It’s all I can manage to heave Hugh over the side and lay him in the bottom of the boat. I put the lance beside him. He feels it, and gives a grimace.
‘At least they didn’t get that.’
I put my shoulder to the boat’s transom and make a halfhearted effort to push it into the water. It doesn’t budge. It’s too heavy for one man, and the sand holds it firm. I think about tying the horses to it, but I don’t have a harness and I’d probably just break their necks.
I clamber back into the boat and kneel beside Hugh. I tell him how we’ll wait for the tide to come in and then sail away. I don’t know if he understands. His eyes are glazed; he barely knows me.
It wasn’t like the stun grenade. That had been over in a heartbeat — a flash and a crack, then nothing but blindness and the ringing in her ears. This time it happened in slow motion: a percussive boom rumbling down from the roof, a torrent of sound that started loud and grew and grew until it was almost a solid presence, driving the air out of the room. She glimpsed flashes above and blooms of smoke, felt the first pieces of debris falling on her like knives. The floor shook.
She scooped the stone off the table and dived into the fireplace. The noise grew again, battering her; for a split second she saw the whole roof of the hall descending like a cloud, and Michel Saint-Lazare under it, powerless to move.
The world went black. She covered her head with her hands and curled in a ball around the stone; she felt her body being punched and kicked from every side, until the blows were so many they became indistinguishable. The world melted around her — sound and stone and flame became one roiling, furious mass pounding against her.
She couldn’t say how she knew it was over. She couldn’t even say she knew she was alive — only that she could identify some spark of life inside her, battling through the suffocating weight of numb flesh and bruises. She could feel something smooth and round and hard against her stomach, and that gave her confidence. She cracked open her eyes.
There was light. That gave her hope. She opened her eyes more; she tried to turn her head and found that she could. She looked around.
She was lying in the fireplace, half-buried under a cascade of earth and rubble that had spilled through from the hall. The fireplace itself seemed mostly intact, though a number of bricks had shaken loose from the chimney. She looked up. There was no light at the top of the chimney, but a hole gaped in the back wall where a cluster of bricks had been knocked out. Behind it she could see space — and light. It was a dim, dirty sort of light, but natural, not generated or kindled. Daylight.
She dug herself free. The hearth was so big, the chimney so wide, she could easily stand up in it. She found a piece of rubble and used it to hammer at the bricks, knocking them out one by one. The explosion had shaken the mortar loose: they came easily. Soon she had a hole big enough to crawl through. She posted the grail-stone through, then put her hands on the lip to haul herself up. She winced. Her hands were a bloody mess of scrapes and bruises. Two fingers seemed to have been crushed.
She heard a noise behind her, the rattle of shifting debris. Beyond the fireplace the whole hall was a symphony of ruination: sighs and clatters, cracks and bangs as the rubble shifted and settled. But this sounded closer. She looked down.
A hand had emerged from the mound of earth. She was sure it hadn’t been there a second earlier. It twisted around, blackened fingers scrabbling at the rubble. The earth shuddered, and a second hand came out beside it. The gold bracelet of a Cartier watch gleamed on the wrist.
Ellie snatched at the wall and tried to haul herself up. The bricks wobbled under her grip; for a moment she thought they might bring down the whole chimney on top of her. Her arms burned, but she swallowed the pain and heaved. Broken stones cascaded behind her as Blanchard rose out of the rubble; something snatched at her foot, but she kicked free.
She flopped through the wall, landed awkwardly and rolled away. She was in some kind of stairwell, tumbling down the steps. She threw out an arm to stop herself, but before she could get a purchase she landed at the bottom with a bump. New shoots of agony ripped through her.
She pulled herself to her feet. A thin layer of earth carpeted the stairs, but otherwise they were clear. The daylight she’d seen seemed to be coming from above, though the tight-wound spiral hid its source.
She had to get there.
She picked the grail-stone off the floor where it had landed and began to climb. The light was barely clear enough to see by; some stairs were missing, others buried where lumps of the wall had fallen in. Her trouser legs tore open. Blood poured from the grazes in her skin, coagulating with dust and grit.
She reached a landing and paused. Her chest ached — she thought she might have broken a rib — and every breath hurt. She bent double to squeeze out the pain, listening to the sound of her breathing.
It wasn’t all she could hear. Quick footsteps rose out of the darkness below — not running, but faster than she could manage. A weary tremor ran through her body.
She went on.
The air grew brighter and cleaner, drawing her up. The footsteps were getting close, but she hardly heard them: she was trapped in an ever-ascending world of her own, concentrating on the pain to keep despair at bay.
And suddenly she was there. She rounded the final turn and came out at the top of the tower. She stared.
After so long underground, the daylight was strange and foreign. The sun was setting behind the clouds, throwing a blood-red light over the landscape. Her eyes took a moment to adjust. When they did, the sight was still incredible.
She was standing on the top of a stone tower, dug into the side of the hill. Behind her, she could see shrubs and trees poking over the edge of an escarpment only a few feet higher than the tower itself. In front of her, there was only space. The collapsing hall had brought down half the hillside, exposing the tower and leaving an enormous crater in front of it. A few pieces of masonry were visible, but most of the hall lay buried under the earth. Uprooted trees lay strewn across the surface.
Laboured footsteps climbed out of the staircase behind her. She heard heavy breathing, a pained sigh, then the clean, metallic sound of a bolt being snapped. She didn’t look back.
‘It’s quite a sight,’ Blanchard said.
‘Is that … what the lance does?’
Blanchard gave a ragged laugh. Reluctantly, Ellie turned to face him. His white hair had become a crazed, mud-streaked tangle; his face and arms were a welter of cuts, and his clothes were shredded. A gaping wound across his cheek oozed blood; his right arm hung limp and useless. The only clean thing about him was the small pistol he gripped in his left hand, incongruously black and shiny.
‘The lance was a lure — a decoy to trap us. Your friend, I think, rigged a detonator to it. When you touched both ends, your body completed the circuit.’
Ellie remembered the scaffolding, the wires running from the generator. ‘The roof …’
‘Explosives.’
A fit of coughing overtook him. The gun shook dangerously in his hand. He spat out a gob of blood.
‘The lance was a fake.’ He pointed to the white stone cradled to her chest. ‘That, I’m afraid, is the real thing.’
Ellie had almost forgotten she was holding it. Instinctively, she pulled it closer, hugging it to her like a child.
‘You did more than I ever expected, Ellie. More than your father — more than all these idiots have managed for centuries. But you cannot keep it.’
His broken lips twisted into a ghastly smile, encouraging her.
She almost gave it to him. But Blanchard’s words bothered her. More than your father. She thought of him, the man she knew only from photographs, run down in a tunnel trying to rescue the stone she now held in her hands. She thought of her mother’s long years of stoic widowhood and her lonely death, imprisoned in Blanchard’s hospital. She thought of Doug. After everything she’d done, she was glad she hadn’t brought him here.