In the Palace of the Khans Read online

  “I don’t want it. I didn’t cheat, but I didn’t play fair. He’s right. What I did wasn’t chess. You can give it to Halli and Sulva if you like.”

  “Uh?”

  “Those kids we picked up on the way here. For their dowries or something.”

  “Right. Wanted to ask you about them anyway. One of ’em told my niece it wasn’t the bodyguard dealt with the thugs who’d kidnapped them. It was you and the Khanazhana.”

  “Hell! I told them …! And they weren’t even there! They didn’t see it happen!”

  “They’d heard the bidzhaya and the bodyguard talking about it. It’s a problem?”

  Nigel explained.

  “Got you,” said Mizhael. “Other way round here, though. Sort of thing we go for big. Great propaganda. Khanazhana not just a crazy kid, but putting herself on the line to look after her people. And these guys we’re hoping to get to go back into the palace with her, they’ll be impressed.”

  “Well, for God’s sake leave me out of it or Dad will be really in the shit. I didn’t do that much anyway.”

  “Bit more than that by what I hear, but suits me. We don’t want the bastards telling everyone we’re in the pocket of the Brits or anyone else. We’ll write you out of it.

  “There’s just one thing. We’ve got a problem. That map the Khanazhana brought. Doctor Ghulidzh, Dad’s librarian, he’s got a cold. Daughter won’t let him out of the house.”

  “I could go round.”

  “Doesn’t want that either. He’s getting on, and he’s got a weak chest. Best she can do is let him read the old script to her and she’ll transcribe it into modern. Lily-Jo’s enlarged the Khanazhana’s map onto separate sheets and we’ve sent a set round to him. Won’t be that quick even like that. Limit to what the daughter will let him do. Trouble is, Khanazhana’s not going to get anyone to come aboard with her if she hasn’t got a plan of the passages they can use. Whole notion’s crazy enough as it is. Without that …”

  He spread his hand in a gesture of despair.

  Nigel hesitated. If Taeela couldn’t get anyone to go with her then the whole idiot scheme would be off. Except that it wouldn’t. She’d go on her own if she had to. Or with just Rahdan.

  “OK, I’ll give it a go,” he said. “It looked pretty hopeless.”

  “Good egg. At least you’ve been there. If you can locate the bit you were in, that might be a start. I’ve got blow-ups of the map for you, of course, and Lily-Jo’s pulled an outline of the palace off Google Earth, which’ll give you a framework. I’ll set you up in the library where you’ll be able to spread stuff out. Not much chance you’ll be disturbed in there. If you need me, it’s seven-three on the house phone.”

  The library was a tall, well lit room with several bays of shelves down either side, carrying row on row of huge old leather-bound books, none of which looked as if it had been opened for a century. The central bays were wide enough to leave room for two fair-sized tables with a few stools either side.

  Nigel perched on a stool and spread the various sheets out on the table. Google Earth showed the palace as a simple rectangle, two squares fitted together, with the main block, including the Great Hall, fronting the river and the courtyard block behind. None of the plans on Fohdrahko’s map were anything like the right shape to fit into it. Instead they were the shape of the pages of the map itself, with a series of parallel lines running up the page, curving back at the top and running down, only to curve back up at the bottom. The whole thing was sprinkled with what must be letters of old script, sometimes a short line of writing, but mostly just single letters a bit like Egyptian hieroglyphics, some of them with circles round them.

  He chose a page at random and studied it more closely. Sometimes a line branched and ran on parallel to itself for a bit, but then one of the branches stopped short before the end of the page while the other one ran on. A main passage, with a short one branching off? But not so close to it, surely …

  No, of course not. It wasn’t that kind of a map. It was a route map, the sort Toby drew for Libby when she was driving anywhere she didn’t know, a single line for the road she had to follow with anything she needed to know, turnings, side roads, roundabouts and which exit to take, marked along it.

  Yes! A route map of the passages. The passages and nothing else. Not the Great Hall. Not any of the other rooms and corridors and stairs. Not the outer shell of the palace, even. It didn’t have to fit into that. All it had to do was fit into the page. And the bits of old script were the need-to-knows—spy-holes, hidden entrances, shafts, drop-traps …

  His eye was caught by a kink in one of the lines, a place where it turned a millimetre off course and then sharply back. A place where the real passage, the passage hidden in the walls of the palace, turned a corner.

  Near it was a tiny picture. Not a bit of old script, which he’d taken it for at first, but a careful drawing of a tufted duck. Unmistakable. He blinked, stared, and saw that there were birds and animals all over the sheet, a swallow, a horse, a fox, a pig, an eagle …

  What the …?

  He looked at the other sheets. Two were like the first one, animals all over the place. One had fewer animals but made up for it with a much more complicated set of lines. That would be the level below the Great Hall, where there was space for a lot more rooms. One was simpler, with fewer lines and only two or three animals. That must be the hidden level. The top half of the final sheet was filled by a few simple lines running to and fro across the page. No pictures. Just one shaft with an entrance, and two grid symbols he hadn’t seen anywhere else. The dungeons. And below that a patch of writing on one side of the page and on the other a column of single symbols with two or three words beside them. Nigel recognised at once what he was looking at. Not single syllables, but a list of map-symbols and their meanings. The need-to-knows.

  So what did they need to know, the people the map was meant for? The hidden entrances, spy-holes, shafts, drop-traps and so on. And there they were, tiny icons, obvious the moment you knew how to read them; a square with a line down the middle—two entrance slabs; oval with pointy ends—he drew a dot into the middle of one and it became an eye—spy-hole; square with three lines across it—rungs in a shaft; square with slant line across and a thicker line running down from its centre—see-saw—drop-trap; those grids—the iron gratings that sealed off the tunnel through which they’d escaped; and two he didn’t recognise, a couple of horizontal lines a little way apart, and two columns of shorter horizontal lines (more rungs?) joined at the top by the same pair of lines.

  So far so good, but not good enough. You were creeping along this pitch dark passage with nothing but a blank wall either side, apart from one place where a spy-hole let in a glimmer of light. Somewhere in that wall was a place where the mortar would give way and let you insert a key like Taeela’s and unlock the entrance marked on the map. She hadn’t gone poking around. She’d known exactly where to find the shaft.

  He’d heard the mutter of her voice, counting. She’d needed his torch …

  Memory shaped the image in his mind, Taeela’s figure, black against the glow of the torch, the endless line of identical slabs at the foot of the wall fading away into darkness … There was only one thing she could be counting. The slabs themselves.

  He chose a line and followed it along. The same pattern repeated itself the whole way. First one of the map symbols, a spyhole, say, then a letter in a circle, then an entrance, another circled letter, a corner, a circled letter …

  The circled letters weren’t letters, they were numbers. Numbers of slabs between one point and the next.

  Got it!

  He straightened, stretched his arms wide, threw his head back and breathed a deep, exultant breath. The sunlight that had shone slantwise on the table now streamed across him. He’d been sitting on his stool, barely moving, for over an hour. The muezzin was calling the faithful to prayer from the minaret across the square.

  What next? Try and draw some of th
e passages out as they actually were. The only part of the palace he knew enough about was the bit around the room where they’d spent that awful, endless afternoon surrounded by the guardian rabbits that Fohdrahko had drawn for Taeela when she was a small child. The hidden level was the simplest sheet anyway.

  There were only three animals on it. The one in the bottom left-hand corner was a rabbit. No it wasn’t. The tiny, delicate drawing was a hare. Not guardian rabbits—guardian hares. That had been the Hare Room. The rooms—at least the ones that mattered—were named after animals. Wherever there was an animal there was a room.

  To the left of the hare a passage led to the shaft by which they’d reached it. Just below the hare was the entrance to the room. A little box beside it represented the room itself and a dotted line across the box led to another entrance and the passage beyond. At this point the line on the map curved back up the page, but there was the corner they’d turned into the long stretch across the front of the Great Hall.

  By the time Mizhael came to fetch him he had the ground plan of the whole of that corner of the hidden level sketched out clearly enough to show how Fohdrahko’s map worked. But that was only the easy bit, the stuff he’d seen. Just a tiny part of the immense, haunted labyrinth. And it was only the passages. What about the honeycomb of rooms the other side of the spy-holes? The assault party would need to know about them. He’d seen the Great Hall and Taeela’s living room and the lobby outside it and part of the President’s offices, and that was all. Maybe he could work out some of the rest of it from the measurements of the passages once he and Lily-Jo had got them sorted, but it would take for ever. He’d have to ask Taeela. She’d lived there most of her life. And Rahdan would know about the bits the guards used …

  “Never mind about that—it’s a great start,” said Mizhael. “Show Lily-Jo. You played Monsters of the Maze? She was working on that when I met her. I tell her she’s wasted cooking noodles. Lunch now, anyway, and then we’ll go and make your phone call.”

  Lily-Jo had done them Chinese food, and it was pretty good, but Nigel was too brain-dead to feel hungry. Fortunately Doglu had decided that black hair wasn’t scary, the way blond was, so Nigel and Mizhael kept him amused by hiding toys for him to find while Lily-Jo took what Nigel had done away to scan it section by section onto her computer.

  After lunch Mizhael got a great big beast of a quad bike out of the garages at the back of the palace and clipped a large black case with an odd bulge in the lid onto the rack behind the rear seat. They roared up through the narrow streets to a turreted gateway, and out onto the ridge above Sodalka. The road was little more than a steep track along the southern flank of the ridge, with terraced fields and orchards below it, but only a boulder-and-scrub-strewn slope above. After a mile or so they turned off and threaded their way up a slope almost as steep as a roof, stopping at a small natural platform at the crest of the ridge. Sodalka’s russet tiles and green or gold domes and leafy courtyards were beneath them on their left. Only a few modern looking buildings lay outside the ancient walls, lining the main road south. Beyond the city the limitless mottled plain reached away westward.

  “Pretty, uh?” said Mizhael. “Doesn’t bear thinking what a bomb or two might do to it. I’ll be a few minutes setting up.”

  Nigel took some photos for his blog, if ever he got back to it, then looked for birds. A dust cloud emerged from behind the next ridge and began to circle towards the city. The dark shape or shapes that produced it came and went in the swirling dust, but resolved through his monocular into about a dozen horsemen, one of them holding a little red and black pennon.

  “You’ve got visitors,” he said

  “That’s the Akhlavals,” said Mizhael, glancing up. “They’re a primitive lot. They’ve got perfectly good jeeps, but they’re putting on a show for the Khanazhana. There’s a couple of chaps there might come in on things.”

  “You’re going to tell them what we’re trying to do?”

  “Those two, maybe, in a day or two. Most of ’em we’re taking the line that the Khanazhana’s offer is just a crazy kid’s idea, and we’re going to use her to negotiate for what we can get, our own people back, for a start, and then some kind of a constitution plus a say in what’s in it, etcetera, etcetera.

  “Same time we’re getting in touch with some of the Varaki units in the army. Akhlaval’s brother’s a colonel, and there’s plenty of others going to be pretty disaffected—we’ve got to do stuff like that or the bastards in DD’ll get suspicious … Nearly there …”

  While he was talking Mizhael had connected various leads from the case to a small satellite dish on a folding tripod, and others to the battery of the quad bike. He used a compass to align the dish, aiming it horizontally out across the plain. When he was satisfied he put on a pair of headphones and twiddled control knobs, then made a brief test call on an ordinary handset, rang off and gave the handset to Nigel.

  “Set this up for business purposes,” he said. “There’s a mast out there, sixty kilometres over the border. We’ve got our own mast, but everything’s monitored. You should be safe with this.”

  Nigel dialled carefully and waited through the clicks and beeps and silences. At last his father answered.

  “British Embassy in Dirzhan. Ambassador speaking.”

  “Hi, Dad.”

  “Nigel! You appear to be in Kyrgyzstan.”

  “Oh … it just looks like that, I suppose. Can’t explain.”

  “Never mind. There’s a rumour that the Khanazhana’s in Sodalka.”

  “Um …”

  “No, better not tell me. I’m afraid your mother’s out. My fault. I pretty well forced her to get out of the embassy for a bit, while the curfew was lifted.”

  “Hell! Hang on. Mike, any chance we do this again tomorrow? Mum’s out … Same time?… Did you get that, Dad?”

  “That should be all right. I take it you’re safe with friends for the moment.”

  “Yes, we’re all fine. Will you tell Rick?”

  “Ah … His family’s still with you, then? I’m afraid I’ve got some disturbing news for you to pass on to them. Tell me, that first call you made to us—you did it from his house?”

  “Yes.”

  “That explains it then. Yesterday the authorities lifted some of their emergency measures and Rick went down to check on his house and hasn’t come back. The authorities claim to be making every effort to find him, but we’ve reason to believe they’ve got him and are planning to charge him with helping the Khanazhana to escape. They’ll claim he doesn’t have diplomatic immunity because he’s got Dirzhani citizenship.”

  “Bastards! Yes, I’ll tell Janey. Does that mean they’ve got everything under control?”

  “By no means. There’s still a night curfew in Dara Dahn, road blocks, foot patrols, house searches and so on. My impression is that their hold is pretty precarious, with most of the army still sitting on the fence. There’s rumours of a mutiny in the barracks at Dorvadu and unrest elsewhere. I and my diplomatic colleagues are pressing them to draw up a provisional constitution leading to the introduction of democratic government. Can you give me any kind of a line on Varaki reactions?”

  “They’re hopping mad. The Dirzh lot are still holding seven of their chieftains hostage in Dara Dahn. Some of them are all set for a fight, which they’d lose. But most of them know that, so they want to try and sort things out, get their hostages back, have a say in the constitution, all that.”

  “Useful as far as it goes. I have deliberately not asked you about the Khanazhana. I’ll leave it to you to tell me what you can, when you can.”

  “Well … Hang on …”

  He’d turned in response to a touch on his elbow. Mizhael made an urgent gesture for him to ring off and pointed south. Three large helicopters had appeared, two or three miles away.

  “Sorry, Dad,” he said. “Something’s happening.”

  “All right. I’ll tell your mother you’re safe and well, and will call
tomorrow.”

  “Thanks, Dad.”

  “Good luck, Niggles.”

  He signed off. Mizhael was already starting to dismantle his equipment. Nigel gave him the handset and watched the approaching helicopters. They had almost reached the walls of Sodalka when they swung out over the desert and then in again to circle the city. Mizhael rose and stood shielding the dish with his body as they clattered along beside the ridge, well below the level where he and Nigel were standing. The horsemen on the plain below had stopped to watch.

  “Probably just a show of strength,” he muttered, hurriedly stuffing the leads and cables loose into the case. He fitted the dish into the bulge in the lid, crammed it shut and clipped the case onto the rack.

  “Sort it out when we’re home,” he said, handing Nigel the collapsed tripod. “You’re going to have to cope with this. Hop on.”

  By the time he started the engine the helicopters had completed their circuit of Sodalka and were beginning another. Two of them swung on along the same course as before, but the third peeled off and climbed directly towards the quad-bike as it jolted down the hill.

  “Don’t worry,” Mizhael shouted over his shoulder. “They can’t land on this slope.”

  The bike bucked and tilted. Nigel clung to Mizhael’s waist with his right arm while his left cuddled the tripod uncomfortably into his stomach. His shoulder was starting to hurt again. The helicopter came directly at them, passing only a few feet above them, with the battering downdraught of its rotors sending the dust and grit of the hillside stingingly into their faces.

  Then it was gone. A bit of grit had got under Nigel’s left eyelid, blinding him with tears, but through the growl of the bike’s engine he heard the helicopter clatter away, turn, turn twice more, and now it was on their tail, directly above them … And staying there. Deliberately keeping them in its hideous downdraught, as if it was trying to batter them into surrender.

  “Hold tight! Lean left!” yelled Mizhael.

  Nigel let go of him, grabbed the side of his saddle and moved with Mizhael as he swung his whole body-weight inwards and the bike lurched violently to the left.