Justice Hall - Laurie R. King [170]
“Which way did they go?” Ali demanded.
“I didn’t see!” the boy answered furiously. “I was locked in here.”
“You have ears. Which way did they go?”
The flat assumption in Ali’s voice steadied young Darling. He frowned, dashed his fist against his teary eyes, and decided, “Not through the gallery.”
“The window?” We were up on the main block’s first floor, but a brief roof line lay not far beneath the windowsill, the portico over a side entrance.
“No, I’d have heard that. They just went. I think the man was carrying Gabe.”
“Good lad,” Ali said, and left the room at a run. Even so, Mahmoud was before him.
But they were not in the next room, nor in the corridor that led back into the long gallery. We were now nearing the old part of the house again.
“Isn’t there a—,” I started to say, the diagrams of Justice clear in my mind, but Mahmoud had already darted into the other end of the corridor and leapt up a flight of six stairs to a small door that looked to be a service room, but was in fact the upper end of the ancient spiral staircase that led down to Marsh’s bedroom and into the Mediaeval chapel with the Roman tiles below. Mahmoud had the key out and the door open in an instant, and then he went still as a statue, listening with all his being for sounds, above or below. None came. Mahmoud snatched up two candle stubs and a box of vestas from the stone niche over the entrance, lit the stubs and thrust one at Ali, then started up the stairway with his hand cupped to shelter the other. I picked up the skirts of my costume and followed on his heels; Holmes plunged into the depths after Ali.
This upper level of stairs was less worn than those Alistair had shown me on our tour, but retained the shape of the others, a tight, shoulder-hugging spiral that ended at a small, sturdy door. It was not locked; Mahmoud blew out the candle and eased the door open.
Icy air rushed over us, blowing snowflakes and the stink of the roof-top torches. The heaving flames reflected off the day’s snowfall, giving a degree of substance to the roofs, and Mahmoud moved off with confidence into the shifting darkness. I went after him, trusting his childhood knowledge of the Justice leads, praying that he could see well enough to keep from stumbling into Ivo Hughenfort. As my eyes adjusted I could tell that the snow had been trampled—but that must have been by the servants, lighting those dramatic torches along the roof line. In the furious leap and ebb of the flames I glimpsed the roof as flat expanses of white cut by the sharp dark lines of chimneys and sections of pitched roof, with the dark wall of the crenellations surrounding the whole. Mahmoud’s night-dark shape moved silently before me, and then went still.
I too stopped. The flaring torches obscured as much as they illuminated, but I thought the movement across the snow fifty feet or so away was cast not by the torches, but by a moving figure. Two figures, one of them emitting muffled cries of fury and fear. They neared the wall of crenellations, and in an instant the air in front of me was empty. A shadow flew across the patches of light and dark, to merge with the other in a scuffle and exchange of shouts, and I slithered and stumbled my way across the intervening space in time to see Mahmoud sweep the boy behind his robes, the small white patch hidden by the black, and face their attacker, teeth and knife bared.
Then the pulsing light caught on the dull gleam of metal, as the figure facing Mahmoud drew a gun. I was too far away to use my throwing knife, even if I could have hit him in the uncertain light, so I did the only thing I could: I shouted. I don’t even know what the string of words that tumbled out of me were, I merely had to let him know that he had a witness, that where he might have hoped to arrange a convenient accident for one Hughenfort, or even two, the problems had expanded beyond that.
The tableau froze, the leaping flames and the rising breath clouds the only signs of movement. I began to inch forward, hoping to get close