He was on a trapeze, and he didn’t like it.
Thaddeus could feel himself swinging in midair — back and forth, back and forth — but around him was only darkness. He couldn’t see the ground, or even the contraption that was holding him up. He felt queasy and wrong, but he didn’t know how to stop the swinging. Back and forth, back and forth …
Thaddeus!
A voice soared to him out of the darkness. He had heard it before, he realized as he heard it again, but it was farther away this time. Or perhaps he was the one who had been farther away — perhaps they were both on a trapeze.
Thaddeus!
Who did he know who would be comfortable on a trapeze?
Thaddeus!
Rémy Brunel! It could only be her up here, swinging with him in the darkness. Wherever “here” was — at the moment he couldn’t tell, because everything was so dark, and the trapeze just would not stop moving … He tried to twist around and see what was behind him, but in doing so, he almost slipped from the swing completely. He flailed with his arms, clutching at anything he could. His hands found cold, hard rungs and he held on.
“Thaddeus!”
The voice shouting at him suddenly got much louder. Thaddeus frowned. It wasn’t Rémy after all. It was —
“Mr. Rec! Would you please just bleedin’ well WAKE UP!”
J!
Thaddeus jerked awake and immediately wished he hadn’t. Pain smashed into his temple as if someone had cracked it hard with a rock. He clutched his head, wondering for a split second if he’d been in The Grapes the previous night, before remembering that he hadn’t been at the Limehouse drinking spot for months.
“Thaddeus!”
“All right, all right,” he mumbled back. “I’m awake, I’m —”
He turned around, slipped, and fell. He cried out before something abruptly broke his fall a second later, or rather, two somethings that were part of a larger something all together. Thaddeus blinked, trying to clear his head enough to focus. He could feel his legs dangling into thin air, and there was that infernal swinging again — back and forth, back and forth — through chilled air.
Even with his eyes open, it was dark, although not quite as dark as it had been in his dream. There was a faint light coming from somewhere — yellow, like a burning torch. It gave enough of a glow to show him where he had fetched up.
Thaddeus Rec was in a cage.
“What the —”
“Are you all right?” he heard Dita’s voice call from behind him. Thaddeus turned his head and saw that she was in a cage, too, hanging beside him, her small hands clutching at the golden bars that imprisoned her as she stared anxiously at him.
“Thaddeus? Are you hurt?” That was Desai, on the other side of him, in another cage, peering through the dim light and the obstruction of yet another barred prison, this one holding J.
Thaddeus looked down at himself, still dazed from the pain of whatever blow his head had encountered. His legs had fallen between two of the rungs of his prison and he was dangling out of the bottom of it — their cages were suspended, apparently hanging above the ground, which he could not see through the darkness.
He struggled, pulling himself up and balancing his feet on two of the rungs — crouching, as the others were. It wasn’t comfortable, but then presumably whoever had built the cages hadn’t been very concerned about the comfort of their prisoners. They hung there in a line: Desai, then Dita, then J, then Thaddeus, in four cages each just large enough to hold a grown man, cubes made of golden bars not quite far enough apart for agile little Dita to squeeze between them. Thaddeus looked up to see that the roof of his cage bore a hatch, and beside the hatch was a sturdy ring through which had been threaded a hook, and from this hook led a chain as thick as Thaddeus’s arm. It led up to a large metal track set in the roof of the cavern that stretched away into the gloom around them. It instantly reminded Thaddeus of what they had found in the Comte de Cantal’s mountain catacombs.
“Where — where are we?” he managed, his voice rasping. His mouth felt as dry and dusty as the floorboards of the Professor’s workshop.
“Where’d you fink?” J asked. “Looks like it didn’t turn out to be as ’ard to get into the ruddy mountain as Mr. Desai fought it were going to be, eh?”
Thaddeus put a hand to his head as he looked up again. The throbbing was diminishing a little, but he’d have given his best trousers for a cool glass of water.
“Are the rest of you all right?” he asked. “None of you are hurt?”
“It looks as if you got the worst of it, my boy,” said Desai.
Thaddeus looked around again, trying to see where they were. Their voices echoed as they spoke, he noticed. Wherever it was that they had ended up, it was large.
“Have you shouted for anyone?”
“Other than you, you mean?” J asked. “Yeah, we’ve shouted. Nuffin’ doin’. No one’s come to see us at all since they stuck us in ’ere. But I suppose they don’t need to, do they? Seeing as there’s no way any of us can get out.”
Thaddeus looked up at the roof of the cage again.
“Makes you wish Rémy were here, don’t it?” J added. “She’d be up there picking that lock in no time. As it is, none of the rest of us can manage it.”
“I have tried,” Dita said softly. “I’ll keep trying, but I’m just not as good as Rémy is.”
“Don’t you worry, Miss,” J soothed. “It ain’t your fault. No one is, are they?”
Thaddeus looked over at Desai, whose face he could only just make out in the darkness pressing in on them. “Any ideas, Desai?” he asked. “You haven’t got … I don’t know, anything hidden in those robes of yours that might get us out of here?” Several times in the past Desai had surprised them all by producing potions capable of amazing feats — the ability to melt metal being one of them.
Desai shook his head. “My apologies, Thaddeus. After so many weeks in captivity at the Raja’s behest, I am afraid my supplies have been well and truly plundered.”
Thaddeus nodded slowly, and then wished he hadn’t. He shut his eyes briefly, trying to close out the pain, but doing so just made him more aware of the gentle swing of the cage. J was right — Rémy would be in her element here. Little Bird, the girl who could fly without wings, and whom no cage had yet managed to enclose — at least, not for long.
“All right,” he said. “Well, let’s look at this rationally and see what we can come up with. It’s reasonable to assume that we’re still inside the valley, isn’t it? And we’ve most likely been taken by the Sapphire Cutlass. Which means we’re probably inside the mountain — in the mines themselves. Yes?”
“I would say that is a reasonable deduction,” agreed Desai.
“Fat lot of good that does us,” J muttered loudly.
“J,” Thaddeus sighed. “Look, I know you’re angry, but —”
“Damn right I’m angry!” J burst out, his knuckles white where his hands gripped the rungs. “I told yer — didn’t I? I said we should turn back, and now look where we’ve ended up! You can be rational all you like, Mr. Rec, but we ain’t getting ourselves out of ’ere in a hurry, are we? We’re stuck, and gawd only knows what the people who put us in ’ere ’ave got planned fer us!”
“J,” cried Dita, “don’t say that!”
J looked past Thaddeus to the girl, his face softening. “Sorry,” he said. “Sorry. We’ll be all right. Course we will. It’s just …”
A noise swelled below them, quiet at first, but growing. Thaddeus felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck as he realized what it was. It was voices, chanting — the same chant that had surrounded them out on the fogged valley floor was rising to them again from somewhere below their cages, a collective murmur growing louder and louder, the sound of too many voices to count united in one repeated mantra.
“Where the bleedin’ ’eck ’ave they come from?” J cried. “’Ave they been down there all along, just being really quiet, like?”
For some reason, the thought made Thaddeus shiver. Then, somewhere off to his distant right, there came a noise like the sound of a giant match being struck: a harsh rasp, a fizz as a new flame added more light to the darkness. They all scrambled to the other side of their cages, stepping clumsily from one rung to another, careful not to slip into the spaces between as the motion jerked and shuddered their dangling prisons.
A large wooden torch had been lit. It burned brightly in the darkness, illuminating a yellow circle around itself. It had been pinned to hewn gray stone above a narrow walkway cut from more of the same rock. Another torch was lit farther along the wall, then another and another, tracing a route that circled where Thaddeus and his friends hung in their cages.
“If we ever get out of here,” came J’s plaintive voice as their surroundings slowly came into view, “I ain’t never going anywhere near a mountain again. You hear me? Not a mountain, not a cave, not an underground bleedin’ tunnel. Never again. I’s seen enough of ’em to last me five lifetimes!”
They were in a large cavern. J was right — it could have been Lord Abernathy’s submarine base beneath London, or the one housing the Comte de Cantal’s metal army in France. It made sense, Thaddeus supposed. If one were drawn to nefarious deeds, it was natural to find somewhere such as this to hide them. Although, he reflected for a moment, there was nothing natural about any of the things they had found in such places. He felt exactly as J did — that if they made it out of this particular predicament, he had had enough of dark places to last him a lifetime. Give him sun, blue sky, and a beach that stretched for as far as the eye could see …
If they got out of here. Which, as he looked around, Thaddeus realized would be nigh-on impossible.
The cavern was a rough oval shape, so large that even with the torches burning their brightest, there were parts of it that were still in darkness. Into its walls had been hewn huge, curved alcoves — eight in total, Thaddeus counted — and in each alcove stood a massive, intricately carved statue. Each one of the huge stone figures depicted the same woman, her face contorted into a terrifying grimace of abject rage. Her fingers bore talons instead of nails, and around her feet wove stone snakes. The carving was so detailed that despite her inhuman size, Thaddeus could almost believe that at any moment, the carved woman would step out of her resting place.
The cages in which Thaddeus and the others were trapped hung from a large iron hook in the ceiling, giving him a good view of the whole place. Thaddeus looked around carefully, fixing it in his mind as he searched for a way out. The cavern was on four levels. Below them was a pit, its depths hidden from view by shadows. This pit had been carved beside a raised stone stage that formed one end of the cavern. A narrow channel had been sunk into the raised rock, leading from near the front of the stage and disappearing back through an archway in the cavern wall at its rear. Opposite where the prisoners swung, at the far side of the stage, a wide, sloping stone path lead up to another archway that stood between two of the massive statues.
Squinting through the flickering gloom, Thaddeus realized that the chains from which their cages dangled fed through the hoop above them and ran across the cavern’s ceiling to a winch beside this archway. The winch meant that the cages could be raised or lowered, so if they wanted to get down safely, that was what they needed to reach. From the mouth of this smaller arch, a narrow ledge circled the cavern, where the burning torches had been lit to flicker at the feet of the huge statues. Thaddeus turned awkwardly, following where it went, and saw, at the opposite end of the cave, another smaller entrance with a narrower sloping path. This path led down to the cavern’s main level.
Thaddeus finally let his eyes drop to what filled the space between them and any hope of freedom. Arranged in tight rows that edged the pit and stretched from one side of the cavern to the other were hundreds of people. They all stood, chanting, swaying slightly as if in some kind of trance as they stared wild-eyed at Thaddeus, J, Dita, and Desai. Their faces were the fearsome ghosts that had circled them in the mists: black around the sockets of their eyes, white in the hollows of their cheeks. The men were naked to the waist, wearing loose trousers in a pale, shimmering blue. Each wore a belt that seemed as if it were made of metal that encased his hips and stomach like armor, and into each of these was mounted the sheath of a curved, wide-bladed sword. On these men’s chests was a tattoo — a cutlass just like the ones they carried in their belts, crossing over the left nipple where a hard blue stone glittered as it reflected the light of the burning torches. Their arms, all as thick and strong as tree trunks, were clad in impenetrable armor right up to the elbows.
The women — there were as many as there were men — were clad in armored breastplates and wore the same trousers. They too had swords, and each of them bore a tattoo on her left arm, the sapphires glinting and winking, blinding Thaddeus with a thousand pinpricks of starlight until he felt utterly mesmerized by the sight.
The cult of the Sapphire Cutlass.