Page 42 of Hell to Pay

I said, “For that, I think I should take you through to the other cellars. It’s hard to describe. If that is allowed, of course.” I was surprised, somehow, to find myself not stained with tears and soot. I was even more surprised to find myself not sixteen.

“Yes,” Dr. Eltschig said. “If you feel capable of it. If not, perhaps we can postpone this until tomorrow.”

“Oh, no!” Ashleigh burst out. “How can we wait that long to find out what happened?”

“I could, of course, simply tell you.” I’d recovered my witsand was once more ninety-four, and in no danger at all. “Without the atmospherics.”

“It’ll be so much better, though,” she said, “withthe atmospherics. That’s what makes this such a great story!”

“I wouldn’t want to deprive my eager public,” I said, and rose to my feet.

Sebastian had a hand under my elbow as I did it. He said quietly, as if only for me, “We really don’t have to do this today. It’s been a lot. There’s no reason you can’t rest before the next part.”

“No,” I said. “I need to do it now.” I didn’t say, “It’s a pilgrimage. Or possibly a quest, and I need to finish it now, just as pilgrims need to find their way through the summer heat to Mecca.” It seemed too absurdly dramatic.

The Long Corridor was much the same as in the past. A hundred meters long, and lined with cases holding hundreds of firearms. Rifles and muskets and pistols dating back to the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, together with the heads of red deer, roe deer, sika deer, wild boar, and other beasts I couldn’t name, animals that had presumably been crowded out or hunted to extinction long before I was born.

“This corridor was built to connect the palace to the stables,” I told the others as I held Sebastian’s arm and concentrated on the rooms we passed. “Hunting wild game was solely the prerogative of the nobility in past centuries, and many noblemen’s chief passion.”

“But didn’t regular people need to hunt to, like, feed themselves?” Ben asked.

“Indeed they did,” I said. “A very inefficient system. Another way in which society has progressed.” The room had been nearly at the end of the corridor, and on the right. Would I recognize it without the huge old desk, the hunting scenes on the walls, the shelves of leather-bound folios?

Four from the end. No, this didn’t look right. There was no fireplace, for one thing, and there had been one in that other room. Surely I remembered a fireplace.

What if the fireplaces had been removed, though? What if I couldn’t find the right room? I’d only come this way once.

Concentrate.Three from the end. Still wrong. But we were nearly at the end of the corridor.

I stopped dead. Sebastian said, “What is it?”

I asked, “Were the fireplaces removed?”

“Some of them,” Dr. Bauer said.

Wait. The bookcase. If it had burned, there would be no latch and no way to get in, would there? I didn’t know how such things worked.

Two doors from the end, I found the room. At least, there was a fireplace. And on either side of the fireplace … empty bookcases.

“How did they not burn?” I asked. “There was fire here. I saw it.”

“The bookcases on this side were scorched,” Dr. Bauer said. “You can see the marks here. They must have been empty. If there had been books in them, they would surely have gone up along with everything else in the room. They are made, again, of very old and very hard wood. Mahogany, in fact, first exported to Europe in the early eighteenth century. One of the strongest of the hardwoods.” How much she knew about the palace. Much more than I ever had.

And she was right. The bookcases holding the folios had been along the other wall, hadn’t they? I couldn’t remember. I went to the bookcase on the left, started to crouch down, stopped, and told Sebastian, “I’m not as good at kneeling on floors as I once was. Perhaps you’ll feel for the latch, underneath the lowest shelf.”

He did, and almost immediately, the latch clicked. Thedoor opened a crack. And I had to put a hand against a shelf and breathe a minute.

“I had no idea,” Frau Bauer said wonderingly.

“I imagine,” Dr. Eltschig said, “that that was the idea. This was a bolt-hole. Rulers had many enemies in those days.”

“Rulers still do,” I said. “And there were cells down here as well for prisoners. There was probably another staircase and another entrance at some point. Perhaps there still is. I’m sure I’ve seen devices that can see through walls in films. Is there such a thing, or is that a convenient fiction?”

“There is such a thing,” Dr. Bauer said. “And we’ll be using it.”

“There are no lights here,” I realized suddenly. “We’ll need torches. Flashlights.” I felt suddenly bone-weary. Another wait for those to be fetched.

Lights sprang out all around me, because every single person had pulled out a cell phone and switched on a light. I said, “How convenient modern life is. Now we go down. It’s a long way, and very steep. You must stay on the outermost edge where the steps are widest.”