Lord of the Hollow Dark (32 page)

“Is there a regular pattern to all this?” Sweeney asked him. “I mean, if we followed this long enough, could we catch up with him, or could he bypass us?”

“Most mazes have a systematic design, and one has only to follow what seems the natural path to arrive at the center,” the Archvicar said. “Sometimes it is much harder to get out again. Do you know, some mazes of medieval times, or earlier, may have been contrived to lure demons in and then prevent the devils from escaping? But this labyrinth, because of its origin in underground water channels, can’t very well follow regular lines. And from what little we’ve seen of it thus far, I think it might take ages, without clues or thread, to learn intimately the contrived corridors of this place. Happily for us, Balgrummo acted as our scout, stealing about these tunnels for many years; and if his jottings are accurate, and if I can interpret them tolerably well, we may get so far as the center of the maze. After that, what Balgrummo set down is even harder to understand.”

“Coriolan! Coriolan!” Sweeney began to shout again, and Phlebas joined him in a wailing African cry. From either unexplored passage, the last two syllables of the name were flung back to them.

“It’s down again for us,” the Archvicar told them. Taking the lead once more, he descended a kind of ramp, with here and there two or three steps in stone that all of them tended to stumble over. The Archvicar watched the wall on their right hand for openings; Sweeney watched the left wall. They came to one low gap on the left.

“Not yet,” said the Archvicar. “Keep on.” They reached a similar large hole on the right; the Archvicar repeated his command.

After what seemed to Sweeney a long descent, Phlebas’ torch showed on the right another opening, this time a round-headed doorway. The Archvicar consulted his notes and a folded chart, blinking in the glare. “Another descent,” he announced, after a few minutes’ musing. “Look sharp, now: I judge by a mark of Balgrummo’s that there may be a drop ahead.”

This time they found no ramp, but a narrow stair cut in the living rock, perhaps twenty steps in length. Phlebas continued to pay out the cord carefully. Halfway down the stair, one of the electric torches caught an effigy in the wall: a creature in a helmet, piggish-faced, with tusks. “Ah, the demon of the stair!” the Archvicar commented. “That must be a vestige of the Templars’ work. A pretty young fellow, isn’t he?” Sweeney didn’t think so.

A few feet farther on, there came a noisy rattle, and the Archvicar bent forward sharply; Phlebas caught him round the waist, to hold him if he were falling, and Phlebas’ electric torch clattered down the steps. The Archvicar recovered his balance, flinging himself backward against Phlebas; and the little black man, recoiling, nearly upset Sweeney. There came a distant crash.

“What in hell was that?” Sweeney directed the beam of his torch over the shoulders of his companions.

The Archvicar had caught himself on the edge of an abyss, it appeared; he now sat calmly enough on the lowest step of the stair, letting his legs hang into the terrible black space beneath. Judging by the time it had taken for the sound of that crash to reach them, it must be a considerable distance to the bottom of this pit. “A narrow squeak, that,” the Archvicar commented. He murmured some kind words to Phlebas. “We’ve lost two torches, but we’ve more above stairs. Can we make out anything?”

The light from the lamps and torches showed that the gap was too wide for anyone but a very practiced broad-jumper to leap; it would have been risky, that jump, even for a champion at the sport. So far as they could tell at their awkward vantage point and with their torches, the pit into which the Archvicar had almost tumbled extended some distance on either side, as if it were a channel or drain; but their own route, crossing the pit at right angles, remained narrow and low.

“A dead end?” asked Sweeney. Could Coriolan have leapt this?

“For more than one medieval pilgrim, quite possibly, this was,” the Archvicar replied. “But not necessarily, for them or for us. Look here.”

The Archvicar had his right hand resting upon a broad and thick plank; the plank’s other end must be on the opposite side of the pit. “My foot slipped on this wood, Sweeney; I didn’t kick it quite into the gulf, nevertheless. It’s begun to rot, but I suppose Balgrummo put it here; it may hold us. Shall I try?”

Oh, he was a cool one, this Archvicar, this Arcane! “Could Coriolan have got across?”

“Perhaps; this is a thick plank, and he’s agile. Are you quite ready, Sweeney?”

They essayed the plank bridge, Phlebas first, the Archvicar shining the torch before him; then the Archvicar; then, with misgivings, Sweeney. The plank quivered, but held, and Sweeney knew enough not to glance downward into the pit. Safe across, Sweeney and Phlebas once again shouted for Coriolan: no reply came.

“Quite like some level of Dante’s Inferno, eh, Sweeney?” The Archvicar’s voice did not quaver. “But the way seems to be widening now.”

Phlebas had run nearly out of cord; the Archvicar produced a second ball from his pocket, and they contrived to tie one end of it to a big chunk of rock projecting from the rough-hewn wall here.

Now curving to their left, the passage distinctly was broader; once it might have been an old stream channel, now dry, enlarged by ancient miners. They were not descending. Phlebas spoke a single word to the Archvicar, who interpreted for Sweeney: “He believes he hears water running.” Two or three minutes later, despite their caution in these contrived corridors of Time and Death, they nearly suffered a second spill. For, invisibly rounding a corner, the Archvicar cried out sharply, “Stop!” A low laugh, perhaps a little forced, came from him: “I’m wet to the ankles.”

Their torches illuminated a scene that put the fear of God into Sweeney.

They stood upon the brink of an underground river, or at least what would have been a deep burn, if above ground. The black water poured past their feet with cruel speed, scarcely rippling; so it must be deep enough to drown. It emerged from nowhere and vanished within range of torch beam, where the stream struck a rock face and sank beneath it, with a sinister steady flow, little whirlpools forming and vanishing.

Opposite the point where the three of them stood, their torches revealed only a sheer wall on the other side of the stream, and above that a roof or ceiling which shone black-a coal seam. So their passageway ended here, abruptly and grimly, at this vadose canyon in the hollow dark.

“Now, we know what one of the medieval pilgrims to the Weem meant by his words ‘rushing Styx,’” the Archvicar said softly.

Sweeney pointed to the terror of the secret water. “Did Coriolan go into that?”

“He did not have to come the way we’ve come. There may be three or four alternative paths in this labyrinth, Sweeney—but none of them, I fancy, with a more cheerful ending than this. At least we may drink of Styx.”

The Arch vicar brought up water in his cupped hands, and swallowed it. “There’s some taste of peat; this stream must run near the surface, higher up, earlier in its journey. It’s cold, my friends, as a Purgatory river should be.”

Phlebas had burst into rapid speech. “Now here’s courage for us, Sweeney,” the Archvicar said, patting his black grotesque on the shoulder. “My foster son asks if he may splash in on our behalf, with our coil of rope round his waist, you and I holding the rope’s end; and he’ll see how deep Styx is, and whither it flows. I will say that he swims like an otter in Kalidu.”

“God! You won’t let him, will you?”

“Not just now, for I’m weary of this scouting.”

Sweeney was weary, too, and so Phlebas must be. But Sweeney said, “What about it? Are we going back to look for those alternative routes and poor crazy Coriolan?”

The Archvicar shook his head. “It would take us more than one night, Sweeney, that maze: we’d never have got down this far without Balgrummo’s brief directions and a great deal of luck. Balgrummo doesn’t trace in detail any other path through this underworld.”

“Then what can we do for Coriolan?”

“Only wait and pray, I fear: he came to us strangely, he has left us strangely. Despite the crack in his head, he’s resourceful. For all we know down here, indeed, already he may have found his way back to the vestibule before us.”

“But you don’t think so, do you?”

“No, Sweeney. But pray, if you will.”

Then they began their hard and tiring return through the blackness, now and again calling out for Coriolan, always disappointed. Sweeney found himself actually praying for Coriolan, or Bain: a friend worth preserving.

Without those cords to lead them back, Sweeney knew well, they might not have found their way even to the plank bridge, perhaps, and certainly not to the cave with the pool, and then the cave with the cross. But come out of the labyrinth they did. How many hours had they been within? Coriolan was not awaiting them by the pool, or by the cross, or by the little bronze door with the mask of Kronos upon it, nor in the vestibule of the Weem; they knew too well that he would not be waiting for them higher up.

“Nearly four hours down there, Sweeney,” said the Archvicar, checking his watch. “I’m to give the Master a report at seven in the morning; we can do no more tonight, can we?

“The terror of that place-fright beyond words, wasn’t it? You did very well indeed, Sweeney: we shall make a hero of you yet. Sleep as late as you can: you’ll need your strength tomorrow night, I suspect.”

“But Coriolan?”

“We’ll leave the bronze door unlocked, of course; and there’s water enough for him to drink down there, and he might find his way to our provision hamper.” Sweeney had wondered why the Archvicar hadn’t let them collect their equipment on the road back.

“How can you keep your cool about it?” Sweeney gave the Archvicar a hard look.

“Because, old chap, I know that Coriolan has been in tight corners before. Nothing down below can hurt him.”

Then Sweeney’s taut nerves gave way, and he knew that he was tired beyond belief and shaking with fright, and he flung himself on his cot in the lumber room. Like a magician, the Archvicar produced a different green bottle from a cupboard in that room.

“One good long swig, Sweeney: no more. There, there, I take it from you as if you were a baby. You must be strong tomorrow, and the rest of us too.
Ora pro nobis
.”

The old adventurer and his black familiar seemed to melt from Sweeney’s sight; with frantic speed, vision upon vision, little vignettes of a foolish life, sped through his fancy; they were succeeded by a horrifying glimpse, mercifully brief, of the Dead File by the pool in the Weem, and another of Coriolan splashing furiously in black waters. It was all beyond Sweeney’s control, and like some
kalanzi
illusion!

Then he woke just enough to draw a blanket over himself, there in the storeroom, with Coriolan’s empty cot only three or four feet distant from his. Coriolan! Should he go back down the ladder into the sewer, in quest of that good friend Coriolan? But exhaustion now fell upon Sweeney like the Tower of Siloam, and he was swept into dreamless sleep as if he had been carried deep underground by that smooth black river of the Weem.

This was the most nearly modern room in the Lodging: Edwardian and almost businesslike. Cabinets and file drawers and cupboards and desks of darkly gleaming wood lined its walls; there was next to no room for pictures, but two handsomely-framed watercolors, looking like Constables, hung above the desks; the rich violet-colored carpet was Chinese. In one wall was set a banklike vault, high enough to walk into. And the outer door of the Muniment Room itself was of steel, almost a vault door. It was closed upon them, and an acolyte-boy with a gun, Marina supposed, guarded it from the other side.

For a prison, the Muniment Room was elegant enough; there was even a small lavatory attached to it. “I suppose that the last Lord Balgrummo spent infinite time here, poking into his ancestors’ papers,” Madame Sesostris speculated. “He must have done up this room not many years before his Trouble.”

Marina and Michael, and Madame Sesostris, and Fresca-even here, they still insisted upon the precaution of being called by their Eliot names-had been herded into the Muniment Room just after breakfast, Grishkin directing the three frowzy young men, with guns in their hands, who had done the herding. One of those boys had put a hand on Fresca’s arm, and Fresca’s eyes had burned, so that Marina had been afraid the Sicilian girl might draw her hidden knife; but she hadn’t.

Grishkin had told them only that they would be given no more food today. She had left with them robes or gowns, ceremonious ones of handsome cloth, scarlet robes for Madame and Fresca, white for Marina. They were to wear these outer robes at the Ceremony of Innocence this night, she had commanded. And then she had produced a really magnificent antique gown, of yellowed silk, a bridal gown; and she had told Marina that she was to wear this beneath her outer robe. Whose was it? Marina had stammered, not daring to ask why. “The last Lady Balgrummo’s, for her wedding,” Grishkin had told her, with merciless candor.

Madame Sesostris had asked to see the Master; Grishkin had shaken her handsome head, and had locked them in. Now it was nearly noon.

Where was the Archvicar? Why, he had risen early in the morning, after three or four hours’ sleep, Fresca answered, and had gone down to the Weem again, accompanying Apollinax there. An hour after the Archvicar’s departure, Grishkin and the armed young men had come for the Archvicar’s “hostages to Fortune.” Now they were hostages literally, and something worse, Marina knew. The baby had begun to cry, unusual for him at this hour; Marina was near to wailing herself.

The two windows of the Muniment Room were heavily barred from the outside with an Italianate grill of wrought iron; that iron pattern, Marina noticed with a start as she stared out in the direction of the front gate, seemed to be a representation of a maze. There was no way to leave the Muniment Room until Apollinax should summon them.

“Manfredo should have taken that chopper hidden in Balgrummo’s study,” Fresca exclaimed. She was pacing back and forth from steel door to iron-guarded windows.