She was guiding him again, that firm hold on his shoulder just caressing the nerves. He found himself wondering how she was with a lover, turning her knowledge of the body into a system of pleasure rather than pain. Or was interrogation her whole sex life? Or vice-versa?
They turned aside into the gloom of the left transept, and she aimed him straight at shadow. Dead black opened at his feet, she nudged him, and his toes felt their way onto a spiral stair down into damp darkness. Down, down, around, around, cold stone beneath and to each side, steep and narrow and no handrails, he groped until he saw a flicker of yellow ahead that grew into an oil lamp in a wall niche. Some kind of crypt or catacomb opened from the stair, leading straight out from the last steps.
Catacomb or columbarium, deep niches to either side filled with musty dusty bones, air thick with the soot of oil lamps. Multiple skulls in each niche, generations and centuries of burials piled one upon another. She nudged him forward again. They passed cross-corridors and more blocks of niches, shadows and shadows and shadows between the far-spaced lamps, until they reached the end of their main corridor and a small shrine flanked by more votive candles.
The light glittered on a reliquary, silver or gold, he couldn't tell in the yellow glow. It was old work, old beyond old, none of that Cellini baroque down here. It housed a skull, shiny with much handling and streaked green with the dripped minerals of long centuries underground.
"Giuseppe Verdi," she offered, from behind him.
"Huh?" She was still keeping him off-balance.
"Joe Green. Supposed to be Joseph of Arimathea, although I have my doubts. Touch him. Hold both hands on his bones, long enough to say three 'Our Fathers.' It's another of Merlin's little safeguards."
Brian did as he was told. She knew what worked here. He had to trust, untrustworthy as she seemed. The bone felt warm under his hands, almost as warm as if he touched a living head, and the surface was slightly damp. He could feel it as skin if he half tried.
And it throbbed as if he imagined a pulse.
". . . for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, for ever. Amen." She turned him. "It's the timing, not the words. I tried it once, by the watch. Safer to use the long form. I'm guessing our ancestors were less glib. That was after I found out that the language didn't matter. And you have to use both hands. Merlin didn't cut any slack for a one-handed knight, or even temporary injuries."
That was Dierdre, always poking, always testing limits. They strolled back past the musty dusty bones. Some of the niches showed traces of worn carving, as if they'd originally had epitaphs or at least names chiseled above the bones. Or below. He couldn't tell which level the traces labeled.
"Anyway, if you don't lay your hands on Giuseppe first, the labyrinth refuses to take you back to Glastonbury. And a bell rings, up in the chapel tower, bringing rude people with sharp blades to ask who you are and what you're doing and whether you belong. I'm one of them. Merlin didn't trust anybody."
They came to the bottom of the stair, barely visible in the flickering lamplight, and climbed back into shadow. "One other empirical observation: you have to go directly from here to the labyrinth. Can't clear customs with Joe and then wander around for a day and a day, stealing the crown jewels or assassinating slimy bastards like me, and then just bounce back out again. The limit is something like fifteen minutes, although it seems to vary. Once it refused me after ten."
She was giving him a mission briefing, in her own peculiar way. She really did mean to let him go.
That was, if she wasn't just playing with her mouse. With Dierdre, you never could be sure.
They spiraled up into the transept. Dierdre turned aside into another shadow, returned, and slapped a shadow into his right hand. His fingers recognized the weight and balance of a kukri, heavy and cold and familiar.
"There'll be guards in Glastonbury. One at the labyrinth and one at the tunnel entrance, and they'll not be looking for someone to come out who never should have gone in. I'm sure you'll come up with a solution."
Queasy feeling. Brian wondered if he'd know the men he'd have to kill. If he'd trained with them, served with them, bled with them, if they'd guarded his back in deadly shadows or paid for a round of drinks at his last promotion party. But if they served the Circle . . .
"And they'll be looking to kill you, once they hear. Before you came here, the Circle wanted to ask you a few questions. Now you'll be 'Shoot on sight.' Every Pendragon, everywhere. Including me."
She stopped in front of the altar, back to him, and slipped something from her pocket. "This is the point where someone hits me from behind. Treachery inside Castle Corbin, the hidden hand. Brian Albion has an unknown ally. How hard is up to you."
Sweet Jesu, the woman had brass balls. Torture him, say she would be hunting him, and then give him a free shot at killing her? And with her reputation, he had to do more than just a simple knockout to make it credible.
He tucked the kukri into his belt, stepped forward, and scissored her neck with double knife-hand strikes. She slumped and spun away from his kick to the knee, but he followed up once, twice, three times, feet and hands and elbows, her own training that taught you never stopped
