by Mike Carey
In other words, the investigation which Klaes had undertaken with so much reluctance had suddenly become a matter of personal urgency.
He climbed to his feet and began to retrace his steps through the forest. And it was now that his policy of walking entirely at random revealed its defects. He was completely lost. As long as the sun was still above the horizon he could follow it due westwards, which he thought ought to take him to the road. But sunset was coming quickly, and once it was dark he would find it hard to stay on the right line. He might wander for hours and make no progress – or fall over a tree root and break his skull on a rock.
He quickened his pace and was surprised to find, as the last dribbles of sunlight bled from between the trees, the ground falling away under his feet into a great declivity. Then he realised that he must have reached the Drench. It ran between Pokoj and the village and Klaes could therefore use it to find his way back. He could walk along the bottom of the defile and then, when he came to the bridge, climb up again onto the road.
Better still, a thin stream ran along its bottom, disappearing from time to time between rocks or under pebble beds, but always emerging again, and widening in places into pools a few feet across. Klaes knelt at one of these to drink and splash his face. The water was freezing but wonderfully refreshing to his parched palate.
He thought about washing his soiled uniform, but a long march in soaking wet clothes was more than he could contemplate – and if he missed his way the cold might kill him.
As it was, the walk took less time than he expected. Even at night the bridge was impossible to miss, its wooden pilings the only straight lines in the wild landscape. Klaes climbed the west bank and found himself at once on the road, the moonlight picking it out as a pale ribbon stitched into the fabric of the dark.
From there the way was easy. Easy, too, to gain entry to the grounds of Pokoj without being seen – he just walked in through one of the gaps in the tumbledown walls rather than through the gates. The sentries would have let him pass in any case, but he had no desire at that moment to be challenged and made to explain himself.
He walked through the tents, steering away from the fires that were still lit and the men who still sat and talked in the dark. There were many of these, and the conversations Klaes overheard as he passed were being conducted in hushed murmurs, with no laughter and no song. Perhaps he was not the only one who had found the morning’s entertainment hard to swallow.
As he was physically walking back along his former path, he had been doing much the same thing in his mind – thinking back through the chain of words and actions that he had followed since the colonel first ordered him to enquire into the villagers’ supposed secrets.
That trail had led him at last to Nymand Petos’s dishonoured corpse, but the corpse was only another cul-de-sac. It could not explain itself, or the reasons for its being where it was. For those answers Klaes had to revisit the cellar and search it again. Though it had seemed empty, it was the other half of the mystery and must surely contain some clue. Or if not, then it must point to something beyond itself that he had missed.
Late though it was, lights were still burning in the upstairs windows of the house. The officers seemed to be having no more restful a night than the enlisted soldiery. Perhaps they were keeping vigil for the man who had been killed, though Klaes thought that unlikely.
He went to his own quarters first. From under the colonel’s door as he passed he heard Dame August’s voice. Her tone seemed oddly formal, almost as though she were addressing a gathering. Klaes paused and listened despite himself, wondering if for some reason the lady had been allowed to speak at some forensic examination of the day’s events.
But he was disappointed: she was only reading from the Bible, and her text was a dry one. ‘Many have undertaken,’ she intoned, ‘to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word.’ The opening words of one of the Gospels, and whichever it was it did not seem to be very much to the purpose. Unless she was drawing some sort of a parallel between the carpenter who had died today and that other carpenter.
At the bottom of a trunk in his room Klaes found some candles. He took them with him back down to the kitchen, bringing his tinderbox too in case there was no fire in the kitchen grate to light a candle by.
The fire was dead, but the ashes were still red so it must have gone out not long before. A heavy, bitter smell of burned food hung in the air. Was the ash warm enough to light a wick by? It was worth trying, at least, since striking sparks off a steel in the dark and getting his damp charcloth to burn would be a laborious business.
Klaes knelt by the grate and held the candle into the centre of the glowing ash until the wick kindled slowly into flame. Then he made his way, holding the candle aloft, into the corner of the room where – to the best of his recollection – he would find the stairs down to the cellar.
The stairs were where he expected to find them, but there was something else that he did not expect. Sitting close by on a joint stool, wide awake in the near-dark, was Sergeant Molebacher. The candlelight seemed to assemble him in stages, from silhouette to huge and shapeless mass to finished man. It was a chilling sight to Klaes, like something congealing from his own conscience.
‘Molebacher,’ he said.
Molebacher raised a hand. Klaes thought at first that he was saluting, but he was only shielding his eyes against the light.
‘Lieutenant Klaes,’ he returned. ‘You were missed, sir. After the floggings. The colonel was calling for you.’
‘Was he?’ Klaes asked grimly. ‘Be that as it may, Sergeant, I believe you should stand to attention when an officer enters the room.’
Molebacher slid off the stool and came upright, without haste. The salute he offered was the thinnest sliver away from actual mockery. ‘Sir.’
‘What are you doing here?’ Klaes demanded.
‘I must have nodded off,’ the sergeant said. ‘It’s not unheard of, at night. You should try it yourself, sir.’
There was a definite tension underlying the insolence, an eagerness. Molebacher was not averse to a fight, even though he was speaking to a superior. He seemed to be inviting Klaes to try to discipline him.
Klaes chose not to. He would dearly have liked to relieve his feelings by laying into the corpulent quartermaster, but he felt detached at that moment from the chain of command and uncertain of the authority he would be calling on. Nonetheless, he did not wish to spend a second longer than he had to in the man’s company.
‘Dismiss,’ he snapped.
‘Please you, sir? This is my kitchen, sir. Perhaps it should be me as dismisses you.’
Klaes felt anger flare inside him, erecting the hairs on his neck and making the breath catch in his throat. He welcomed it like a friend, but did his best to keep his voice from rising to a shout.
‘Dismiss, Sergeant,’ he said again. ‘By God, you cur, if you’re still in my sight when I set this candle down, I’ll beat you out of the room with the flat of my fucking sword!’
He tilted the candle to let the wax drip down onto the end of the nearest table. There was no point in putting it down if it would not stand. He would be reduced to swiping at the sergeant in the dark, as if they were playing a game of blind man’s buff.
Molebacher held his ground a second longer, but only until Klaes succeeded in planting the candle upright in the hot wax and drew his blade. Then the sergeant took a step back, bringing him into contact with the wall.
‘You can’t beat me.’ he objected. ‘I’m no bondsman, I’m a fellow officer. And we’re both under the colonel’s authority!’
‘Then by all means plead your case to the colonel,’ Klaes said, swishing the sword. Molebacher retreated to the doorway, where he stopped and stared at Klaes. Then, as the lieutenant strode towards him, he turned with deliberate slowness and moved off into the darkness of the corrid
or.
Klaes retrieved his candle and descended the stairs.
The door at the bottom opened only a few inches before it hit something that blocked it. Klaes pushed it, tentatively at first and then with his shoulder to the wood, but he could not make it move any further.
He slid his hand through the gap to try to discover what was causing the blockage. Then a second later he pulled it back again with a curse. Someone had struck at him from inside the room, catching him a stinging blow across the back of his hand.
‘I sleep lightly, Eustach,’ a voice said, seemingly from right beside him.
Klaes rubbed the injured hand with the fingers of the other. He knew that voice. ‘Drozde,’ he muttered bitterly. Of course it would be her, if only because there was nobody he would be less pleased to see.
‘Who’s there? Klaes?’
‘Yes, Klaes. What are you doing locked in the cellar? Did Molebacher do this to you?’
‘I did it to myself.’
‘And now you’re fending off all comers? It’s possibly a little late in life, madam, to start repelling unseemly advances. You’ve made yourself a name and a living by inviting them.’
Even through the wood of the door and the mass of whatever was blocking it he heard Drozde sigh. ‘You can’t help yourself, can you, Klaes? You have to squeal at everyone else’s sins because you haven’t blood or courage enough to sin on your own behalf. You’re like the old lady at the back of the church, fishing for gossip around the confessionals. “Isn’t it awful? And can you speak a little louder?” ’
Klaes was about to utter some fierce rebuke, but the woman’s insult struck close enough to his shame to wake it again. He swallowed the tart words unspoken, and cast about for better ones.
‘Would it be possible for you to let me in?’ he asked at last, with as much courtesy as he could muster.
‘Why?’ Drozde sounded suspicious, as well she might. But it was the cellar he wanted access to, not her person, and he hastened to assure her of this.
‘Are you alone out there?’ she demanded next.
‘Well, yes, I am. I am alone. But I promise you, I won’t seek to take any advantage of your—’
‘I mean, has Molebacher gone?’
‘Yes. I sent him away.’
There was a brief interval of silence, followed by sounds of great effort and concerted movement from within, bumps and bangs and the groaning of wood. ‘All right,’ Drozde said at last. ‘Try it now.’
Klaes pushed the door again. It opened halfway, allowing him to slip through into the cellar. In the light of his own candle and another that was already lit inside the room, he was able to see what had caused the blockage. Someone – he supposed Drozde herself as there was nobody else in the room – had dragged the tall cupboard from its place against the further wall and turned it into a barricade.
Drozde still stood with her hands gripping the side of the massive piece of furniture, breathing hard. Klaes stared at her in bewilderment.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked her. ‘Did the sergeant offer you violence?’
Drozde laughed – a single hollow bark. ‘The sergeant offered me the sergeant. I said no thank you.’
Klaes nodded. In the light of what had happened at the floggings, he could understand the need to bolster that refusal with a physical barrier of some kind. ‘Are you hurt?’ he asked her.
‘No.’ But she hesitated, as though that was a more difficult question than it appeared. ‘He didn’t hit me. I wouldn’t let him get close enough for that. I couldn’t let him touch me after what he did to Hanslo.’
‘Hanslo? That was the carpenter?’
A nod. The woman’s face worked, moved from within by strong emotions, and she shook a little. Klaes had never seen her cry – he had always thought her much too hardened and brazen for that – but she looked as though some wild and watery grief were about to escape from her. And it seemed to him that she would not want him to see it.
‘Things have gotten out of hand,’ he said, deliberately putting on some of that old-maid prudishness again. ‘This whole business has been handled deplorably, with no thought to the wider concerns of our mission here.’
The ploy worked, pulling Drozde back from misery to her former irritation with him. ‘Our mission!’ she echoed. ‘You’re an ass, Klaes. Nobody but you is even thinking about the bloody Prussians, though – what? What are you staring at?’
What Klaes was staring at was the wall. There was a door there that he had not seen before: a wooden door bearing a bolt as long as Klaes’s forearm. He pointed stupidly.
‘The cupboard!’ he exclaimed.
‘What?’
‘The cupboard was in front of that door. It had been moved there to hide it. But you moved it away again!’
He turned to her, unable to keep the excitement from his face or from his voice. ‘I’ve been looking for this place,’ he said. ‘And you’ve found it for me. I owe you a debt, madam.’
‘Klaes, nobody calls me madam, or thinks madam when they see me. If you want to say thank you, give me my name.’
‘Drozde. Thank you. For your assistance.’ He gave her an uncertain smile, and then – because formality died hard with him – bowed from the waist. ‘I’m obliged to you.’
‘You’re far from the first.’
The crude joke made Klaes blush like a schoolboy.
Drozde looked on while Klaes drew the bolt.
Magda stood beside her and watched too, seeming both scandalised and excited. ‘What’s he doing?’ she demanded. ‘Why is he down here? Is he your friend now?’
Drozde turned to the girl and put a finger athwart her lips, urging her to be quiet. There would be time for explanations. Right now she wanted Klaes to be done with whatever it was that he needed to do down here so she could leave with him. He had said that he’d sent Molebacher on his way, but it was hard to imagine the stolid and monumental sergeant blown away like thistledown by the weightless, mannerly lieutenant. When she went back up into the kitchen she would walk behind Klaes and set her feet in his bootprints. His presence might deter Molebacher from active hostilities, but there was no way his bare word would do it.
Klaes swore a maidenly oath. The bolt was drawn back but the door still didn’t open when he pulled on it.
‘Do you want me to help?’ Drozde asked.
‘It’s locked,’ Klaes told her acerbically. He tapped the lockplate, a square of black iron right at the top of the door. ‘I’ll try to force it – you should probably stand back.’
‘The key is under the floorboard there,’ Magda said. ‘That’s where the men always put it after they’re finished.’
Drozde was careful not to answer her, and she didn’t trouble to explain the matter to Klaes. She just went to where Magda was pointing, levered up the loose board and took out the key. She handed it to Klaes, who stared at it in dumbstruck astonishment.
‘The board was standing proud,’ Drozde lied. ‘I thought something might be hidden there.’
The lieutenant tried the key in the lock. It turned freely.
Beyond was a well of pure dark that their candles could not fathom. The two of them shared a momentary glance containing one part of triumph to two of presentiment. Klaes led the way down a short flight of wooden steps into a passage with a dirt floor. Drozde took up the candle from the lid of her trunk and followed, with Magda chattering at her side. ‘Nobody likes it down here. We hardly ever come. Mostly it’s underground, until they dig it out. And then parts of it are underground again later, when they do the rebuilding and put in the spa and the gym. It’s not a very nice place to be, most of the time.’
‘No, it’s not,’ Drozde agreed, keeping her voice low. The narrow corridor stank of dampness, dust and rot – a potent brew of odours that made her feel somewhat light-headed. Spiderwebs draped the walls and bellied down from the beamed ceiling like bunting at a wedding breakfast. The bones of mice crunched under her boots.
They passed two ro
oms, really no more than widenings of the passage. Both were mostly empty, though in the first a broken table and some empty wine racks had been propped against the far wall. Drozde’s attention, however, was fixed on something else. There was a ghost down here. It was not like most of the other ghosts of Pokoj, but like the phantoms she had encountered elsewhere, or the one on the floor of the kitchen upstairs – a stain on the curdled air, leached of colour and all but shapeless. It had a face, though, or at least the suggestion of one, and a mouth that opened and closed like the mouth of a fish. Its hands moved ceaselessly in a combing motion across its unfinished features. It emitted a low, broken sound like the thrumming of a jaw harp.
Drozde stole a questioning glance at Magda, but Magda didn’t notice because she was scowling at Klaes. She seemed to resent the man’s intrusion into a moment that she and Drozde had been sharing.
They came to a cross corridor leading off to left and right. Klaes stopped and knelt down, playing the candle flame over the packed earth. To one side it was clear, to the other scuffed and rutted with the passage of many feet and many heavy objects dragged or pushed. That was the way they took.
In a larger room at the end of the passage they found their way blocked and their questions answered. From floor to ceiling, this wider space was filled with barrels. And the barrels, as Lieutenant Klaes soon ascertained by staving one in with his boot, were filled with brandy.
His face veered between emotions, but disapproval won the field. ‘Smuggling!’ he exclaimed. ‘This is what the mayor wanted to keep hidden from us – and this is why he lied to me about Petos!’
‘Petos,’ whispered a second voice, so faint that Drozde almost mistook it for an echo. She turned her head to find the ghost – the washed-out, vestigial ghost they had passed in the corridor – floating close to her shoulder. It pressed its hands together as though it was imploring her. She recoiled in instinctive disgust.
