by Lynn Kerstan
Distracted, he forgot to watch where he was going and ran for the second time directly into the pile of fallen rocks that marked the end of the passageway. The candle fell, sputtered, and went out.
At this point, it didn’t matter. He felt overhead for the trap door, found it, and pushed upward. As before, it lifted without difficulty, sending a scatter of dirt and pebbles and wet leaves over his face and shoulders. Rising to tiptoe for more leverage, he kept pushing until the heavy board toppled over. Then, gripping the frame with both hands, he pulled himself up and out.
The air felt thick as water. It was like that night off the coast of Madagascar . . . no moon, no stars, no visibility whatever.
The Dartmoor fog. He’d heard about it. Sothingdon had described being trapped for hours on the moorlands, unable to see so far as his nose and afraid to move for fear of tumbling into a bog. His best hound had led him to safety.
And what was it Shivaji had said? Something about the pathway to death lying under the ground. Then . . . You will be lost in white darkness.
Just what the world needed. A prescient assassin.
After some fumbling he replaced the trap door, kicked leaves and dirt on top of it, and with arms elevated like a sleepwalker’s, picked his way out of a shallow crater onto level ground. Shortly after, when his fingers brushed the rough bark of a tree, he decided this was as good a place to wait as any.
Settling down with his back against the tree trunk, he laced his fingers behind his neck and lifted his gaze in the direction of the obscured sky. Within the hour, the first light of dawn would creep up from the east, giving him a compass point to steer by. Assuming he was able to see it at all.
He spent what felt to him a great deal longer than an hour mapping in his mind what he knew of the estate. Always aware he might need to make a run for it, he’d paid close attention during the shooting expeditions to the landscape and its landmarks. He was fairly sure he could find his way to his destination.
Unless the Others stopped him. He’d planned to travel under protection of night. Now he hoped the fog would persist long enough to conceal him, at least until he arrived at Devil’s Tor. He didn’t have a good feeling about what was likely to happen after that.
He could go the opposite direction, of course. Board the coaster at Dartmouth, carry on to South America and more soldiering. There was always a battle going on somewhere, as Michael Keynes used to say. You need only get to it in time.
But none of those battles were meant for him. The only one that counted would take place a mile or so from where he was sitting. He had a promise to keep.
I have always believed in you.
The last words he would ever hear from Jessica’s lips. Nothing in his life had ever meant so much. More than escape, above all things else, he wanted to give her a reason for that unreasoning faith. But the only service he could provide her was to save the family from Talbot, so whatever the consequences, he would try. Pray God the son of a bitch showed up with his swords, ready to fight.
Like a ghostly apparition, not necessarily real or to be trusted, a glimmer of light teased him from his left. Not a glimmer, really. A sensation more felt than seen, but it beckoned him like a Siren’s song.
Rising, turning to face it, he still could not be sure. The impenetrable fog admitted no certain light and only a begrudging trace of air. But he did the mental calculations, formed a notion of where the high, misshapen hill with its outcroppings of granite, its escarpments and cul-de-sac and stone ring might be found. Then, moving slowly and feeling his way through the trees, he proceeded in a direction that might or might not be the right one.
Jessica sat up with a start, her heart pounding, sweat streaming down her forehead and between her breasts. She felt weak. Groggy, as if her brain were wrapped in wool. Her eyes must have been sealed with glue. She had to force them open, and immediately they wanted to close again.
The room was dark. And Duran was gone. She knew it even before her hands reached for the empty space next to her, before she dragged herself from the bed and stumbled over to the dressing room. A slice of light showed at the bottom of the door. She entered, not expecting to find him, and used the candle burning there to ignite a lamp in her bedchamber.
The clothes he had been wearing, the ones he’d left beside the bed, were gone. Nothing else seemed out of place. She had noticed his comb and brush alongside his shaving gear in the dressing room. For something to do while her head cleared, she looked in the armoire and checked the drawers where his things were kept. It didn’t appear that anything was missing.
Nothing except Duran.
Perhaps he couldn’t sleep. He might have gone downstairs to read, or smoke a cigar, or locate a bottle of cognac. But it was nothing so simple as that. Her heart burned with the truth. Sure as he’d left her before, he’d left her again.
And with only three more days remaining. Could he not endure staying with her to the end of the contract? Perhaps he’d feared an awkward scene, her begging him to stay the way she had once begged him for a child. That had been an impulse. A mistake. She had no right to ask, or to assume he would think nothing of giving her his seed in the way a man thought nothing of offering a woman his handkerchief.
But he needn’t have worried. She had firmly resolved to make all she could of their time together, and then smile and wish him well as he walked away. She might even have succeeded in doing that. But as always, he’d forestalled her plan. He had done the thing she least expected, the thing she ought to have known he would do. Possibly he’d decided it would be kinder this way. That she would not be hurt this time by his vanishing trick.
If so, he had been wrong.
She kept worrying at the problem while she dressed. Their private contract was all but finished. Why shouldn’t he leave if he wished to? Gerald, if she was to believe Duran, would make no more trouble for the family. There was nothing else to hold her husband here.
She pulled on her half boots, shook down the skirts of her plainest dress, and tied back her hair with a length of ribbon. If asked, she couldn’t have said why she had clothed herself for walking. Her eyes kept drifting shut. She felt weak and her mouth tasted of ashes. She wanted to curl up in bed and sleep. Or cry. She wanted very much to cry.
But a voice was stirring inside her, cutting through the porridge in her head, telling her something was dreadfully wrong. Worse even than . . . Well, she mustn’t think on it.
The clock showed a little after six. Near to sunrise now. The servants would be at their breakfasts. She didn’t wish to disturb them, but if she went to the kitchen, someone would give her toast and tea. Perhaps some news.
With so few guests in residence, few of the wall sconces that lined the passageway were kept lit. She was just coming on the servants’ staircase when a figure seated cross-legged beside the door uncoiled itself and rose up.
Arjuna. She hadn’t seen him until he moved. But why in blazes was he here, on watch, when there was no longer—
And then she knew.
She smiled. He bowed. She moved on by him to the main staircase, descended a little way, and then stole back up to see what he was doing. Sure enough, he had gone to her bedchamber door and was standing in front of it, probably as undecided as she was feeling at the moment. But no. He raised the latch and stepped inside.
Oh, God. Why couldn’t she think? Just when she started to figure something out, a curtain would drop over her mind.
Keep moving. Keep moving. But where? Soon they would know Duran had gone. What would they do then?
Instinct was driving her now. She rushed down the stairs to the ground floor and her father’s study. Most of his guns were stored in locked cases, but in a small cupboard he always kept a rifle and at least one pistol primed and ready to hand. She slipped the pistol, a small one, into her pocket. Fairly sure she’d not escape the house carrying the rifle, she raised the window casement and lowered it to the ground. She was about to follow it there when the slightest
of sounds from just outside the door caused her to lower the window and speed across the room to the desk. She had just got there when the door swung open.
“Memsahib,” said Shivaji, bowing.
Arjuna must have just roused him. He wore white muslin trousers under a knee-length, unbelted tunic, and his thick black hair, streaked with gray, hung straight and loose to his shoulders.
“Good morning,” she said cheerfully. And waited. This was his nightmarish game, and she didn’t know the rules.
He came straight to the point. “How, excepting the door, might one leave your bedchamber?”
She considered. Frowned. Brightened. “Through a window? But it would be a long way to the ground.”
“The windows are watched. How else?”
“There is no else. Why would there be?” She thought she sounded fairly convincing. And even if he knew she was lying, he couldn’t prove it. Not in time. She couldn’t imagine how Duran had worked out there was a concealed passageway, let alone the combination to open it. “Are you by chance looking for my husband? So was I, as a matter of fact.”
“You do not know where he is, or where he means to go?”
“Truly, I have no idea. But do you believe me?” She slouched against the desk, the fog in her head even thicker than the fog she’d seen outside the house. “We’ve done this before, haven’t we? Conversed in questions, I mean. That was the day you told me the story about the princess and the Lord of Death.”
Death. Her heart skipped a beat. But when there is pain, she reminded herself, it is better to walk directly into it. “Shall we cease the dancing about? At the posthouse, when Duran brought you back the leopard, you lied to me. You mean to kill him after all.”
A long pause. “I am sorry, memsahib,” he said. “There is nothing you can do for him now. You will remain here, please.”
The door had scarcely closed behind him before she was out the window.
Grabbing the rifle, she took off through the fog, surefooted as a Dartmoor pony. She had navigated this territory since childhood, eluding the servants dispatched to track her down, vibrating to the rhythms of the land and the weather. All her fear was for Duran. She knew the place where he’d have exited the tunnel, but he would not remain there. Where would he have gone?
There was no answer to that. But the fog would slow him down. He’d surely avoid the road, which was the first place Shivaji would go looking for him. And she hoped he had better sense than to strike out across the moors. If he’d done that, he could be up to his neck in a bog by now. Or under it altogether.
No. He had figured out the virgin and the unicorn. He’d escaped Shivaji once before. She must not underestimate him.
He would do the unexpected, she decided. Go the direction he was least likely to go. Or not go very far at all.
It was only a hunch, but once it came into her head, it felt exactly right. On Devil’s Tor were any number of places to hide. When the fog cleared he would have a good view of the landscape for miles around, and best of all, no one could sneak up on him because there was only one way to the top.
Unless you knew the other one.
Leaving behind the rifle, which was too cumbersome for the voyage she was to take, she crossed the moorland between the house and the Tor, found her way to the narrow break between a stand of tall rocks, and stopped there long enough to knot her skirts between her legs. The last time she’d ascended the Tor from this direction, she had been considerably younger and smaller. Now the concealing fog became her ally, forcing her to climb by feel, guided by instincts that came back to her like old friends. She wriggled through tight spaces and scrambled over boulders, her hands and knees scraped raw on the rough moorstone.
Something was going to happen. Was already happening. She felt it, like electricity in the air, and drove herself harder. She must not be too late.
A clap of thunder. She paused. Listened. Then another, just like the first. Then silence.
Feverishly she scaled a steep incline, skirted a clump of nettles, and came up behind one of the Druid stones. Sunlight dazzled through the mist, which was beginning to clear, and a small breeze stirred her hair. She pressed her cheek against the stone and gazed one-eyed into the circle.
Across the way, about ten yards from where she stood, Shivaji was crouched beside a figure lying prone on the ground. The milky fog swirled around them like silk scarves. For the barest moment, light flashed off a circlet of gold and jewels on the fallen man’s wrist.
Her heart gave a lurch.
Oh, God. Oh, God. It was over.
Shivaji lifted his head like an animal scenting danger. He rose. Turned. Blotches of red stained his tunic and smeared the blade of the large curved knife he was holding. Blood dripped from its point.
Her hand dove for the pistol in her pocket, got it free, pointed it at his chest. She moved toward him. “Drop the knife,” she said. The fog blurred her target, but at this range, she could not miss. “If he is dead, I will kill you.”
Shivaji held out his arms. “I will not prevent you. But he is badly hurt. If you wish him to live, you must go for help.”
“And leave you here to finish what you started?” Was Duran still alive? She couldn’t tell, dared not shift her gaze from the assassin. Her pulse beat in her head. What choice had she now?
She steadied her hand, sighted down the barrel, saw his eyes look past her.
An arm lashed around her from behind. She cried out as the gun was wrenched from her fingers. Then, at a nod from Shivaji, she was released.
Helpless, numb with despair, she watched him kneel beside Duran and place a finger on his throat.
“What I say is true, memsahib. He lives, but there is great loss of blood. The bullets must be removed, and it cannot be done here.” With his knife, he began slicing strips of fabric from the hem of his tunic. “My servants may not be heeded if I send them to the house. You must go yourself. Have a litter brought here and make the necessary arrangements.”
He glanced over his shoulder at the man standing at her side. “Return the gun. The decision must be hers alone.”
She looked at the brown hand holding the barrel of the pistol, at the curve of the grip offered to her, and shook her head. “I’ll go,” she said from a burning throat.
And then she began to run.
Chapter 30
He was underwater. A horse was sitting on his back.
No. It was standing on his back, one hoof just below his left shoulder blade, the other to the right and lower, near his waist. Damn fool place for a horse to be.
He could breathe, though. Strange that he could, given where he was. But it hurt a great deal, so he tried not to do it often. A little air, a little more. God he wished that horse would go away.
Another breath. And with it, something hot and sulfurous burning his nostrils. And a voice, distant, as if it originated in the depths of a cave.
“Duran-Sahib.”
So. He was in hell, then. No surprise there. Stood to reason he would be.
Acrid fumes swirled around him like the fog that . . . Ah. He remembered the fog. And the thunder. And the horse kicking him in the back. After a struggle, he opened his eyes.
The demon’s face, golden-lit by the candle he was holding, swam into view.
“I didn’t know,” said Duran in a husk of a voice, “that Hindus went to hell.”
“We go where God wills,” Shivaji said. In his other hand was a small copper beaker emitting curls of astringent smoke. “You must pardon this. It is harmless, but necessary to bring you awake.”
Awake. That sounded . . . well, unexpected. “Is water permitted?”
It was given him soon after, a glass held to his lips, cool water in his mouth and dribbling down his chin. Only a little, but he was allowed to drink at intervals, and between times, feeling marginally better, he took stock of his surroundings.
A small parlor, he decided. A dark one with two or three pools of light from candles or lamps. With th
e curtains closed, he could not tell the time of day. He saw a table strewn with basins, folded towels and bandages, small bottles and jars, ominous-looking metal implements, and a mortar and pestle. Another table held Shivaji’s wooden Cabinet of Horrors, as he had come to think of it.
And the horse was not, after all, on his back. Turned out he was sitting nearly upright on a bed, held in that position by pillows at his lower back and behind his neck, but more amazingly, by a contraption slung around his shoulders and attached to some sort of pulley device. He could reason it all out within a week, he was thinking when the water glass was offered him again.
“The sling holds your back clear,” Shivaji said, “permitting the wounds to receive air and be tended. I rigged it because when you were lying on your stomach, your breathing became labored. Do you remember what occurred?”
The fog in his head was more dense than the fog that had swaddled Devil’s Tor. He cast back, snagging bits and pieces of that morning. He’d got all the way to the stone circle. Lost a boot in a patch of bog on the way. He remembered that much. And the silence. Like cotton balls were stuffed in his ears. He’d come to level ground, found by feel one of the standing stones, and was just turning when the thunder . . . No. It was a blast of noise, muffled a little by the fog, echoing a little from the rocks, not like any sound he’d ever heard before. And at almost the same time, the horse kicked him.
Not a horse. That was when he’d been so sure the assassin would kill him with a knife. That’s what he was thinking when he grabbed hold of the granite spire with both hands, felt them slip, felt himself slipping, knew he’d been shot.
Thunder will bring you down. Well, he couldn’t say he hadn’t been warned.
Then more thunder, a blow to his side, and the fog took him altogether.
Again, water to his lips. He kept forgetting what he’d known just a moment earlier. His body, hurting like the devil was sticking pitchforks in it, now suspended in space. Not quite. His bottom and legs solid on the bed. Bits of him against pillows. Other bits wrapped up and strung out with ropes. Where was Jessie? She wasn’t here, which told him quite a lot.
