The Red Wyvern - Katharine Kerr [44]
“Oh ych!” Lilli said. “It smells horrid.”
“Well, we’re letting some fresh air in now,” Brour said. “We don’t dare linger out here. What if some watchman sees the lantern light?”
Lilli took a quick gulp of fresh air, then went down the steps. The floor was mostly muck from seepage, but someone had laid big flagstones across the middle. Although they were slippery, they held stable. Brour followed her, watching each step he took.
“How did anyone get horses down here?” Lilli said. “For the king to ride away on?”
“Good question. I haven’t the slightest idea.” Brour paused, looking around. “Maybe it’s not the right—oh! Look!”
A heavy door made of oak planks, hinged and bound in iron, graced the far wall.
“Hah!” Brour said, grinning. “You don’t build a door like that to safeguard your turnips! Hold the lantern, lass. Let’s see if I can get it open.”
Brour pulled, then tried pushing, shoved and grunted and shoved again. The door scraped inward by a bare inch. He set his back against it and began to walk backward, driving hard with his legs. Sweat broke out on his face. He took a deep breath, then drove once more. With a screech like ravens the door scraped on stone and opened. Lilli held the lantern high and sent a beam of light into a tunnel, lined with worked stone blocks, about eight feet high and ten across, stretching into darkness beyond the lantern light’s power to follow. Brour wiped his face on his sleeve and laughed, a bit breathlessly.
“Well, that looks promising,” he said. “You could lead horses through it, sure enough, once you got them down here.”
“Are we going to follow it tonight?”
“Aren’t you too tired?”
“I’m not! I want to see where it goes.”
“And so do I. Curiosity’s a terrible thing.”
Though the root cellar was filthy enough, the tunnel was worse, stinking of old rot. Pools of mucky water lay across the uneven floor. Brour rolled up his brigga legs, but since Lilli couldn’t carry a lantern and hold her skirts up at the same time, she had to let the hems fend for themselves. Fortunately she was wearing an old outer dress that she could give to a servant to keep her mother from asking about the stains.
“Do you think there’s going to be rats?” Lilli said.
“Probably. They’ll run from the light, though.”
As they walked on they did hear noises that sounded like small things skittering away in the darkness. As it ran forward, the tunnel sloped downhill and a drainage channel appeared, lying along one side of the roughly paved floor.
“Good.” Brour pointed to it. “We won’t find a lake waiting for us at the bottom after all. I was beginning to worry, but they must have made some outlets for runoff somewhere.”
“That’s probably how the rats get in and out, then.”
“Please stop worrying about rats, will you? I’m trying to forget about them myself.”
After what Lilli judged to be half a mile, the tunnel levelled out again and ran straight ahead, though after a few hundred yards or so it made an odd jog around an enormous pillar of worked stone.
“Know what that is?” Brour said. “One of the foundations of the outer walls of the city. We’re leaving Dun Deverry behind, all right.”
“Which way are we going?”
“I don’t have the slightest idea.”
Whichever way it headed, the tunnel ran straight enough. Perhaps a mile on, Brour had to stop and put fresh candles in their lanterns. By the time the tunnel began to slope upward, the candles were burning down, too. Once they’d replaced them they walked forward for a long breathless climb up a slope. At the top the tunnel levelled out.
“Another door!” Brour crowed.
A door, bound and hinged in the exact same pattern of ironwork as the one back in Dun Deverry, stood across the passageway. This one, fortunately, opened outward and somewhat more easily, though Brour could shove it open a couple