The Trojan Icon (Ethan Gage Adventures Book 8) (19 page)

CHAPTER 23

Harry

I
bit the mean soldier’s fingers as hard as I could and came free as Mama promised. I had to get away from the dead ladies! Mama had whispered as she hugged me, and slipped a pin from her mouth into the lock on my neck. She told me to do three things. Bite the man when she fainted. Pull hard on the chain to make the lock open. And run very fast to find Papa. She told me he’d be in one of the tunnels under the castle.

Now I’m lost and scared. Decebal came after me with his iron collar, snarling very bad words. I hid in a chest while he rushed by. Then I climbed out to search. Tunnels led everywhere like an ant’s nest. Somewhere I heard Mama scream. The Pig Man was shouting.

I finally thought I heard Papa’s call and ran that way. I saw a lamp ahead but the tunnel floor was very dark. Then I heard Papa again and ran as fast as I could. I was running too fast in the dark and I tripped.

It hurt! I scraped my hands and knees, and started crying. But I realized there was a big hole where I’d been rushing. I felt with my arm. The tunnel floor disappeared.

If I hadn’t stumbled I would have fallen into a pit. “Papa?”

Maybe the pit was a well. I smelled dirty water. I felt with my hands. The reason I tripped was a curb of stone near the edge of the hole, maybe to warn people in the dark. But I couldn’t go any further.

“Witch’s spawn! Now I’ll flay you!” Decebal was coming, yelling bad words. I could see the flare of his torch and hear the drag and bounce of the chain.

A single oil lamp gave tiny light. Otherwise it was all black and scary. I sobbed and wet my pants. I hated this place. Where was Papa? I felt frozen and there was nowhere to go.

The bad soldier called Decebal came around a tunnel twist, saw me lying in the shadows, and charged, swinging the chain. I wanted to be brave and stand tall, but when he reached for me with his wild eyes I curled into a ball at the edge of the pit. I was so afraid!

Then a strange thing happened. Decebal tripped on the same stone bump I had, but he was taller and fell further.

He fell into the hole.

I turned to see. His torch fell too. Decebal screamed and screamed but he disappeared into darkness. The torch went out. There was a huge splash, and a wait, and then I heard him, very deep and far away, call me more bad names.

Then there was a bigger splash. Was something else down there? Decebal went very quiet. He was afraid too.

I was glad the bad soldier fell. But I also remembered how he seemed sad and angry. Unhappy people do mean things.

I stood, shivering. I tried to stop crying but shook all over and smelled from wetting myself. I was so ashamed. But then I heard Papa call again, and suddenly I didn’t care.

“Harry! Astiza!”

“Papa!” I don’t know if he heard me. But I heard him. There was a tunnel on the other side of the pit where the voice was coming from.

But if I tried to go there, I’d fall like Decebal.

I listened. No one else was coming so I tried to calm down. Papa told me the most important thing in fighting is thinking. So I tried to think.

Why would grownups put a pit in the middle of the tunnel if you couldn’t get to the other side? That’s silly. I looked around.

There was a chain near the pit that came out of a hole in the wall. I pulled it. It was heavy and at first nothing happened. So I pulled as hard as I could and with a thunk the chain began to come. It made a rumble sound.

I crawled to the edge of the pit. Just below its rim, a log had started to poke out of the pit wall.

I pulled the chain some more.

The log came out more.

When I pulled the chain as far as I could, the log slid all the way across the pit and into a hole on the other side. The log’s top was flat, but the flat part was hardly wider than my foot. There was nothing to hang onto, and it was really dark.

I looked down into the dark and wondered what made the big splash at the bottom of the pit. Decebal was quiet. Was he dead?

I heard Papa shout again. “Harry!”

It’s very hard to decide to be brave, but I decided. I was brave to bite the bad man who came after me, but then he fell! So I’d be brave again. I need Papa to rescue Mama.

I pretended the log was just a line on my bedroom floor, if I had a bedroom. This helped me balance when I walked across. When I got to the other side, I saw another dim light down the tunnel, very far away.

“Papa?”

“Harry! Here!” And then: “Be careful.”

I crawled on my hands and knees, feeling for holes. It was a long way, but I didn’t want to fall like Decebal. Finally I came to iron bars. On the other side were Papa and Uncle Caleb and the prince.

“Harry, thank God! You’re bleeding. Damnation—no, don’t listen to that word, but by Jupiter—Harry, we can’t open this gate. Is your mother alive?”

“She fainted. On purpose.”

“Do you see any tools on your side to break down the bars?”

I looked. “No, Papa. Maybe you can go another way.”

“A gate closed in back of us. We’re trapped.”

“The Pig Man said it’s a bear’s mouth.”

“Can you fetch Mama?”

“She told me to bite a bad soldier. He fell in a hole. The Pig Man wants to make her join the dead ladies. He was yelling. I ran away.”

Papa picked up his gun. “Are there other bad men?”

“Not yet.”

“Harry, look carefully. Is there a pry bar, or a pick, or a shovel, or a saw?” Papa had his funny hammer out but it didn’t seem to help.

I looked and felt in the dark. “No.”

“Harry, we need something to get us out.” Papa’s voice was tight.

“I’m sorry.” I began to cry again.

“Don’t cry. It’s not your fault, son.”

“We’ll get to you somehow, lad,” Uncle Caleb promised.

Now I bawled. I was so tired and afraid. I felt bad because I couldn’t find the tools Papa wanted. I tried to talk but it was hard because I choked and hiccupped. I just wanted him to hug me.

“I’m so sorry, Papa!” I hiccupped and hiccupped. “All there is are rusty old keys!”

CHAPTER 24

S
o my son was once again a hero. The fact that he was wet and sniveling didn’t concern me, given that I’ve been that way myself more than once. Besides, there’s no courage is being too dense to understand danger. My boy is smart enough to know he has to be brave, and resourceful as a mouse in a beggar’s bowl. “There’s a big hole,” he warned after freeing us. So I snuffed out my candle and we crept instead of charged, and thus heard a snarl of voices ahead before they heard us. We made ready.

Sure enough there was a flare of torchlight on the further side of a pit that seemed to plummet to Hades. The illumination silhouetted Dalca Cezar’s henchmen as they crowded the far side of the cavity. A narrow log crossed the void and my amazement at my son’s grit grew. I swear my boy would dance across the yard of a topgallant to fetch his wayward Papa.

I crawled to the edge of the well. The chasm was absolutely black and seemingly bottomless. Then I heard a groan of despair from its depths. I backed up to the others.

“Someone’s down there,” I murmured.

“The bad soldier,” Harry said. “He made a big splash.”

I remembered my own desperation in the moon well of the Russian ship in St. Petersburg. “He’s got a long climb or a slow death.” And then a thump echoed up to us, followed by a splash and scream. Then silence.

“Not so slow,” Caleb whispered. “There is some
thing
as well as some
one
in that perfidious hole
.
Suddenly that log looks skinny as a wire.”

Dalca’s men looked nervously down into the chasm, arguing nervously in a guttural language and pointing at the narrow log. Dark still hid us.

“The beam is our only path to Astiza, and my child has already crossed it.” I turned to my imperfect partners. “A volley and we’ll dash across. Sword and pick to finish off any survivors.” My patience was gone and I felt cruel as a Turk. “Harry, get behind. You two, ready?”

Caleb and Dolgoruki leveled their muskets.

“Ready. Aim. Fire!”

Our shots flashed like a lightning bolt. Three of Dalca’s bastards dropped, one toppling with a howl of despair into the cavity. I rose, gunsmoke in my nostrils, in order to press our attack.

“Look out!” Caleb jerked me down, slamming my son to the cave floor as well. An answering volley punched through our smoke and bullets combed our hair. There was a bigger company of louts across the chasm than I thought. My brother had saved my life.

“See? I’m not entirely bad, Ethan.”

“Let’s reload. Stay prone.”

Guessing that we were momentarily without powder, some of Dalca’s brutes risked rushing to the lip of the pit and inserting an iron bar in a fitting on the far side of the cavity. As they levered back and forth, the log bridge popped from its socket on our side of the chasm and began to recede like a worm into its burrow. A chain rattled as it wound back into the earth.

“We’ll be trapped again,” Caleb hissed, scraping his ramrod out of his musket barrel and priming his pan.

“By the Icon of Kazan, we most certainly will not,” growled Dolgoruki. Without asking he crawled over and past us, snatched my horse pick, rose up, brandished his sword with his other hand, gave a mighty Russian oath, and sprang into the void.

It was an impossible jump toward the receding log, the well far wider than he could ever cross. Yet the prince flew just far enough to swing my pick like a grapnel. It bit the logwood as he fell so he swung, clinging like a monkey while still clutching the golden sword awarded by Tsar Alexander. Then with a kick and heave, he boosted himself by the pick handle and got an arm around the log.

Russians don’t lack courage.

Dalca’s preoccupied henchmen were still frantically hauling the log in, inadvertently drawing Dolgoruki to their side of the pit. Perhaps he’d take them unawares. But no, another Szekler, this one taller and thick as a bull, had seen the daring leap and ran up with a pike to stab. The prince peered up, helpless where he hung. The scoundrel lifted his weapon, ready to impale.

Caleb fired. The warrior gave a great cry and pitched over the prince’s head and down into the pit, his pike clanging against the well’s sides as he plunged. A distant splash was followed almost immediately by a bigger one, and another terrified scream.

“What in hell is down there?” my brother asked.

“Hell indeed. Don’t slip.”

Our Russian used the reprieve to clamber over the lip of the pit to attack with saber, pick, and hammer. One man cranking the lever took the blade through his heart, and another staggered away with my pick impaled in his back. A third pulled his own scimitar to foolishly fence. It was no contest for a noble taught swordplay since infancy. The ruffian quickly fell. Their blood looked black in the dimness.

That would have ended it except that a fourth charged Dolgoruki from his blind side, hurtling out of the dark. I killed that one with my own rifle, and then the Russian chased down the wounded man and thrust deep to finish him. He jerked out my horse pick and tossed it back where I’d retrieve it, once across. We’d now accounted for eight or nine of the demons, a satisfying slaughter on the pit’s far side. Other shadows ran away to get reinforcements.

Dolgoruki came back and hauled on the chain as hard as a sailor, the log bridge surging back across the well to slam into its socket again. Emboldened by the Russian’s example we danced across, Caleb carrying Dolgoruki’s musket and me carrying Harry. Then everyone reloaded.

“Bold work, my Russian friend,” I congratulated.

“Ha. I’m your friend now?”

“I don’t want you as my enemy.” His beautiful inlaid sword was slick with gore. “Let’s go get my wife.”

We proceeded cautiously, wary of ambush. Our opponents were noisy so twice we did the ambushing ourselves, seeing torchlight approaching and lying prone until we had a clear shot at their silhouettes. Both times we killed three. No general alarm had been raised, meaning the deep tunnels must be swallowing the sound of gunfire. We probed through a labyrinth. Harry, who’d seen enough mayhem in his young life to be untroubled by the dispatch of “bad men,” was an able guide. He pointed to this stair and that corridor as the way he’d come, content that I’d finally arrived and perfectly confident we’d rescue his mother. He hesitated only at one door.

“We have to go past the dead ladies.”

Beyond was the most bizarre and hideous tableaux I’d ever seen. In the bowels of the castle was a banquet room filled with the desiccated corpses of two-dozen young women around a long heavy table. Their features were waxen, their color false, and I sensed they’d somehow been drained dry and re-stuffed. Yet there was no rot, only some gruesome kind of pickling.

“What in God’s name would draw a woman to a place like this?” Dolgoruki wondered.

“Not God. The devil. So where’s Mama, Harry?”

“That door wasn’t open before.” He pointed.

At the far end of the room a tapestry had been pulled aside to reveal another exit from the banquet room. Stairs led down toward an odd chemical smell.

“Some kind of laboratory,” I guessed. “Harry, stay here to stand watch. Yell if anyone comes.”

“I’m afraid of the dead ladies.”

“They’re just dead, like the bad men. I’m going to bring Mama to you here.” If she hasn’t already been transformed into a mummified trophy, I thought. If she wasn’t already a wax corpse. “These ladies don’t like the bad men. They’ll help you keep watch.”

“Hurry.”

I began to creep down the stairs, rifle primed and ready. Caleb excitedly caught my arm.

“Now comes reward, Ethan!”

“If your palladium exists.”

We advanced. Two sentries jumped in surprise, drew scimitars, and were killed. We reloaded and kept going.

And found something even more bizarre than the banquet room.

We entered a barrel-roofed chamber lit by a hundred candles. In the center was a bubbling pool of mud-thick liquid, fumes wafting, that producing a noxious and cloying haze that stung. Shelves held vats, vials, and bones—lots of bones. Skulls were lined like apothecary jars. Leg and arm bones were stacked like firewood. Tendrils of leathery flesh still clung, and some of the skulls had wisps of hair and scraps of scalp. There were rust-colored stains on floor and walls, and brown spots spattered the ceiling. Was Dalca a cannibal?

“This is an evil place,” Dolgoruki muttered, crossing himself.

“So you’ve come to watch,” a deep voice rumbled.

The monster was at the far end of the pool. He was a sickeningly obese creature in dressing gown, leather apron, and leather boots that reached to fat thighs, his body slumped in a wicker wheelchair. He had the bushy beard and wild hair of a Russian hermit, and sunken, nearly hidden eyes that nonetheless seemed to probe with pitiless scrutiny. Pig Man, Harry had called him.

“Or we can bargain,” he continued in a voice as heavy as a millstone.

No more servants were present, but Dalca wasn’t alone.

We froze at the sight of Astiza. My wife was embarrassingly nude and strapped to a table that tilted over the foul pool, her feet aimed at its contents. Next to her was a second table, horizontal and sturdy, that held a demon’s collection of surgical instruments. There were scalpels, glass suction cups, coiled tubes, needles, and clamps. Her mouth was gagged, and her eyes wide with fear and fury that seemed even more naked than her body, a look as wrenching as that of the insane. Astiza, usually so serene, so philosophic, had been stripped bare in more ways than one. There was nothing erotic about her humiliation, and nothing beautiful in her exposure. It was a betrayal of all that was decent and proper.

“That’s my wife.” My voice rasped like a bayonet lifted from its scabbard, and the muzzle of my rifle pointed at Cezar Dalca.

He lifted one lazy hand in his defense. His fist held a rope, leading through a pulley in the ceiling down to the tilted table. The meaning was clear enough. If he yanked, or I shot, Astiza would slide into his tank.

“Sorcery,” Dolgoruki said with the gagged contempt only the noble can fully express. “Witchcraft. This man is an
upyr.”

“Utter blasphemy,” agreed Caleb, his voice breaking. “Ethan, I never suspected, never dreamed. Astiza, I thought him only a crank—”

“What your wife is, my new friends, is my contribution for admission to your fellowship,” Dalca rumbled. Even as he spoke I began to mentally measure distances. “I’d dearly love to add Astiza to my immortal banquet but she informs me you’re after a higher prize. Is that not true, my dear?”

A leather strap on her forehead prevented her from nodding or shaking her head.

“You’re an instant from death, Dalca.” I was squinting down my barrel.

“My hand can twitch as fast as your finger can pull, Monsieur Gage, and then your wife
will
join my banquet. I prefer to empty my guests first, eliminating any pain from the bathing, but your intrusion has robbed me of time to drink. If you prefer to make a fight of it you can watch her boil alive. Her screams would be one of the last things you hear, because there are a hundred Szeklers between you and any exit from Balbec Castle. But why dwell on such terrible contingencies? I want to be your partner, not your executioner.”

“Partner in
what?”

“The Trojan Icon.” He nodded. “Yes, Astiza and I have discussed your quest at some length. Unfortunately I don’t have it. You can search my home but you’ll find that I keep my belongings in more secret places than this, and don’t have the palladium of Pallas Athena at all. Your entire quest, and all the risk to wife and son, was in vain.” He coughed what might have been a laugh. “But I think I could lead you
to
the palladium,
if
you could contrive to carry me there.”

“Where?”

“Constantinople. The Ottomans call it Istanbul, I believe.”

Their capital was hundreds of miles away. “Where in Constantinople?”

“That’s part of our bargain, is it not? Your derring-do, my research. I’m a rather conspicuous treasure hunter, unable to travel unnoticed, but you have a knack for worming where you don’t belong. We’d be superb collaborators.”

“Would we?” I began to move toward him.

“Ah! Not with your rifle, please. Firearms disturb me. But yes, a brilliant fellowship. None of us are hobbled by morals, are we? A society of thieves.”

Another step. “Release my wife first.”

“Now the prince’s sword,
that
I can appreciate. Russian, I assume? A pretty prick. Is that sweet blood on the blade?”

Another step.

“Gage! Lower the guns while we come to understanding.”

“Not before you get your hand off that rope.”

He considered, eyeing us, and then slowly released his grip and dropped his hand to his fat belly. “Done. See? I’m a man of compromise. Like you. Now. Lower your gun.”

I did so.

“All the way, where it can’t harm me.”

Reluctantly, I laid my rifle on the floor.

“Ethan!” Caleb protested.

“He’s insane. Don’t startle him.” Then I spoke to Dalca. “Move away from the rope.” I slowly edged closer.

“Alas, that defeats my bargaining position, which is this. I’ll trade Astiza to you for a half-share of the palladium. We’ll find it together, sell it together, and split the profits. Half for me, and half for the rest of you.”

Another step. “Shares equally.”

“No. Your beauty of a wife is worth a full half-share. It’s true you’ve penetrated my castle and fought past my sentries. But it’s equally true that I could add Astiza to my banquet and swarm you with the remainder of my garrison. I’d rather given up on the palladium, but your arrival reassures me of its existence. So exciting to imagine possessing it.”

So Dalca’s interest was our proof, while our interest was his. Rumor feeding rumor. “Harm her and you get nothing.” Another step.

“Harm me and all of you die as well.”

“What chance do we have of finding the palladium and stealing it from the Turks?” Closer.

“I’m a scholar, much like your wife. I know things. You’re a thief, much like your brother. A partnership, I said.” His fingers were still clasped, his gaze fixed on me instead of Astiza. My wife was squirming in her bonds, her eyes pleading. Were they warning?