George stepped to one side. A shaft of slightly brighter light burst through the door and onto the floor in the center of the room. Magdalena gasped. There, clearly illuminated, was the hole into the Jug below.
Crumbling stones rose up and circled the small hole, just wide enough for a man’s shoulders to pass through. An iron ring kept the circumference of the hole intact and an iron cross had been affixed to the ring at some point to prevent any modern intruders accidentally falling into the Jug beneath.
George knelt with caution at the hole, staring into its black depths. The shaft of light from the doorway showed no more than a few inches of the stone esophagus leading down into the Jug, which was itself impossible to see. He ran his hand along the iron, tracing the crumbling mortar with one finger. A slight smile appeared on his face, and he licked his upper lip.
“Give me the yew, Magdalena. Cut a good length of twine as well,” he instructed, never taking his eyes from the hole.
Magdalena nodded, understanding her assignment. She pulled the yew from her shoulder bag and placed it in his open hand. He brushed the yew along the stone just below the iron ring in the floor. She pulled the twine and a small pair of sewing scissors from her shoulder bag and cut a length of string at least twice George’s height. She knelt next to him, rather clumsily trying to put away the ball of string and scissors as she handed him the cord she had cut. He reached for it, still never taking his eyes from the black depths of the Jug. He tied one end of the string around the yew, just below the horsehair, so it remained exposed to the air. Then he deftly brushed the entire circumference of the hole several times as well as possible, given the iron cross fixed to the ring.
A cold puff of air rose into Magdalena’s face. As much as she wanted to maintain a reverent silence, she could not help exclaiming, “What was that?” She shuddered. “A draft of air from below? How can that be? There is no ventilation down there… at least, that is what the stories say.” Another whisper of cold air rose from the Jug to caress her cheek. A slight sound caught her attention next. “Was that a pebble falling? Or a rat down below?” she asked George.
He shook his head. “We are attracting the attention of the dead,” he replied. “But we need to attract the attention of one of the dead, in particular.” He brushed the yew against the stones once more and then, holding the free end of the twine securely in one hand, he slowly lowered the horsehair-tied yew into the Jug. Magdalena anxiously followed its descent and disappearance into the shadows with her eyes.
The whispers and rustling she heard in the darkness below increased, both in volume and intensity. The attention of whatever or whoever was below was clearly aroused and growing more agitated.
“They sound like birds flapping in the dark,” she whispered.
“Yes,” George agreed. “Birds in the dark with broken wings.” He let the yew slip further into the Jug. Wordless cries, gentle sighing wafted up to George and Magdalena. A multitude of voices seemed to be joining the chorus of the roused. Magdalena thought she could distinguish a handful of women’s voices from the more numerous men’s voices. George peered down at the string and let the last few inches of the string go, the yew swinging freely in the air at the other end.
Magdalena closed her eyes, hoping to improve her hearing by closing one of her other senses. Could she hear the yew scraping the floor of the Jug? No, but something was definitely scrabbling at the stones and loose mortar below.
She opened her eyes. “Is something trying to climb up the wall and out?” she whispered nervously, pulling away from the edge of the hole.
George paused before answering. “No, not out of the Jug. But climb out of the netherworld and into the Jug? Much more likely.” He gently jerked the string with his free hand as if he were fishing. The whispering voices burst into a quiet cacophony of muffled struggling. Were they desperately trying to catch the yew, as fish struggle to swallow a baited hook?
George swung the string in a small circular motion, causing Magdalena to imagine the yew at the other end swinging in broad circles below. Cold air swirled up into her face. Mournful sighs and angry whispers assaulted her ears, as if the dead were struggling against each other, clambering over and around and under each other, each trying to catch hold of the dangling, tantalizing yew.
The string in George’s hand jerked taut. “Dalibor!” his voice snapped. “We are looking for Dalibor!” The string shivered as something pulled on the other end in the dark. George seized the string with his other hand too, leaning back and away from the hole. Magdalena could hear gasps and panting from below.
“Are they fighting each other?” she asked. “Why?”
“Because they want out of the Jug!” George answered curtly, struggling to keep hold of the string, playing with it exactly as a fisherman might play with a fish. “Caught on the yew… pulled up into the light… is their one way of escape!” He pulled up on the string, straining to raise his hands as high as his shoulders, when an angry snarl from below—a sound more substantial than any Magdalena had heard before—startled her. Something seized the string and snapped it tightly down and across the Jug below. George was caught off-guard and fell forward, barely able to keep hold of the string with both hands and still brace himself against the iron cross he nearly collided with.
“Help me… hold the string!” he hissed at Magdalena. She scurried to his side, grabbed hold of the string with both hands and pulled. The weight and strength of whatever was caught on the yew surprised her. Together she and George held the string taut, struggling to rein in whatever was on the other end. Feeling the string begin to slice into her palm, Magdalena managed to make a fist with one hand and wrapped the string several times around her knuckles. The snarling below grew more vicious, like a rabid dog trapped in a corner.
“I thought… you said… they wanted to escape,” she managed to slip the words out of her lips. “Why…?” she could not complete the question. The pressure of the string tightly wrapped around her fist was intense, making it difficult to concentrate on anything else.
George gave the string a sudden snap and whatever was below seemed thrown off balance for an instant. “Most of the dead would be happy to escape their prison down there,” he gasped. “But some prefer the dark. They prefer their miserable solitude to serving our cause.” Seeing the sweat running down his face, Magdalena knew it was not the time to ask for a more detailed explanation.
“I want Dalibor!” he thundered down into the hole. “The rest of you… the yew is only for Dalibor,” he repeated. The string snapped tight again and then went limp, a quiet whimpering beginning down below. George panted, wiping the sweat away from his forehead with the back of one hand, never letting go of the string. The string remained limp.
“Did they… it… give up?” whispered Magdalena, glancing back and forth between the darkness of the Jug and George’s face.
The Jesuit nodded, breathing heavily. He struggled to get to his feet, and Magdalena, rapidly disentangling her fist from the string and letting it go, stood and took his arm to help him rise. The sound of shadowy footsteps came from below, as if a crowd were dispersing, shuffling away from whatever had caught their attention and drawn them together. The whimpering continued, breaking into an occasional muffled sob.
George began to pull the string up. It swung freely but there was clearly something heavier than just the yew at the other end. Magdalena reached out and helped pull the yew and whatever it had caught up into the light.
The string jerked tight. The yew seemed caught on something below. George shook the string, attempting to dislodge the yew from whatever had caught it. Magdalena looked around. Most of the length of twine lay on the floor around them.
“It must be just below the light,” she pointed out to George. “Maybe caught on the rim of the stone hole?” The whimpering had subsided now, and nearly all of the shuffling footsteps had faded away.
“Maybe,” George said. He peered at the shadows below, bobbing his head a
bout, trying to see what had snagged his catch. He gave the string another large swing and whispered, “Dalibor? Let go of the stones… Come into the daylight.”
Magdalena scrambled onto her knees again, reaching one hand into the shadows of the Jug. “Let me see if I can get it loose,” she offered. She ran her hand along the twine as far as she could reach. She lay as flat as she could on the rough stonework around the hole, extending her reach. She could not see over the rim of the hole but could feel the stones under her fingertips, the mortar crumbling in places. She stretched her arm as far as she could, feeling the rough stone against the skin of her forearm when suddenly… She gasped in shock.
A strong hand from below locked itself around her arm. She could feel the rough garments, a sleeve of some sort pressed tightly into her palm. The hand held tight, and then…
With an abrupt jerk, Magdalena was pulled forward across the rough, sharp stones of the floor. Whatever or whoever held her arm pulled sharply again. With her free hand, she tried to push herself away from the hole.
“Help! George!” she exclaimed. “It’s trying to pull me in with it! It’s trying…” She attempted to brace herself and deep, hearty laughter rumbled below them as her arm was wrenched a third time. “George! It feels like it’s pulling my arm out of the socket!” Terror of the dark, of the shuffling of the dead, of being trapped below was the only thing she was aware of besides the pain. She pictured herself lying on the floor below, her neck broken by the impact of her fall.
Theo made his way back down to the hotel dining room early the next morning, the sun struggling to pierce the veil of clouds and humidity that wrapped the city. Fortifying himself with tea and a roll, he examined the tourist map of the Little Town he had found on the desk in his room. Spreading the map on the table, he struggled to read the tiny print.
“This is where I am now,” he muttered, establishing the location of the hotel on the map and then tracing a path from the castle with his finger back toward the hotel. He pulled a pen from his pocket and marked an “X” on both the castle and the hotel and drew a line to connect the two, following the route he had traced with his finger.
“This street must be the Royal Road,” he decided, determining which street emerging from the tangle of the Little Town Square led directly to the castle gates. When he looked up from the map, he noticed the flood waters outside the hotel. The water had risen during the night, but there was still an area free of water outside the hotel’s patio.
“This is probably not enough salt to make much difference,” he grumbled. “Against everything that George has, I can’t imagine this will work at all. But I have to try!” Folding up the map and tucking it into his back pocket, he picked up the canister of salt from the floor, returned the pen to his pocket, and went to sit on the short wall surrounding the patio. Swinging his feet over the wall and onto the ground outside, he stepped off and made his way toward the Little Town Square, skirting the edge of the water.
“Dalibor!” George barked his stern command. “Come up into the light!” He wrenched the twine upward and the yew flew up through the grating, the string tangled on the iron cross that Magdalena had forgotten blocked the entrance of the hole. The yew bounced against the iron rim of the Jug’s entrance and Magdalena felt her hand suddenly released. She scrambled away from the edge of the hole as quickly as she could, panting with fear and relief.
George stood between her and the hole now, his back to her. The string hung from his hand, wrapped over and under the arms of the cross, the yew at its other end sitting on the floor on the other side of the hole. Next to the yew, kneeling over it, was the figure of a man slowly materializing like dust gathering in a sunbeam.
He was tall, dressed in the rough and simple workday garments of a medieval Czech peasant. One hand held the posy of yew-and-horsehair on the floor, his fingers tangled in the knots of the horsehair. His hair and beard, dark and scruffy, added to the shadows of his emaciated face. Magdalena thought, “He must have been handsome, once.” Then she remembered that this—what? This entity? This ghost? This man?—had tried to kill her by pulling her down into the Jug with him. She shuddered, and any sympathy she might have felt for him died. She hurried to George, careful to stand behind him. She looked over his shoulder at the man across the room.
“Dalibor.” George said the name simply, with no emotion.
The man lifted his head toward George and Magdalena, his dark eyes hard to distinguish from the shadows of his face. Except for the anger that glittered in them, Magdalena would not have been sure he had eyes at all.
“Yes.” The voice was deep, warm, strong. But the man’s lips had not moved. He and George seemed to understand each other, but they seemed to be speaking to each other directly with their thoughts, not their lips and tongues.
Magdalena heard George’s voice but strained to make out the words. He was speaking to Dalibor, not her, and she realized that she was eavesdropping on his thoughts.
“Those that oppose me.” She could make out those words in George’s voice. Then he gestured behind him, toward her. “Those who oppose us,” he corrected himself, the words coming through to her slightly clearer.
“You would have me do what?” Dalibor asked, his voice—unlike George’s—clear and distinct.
“He must be aiming his thoughts at me, as well as George,” Magdalena concluded, and Dalibor nodded in response as if he had heard her thoughts as well as George’s. He studied her face, then stood. His fingers were still tangled in the yew and horsehair. He looked at his hand and a wave of anger and disgust rolled across his face. George glanced over his shoulder at Magdalena and she read his instructions in his eyes: “Do not interrupt.”
“He tried to kill me!” she protested.
George looked startled, then pleased. He smiled at Magdalena. “Very well,” he agreed. “You do have a point.” He turned his attention back to the knight.
“Dalibor. You attempted to destroy my… apprentice.” George’s voice was cold and dangerous. “You had to know that you would not succeed. Why the futile gesture?”
Dalibor stood seething and silent.
“You deserve to be punished for such insubordination,” George went on. “You forget yourself, knight. Provoking my anger is never a wise thing to do. I would have thought you had suffered enough punishment in the Jug, playing your violin there in the dark, before your death. Why risk something that terrible again?”
Dalibor refused to answer, his eyes defiant and proud.
“Very well. You shall be punished, for your refusal to answer as much as for your attack on my apprentice,” George warned him. “But first I have a task you must complete.”
“How can I complete any task, or suffer any punishment for that matter, so long as I am entangled in this yew and horsehair?” Dalibor retorted. “You forget yourself as well, coven-master.”
“If I allow you to remove your hand from the yew and horsehair, I do not want you to escape back into the Jug,” George instructed him.
“You know that I cannot,” Dalibor answered. “Not so long as…”
“I give you leave to remove your hand,” George interrupted. The knight easily cast the magical posy to the floor, rubbing his fingers against his jacket as if to restore circulation. He finally examined his fingers and then turned his attention back to George and Magdalena.
“You would have me do what?” Dalibor asked again.
George’s voice dropped in volume and the words slurred together. Magdalena felt like her ears were filled with cotton. Concentrate as she might, she could only make out occasional phrases of George’s instructions to the dead knight.
“I have retrieved two of the magical tools of Prague… the rabbi’s staff and Bruncvik’s sword… hidden in my hotel room… bring them to us, in the plaza outside the cathedral, where Svetovit was worshipped…”
Dalibor stumbled back, his mouth open in shock. “Bruncvik’s sword? How?” he stammered. “That was buried in the foundation
of the bridge! The power of the bridge—surely it would have made the sword impossible to remove!”
Magdalena struggled to hear George’s answer and her ears seemed even more densely packed with cotton, making the Jesuit’s voice sound distant and nearly incomprehensible.
“… egg… bridge poisoned… power unimaginable…”
The knight slowly climbed to his feet and nodded. “I understand,” he replied. “Your instructions seem clear enough.”
George’s response was muffled again. He pointed to the yew on the floor. Dalibor’s reaction was… What? Magdalena thought she saw fear in his eyes, but that seemed out of character with the Dalibor of the old stories. Anger, maybe? Or contempt? Perhaps some duel involving all three.
“Very well,” Dalibor agreed. “I will bring them to you in the cathedral plaza.” He glared across the room at George and Magdalena, then clumsily bowed his head and gradually faded from sight, the stones in the wall behind him shimmering through his increasingly translucent form. Then he was gone.
Magdalena stayed behind George. He slowly turned to face her.
“You do understand, don’t you?” he asked her. “It is of paramount importance to stop our foes and prevent them from destroying the city. Punishing Dalibor, important as that is, must take a back seat to our primary goal.” He put a hand on her shoulder and caught her gaze.
Magdalena was torn. “He tried to kill me!” she insisted. “I am your apprentice! You said so! How could he dare to do it? He scares me, George!” She sighed. “But Dalibor will pay the consequences at some point, yes?”
George nodded. “He certainly will,” he agreed, wrapping Magdalena in his arms. “I would never let anything harm you,” he reassured her, his warm whisper in her ear convincing her she was now safe. She hugged him eagerly in return, and then they turned, hand in hand, to return up the twisted stairway. As they passed the luggage trolley with the black rooster, George grabbed it to pull along behind them. Disentangling her arm from his, Magdalena darted back down the steps towards the dark hole in the prison floor and snatched up the discarded yew and horsehair.
Come Hell or High Water: The Complete Trilogy Page 116
