I needed something to open the lock. A year ago, I’d have put my hand to my head and drawn out a pair of hair-pins, but my hair was short now—I even recalled cutting it, eleven months ago in India—far too short to need pinning. My spectacles were gone. And the knife might be slim, but its point would not slip into the padlock’s hole. I could try using it to prise the mechanism apart, but the lock felt solid, and I was loath to risk snapping my only weapon.
I sat against the pillar, finger-tips caressing the cool blade. The alternative was to conduct a detailed search of the ground within my reach, in hopes of finding an object that could be turned to picking a simple lock. A bit of metal, my trodden-on spectacles, a stout twig, even a bone—and my mind hastily turned away from the question What kind of bone would you expect to find here?
Before I started crawling about, I went again through the inventory of my possessions: stone, paper, crumbs. Half a dozen small buttons on my garments: What if I carved one down …? Too short.
The knife scabbard in the top of the boot was of leather, but it was stiff. Perhaps if I sliced away its softer portions …
The boot. With its old, worn, brass lace-hooks.
I drew up my right foot, and got to work.
“I’m assuming that you have nothing that could be used on these locks,” I said, “or you’d have freed yourself long ago. But whoever brought me here was either in a hurry, or had been told that I was a woman, which made him loath to strip me properly. For whatever reason, he—they—left me my boots. Which have various bits of metal on them. And that should make matters easier.”
A throwing knife is a flat piece of steel whose handle is simply a continuation of the blade, cross-hatched to offer control. I keep mine sharp, and it took but a moment to separate one of the thinner brass lace-hooks from its leather. The knife’s handle was too thick, so I slid the little loop over the blade, pulling at it to work it flat, and talking, so as to keep Mahmoud with me.
“I should tell you,” I said, my words pushing away the darkness that caressed my skin, “I’ve had amnesia, since the night you and I were set upon outside of Fez. I took a knock on the head, but a farmer and your young friend Idir came to the rescue.” I told him the story, all of the past events from the time I had staggered away from the fleeing motorcar. Whether he was hearing me or not, I could not tell, but my fingers kept prying.
And then the knife slipped, slicing a chunk out of my finger and, far worse, flipping the metal snippet into the darkness. I cursed, and stuck my finger in my mouth. Should I conduct a search for the thing, or just start again?
I made mental note of the direction in which I thought it had flown, then picked up my boot and got to work on the next-thinnest hook—this time leaving it attached to the leather. I resumed the story, with Holmes, Lyautey, and me riding north out of Fez.
Lacking its key, a padlock may be opened in two ways. It can, of course, be picked like any other lock, a technique requiring both a pick and a companion wire to hold the sequence of manipulated pins in place. But a padlock may also be popped open with a shim: a thin, narrow strip of metal that, worked into the tiny gap between the lock’s shaft and its body, releases the latch. That was what I was attempting to create.
It was a ridiculous task, one that I would have said impossible—one I would not even have attempted—but for two factors: First, I suspected that my captors had not invested in an expensive lock. And second, I had no choice.
If I did not free my ankle, Mahmoud Hazr and I would die here. Time, the story, and my skin, all wore on.
When this second hook was more or less flat, I cut it from the boot, then struggled around to face the pillar. The metal dug into my ankle, but the soft tile pillar stood atop a slab of rock hard enough to be a grindstone. I worked away at the slip of brass, wearing it down, flattening it on the stone. My fingers grew raw. My hips ached, my ankle burned. I ripped various bits from my clothing to shield my skin from the blade. My conversation descended into babbling—snatched recollections about the night of his abduction; meeting Nurse Taylor; my reaction to finding his ring, first in my pocket that night with the head-lamps on me, then again beneath the brass-worker’s bench on Saturday morning. I told him about throwing Holmes head-over-heels at the top of the stairs in Dar Mnehbi, and what Holmes had said about the shadowy person who possessed information about the secret meeting, and my own speculations about whether that man was within the ranks of the French Protectorate or the Rif Republic. On and on.
I had not heard any reaction from my companion for at least an hour. Apart from my stream of words and the susurration of brass on stone, the only sound in the universe was one that added a note of vicious irony: a slow, regular drip of water into a small pool, thoroughly out of reach. And on I worked.
The knife blade had opened the hook to a gentle curve, taking pieces of my flesh as tribute for its task. A thousand blows from the knife handle now flattened the curve—even Mahmoud’s ring came into play, the knife jammed through it to form a rolling-pin. Once the curve had opened, I set about reducing the metal hook to the thickness of paper by grinding it—and my finger-tips—against the stone slab.
As I said, it was a ludicrous plan. I did not actually believe it was going to work: The hook would not be long enough, it would never be thin enough, the padlock was sturdier than I hoped. But as my only other option was to curl up hopelessly on the filthy stones, I kept going: rubbing, resting my fingers, rubbing again.
The brass wore away, becoming sharp enough to contribute another set of slices to my finger-tips. My fingers were so numb, merely picking up the slip of metal risked losing it, much less trying to use it.
Ten, twenty times I slid the boot-hook down the shaft of the lock. Each time, one edge would go in, an eighth or a quarter of an inch, before the flatness of the hook and the curve of the lock shaft would reach a point of disagreement. Half a dozen times, I thought it irretrievably stuck; each time, repeated attempts freed it, and I sat with my hands tucked under my arms for a while, to rest them, warm them, and allow the blood to dry. Then I would try again.
For the hundredth time—the five hundredth?—I wiggled the little scrap of metal down the padlock shaft to the hole and pushed it in. This time it was thin enough. In fact, it was too thin: At first I thought it was merely the lack of sensation in my fingers that lost track of the sliver of brass against the rough steel, but no. The thin hook was gone, vanished into the body of the lock.
My heart stopped. Hours of labour, my only hope of escape, gone. The urge to fling myself to the ground and wail rose up, but I ruthlessly forced it down. Without moving my right hand on the lock, I splayed and clenched my left fingers to restore circulation, until I could pick up the knife. Closing my eyes (as if this might help me to see!), I rested the blade along the shaft and probed, blindly, ever so gently, hoping I might ease the minuscule brass sheet up. I could feel it, but short of turning the lock upside-down, it did not seem inclined to come out. I started to move my arm, to lay the knife down and turn the lock over, and then stopped.
Maybe it had caught on something. Something internal. A rough bit, or …
With a prayer to the gods of the open skies, I gave the knife a tiny jab. Click.
I did not believe it. I had doubted for so long that anything was going to happen—I had been so convinced that I would be found here, in a year or a century, a rust-clogged padlock nestled against the bones of my foot—that I did not trust my senses.
But the lock snicked. More than that, it moved: Cold metal pressed against my palm.
I fumbled and dropped it, then grabbed it with horror, convinced that it had relocked itself—but it had not. The padlock haft swung free. A quick twist and it was out of the ankle shackle, and the chain fell away.
I stifled the urge to leap for freedom. I did shove away the chain. And rested my head against the pillar. I may have wept, a little. And then I snatched up the padlock to throw it into the darkness …
And stopped
.
I had spent hours rubbing metal on stone, but the metal had been brass. Brass does not participate in the chemistry of Fe2+O2=Fe2O3+ heat. The equation that iron and oxygen equals rust and heat has lit many a back-country camp-fire. In plain English, rust is the slow oxidation of iron; a spark happens when the oxidation is instantaneous.
A spark is merely a very rapid rust.
I had in my hand a million potential sparks, in the form of steel. The necessary flint, however, was stuck beneath a massive mud-brick pillar.
As I sat forward to lace up my boot, a tiny ting drew my attention to the blessed scrap of brass. I retrieved it, folding it into my shirt pocket, then set off on a crawl around the pillar, using the point of my knife to explore the stone foundation slab for cracks. Three-fourths of the way around, I found one.
A corner of the stone the size of my palm rose up a fraction of an inch, suggesting an ancient crack. Digging it free would be laborious, but with the knife, not impossible. I opened my mouth to tell Mahmoud what I was doing.
Then I sat back on my heels.
God, I was being stupid.
I thrust my right hand into its pocket, then changed hands, finding in the left side the small, chalky stone I had picked up on the road on Thursday, that Nurse Taylor had preserved for me on Friday, that I had not been able to bring myself to drop by the wayside Monday. Holding tight, I crawled back to where I had begun, felt around for the padlock, and prayed that the universal laws of physics held sway in this Mediaeval underworld.
The first try gave nothing but a dull scratching sound. The second, a clean tap, but no light. Was I, in fact, blind? Had this entire charade, from sneeze to crawl, been rooted in the delusion that the world was dark, when it was not? Raisuli was known for laying hot coins upon the eyes of displeasing messengers: Had his followers come up with some method of blinding that did not cause pain?
No—damn it, that was absurd. I palmed the stone and rubbed it about on the foundation-block for a minute, to scrape away the chalky surface, then grasped both objects as best I could, took aim, and slammed my hands together.
The fragile instant of light would have been invisible in a dim room; here, it was a miracle.
“Ehiy ’or!” I cried aloud. “Let there be light!”
And it was good—though not much assistance in seeing, when the spark was directly before my eyes.
I got to my feet. Facing the direction where I thought Mahmoud’s voice had come from, I held my iron-and-flint over my head, and cracked the pieces together.
The flash left an impression of great distance, a less impressive height, and rows of moth-eaten pillars radiating into the darkness. I took a step to the side, and bashed my primitive firestarter again, then again. And saw a man’s foot.
When I reached Mahmoud, I knelt in the darkness, laying my tools on the ground. My hands hesitated, fearful of what they might encounter, until I forced one to reach out and touch him. I found a corpse.
But the corpse reacted to my touch—or had it? Fumbling my way up his arm, I located the hollow of his neck, and pressed. I felt something … no, it was only my own pulse. I held the pose for a long time, my entire being focussed on the two fingers of my left hand, until at last I perceived a rhythm that was not my own. It was weak, and the motion of his chest was no deeper than a bird’s, but he was alive. Barely.
I worked my way back down to his hand, taking it in mine, cradling my arms around the hard skin and broad fingers. The joints were flaccid and it was as cool as a corpse, but the skin on its back betrayed the greatest threat: so dehydrated, it had the texture of half-tanned leather.
“Don’t you die, Mahmoud,” I commanded again, and sprang to my feet.
Each click gave me an instant of infinitesimal energy, so brief that only after many hours of darkness did it actually qualify as light. The sparks had the effect of a vastly slowed cinema projector, each one taking me a few steps closer to the sound of the drip. As I went, I scuffed a wide trail through the dust and fallen débris, terrified of losing my way. I had a bad moment when my tiny flare revealed what I thought was my own trail, running crosswise to my path. Several desperate sparks later, I realised that I had found the route of our captors. Towards the exit.
But I would investigate that path later. Now, I made for the steady sound, eventually rounding a pillar to find a dripping stalactite half as long as my arm. The pool at its base was small and malodorous, but when I had sopped my torn-off, cut-up, bloodstained sleeve in the water, I sucked up the result with more pleasure than I had ever taken from chilled water in a glass.
Although I could have done with the glass. Or a screw-top canteen. Even a medina water-seller’s musty goatskin would have done nicely. Here, I could either see, or I could carry water—unless … Yes, my boots were old, but I had kept them oiled, which meant they were more or less waterproof. After soaking my swollen hands in the frigid pool, I managed to tie together the laces of one boot. With it dangling around my neck, I succeeded in transporting a good cupful of the precious liquid back to Mahmoud.
I vowed that if I ever got back to Sussex, I would make a shrine to those boots.
Working blind, I wrenched off a small scrap of the sleeve and dribbled some water into his slack mouth. I did it again, and again, and when at last he actually swallowed, I felt as if a chorus of angels had burst into song. I put down the cloth and picked up his hand, rubbing his extremities for a time before starting the process over again. It was probably an hour later that I squeezed the last of the water into him, and he gave a faint groan.
“Mahmoud?” I said. “I’ve given you some water, there’s more available, then we’ll see what we can do about getting your— Ack! Stop!” My patient had gone from comatose to aggressive in an instant, his convulsive grab sending a bolt of pain up from my already throbbing hand. “Mahmoud, ow!” but my other hand had already knocked loose his grip. His response was to bring his other arm around—only this time he fastened onto my knee, which was uncomfortable but not actively excruciating.
“It’s all right,” I told him, “you’re not blind, you’re not alone, you have water. I’m here. You’re not alone.”
The grip on my leg seemed to pause. “Miri?”
“Right. I got my shackles off and found a pool of water dripping out of the ceiling. When you’re ready, I’ll go fetch some more of it, and then we can see about getting you free as well.”
At the word go, his fingers clamped down to keep me from carrying out the threat to walk away. I kept talking, as if I had not noticed. “I managed to turn one of the brass hooks on my boots into a shim and opened the padlock. It took me a while, and I’m afraid my hands may be too swollen to repeat it on yours, but once you’ve had some more water, we can let you try. I can also see the direction we were brought in, so we won’t have to wander around looking for the door.”
As I spoke, his grip lost its intensity, until, with an effort I could almost feel, he forced his fingers from my knee.
“Are you injured?” I asked him.
“No.” Which only meant that whatever had been done to him, it stopped short of broken bones.
“All right, I’m going back for some more water. Oh, but first—” I retrieved the larger of the two rings I wore around my neck and pressed it into his hand, folding his nerveless fingers around the warm gold. “This is yours. I’m sorry it got a bit nicked; I needed it to flatten the boot hook.”
The ring had been in Mahmoud’s family for three centuries. The newer ducal signet ring, created a mere two generations ago, remained with the child duke; this one Mahmoud had kept, his only possession from his former life.
With the boot around my neck again, I retraced my steps to the pool, drinking more myself, soothing my hands in the cold puddle, sopping up another cupful in my boot. Back at the pillar, Mahmoud was sitting up, and this time he could summon enough control to raise the sodden cloth to his lips and suck—taking his time, at my urging. While he did so, I set out to quarter
the immediate area, one spark at a time, in search of anything that might prove useful. A padlock key, for example. A keg of ship’s biscuits. Surely this enormous space hadn’t sat here for three centuries without drawing the attention of smugglers?
No key, but I did find the keg.
Well, not really a keg, and certainly no biscuits, but scraps of wood from what had once been some kind of a crate, half-buried under the collapse of a wall. I gathered them by touch, wary lest the rest of the wall come down, and secreted a doubled handful inside my garments. Enough to start a fire, pushing back the dark and cold, allowing me to cease this exhausting method of illumination before my agonised hands failed altogether.
Back at Mahmoud’s pillar, I emptied my pockets of the wood, chose one piece that felt a fraction dryer than the rest, and drew my knife to carve it to slivers, cursing under my breath as splinters joined the accumulated damage to my half-numb fingers. When I had a handful of scraps, I sorted them by feel (more jabs) into fine below and very fine on top. A frayed snippet from my shirt-tail added fibres. I took out my flint and padlock again, wondering if this could possibly work—and then I laid them aside, and dug through my pockets.
The scrap of onionskin paper, Mahmoud’s map and Idir’s writing, was the driest thing I had. I crumpled it, laid it atop the fibres, and knelt over the would-be fire.
“Say a prayer, Mahmoud,” I told my companion, then: “Sorry, what was that?” I leant forward, straining to hear his threadbare words.
“Truly,” he breathed, “Allah has cursed the Unbelievers and prepared for them a blazing fire.”
I laughed aloud, in surprise but also in pleasure: His earlier mumble had not been wordless, after all. It had been Arabic, I thought, the beginning of Al-Fatihah, the Opener of the Qur’an—poetic phrases a Moslem recites numerous times every day, a song of God’s greatness: “In the name of God, the merciful, praise be to God, the Lord of all being, the beneficent, the merciful, Master of the Day of Judgment.”
Garment of Shadows: A Novel of Suspense Featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes Page 22
