Borrower of the Night - Elizabeth Peters [81]
Tony turned.
‘I think we can make it now.’
But for several seconds none of us moved. We stared at one another with the white-faced incredulity of shipwrecked sailors who finally see a sail on the horizon.
‘Better let me go first,’ I said. ‘I’m the thinnest.’
At the expense of a few square inches of skin, I got through. A push from Tony and I was out, gooseflesh popping out on my bare arms as the heavenly coolness of the night air hit them. My coat was still down below, and so far as I was concerned, it could stay there. Nothing, not even the shrine, could have gotten me back into that hole.
At first I just lay there on the floor and admired the view through the open door. As Tony had predicted, I was on the ground floor of the keep, and the moonlight scene without was exquisite. A desert would have looked good to me just then if it had a sky over it.
The sight of the silvery moonlight reminded me of a minor discomfort that had been overridden by more pressing worries. Suddenly I was dying of thirst. Leaning over the hole I croaked out, ‘Put out the torch and come on.’
Getting Blankenhagen out wasn’t easy. Only fortitude and hope had kept him conscious; he was a dead weight, and even with Tony pushing from below and me pulling from above we had a hard time. When we finally extracted him, he collapsed at full length on the floor and lay there without moving.
Tony followed, breathing hard and looking as if he was going to be sick. We were both flat on the floor, just breathing, when the beautiful silver moonlight was blotted out by a shape in the doorway.
The figure crossed the room without a glance at the shadows where we were sprawled, and disappeared.
I applied grubby knuckles to my eyes. I knew the stairs leading up to the next floor had provided the means of exit for that incredible apparition, but I couldn’t believe I had really seen it – a tall figure, cloaked and hooded, wearing boots that rang metallically on the stone floor – and carrying in its arms the white-robed figure of a woman.
Tony stared speechlessly. Blankenhagen sat up. He had no voice left; but the air came out of his lungs in an explosive whisper that broke my paralysis like a dash of cold water.
‘Irma!’
Chapter Twelve
I HAD NOT RECOGNIZED Irma. I wouldn’t have known my own mother under those confusing conditions (especially my mother, under those conditions). But I was willing to take Blankenhagen’s word for it. I couldn’t figure out what Irma was doing there, but I decided maybe I had better go up and find out.
Tony beat me to the stairs. Blankenhagen was behind me, but not for long; I heard him stumble and fall after a few steps.
We kept going up – all the way up. I don’t know what I expected to find up there. I wasn’t thinking coherently. But I felt a mild shock when I came out of the opening onto the roofless top storey, and saw what was happening.
The character in the cloak stood at the edge of the platform, with not even a ridge of stone between him and the ground some sixty feet below. Irma lay at his feet. She was drugged or unconscious – probably the former, because her face was quite peaceful and she was breathing heavily through her nose. If the poignancy of the moment had not raised my mind above ordinary cattiness, I would have said she was snoring.
The man who had brought her there was wearing riding breeches and boots. The hood of his dark-grey loden cloak was thrown back, so that his fiery head gleamed in the moonlight. His gun gleamed too. It was big and shiny and it was pointed straight at Tony’s stomach.
‘So it was you,’ I said unoriginally.
‘In part. No, Tony, don’t try anything.