How’d it do that? Karigan wondered. She’d once thought of the cat as a ghost kitty, but it had felt so real rubbing her leg…
Fastion crutched over to the wall. “There is a fissure here. Your position and the angle of light only makes it look solid. Come see.”
Karigan and the remaining Weapons clustered around what was not more than, to Karigan’s mind, a narrow crack in the wall. Fine for a cat, but a human being?
“It will be a squeeze,” Brienne said. “I shall test it first.”
Except for Karigan, Brienne was the slimmest of the group. The others, all men except for Cera, had broad shoulders and chests. Brienne removed her sword, felt her way into the fissure, and squeezed in. She did not even take a lamp with her. Karigan admired the sergeant’s grit and was glad it wasn’t she who had to chance getting jammed in some dark fissure.
It was not long before Brienne reemerged unscathed. “It is tight in the beginning, but widens. It comes out behind Queen Lyra’s bed.”
There was murmured consternation among the Weapons. “Do the caretakers know about it?” Lennir asked.
The Weapons prided themselves on knowing every crack and corner of the castle, but were now learning they had not discovered everything just yet. Karigan wondered if the castle played tricks on people; changed its configuration now and then; revealed and concealed its extent at whim.
“Perhaps, perhaps not,” Fastion replied.
“A tapestry conceals the outlet,” Brienne said.
Karigan was still working out the idea of Queen Lyra’s bed. Surely this was a quaint way of referring to a funerary slab. Surely.
But now the Weapons started to file into the fissure, and Fastion placed a hand on Karigan’s shoulder and guided her toward it.
“Brienne will be in charge on the other side,” he said.
“What? Aren’t you coming?”
“Yes, of course, but in the tombs she outranks me. Above is my domain.”
It was all really too much for Karigan to digest in her current state. The Weapons were beyond her, and she left it at that.
Fastion practically shoved her into the fissure and she found she had to shuffle sideways to fit. She held the sword vertically against her hip and moved cautiously so as not to jar her already battered body. Still, her cheek grazed a jagged rock and she probably added a new bruise to her shoulder before the passage widened. Light glowed ahead and she surged toward it like a swimmer seeking the water’s surface. She emerged into a large chamber, Brienne holding aside the tapestry. Fastion hopped out of the passage next, dragging his crutches behind him.
Brienne dropped the tapestry back into place. Whether or not the caretakers knew of the passage, the Delvers had, for Karigan glimpsed stick figure people and beasts incised into the stone around the opening before the tapestry swept back over them.
“I sent Lennir and Beston to Heroes Avenue to investigate what’s happened at the main entrance,” Brienne told Fastion in a hushed voice. “Offrid and Sorin I’ve sent to the village, and I’ve ordered the rest to scout for intruders.”
Fastion nodded.
“Village?” Karigan asked.
“Shhh,” Fastion said. “We don’t know how near the intruders are. The village is where the caretakers live.”
“You two are with me,” Brienne said. “We’ll visit the kings and queens and perhaps intercept the intruders and the book.”
Visit the kings and queens, Karigan thought sourly. Visit dead people.
Only now did she take in her surroundings which were lit by lamps at low glow, leaving much in shadow and to the imagination. When Brienne said the passage ended at Queen Lyra’s “bed,” she hadn’t been using a quaint figure of speech. She’d been precise. A canopy bed, to be even more precise.
Beautiful blue velvet curtains draped down from the canopy and were tied to each bedpost with gold cords. Beneath the matching covers a figure reclined against silk pillows, jewels on boney fingers and a tiara on its head sparkling in the light. A perfectly braided rope of silver hair flowed down the figure’s shoulder. The flesh was shrunken to skull and bones like parchment, and Queen Lyra gazed out from her bed with a perpetual, skeletal grin.
Karigan did not know if it was some secret method of embalming that preserved the dead in these tombs so well over hundreds of years, or the cool, dry environment, or some alchemy of the two. She didn’t care. All she knew was that she hated the tombs. She really did.
The white cat reappeared from beneath the bed and jumped up onto it.
“Shoo!” Brienne said, whisking the cat off. “Agemon would be most displeased to find clumps of white hair on the queen’s bed.”
Karigan groaned inwardly when she heard the chief caretaker’s name, and she hoped they would not encounter him this time.
The rest of the chamber was fitted out like a bedroom, complete with dressing table, armoire, and washstand. There was even a chamber pot stashed under the bed. Though tables and furniture were cluttered with personal items, such as combs and jewelry, no trailing cobwebs hung from the canopy bed; no dirt or grime clung to any surface. There was even a book on a chair next to the bed with a marker in it. Apparently Queen Lyra liked to read.
When Fastion observed Karigan absorbing everything, he said, “Many wish to take with them the comforts of home after death. The dying find it easier to accept their journey to the heavens knowing they’ll be surrounded by things they loved in life. The queen’s husband, King Cedric, preferred to spend the afterlife with his favorite horses.”