Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [82]
‘The captain forgot to lock it as he ran out. Or didn’t turn the key fully home.’
‘Yes. So you followed me here … gave me your cloak for decency’s sake … if you please … and then took me straight to the castle. You’d better take me straight to the castle. We want to be seen very obviously going there.’
Lymond slung her his cloak, resumed his own finery and for a moment stood still, looking at Marthe. ‘You enjoy this,’ he said.
And Marthe, surprise and contempt in her face, said, ‘Of course.’
9
Gabès
Unlike Francis Crawford, whose game with life was a strange and rootless affair played with the intellect, Jerott had a passionate instinct to live. It was a happy circumstance also that his nervous and bronchial systems were roughly as frail as a bison’s.
His first impression, as the effects of the blow wore off and the effects of the drug uneasily lingered, was that someone had opened his jaws and poured a ladle of boiling lead straight down his throat. His next, as he opened his eyelids with difficulty, was that, like the unchaste virgins of the Campus Sceleratus, he had been sealed alive with a light in a cave. There were caves he had heard of where a dog would die in a day because of the seeping of sulphur … except that this wasn’t sulphur so, thought Jerott prosaically, it couldn’t be hell either, thank God. He sat up, and started to cough.
He was on the cold floor of the warehouse. It was pitch black, except for a small, volatile patch of dull red in the centre of his circle of vision. Dimly pulsing, almost lightless, it revealed that the darkness was crowded with banks and pillars and avalanches of throttling grey smoke. It revealed also the dead body of Kedi, the child Khaireddin’s nurse, lying beside him. Retching and choking, Jerott flung himself on his hands and knees, and face to the ground, felt his way to the door.
He thought his head would explode before he finally found it, eyes and nose streaming, his throat raw. The door was sealed and immovable, the bars dropped outside. He tore the carpets from both that and the windows and found that these, too, were shuttered outside. Pressing his face hard against the rough frames he tried, savagely, to wrench into his lungs some thread of wandering air which would stave off the poison a minute, two minutes longer.
There was a trace, but only a trace: for every half-breath of life he was taking several of death. But it gave him the second he needed to think: to realize that the light represented something burning, which must be the cocoons, and that the fumes, not the fire, were intended to kill him.
Jerott drew a last, difficult breath. Then, stumbling to where he remembered the shelves to be, he laid hands on the wood and, with a strength which drove the splinters unheeded into his hands, wrenched off two boards and, fighting straight through the smoke, thrust their ends deep into the dully burning, venomous heap.
They wouldn’t light. He had to leave them, to reel to the window and lie there, gasping: it was one of the most appalling acts of will he had ever had to perform, to leave that window and stagger back to the fire.
When he got there, it was to find that both planks had caught and one was almost consumed. He grasped them, careless of burns, and got them to the door. One of them, dying, went out. Jerott watched it from where he lay on the floor, nursing the other against the smooth wood of the door-leaf. It was a matter of lessening interest whether this one survived. He knew he couldn’t do it again. He felt as if the gas had somehow invaded his flesh, congesting every passage and vein in his body: his head felt expanded and solid, like that of a malformed infant; his legs were useless. It was very warm.
His hand dropped, and his eyes closed.
A burning fragment of wood, falling on his wrist, stung him awake. Remotely irritated, Jerott looked