He put out his hand and pushed the far side of the grating, watching it rock very slightly away from him. It was not properly bedded at one side, and by rocking it to and fro he worked out the pivotal point. Yashim ran his fingers along the edge and gave a grunt as his fingers closed on a small twist of cloth no bigger than a fingernail that protruded from the joint.
He stood up and stepped back, carefully, to take a flaming torch from a bracket in the wall. Once more he scanned the tannery, but nothing moved. By the grating he knelt down and thrust the torch against the grille.
It has already been said that Yashim was reasonably brave: but that was only when he stopped to think.
Without a moment’s reflection, he heaved up the grille and swung his legs into the pipe. The next moment he was crouched at its base, about five feet below, peering in astonishment at what was revealed in the flickering light of his torch.
[ 62 ]
The assassin hung for a moment on all fours, to catch his breath. Strong: yes, he was very strong. But the running was for a younger man, perhaps; a man in training. He had not trained that way for ten years.
Move, he told himself. Crawl away from under the grating. For the first time in forty-eight hours he felt tired. Jinxed.
The mission had failed. He had waited for hours in that room, focusing on the door. Once or twice he had tried the latch, to see how long it took for the door to swing open. Darkness had come: his element.
He had heard her coming. He saw the light approach, watched with satisfaction as a finger snaked in to flick the latch. His hand coiled around the weight at the end of the twine.
And then, in the darkness, it had all gone wrong. The dancer stepped back, not forwards. The weight sliced through the empty air, and then the crashing. It would have been possible to go on—but someone had come.
If there’s any risk of being discovered, abort.
The assassin began to move again, silently, creeping away from the grating down the sluice. Forget the failure, he thought. Hide. Go to earth.
The movement consoled him. His breathing softened. Rest now. No one would follow him down here, and later he could rectify his mistake. Sleep now.
Sleep among the altars.
Each altar topped by a glowing brazier.
The air was fetid and warm.
The air was full of sleep.
The assassin squirmed through a low arch and found a clear space on the warm brick. He also found a day-old loaf of bread on the ledge of a brazier and stuffed a piece of it into his mouth. He took the stopper from an earthenware bottle and drank a long draught of warm water.
At last he stretched out on the warm bricks, clasping his hands behind his head.
And then, looking up at the curving belly of the vats, the assassin screamed.
[ 63 ]
Yashim saw he had been wrong about the spaces that lay below the vats. From what he could make out, a succession of air-wells all dropped to a huge and very low chamber, raised on shallow brick vaults. Between the vaults, at regular intervals, wide braziers were set on stacks of bricks to heat the tiled cauldrons overhead: in the dim and smoky light the cauldrons were suspended like the teats of a monstrous she-devil.
His eyes ran from the wooden bungs which hung like nipples to the brickwork that composed the floor on which he now crouched. In a way he had been right. He had expected a maze of tunnels, but what he found was the impress of a maze, as if the floor of the tannery had been scored by a huge wheel: as if the tunnels he had imagined had been abandoned when they were only a few inches high. They were thick with coloured grease.
