The Assassin King

In the near total darkness, relieved only by Anna’s modest torchlight and the lamp on Oliver’s video camera, they’d never have found it had they not actively been looking, so cunningly had Uncle Dun hidden it. But, after a minute or two of struggling with the brambles and other thickets, Anna’s eye was caught by a tangle of thorns between a blackberry bush and a bed of nettles that looked too twisted and bunched up to be quite natural, as though it had been uprooted elsewhere then stuffed into the gap. She made mittens of her sleeves to pinch its branches between her fingers and then pull. It came far enough to encourage her to take a firmer grip then drag it all the way aside. Yet it only revealed the same packed earth, twigs and leaf litter as she could see elsewhere.

She got down onto her hands and knees for a closer look, while Oliver stood above her with his camera on his shoulder, both to film her and to give her light. She dug her fingers into the soil, which proved to be cold, damp and unexpectedly brittle, as if broken up only to be stamped back down again. She scraped away maybe three or four inches of it before encountering something more solid, a first glimpse of what proved to be a pair of short pine planks sawn from the timber in the back of the van.

She cleared them both of earth then worked her fingers beneath the nearer of the two. It was still so firmly plugged that she had to lean backwards and lift with her legs, only for it to give in such a rush that she went tumbling onto her backside. Its partner came more easily, exposing the top of a shaft not much broader than her shoulders, and against whose wall her uncle had fixed his aluminium ladder with orange rope and steel pegs.

Oliver stood on its lip and shone down his lamp, its powerful beam lighting up a mound of earth and broken brickwork far below. An underground chamber of some kind, whose ceiling – some ten or twelve feet beneath them – had presumably collapsed beneath her uncle’s assault. There was no way he could have dug that deep with a spade, meaning he must surely have used his augur instead, despite the din it would have made. Nor could he have done it in a single visit. He must have come here multiple times, photographing the fields on his first visit, then choosing this spot to dig before returning with the necessary equipment packed into the back of his van. ‘Enough,’ she said. ‘We need to report this now.’

‘Of course,’ said Oliver. ‘But come on! Surely a quick look first. In and out. Thirty seconds. Just to make certain it’s what we think.’

‘What else could it be?’ asked Anna. Yet she couldn’t deny the tug. ‘You’ll have to stay up here,’ she told him. ‘In case anything goes wrong.’

‘Nothing will go wrong.’

‘No. Because you’ll be up here to make sure.’ She sat on the edge of the shaft then turned onto her side to feel for a rung with her foot, gradually increasing her weight upon it until she was confident it would hold. Yet it still gave such a wobble when she committed herself to it that she had to claw at the earth to save herself.

Oliver had to fight back his laughter. ‘Maybe I should do it,’ he said.

‘In your dreams,’ said Anna.

‘I’m only thinking of your safety.’

‘You’re only thinking of your documentary.’

His teeth flashed. ‘Can’t blame a man for trying.’

She tucked the phone into her waistband to give herself some light while leaving her hands free. Then she began her descent, feeling out each rung with her foot, slowly delivering herself into the gut of this monstrous serpent. The soil had that rich and pungent wet earth smell, and looked to be kept from collapsing in on itself only by the chaotic mesh of yellow roots that her uncle had sliced through with his augur. The shaft grew narrower and narrower. Her breathing echoed unnervingly loudly back at her and she could feel the thumping of her heart. But then she reached the point beneath which it had collapsed, and it immediately opened up wide. She paused to shine her torch around. Its feeble beam was little match for the huge space in which she now found herself, yet it was still strong enough to make out a colonnaded hallway with an arched ceiling supported by two rows of fat pillars, creating aisles either side of a taller central spine. An ambulatory, perhaps, around which Knights Templar would have walked in quiet contemplation or in murmured conversation.

She completed her descent, stepped off the bottom rung onto the mound of fallen moist dark earth in which a number of limestone blocks were mixed, each the size of a farmhouse loaf and trapezoid of shape, the better to fit together to form the vaulted ceiling. She bedded the ladder’s feet a little more securely into the earth then looked around once more. The walls on either side bulged alarmingly from the pressure of the surrounding land, but thankfully were buttressed by sturdy ribs every few paces, each one sculpted with gargoyles both beautiful and grotesque. This place would have been built during the first great flowering of cathedral architecture, of course, from which it had doubtless borrowed techniques and designs. It looked as though it would have been well lit back then, for she could see the rusted traces of iron beckets on the walls, as well as several niches at chest height in which a few clay oil lamps still remained.

A soft, discordant tapping caught her ear. It took her several moments to work out that it was water dripping at different tempos from various fissures in the ceiling, which presumably was why the floor was gently cambered, to channel such leaks into the gutters that ran alongside either wall, to be drained from there into cisterns or maybe the earth beneath. The moisture meant that the carpet of dirt and earth had taken beautiful impressions of her uncle’s footprints, and had held them almost perfectly since his visit. On one side, they led away along the central spine before returning down the left-hand aisle. On the other, by contrast, there were too many to make sense of, as though he’d been back and forth at least half a dozen times. The latter, then, looked the more promising; but the former seemed easier to rule out, so that was where she headed first, filming as she went.

Her shoes and socks grew damp, giving her the graveyard chills. A cobweb caught in her face and throat and hair. She brushed it away then checked herself for spiders. The darkness began to play upon her nerves. The ancient stone creaked like an old house, and she kept sensing movement out of the corners of her eyes, absurd though she knew that to be. She felt twelve again, spooked by the ghosts in the local woods when moonlight had played upon the trees.

She reached the end of the ambulatory. An arched doorway would have led into the next chamber along, or perhaps to a flight of stairs, except that it had been bricked up centuries ago. She was taking photographs of it when a bloom of light behind her gave her a start. But it was only Oliver, of course, approaching with his camera on his shoulder, its lamplight bright in her eyes. ‘You promised,’ she said.