Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [111]
Jerott followed. De Herrera, a pace behind, stopped, alarmed by some change in the air at his back. In that moment, against all his orders, the antechamber door was flung open; announcing, by the great swirl of air sucking behind, that every door in the arsenal corridor stood similarly ajar. De Vallier, too long left in ignorance, disturbed by rumours of running men and sudden orders, had sent a squad of soldiers, led by picked knights, to investigate.
Now, debouching into the antechamber, they stopped, paralysed, the glare coppering glazed faces; then, horror-struck, slammed the door shut. But it was too late by then. Fed on that life-giving air, the young flames around the two men inside the arsenal had leaped into full life, to become a single vast sheet of fire.
To Jerott, caught suddenly between a wall of serpentine and corn powder and an advancing surge, like a wave, of towering flame, it seemed beyond believing that now, with free access to water, sand, all the help that they needed, they were going to fail. Lymond, driven back also, arrived at his side breathing painfully; said, ‘Cosy, isn’t it?’ and dragging off his smoking burnous, flung the wet folds over the nearest powder boxes and, coughing, dodged forward again …
The fire had spread between themselves and the door. Through it, Jerott saw faces, grim, terrified, sick, lit by the glare; and the sound of a weak hissing rose behind the crackle and roar of the flames. Sparks and soaring pieces of lit stuff in clouds of ash began to drift through the air. He pulled off his protective shrouding, like Lymond, and flinging it over the boxes, ran forward to join him.
The fire was running towards them, along a single line of stacks and casings; and between themselves and it was now only one stand, packed shelf upon shelf with armour. Lymond had made no attempt to get to the door. Instead, he was at the foot of the stand, hacking with all his force at the uprights with the sharp axe. After a second, Jerott took the other post and did the same.
Above them, the stand caught fire. The heat was scorching them now. Seared and blistered already by the stinging debris, Jerott worked now with timber crashing about him and pieces of flaming leather, jerked from above, falling flaring on his exposed back and head. A beam of wood, disturbed, glanced off his arm; he felt nothing at all. But for the wet cloths protecting them, the cases at his back would already have exploded in the heat. Already the thin, webbed folds were whitening; soon the fabric would be tinder-dry, a fuse in itself.
The stand rocked. He realized suddenly that the post Lymond had been working on was severed. In a moment the other man was beside him, adding his blows to Jerott’s own. The wood under the blade creaked, then grated; the towering erection shuddered; and as Lymond said quickly, ‘All right. As far back as you can!’ the unwieldy thing rocked and heeled faster and faster with its vast platforms laden with chain mail and plated metal, away from them, to fall with a clashing roar into the heart of the flames.
A tower of orange, roof-high, shot up from its far perimeter; then died low in rolling seas of black smoke, to fumble and mutter on fresh fuel. In a moment, such was the bed of heat, it would have found fresh, renewed life. But that moment was all that the men in the doorway required. As he pressed back against the lethal boxes, blinded, coughing, half-stunned by the tumbling metal as the rack fell, Jerott saw water run streaming across the floor at his feet. Men masked in wet cloth leaped over the fallen debris towards him in a whirling, feverish spray of water and sand. Sodden bales, thrown over and over, shrouded the naked, perilous boxes behind him, and as the teams began to move inwards, pressing, extinguishing, reducing in clouds of steam the diminishing circle of fire, he saw that the powder crates, one by one, were being carried outside. Then he looked at Lymond.
Lymond was looking