The Traitor's Heir (34 page)

Lord Ashway took them into the lower levels of the West Wing. They went down a set of twisting corridors and a bewildering number of stairs. Eamon began to notice that the stonework grew less ornate and much paler the further they went. Then the hallways became dilapidated and dusty. There was no sound but that of their steady feet.

Were it not for the windows, which looked in towards the palace gardens, Eamon would have found himself completely disoriented. They seemed to be going to the farthest part of the wing.

At last Ashway halted and passed through an open doorway. One after another they followed him across the threshold and into the room beyond. It was well sized and Eamon saw that it would once have been a beautiful place. Great bay windows, now greased and stained, curved from floor to ceiling on the eastern side, looking out towards the Hands' Hall. Crumbling embrasures lined each casement and Eamon knew that they would once have been filled with cushions for the comfort of any who might sit there to read. How his hands ached for the feel of a book!

But that was a lifetime ago.

Marks on the flame-scored walls were all that remained of the tall cases that had once circled them. In places the walls showed traces of pastoral frescoes that had been tarred over. High in one corner Eamon could just see the arching branches of a tree, faintly twining between the swathes of obscuring black. A fireplace was set into one wall, and though its stones must once have been clear and bright it was now charred and blackened. As Eamon imagined how the place must once have looked he felt a pang of regret.

The Hands seemed not to see what had been done to the room, their nonchalance indicating that they had observed it many times before.

“Mr Goodman,” Ashway commanded, drawing him across to the fireplace. Eamon felt air moving – but from where?

He looked at the stonework and his eyes fell at once upon an opening in the back of the fireplace, at its very heart: a small hole, marked round with ridges. After a moment he realized that the shape correlated to that of the stone at his neck.

Ashway gestured to the fireplace. “The stone, Mr Goodman. Put it there.” His voice quivered. What were the Hands expecting? Eamon glanced at the others and saw that Cathair was also interminably still, as though holding his breath.

Eamon stooped and leaned into the fireplace. He brushed soot and grime away from the hole and felt the smooth stonework beneath. It had been lovingly crafted.

Carefully he drew the stone over his head. It felt dead in his hand. Crouching, he balanced it between his fingers and then slotted it into the hole. He stepped back.

For a moment nothing happened. Then the stone began to glow blue. Eamon heard a click. Lines of light appeared in the joins of the stonework: they flickered and shifted before giving way to a doorway, illuminated from above by the shining heart of the King. Musty air rose out of the opening. The light showed steps leading down into darkness.

Eamon's jaw dropped. But Ashway's face split with a grin that ran from ear to ear. Cathair almost cheered.

“Well done, Mr Goodman!” he cried, his green eyes twinkling. “Torches!”

“Scour the place,” Ashway commanded, gesturing downward. Eamon wondered what could possibly be below. “Anything you find is to be brought back here, do you understand? Books, scrolls, folios, volumes, scraps… books, anything.” His torch raised high, Ashway looked into the stairwell with an evil grin. “Ellen's Well is breached at last! How she would weep!”

Ashway and Cathair were the first to go down the darkened stair, their torches mere flickers in the engulfing dark. At Cathair's insistence, Eamon was next to follow and Mathaiah was close behind him. The other Hands came after them.

The air smelled vaguely of smoke and the steps were vertiginous and uneven. They led down into a large cellar whose innumerable alcoves were filled with long stone shelves. All were empty. As Eamon's eyes adjusted to the guttering light he saw that corridors stretched off in all directions. Stale air stirred at their approach and the torches disturbed the long-sealed dark.

Ashway split them into pairs and commanded them to search in different directions. Much to Eamon's relief he was paired with Mathaiah. Ashway cheerfully assigned them the task of searching what he called “the tomb tunnel”, after which pronouncement he dismissed them to their corridor.

“Why is it called that, sir?” Mathaiah whispered as they walked away from the staircase. He nervously fingered his torch.

“At a guess?” Eamon offered.

There was no need to say more.

They peered down the tunnel before them. “Does the dark worry you, sir?”

“No,” Eamon lied. He had never been afraid of the dark. Why did this feel different? “Come on.”

As they started down the tunnel, the roof came in lower over their heads, the sounds and lights of the other Hands becoming fainter with each step. They held their torch aloft into each alcove that they passed, but found nothing. Eamon could only reason that that was a good thing. Another good thing was their increasing distance from the Hands – he found Cathair and Ashway tense work.

Mathaiah ducked into another alcove, peered around it, made a disgusted noise at something he had trod in, came back, and shook his head.

“Nothing but a broken bottle in there, sir.”

“They used to be wine cellars,” Eamon answered. “Hughan told me that Elaina emptied them for her books.”

“Sir!” Mathaiah hissed, glancing anxiously back.

Feeling bold, Eamon laughed. “I think we can safely speak if we keep our voices low.”

Mathaiah nodded, pacified. “Strange library,” he mused. “I don't suppose it was always this dark.”

“That stone, sir: what was it?”

“Bait for the Hands,” Eamon told him. “It was Hughan's idea. The throned is obviously looking for something down here. If it is here, whatever it is, we must send word back to Hughan.” He felt stronger for saying it.

“How far do the tunnels go?” Mathaiah asked, squinting into the inky dark.

“I don't know.” Mathaiah held the torch steady while Eamon searched another alcove. “Hughan told me that the bookkeepers swear the tunnels to be empty. There shouldn't be anything here for us to find. Not,” he added, moving on to the next alcove, “that that will have any bearing on how far we have to walk to confirm it.” Scaring an errant spider and ascertaining the alcove to be empty, he returned to the main passageway.

“I suppose the bookkeepers emptied it all. It must have been quite a job.”

Eamon nodded, imagining the cellar, every alcove filled with knowledge. It would have been an impressive sight. No wonder his father had loved to imagine it in its days of glory.

They went on for a few moments in silence. Hanging cobwebs brushed at their faces and trailed over their heads. The corridor stretched forward until it passed through a cracked archway and pooled into a hall.

Eamon took Mathaiah's torch and held it up, casting light into the room to reveal a dozen long stone boxes. Eamon walked carefully to the nearest and examined it curiously. A stone effigy lay on its top, showing a man with a book and a sword over his breast and a crown upon his brow. A star was shaped on the crown's crest.

“Well, that explains why he called it the ‘tomb tunnel',” Mathaiah murmured. He looked at the effigy's face; it was long and noble. “Who is he?”

“I don't know.”

“Do you think he… was a King?”

The forbidden word hung in the air. Eamon shook himself. The throned could not hear them there.

“Perhaps he was.”

Slowly Eamon stepped to the next tomb. The figure of a woman was carved into the red marble. Intricate words ran round the lid but he could not read them. The stone was scarred, as though someone had taken a chisel to it. Who and why, he wondered? The woman's face was broken. Eamon touched the shattered stone, gently brushing thick dust from its marble brow.

“Sir,” Mathaiah called suddenly, “there are papers here.”

Eamon hurried to the cadet at once. Mathaiah was crouched on the other side of the red tomb. Tucked into the side of the stonework was a small shelf littered with reams of parchment. Mathaiah was holding one in his hand, turning it to try to make sense of it.

“Poetry, I think,” he said, then pulled a face. “And bad poetry, too! Who rhymes death and teeth?”

“It's a particular kind of rhyme,” Eamon answered distractedly, stooping to look through the papers himself.

“So particular that it doesn't rhyme?”

“Perhaps it's an intentional break of rhyme, meaning to give emphasis to something else. The broken rhyme might be the critical point of the whole work.”

Mathaiah laughed. “I didn't know you were a scholar, sir!”

“A hidden and much maligned talent. I read a lot when I was young: my father was a bookbinder. So was I, before I joined the Gauntlet.”

He tried to interpret the papers. They seemed to be a series of sonnets, written in a striking hand. The ink was faded and he could not read a word of the inscription, but to see words withstanding decay in such a place moved him. He looked back at the face on the stone lid. Were the poems hers? Had she written them? Had they been given to her, or written for her? If so, by whom?

“Should we take these back, sir?”

With the exception of Lord Cathair, Eamon did not think that Hands relished poetry. He shook his head and placed the papers back. “They have more value where they are, I think.”

“Sir.”

Eamon rose.

Breathing deeply, he began to circle the other tombs. Some of them had shelves similar to the one that Mathaiah had found. On some stood chipped pots or ornaments; on one was a tiny iron horse. One of the tombs belonged to a child with a beautiful, round face. With his torch lifted high, Eamon could see traces of paintings on the wall. Some showed knights; some showed gaily painted ladies in springtime, spreading flowers by the River in a time of peace. One, the highest and most faded, seemed to show a man beneath a field of stars. A star shone brightly at his brow, making a crown of light, and his face was turned towards the midnight hue of the River.

Eamon came to the tomb farthest from the hall's entrance. It had an unfinished look and its shelf stood empty bar a large, uncomely insect that scuttled indignantly away. Eamon leaned against the stonework.

The face below him was a man's, stern and wizened. The hands over his breast held a tightly bound scroll marked with a star. In the flicker of the torchlight Eamon saw illegible shapes on the scroll. He traced his fingers across the faded forms. It was as he did so that his eyes were suddenly filled with the hideous strokes of the writing in the Hands' Hall. He went deathly cold.

“Sir?”

But Eamon didn't hear him. His vision blurred and his eyes opened to the chamber. He saw the paintings in the fullness of their colour and vivid hues of stone in the flickering torchlight.

A man was there, dressed in black. A red stone hung about his neck and a strange dagger rested at his side. Eamon stared as the man pushed back the lid of a tomb. Determined sweat plastered his pale face; Eamon watched as he picked up a book from the floor beside him. The book – the same book that Eamon had seen when he lay in torturous dreams at the Hidden Hall – was grimly bound, its dark cover embellished with a grasping eagle and its pages thick with the same writing as Eamon had seen at the Hands' Hall. The sight of it made him tremble.

The man in his vision gripped the book for a moment between his palms. Eamon thought he saw a spark of fire between them. The stricken man cried out and forced his shaking hands to press the book down deep into the tomb. Tears lashed his face, and as the stranger struggled to close the tomb again Eamon saw the heart of the King clutched in his hand.

He staggered against the tomb as the vision released him. All was clear: it was the same tomb, and the man kneeling by it had been Eben Goodman.

Eamon quivered; his ancestor's incomprehensible grief coursed through his veins. He choked back a sob.

“Sir?” Mathaiah whispered, alarmed.

Eamon pulled sharply away from the tomb and drove tremulous hands across his face. He knew what lay hidden there. The throned sought it.

“Sir?”

Eamon could barely speak. “There's a book here.”

“What? How do you know that?”

“I saw him putting it inside…” Eamon swallowed hard. He could not take his gaze from the tomb.

Mathaiah followed his look. His face creased with horror. “In there?” he whispered. Eamon nodded. Mathaiah's mouth fell open. “Sir, we can't open a tomb –”

Eamon did not hear the rest. He knew there was a book inside, and he knew that Eben had risked everything to hide it. Every fibre of his being commanded that the thing remain hidden.

But the vision had aroused his curiosity. What was it that Eben had so desperately hidden – something that the throned desired so much that he had once tried to burn his way into the library. Could it really be so very terrible? Hadn't Hughan said that nothing important was left in Ellen's Well? Hadn't the King told him to find out all that he could? He would never know what lay in the tomb if he did not open it.

What price had Eben paid?

“Sir?”

It might help Hughan. He made up his mind. “We'll open it.”

Mathaiah watched him silently. Though clearly unconvinced, he gave his assent: “Yes, sir.”

Eamon looked around. Finding a hook on the nearby wall he slid the torch into it. The light made the faded figures in the paintings dance.

Eamon pushed his sleeves up and laid his bare hands to the side of the thick, heavy lid. Without a word Mathaiah joined him and at an unspoken signal they both heaved. The scars on his back burnt as he strained against a force so strong that his muscles could scarcely nudge it. Mathaiah's feet scuffed and skidded in the dirt and he struggled to keep his footing.