'But Steerpike is ill, ladyship?'
Fuchsia stared up at him. Neither she nor Titus could understand why he had suddenly got to his feet.
'Yes.' said Fuchsia. 'He was burned when he tried to save Barquentine who was on fire - and he's been in bed for months.'
'How much longer, ladyship?'
'The doctor says he can get up in a week.'
'But the Ritual! The instructions; who has given them? Who has directed the Procedure - day by day - interpreted the Documents - O God!' said Flay, suddenly unable to control himself any longer. 'Who has made the symbols come to life? Who has turned the wheels of Gormenghast?'
'It is all right. Mr Flay. It's all right. He does not spare himself. He was not trained for nothing. He is covered in bandages but he directs everything. And all from his sickbed. Every morning. Thirty or forty men are there are a time. He interviews them all. Hundreds of books are at his side - and the walls are covered with maps and diagrams. There is no one else who can do it. He is working all the time, while he lies there. He is working with his brain.'
But Flay struck his hand against the wall of the cave as though to let out his anger.
'No! No!' he said. 'He's no Master of Ritual, ladyship, not for always. No love, ladyship, no love for Gormenghast.'
'I wish there wasn't any Master of Ritual,' said Titus.
'Lordship,' said Flay after a pause, 'you are only a boy. No knowledge. But you will learn from Gormenghast. Sourdust and Barquentine, both burned up,' he continued, hardly knowing that he spoke aloud... 'father and son... father and son...'
'Maybe I'm only a boy,' said Titus hotly, 'but if you know how we've come here today, by the secret passage under the ground (which I found by myself, didn't I, Fuchsia? then...' but Titus had to stop for the sentence was too involved for him.
'But do you know,' he continued, starting afresh, 'we've been in the dark, with candles, sometimes crawling but mostly walking all the way from the castle, except for the last mile where the tunnel comes out, only you'd never know it, under a bank, like the mouth of a badger's set - not too far from here on the other side of the wood where you first saw us, so it was difficult to find your cave, Mr Flay, because last time I came was mostly on horseback and then through the oakwood - and, O Mr Flay, was it a dream or did I really see a flying thing and did I tell you about it? I sometimes think it was a dream.'
'So it was,' said Flay. 'Nightmare; and no doubt of it.' He seemed to have no desire to talk to Titus about the 'flying thing'.
'Secret tunnel to the castle, lordship?'
'Yes,' said Titus, 'secret and black and smelling of earth and sometimes there are beams of wood to keep the roof up and ants everywhere.'
Flay turned his eyes to Fuchsia as though for confirmation. 'It's true,' said Fuchsia.
'And close by, ladyship?'
'Yes,' said Fuchsia. 'In the woods across the near valley. That's where the tunnel comes out.'
Flay stared at them both in turn. The news of the underground passage seemed to have had a great effect on him, although they could not think why - for although to them it had been a very real and forbidding adventure, yet from bitter experience they knew that what was wonderful to them was usually of little interest to the adult world.
But Mr Flay was hungry for every detail.
'Where did the passage start from within the castle? Had they been seen in the corridor of statues? Could they find their way back to this corridor when the tunnel opened out into that silent and lifeless world of halls and passageways? Could they take him to the bank in the wood where the tunnel ended?'
Of course they could. At once - and thrilled that a grownup, for Fuchsia never thought of herself as one, could be as excited by their discovery as they were themselves - they were soon on their way to the wood.
Flay had almost at once seen more in their discovery than Fuchsia and Titus could have guessed. If it were so, that within a few minutes of his cave, there was, as it were, for Flay, an open door that led into the heart of his ancient home a road which he could tread, if he wished, when the broad daylight lay upon the woods and fields five feet above his head, then surely his power to root out whatever evil was lurking in Gormenghast, to trace it to its source, was enormously increased. For it had been no easy thing to enter the castle unobserved and to make, sometimes by moonlight, those long journeys above ground from his cave to the Outer Walls, and from them across the quadrangles and open spaces to the inner buildings and the particular rooms and passageways he had in mind.
But if what they said was true, he would, at any time of the day or night, be able to emerge from behind that statue in the corridor of carvings, to find the gaunt anatomy of the place laid bare about him.
FORTY-FIVE
The days flowed on, and the walls of Gormenghast grew chill to the touch as the summer gave way to autumn, and autumn to a winter both dark and icy. For long periods of time the winds blew night and day, smashing the glass of windows, dislodging masonry, whistling and roaring between towers and chimneys and over the castle's back.
And then, no less awesome, the wind would suddenly drop and silence would grip the domain. A silence that was unbreakable, for the bark of a dog, or the sudden clang of a pail, or the far cry of a boy seemed only real in that they accentuated the universal stillness through which, for a moment, they rose, like the heads of fish, from freezing water - only to sink again and to leave no trace.
In January the snow came down in such a way that those who watched it from behind countless windows could no longer believe in the sharper shapes that lay under the blurred pall, or the colours that were sunk in the darkness of that whiteness. The air itself was smothered with flakes the size of a child's fist, and the terrain bulged with the submerged features of a landscape half-remembered.
