In the Palace of the Khans (36 page)

Nigel crouched alongside the others. With a fizz and a crackle a light blazed, blinding, at the top of the pole. It sparked and popped as insects flung themselves against it. The dark mass beyond turned out to be fair-sized inflatable.

Almost at once the reason for the boat's odd shape became apparent. There was a splash from nearby followed by a slap as a fish landed in the well of the boat. Before it had finished flopping about another one joined it.

Nardu laughed and spoke. Nigel, conscious of eyes switched towards him and instantly away, didn't need to wait for Benni's translation.

“He say someone bring him luck.”

Mercifully it didn't go on like that. The fish leaped in erratically in a brief, gleaming arc, two or three almost together and then none for several minutes. They were about the size of small mackerel, with blunt heads and silvery-green bodies. The crewmen sorted them out as they flopped and gasped, throwing the larger ones onto the gleaming pile round the foot of the mast and the rest back into the water.

This lasted an hour or so, until one by one the engines of the other boats woke to life and they chugged away. Their engine-notes rose as they drove into the river current. Nardu waited a few minutes before he followed and the passengers could rise with sighs of relief and stretch their limbs.

All the way back to Dara Dahn Nigel yawned with weariness and tension. The crewmen got on with their normal night's work of sorting their catch into wicker baskets. The lake narrowed and became the river, and the passengers had to hide again, huddling together beneath the tiny foredeck as they passed under the bridges.

Nigel could hear the tension in the men's voices as they muttered in the darkness. Peering over the stack of baskets he counted the bridges. There were nine of them on the street map. The Iskan bridge must be about the fifth or sixth. The one below it had been modern, brutally plain. That one? Yes.

The crewmen heaved the inflatable to the side of the boat and slid it into the water. Now, with the sky overhead suffused with the glow of the palace floodlights, it was natural for Nardu to take advantage of the slack of the current by sailing upstream in the deep shadow cast by the tall embankment. Izhvan and Benni shoved the baskets away, crawled out from under the foredeck and dragged the tarpaulin off the boxes of guns and stores. Nigel waited for the others to follow and felt his way out as the boat passed into the darkness beneath the second arch of the bridge. By the time he reached the gunwale Izhvan and Benni were already in the inflatable and the crewmen were lowering the boxes to them.

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 entrances 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.