In the Palace of the Khans Page 28

  Hands guided him down and settled him onto one of the boxes. The boat chugged softly towards the growing arch of sky, letting the inflatable drift backwards in the slight current until it lay astern and was being towed upstream. Out in the open Nigel saw that Izhvan was in the water beside them, with the faint light glistening off his naked shoulders. Even without his weight the inflatable seemed dangerously low in the water.

  Once clear of the archway, Nardu steered close enough to the bank for the crewmen to cast the inflatable loose and let it drift back with the current while Izhvan shoved at its side until it fetched up in the corner where the tangle of driftwood that had lodged against the grating met the river wall, well in under the overhang of the arch.

  Nigel reached for the lip of the ledge and tension slipped away at the touch of the stonework. He was no longer just a lucky mascot, a passenger tagging along with a lot of guys he couldn’t even talk to. Now there was stuff for him to do. He scrambled onto one of the boxes, stood and shoved his bag onto the ledge, got his elbows onto the surface and swung his legs up.

  “I’ll tie up, Benni,” he whispered and took the rope and made it fast to the grating.

  A locksmith in Sodalka had made several copies of Taeela’s key to the hidden entrances, and a leather-worker had made head-straps for the party’s torches Nigel fished his out, adjusted it and used it to find the slot to on the section of grating, but like Taeela had trouble getting the key to engage. He felt it grate home, levered and tugged. The mechanism clicked, and the bar he was holding with his right hand shifted slightly in his grasp.

  He rose, took a fresh grip and heaved. The bars refused to budge. When he threw his full weight on them they shifted a fraction, and the next jerk came with a rush that almost sent him backwards into the water. He rose panting, and stared at the opening.

  It was too small for the boxes to go through. His own stupid fault. He was the only one who’d seen both the boxes and the opening.

  Benni didn’t seem at all put out.

  “We see what is in there,” he said, pointing at the tunnel.

  They explored briefly and returned. Benni explained the problem to Izhvan as he rubbed himself down. He nodded, unperturbed, and started to dress. Benni opened the first box and passed the guns through to Nigel to stack against the wall, until Izhvan joined them, stared at Nigel and spoke.

  “He is right,” said Benni. “Now you sleep, Nick. Soon we are needing you.”

  “OK,” he said and climbed down into the inflatable, made himself comfortable and slept without dreams till Benni woke him at one in the morning. He’d had had less than two hours, though it felt like ten and he could have done with a dozen more.

  While he slept the other three had arrived from the fish quay, with Nardu’s son to take the inflatable away, loaded with the empty boxes. They had ferried the guns and stores across the stream, and now needed him to open the inner gate for them.

  He adjusted his torch in its head-strap while they fetched the guns and stores through, then closed and locked the gate and showed them the hiding place for the key. Benni drew a white cross on the brick with a piece of chalk so that any of them could find it. Then on beside the stinking stream, counting the forty-seven slabs to the entrance to the shaft.

  He knelt to open it, and paused. He’d known all along that he was going to have to face this moment, but his mind had shied away from thinking about it. Another ghastly death. Fohdrahko lying in the pool of his own blood. The rats would have found his body by now. It would stink …

  At least if he warned the men they wouldn’t think it was a bad omen. Then they could face it with him. He rose and turned to Benni.

  “There’s a dead man in there,” he whispered. “Fohdrahko. He looked after the Khanazhana. He helped us escape, then he came back here and cut his wrists. That’s what the eunuchs did when they weren’t going to be any use to their masters anymore.”

  “What is ‘eunuchs’?”

  “They looked after the Khans’ women. They had been … you know …”

  Nigel gestured towards his groin. Benni’s eyebrows rose. He nodded dismissively and started to turn.

  “Wait,” said Nigel. “Tell them he was a hero. And the Khanazhana loved him.”

  Fohdrahko sat almost he had last seen him, propped between the ladder and the side wall of the shaft. His head had fallen forward and his hands were folded on his lap. His blood, black in the torchlight, had soaked his thighs and spread across the floor of the shaft. There was no sign of anyone having stepped in it, or of rats having come anywhere near him. The reek of the stream and the musky scent he wore disguised the stench of death. It looked as if he had simply fallen asleep and chosen not to wake up, ever. Not ghastly at all.

  Nigel rose and stood aside, wiping his eyes while one by one the men came and peered through the opening. The slow tears wouldn’t stop coming.

  Benni turned to him.

  “Now we go up, you, me, find the place we wait. You ready?”

  Nigel wiped his eyes on his sleeve yet again,

  “Sure,” he said. “Sorry. I can’t help this. He was my friend.”

  “It is good you cry for a friend. The others, they bring guns. Then they make your friend right for Khanazhana seeing him.”

  “Great. Thank you.”

  Again and again Nigel had mentally rehearsed the next stage. He counted fourteen rungs up, found the slot, slid the tool in and worked the lock. Its click seemed horribly audible. He listened. Nothing.

  He eased the slab open an inch and listened again. Again nothing.

  Cautiously he pushed the slab fully open and turned his head to shine the torch-beam along the floor of the passage, sighing with relief to see the dust undisturbed. Everything depended on how far the soldiers had managed to explore the maze. They must have tried, surely, even if they were short-handed. They knew about the Hare Room. If they hadn’t found a way past the open drop-trap they could still have broken through from Taeela’s living-room. How much further had they got? Not this far, at least.

  Benni chalked crosses on the slab, inside and out, and Nigel led the way towards the back of the palace, holding his torch with just enough light showing between his fingers to let him count the slabs. Now he was in the palace of his dreams, the maze he had built up step by step in his mind as Lily-Jo drew it out on her computer. The tension was still there, twanging taut, but changed. In the boat it had been the approaching dangers, the thousand things waiting to go wrong, felt in the churn of his imaginings, in the chill hollow of his stomach. Now they were all around him, just the other side of the passage wall, where a sleeper might wake to the sound of a careless movement, or in the actual stonework, where some ancient booby-trap might have been left primed to do its deadly work. His skin crawled, as if it were trying to wake some extra sense that would reach out through the dark and warn him.

  … Fifteen. Sixteen. Seventeen …

  He switched off the torch, ran his hand over the right-hand wall, and found the spy-hole. The left pocket of his jacket was stuffed with little squares of cloth. He rolled one up, doubled it and crammed it into the hole. The entrance to that room was four slabs further on. Benni marked it with a circle, because it wasn’t a room they expected to use, but might need to find.

  Faint moonlight gleamed ahead. They crept forward and reached a T-junction, where the passage to the left ran off into the total darkness under the Great Hall but the one to the right ended a few paces further on in moonlit stone tracery. In the far left corner Nigel found and opened the entrance to a tunnel that ran beneath the windows of a room called the Fox room. They crawled through on hands and knees. Through a spy-hole Nigel saw by the moonlight that the room was full of filing cabinets, their drawers wide open and files and papers littered across the floor. At the further end of the tunnel another short side-arm led into the main passage that from here on snaked past the rooms all along the west side of the Palace.

  Two more spy-holes to block, two more ent
rances to locate and mark, and then the Lizard Room. On tip-toe Nigel peered through the spy-hole. There was only a faint glow of moonlight, much less than in the ransacked office, but he made out what looked like a stool and the corner of a table.

  “I think it’s OK,” he whispered, and counted the slabs to the door.

  “Yes, for six men only, is good,” said Benni, as Nigel swung his torch round the little room, revealing two stools, a small table, and a canvas cot, all covered with dust. A curtain in the corner hid the latrine. Beside it stood a water-barrel. There was one small barred window and a shackle in the wall above the cot. A prison cell.

  Benni sniffed the water in the barrel and nodded.

  “You are knowing this is here,” he said. Not a question, a statement.

  “It just looked like it. There’d got to be a room here, because they’d given it a name, but there was no way it could have a door leading anywhere except into these passages. The room where we hid after the President was killed was like that.”

  “OK,” said Benni, unconvinced. It wasn’t Nigel’s job to be that sort of smart. He was there to bring them luck, luck like finding this room straight off, the luck of the ancient khans. They were going to need it.

  “Now you sleep again, Nick,” he added. “I go bring the others.”

  “I’m fine,” said Nigel. “I could easily come.”

  “No, you must sleep. Is coming long day.”

  “You’re sure you can find the way?”

  “Sure,” said Benni and crawled out.

  Even the few movements they’d made had stirred up clouds of dust. Nigel ran water from the barrel into his cupped hand and slung it hither and thither across the room until the air cleared, then tilted the cot onto its side and used one of the cloths in his pocket to sweep as much of the damp dust as he could off onto the floor. Finally he spread his anorak out on the filthy canvas, curled up on it with his bag for a pillow, and was asleep before he had time to start thinking about tomorrow.

  His shoulder woke him just after six, with daylight outside the window. Ammun Amla, a plump, earnest-looking young man, was sitting at the table, rolling dice, using a piece of cloth to muffle their rattle on the bare wood. The four others were sprawled on the floor, asleep. Boxes and bags were piled in a corner, with the guns leaning against the wall beside them. It didn’t leave much room to move around.

  Ammun looked up, raised a hand in greeting and returned to his dice. Nigel picked his way between the sleepers to use the latrine, then rinsed his face with water from the barrel and dried it on his sleeves. He was furiously hungry.

  “Is there anything to eat?” he whispered, pointing at his mouth.

  He breakfasted off greasy dark bread, salt fish, dried apricots and water. One by one the men woke and joined him. He answered their greetings with a grunt and a smile, and they stood round talking in low, serious voices while they ate. His apprehension grew and grew until he found it hard to swallow.

  Benni turned to him at last.

  “Good,” he said. “Is much for doing this day. First we find room for when others come here. Then you show us all these hided ways …”

  They’d gone through all this several times, before they’d left Sodalka, but Benni was like that. The business of looking for an extra room had unsettled him, and he wanted to make sure everything was still in place. Nigel forced his exasperation down.

  “OK,” he said, as soon as he got the chance. “We’ll check out some of the rooms the other side of the passage in case that’s the best we can do, but they’re all inside rooms. No windows. No water-butt, probably. Our best bet is two floors up, in the hidden level. There’s a couple of rooms there might do. We’ll have a look at them, and the passage across the front of the Great Hall, and then we’ll move up a level.”

  Benni translated. The men picked up their guns and waited for Nigel to lead the way out.

  On Fohdrahko’s map the rooms in the mysterious area beneath the Great Hall had letters and numbers, not names. The spy-holes revealed nothing but darkness, and when Nigel opened a slab and shone his torch into one he saw a dusty corridor with closed doors either side—store rooms, at a guess.

  The next entrance opened into a large strange room, bare apart from about twenty raised slabs ranged opposite each other down its length. It looked like a hospital ward with no privacy and very uncomfortable beds. The slanting beam of Nigel’s torch picked out scraps of writing scratched deep into the walls, and he realised what he was looking at was a different kind of storeroom. This was where the khans had stored their slaves. There was a water barrel and a latrine hole in the corner but no curtain. The men gazed doubtfully round.

  “Maybe, maybe no,” said Benni. “We go up now, see there?”

  “Fine,” said Nigel, and headed for the shaft in the south west corner of the palace. They climbed to the hidden level and began to wind their way back towards the river, the men stooping beneath the low ceiling. Lily-Jo had been right. Fohdrahko’s map of this level showed only two named rooms along all this side of the Great Hall, because they could only be fitted in where the room below was low enough to have a false ceiling. Elsewhere the spy-holes looked out into the Great Hall or down through the inward-curving ceilings of the rooms on the floor below, as the passage snaked between them. Nothing much was happening in any of them this early in the day.

  The Scorpion Room turned out to be a bleak unfurnished space, barely larger than the cell where they had spent the night. Something had died beneath the floor and the air was rank with its reek. But the Beetle Room, further on, was a smaller version of the Hare Room, with water-butt, latrine, a few worm-eaten furnishings and a window in the side wall of the Palace. The dust lay thick and undisturbed. Urvan poked his head in, withdrew and nodded, Benni marked the entrance and Nigel led them on, pausing to show the men the shaft down which he and the others had escaped. To his relief the faint trail of the cloth-roll he had dragged this far was unmarked by any later footprint.

  Two more turns, and the passage ended at a seemingly blank wall. He put his ear against it and listened. Nothing, and still nothing stirred at the click of his key in the entrance-catch. He switched off his torch, swung the slabs apart and peered out. To his right a few pale patches of daylight receded down the long passage across the façade of the palace. To his left, impenetrable dark. He switched the torch on. The dusty paving was scuffled with footprints.

  His heart thumped and steadied. First contact. The searchers had come this far, not found this entrance and gone past. Even before he looked to his left he knew what he would see. A dozen paces further on a whole section of paving had risen to block the passage. This side lay the black mouth of a trap-shaft. More dead men. He withdrew and turned to Benni.

  “You’d better all see this,” he whispered. “We can’t go any further for the mo. Just look. Don’t go right out.”

  He waited while they peered out one by one, then closed the slabs. They gathered round him in the dark and he explained what they’d seen.

  “That’s the passage that runs across the front of the Great Hall. It’s a nuisance they’ve found it, because it’s the best way across to the other side of the palace. They must’ve got into the room we’d been hiding in, and then found their way out into that passage …”

  A murmur of interruption. Benni translated.

  “They had dog. Izhvan sees mark from dog-foot.”

  “That makes sense. It was following Fohdrahko. He wore scent, and he’d gone on along the passage to set the drop-trap. I told you about drop-traps at Sodalka. That was one you saw out there. If the dog was following him it’d have fallen down the drop-trap, and some of the men too, probably. They couldn’t get any further without it. They can’t keep losing men. They must be pretty scared about using the passages at all.”

  He thought about the dog while they discussed it among themselves. Why should he mind almost as much as he did about the men? It was as if it had been a dog he’d known.

&n
bsp; “OK,” said Benni. “Now we go up, find attack room for us.”

  This was the main thing they were here to do. Back in Sodalka the first idea had been that the attackers would muster in the passage behind some chosen room on the main floor, and at the right moment rush in and burst out into the Great Hall. But from what Taeela had told them they’d realised that those rooms were too large and busy. Not everyone in the palace would be watching the ceremony. How could thirty men burst through a small opening on hands and knees and take over a room that size without someone giving the alarm? So they’d decided to attack down the stairs from one of the smaller rooms above, where their guns could command the whole hall once they were out onto the arcade.

  They climbed two floors to rooms Nigel had already seen and started to work their way back round to the far wing of the palace as it began to wake to its daytime life. Two young army officers were lounging in the President’s outer office. Their chat sounded more like gossip than work. A bored guard slouched in the lobby using his mobile, with his gun propped against the wall beside him. The spy-hole into the President’s private office was sealed off. They crept on in silence through the casual noises of the day, the twitter of a call-tone hushed by an answering voice, a vacuum cleaner, a query and its bored reply, uninterpretable knocks and rustlings, all as ordinary as the daylight streaming through the windows of those rooms and glimmering through each spy-hole into the darkness of the haunted passages.

  Though this was the world of Nigel’s dreams, in one way it was very different. A rattle of gunfire startled the silence, but turned out to come from a shoot-’em-up someone was playing on his desk-top computer. An unwatched monitor was running a porn video in an empty room. A guard chatted up a cleaner while an officer strolled past uncaring. Another guard was smoking.

  If the palace had come to life, it wasn’t the life Nigel had sensed all around him when the President was still alive, humming with his energies, busy fulfilling his demands, tense with the dread of his displeasure. Now its life was the life of a zombie. Power had gone elsewhere.