The Writing on the Wall CH29

Heading out into that hallway again, without the cloak of borrowed darkness, was like walking naked into a rosebush.  Fortunately, I wasn't in the lead.  Kosmo took point, so to speak, and I had to deal with sharing a sort of place in line with Chrysander.  He had latched onto me again, in a way that I was almost becoming accustomed to.  Demetrius was last, taking up the rear with a sullen, but dutiful air.

They were all so much like soldiers that I found myself thinking of the general.  The spider skittered about as if thinking about the man was like bringing up his name in front of an enemy.  It felt so loud that I actually held a hand over my chest, in case someone heard the scratching of hairy legs on glass.

My chest tightened, but no one came running to inspect the sound.  Perhaps only I could hear it.

Chrysander looked about, then turned to Kosmo, who pointed down the hall.  It lead in two directions.  One, obviously the one that Soterios and Noni had taken, led back into the main room.  Down that way, I could hear and see the Hollow Children.  I turned my back quickly to them, scurrying along after Kosmo as he strode stealthily in the other direction.

Voices rang all around us, but some of them held an echo that I wasn't certain had anything to do with me or the Hollow Man.  As we descended, the hall curving downward like a stepless staircase, I didn't know what to do with my own ears.  They were becoming a nuisance to me.

I tilted my head and tapped the side of it.  As if trying to dislodge water from my ear.  It felt like I had been swimming against my will.

We paused, and Chrysander pulled on my arm to keep me from going on again when Kosmo resumed the journey on.  Demetrius passed us, glancing our way, but not stopping.  His boots made no sound at all.  He could have been a ghost for all the noise he made.

"Are you all right?"

The whisper was so low that I almost didn't hear it.  My ears still felt clogged with water.  But the question was already becoming one that I dreaded, so all I had to do was watch Chrysander's lips move to guess at what he was asking.  I just nodded.  I wanted to chide him for the halt, but the truth was that I was afraid of moving farther.

He looked down the hall and then back at me.  Guessing what I was thinking, perhaps.  I pressed my lips together in a grim face and took my turn to tug on his arm and get him moving.

Although I wasn't nearly as stealthy as Kosmo, or catlike as Demetrius, I had my upbringing in Zurhykeh.  Chrysander may have been good at other things, but he didn't know how to walk on sand.  I bent my knees, tugging on his arm again to try and teach him as we went.  He flashed a brief grin at me and followed my lead, but there was a joke in it.  A sense that he was teasing me.

I tapped my head again, and the spider dropped out of the bottleneck to plop onto the bottom of the bottle.  My throat tickled as I held in a cough.  This was becoming too familiar.  Too literal.

But there was not going to be any chance to tell anyone.  Voices were growing louder, either because I had cleared my ears at last, or simply because we were getting closer to people.

We hadn't even gotten very far away from the room that my friends had been kept in.  Moving as if on sand lowered the audibility of our steps, but it kept Chrysander and me at the far rear.  Demetrius doubled back twice to try and hurry us up, but the second time Chrysander just motioned for him to go on ahead.  They communicated something in a complicated bit of improvised sign language, and then Demetrius shrugged and went on ahead again.

Almost immediately, I wished he had not.  Tapping footsteps from impatient, light shoes behind us made my heart leap into my throat, to take the spider's place there.  A door opened, then slammed shut.

"They've run off!" someone shouted.  Miss Saccourt.

She clarified who 'they' were, and more footsteps came to aid her.  "Heads are going to roll," a male voice moaned.  "First the girl, now those other ones...  You start up a search party in here, I'll grab Ton and Farreach to help me look outside."  The footsteps took off again in different volumes, pitches, and paces.

I hooked arms with Chrysander and ran.

They had taken my shoes, for which I was actually quite grateful.  Running on stone was not comfortable in one's bare feet, but at least it was nearly silent.  Chrysander did his best with his boots, but he had to be careful not to step on my toes, and that slowed us down.

We collided with someone, and my gasp felt like a scream.  In fact, it was hard not to scream for real before I saw that the person we had bumped into was Kosmo.  He fixed us with an indignant frown that was not quite reproachful, and then held a single slim finger to his lips.  Then he moved us behind him with one long arm, drawing a small, sharp projectile from his coat.  The revolver stayed in its holster.

The light, impatient footsteps tip-tapped down the corridor, too quick and intent to be wandering aimlessly.  Miss Saccourt had seen us, and I guessed by the lack of additional footsteps marring her rhythm that she had spotted us so quickly that she hadn't taken her colleague's advice to form a search party.

Kosmo held his weapon ready, and I realised that Demetrius had come over to huddle behind me.  With him standing there, and Chrysander standing in front of me, I felt a bit like a useless ingredient in a sandwich.  The spider twitched, scurried in circles, but did not spin any sigils.  It took a great effort to keep it from doing so, especially since I wanted it to.

It would have been so easy, and we would have all been safe...

The Hollow Man's hand had been on my neck, Chrysander had said.  I believed him.  He reached back for my hand, and I gave it to him, reaching back for Demetrius.  If I was going to be the useless part of a sandwich, then I would have to compensate by being a decent part of a strong chain.

"You!"  Miss Saccourt actually skidded to avoid walking right into Kosmo's throwing dagger.  It was too dark in that twisting corner of the corridor for the metal to gleam, but I imagined it doing so.  Like a spoken threat from an inanimate object.  "That's impossible...  The general said that you--"

"Some things," Kosmo said, not looking at her, "tend to pass hands when one is not attentive."  As if to demonstrate, he passed the dagger from one hand to another.  His eyes stayed fixed on it, sliding over his fingers.  As if he were regarding a harmless pen while contemplating the contents of a letter he intended to write very soon.

She held a hand over her chest, a mixture of surprise and guarded fear.  "Yes, things like you.  I have not warned him," she said, her eyes trying to find his gaze.  "And I never would.  Surely you know that I have no love for the general.  If you want revenge on him, then take it and go."

But even from where I was, I could see that it was like trying to pick up a fistful of water.  Even when his head moved up, side to side, following the dagger passing from his left hand to his right, then back.  Kosmo did not lift his eyes high enough to meet hers.  "Oh of course not.  You think that he is a petty man.  That his reach does not extend far enough.  You, madam, have ideals."

"I do."

"A pity that you do not have morals."

The dagger did not soar through the air.  I had a feeling that that would have been too poetic, too... wasteful.  It was just there in his hand--left or right?--and then it was not.  Blood, foreign-looking and odd in the poor light, spilled out around the blade in Miss Saccourt's neck.  Her eyes, glassy and wide open, were still searching for Kosmo's.

She slumped to the ground, even less poetic than the dagger's trip from fingers to throat.  Kosmo did not wait to see her fall.  He turned on his heel and hurried us along.  Expressionless.

My skin crawled, and I couldn't look at him.  Demetrius probably needed to let go of my hand, and it was awkward to run down the corridor holding onto a young man in front of me and another behind, but I could not bring myself to release either of my friends.  Luckily, they seemed equally reluctant to let go of me.

At last, our descent came to an end.  There was farther to go, I felt, but Kosmo had stopped.  There were no windows here, not even the little arrow slits we had seen after first leaving the room.  Torches like the ones in the tunnel anterooms flickered unfeelingly, spaced so far apart that they didn't do much against the darkness.

The spider sat in the closest thing a round bottle bottom could offer as a corner.  It felt as though the thing was purring, or whatever spiders did instead of purring.  But there was also an edge to it.  As if it were waiting anxiously for something, yet happy to wait.  I squeezed my friends' hands.

Kosmo reached into his pocket again, and I flinched, my mind's eye filling with the sight of Miss Saccourt, falling bloody to the floor.  But all he took out of his pocket was a key.  He held it up and twisted it around in the light, then inserted it in the lock.

He turned to Demetrius.  "If I go in, they might well attack me.  And I would rather not face down a man who can turn a cat into a weapon."

Pride tugged at Demetrius's mouth, giving him an awkward grin.  "He attacked you with a cat?  How--where did he find a cat?"

"One of the scientists used to keep one."

"Is the cat all right?" I asked.

Kosmo raised an eyebrow at me.  "Cats are always fine," he said, his tone a little flat.  "Bloody things.  It fought like a demon, and all the old grandmaster did was toss it my way."  He looked as if he might have liked to say more, but he didn't.  He just stepped away from the door and held out his arms.  Like the driver he had been before, inviting us to get into the back seat.

It made me think of when I had first seen him from behind, of the way his ears had changed, and he had been brave in the face of Chrysander's elephant trying to smash the back of the car against the road.

Demetrius had already yanked the door open and run inside.  Chrysander held back with me, still holding my hand.  My other hand felt cold.  I curled my fingers into a fist and held it to my neck.  There was nothing there.

Inside the room, I could see the grandmaster rush forward to embrace his son.  The sight made tears spring to my eyes, but they blinked away on their own.  I couldn't see Dr Cordet.

"We should go in," Chrysander said.  "At least to get out of the open."

I nodded, but I couldn't make my legs move.  Something was wrong.

"Come on..."

He moved to walk in, but I stayed rooted to the spot.  I didn't want to go in there.  Kosmo had stationed himself by the door like a butler, out of sight of the room's occupants.  He would need one of us to explain that he had betrayed the general--for my sake, I reminded myself.  I started to ask him what would become of him, but I knew it wasn't the time for questions.

But questions would have kept me in the corridor.  I tried to let go of Chrysander's hand, so that I could let him go in on his own.  "You go on," I said, when he refused to budge a single finger.  "I'll stay out here with Kosmo."

Chrysander just tried walking in again, stretching both of our arms out almost to the full length of distance they could span across one side of the narrow bit of hall to the other.  "What are you so worried about?"

"I don't know."  My voice was a whimper.  The spider was climbing back up the bottleneck, and I had to shiver hard to make it fall back down.

"Is there something in there?"

Kosmo stepped away from the door and pulled us both over to huddle in front of him.  "Sweet as you two are, this is not a secure place to have a confusion of spat and... whatever else it is that lovers do.  Go inside.  Dr Cordet was sedated, and she'll need both of you to carry her out."

A little smile crept onto my face, and warmth replaced some of my fear.  He had been serious about not wanting to face Grandmaster Trevino in a hurry.  There was also something about the guilt of hearing of Dr Cordet's condition that kicked the anxiety out of me.  It was our fault she was here.

Twisting out of Chrysander's grip, I turned the smile on him, forcing it to grow so that he would not protest.  To my surprise, he looked shocked for a moment, and then his face took on the expression it had when he had still been so much a stranger, and the general had appeared to be an ally.  That goofy look when I had kissed his cheek.

As soon as I entered the room, Demetrius caught me up in a tight hug, then drew me forward to see his father.  "He's fine, Athena, isn't it amazing?"

Indeed, the grandmaster looked more disgruntled than anything.  There was a cut on his forehead that no one had seen to, but he did not appear to pay it any notice.  He stood as dignified as I had ever seen him in his study.  Then he actually bowed to me.  It wasn't a courtly gesture, more the sort of thing that a sweet old man would do when he saw a friend or acquaintance in the village.

"My son tells me you've been a great help in this rescue."

"I've been a something," I admitted, looking away.  There was too much attention on me.  Chrysander had pulled the door mostly shut behind him, and the room became another world.  Kosmo and the hallway no longer existed.  Miss Saccourt, the general, and the rest of it, could have been a nightmare that I had woken up from moments ago.  The memory of it fresh inside me.

Skittering against glass.

"Dr Cordet is not well, I am afraid.  They have not treated us poorly," the grandmaster said, gruff and annoyed after the niceties of gratitude had been passed to all three of us.  "In fact, they seem rather to have forgotten we are here."

"Let's hope that's so, Dad."  Demetrius did not expand on why we should have hoped for it.  No one asked him to, either.  "Right now, we have to concentrate on getting out of here."

"Has that blackguard's dark assassin really come over from his treacherous master's side?"

I bit my lip and repressed the urge to glance back over my shoulder.  I wished Kosmo had just come in with us.  With a body in the hall, he was as vulnerable as we had been, lingering back there.  "Yes.  He swore fealty to me."

Grandmaster Trevino looked unduly impressed, I thought.  He started to ask me a question, but then the door opened, and Kosmo poked his head in.  When he was not immediately set upon, he slipped in and shut the door.

"There's a good boy, king to be," he said to Chrysander, who had gone straight to Dr Cordet and was helping her sit up.  She had been lying on a makeshift bed, unconscious.  Although she didn't appear to be injured, she wasn't moving even groggily.  Her eyes did not so much as flutter open as Kosmo and Chrysander worked together to make her stand up.

It was like watching a doll trying to come to life and failing.  I walked up to them to help, then stepped back.  "Hang on, I have an idea.  There's a sigil--it's a very old one that is approved and used a lot," I added, when Chrysander shot me a warning look.  "It's like smelling salts.  Whenever a student in my dorms went on a dangerous bender, we'd use it to bring 'em round."

I looked around, seeking a bit of chalk or charcoal, anything to make a mark.  The walls weren't very smooth, but there was a wooden table pushed up against the opposite wall.

"Is that really necessary?" Demetrius asked me, putting a hand on my arm.  "There's enough of us, we can carry her out and get her to a hospital."

"She'll do better if she can walk on her own.  What if we have to run?"  I knelt on the floor to pick up a bit of candle.  The spider tickled its way up the side of the bottle, but when I snapped upright, it dropped back down again.  It was a red candle, with plenty of wax left.  Not ideal, but it would do.  Rather like a crayon in place of a pencil.

I sketched out the sigil on the wood and motioned for Dr Cordet to be brought over.  The sigil worked best with it was drawn on a piece of paper which was then thrust into the intended person's hand, but it would be effective enough if she just touched the table when it activated.

Her hand was a little cold, but like a fish was cold.  Alive and a bit damp, as if she had broken a fever in her sleep.  I spread her fingers out on the table's surface and stepped back.  The sigil flashed, and her eyes snapped open in nearly the same instant.

"Everything is going to be fine," I said.

Suddenly, the spider wriggled a bit, standing in the centre of the bottle's bottom.  It leapt straight up, sailing through the bottleneck.  Right into my head.

I waited to collapse, but my feet touched the ground as they had in the cave.  Ankles stinging and sore, I half-crouched, bending at the knees to redistribute the awkward pain.  The room was gone.  My friends were gone.

I stood in the middle of another room, one filled with machines that thrummed and pumped as loud as a small factory.  There was a table there, like the one in the round cavern room.  Like the one that I had been strapped into before Kosmo had let me go.

The Hollow Man lay on it, writhing and emitting an unearthly howl that made my heart ache so that I did not think it would continue beating if it went on for a second longer.  He looked just as he had when I had caught a glimpse of him through the door, while hiding in the closet under the stair.  But there was a wanness to him, white where there ought to have been grey.  His frayed, ancient rags flapped against a wind that did not exist, while lights flashed and monitors scrolled reams of data faster than the eye could follow.

"This is an exciting development."

General Thornbehr stepped in front of the table, his face lit by the eerie glow of the monitors and the Hollow Man's weakening magic.  I backed away from him.  My back bumped against a door, the knob immediately digging a bruise into my skin as I continued trying to move away.  "You're killing him," I said, or tried to say.  It came out in a ragged whisper.  The feeling of being compressed and torn apart all at once had returned as though it had never left, and I could barely breathe.  It was stronger in this room than it had been upstairs.

He did not move, other than to shake his head, like a schoolteacher disappointed in a particularly stupid guess from an inattentive student.  "Oh no, Miss Idony.  I am not killing anything.  What I am doing is giving life to another.  You see, the Hollow Children, as many of those here have taken to calling them, are incomplete.  I suppose we should have expected as much.  Not even with a monster so magnificent as the Hollow Man," he indicated the writhing creature on the table, "can reproduce without a mate."

I recoiled violently, nearly hitting my head on the door.  If the room had been the size of an entire country there would not have been room enough to put between me and this person.  "You're insane."

"That is often said to men of vision.  But when I present to the king a perfect soldier, an improved Hollow Man with the longevity and power of his father, and the wits and humanity of a mother, then we shall see what folly it is to have thought me mad."  His eyes flashed in the light-punctuated dark.

I scrabbled for something I could use as a weapon, but there was nothing.  Only the machines, and nothing with with to smash them.  My bones felt like brittle rubber as they were continually pulled at and pushed in.  The spider huddled inside my head, screeching like a gull.

Gasping, I took one staggering step towards the general, then another.  "Somewhere in this place," I said, still gasping, panting to make the words come out, "there is a man who fancies me."

The general sneered.  "Oh yes, the prince.  That was an unfortunate acquisition.  He shall prove difficult to deal with, but not impossible.  As I believe he told you, our great kingdom would not be harmed by his death."

"He would be harmed by mine.  And I think you'll find," it was getting easier to talk, I was so close to him now.  So close to the Hollow Man.  "I think you'll find that Chrysander is the jealous type.  He wouldn't like it if I married a monster."

A curt, barking guffaw left the general's throat, tilting his head up slightly.  Lifting his guard that much.  I grabbed his fist, the most mobile weapon in the room, and used it to batter myself in the chest.

The glass broke.  The spider was free.

General Thornbehr ripped his arm away from me, but I wasn't the one he was staring at.  Horror transfixed his features in a rictus, as the Hollow Man shook himself, standing free of the table, his skeletal, rope-like limbs swaying.  I backed away, covering my mouth as I coughed, long hacking coughs.

They turned to retching as I watched.  Even when I turned away, I could hear the general screaming, the Hollow Man's own cries of victory filling the air of that tiny room.

I covered my ears with both hands.  One of them was wet with blood.  I couldn't tell if it came from my coughing, or from breaking the glass, as if the glass had been real, and not just the cage of my own thoughts.

The cage that had been keeping the Hollow Man both close to me and at bay.  He turned with slow, grim, excited purpose, and lurched towards me.  His face, once again a rainbow of grey death, empty eye sockets ringed with his own healthy black, appeared to smile, though this was not a function of which those muscles were capable.

Revenge had been taken, and he was free now.  Utterly free.