Sharp and Sara staggered through the endless low tunnels that snaked through the catacomb. They were weak and soaked and shivering badly with the cold, too chilled to talk, too fatigued to move faster than a dogged shamble. It was all they could do to keep moving. Sara kept one hand clenched on his arm, and the other held protectively across her body: partly this was to try and hug whatever remaining warmth there was in the core of her body, but mainly she knew she was keeping her hand clear of the bone piles they were hemmed in by. Even though she was wearing her gloves, she didn’t want to touch them. The pull of the past was all around her and if she glinted again she thought she might never find her way back from that past to the present. Glints did go mad if they were unable to escape the visions, and she had no intention, after all she had gone through, of losing what was left of her rational mind.
The stacks lining the passage were the ordered-looking walls of femurs and tibias laid end out, but the candlelight shed enough illumination into the recesses behind the regular bone hedge to see that all the other smaller bones had been tumbled behind them in an unending, disordered jumble. The people who had laid the ossuary had, perhaps as an attempt to relieve the innate grimness of their trade, on occasion indulged in flights of macabre decorative whimsy, and every now and then the bone hedge was broken up by designs made of carefully placed crania, inlaid into the knuckle ends: they passed crosses, diamonds and heart shapes made from grinning skulls, and one skull placed piratically atop a pair of crossed bones. They came to forks in the tunnels and, without needing to discuss it, always took the tunnel that seemed to rise.
They passed several dead-ended chambers, each again decorated in their own individual manner in the style of cathedral side-chapels, with bone altarpieces and freestanding pillars wrapped in mosaics of skeletal remains. They did not linger on these morbid cavities, but shuffled onwards.
Eventually, just when Sharp was beginning to think he would have to carry Sara, and was wondering if his remaining bodily strength would allow him to do so, they stumbled into a wider space, like a low-built hall. At the centre of it was a sturdy pillar made from tiers of bones, interspersed with bands of skulls, like a grotesque barrel-shaped layer cake.
They stopped and stared at it. Sara’s legs sagged and she clasped herself tighter to his arm. In the strangest way, he took strength from her need and reached around her to support her.
“This is a bad place,” she said.
“Of course,” he said.
Her hand flexed, and she shivered.
“No,” she said. “Not because of the poor dead ones piled here. Something truly bad happened in this room.”
He saw her eyes becoming glassy and felt her beginning to sag again.
“Come,” he said, and walked her to the door on the other side of the pillar. She seemed to drag her feet, almost as if she did not want to leave, as if the horror of it was exerting a powerful magnetic pull.
They ducked under a low lintel and found, to Sharp’s enormous relief, that they had stepped down into another room, a wedge-shaped space that was entirely free of bones. Something eased in him and he paused for a moment.
“Where are we?” she said, looking round at the smooth-hewn walls.
He turned and looked back at the doorway they had just emerged from. It was an ominous black maw into which his candle was seemingly unable to cast much light. There was writing incised into the lintel above it in deep capital letters:
ARRETE! ICI, C’EST L’EMPIRE DE LA MORT.
“The Empire of Death,” said Sara quietly.
“I don’t think we are under London,” said Sharp.
She shook her head. Her eyes dropped from the writing to stare back into the darkness beyond the door.
“No,” she said. “No, we are not.”
He pulled her away towards the rising passage at the far end of the wedge. She craned her head backwards, watching the door into the catacombs until the circle of candlelight moved too far for her to see it. He thought he felt something relax in her, and after a hundred yards he noted a renewed vigour in her stride. She gently slid out from under his arm and walked under her own steam. They picked up speed and soon felt something new. The candle flickered and a fresh breeze winnowed down the passage, cold air from above. Sharp turned a corner a pace before she did and stopped.
A ladder had been nailed to the wall, and thirty feet above their heads he saw daylight through a metal lattice.
“We’re free,” he said, turning with a smile. “We can go home.”
Motes of dust seemed to be falling down the chimney-like shaft, and as he turned his face upwards some of them began to land on his face and melt. He held his hand out in wonderment.
“Sara,” he said. “Snowflakes. It is snow. It isn’t winter. How can that be… ?”
He turned to look at her. She was not looking up at the snow. She was looking back down the dark tunnel.
“Come,” he said, making room for her at the bottom of the ladder. “You go first; I will follow close in case you miss your hold.”
“No,” she said. “No. I cannot go. Not yet.”
“Yet?” he said, dumbfounded.
She nodded and walked back into the dark passage.
“Sara,” he said, reaching for her arm. She shrugged him off and kept striding down the slope.
He followed her, this time grasping her shoulder and not allowing her to shake him off. She turned her face to him. Her eyes were wide and despairing, but her jaw was set.
“I have to go back into that last room. I have to enter the Empire of Death and touch the walls—”
“No. Absolutely not,” he said. “I will not allow it.”
Something hardier than despair glimmered into her eye and replaced it.
“It is not yours to allow.”
“I am sworn to pr—” he began and stopped, shocked to find her gloved fingers on his lips. She shook her head sadly.
“You do protect me, Jack. You have always protected me and I have always known it and esteemed you for it, even when you think I have not noticed you doing so, and especially when I have seemed to resent it most. But there is one thing you can never, must never protect me from…”
“Death,” he said.
“No,” she said. “Duty.”
She smiled up at him, face tight.
“Death? Death you are more than welcome to protect me from any and all the time. I’m no martyr, Jack. But duty? Never. Whatever else we are, we are first and most importantly The Oversight. Others rely on our protection.”
She turned and strode off.
He followed.
“Sara,” he began.
“I have to go in there and glint,” she said without slowing down. “I have to. I need to…”
“You are weak,” he said. “You are too weak–let us get out of here, get dry, warm, eat, sleep and then maybe—”
“What?”
“In the cavern. Under the water. Alone. Before you came back through the mirror and plucked me out. I…”
Her voice faltered but her stride did not.
“What?” he said. She cleared her throat.
“In the cavern. I touched the wall. I glinted.”
Her voice was ragged.
“That’s why you didn’t follow me,” he said.
He saw her nod her head. She cleared her throat again. He knew enough not to stop her and turn her. The rawness in her voice was clue enough as to why she would not thank him for seeing her face as she spoke.
She cleared her throat for a third time and took a deep breath.
“I saw the moment of the Disaster. I saw what happened after all those good… those good, misguided hearts went into the mirrors via the damned Murano Cabinet, all those long years ago, thinking that they were going to save us all. I saw it. I saw a churning cavern full of water and the dead and drowning trapped in it. I saw them all, the lost ones, the faces you and I grew up with. I saw them in the final moment no one should witness.”
The pain in her voice was unbearable to listen to.
“I saw them dying.”
“Sara,” he said again.
“I saw my mother die,” she said. “She tried, she fought to the last, and then she tried to break the mirror so no one else would come through it and be trapped and die as they did. If we had not needed to escape through it, I would have shattered it for her. Even in the teeth of her own death she did her duty. How can I do less?”
She stopped and turned and looked him straight in the face, unashamed of the tears streaking down her cheeks.
“And I need to know why there is something in that hellish chamber that wants me to touch it.”
“I know all the things you want to say to stop me doing it–that it’s dangerous, that I am weak after our ordeal, that it’s your job to think straight when I can’t–but—”
“Do it,” he said. “You must do it.”
Her eyes widened in surprise.
“But I’m coming with you,” he finished.
She nodded slowly, then grinned through eyes too bright to be just smiling. She wiped them.
“So I should damn well hope.”
He handed her the candle.
“Lead on,” he said. “And hurry up. That candle’s nearly done.”
She began to run, moving into the darkness in her own circle of bobbing light.
“It’ll be all right,” she said, breath coming in short jerks. “I saw the Disaster. I saw her die. Nothing could be worse than that.”