XXI. Castle Caves
Isabella Birkin and Will Scathelock followed Elias and Osbert, as representing the Waits, along the Broad Marsh to where it narrowed beneath the castle. The Norman gaol, built into the base of the massive promontory on which Nottingham Castle perched, was fronted by a trio of barred cave openings, as if the massive rock was something alive and with mouths open and eager to devour any who approached below.
Isabella couldn’t help thinking of the queer gills in the demon that the archer Robyn Hoode had beheaded. She shivered, recalling how it had come back to life, and quickly buried the memory.
Vertical bars lined the trio of cave mouths, but only the center one, the gate, could be opened. Isabella was a frequent visitor to Passelewe’s gaol; as the leader of the foresters, she reported to both sheriffs any news on poaching or thieving or assaults in the king’s preserve. She would have considered their working relationship close before today.
The first time she had come here Adam had been twelve and expressing a nascent interest in joining the Keepers of the Forest upon reaching maturity. After she’d introduced him to the sheriff, Passelewe had given them a tour up through the rock, showing them various cells that existed at different levels of dungeon within it, up the long winding stairwell that led from the gaol facing Broad Marsh all the way through the rock to the larger, southern keep on the plateau far above. As they climbed, he regaled them with stories—how it was believed by some that Lancelot had carved out many of the hidden chambers in the promontory to hide Guinevere from King Arthur once their adulterous affair had been found out. Surely, the man who told her that romantic story had not yet been turned by the demons. When had it happened, then? And how? She couldn’t really comprehend what Orrels called spinners.
If Hoode’s plan failed, how was she ever going to come calling upon the Norman sheriff again after this, knowing what lurked behind those eyes? How would she dare leave Adam alone in his company?
She wished she knew what lurked behind the eyes of that one who called himself Robyn Hoode. He had not joined them in this endeavor; he’d insisted that he would find another way in—that their contentious visit would misdirect the sheriff’s guards (what did he call the demons? Yvags?) and afford him the opportunity to penetrate the promontory—yet she could not see how he might succeed at this. The Waits were known. She was known. But this outlier who’d suddenly appeared with answers and explanations, with direct knowledge of the demons in their midst, well . . . she didn’t trust him. Then again, at this point, what could she trust?
Knights that weren’t human and could suffer fatal blows and revive? Not just revive but resurrect as Jesus did. That she’d seen with her own eyes. It was unholy, and it should have sufficed as proof of what he told them. Nevertheless, his story felt . . . wrong. False somehow in a way she could not work out. Yet the quiet anguish when he’d mentioned his dead wife had been plain to see. His hunger for vengeance as he beheaded that creature.
No, it was more as if Hoode had left something out of his tale that she couldn’t quite pinpoint. His facts failed to connect properly. For instance, he knew Little John by name, but didn’t know that Little John wasn’t Reynold Greenleaf? Absurd. Both could not be true. But as he had not accompanied them, she could not interrogate him further, and she very much wanted to do so. He was, well, intriguing.
At that point she set the matter aside, because they’d arrived at the barred caves of the Nottingham castle gaol. The guard on duty at the gate knew them all and she him. He was called Milo, and was surely not one of Passelewe’s Yvags.
Elias asked that they be taken to the sheriff as if this were the most casual visit, perfectly ordinary. The Waits were always reporting to both sheriffs about things in the city, and she was always reporting about matters in the king’s preserve. There might be two boroughs here but Nottingham remained essentially a Norman town. Passelewe received any news first.
The unlocked gate was thrown back and all of them entered the dark sandstone gaol. Somewhere deep in its recesses—if he was to be believed—Robyn Hoode would be making his way down from the keep to the cells that had no doors, the oubliettes, as well as those with more traditional entries. Little John and the Waits’ own Benedict could be in either type of cell—she’d no idea how Passelewe decided on such things. The last she’d turned over a poacher to him was three months ago. She’d made no inquiry as to the disposition of the man, but also had neither seen nor heard anything further of him.
How would Hoode be managing? Mostly, how did he think he would actually make his way past the various guards and checkpoints in the first place when he sported no red mustache nor looked anything like that creature had done in its human guise? The Waits and she would provide a modest diversion at best. In fact, she expected the next time she saw Robyn Hoode, he would be occupying a prison cell of his own.
Or perhaps dead.
Escaping from the Waits proved to be the most difficult part of Thomas’s plan. Geoffrey and Osbert both wanted to accompany him and had to be talked out of it—their presence would have kept him from penetrating the castle at all. They objected that he would not be known to any of the soldiers there. He countered that his unfamiliarity was the thing that would get him inside. There was no way to tell them how he would accomplish this without them all thinking he, too, was a demon. He argued that the more diversion they made, the easier his task. At last they conceded.
The body of the slain Yvag they put in an empty cell. Orrels oversaw this from his stool at the table. He had his leg elevated on the table. The ankle was bruised, but fortunately not broken. Still, it would be some days before he could walk on it without leaning on one of the pole arms for support.
In the cell, Thomas stripped the Yvag of its armor and surcoat. Most of the blood staining the fabric had been resorbed.
Orrels called out that he had multiple suits of mail for Thomas to choose from for his disguise. Of course, when he emerged from the cells in the Yvag’s armor, he’d already glamoured it as mail. Orrels said, “Oh, I see you found one. Good.”
He took the Yvag’s magical sword, which was light as a cloud. The only thing he regretted leaving behind was his bow. But judging from the various descriptions of the tunnels beneath the castle, it would be useless anyway.
The rest of the glamouring was easy; the route up to the castle passed by any number of uninhabited caves. He simply ducked into one. He remembered the lantern-jawed and mustachioed face the Yvag had hidden beneath well enough. Besides, under mail and with the bright yellow and red cinquefoil surcoat on display, any minor discrepancies would likely go unnoticed. The surcoat was torn where his dagger had done its work, and, after rinsing most of the remaining blood out, he’d left it torn. It would give the enemy the impression that he’d not easily gotten his hands on the masonry bag, that he’d fought for it. He hoped that might work to his advantage, too, as he hoped the glamoured Yvags among Passelewe’s guards would cluster close to the sheriff rather than mingling with the humans who might apprehend their oddness. The keep would be ill-lit inside, the steps down through the rock—which Isabella Birkin had described to him in detail—even darker. He was as prepared as he could be. The rest was in the hands of God.
As he entered a gate in the castle curtain wall, however, he was nodded to familiarly by a few of the guards. For a moment he worried that all of them might be Yvags, that Passelewe had been accruing a cohort here well before the prelate had been slain and the dights taken.
Now uncertain what to expect, he listened hard for the buzzing, the pressure, of conversing Yvags. But every soldier he encountered, every surcoated guard like himself, registered as human. So either they had seen his double in the sheriff’s company or they simply recognized and acknowledged the coat of arms that he, like they, wore.
He crossed the courtyard straight for the donjon, walked in through the open portcullis door, and was immediately immersed in darkness and the smells of cooking, of fatty meat and onions, and a haze of smoke. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the dimness. Another guard stepped up, another mortal.
Thomas patted the mason’s bag. “Sheriff Passelewe,” he said.
Without so much as a word, the soldier ushered him across the wide stone floor. They passed two adjacent kitchens, and arrived finally at a large dark door in the rear wall. Small torches burned on both sides of it. Wide iron hinges and rows of studs decorated its face.
The guard dragged the door open and came smartly to attention. Stepping into the space, Thomas could just make out a flight of roughly carved steps disappearing in the blackness below. He reached for the torch beside him and held it over the steps. The flame guttered in a draft emerging out of the stairwell. Perhaps twenty feet below, the steps turned, leading out of sight. He glanced back at the guard and the banded backside of the door, then started down the steps.
Above him the door thundered shut.
The question now was how to find John. The bend in the descent led to another, and soon he didn’t know which way he was facing as he walked down. Eventually, he came upon a horizontal tunnel that branched off from the stairwell. Everything below remained dark and no one was about, so he strayed into the tunnel and shortly encountered a locked grate set in the floor. The space below lay in utter darkness.
He knelt and held the torch close. It threw long strands of shadow into the chamber below, delineating a floor strewn with straw or perhaps dried reeds. There was an overturned bucket. Otherwise, the cell lay empty.
Thomas got up and continued until he came to a second grate. This one was unlocked. He opened it on loud hinges, and lay down to hold the torch deeper into the hole.
A figure lay in the straw far below. Short and thin, in ragged clothes suggesting that he’d been here for quite a while, the man was either dead or insensible. Beside the grate and tied to it was a coil of rope. Thomas supposed this was how the prisoner received water, or had his slops emptied if such a courtesy was even provided, which—from the stench—he doubted. But no exit for the prisoner, who could never hope to reach the opening. The cell reminded him of Taliesin and the inescapable Yvag prison, which he’d thought to be an oubliette, too. Was the old poet even there any longer?
Getting to his feet again, he idly kicked the rope into the open hole. If the man had any strength left, maybe he could climb out. Thomas stepped around the open grate, but the tunnel ended just ahead. There were no more oubliettes, at least not on this level. He returned to and continued on down the steps.
It surprised him how uninhabited the passages were. Then again, he was somewhere in the middle of a mammoth stone promontory with soldiers above and below him. It wasn’t as if anybody this deep inside the castle rock was going to escape. Perhaps he shouldn’t have bothered with that rope. It was offering false hope to a dead man.
The steps continued down in what felt like a random direction. Whoever had carved this path had not worried about straight lines. Other short tunnels branched off, but all appeared to be dead ends. No Yvag chittering reached him from any of them. He kept going. Here and there the torch guttered, and the steps echoed as with the sound of fluttering, causing him to look about himself.
Eventually, the way below glowed softly with its own flickering torchlight. Thomas followed another turn in the steps.
Before him was another tunnel offshoot, this one lined on each side with three solid doors set in the rock. Two guards sat on stools there. The nearest stood up at his approach. The one farther back was a bearded guard he’d already met, with the Yvag name of Simforax. His torturer in the caves of The Pilgrim had called him that. Simforax appeared to be sleeping, but the soft pressure and whisper of probing thoughts attempting to invade Thomas’s mind suggested otherwise. He instinctively rebuffed them, and Simforax rose to his feet. No surprise how the nearer, human guard was maintaining as much distance as possible from the other. On some level, probably not even consciously, he would sense the odd stillness of the bearded soldier, poised like a mantis on a foxtail.
Out loud, Thomas said, “I seek Sheriff Passelewe.” He closed a hand around the strap of the mason’s bag and pushed the word dights to the forefront of his thoughts.
The Yvag soldier took an eager step forward.
Thomas gestured at the cell doors. “Are the prisoners here?” he asked.
The human guard answered, “You mean the outlaws?” The Yvag simply focused upon the nearest two doors as it buzzed something the equivalent of outlaws.
Thomas said, “I thought only one of them was considered an outlaw. The other man was simply found in his company. As it happens, he’s an upstanding member of the Nottingham Waits.”
The human guard nodded. “That were his defense, but the sheriff, ’e thought it wisest to hold them both for now while ’e draws up proper warrants.” While he spoke, Thomas sent to Simforax the thought We need to remove this one if we’re to empty the outlaw for Passelewe.
To the human guard he said, “What are you called, lad?”
“Er-Ernald,” he replied as if no longer quite sure.
Thomas said, “Ah, well, worry not, Ernald, this should be sorted soon. Waits are even now down below with the sheriff.”
The Yvag glided quietly forward. Ernald must have sensed the movement and glanced around. In that moment Thomas unsheathed the Yvag sword. He’d had no opportunity to test it, and could only hope it would activate for him as it had done for the creature in the Chandler’s Lane gaol.
Trapped between them, Ernald looked at him, fearful now. “’Ere, what you about?”
“This,” he replied, and thrust his arm out.
Without a sound the blade shot forward. It just missed Ernald but squarely impaled Simforax—so keen the leaping blade that the Yvag kept walking another step before it realized what had happened. By then the blade had retreated and black blood was spreading down the front panel of its surcoat. It shot him a look of outraged confusion.
“What have ye done?” shouted the guard. He drew his own short sword.
“Hush, Ernald,” said Thomas. “See for yourself.”
Warily, with his sword tip still angled defensively at Thomas, the guard dared a look behind him.
The Yvag’s appearance melted away as it lost its glamour until, in surcoat over black armor, it swayed, its thorny face gray as death, fierce and inhuman, weirdly jointed. Not taking any chances this time, Thomas thrust the sword and ran the creature through a second time. The black-dripping blade snicked out and back to its normal state so fast that it sprayed Yvag blood after it across Ernald’s own coat.
“If it puts your mind at ease, he was walking this way in order to kill you with that dagger.” He gestured at it with the sword, which reacted by snapping forward and skewering the Yvag’s hand. A barbed dagger fell from its grasp and clattered on the stone.
Thomas, deciding the sword was if anything a little too receptive to his gestures, sheathed it again as Simforax collapsed.
The guard waved his sword warily to keep Thomas back although Thomas was making no attempt to close the distance or attack him. “What . . . what was that?” he asked.
By now Thomas knew how to field such questions. “A demon, lad,” he said, “in the employ of your sheriff. They’ve arrested these two men under false pretenses and we need to set them free before reinforcements are sent.” He’d sensed the Yvag’s dying squall. Even Ernald had winced—though the cause of that ringing pain would elude him. Whether or not the cry reached anyone, Thomas had to assume it had. Someone would be coming, probably from below. How many glamoured or reshaped Yvag knights would the sheriff have enlisted in the town? Before the theft of the dights, would their presence even have been necessary? The aldermen and magistrates he’d known in Melrose and Ercildoun had all acted solo. Unless Nicnevin had changed the rules, he assumed Passelewe would do likewise. Right now, however, he didn’t know and didn’t dare assume.