, catching up to Charity and Maretha.

  “The workers refuse to dig underground. Some kind of superstition.”

  “Oh dear.” Maretha frowned. “That will make it difficult. I don’t suppose anyone thought there might be underground levels to this city.”

  “I wonder whether their technology was sophisticated enough to manage such construction,” said Sanjay.

  “But wouldn’t that depend on—” began Chryse.

  “—on what kind of technology they used?” finished Sanjay. He lifted one dark hand to touch the coat pocket where he carried, as always, half of their deck of cards, and his gaze shifted quickly to the little pouch dangling from the waistband of Chryse’s gown, where she carried the other half. He turned his attention back to Maretha as they hurried along the well-worn path that led through the ruins to the central excavation. “I’m afraid this refusal is quite serious. Not a single worker has dissented.”

  “Not even Thomas?”

  “Mr. Southern crossed himself, and said he was sure you would make the right decision.”

  For an instant Maretha’s expression fixed in a look the more surprising for its bitterness. “Don’t I always? But no, it would do no good to antagonize the workers now. There is quite enough to do aboveground. By the Lady! Has everyone gathered here?”

  They had walked up to the excavation from the high side, a low height that looked out over this portion of the site. Beyond, on the far side the dug-out area sloped smoothly into undisturbed ground. The mound Billy had fallen through was obliterated, its remnants half carted off and half heaped in a haphazard pattern across the building revealed by its absence.

  The centralmost portion was about half uncovered. Frescoed walls curved in on themselves, and it was clear from the arc of their curve that they met under the rubbled ridge on which Sanjay, Chryse, Maretha, and Charity now stood. Pillars dotted the ground, some still twice a man’s height, others broken off halfway down, still others shattered into splintered pieces that littered the tile floor. The tiling was stark: one dark and one light color that interwove as it curled into the center, following the slightly off-center line of the pillars to a low circular platform that had just two days before been uncovered in the very middle of the building. From their vantage point, they could guess that the edifice itself was built on the pattern of a spiral.

  On the central platform stood Professor Farr, Kate, Julian, and, to no one’s surprise, the earl. Kate was crouched at the base of a great pillar, twice the diameter of any of the others, that stood in the middle of the platform. With one hand she brushed at something on the stone floor, but as swiftly as if Chryse or Maretha had called out to her, she looked up at the party standing above on the ridge and waved.

  “We’d better go down,” said Sanjay. “Before they get impatient.”

  They circled about a third of the way around the site before climbing down to the building remains. The workers, clustered at the edges of the dug-out area, separated to let them pass.

  “Ain’t right, your ladyship,” said one as they reached the platform, “to ask us to go unnerground, not in any wise, and certain not in a place like this.”

  Maretha turned. Thomas Southern had stepped forward to speak to the worker, but she forestalled him with a lift of her hand. “I can assure you that Professor Farr respects your feelings on such matters.”

  “Regent don’t,” a lighter voice muttered, meant to be heard only by its neighbor, but a trick of the hollow amplified it.

  “In any case,” continued Maretha, ignoring the comment, “there is no guarantee that there is any underground work to be done here at all.”

  “The flooring all looks the same to me,” said Chryse to Sanjay as they went to stand by Julian. The floor of the platform was made of plain fitted stone, unadorned by carving or paint. “How did you find the loose slab?”

  Kate rose from her crouch and stepped aside to let Sanjay kneel where she had been. “See here.” He brushed with his fingers at a series of small holes, no more than three fingerwidths across, that pierced in two lines a large section of the stone. “It occurred to me that those holes could be used as a means to shift the slab, and with the help of a few fellows, we found we could. So I called everyone together. Who knows what we might find.”

  “You have a keen eye,” said the earl from directly behind Sanjay, “to have seen such a delicate clue. Who knows what we might find?”

  Sanjay tilted his head to give the earl a speculative glance, as if to say, You might. The earl smiled, a frosty cordiality, and, much to the surprise of the others, Sanjay smiled back, as if he and the earl shared some secret, or recognized some likeness between them.

  “How do you think it worked?” asked Chryse into the pause.

  “Rope handles.” Kate looked at Sanjay for confirmation.

  “That’s what I was thinking.” He stood up and beckoned to Thomas Southern. “Did you get the crowbars and rope?”

  Southern brought several burly laborers, each armed with a heavy iron crowbar, and they set their backs to levering up the great slab. It was slow work. The earl stepped off the platform, brushing unseen dust from his white cuffs. Professor Farr ventured too close in his excitement and had to be drawn back by his daughter.

  At last they shifted the slab enough that ropes could be slipped through the holes in the stone, and with a grating that echoed across the hollow like the rumbling of a distant avalanche, heard after it is seen, they dragged it to one side.

  Only the earl did not crowd forward to see what lay beneath. There was silence.

  “Oh dear,” said Maretha.

  The top of a staircase lay revealed in the afternoon sun. A single step, alone; the rest was buried in rubble and debris.

  “A little dynamite,” began the professor.

  “Uncle, I’m not feeling well,” said Charity with what was apparently an unexpected rush of common sense. “Could you take me back to my tent.” She was, indeed, pale, in distinct contrast to the rose that had flushed her cheeks while she slept.

  Professor Farr blinked in his vague way. “Not feeling well, my dear?” He looked uncertainly at Maretha.

  “This can wait, Father.” Maretha cast a glance both grateful and concerned at her cousin. “Perhaps—” She turned to Southern. “Perhaps you could assist the professor, Thomas.”

  “If you wish, your ladyship.” His acquiescence seemed disapproving, but of what it could not be told. He offered Charity his arm with what appeared to be great reserve, quite in contrast to his usual manner. Charity seemed not to notice as she took it and let him escort her out of the site. The professor followed.

  Maretha turned to face the earl, who had come up on the platform to examine the buried stairwell. Behind, the workers were muttering, their voices s
welling with discontent.

  “My lord,” she said in a soft voice that scarcely carried to Chryse and Sanjay’s ears. He met her gaze. His face bore no discernible expression. “Don’t force this.” She made an infinitesimal gesture toward the stairwell, and a second toward the tide of revolt stirring in the laborers.

  His gaze, drifting with lazy arrogance over the crowd of workers, stilled their talk as if he had spelled them to silence. “Do you suppose,” he said on a slow, exaggerated drawl, “that they would dare to resist me?” Her expression darkened, fire rising in her eyes to match the chill in his, but he spoke again before she could reply. “Not yet,” he said, with the barest bow to her. “Not yet.” He scrutinized the opening, stair peeping from rubble, for a few more silent moments, then strode away abruptly into the ruins beyond.

  “It’s late enough that we can safely call off work for today.” Maretha pitched her voice to carry to everyone left in the hollow. “Be assured that there will be no digging for the time being below this floor level. You may go.”

  The workers dispersed quickly.

  “Do you know what strikes me,” said Sanjay into the lull.

  Kate stood one step down into the stairwell, poking at the debris with a crowbar. “Hell. Give me a shovel and I’ll dig it out. I’d wager my fortune that our treasure is buried somewhere down here.”

  “Good winnings for someone,” said Julian drily. “What strikes you, Sanjay?”

  “I don’t know much about the science of digging,” he replied, “but I’d wager that there’s only one layer to this city—that it was never built up over an older city, and that over an older one yet again, as you’d find in, say—” he paused.

  “Heffield?”

  “How much would you wager?” asked Kate. “If we don’t find this treasure soon I won’t have a penny left to my name.”

  Sanjay chuckled. “I’m hardly the one to wager with.”

  “Father!” Maretha’s exclamation interrupted them. She stepped down from the platform to meet the professor, who was peering through his spectacles at the dim outline of frescos on one of the excavated walls.

  “Arguments. Arguments,” he muttered as he stared at the wall. “Don’t understand ’em.”

  “How is Charity, Father?”

  “Incredible.” He moved closer to the pictures, until his nose practically touched the wall. “Just as I predicted.”

  By now the others had come up beside them. The fresco was faded and worn; all that could be discerned was a kind of bed or flat couch on which a figure, probably female, lay reclined, a second figure leaning over the first, arms stretched over the female’s chest or shoulders, hands rubbed away until they were little more than a suggestion about her neck.

  “Now where was that other fresco?” The professor wandered along the wall, Maretha hurrying after. “Bad day,” he mumbled as he walked and peered. “Bad day tomorrow.”

  “I know what was so strange,” said Chryse abruptly to her audience of three, watching Maretha and the professor walk away from them. “He was baiting her.”

  Kate nodded with swift understanding. “You’re right.”

  “Am I simply obtuse,” asked Julian, “or—”

  “Obtuse,” said Kate. “The earl. He baited Maretha, back there. He said that bit about the workers resisting him just to get a reaction from her. Interesting.”

  “What do you suppose he means, ‘bad day,’” asked Sanjay.

  Julian looked thoughtful, staring at the fresco. “Haven’t you noticed the weather? It should be the heat of the summer coming on. The last day of the month is—I can’t remember what the holiday was called anciently—”

  “Hunter’s Run,” said Kate. “Remember your cards.”

  “Of course. First day of the season—dove and such. Usually I take my dogs out, dry run for October, you know, when the really good hunting starts. Isn’t much of a holiday anymore. I suppose the church couldn’t find a holy day to merge with it.”

  “And tomorrow is the last day of the month, isn’t it?” asked Chryse.

  “Maybe he was referring to something else.” Sanjay reached out to touch a fresco farther down the wall. A few faint lines showed the forequarters of, perhaps, a stag—in any case, some antlered beast.

  “I hope so,” said Kate. “At least it isn’t too hot for digging.”

  Chapter 18:

  Dawn

  THAT NIGHT THE WIND rose. The noise of it filled the distant forest and scattered ruins until it drowned out the other senses, like the constant rushing of falls to a blind man. The canvas of the tents flapped and shuddered until Chryse, huddling against Sanjay in their bed, felt impelled to wake him so that he could reassure her. Half asleep, he managed to enfold her tightly enough in his arms that she could sleep.

  When he woke completely, the wind had ceased and the bed was empty beside him. He slipped on a pair of trousers and a shirt and stepped outside. It was just dawn. The haze of light that heralds sunrise was brightening to day. He saw her figure silhouetted against a dark height, edged in silver by the rising sun. He climbed up to stand beside her. She had put on her kid boots, but only a robe over her nightshirt.

  “Do you hear them?” she asked without looking at him, then lapsed into a silence so intent that he did not reply.

  “There,” she said again. And listened. “There.”

  Like a sound blown so far on the breeze that the current of wind itself had shredded it almost beyond substance, he heard the belling of hounds.

  “Horns,” she said. “And that melody. How perfectly the harmony complements it.” She stood rapt. He could not break her quiet to tell her that he heard nothing now, certainly not music. “Lord, it’s beautiful,” she breathed. He took her hand. A tear slid down her cheek, and as he watched it, he saw out of the corner of his eye a movement far beyond, in the distant forest.

  He snapped his head to look, but it was gone, no more than the suggestion of some antlered beast, perhaps, bounding away through the distant trees.

  And then, sudden and clear, the voice of hounds, belling and barking. He shuddered at their tone, for it was a killing run, with death as its goal. Chryse started suddenly, her hand convulsing in his, and she took a step back.

  “Someone is hunting over there. The music is gone.”

  From below, a shout carried up to them.

  “Oh Christ, I’m still in my robe,” said Chryse.

  “Fire!” cried Sanjay. “Look!” A haze of smoke, like an echo of the lightening horizon, swelled up from the center of the ruins.

  They ran down to the cluster of tents. Thomas Southern was talking to Maretha, who also had had time only to put on a robe over her nightshift. Julian emerged from his tent, bleary-eyed and, though fully dressed, a bit rumpled. He shook his head as Sanjay and Chryse came up beside him, and they hurried over to Southern and Maretha.

  “—we don’t know how the fire got started,” Southern was saying, “but it’s spreading in this direction. I have every hand digging trenches to protect our camp. I’ll send a group down here as well, though it appears to me that you’ll be well out of it. And we’re missing that—” he paused on an aspirative, as if he had been about to swear and caught himself “—that fool Hawthorpe. Evidently he got drunk with some of his mates last night and boasted that he could swim across the lake to the north shore. Hasn’t been seen since.”

  “Is anyone else missing?” asked Maretha.

  “I don’t know. I haven’t had time to take a count, but—”

  “Bloody hell.” Kate’s voice cut into their conversation. She ran up to them, fully dressed, from the direction of the stables. “He’s gone again.”

  “Not—”

  “Yes. Lucias. He’s early up to the stables in the mornings, so I’ve taken to trailing him, not trusting to luck like last time, in case that murder attempt wasn’t a fluke.” She lifted a hand to tug her cravat back into position. Dirt smeared her fingers, as if she had been digging. “And now he’s disapp
eared.”

  “Again,” said Sanjay.

  “We are not,” said Maretha decisively, “sending any search parties across the lake.”

  “Lady bless us.” Charity had appeared at the entrance to her tent, looking bemused and quite lovely in her robe, which was belted so loosely about her that one could not make out even the barest outlines of her figure.

  “Prim of her,” muttered Kate. She grinned as Chryse looked self-consciously down at the revealing fit of her own robe.

  There was a rush of energy about Charity’s skirts, and Mog and Pin came charging out of the tent.

  “Fire! Fire!” shrieked Pin, while Mog simply bellowed like an ogre.

  “Back!” Julian lifted a hand. The children halted stock still. “Into the tent,” he ordered, “and stay there.” Meek as worshippers, they went.

  “What about Lucias?” asked Kate.

  “Send what men you can spare to dig trenches around this camp,” said Maretha to Southern, “the rest of us will have to look for the boy. But I—” She directed a challenging look at the men present. “—am going to change first.”

  “Yes,” agreed Chryse.

  They returned in short order. By this time Professor Farr had come out of his tent, pen in one hand, journal in the other. “Maretha? Are we starting so early today?” He did not seem to notice the pall of smoke that rose behind them.

  “Nothing important, Father. Why don’t you finish what you’re writing and then Charity will bring you breakfast.” He nodded and retreated back to his tent. Southern had already left.

  “I would suggest we investigate the fire first,” said Sanjay, “and then split into search groups. Is the earl—”

  “No.” Maretha’s voice was shadowed by an emotion that her face disguised. “He’s gone, too.”

  Without further comment they set out for the other camp. Soon enough the first drift of smoke began to permeate the air as they walked. It grew heavier, and by the time they reached the other camp the smoke had gathered so thickly that it had begun to obscure the sun. A line of workers labored on a deep trench; like ghosts, they flickered in and out of view as the breeze shifted. All wore shirts tied about their noses and mouths.