Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [98]
He had taken his eyes from his leader to look at it; had failed to watch Thady’s movements and to match them with precautions of his own. The first he knew was a crack of a stone at his ear which disappeared chattering into the void. There was a quick movement, then the sound of a breath sharply drawn and then held. The linking rope whipped and swayed.
He looked up. Faced with a space of sheer wall, Thady Boy had done the only thing possible. He had flung the free end of his rope to noose a stone crocket high above his head near the belfry, and bringing his weight to bear slowly on the doubled rope, was climbing the open face with its help.
The crocket bore his weight. It was the rope which, fraying on some unseen neck of the spire, had given way, bringing him slithering down to the fine ledge of his starting point. And under the sharp impact of his foot, the stone had broken.
Horrified, Stewart watched. Thady Boy had saved himself, for the moment, by throwing himself inwards, hands flat on the wall, feet arrested in inadequate cracks; but he had almost no purchase, no belaying projection within reach and no safeguard but the remaining intact rope linking his waist with Stewart’s. And Stewart, cramped like a moth himself to the stonework, nails dug into crevices, could not support another man’s falling weight.
Lymond knew it too. Economically, using as little as possible of his vanishing store of balance, of energy and of time, he cut the rope between himself and the Archer.
Thought that night came godlike to Robin Stewart; dilemma and master plan appearing from nowhere printed themselves on the wax tables of his brain. In the half minute before the fat man fell, he knew exactly what he must do.
There was a barred window on his left, just out of arm’s reach. For a moment, each in turn had rested on its sill, looking longingly at the inaccessible staircase inside. Stewart had no time to wonder if the stone was rotten there too, or if the bars would hold. To reach it, he must leave hand and foothold and jump: a jump of life and death, with below him the gaping chimneys and the blue slates and the waiting bricks of the streets.
He turned his back on Thady Boy and leaped. As his bony hands, like a grip from the tomb, closed hard on the cold bars, his feet swung free over the void; then his knee found the sill, his shifting elbow the bar, and ramming body and arms like some iron throttling plant within the lifesaving cangs and cavities, wearing the window like a harness, he spun the dark rope through the night, unfolding the coils he had held spare in his hand, sending the hemp hissing along the stone surface level with Thady Boy’s head.
In his turn, Lymond took the life-or-death chance as had Stewart. Loosing all his inadequate, sliding grip, he watched the dim rope coming, and jumped.
Stewart braked his fall. The bars, though he didn’t know it till later, squeezed his arms black; and the rope running harsh through his hands left raw flesh, whipped and bloody, behind it. Then came the drag at his body he was waiting for, the pulsing strain at his waist rope as the man below swung and span at the bottom arc of his fall. Stewart braced his aching body across the width of the