Luckily, it was a really solid wall. Old stone, thick and sturdy. I hit hard, and the stone cracked from top to bottom, but it held. I took a moment to get my breath back. The hallway stretched endlessly above me, the walls like mountainsides. I could see Molly way above me, looking out of the hole I’d made in the wall, peering anxiously down at me. I yelled at her to stay put. I thought hard as my heart rate slowed reluctantly back to something like normal. The family had to know the fall alone wouldn’t be enough to kill me. This was just another delaying tactic. It was all they had.
I forced myself out of the broken stone wall, damaging it still further, and looked up at Molly. "Stay put! I’ll climb up to you!"
"I could retrieve you with my magic!" she yelled back. "Maybe even undo the gravity inversion!"
She really did look a long way off. Maybe someone was messing about with space here, as well as gravity. Or were they connected anyway? It was a long time since my old science classes.
"No!" I yelled back. "Don’t do anything! Your magic could set off the Hall’s inner defences!"
"You mean this isn’t—"
"Hell, no! This is just some crafty little bugger showing off his lateral thinking."
I punched a hole in the left-hand wall that used to be the floor, carefully pulled my golden hand back out again, and then made another hole. I kept on punching holes until I had enough hand-and footholds to get started, and then I climbed up the wall, heading back to Molly. I picked up speed as I got the hang of it and got a rhythm going, and soon I was scuttling up the wall like a giant spider. ( I winced as the thought occurred to me, and I pushed it firmly away.) I soon reached the hole in the wall where Molly was waiting, and she helped pull me back through. We both looked down at the long drop below us, and the wall opposite.
"Now what?" said Molly.
"When in doubt, use brute force and ignorance," I said. "Climb on my back."
She gave me hard look but finally did so, holding on tightly as I walked back across the room we’d just come through. Then I took a good run up to get some speed going, jumped through the hole and across the gap, and smashed through the far wall into the room opposite. Molly jumped down from me, slapping dust and splinters from her hair and shoulders.
"I don’t want to have to do that again, ever," she said firmly. "Next time, I’ll fly us across."
I looked at her. "I didn’t know you could fly."
"Lot of things you don’t know about me. You should see what I can do with a Ping-Pong ball."
I looked around the room and once again I recognised it. I always thought of the long narrow chamber as the souvenir room. It was crammed full of old trophies and mementos and a whole bunch of basically interesting old stuff that my various ancestors had brought back from their travels around the world. Books and maps, objects and artefacts, and some odd and obscure items that presumably meant something to someone once but whose stories were now lost and forgotten. To a young Drood like me, they were all wonderfully interesting and fascinating, with their hints of a much bigger world outside the Hall. I spent a lot of time here as a child, leafing through the books and playing with the pieces. At least partly because I knew I wasn’t supposed to. I was still fond of a lot of the exhibits, so I was careful not to break anything else as I made my way across the room. I pointed out a few of my favourites to Molly.
"That’s the skull of a vodyanoi from pre-Soviet Russia. Those are genuine Thuggee strangling cords from the Hindu Kush. That lumpy-looking hairy thing is a badly stuffed Chupacabras from Chile. Which if anything smells worse dead than it does when it’s alive. And all the intricate carvings in that cabinet are scrimshaw carved from the bones of a great white whale."
"You should charge admittance to the Hall," said Molly. "You could make a fortune out of the summer trade."
The door ahead of us slammed open and my grandmother Martha Drood, the family Matriarch herself, strode into the room to face me, accompanied as always by her consort, Alistair. I stopped abruptly, facing them, and they stopped where they were, maintaining a cautious distance. Molly moved in close beside me, reassuring and supporting me with her presence. I was glad she was there. Even after all that had happened, after all that I’d discovered…Martha was still the Matriarch, the will and authority of the Droods. And once I would have died rather than fail her.
The Matriarch wasn’t wearing her armour. Of course not. That might have come across as an admission of weakness, and Martha’s arrogance would never allow her to see me as a serious threat. Not even after all I’d done. For a rogue to triumph against the will of the family was unthinkable.
So I armoured down too. Just to show my contempt.
"Hello, Grandmother," I said. "Alistair. How did you know where to find me?"
Alistair smirked. "Intercepting your path wasn’t exactly difficult, Edwin. All we had to do was follow the wreckage and destruction, draw a straight line to the Sanctity, and then get here ahead of you."
"You always were very direct, even as a child," said the Matriarch.
"That’s why I chose this room, for our…little chat. The number of times I had to send someone to drag you out of here because you weren’t where you were supposed to be…You always were such a disappointment to me, Edwin."
Molly looked at me. "It’s your family, Edwin. How do you want to handle this?"
"Very carefully," I said. "My grandmother wouldn’t be in here, facing me without serious backup, unless she was confident she had some really nasty cards to play."
"This is the Drood Matriarch?" said Molly. "Well, colour me impressed. The queen bitch of the family that runs the whole world. Hatchet-faced old cow, isn’t she?"
The Matriarch ignored her, fixing me with her cold gaze. "Where is James?" she said harshly. "What did you do to James?"
"I…killed him, Grandmother," I said.
She cried out briefly then; a lost, devastated sound. She crumpled as though I’d hit her and might have fallen if Alistair hadn’t been there to hold her up. She pressed her face against his chest, eyes squeezed shut to keep the tears from falling. Alistair glared at me over her bent head. I wanted to see her suffer for what she’d done to me, to all of us, even to Uncle James, but in the end it was disturbing and even sad to see such a legendary facade crack and fall apart right in front of me. I’d never seen her show any honest emotion in public before.
"You killed my son," she said finally, pushing herself away from Alistair. "My son…your uncle…He was the best of us! How could you, Edwin?"
"You sent him to his death, Grandmother," I said steadily. "Just like you tried to send me to mine on the motorway. Remember?"
I stepped forward to confront her with all the other things I had to say, but to my surprise Alistair stepped forward to face me, putting himself between his wife and the rogue who threatened her. He stood tall and proud, doing his best to stare me down, and for the first time, he actually looked like a Drood.
"Get out of my way, Alistair," I said.
"No." His voice was high but steady. He had no authority, no power, and he knew it, but in his refusal to remove himself from the line of fire, he had a kind of dignity at last. "I won’t let you hurt her anymore."
"I don’t want to hurt her," I said almost tiredly. "I don’t want to hurt anyone. That’s not why I came back. But I have something important to do and not much time to do it in. Take her out of here, Alistair."
"No. This ends here."
"I have Oath Breaker," I said. "And Molly has Torc Cutter. Even the Gray Fox couldn’t stand against that."