The Sea Peoples(83)
“That’s what counts,” she said coolly.
Thora nodded, and touched her chest where the amulet lay again.
“Thanks, my old friend,” she said . . . and Pip knew she wasn’t addressing anyone here. “I’ll make a Blót when I can.”
Toa grunted from the doorway, his face and massive forearms sheening with sweat as if he’d grappled with forces strong enough to have uprooted oaks.
“Someone coming up the stairs, bloody fast!” he said.
“Quick!” Deor snapped.
He bent and grabbed Wilde by the collar and dragged him backward from the room and into the corridor beyond. The knife in his hand moved in a curious pattern around the dying man’s head, then dipped into the blood and drew runes in a semicircle about him.
“Through here!” he said. “Thora, Pip, together—feel the bond that unites you to Prince John.”
Pip did, feeling a little self-conscious about it. And there was a feeling of connection; but it didn’t lead anywhere in particular as far as she was concerned.
“Here!” Deor said, his head turning with an intentness like a hunting wolf.
They followed him down the dark corridor, leaving the light of the tallow candle behind. The next room was lined by books and papers, dim shapes in shadow. One wall had a bare space, and on it was hung a plaque that bore a three-armed yellow sigil on black, twisting in ways that made her eyes want to slide away and focus on it at the same time. Deor advanced on it with the knife held before him, and used the knife to flip the plaque off the wall. It shattered, and Pip felt an obscure sense of relief, as if some physical pressure she hadn’t been conscious of until that instant was removed.
And now she could see the wall better. “Look,” she said. “See the gap between those two bookcases?”
Deor tried to feel into it, but his hand wouldn’t fit. She stepped over and ran hers in; it was tight, but she could just feel a line down the plaster beyond.
“Wilde had small hands—smaller than mine, but there’s definitely something there. I’d say that bookcase is concealing a door. It must pivot on the other side. Toa, watch our backs.”
The big man had good eyes, but huge hands and fingers like muscular sausages.
Thora, Deor and Pip began tracing the outlines of the mahogany shelves. Pip’s fingers found a rough spot.
“Help me take these bound files off here!” she said. “I’d wager there’s a catch here somewhere.”
Behind them, the door to the outer room slammed open.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
BETWEEN WAKING WORLD AND SHADOW
John felt an inner dizziness, and the world contorted around him, making him feel as if he were about to pitch forward on his face . . . when he didn’t have one, and was bound upright back where he did have one. He was here and there, spinning, the fabric of things buckling like the buffeting of huge blows or a raging storm through existence rather than sea and air—only the typhoon that the Grasscutter had raised in Westria came close to the cataclysmic violence he sensed.
Hildred’s mind blazed like a burning jewel, but something was tugging at the connection between them. Wilde’s door was open, and Hildred burst through crying:
“It is done, it is done! Let the nations rise and look upon their King!”
Wilde wasn’t there, and the first jar of worry dampened the flow of maddened joy. Hildred went to the cabinet and took the diadem from its case, the diamonds and fretted gold glistening blue and yellow in the dim light of the tallow candle, and then drew on the white silk robe, embroidered with the Yellow Sign.
“King!” he muttered. “At last I am King, King by my right in Hastur, King because I know the mystery of the Hyades, and my mind has sounded the depths of the Lake of Hali. I am King!”
His mind moved gloatingly to the first gray pencilings of dawn, and how a tempest brewed which would shake two hemispheres. Visions of shouting crowds and ranked guards and men and women kneeling before a throne possessed Hildred as he threw up his arms in exultation.
Then a man groaned. John and the Boisean with him both recognized the sound of someone badly wounded, too badly hurt to scream, but Castaigne was simply puzzled by it, and by the smell of blood—he did recognize that, and vague fleeting memories of hunting trips and hanging a deer up to drain while the dogs nuzzled at it and ate the offal went through him.
He seized the tallow dip and sprang to the door to the hallway, sheltering the guttering flame. The cat passed him like a demon, and the tallow dip went out, but the long knife flew swifter than she, and he heard her screech; John and the Boisean recognized the heavy tugging feel of a steel edge ramming into meat and bone. For a moment the sound of her tumbling and thumping about filled the darkness, and then Hildred lighted a lamp and raised it over his head.
Wilde lay on the floor with his throat torn open. The unwilling co-hosts of Hildred’s mind recognized the ragged tear of an animal’s claws, and the word tiger went through them in unison. At first Hildred thought his mentor was dead but as he looked, a green sparkle came into his sunken eyes, his mutilated hand trembled, and then a spasm stretched his mouth from ear to ear.
For a moment terror and despair gave place to hope, but as Hildred bent over him his eyeballs rolled up in his head, and he died with the usual twitching squalor and stink.
“My Crown, my Empire! Oh, Master, no!”