‘This is a private matter. Not a tournament — a real fight. I need men who aren’t too proud to fight on foot, nor too noble to bury a knife in someone’s back if need be.’
I don’t blink. It’s nothing I haven’t done already.
‘It will take six weeks, maybe two months. For this, I will pay you a hundred livres.’
It’s been a long time since I smiled, but now I do. I glimpse myself in the silvered mirror on the wall and realise what a terrifying sight it is. A hundred livres.
For that, I could hire enough men to overrun Hautfort and burn it to the ground, Jocelin inside. I can almost hear his screams.
Perhaps this is the day.
There’s a noise behind me. A man’s come through the door, though if he wasn’t standing by a candle I wouldn’t see him at all. Everything about him is black: his hair, his eyes, his tunic and his boots. He stands so tall his head’s almost hidden behind the roof-vault.
‘Malegant de Mortain will be your captain,’ the old man says. ‘You will do whatever he tells you.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘West.’
The raindrops make rings on the flat sea, a labyrinth of interlocking circles. Our shallow boats glide across the surface and disturb the pattern. The hulls are so thin I can feel the water beneath, like horseflesh through the saddle.
It’s been a hard ride from Troyes. It’s winter: even the main roads can be impassable, and most of the time Malegant kept us on shepherds’ paths and animal tracks. He wouldn’t tell us where we were going, though every day the sun set ahead of us. The landscape changed as we headed west. Open farmland gave way to dripping forests and dark mountains, deep gorges and wild rivers. Sometimes it took a whole day just to cross one valley. It reminded me of my childhood, a magical place where the edges of the world grow permeable.
A shadow appears in the mist ahead. I can hear the lap of water on land. We scramble off the boats on a ramp by the water gate. I take out my sword and unwrap it from its parchment binding. I drop the pages in the water and watch them float away.
These are the pages of my past. Once I thought I could write them myself, fill them with romance and happy endings. Now I know better. I watch the rain try to drown the pages, and wish I could do the same for myself.
‘Guard the gate,’ Malegant says. ‘When the fighting starts, no one escapes.’
XXXI
The vault was a pit, five feet deep and three feet square. All she could see at the bottom were shadows.
There shouldn’t be much in there, Harry had told her. Get everything.
It was too deep to reach: she’d have to get in. She sat on the edge of the hole and prepared to lower herself down.
But something about the edges of the open doors had caught her eye. They were serrated, sharp triangular teeth that fitted together seamlessly when closed. She touched one of the points, and grabbed it away as a thin bead of blood welled on her fingertip.
Perhaps there’s a reason they’re called trap doors.
Painfully conscious of time, she got up. She’d seen two tall iron candlesticks lurking in the corners of the vault: she fetched one, dragging it over the stone floor, and wedged it across the mouth of the hole. She remembered the head-torch and turned it on. The white beam searched the pit.
Was it all for this?
In spite of her terror, she found herself strangely disappointed. There was nothing that she had imagined: no treasures like the ones in the antechamber; no ancient books of magic or wisdom; no hoard of gold. It looked more like what you’d leave behind after cleaning out an attic. A battered leather tube that might have held a telescope, and a square cardboard box sitting on a low plinth.
She dropped down to the pit floor. The tube was lighter than she’d expected. She shook it gently, but nothing moved inside. Was it empty? She put it in her backpack.
She put her hands on the box. It was cold to the touch, even through the cardboard. She could tell it would be heavy. She edged her fingertips underneath it and lifted it off its pedestal.
She’d never know what she’d done wrong — only that, for all her precautions and preparations, somewhere, somehow, she’d missed something. The trap doors sprang together: if not for the candlestick wedging them apart, their sharp teeth would have bitten Ellie in two. The iron shivered; for a terrifying moment she thought the candlestick might snap. A second later the lights went out.
Barely aware of what she was doing, Ellie shoved the box into her backpack and threw it out of the pit. She hauled herself out, slung the backpack over her shoulder and ran for the door. Behind her, the chamber echoed with a noise like a gunshot as the candlestick holding the trap doors fell loose.
She reached the end of the aisle and stopped dead. The torch played over the door, casting a ghostly orb on the ironbound wood. It must have closed automatically.
She was trapped.
‘Knock the fucking door down if you have to.’
Destrier gunned the car down Cable Street. Ahead, he could see the crenellated outlines of the Tower of London — and the real towers of London, the towers of banking and finance, rising beyond.
‘I’ve been trying to reach him all night and he’s not answering his phone,’ he told the Claridge’s concierge. ‘I’m worried there might be an emergency.’
There’s an emergency all right, he thought grimly. The latest update had come a minute earlier
01:44 >> FLOOR 6: VAULT 32: THEFT ALARM
He still couldn’t believe she’d got that far. With any luck, the trap doors would have ripped her in two by now. If not, he’d do it himself.
The phone rang again. A foreign number, not Claridge’s, and an accented voice.
‘Mr Saint-Lazare wants to know what is happening at the bank.’
This side of the door had neither handle nor keyhole. Ellie scanned the walls for anything that might open it, a monster’s head like the one in the chamber or a thin slit for a card. There was nothing.
Panic rose in her throat. She kicked the door; she hammered her fists against it until her skin was raw. It didn’t move. She cursed herself for being there, for listening to Harry. She cursed Blanchard, her father –
Nye Stanton died trying to break into the vaults. He was hit by a train in an Underground tunnel.
There must be a way out.
Not that it did Dad any good.
She stepped back from the door and took a series of long breaths, forcing herself calm. She didn’t know what commotion the alarm might have unleashed in the rest of the bank, but the underground chamber was silent as the grave. She looked at the row of vaults in the wall, the iron doors where monks’ bones had been dragged from their rest to make way for worldly treasures. She imagined the rattling of the bones as they tumbled out of the alcoves to be hauled away in sacks. The screams of their ghosts. She listened to the darkness.
The grave wasn’t silent. The air throbbed; a low rumble pulsed through the chamber. At first she thought it was only the blood in her ears, but the longer she listened the more distinct it became.
She looked at her watch. The first Tube wouldn’t pass for hours yet. And it didn’t sound like the train that had shaken the vault when she was down with Blanchard. It was less intense, more constant.
As Mr Saint-Lazare likes to say, the present always intrudes on the past. And vice versa.