‘Easy, easy. Tell me what happened?’
‘Katāros. . . He took them.’
‘Took who? Lilla?’
‘Yes. And Anna.’
‘The princess? Where?’
Her eyes rolled backwards.
He shook her, more violently than he meant. ‘Grusha, where did he take them? Where!’
‘I don’t know,’ she groaned. ‘Away. Out of the city. He. . . they attacked us.’
‘Attacked you? Here?’
‘No. . . the steps. . . below the Golden. . . Hall.’
Erlan’s mind was a tempest. Then his gaze fell on Aska. Yes, Aska. . .
‘The steps by the Golden Hall,’ he repeated. He knew the place and next moment he was on his feet. There was a chest by the wall. He threw it open and recognizing a shawl of Lilla’s lying on top, he seized it and tore it in two. He pressed one half to Gerutha’s wound. ‘Hold it as tight as you can.’ He took her hand and put it on the shawl. ‘Keep pressure on it, like this. Now look at me, Grusha. I’ll come back for you, all right? I promise. I’ll come back for you!’
She gulped hard and nodded. Then he grabbed the rest of the shawl and unsheathed his stolen sword. ‘Aska,’ he hissed. ‘With me.’
Gerutha lay there for an age after he had gone, her whole will focused on stemming the blood leaking from her side. The wound was deep. She didn’t want to die. Her hand rose to the hollow at the base of her throat, her bloodstained fingers fumbling for the little gold cross there. She wanted to cry for help but didn’t have the strength for it. Instead her lips moved with the only word that came to her mind. ‘Jesus. Jesus. Jesus. . .’
Love is more powerful than death.
She was still murmuring His name when her eyes closed for ever.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Erlan ran.
He ran though he wasn’t made to run. He ran, ignoring his aching thighs, and the cuts and bruises and everything else he’d suffered these last days and weeks. He ran along marbled colonnades, across courtyards, past fountains. Aska bounded alongside him until at last the great Golden Hall rose in front of them out of the gloom. There was the terrace, there the staircase. Erlan stopped and doubled over, his chest heaving. ‘Come here, boy.’ He caught hold of Aska’s collar and offered him the scent off Lilla’s shawl. Then he could do nothing but watch Aska hunt around, dying with each second lost, but knowing that without the hound on her scent pursuit was hopeless.
At last Aska caught something and immediately he was off along the edge of the terrace to the south, skirting the Golden Hall and loping along the colonnades that led downhill towards the Boukoleon Palace. Erlan hardly knew this part of the palace and so had to rely on Aska’s nose. When Aska stretched too far ahead, Erlan had to call him back. They ran on, down the labyrinthine pathways, under arches until his legs could carry him no further. He slowed to a halt. He had lost sight of Aska. Despair crashed in on him like a cold wave, overwhelming him. What was he doing? What was he hoping for? It was absurd. There was no hope. He put his head in his hands. . . no hope.
That was when he heard a voice.
Run on, my son, my chosen son. Run on. His father’s voice.
And so he ran.
He reached the next corner and there was Aska, waiting for him. They ran together, still on the trail, until they came to a large imposing building standing in isolation against the sea walls. This had to be the Boukoleon Palace, he realized, and the stone gateway to the right must lead to the emperor’s private harbour.
Except Aska turned east along its outer wall until they came to a smaller building beside it. Then he disappeared inside. Erlan slowed only long enough to register the terracotta domes of a bathhouse. Inside all was darkness. His footsteps echoed off hard tiles. ‘Aska? Aska!’ he hissed. A shaggy head appeared at the top of a staircase. Erlan flung himself down it, not knowing where it would lead. The sound of running water murmured off the walls. He reached the bottom, blindly following Aska’s skittering footsteps past empty bath cells to the end of the corridor until a grille gate barred their way. Erlan snapped open the bolt and they slipped through. The running water grew louder and there was a different smell on the air, noisome and damp. More steps, slick with mould, to a still lower level where the water became a rush and the stink overpowering.
‘Aska – where the Hel are you?’
He couldn’t see a thing. The dog yowled softly in the dark a few paces ahead but he seemed reluctant to go on. There was a slight lessening of the darkness to the right. Erlan moved towards it and suddenly his foot jarred down with a splash.
He guessed he was standing in the effluent from the bathhouse – or maybe even the whole palace. He felt around for the top edge of the opening. It was low but not too low for a man to pass through. Was this where they had come? It had to be. Aska couldn’t possibly have led him to such an obscure corner of the palace if it wasn’t. Could he? But if they came this way, how long ago? Was he already too late? He inhaled a deep breath, foul with the reek of excrement, then bellowed Lilla’s name.
Lilla and Anna had kicked and bitten and scratched like wildcats, doing all they could to hold up their kidnappers’ flight. But it served them nothing; the eunuch and his men had merely picked them up and carried them like corpses with hands clamped over their mouths.
Katāros, cockroach that he was, knew every shadow and nook in which to conceal them. Not that much discretion
