“Over here, Father. Help me.”
Albrec bumped into him. “I have only one good hand.”
No matter. Three are better than two. Get a hold here.” He positioned the monk’s fingers for him. “Now, after three, pull like a good ’un.”
They heaved until Corfe thought his head would burst. A slight shift, a tiny grating sound, no more. He collapsed on to his side on the floor.
Several minutes passed, and then they tried again. This time Corfe was sure one corner of the grating had shifted, and when he felt over it he found that it was raised above the level of the floor flags some half an inch.
A strange, unearthly time of blinding pain and intense physical struggle, all in pitch blackness. They tugged on one corner of the grating after another, their fingers slipping on slime. Finally Corfe was able to get the chain of his manacles under one corner and pull back, feeling as though his hands were about to be wrenched off at the wrists.
A squeal of scraped metal, and he fell over on his back, the heavy grating jerking free to smash into his kneecap with dazzling pain. He lay on his back, gasping for air. “We—we did it, Father.”
They rested and listened in the blackness. No jailer approached, no alarm was raised.
“Are we going to go down there?” Albrec asked at last.
“We’re on the waterfront. The sewers here lead straight into the river. It shouldn’t be far—not more than a hundred yards. Come, Father Albrec. I’ll have you breathing clean air inside fifteen minutes. I’ll go first.”
The sound of rushing water seemed very loud as Corfe squeezed himself into the drain. He retched once at the smell, but nothing came up. His stomach had long since rid itself of the last vestiges of Fournier’s dinner.
His legs were dangling in a current of icy liquid. He felt a moment of black panic at the idea of venturing down there. What if there was no room to breathe? What if—?
His grip on the lip of the drain slipped and he scraped down through the short shaft and splashed into the sewer below. The current took him and buffeted him against rough brick walls. His head was under water. He could not breathe, was not even sure which way was up. His lungs shrieked for air. The tunnel was less than a yard wide; he braced himself against it, shearing the skin from his knuckles and knees. A moment’s gasp of air, and then he had slipped and was being hurtled along again. His head smacked against the tunnel wall. He felt like screaming.
And then he was in midair, flying effortlessly before crashing into water again after a fall of several yards through nothingness. Clean, cold air. He was out. He was in the river, and it was night outside. The water was brackish here, this close to the estuary. He choked on it, struggled manically to keep his head up, his manacled hands flailing. The current was taking him downstream, out to sea. But there was a tree here, leaning low over the water. He grasped at a trailing limb, missed, was slashed in the face by another and caught hold of a third, his grip slicing down the leaves. He pulled himself up it as though on a rope, and found mud under his feet. He waded ashore, shuddering with cold, and took a second to collect himself. Then he remembered Albrec, and floundered about on the muddy bank until he had found a long stick, all the while watching the surface of the racing river. He waited then for a long time, but saw nothing. It was too cold to remain. Either Albrec had drowned, or he had remained in the cell. He could not wait any longer. The lights of Torunn were bright and yellow and the city wall towered like a monolith barely two hundred yards away. Corfe had been washed ashore on a little patch of wasteland just within the city perimetre, not far from the southern barbican. It was too exposed here. He had to move on.
There were reed-beds here at the riverside, filled with old rubbish and stinking with the effluent of the sewers. He crept along in them as quietly as he could, and then stopped. Something was crashing about in front of him. A man.
“Lord God,” a voice whispered. “Oh, Lord—”
“Albrec!”
“Corfe?”
He moved forward again. The monk was caught in thigh-deep mud and looked like some glistening swamp denizen. Corfe hauled him out and then they lay there in the reeds for a while, utterly spent. Above them the clear sky was ablaze with stars from one horizon to the next.
“Come,” Corfe said at last. “We have to get away. We’ll die here else.”
Wordlessly, Albrec staggered to his feet and the two of them lurched off together like a pair of mud-daubed drunks.
“Where are we going?” the monk asked.
“To the only man of importance I think Fournier will have left alone. Your master, Macrobius.”
“What about the army?”
“Fournier will have it under control somehow. And he’ll have neutralised all my officers. Maybe the Queen too. I have to get these damned manacles off before my hands die. How much shooting did you hear when you were in there?”
“A lot of volleys. But they lasted a few minutes, not more.”
“There’s been no major battle then. They must have my men bottled up. The Merduks are probably on the march already. Hurry, Albrec! We don’t have time to waste.”
NINETEEN
A S the ladies-in-waiting quaked, terrified, the Queen twitched and snarled in her chair, the whites of her eyes flickering under closed lids. She had been like this for almost two hours, and they longed to cry out to someone for help, a doctor or apothecary to be sent. But ancient Grania, who had been at the palace longer than any of the rest and whose dark eyes were unclouded by any vestige of senility, told them to hush their useless mouths and pretend nothing untowards was happening, else the guards posted outside might take it into their heads to come in. So the little flock of ladies embroidered and knitted with absent fervour, stabbing fingertips with monotonous regularity while brimming over with hiccuping little sobs for the predicament they had found themselves in: and Grania glanced towards heaven and helped herself to the wine.
None of them noticed when the black furred shape with ruby eyes crept back into the chamber through the smoke hood and took up its accustomed place in the centre of a huge web that quivered sootily in the shadows of the rafters. The Queen sighed, and sagged in her chair. Then she rubbed her eyes and stood up, putting a hand to the hollow of her back. For several seconds she looked what she was: a tyred woman in her sixth decade. As the ladies-in-waiting chattered around her she took the goblet of wine that the silent Grania offered and drained it at a draught.
“I am getting too old for this sort of thing,” she said to the aged woman who had once been her wet nurse.
“We all are,” the crone retorted drily. And to the brightly plumaged chatterers about her she snapped: “Oh shut up, all of you.”
“No,” Odelia said, “Keep talking. That is an order. Let the guards hear us gossiping away. Were we too silent, they would be the more suspicious.”
“How bad is it?” Grania asked the Queen as the surrounding women talked desperately of the weather, the price of silk, all the while trying to spare an ear for the Queen’s words.
“Bad enough. They have massacred many of his Cathedrallers. The poor fools charged massed arquebusiers with nothing more than sabres.”
“And his Fimbrians?”
“Strangely supine. But something tells me that their commander, Formio, is not letting the grass grow under his feet. The rest of the city is under curfew. Fournier has installed himself in the East Wing. So sure of himself is he that he has only fifty or sixty men around him. The rest patrol the city. There are fires down by the dockyards, but I don’t know what they signify. Arach’s vision is limited, and sometimes hard to decipher.”