He remembered Rose’s museum brain moment on their way up to the castle and realized he must be inside the old lime kilns. He seemed to have discovered the escape route he had postulated. He dropped back down into the passage, wondering if this was all some ridiculous wild goose chase. Could he honestly believe that such a thing as Thor’s mythical hammer really existed? And that they might find it here? But what other choice did he have right now than to continue as if it were?
He retraced his steps and soon emerged back into the central cave. The others were nowhere to be seen, everything quiet and still. It felt as though the cave itself were waiting for something. Only one passage left unexplored, assuming Rose and Cameron hadn’t found anything. It was the lowest and narrowest of them all and Crowley bit down on rising claustrophobia as he squeezed his bulk through the small opening and crawled forward.
Chapter 53
Landvik emerged into a small cavern, Jarn on one side of him, Levi on the other. Several more tunnels were ranged out before them.
“Well, well,” Landvik said. “You really did find something of interest here, Jarn. You have an eagle eye.”
Jarn nodded his thanks. “You told us to look for anything out of the ordinary while we tried to find Rose Black and her friends. Besides, that scraping sound tipped me off. It must have been the secret door closing behind them.”
“Even so, you did better than myself or Levi. Well done. Now, we can assume that Rose Black and her friends are down here somewhere, and we can’t discount what they may have found should we run into them. So I want them alive. You find anyone, you bring them back to this spot and you call out for me, understand?”
Jarn and Levi both said simultaneously, “Yes, sir.”
Landvik pursed his lips. “Right, well let’s each choose a passage to explore. Let’s make this quick.”
Crowley had crawled for what felt like a couple of hundred meters, worried he was traveling down a stony throat which might swallow him, when the ceiling above him finally began to rise higher. He stood, moving cautiously further ahead. After another twenty or thirty meters, he stopped, crestfallen. Before him was a wall of rock. A dead end. He shined his light across it and saw that between the stones there seemed to be leaking sand. He frowned. This wasn’t solid rock, but stones stacked and mortared in. A long time ago, it would probably have appeared like nothing more than an actual rock face, the dead end he had first assumed it to be. But time had caused the mortar to crumble, the stones had settled a little. The whole thing had the appearance of a tired wall rather than a rock face once he paid enough attention.
Cautiously, Crowley put one hand against the higher rocks, and pushed. They shifted slightly. He pushed harder and a couple moved, slid against each other with hollow knocks. One tumbled free, falling into a space behind. With a smile, Crowley pushed harder, putting his back and shoulder into the effort. Once he had started the movement, the wall lost its integrity and tumbled to a pile at his feet. It still blocked the lower meter or so of the passage, but he could easily climb over it and get through the gap above. He moved on, the air drier and more still than it had been before. Or was he just imagining that?
After another several meters, the passage flowered out into a wider tunnel. He froze at the sight of figures moving around ahead of him.
Holding his breath, he smothered the light with his arm and stood motionless, ears straining. No sounds of movement, no shouts of challenge. As slowly as he could manage, Crowley took his knife from his pocket and then began to reveal a tiny portion of his light. Under its weak illumination, now that he was still, he realized he had seen not actual people, but life-sized carvings. He unveiled the light entirely, panned it back and forth.
Figures in all manner of friezes were carved into the rock walls of the widening passage in which he stood. He moved closer, recognizing many. He strained his brain to recall his history lessons on Norse mythology, trying to place the characters and settings. Winged Valkyrie ferrid the dead to Valhalla, wolves flanked the god Odin who stood with a raven on his outstretched arm. Beautiful Freya, on a mighty steed, rode through fields of corpses. Ice giants roamed, and there was Loki, causing mayhem. And finally Thor, his hammer held high, about to crash down on the world below him. The carvings were incredibly detailed, unlike anything Crowley had seen in his life before. He moved his light slowly, made the deep shadows flicker and shift as though the scenes before him were truly alive. He had found something incredible here.
He moved along further and the passageway ended with a small opening, a lower tunnel once more. Crowley sighed, fell back onto his hands and knees, and crawled along. It was only three or four meters before the cramped way opened into a small square room hewn from the rock. As Crowley lifted one arm to see more clearly, the light of his phone glinted on something metallic.
Chapter 54
Rose’s tunnel had gone on for so long that she began to wonder if it would ever end. Admittedly, she was going cautiously and watching all around herself, so it probably wouldn’t seem nearly as far on the way back. But surely it had to go somewhere.
She did her best to ignore the rapid flashes of memory that repeatedly flickered past her vision. They were not only disorienting, but hard to decipher, confused and opaque. And while their frequency seemed to be enduring, their clarity faded with every passing minute. Perhaps the effects of Landvik’s ritual were finally wearing off completely.
She paused, listening. A sound, distant and roaring, worried at the rock somewhere ahead. She kept her light high, hoping her phone battery wouldn’t fail her. She was terrified of being lost in the complete darkness of underground. As she moved further forward, the sound resolved itself slightly and she realized she was hearing the sea. There were no great waves around Lindisfarne unless the weather was stormy, but she definitely heard water, and the soft rush of the ocean further out.
She came around a shallow bend and her light reflected back off a solid surface and she stopped, disappointed. The end of the tunnel had clearly been sealed up, rocks piled and jammed together. There was a vague outline of the original tunnel mouth that seemed to be the beginnings of an opening into a cave. Clever bastards, she thought to herself, imagining the builders of this place finding a sea cave far from the foot of Beblowe Crag. She could picture them digging the tunnel from the cave system in the crag itself, working their way along until they met the sea cave, thereby having an exit like Crowley had suggested. An escape if they were under siege, or a way to smuggle people and supplies into the castle from the water, with only a small cave to defend, or the tunnel itself if the cave were taken.
She smiled, shook her head. Interesting history, but useless to her now. There was nowhere here to hide a mystical hammer. She turned off her light for a moment, plunging herself into stygian blackness. She breathed deep against the nerves that immediately rippled through her. She would need to preserve her battery, in case they needed to explore further. Who knew how far the other tunnels might go? She knew for a fact that it was one single passageway back to the cave where they had split up, so she could walk carefully trailing one hand on the wall for stability and get back with some of her battery preserved.
She took another deep breath, telling herself to be calm, then froze. She had heard something. No, not something. She knew exactly what it was. The scuff of a shoe on the rock floor. She knew instinctively that it wasn’t Crowley or Cameron. They knew she had come this way, they would call out her name or something, not creep along like that. A light danced around the shallow bend back the way she had come.