I was halfway down the stairs into that room filled with skeletons. These were now completely disarranged in what looked like some vague effort at clearing the place. Or there might have been a long struggle. The room was brightly lit from the flames of two torches set into the wall brackets. But I could give only a passing look at the evidence of past atrocities. All my attention was focused on the here and now.
Her clothing smeared with dark gobbets of what could only be congealed blood, Euphemia had one of those manacles about her left wrist. She’d pressed herself against the wall, and was holding up a severed head in both hands. As I looked on in silence, she took it away from her face. She saw me, and spat out a mouthful of dark jelly. It fell on to her breast, then continued on to the floor with a quiet splash.
‘Alaric,’ she cried in a choking voice, ‘help me!’
Balthazar wheeled round and gave me a stare of utter madness. ‘Don’t go near her!’ he shrieked. ‘This is her time of weakness! The Goddess is strong within me!’
I saw the bloody knife that he held in his right hand. I saw the smashed wooden box at his feet, about the size of a coffin. I saw the naked body from which the head had just been cut. I looked back at the head that Euphemia now threw into the middle of the room. It was the blond boy that old Gundovald had been fussing about for the past four days. I forced myself not to look into the dull eyes and looked back at Euphemia.
‘Thank God it’s you, Alaric,’ she cried, now with a smile that sent another gobbet of dark jelly on to her chin. ‘He was trying to kill me.’
I hurried down the crumbling steps and moved towards her.
‘Oh, please, Alaric,’ she implored, holding out both arms, ‘please, get me out of here. It’s horrible.’
Balthazar rushed at me and put up his hands to push me back. ‘Keep away!’ he shouted. ‘Don’t let her touch you!’
Theodore might have had more strength in his body to restrain me. I pushed Balthazar hard in the chest, and he crashed head first against the wall. He slid down on to the floor and started a long coughing attack. Then he groaned and pitched forward into a silence in which only his shuddering breaths showed that he was still alive. I blinked and looked about me again. I stepped back and tried frantically to make sense of what I was seeing.
‘He sacrificed the boy before my very eyes,’ Euphemia whimpered. ‘He forced me to do such horrible things. Will I ever be clean again?’ She burped and more of that disgusting jelly leaked out on to her chin. She smiled suddenly and reached out her arms again. I heard the short chain rattle that held her to the wall. ‘Get this off me, Alaric,’ she said, her voice now taking on a low, husky quality. ‘Let’s just get out of here into the daylight.’
I bent forward and made myself touch the headless corpse. I straightened up and looked again at Balthazar. He was only stunned. In a few moments, he’d come back to life. I pointed at one of the manacles that now hung loose on the wall. ‘Get that about one of his wrists,’ I commanded.
She stretched forward as far as she could manage and grabbed at Balthazar, and fiddled ineffectually at first with the bracelet of dark bronze. At last, though, she had it about him. She got to her feet and came forward to the point where the chain stretched tight.
I ignored the new flood of pleading and endearments and bent down to touch the dead boy.
I stood up and wiped my hand on the lower part of my tunic. ‘You say the boy has just been killed?’ I asked in the neutral tone I’d learned to use when sitting in court.
She nodded eagerly, and moved her arms again so that the chain gave another of its dull rattles.
‘I’d say he’s been dead for days.’ I stood back and sat carefully on one of the lower steps that led down from the referred light of the long passageway outside the arch. ‘Tell me, Euphemia, what really happened.’
She tried to smile and repeated what could only be a pack of lies. Every elaboration of the story had to be another lie. I gave up on following the incidental details and looked over at the body where it sprawled in the remains of the cobwebs. It must have been carried down in the long wooden box that lay smashed on the far side of the room. I couldn’t explain the three sets of footprints in the room. None of them was mine. Probably the body had been taken from the box and somehow guided rather than dragged across the room. All I could say for sure was that Balthazar could never have carried the box down here by himself — nor have lifted the body from it. Doubtless, he’d cut off the head. Beyond that, the explanation of present facts was blurred by a dawning realisation of others.
‘You helped kill that girl — didn’t you?’ I asked suddenly.
A proper denial would have been all the answer I needed — all the answer I wanted. The brief look that flashed across her face was the equivalent of any confession that might have emerged from the longest cross-examination.
I leaned forward and put my head in both hands. ‘There’s no point asking for reasons of those who are mad,’ I said. ‘It’s enough that the pair of you have been in this together — even if you both might claim somehow to have been working against each other.’ All the woman had to do was give me a few words of decent explanation. Instead, I looked straight away from where she’d pulled up her clothing to show her thighs and the middle parts of her body. I looked away from her lush, voluptuous smile. I took a deep breath, then made myself stare at her again.
‘How many have you sacrificed in the past few years?’ I asked. ‘What did you do with the blood? Don’t tell me you were drinking it.’ I thought of a sorcery scandal back in Constantinople that had sent Heraclius into a frenzy. ‘Were you bathing in it? Is that why the latrines stank to high heaven?’ I had a further thought. ‘Why did you kill Irene?’ I asked. ‘Why the maids?’
Oh — if only she’d found the presence of mind to jump in and stop this entire train of questioning! It wouldn’t have taken much, after all. I wanted to believe I was talking nonsense. But she only simpered and pulled her clothes up to her neck. She spread her legs where she sat in the filth of centuries and groaned with simulated lust.
She heard the scrape of my sandals as I got up, and struggled to get her face clear of the clothing. ‘Get me out of this, Alaric,’ she pleaded, holding up her left wrist. ‘We can go out into the light together, just as you said we would. It will be you and me and little Theodore. We can all go to Constantinople together. It will be just as you’ve always wanted.’
I stared down at her through slitted eyes. The lawyers admit there are classes of madness that absolve from any guilt. But she’d known enough of what she was doing to hide it from the world. Even if she really was what she plainly believed she was, her actions would still have been wrong. Murder is murder, and justice must always be done.
‘If you look properly at your manacle,’ I said in my coldest and most judicial voice, ‘you will see that it was made not to come off.’ I turned and willed myself to blot out those horrified screams as I made my way carefully back to the top of the steps. The wooden door was inches thick, and pushing it shut muffled the worst of the screams. I tried and tried to push the bolts into place. But ages of rust had caused them to swell and seize, and I found myself twisting them to no effect.
It was now that my legs gave way, and I fell sobbing to the floor — sobbing with the horror of all I’d seen, and with the horror of what I was now doing. I might have pulled the door open again and gone back down. Even before the faint cries from within began to fade, I’d found myself starting all over again to tremble with lust. If I shut my eyes, all I could now see was how she’d spread her legs in the filth. It was suddenly as arousing as it had been disgusting. I do think I was about to scramble back to my feet, when I heard a quiet chuckle behind me.