He put his sore right hand to the scar again. Again the keyholes shrank and squirmed.
“God’s bodkin,” said Claude, and drew his dagger.
“Good,” said Gertrude. “Do something, and quick!”
But rather than cut the flesh, and risk the Beast crying out of God knows what, Claude wanted to force the lock, the way he had in the camp. He wrapped the fingers of his weak hand around the knife hilt, and held them in his strong hand, and thrust the knife in. A few twists and the beast groaned. Blood poured out from the scar. He had been right to worry that this would have alerted the Mantis-man; but now the Mantis-man was dead, and they would soon be caught if they stayed much longer.
The door cracked and swung in.
The Chatelaine’s private chamber was hung in tapestries that showed strange scenes, with no humans in them. Claude had had a chance to study them, before, when the Chatelaine had asked him what he wanted to be.
“I want to be myself,” he had said, over and over, unwilling to be made into one of her lackeys, mistrusting any transformation she could give him.
And in the end he had transformed himself, into something very like her.
They strode in, not speaking, each of them looking in the corners for the chest.
Into the next chamber, where the Chatelaine slept. Here it was more bare: a bed, a table with a book upon it.
There beside the bed was a great chest.
Claude used his knife again and cracked the lock. This one was much easier; it gave way willingly. An ordinary padlock, to hold the wealth a man had tried to keep from his wife and child. An easy thing to break, a pleasure to break.
There was the sack, full of Willem’s goods. Still not distributed or melted down. But the mace-key was not inside.
He stood, seething. Where had she hidden it? Was it possible she had destroyed it already?
“We should take this and go,” said Gertrude.
“It isn’t all there,” Claude answered.
“They’ll find us.”
Claude paced the room. “What would you do with something you wished did not exist?”
“I’d throw it away.”
“No, you foolish woman, not something you wished you didn’t have. Something that should not exist.”
“I’d throw it away, and don’t call me foolish. I’d throw it somewhere no one could find it, like the sea. Or into a fire.”
Claude whirled. There was no fireplace in this room, or any other room inside the Hellbeast. It was always warm in here. But then where could they find a fire?
“The forges,” he said, despairing. “But she’d have to do it quietly, privately. She didn’t want anyone to know. Did she do it already?”
“We must go now,” Gertrude urged.
Claude picked up one side of the sack and Gertrude the other, and they pulled it out of the strongbox and walked out, stepping over the Mantis-man’s body, not bothering now to close the doors. If anyone saw them now in the hall there would be no denying their purpose. No running, either. They would have to fight.
But not without a search of the smithy furnace, if Claude could manage it.
The hall was empty save a cloud of bats and a few scrappy revenants who ignored them.
“They weren’t gone long,” Claude said.
“What do you think happened to Beatrix?” Gertrude asked.
Nothing good, Claude thought. Not for them to have come back so quickly. Or perhaps Beatrix had simply lost her nerve, and sent them all back. The most likely scenario, really. He said nothing to Gertrude, who seemed so fond of Beatrix. Let her think what she liked. Nothing Claude could say would make it any better or any worse.
They paused as they came near the door of the smithy where there were crowds of people hanging at the edges. But everyone was looking inward, where a fire was raging and some victim was screaming. There were hoots of laughter. Margriet. It must be Margriet.
Claude looked at Gertrude’s face and saw she had realized it, too. What could they do? She had asked them to get the chest to Beatrix. Although now Beatrix was very likely dead, and there was nothing in this sack Claude wanted, and Gertrude had wanted only to hurt the Chatelaine and would have a very hard time convincing herself she had.
Claude shut his eyes for a moment to steel himself and saw only red, the glow of fire through flesh, his or Hell’s, it did not matter. Then he opened them and walked to one side, yanking Gertrude on the other side of the sack.
“Wait here,” he told her. “And if any chimeras come, scream. And run. Run first then scream while you are running.”
“But—”
He walked away from her, elbowing his way in to the crowd of chimeras watching the scene at the smith. He glanced at each of the fires in turn, at the scraps of bone and charred fur, of horns and blades. He could not see the mace-key. Of course not; if she had brought it here she would have seen it done, in private, not left it lying here. Still he could not help himself.
He was closer in through the crowd now and could see Margriet lying prone on a great anvil. She was shackled, no, more than shackled—she was ringed with iron all down the length of her body and her mouth was open, open wider than Claude would have thought possible. It was hard to tell from a distance but her face did not look pained at all; she looked ferocious, like a lion receiving its prey.
He looked to one side and there his eyes caught Monoceros’s again. The horned man leaned in toward the Chatelaine, who was exulting over Margriet. He said something, and the Chatelaine looked up, toward Claude. Claude turned and walked through the crowd as quickly as he could without causing alarm. As he passed one of the working tables he saw one of Margriet’s gauntlets lying there and he picked it up, like a champion’s token, like a trophy, like something to give Beatrix of her dead mother. For there was no doubt Margriet would be as good as dead, soon enough, that she was now a weapon of war.
Claude strode out through the room and into the hallway. He glanced back just once to see that Monoceros was following him, although silently and alone.
When Claude got near the hall, he could hear a hound yelping and someone screaming. Gertrude!
He ran through the corridor, uphill on the damp surface like loamy earth. He put the gauntlet on his weak hand and with a thought, sent the steel gadlings flying off his knuckles like living things out toward the chimeras gathered there.
He had known, somehow, when he gave these gauntlets to Margriet, that they were more than they appeared. Had Monoceros known as well? Had he given Claude the gauntlets to try to trap him, to turn him into a chimera for once and for all?
But the creatures gathered before him, shooing away the flying gadlings, were not chimeras after all but revenants. Gertrude must have angered them somehow, or else the Chatelaine had given them orders.
Gertrude was struggling with one—Baltazar. The revenant whirled as one of the gadlings hit him in the forehead, and Gertrude managed to grab Beatrix’s distaff from him. The hound leaped up and took a gadling in its dog mouth but then it wheeled like a mad thing, as if it had swallowed a hornet, until Gertrude thrust the end of the distaff into the hound’s chest, hard, and it yelped and its legs shook.
The face on the back end was a woman’s. It grimaced.
The gadlings returned to Claude’s hand. The hand, his mace-hand, throbbed from the chafing of the gauntlet upon it. But the itching, the horrible itching, was gone.
Now Gertrude was pulling the distaff out of the dog, and it wouldn’t come, and Gertrude was yelling something Claude could not make out. Baltazar seemed at a loss. He stood and watched Gertrude.
“Come on,” Claude said. “Monoceros is behind me.”
Gertrude pulled once more on the distaff and it came free. She whacked Baltazar across the head with it, and he fell to the ground.