Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [309]
‘He could have survived anything,’ said the rich voice, suddenly roughened. ‘Anything, but injustice and double-dealing by those whom he trusted. You … Leone Strozzi … de Villegagnon—all tried to besmirch him. At Zuara, you tried to kill him.’
‘Hence the accidents between Malta and Thessalonika,’ said Lymond. ‘Until you got news from Egypt in the Beglierbey’s house, you thought as we all did that Gabriel was dead. Gabriel living had told you not to harm me: I was to be preserved—am I right?—for a more painful fate. Gabriel dead meant that at last you could take the joys of revenge. And whether living or dead, there was a revenge you had already taken, for which I was hoping to pay you in very particular coin.’
‘It seemed to me,’ said the disembodied, gratified voice, ‘that you might presently realize that the opium was reaching you through your food. It hardly mattered. You did not understand until too late, as it happened, that you were receiving opium at all.’
‘Or Salablanca might have lived,’ said Lymond evenly. ‘If not Khaireddin. What a great deal, I’m afraid, you must answer for.’ He was looking after Marthe, who had laid a hand on his arm, and then disappeared. After a moment the old man Gilles followed her. Archie, consulting Lymond with his eyes, stayed where he was, and so did Jerott, Míkál and Philippa, clutching Kuzúm. Then Philippa saw Jerott give a great start and, staring at Lymond, bend to pick up the extinguished torch from the floor. Lymond said aloud, ‘Where did you meet Graham Malett?’
‘I was a Serving Brother on Malta. A humble Brother, but he allowed me to care for him as if I were worthy. It was Graham Malett who trained me.’ Lymond was working with flint and steel and paper. There was a spark. The torch, shielded by Archie, flared into light. Lymond said suddenly, light-heartedly, ‘I always thought your urchins in ginger were bloody appalling. Did he give you the recipe?’
Onophrion’s shadow leaped on the wall. Onophrion himself was more circumspect. Hurt in his tenderest spot, he moved a mere two feet forward, but it was enough for Lymond, slipping down the passage quietly, to emerge for a second so that he and Onophrion were in full view. The marksmen behind in the short passage had hardly time to swing round and aim when Lymond’s knife, thrown very hard, entered Onophrion’s leg at the groin. And in the same moment Jerott, dodging round the same corner, threw his torch, equally hard, at the rampart of straw. Onophrion screeched and fell like the trunk of a tree to the ground. And the straw stacked against the wall of the short passage, the wall opposite the chamber of treasure, began to crackle and blaze.
The glare of it and the first of the smoke came round the corner and back up the conduit to where Philippa and the rest were all standing. Jerott with Lymond behind him came with the smoke, fast up the incline, and Philippa found herself retreating; pushed gently by Jerott with the rest of the party back up the hill: back the way they had come. She said, ‘Once they get a boat, the other men will simply come up the conduit behind us?’
Once they get a boat,’ said Lymond. And to Jerott he said, ‘Will he think of it?’
‘He’s busy with his leg at the moment,’ said Jerott. ‘You meant to miss?’
‘I meant,’ said Francis Crawford, ‘to do just what I did. Maître Gilles, you know what will happen?’
Rose-coloured in the increasing light, Pierre Gilles’s white-bearded head nodded. ‘It’s best. It was the girl Marthe’s idea.’
Turning briefly, Lymond’s eyes looked for and found the blue eyes of Marthe. ‘As Master Gilles here would say, Ars sine scientia nihil est. It may bring down the roof. And you’ve lost everything, you know.’
‘It will bring down the roof. Moist Mother Earth …’
He finished it for her: ‘… engulf the unclean power in thy boiling pits, in thy burning fires.… Or we shall suffocate.’ He broke off, listening to the voices. It seemed to Philippa that Onophrion had called out his men: she could