Inside the chamber, the air was thick with dust and grime that coated the artist’s mouth and throat. He couldn’t see the boy amid the chaos. He couldn’t see the Grand Inquisitor or Don Grigori either. He prayed they had both been squashed as flat as the dead, scarlet beetles that carpeted the room.
Clambering over the rubble, he saw a hand sticking out from beneath what was left of an iron and wood chest. The chest had snapped in three places, the heaviest part pinning the Moor beneath its weight.
The artist used his own sweat and muscle to lift the broken wood and iron from the Moor’s chest. It wasn’t enough. The Moor’s legs were pinned by something bigger, something the artist couldn’t move.
He kneeled by the Moor’s turbaned head, which was caked in blood from a gouge slicing through his eyebrow into his scalp. Pulling a paint rag from his pouch, the artist did his best to clean the blood from his friend’s face. He pressed his hand to the Moor’s chest, but his fingers were shaking too much for him to feel a heartbeat over his own racing pulse. Instead he leaned his ear to the man’s lips and listened.
Nothing. Wait. Something. A ragged whistle of air? Perhaps.
Quickly, the artist used a chunk of brick and sketched a pouch filled with water on the ground. It burst from the thick air in an oval of blue light, and landed with a splosh next to the Moor. It was all he could do, other than pray – and complete the mission on his dear friend’s behalf.
He searched quickly until he found the box, the size of a small saddle with the design on the wax seal identical to the mark he had concealed with black ink at the curve of the slave boy’s neck. Securing it under his arm, the artist scrambled back to the balcony and down to the foot of his imagined stairs, where he dug the scrap of parchment from his pouch and rubbed out the drawing. The steps dissolved to nothing in a whizzing zigzag of blue light.