The Game - Laurie R. King [156]
After an interminable time, which was probably only six or eight minutes, the animal grunted to itself and padded across the ground. Then it dropped with a breathy grunt and quieted.
I began to breathe again. After a minute, one of the men touched my arm, and we crept forward, cautious as mice in a cattery.
At the end of the lion cage, the greenery closed in so it became impossible to avoid the gravel, but when I gingerly set my foot onto its pale surface, I found that here it had not been refreshed as recently as in the centre of the zoo, and the stones in this damp place had sunk into the ground. We passed the door to the keeper’s building behind the cage where the food and cleaning equipment was stored, and where the white gravel came to an end.
But as I had remembered, there was an unnatural space between the bushes and the building where the salukis had bounded as at a familiar way, and the ground under our feet bore the unmistakable imprint of traffic. Working by feel alone, unable to see anything but the glow of the sky above, I patted my way along the walls until I came to the place where baked-mud wall merged with the naked rock of the hillside.
There we found the door. Unevenly shaped to suit the rough wall, too low for even a short man to pass while standing, and narrow enough to require slipping through sideways.
And locked.
Holmes eased past me to deal with that little problem, and when his pick-locks had done their work, we all breathed a sigh of relief to find the door unbarred. A battering-ram would not have suited our purposes at all.
We slipped inside, into a tight space that smelt of must and stone and the dampness of ages. Holmes closed the door behind him, and I lit a candle. We stood in a hollow perhaps five feet square and seven feet tall, rough-hewn from the rock. I had expected one passage, but we found two, both just wide enough for a man’s shoulders and tall enough for Holmes to walk without being forced to duck. We took the one to the left, which began by heading north, but soon doubled back south, then north again. We were, I decided, cork-screwing upwards in the hill below New Fort, the floor of the passageway ever rising beneath our feet. Twice we came to junctions, and after debate, we took care to mark our choice with small pebbles. After the second junction, we went for five minutes or so before Holmes and I stopped almost simultaneously, sensing the way diverging from where we wanted to be. Returning to the junction, we shifted the pebbles and went on, ever climbing, until the passage came to an end at a door as broad as the outside one had been narrow.
This door, however, had no lock, merely an expanse of uneven, time-darkened wood. I pushed against it, then dug my fingernails into one of the cross-pieces and pulled, but the heavy thing did not budge. Without a word, I stepped back far enough to allow Holmes to pass, and handed him the candle.
He ran the light back and forth over the surface, looking more for signs of wear than for a trigger, but found nothing. Not until he began to search the surrounding rock did he give a grunt of triumph. Shifting the low-burning stub to his left hand, he reached up with his right forefinger to press something hidden by a rough place in the stone. There was a faint click, and the flame danced wildly and snuffed out in the sudden current of air from around the concealed door.
Holmes pressed back against the rock to allow me passage. I laid my hand against the wooden surface, which despite its weight gave way with the silent ease of oiled hinges, and felt forward with the toe of my boot for the high marble trim that had run around the toy-room floor. It was there, and moreover, the air smelt of dust and machine oil. I stepped inside, listening for motion or the sound of stifled