Chapter 298: Every Hole Has a Bottom

James managed an oath and half a prayer, finishing neither.

His sodden coat dragged at his arms, and Anne’s wrist was the one thing he could hold as the world dropped away beneath them, and then the water slammed into him like an open palm.

The blow drove the breath from his lungs, and cold closed around his chest as the torrent forced them under, churning the darkness above them into a wall of water. His hat stayed on his head, which was a small victory, though not one he had expected to celebrate.

He broke the surface coughing up black filth, and Anne surfaced beside him, choking.

"James, you mad, grinnin’ lunatic!" she gasped.

"Och, it’s just a grand cellar, lass."

He coughed and laughed at the same time.

"A wee bit damp, mind, but you can’t fault the hospitality."

The couple reached out blindly until James found a wall and followed it down into a sunken court, where the water reached his chest and the floor offered no sure ground. A submerged beam scraped his hat brim, forcing him to duck beneath the arch with water at his chin, and beyond it lay the next court, then a flooded corridor.

The water sank to their waists, then their knees, then their ankles, till dry stone. Both dragged themselves onto it and lay there, streaming in the dark.

For a while, they could do little but breathe as water dripped from their clothes. Anne wrung out her tangled hair, shoved her spent pistol through her belt, then caught James’s sleeve with her free hand and clung to it, shaking, and he covered her hand with his.

Her words tumbled out too quickly. "It’s only the cold, d’ye hear? There ain’t no ghosts here, nor spirits... anyway! That grey scarecrow back there, James, he didn’t even glance at me, I stood there with a pistol at his laddie’s face, and he looked straight through me like I was a bloody sideboard!"

"Aye, that’s a bitter draught to swallow, and no mistake."

James squeezed the water from his hat brim.

"I’d ask him to apologize, but he’s awfully busy tryin’ to hang us."

Anne snickered. "I’ll have his apology out of his hide, a strip at a time. But how did he know ye’d come, James? ’Different door,’ he says, our swamp."

The grin slipped, only a little, and only because the dark was thick enough to hide it. "I don’t know, lass, the man’s got a whole lot to say and not a thing to tell us. He’s fishin’ for clues, and I’ll not be givin’ him so much as a nibble."

"Well, then? Are we to stand here drippin’, or have you a plan in that daft head of yours?"

A thread of cold air brushed across the water from the right, and James turned toward it, reading the draught as a sailor reads the wind.

"The breeze knows the way, and I’ll follow it to the devil’s front step if I must."

The merry couple felt their way along the corridor, the low roof brushing James’s sodden hat, until the draught drew them right at a fork. They followed it up nine steps and across a gallery of empty cells, feeling their way past one niche after another, and at the next turn went left, where a yellow light bobbed ahead as voices approached with it.

"Nothing but black water and gawping statues."

"Christ’s teeth! This wet’ll rot the boots clean off my feet, stocking’s and all."

James pulled Anne into a recess beside a doorway as a pioneer appeared with a horn lantern in one hand and a hatchet hanging from his belt. Beside him, a pole-man inspected the floor with a ten-foot iron-shod pole, while a musketeer followed with his bayonet fixed.

The pole’s ferrule probed the recess and struck James’s boot with a ring.

"Oi! There’s summat in the..."

[Verdict] flashed from its scabbard, and James knocked the thrust aside with the forte of his blade, sending sparks against the wall. The pole swung low for his knees, but he jumped it, and when the pole-man jabbed again before sweeping low once more, he stubbornly repeated the only trick he had found.

This time James stepped aside, caught the shaft, and drove his blade down it, severing the pole-man’s hand at the wrist, then his next slash cut the man’s neck down to the collarbone.

The pioneer swung his hatchet at Anne’s head, but she knocked it aside with her cutlass and ducked the return hook, its blade slicing through her hair. He chopped again and hooked back toward her, only for Anne to beat aside the chop, deflect the swinging lantern from his hand, and split his cap and skull down to the brow.

Behind them all, the musketeer fired from four paces, and James dropped behind the falling pioneer as the lead struck the wall. The muzzle flash lit the gallery white as lightning.

He then advanced with his bayonet, thrusting at the thighs, but James swept the thrust aside with the flat of his blade and stepped inside the private’s reach.

"You sodden, thievin’ Scotch bast..."

James seized the barrel and drove his blade through the man’s eye, leaving the fellow’s insult unfinished.

He then wiped [Verdict] on the pole-man’s coat, and picked up their lantern.

"Mind your step, lass. His Majesty’s gone and left his washin’ strewn about the floor.

At the end of the corridor, lantern light spilled through a doorway and cold air streamed out as they stepped onto steps whose edge fell away into darkness. James held the lantern over it, but its light reached only a few strides before vanishing.

It revealed a waist-high altar with a bowl carved into its top and figures bearing jars around its sides, beyond which a bridge of three fitted slabs spanned the gulf, cracked clean across.

Below in the darkness, a drop of water fell.

James let out a low whistle, and the dark swallowed it.

He raised the lantern higher, as though a little more light might shame the black into shrinking.

"Well, I’ll be. It’s a wee bit bigger than some cathedral, is it not?"

Anne leaned away from it, as if the dark were breathing on the back of her neck, and her whisper came out thin as a thread.

"It’s a great black hole, James."

An orange spark appeared high across the abyss, then lengthened into a line as torches flared across the stone, a dozen and then more, their light sweeping from pillar to pillar until the whole chamber lay exposed.

The whole chambers was crowded with an archipelago of platforms and altars, broken space above a black drop that stretched into the far darkness.

On the opposite side, thirty-odd paces away, stood the commodore, hands clasped behind his back, the blazing torches at his shoulder. Behind him, ranks of redcoats held torches, while pioneers waited with planks balanced across their shoulders.

Anne bared her teeth at him.

He ignored so and greeted them. "Welcome to the bottom, Mister Calloway, ’pon my soul. You are a weevil in His Majesty’s biscuit that no hammer can crack and no cook can drown, I’ll swear you’ll crawl out of every hole in the Indies with that grin still on your face."

James cupped a hand to his mouth. "A weevil, is it? Och, Commodore, a hundred years the Royal Navy been chewin’ on the likes of us, and you’ve not reached the bottom of the barrel yet! Maybe you’d care to try a wee bit harder, we’d hate to see you go hungry!"

By then, the torchlight reached the far end of the chambers, where the broken archipelago of platforms met eighty paces away at a stepped dais. A long stone sarcophagus rested on top, its heavy lid carved with figures too distant to make out.

The second key gave one slow throb against his ribs, half a beat behind his heart.

Across the gulf, the commodore’s pale eyes had stopped on the same lid.