In the Palace of the Khans (37 page)

“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.

“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.

But in the passages the tension was still unrelenting, as the intruders stole along, the men so silently that Nigel had to fight the urge to look back and check that they were still there. Those idlers had ears, ears that might startle to the knock of a gun-butt against the stone-work or the cough of a throat tickled by the dusty air, and wake the zombie into murderous life.

It was slow work. They all looked through every spy-hole, then Varat would block it and Benni would mark the entrance, while Ammun made notes about it before they moved on. It took most of the morning to work their way through the complex maze running across the back of the Great Hall to the passage along the further wing of the Palace. Weary through and through, Nigel knelt, worked the entrance-lock and eased the slabs apart. Several pairs of foot-prints were clear in the dust beyond.

He snapped the torch off and waited, straining for the whisper of any movement nearer than the casual noises from the unseen rooms on either side.

Nothing.

He peered out. The faint light seeping through spy-holes only emphasised the darkness. Yes, of course. Once they'd broken into the passage past Taeela's room there'd been nothing to stop the soldiers exploring back in this direction. It didn't mean they were still there. No telling.

He switched on his torch again and edged aside so that the men could see what he had seen, but sat slumped against the wall waited while they worked it out for themselves. He felt utterly done for. He'd had only scraps of sleep last night after an endless-seeming day, and had woken still bone-tired. All morning tension had kept him going. Every step forward had been into possible danger, forcing him alert for each next step, denying him any moment to notice what was happening inside himself. Finding the footprints—that sudden extra demand—had taken all he'd got. His mind filled with a picture of a sodden and exhausted dog paddling in a foul dark stream, searching for a place where it could climb to land. The picture became a dream.

“Nick?”

“Uh?”

“Nick. You hear me? You are ill?”

“Sorry. Fell asleep. I'm all right … uh …”

Benni put a hand under his arm and heaved to his feet, then helped him all the way back through the maze, their two shoulders scraping against the passage walls. He was yawning uncontrollably by the time Benni unfastened his torch-strap and helped him onto the bed in the Lizard Room. Someone took off his sneakers. His last thought was that Fohdrahko hadn't come out alive.

Benni woke him after a couple of hours and sat him down in front of some food. He'd thought he wasn't hungry, but after a couple of mouthfuls found he was wrong.

“Where are the others?” he said.

“They take guns up to other room,” said Benni. “This room for Khanazhana. Then they look again where we are this morning.”

“She's coming tonight?”

“I hope. When you finish eat, we go look down at below ways. You are strong for that?”

“I'm fine.”

“Nick, you been here in palace when President is live. These soldiers we see, no good.”

“You can say that again. No, his guards were a crack lot, and dead loyal to him. The bastards would never have got away with it if they'd been here, but they tricked him into sending a lot them up to Lake Vamar so they could put their own men in. They haven't got a lot of guys they can trust, and they need them to do other stuff. There's nothing much to guard in the palace now, so I suppose they thought it doesn't matter who does it.”

“Maybe they bring gooder men in tomorrow.”

“They won't know their way around.”

Benni nodded. It didn't seem to cross his mind to ask how Nigel knew the stuff he came up with. Maybe he didn't mind if he was just guessing, because his guesses would be right. He was the Khanazhana's baizhan.

He was still eating when the Akhlavals came back. They glanced at Nigel and Urvan asked a question which Benni answered briefly. The same thing happened when the other two showed up, and this time round Nigel recognised his own name. He could hear a strain in their voices that hadn't been there before, as if there'd been some kind of furious, whispered argument out in the passages. The atmosphere in the room had soured. Old animosities had come to the surface. Urvan Akhlaval and Varat Vulnad wouldn't look at each other.

Ever since they'd left Sodalka things had been going unbelievably well, but now, suddenly, they weren't. They couldn't find a room from which to launch their attack and they couldn't agree what to do about it. At the crucial moment their baizhan had failed them. The feeble little wimp had flaked out. So now they stood around and waited for him to finish his meal and pull himself together and summon up his non-existent powers and get them out of this.

If only, he thought, chewing sullenly on because he knew he needed the food, though it no longer seemed to taste of anything. Why had he ever agreed to come on this horrible adventure? If he'd refused the others wouldn't have come without him and the whole mad plan would have been off.

Except that it wouldn't. Somehow or other Taeela would have scraped a gang of even crazier guys together and given it a go and they'd all be dead.

He shoved the remains of his food away and lurched to his feet.

“OK,” he said. “Let's go and see what we can find downstairs.”

The larger rooms at floor-level with the Great Hall made for a simpler lay-out than on those above and below, and Taeela and Rahdan between them had known what they were used for. The shaft emerged into the main passage between the guard room in the corner of the Great Hall and the rooms down that side, and ran along the outer wall of the palace, ducking below their high-silled windows. Fohdrahko's map showed a couple of spy-holes and a hidden entrance into each room, and three sets of rungs running up to crawl-ways that led to spy-holes looking out across the Great Hall. The central set came on a fold in the plan and the original markings were illegible, so Lily-Jo had marked it with a query, but she said that was the only thing that made sense.

The first room was used by the palace officials as a general purpose office, with people coming and going. Even during the signing ceremony it was likely to be occupied. Next came the first set of rungs. Ammun climbed to investigate, and found that the spy-hole was one of the ones that looked as if it was designed to let a gun to be fired through it He sounded excited about it. The Akhlavals were scornful.

Listlessly Nigel led them on, automatically counting the slabs between each feature. He could hear the men following him, moving less carefully than they had before, as if it didn't matter. The whole idea was hopeless anyway.

The next room used to be the old khans' audience room. It was now used as a council room and looked more promising, with a big central table, chairs, shelves of books, computer consoles and so on. But the entrance was blocked by some large piece of furniture, invisible through the spy-holes.

Then a smaller room that used to be the antechamber to the audience room. There were people in it, setting up television equipment for the ceremony. No use. Still counting, Nigel crouched along beneath a window, beginning the count again when he reached the hidden entrance just beyond it. One, two, three, four, five …