The Unicorn Hunt - Dorothy Dunnett [284]
There were no trap-doors or doors in the passage. After a while it turned sharply right, and became narrow. Like the cells, it had been paved. It ended at the point of junction with a much wider corridor, set at right angles to his, and equally dark. Barring the way was a grilled iron door, set with mortar and heavily locked.
He believed, for a while, that he could break the door, but found he was wrong. Thrusting his torch through the bars, he saw that the other passage, too, was made of featureless brick, with no sign of doors to left or to right. The complex appeared to run the full length of the building, which he imagined to be some sort of warehouse, a secondary building used by the Dragoman for private dealings, or summary justice.
He stayed at the grille for a while, banging it with a loose brick; making play with the brand and his voice to attract outside attention but without wasting much energy. If he had been close to anywhere public, they wouldn’t have opened even these few, useless doors. He wondered if David de Salmeton was reclining somewhere, sipping wine, smiling and listening. He felt sure that, before the end, David de Salmeton would come. He wished it had been Gelis instead, and that she had not escaped him to Sinai. It was what had kept his mind awake, assembling all he wished to say, once, to Gelis.
The flame was low. If he wanted to save it, he would have to return, depressingly, for fresh wood. He had already rejected the idea, once rather tempting, of setting fire to the heap under the trap-door to see what would happen. What would happen, he suspected, was that the watchers above would immediately quench it and he was not in any form to prevent them. Or to do anything involving rapid movement, much less acrobatics.
He decided, all in all, to stay where he was, although it was unlikely that the ubiquitous John or Tobie would manage to find him. He gave it little thought: his interest in them, in all his former circle was slight. Adorne was going to Sinai, to Gelis; but he didn’t think John or Tobie would make for the gold without trying to find him. Of course, they might conclude that he had gone there without them. He had been known to do such things before.
He dwelled, for an uncharacteristic moment, on the various things he had done since he became conscious that he could usually outguess other people. If those were his sins, then he had committed them. He wasn’t going to apologise now.
The torch was nearly out. Upstairs, it might still be day: the trap-door had emitted, that last time, a flash of transient sunlight, and he had even heard sounds: the cloudy roar of some sort of festivity. Reminded, he stopped his desultory banging and listened.
Silence, as always. The small stirrings of animals. The beat of his heart. And something else. Beyond the grille, to his left, a rumour of sound he was unable to place, a noble resonance in which, straining, he seemed to identify a tessitura of bowstrings, the sonority of an organ, the hollow reverberation of drums. He listened, the hairs pricking on his arms. Then, overlaying the single thundering chord, still sustained, a soft roll on the timpani that seemed close and becoming closer … that filled the channel outside with sound … and then abruptly translated itself into a heaving, tangible presence.
A tide of rats erupted into his sight. They emerged from his left and poured past his grille in a frenzy, crowding back upon back, arching along either wall, spurting eventually through the iron apertures at his side to blunder past his shoulder and neck, racing into the dark of the passage behind him.
Rats. Rats fleeing from the sound he had heard; the sound which now held the muted thunder of a storm building at sea; the sound a water-wall makes when it first meets resistance: the snap of splintering wood; the hollow thud of breached canvas; the clangour of bells. The sound of the element for which these cells, these passages, these corridors had been designed.