He climbed into the storm cellar before anyone came to investigate the noise. Steps led down to a lit room, from which he could hear the growl and rattle of machinery. He slipped inside, shut the cellar door behind him, and crept onward into the hermitage.
Fourteen
Frey stepped warily into the dim electric glow of smoke-grimed bulbs. The room at the bottom of the stairs was the powerhouse of the hermitage, dominated by a huge old generator that whined and screeched and shook. It took Frey a while to persuade himself that the ancient machine wasn’t in imminent danger of detonation, but in the end logic triumphed over instinct. Since it had obviously been running for fifty years or more, the idea that it would explode just as he was passing would be such incredible bad luck that even Frey couldn’t believe it would happen.
Pipes ran from the generator to several water boilers and storage batteries, linking them to the central mass like the legs of some bloated mechanical spider. The air pounded with the unsteady rhythm of the generator and everything stank of prothane fumes. Frey’s head began to swim unpleasantly.
He crept forward, his cutlass held ready. He always preferred blades in close quarters. The powerhouse was shadowy and full of dark corners and aisles from which someone could emerge and surprise him. He hadn’t discounted the possibility that he might run into a mechanic down here, or maybe even a guard, although they’d need lungs like engines to breathe these fumes for long.
The generator banged noisily and he shied away, threatening it with the tip of his cutlass. When nothing calamitous happened, he relaxed again, feeling a little stupid.
Just get out of here, he told himself. Abandoning caution, he hurried through the room with his arm over his face, breathing through the sleeve of his coat.
If there was anyone else down there, he neither saw nor heard them. A few stone steps led up to a heavy door, which was unlocked. He peered in, and found himself in an untidy antechamber full of tools. Dirty gloves and rubber masks with gas filters hung on pegs. Frey shut the door behind him, muffling the sound of the generator. There was another door leading to a room beyond, and now he could hear loud snoring from the other side.
Snoring was good. Unless it was a particularly cunning decoy—Frey briefly imagined a sharp-eyed assassin waiting behind the door, dagger raised, snoring loudly—then it suggested the enemy was unaware, unarmed and at a massive disadvantage, which was the only way Frey would fight anyone if he could help it.
He lifted the door on its hinges to minimise the squeak, pushed it open, and immediately recoiled. The room beyond reeked overwhelmingly of cheesy feet and stale flatulence, strong enough that Frey had to fight down the urge to gag. He glanced briefly at one of the gas masks hanging on the wall, then took a deep breath and slipped inside.
The place was a wreck. Every surface was covered in discarded plates of food, half-drunk bottles of milk that had long gone bad, and pornographic ferrotypes from certain seedy publications (Frey saw several women he recognised). In the corner, on a pallet bed surrounded by discarded chicken bones and bottles of grog, lay a mound of hairy white flesh entangled in a filthy blanket. It took Frey a few moments to work out where the head was. He only found it when a gaping wet hole appeared in the crumb-strewn black thatch of a face, and there emerged a terrible snore like the death-rattle of a congested warthog.
Frey kept his sword pointed at the quivering mass of the caretaker’s naked belly, and edged through the room towards the door at the far end. Finding it locked, he cast around the room and located a key under a scattering of toenail clippings. He extracted it gingerly, slipped it in the lock and went through. The caretaker, deep in his drunken slumber, never stirred.
It took him some time to find his way to the dormitories. A quick search established that the basement level of the building was a maze of gloomy corridors and pipes, sealed off from the hermitage proper, presumably to stop the caretaker getting in and giving the acolytes a nasty shock. There must have been another entrance for the caretaker, since the storm doors had been locked on the outside, but Frey never found it. What he did find was a chimney flue, which he climbed with considerable difficulty and much discomfort.
When he emerged, sooty and dishevelled, from the fireplace, he found himself in a small hall. Doors led off to other rooms, and a wide staircase went up to the floor above. The place had a clean, quiet, country feeclass="underline" the cool, pensive atmosphere of an old house at night. Bulbs shone from simple iron sconces; decoration was understated and minimal. There were no idols of worship or shrines, such as the old gods might have demanded. The only evidence of this building’s purpose was a shadowy, gold-framed portrait of King Andreal of Glane, father of the Awakeners and the last ever King. He’d been painted in his most regal pose. It betrayed none of the madness that later took him, and set him to burbling prophecies which ended up having far more influence over the country than he ever did while he ruled it.
There was little here to distract the mind from its devotions. Instead, there were only panelled doors, strong beams, smooth banisters, and the frowning sensation of trespass that settled heavier on Frey with every passing moment.
There are no guards. Only women inside, he reminded himself. Since when have you been scared of women?
Then he remembered Trinica Dracken, and he felt a little nauseous. Of all the people in the world he never wanted to see again, she was top of the list.
Forget her for now, he thought. You’ve a job to do.
He dusted himself down as best he could, though he was still covered in sooty smears when he finished. Having made himself as presentable as possible, he looked through the nearest doorway. A short corridor led to an empty wooden room, with only a small brazier in the centre. Mats were laid out in a circle around it. A skylight let in the glow of the moon.
A meditation chamber, Frey guessed, backtracking. The Awakeners were very keen on meditation, Crake had told him. Sitting around doing nothing took many years of practice, he’d added with a sneer.
Other doorways let out on to other corridors, which took him to a small study, a filing room full of cabinets and paper, and a classroom with desks in rows of three. Any windows he saw were set high up on the wall, too high to look through without using a stepladder. Obviously interest in the outside world was discouraged.
He soon came upon a room with a stone table, red-stained blood-gutters running down it. Frey’s alarming visions of human sacrifice faded when he remembered that many Awakeners used the reading of entrails to understand the Allsoul. As he was wondering how it all might work, he heard the distant whisper of footsteps and female voices in conversation. Someone was up, even at this hour. It was difficult to tell if they were heading his way or not, but he returned to the hall to be safe, and then went up the stairs.
The problem of actually finding Amalicia once he was inside the hermitage hadn’t greatly troubled Frey during the planning of his daring infiltration. He’d been sidetracked by delicious visions of what an army of cloistered girls might do when a man turned up in their midst. In the face of that, the details seemed rather unimportant. But now he realised that he hadn’t the faintest idea where his target was, and his only option was to keep nosing around until something presented itself.
There was another small concern that had been nagging him. It had been two years, more or less, since Amalicia’s father sent her to the hermitage. Granted, the point of a hermitage was to keep acolytes in isolation for twice that, but still, two years was a long time. He wasn’t even certain she was here at all. Maybe her father had forgiven her and let her out?