Stone's Throe, page 17
It was thus with some haste I finally flung one arm over the pillar's top and dragged myself up to balance precariously upon it, and it was only then that I began to appreciate the true difficulty in which I now found myself.
Kiera's light was gone entirely; only the fact that my eyes had slowly adjusted to the faint glimmers from above allowed me to see at all, and then, not well. Well enough to know—to almost sense—that there were other pillars upon which I might balance, but far too poorly to judge the distances to them so that I might leap free of this predicament. Above me the curved, carved tunnel roof offered no assistance. I could perhaps create some sort of swinging mechanism with the leather gun holsters secured around my torso, but there were no visible hooks from which I could dangle and swing. My choices were to go down to the spine-ridden floor and search blindly for a way up the far wall, or jump.
With a roar intended wholly to drown my own fear, I leapt before I could think on it further: toward the left, and forward, trying to recall in my mind's eye the steps Kiera had taken as she danced through the death trap. My feet hit squarely. Scarcely able to believe my own good fortune, I leapt again, this time surging to the right—and this time I was not so fortunate. My right foot landed hard on a pillar's edge; my left, not at all. My right ankle twisted and so did I, too frightened, too desperate, to even scream. My right arm, flailing as I fell, caught the pillar's flat top; so too did my jaw, which snapped shut hard enough to cause stars in my vision. Before I could stop moving and think, I called on desperate strength and hauled myself upward. The very moment my feet were under me, I crouched, turned to face the way I believed I had been traveling—in the dark, after the fall, I could no longer tell—and with a prayer for wings, jumped.
A coward dies a thousand deaths, they say, and a brave soul, but one. In that leap, I was a coward, imagining every iteration of pain that I might soon face; pierced through the eye, the kidney, the stomach, the lung—all the worst ways to die by piercing came to me, but I could no more alter my course now than I might change the path of the sun in the sky.
I hit solid stone, rolled, and came up against a wall with such force that dust shook from above and coated my gasping face with the detritus of dead men.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
I was not dead; this was chiefest amongst my blessings. I was also in the dark, alone, and without any notion of where I ought to be. Silence was my only companion, and no matter how intently I listened, I could not discern the distant echo of Kiera's footsteps. My choices, though, were simple: go on in the darkness or go back. The latter was no choice at all, nor would it have been had I an easy way to cross the broken floor again. It was onward, as always; onward through darkness and silence, with my fingers stretched to brush both walls so I might find side passages, and each step taken slowly so I would not plummet should another pit open beneath my feet.
Even in the depths—and we had gone deep before the trap had opened on me—even in them there were ways to guess at direction: the sound of water flowing, or the slightest breeze. I cursed my foolishness in having not stopped for a torch, but it was too late for regrets; instead, I did the best I could, scenting for a hint of human sweat and pausing, when I reached passageways, to gently investigate the dust on the floor, brushing my fingers clean after each examination so I might have some chance of telling whether Kiera had passed this way before me.
Thrice I found passages where the dust, sometimes fingertip-deep, was broken. Thrice I followed those passages, hoping that if they did not lead me to Kiera or le Monstre they might at least take me to an inhabited site within the catacombs, and that from there I might find my way back to the surface. I began to believe I could see again: that the white sparks in my vision, born of the eye's desperation for information, were in fact light that could guide me. Unwisely emboldened by this illusion, I began to walk more swiftly, though my belly was tight with apprehension each time my foot touched the ground. Once in a while I encountered a loose stone and kicked it forward, listening to the clicks and bounces as if they were sonar, telling me where I dared or dared not step.
In time, this intense listening suggested to me that there was more space above my head than there had been, as if the catacombs rose up in cavernous arches. I breathed more freely for a moment, but found the sound disturbed my efforts at navigating like a bat, and returned to the slow, shallow breaths I had unconsciously adopted. In that very moment, I perceived the faintest whistle of rapidly disturbed air, a sound so unlikely that I fell to the floor, not even knowing why. Doing so saved me from certain death: a boulder as broad as the tunnel whizzed over my spine. It swung back again a moment later, its breeze riffling my hair. Physics demanded that it would at some point stop; if I remained where I lay, I would be trapped beneath it, perhaps not crushed but certainly unable to move. As it swung a third time, passing behind me again, I crawled forward on my belly, staying as low to the dusty ground as I could. Each swing came faster, the pendulum's arc shortening, but when it groaned to a stop I lay some yards beyond its weight, still on my belly and gasping at the nearness of my miss. I rolled onto my back, staring sightlessly at the high ceiling, and suddenly grinned.
I had not yet gone astray, it seemed; there would be no need for traps if there was nothing ahead of me to hide. Heartened, I all but leapt to my feet, but in the swiftness of my actions thought I heard something, and went silently still.
German voices, some distance behind me, shouted orders to one another with no evident fear of being overheard. They were pleased with themselves; they had passed the pit trap without injury, by which I surmised they must be carrying appropriate materials to deal with the catacombs as a whole: rope, picks, grease—a dozen possible items, but most importantly, lumière. I suddenly wanted light so badly it became a taste in my mouth, bright and clean after all the dust I had breathed in.
I remained where I was, heart palpitating as I considered my options. They would soon encounter the boulder that blocked the passage. I darted back to examine its shape with my hands: round, as I had suspected; if it had been squared to the passage, I would not be standing there to tell my tale. I knelt, gauging the distance between the rounded sides and the catacomb walls. I could fit through if I had to—if I had grease, and perhaps applied it to my bare skin, and then had a certain lack of regard for the condition of that skin once I had squirmed through—but anyone larger than me would have great difficulty. There were bound to be youths amongst the troops, though, and it was possible that a narrow-shouldered young man, necessarily lacking my own attributes, might fit more easily than even I. Thoughtful, I backed away from the boulder once more and stood quietly, listening to the Nazi approach and garnering what knowledge I could from the scraps of conversation that floated toward me.
Their loyalty to the Führer had outweighed the elixir of Obedience; that, or a single vial broken among so many had simply lacked the strength to keep them in rein for long. They were more interested in obtaining the double cobra crown than in arresting me, though I imagined they would regard me as an entirely suitable secondary prize.
Exasperation rose in the voices when they finally reached the boulder that separated us. A brief discussion took place, ending as I hoped it would: with a youth ordered to strip down and squeeze through; they would then pass him a light and he could investigate some small way ahead to make certain the path was clear and that they were going the right way. Smiling in the dark, I moved far enough away that he could come through unimpeded, and even found myself in some sympathy as he grunted and cursed while wiggling through.
At what must have been the very moment he completed the passage, he demanded, "The torch! And my clothes, for God's sake, my clothes!" in near-panic-stricken German.
Laughter bounced around the boulder and the torch was passed through before his clothes, which he was obliged to request again, in a far politer tone. My grin was as broad as his superiors', though I did not allow myself the luxury of actual laughter. He sighed in relief as the clothes came through and, foolishly, set the torch down beside himself, pointing toward the boulder, not away from it. While he pulled his trousers on and sat to don socks and boots, I crept up behind him silently and laced an arm around his throat, squeezing with all due strength; within seconds he fell unconscious without ever having made a sound. I laid him out quietly, collected the torch, and paused briefly to examine his build: slim-shouldered indeed, and altogether too much of a youth to suit my fancy, although his sleeping face was handsome enough. Feeling lighthearted, I blew him an apologetic kiss and, now able to see clearly, broke into a swift run. It would be a minute or more before his comrades even began to suspect something was wrong, and, I trusted, considerably longer before they were able to do anything about it.
I considered, briefly, the possibility that they might carry demolitions with them, and dismissed the concern: the risk of bringing the entire section of catacombs down upon themselves was too high when the goal was merely pursuit, not survival. I, at least, would not choose to risk that level of action unless I faced otherwise certain death. Breaking the boulder to bits with pickaxes would be far more time consuming, but much safer. I believed I had earned myself a long head start.
It came as some surprise, then, when several minutes later, explosives rattled the entire catacomb system. Dust and stone rained on me from above and I turned to stare back into the pale darkness with genuine astonishment, and a hope that the poor boy I had rendered unconscious had awakened and moved away before a boulder was demolished on top of him. I had no sympathy for the Nazi cause, but a half-naked boy lying beneath rubble was a person, not a cause, and worthy of justice.
This, though, was not the time to see how badly used he may or may not have been. I turned again and continued my journey, able now to follow footsteps and see the passages Kiera had chosen. Behind me, newly motivated troops moved swiftly to catch up, and whilst the narrowness of the catacomb tunnels might offer me sufficient advantage to defeat so many, in this particular case I preferred not to fight.
Armed with a light, I saw the third trap before I triggered it, and, toothfully pleased, darted past the danger point to set it off myself: a severed rope allowed another massive boulder to roll entirely free. I stood near the top of a slight incline; the boulder picked up speed almost immediately, rumbling and crashing loudly as it bounced toward the Nazi troops.
Shouted orders echoed along the passageways, followed by high-pitched squeals as men threw themselves into the cut-out tombs along the catacomb walls and, I imagined, embraced Death far more literally than they might ever have hoped to. I resumed my own journey with a florid bow that I thought would please le Monstre's theatrics; he had, after all, been the architect of my escape from these pursuers. I listened as I climbed, and after some time, heard the boulder grind to a halt. There would be some men on my side of it, but many more would be trapped on the far side. If fortune favored me, none of them would have explosives left, so that those few who followed me, if they did, could be dealt with easily enough when the time came.
The air's texture changed as I hurried forward: warmth came into it, and the lightest scent of well-oiled machinery. Triumph clenched my gut and I broke into a run, following the warmth and increasing smells of humanity, eager to lay my hands upon Knapp and end this farce for good. Those behind me were forgotten; all that mattered now was Knapp, and in her aftermath, le Monstre. Justice would at last be mine.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
I flung open the rotting wooden door with, I admit, some expectation of becoming the main player upon the stage; Josephine's dramatics, it seemed, had infected me. But no sooner did the door crash against its stone setting than I realized I was, en vérité, the very least player upon the stage, so unexpected were the other actors.
The room's size put le Monstre's old lair to shame; it very nearly put the opera house to shame. It was not a place of rot and damp, but rather a clean and modern laboratory, with curved, plastered walls painted soothing cream that brightened but did not blind as electric lights reflected off their smooth surfaces. Betwixt the light settings were steel cabinets set into the very walls; their glass-doored fronts showed row after row of beautifully colored liquids, arranged in dizzying arrays. These were the elixirs, and their clever cabinetry no doubt helped to keep them cool so they would not spoil. A full quarter of the walls were taken up by these units, and I knew a moment's horror, wondering how many innocents had fallen to fill le Monstre's vials.
But if I was the least player, the cabinets were the least of the setting. Around them, also set into the walls, stood chambers no more than a hand's-width apart from each other. Each of these chambers was coffin-shaped and primarily made of a door; large handles intersected the midpoint of each. But at chest height, rising to the top, each chamber also had a window, within which much steam and colorful lighting could be seen. I did not know, and did not want to know, what lay within them. There were easily two dozen of those chambers, perhaps more, and anything within was likely to spell a certain doom for the solitary Centurion who had chosen to throw herself into this fray.
A host of lesser things—tables, beakers, papers, desks, and the like—made a smaller circle within the great shape of the room. But other than a brief awareness that many of the items displayed upon them could be used as weaponry, I did not take much notice of them, for within both concentric circles were the two people I pursued: Knapp and le Monstre, who stood locked in a struggle unlike anything I had ever expected.
He fought to wrest the double cobra crown from her grip; she lashed and fought and bit in an attempt to reach a great red-topped plunger that fed innumerable tubes running from beneath the plunger's table to the windowed chambers all around the room. His strength was terrible, the power of a madman, but he was crippled by his burns. She was weaker but, it seemed, also taken with the strength of madness; as his burned hand lost its grip on the crown, she swung it with remorseless violence, impacting his head with such force I flinched with it.
So too did le Monstre, but ill luck held for Knapp: she had taken him on the masked side, and though the ringing of two metals clashing reverberated in the room, it only stunned, rather than felled, le Monstre. But that was all the time she needed; with both hands, she threw all her weight onto the plunger, which shuddered as it sank.
Liquid of such bloodlike hue coursed through the tubes that I watched in fascinated dread to see what would happen when it reached the coffin chambers. But as suddenly as the blood flowed, then so to did another color, and then a third, and a fourth: elixirs, then, not blood, but they could mean nothing better as they rushed toward the chambers.
Le Monstre howled protest, bringing my attention and Knapp's back to him; this time when Knapp hit him with the crown, she directed the blow to his unprotected cheek and sent him into a collapsing spin. He fell and did not rise again, though consciousness was still his own and he did not cower before her; my angel had never cowered in his life. When he spoke, his cultured voice could not quite hide his honest confusion, though he did a better job of it than any save a trained performer like Josephine might have managed: "Why? Or, why now, as I am now certain you've intended this for years, perhaps since the beginning...?"
"Don't you know?" Knapp bent, though she never came close enough for him to seize her and gain the advantage. "Don't you know who I am?"
The strangest, most gentle smile I had ever seen on his face touched le Monstre's lips. "Of course I do. You have the look of your mother. You always have. You could not imagine I regularly selected waifs from the street to raise, Kiera. I had forgotten," he confessed, so softly I found myself straining to hear. "I had forgotten, in my pain and rage, that you had even come into this world, until I saw you by chance one day. I began this project then," he said with his gaze going to the now wildly steaming chambers. "I began it because I could not bear for you to look upon my ruined face and to see the fear and revulsion in your gaze. I wanted to be beautiful again before I confessed the truth to you, though it now seems you've known it all along. Amélie," he said, so unexpectedly and clearly that even I startled, as though I had forgotten I stood witness to this strange scene.
Kiera, it seemed, had not known at all; her startlement was far greater than my own, and turned at once to blackest rage. She fell back from le Monstre with a stride or two toward me, then stood trembling in one place, unable to decide where to first unleash her fury.
My angel, le Monstre, stood when she stepped away, and with careful motions I knew so well, tidied his cuffs, his collar, and brushed imagined dirt from his trousers before speaking again. "Amélie, in a few moments you will have done the maths, and although it will make no difference to you now, I would like you to know that in all the ways I did betray you, this was not one of them: I knew Kiera's mother before I knew you, though Kiera was born in the time we were together."
"But her surname is German," I said in perfectly foolish astonishment, and cringed to have even entered the conversation, when silence would have been all the wiser. I did not think I felt betrayed; I was too surprised for that, and too embarrassed that I had missed what—in truth—did not seem at all obvious, even now.
