In the Palace of the Khans Page 14

  In the centre of the hall the chieftains waited, ten of them in a curving row, facing the dais. Their robes were in the same style as the President’s, but in different colours. Three of them had less grand versions of his hat, the rest a sort of floppy turban. Behind each of them in a second row stood a couple of men with a polished wooden box on a low table between them. They wore turbans, jackets and baggy trousers, and a sort of sash running down from shoulder to hip, like a sword-belt. Their sashes matched the robes of the chieftains in front of them, red and brown, black and orange, yellow and green, or whatever. Like football shirts. This must be the Premier League.

  A few uniformed functionaries stood in one corner of the dais, opposite a band of musicians carrying strange brass instruments and drums. There was no one else at floor level, apart from the usual guards standing well out of camera shot by the main entrance and at various doorways around the hall. The other camera was filming about thirty women wearing handsome headscarves who were crowded into three of the arches of the opposite gallery. The remaining arches were empty.

  Nigel turned to speak to Taeela, but she was rapt in the spectacle, her lips parted, her cheeks flushed with excitement. Beyond her Fohdrahko was watching through the strip of pierced ornamental stonework that ran up beside the next pillar.

  The seconds on Nigel’s wristwatch slid towards noon. The band stirred and raised their instruments. A drum rattled. The brass burped and hooted through a fanfare. In the middle of it the President appeared at the top of the stairs. The chieftains and audience clapped enthusiastically as he came slowly down to the dais. They made an astonishing amount of sound. No, they didn’t. There was canned applause coming from somewhere

  He waited a full minute and then held up a hand for silence. One of the functionaries stepped forward, made a brief pronouncement, opened a scroll and called a name. The chieftain to the left of the line, a dignified bearded man, came forward, followed by one of his henchmen carrying his box. They climbed to the dais and halted. The chieftain placed his palms together, bowed his head and spoke in a low voice. The President held out his right hand, fully open, thumb upward. The chieftain took it between both of his, bowing again over the three hands, spoke a few words and let go. The henchman opened the box and offered it to the chieftain, who very solemnly took out a child’s doll in a nurse’s uniform—the sort of thing you might buy at a cheap market stall—and rotated slowly so that all the imaginary audience could see it, while deafening applause filled the Great Hall and died away. Finally the chieftain presented the doll to the President, who thanked him unsmiling and passed it to another functionary, who put it on a table at the back of the dais.

  One after the other the remaining chieftains repeated the process. The next one contributed a neat model of a bridge, the next one what Nigel guessed was a well-head, the next one a model pylon, and so on. Some of the chieftains seemed happy enough in their fancy dress, others looked as if they were thought they were being forced to make fools of themselves in public. There was one tall, angry-looking man whose colours were black and brown, like a hornet, who looked as if he’d rather have spat in the President’s eye than give him the model of a tree he had actually come with.

  When the last one had done his stuff the President squared his shoulders, raised his head and spoke for a couple of minutes to the imaginary audience occupying the floor in front of him and the arcade above. The applause was thunderous. In the middle of it Taeela appeared at the top of the stairs.

  The applause redoubled. Nigel heard the shots, coming from somewhere to his right along the gallery, but didn’t at once recognise what they were. Nor did he see the President fall, because like everyone else in the hall he was watching Taeela start down the stairs, smiling, demure.

  Three steps down she stopped. Her face changed. Only then did he look to see what she was staring at.

  The President lay sprawled on the lowest stairs dais in his purple robe. His hat was underneath him. His face streamed with blood. Everyone was shouting and milling about. Some of the soldiers had dropped their spears and started to run. Nobody had turned off the canned applause. A group of real soldiers burst through a door under the far arcade, firing into the air as they came. Nigel darted behind a pillar and peered through the screen, then stood, transfixed, every muscle locked in place.

  What happened next was all his old nightmares made real. The smashed and bloodied horror on the stairs came to life, heaved itself onto one elbow and with its other arm made an urgent gesture to Taeela. Go!

  She was already half way down the stairs, but she halted, just caught herself from falling, lifted her skirts and raced back up. Behind her the horror collapsed into a heap of purple and gold and blood.

  Nigel shuddered himself out of the trance of shock and turned to run for the doorway. The guard at the door half-raised his gun and gestured to him to stay where he was. Another guard was watching the chaos below from behind a pillar at the far corner of the gallery. Nigel didn’t think he’d been there before.

  He waited, his heart pounding, his throat working to swallow nothing. The guard growled something, gestured again with his gun, and strode past him. Carefully he turned his head to see if it was safe to make a dash for the door.

  Taeela had just come careering round the corner. The guard moved forward, ignoring Fohdrahko in the shadows of his pillar, and raised his gun, shouting at her when she still came on. She heard him through the clamour and halted, staring, only a few paces from him, and started to raise her arms.

  Fohdrahko moved with extraordinary speed, three lurching steps, with his right arm already swinging out for the strike. Nigel barely glimpsed the thin blade of his dagger before it was deep in the guard’s neck. The guard collapsed. Fohdrahko, unable to halt the impetus of his attack, caught his foot on the falling body and would have tumbled on top of it if Taeela hadn’t dashed forward and managed to hold him upright.

  Nigel turned and raced for the door, barely mastering his panic flight in time to halt and wait ready to close it. The soldier he had seen at the other end of the gallery was running towards them shouting. He was only a few paces away when Taeela helped Fohdrahko stagger through the door and Nigel could slam it shut and shove the bolts home as the guard flung his weight against it.

  He ran for the inner door and swung it shut, then waited while Fohdrahko, wheezing heavily and supporting himself against the door-jamb, opened the hidden panel and worked the mechanism that slid the big bolts home.

  Taeela was over by an open drawer of the desk strapping a belt round her waist. She tapped at a keyboard that had appeared in the surface of the desk, and a section of the panelling beside the desk slid away, leaving a narrow opening with darkness beyond it. She stepped through, gesturing to Nigel to join her. He found himself in a narrow passage stretching away to left and right. Fohdrahko stumbled through behind him and closed the panel.

  CHAPTER 11

  Absolute darkness. The only sounds Taeela’s steady panting, Fohdrahko’s wheezing gasps, and the distant, battering thuds of the soldiers trying to break their way in from the gallery. Nigel groped in his bag.

  “I’ve got a torch in here somewhere,” he whispered.

  “Wait,” said Taeela. “Let Fofo pass. He knows the way in the dark. Then hold my scarf and follow me. Where is your hand?”

  Huddling against the inner wall to let Fohdrahko squeeze by, Nigel shoved the torch into his pocket and felt for her fingers. She pushed the tasselled end of her headscarf into his grip and at once started to move away. From behind them came a splintering crash of the outer door giving way and then more, louder thuds as the soldiers started to batter at the inner door.

  Taeela halted so suddenly that Nigel stumbled into her.

  “Wait,” she whispered. “Fofo makes the trap work. Give me your torch.”

  He switched it on and gave it to her. Fohdrahko had vanished, but they passed him as they hurried forward, standing in a narrow niche in the right hand wall, with his han
d twisting something out of sight. Taeela slowed her pace, and he heard the soft mutter of her voice, counting, by the sound of it. A dozen paces further along she halted again and knelt. Nigel waited, quivering. The racket from the living-room entrance paused. A decisive voice gave orders.

  Taeela opened the purse on her belt and took out a tool like the blade of a table knife with a backward-curving slot near the tip. She slid this into the crack between two of slabs in the wall, felt around with it until the slot engaged and levered downwards. A catch clicked. She rose and switched off the torch.

  “We wait here,” she whispered. “We are the bait for the trap.”

  With his heart slamming he stood in the pitch dark until the silence was broken a violent explosion from beyond the living-room, followed by men’s shouts, nearer now, fading into uncertainty. The voice they’d heard before asked a question. Another, quieter, answered. Taeela gasped and started to say something, but her words were drowned by a crash from along the passage. Light streamed through the broken panelling. Armed men burst through the gap.

  Nigel turned to run, but Taeela stayed where she was, blocking the way.

  “No,” she muttered. “They must see us.”

  She pushed past him, raised her arms in surrender and waited, silhouetted against the light from the broken panel. Nigel forced himself to copy her. His throat kept trying to swallow saliva that wasn’t there. A torch was switched on, its beam blinding. A man called out in Dirzhani, his meaning obvious.

  “Got them!”

  Fohdrahko had been setting a trap. Taeela and Nigel were the bait. It had better work. Boot-steps thumped on the paving, nearer and nearer.

  A man yelled. The beam of the torch blanked out as a blackness rose from the floor, filling the passage, except for a faint crack of light running round its edges. From beyond came more yells, some dwindling away downwards and snapping short.

  Calls now, anxious, questioning. Only echoes returned, and the rustle of running water.

  Mutterings. Footsteps receding. Two pairs, or perhaps three. Taeela switched the torch on and Fohdrahko emerged from his niche. Just beyond him a shallow pit had opened in the floor, where a whole segment of paving stones had swung up, like one arm of a see-saw, to fill the corridor from wall to wall, allowing the other arm to swing down as soon as the weight of the men advancing onto it had altered the balance, and tipped them down into the water far below.

  Fohdrahko muttered briefly. Taeela translated.

  “He has locked it. They cannot open it from that side. Nigel, did you hear …? No, we must go now. Let Fofo come by. You take the torch.”

  Unused adrenalin thundering through his bloodstream, Nigel watched her kneel again and pull on the gadget she’d inserted into the wall. Two of the stone slabs at the foot of the wall hinged apart. She helped the old man sit and hunker round until his feet were in the opening. He edged forward until he could grasp something out of sight and then, with Taeela’s help and gasping with effort, slither himself further in, pull himself upright and disappear.

  “Now you,” she said.

  The opening led into a shaft with a series of iron rungs let into in the opposite wall. Nigel slung the loop of the torch round his wrist and wriggled himself through, feet first. Above him the shaft vanished into darkness, but below him he could see Fohdrahko climbing slowly down, leaning his back against the wall behind him each time he needed to shift his grip. A catch clicked overhead as Taeela locked the slabs into place. There was a long wait, hanging in the dark shaft while Fohdrahko twisted himself half round and used a tool like Taeela’s to open another pair of slabs. He rested, gasping, and struggled back up and out.

  Nigel found him sitting slumped against the wall of a passage like the one above. His breath wheezed painfully in and out, and the shadows cast by the torch turned his face into a Halloween mask.

  Taeela crawled out and swung the two slabs shut. She twisted round, still kneeling, and stared at Fohdrahko and asked a question. He muttered an answer. She shook her head and waited, frowning. He didn’t move.

  “He looks pretty well all in,” said Nigel.

  “He is so tired. His heart is not good. He says to leave him.”

  “Suppose we got him onto his feet. One each side. Then he could lean on me. I think there’s just room.”

  She spoke to Fohdrahko, who nodded and managed a feeble smile. Nigel crouched on his right so that he could pull the old man’s arm round his shoulders and waited for Taeela to get into place.

  “One, two, three, and up,” he counted.

  He could almost have done it on his own. The eunuch felt as light as a dead leaf and quivered uncontrollably. His feebleness, his need of Nigel, pushed terror into the background. Their shoulders brushing the walls on either side, they crept along behind Taeela in the direction they had come from on the floor above, rounded the shaft down which their pursuers had fallen, and saw the passage stretching ahead of them into darkness.

  Taeela kept the beam of the torch trained on the bottom of the right hand wall. Again he heard the mutter of counting. She stopped, knelt, and used her gadget to open two slabs that looked no different from all the others. They helped Fohdrahko kneel and crawl slowly through. Nigel followed and Taeela came last, pulling the slabs together and locking them firm.

  At the sound of the solid masonry settling into place things changed. The desperation of flight receded like water flowing down a plug-hole. Nigel rose to his feet, gave a long, slow, sigh and looked around.

  They were in a fair-sized room, except that the ceiling was low enough for him to be able to reach up and touch it with his fingertips. There were bright-patterned mats on the floor, two cots with gaudy bedspreads, chairs, a table, a cupboard with drawers, two shelves of books, and a washstand with basin and jug, and a mirror above it. Everything was simple and solid and old-fashioned, apart from a slick-looking PC console against the left-hand wall.

  Three walls were whitewashed, but covered with large cartoonish outlines of rabbits painted in different colours, like a nursery frieze for a giant’s baby. The fourth wall looked out over the river through the same stone lattice as the room above, with a small curtained area in the corner beside it.

  Taeela paid no attention to any of this. She gestured to Nigel to help, and again they lifted Fohdrahko to his feet and walked him over to one of the cots and shuffled round until they could lower him to a sitting position. He made feeble efforts to rise as Taeela knelt and took off his sandals, then sighed and let her help him twist round and lie down.

  She stood and spoke to him firmly, a nurse with her patient, and bent and kissed his forehead. He smiled and closed his eyes.

  Now, at last, she loosed her hold on herself, relaxing the force of will that had kept her going, decisive and clear-headed in the face of horror and loss. Her shoulders sagged and the set of her jaw slackened and voice quivered.

  “Oh, Nigel! Dudda is dead! He is dead! He is dead!” She croaked.

  The appeal was intense, direct. Her misery and need were all there was. He lurched towards her and wrapped his arms clumsily round her. She collapsed sobbing onto his shoulder.

  And he needed her as much as she needed him, someone to cling to, share it all with, the horror of what had been done, the dread and anxiety of what would happen next. His parents—what had happened to them? There’d been gunfire in the Great Hall, bullets, splinters of marble and lapis flying around … And Fohdrahko, the only one who could help, himself helpless …

  “Oh, Nigel!”

  “How …? Who …?”

  He barely knew what he was asking. The words had just come. Something outside the nightmare.

  Her sobs cut short. He felt her body stiffen.

  “Avron,” she whispered, easing herself away from him.

  “Avron Dikhtar? What about him?”

  “In my room. I knew his voice. He said where the men must break the wall. He knows where the place is. Perhaps one time we forgot to switch off the closed circ
uit. He does not know the numbers to open the door.”

  Yes! Nigel’s mind snatched at the chance to think. Mr Dikhtar had been scared stiff that morning—he’d known this was going to happen. It had been a new guard on the door, who hadn’t made much of a job of searching Nigel, but he’d been in the plot and tried to capture Taeela … And that morning Nigel had set the alarms off, Mr Dikhtar had been in control of security. He’d’ve known a lot of the President’s guards were out of action. They were training new ones, Taeela had said. He could have picked them …

  And the men who’d come storming into the Great Hall, they’d been soldiers … Someone high up in the army must be in the plot too …

  And Lake Vamar. The plotters had already set things up there at so that when the time came they could make it look like some local hunter taking pot shots at the President when he next paid a visit. They didn’t expect to nail him then, but it would allow them to send most of the loyal soldiers up there to crack down on the villagers. Then they’d move their own men into the palace and stage their coup. He’d taken the Ridgwells there on the spur of the moment, and they weren’t really ready, but the helicopter crash had made it too good a chance to miss, and the Tribute ceremony gave them a perfect target, so they’d gone ahead.

  Footsteps sounded on the floor above. Nigel froze, straining to listen. Three, no, four people coming into the room. Voices, questioning. Somebody already there, nearer the window, answering. A man giving orders, the words muffled, but the urgency and anger clear. The Dirzhani for “Yes, sir.” Footsteps—two sets? Three?—hurrying out of the room.

  Taeela was at the PC console waiting for the screen to settle. Nigel crept across and watched over her shoulder. Her fingers moved decisively on the keys, and he was looking down at an angle into her living room from high in the corner to the left of the door. He could see the area around the sofa and TV, the window and the whole of the right-hand wall including the desk, with the splintered panel beside it.

  The room seemed to be empty, but after a moment or two a soldier hurried in carrying a tool-box, which he placed in front of the desk and opened. He knelt and tried the drawers, but they seemed to be locked, so he chose a tool and started to pry at the central one.