Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [165]
Then they were running downstairs, Lymond with a sword in each hand. Mat said, “The boy … ?”
“Of course: who else? But he may not know there’s a passage out of that cellar. Unless it’s full of Hunter and his friends, waiting for us.”
It wasn’t. At the next bend there was light: a sickly glint from a wall taper exposing the sunk treads and checkered green walls. Then they were in the basement.
The floor was littered with rubbish from the groined roof, and dust covered everything. In a corner stood a heavy leather chest, securely locked: their useless gold. They sought instead what their lives depended on: the low and obscure door to the nuns’ underground passage. It was there. They saw the lintel. The rest was blocked, triumphantly and symbolically indeed, with stacked cases of gunpowder.
It was suddenly very quiet.
Overhead, they could hear the jangle of harness and men’s voices but no steps descending, although Mat moved instinctively to the narrow stair and put his sword across it. Scott was standing motionless between the gold and the gunpowder, the tallow dip in his hand, light and shadow racing in freshets over the stone between leader and accolyte.
Softly Lymond said, “You put the cost of your pride at three lives?”
“Three!”
Lymond answered Mat without turning his head. “Why do you fancy he’s holding the torch?”
It was quick, of course, admirable; but quick thinking would hardly rescue him now. Scott raised the flare, beside red ear and thick jaw and tousled, marigold hair. He said, “Just a precaution. You have ten minutes to walk upstairs and give yourselves up; otherwise they fire stoneshot, and then Greek fire, and there’ll be an explosion like Muspelheim. By waiting, of course, you’ll take me with you; but that’s a dull prospect compared with setting a score of young lassies to fry …”
“You bloody little traitor, shut your mouth!” It was Matthew, not Lymond.
The direct assault on the memory was intentional: a revenge indeed for every doubt and indignity and misery that Scott had suffered. He had perhaps reckoned without Lymond’s peculiar strength.
No trace of the ordeal was visible to Scott. The raw light shuddered on the Master’s face but Lymond himself was quite still. He said, “You evidently want to be taken seriously. I am now doing so. You are prepared to take responsibility for Matthew’s death?”
Buccleuch had hinted, and Sir Andrew had confirmed. You don’t make concessions to a man who has killed his own sister. “Matthew’s safe,” said Scott. “We’re all safe, for ten minutes. She was called Eloise, wasn’t she? Why did she die?”
“Because in this age only the intolerable have survived. Matthew, quickly.”
Scott reached the gunpowder before them, the tallow spluttering in his hand, smiling. “Touch one box and I’ll explode it.”
The dreadful, fragile little situation was too much for Mat. He raised his heavy sword, inhaling stale air with a roar. “Explode it then, you bloody little rat: you don’t have the guts!” and stumbled, arrested by Lymond, iron-armed.
“You’re dealing with hysteria, not guts or lack of them. Scott: if I were alone I’d say throw and be damned. Burn us into red and white rose trees. Make sweet cinders of our bloody gold. Exercise this pitiful, feckless piety you’ve discovered and reap your own trashy reward. Why the melodrama, I don’t know. If you were determined to trap me, it seems a fairly simple thing to do without the busking. If you want the satisfaction of a discussion, you won’t get it. Make your decisions, such as they are: you’re in command. I have nothing to say to you.”
“Hell, but I have!” said Mat. “Jump him! Start on the boxes. He won’t throw.”
“He will,” said Lymond calmly. “Big bangs and primary colours