The smoky tunnel angled downward—not a good sign. It was narrow as a coffin and low as a gun deck on a warship. I banged my head twice, and the cauldron I’d snagged gonged as it hit walls of rock. The three of us held hands, our beacon Astiza’s lone candle. Behind, a glimmer showed where fire still burned in the ruined laboratory. The flames should slow pursuit, but they might also consume our air. We could hear shots and great crashes as Richter and his men rammed the door we’d blocked.
“I can’t see, Papa.”
“I’ve brought more candles,” Astiza said. “Let’s get further out of sight and I’ll light another.”
With better illumination, I saw that the shaft was unevenly hewn from pick and shovel, twisting like a worm into the earth.
“What happened back there?”
“Christian Rosenkreutz made such an explosion in another prison,” Astiza explained. “I discovered his formula in old books. It’s called fulminating gold, and it has killed more than one alchemist. To make a volatile mixture, you dissolve gold in aqua regia, a form of nitric acid that can be gleaned from urine.”
“I peed to make it, Papa.”
“We all work together, don’t we?”
“We do now that you’re home.” That Harry called a maze a home shows how low I’d set his expectations. I resolved to do better, should we survive.
“The urine salts have to putrefy for forty days, and then are distilled into crystals,” my wife said. “The result, when mixed and purified, is a powder that explodes when struck. I refined enough to fill that clay egg and rigged the bookcase to spill the hammer onto it.”
“You’re as odd and dangerous as my friend Robert Fulton.”
“Useful in other ways, too.” She gave me a kiss, hot and hurried. Her lips were soft, her waist taut as a bowstring, and her hair fanned across my cheek like salve. I kissed back, mashing mouths with a colt’s enthusiasm, but my son gave an impatient kick as we heard the door give way. There were shouts of dismay as our enemies stormed into the room and discovered Auric. “Later,” I gasped. We hurried on.
Astiza led, Harry was in the middle, and I was the rear guard, Auric’s pistols in my belt and the sword and cauldron handle clutched awkwardly in my one free hand. My wife selected twists and turns as decisively as if walking a path to her front door, even though we had no map. I didn’t argue, taking heart when we seemed to be climbing toward the surface and despair when our flight took us deeper into the earth. I’d already experienced being buried and had no desire to be permanently entombed.
Shouts from our pursuers echoed to tag us. Some of the Invisibles apparently turned the wrong way, and we heard cries of “I’m lost!” reverberate down the mine shafts. Others spotted the faint light of our candles before we turned a corner and they began to sprint toward us. “It’s them!”
“Go faster,” I ordered.
“We can’t go faster.”
“Go as fast as you can while I make them hesitate.”
“I have chalk,” Astiza said. “If we make a turn, I’ll make a mark.”
Clever girl.
I crouched at an elbow in the mine, my candle in a crevice to minimize its light. Auric’s pistols were small, women’s guns to fit a dwarf, but lethal enough at close range. Richter’s gang came heedlessly on, remembering us helpless and cursing in order to keep up their courage. A torch lit four who drew near. When they got within ten paces, I fired.
A man screamed and pitched backward. Auric’s pistol had a pretty punch. Smoke filled the tunnel, the others fell flat, and I fled, the other gun still ready.
I’d no means to reload.
My shot stalled the pursuit. A chalk mark led me to a new branch that curled down into blackness. I dreaded more descent, even while hoping that our bold plunge into the heart of the mines would lose them. Water dripped everywhere, and I splashed through puddles.
I caught up with Astiza and Harry in a few hundred yards.
“Did you shoot the bad men, Papa?”
“One of them.”
“I want to go outside.”
“As soon as we get away.” Yet I could hear running water and feared we were fleeing into a dead end. If the bottom of the mines were drowned, why were we going that way?
“Did they give up?” Astiza asked.
“Perhaps.”
Then we heard dogs barking.
“Or not.”
“I don’t like dogs,” Harry contributed.
Someday I’m going to get the boy a nice puppy, but no time for that now. We began to trot. Richter had fetched hounds.
A distant murmur rose to a rumble, and then a roar. We soon saw the cause. Our passage joined another tunnel half-filled with an underground river. It plunged from a cliff upstream, the waterfall meaning there was no chance of ascending. We’d have to plunge into black water and float downstream.
It was hopeless, but so was surrender. The dogs were getting closer.
“Harry, can you swim?”
“I’m scared.” He looked miserably at the current.
“I taught him to float,” Astiza said. “But he needs something to hold on to.”
The baying of the hounds grew louder. Harry was crying. I crouched. “Horus, listen to me. I’m going to shoot one of the dogs, and then we’re going to leap into the water. Dogs can’t smell us there.”
“Can doggies swim?”
“Yes, but they won’t follow, I promise.” Dogs have too much sense. “You must hold tight to Papa.”
He was shaking, cheeks wet, but he looked at me with trust. “Don’t let me die.”
I hugged him. “I won’t.” Then, “Astiza, take the cauldron for a moment.”
“Ethan, why did you bring that thing?”
“You’ll see.”
I put my candle on a rock shelf, strapped Durendal to my back, cocked the second pistol, and put my left arm around Harry. I could feel him shake. The baying of the hounds was amplified by the mines into a great echoing clamor of canine excitement. Then there was a blur of movement as they spied our light and charged in excitement, snapping and yowling.
I fired.
The lead animal somersaulted. I hurled both pistols, hearing yips as they struck. Then I plunged with Harry into swift, waist-deep water, my boots sliding on the slippery bottom. Astiza was wading ahead of us, dress dragging, gamely holding a candle in one hand and the cauldron in the other. I eased in to float on my back, gasping from the chill, and held my son to my chest. “Easy, boy. Now we get away from the hounds.”
He shivered.
The animals had halted, confused and wary, sniffing the body of their dead companion. Some came to the edge of the water, barking. Harry clutched me as tight as he could. One dog jumped in and Harry shouted in terror, but then the hound thought better of it, turned, and paddled to heave himself out. I heard men’s voices, and then shouts of frustration. We floated out of sight.
The water deepened. Astiza was swimming, too, trying to keep the candle alight. I floated like an otter, Harry on my chest.
Then a splash as my wife’s candle finally went under, and it was dark—not just dark but as black as it is possible to be. The three of us were carried deeper into the underworld. I reached up and brushed rock. The water was closer to the ceiling. We swirled at the speed of a trot, blind and cold.
“Astiza, are you there?”
“Yes.” Her voice was small, with a tremble to it.
To think that medieval miners came into this hell every day of their lives.
“Ethan, the air disappears! Stop!”
I bumped up against her, legs drifting down to find a precarious hold. “Here, take Harry.” We were all shivering. I felt past her and ahead. As she said, the ceiling dipped so that there was no air between it and the rushing river. If we went farther, we’d drown. If we went back we’d be tortured and killed. I could still hear the dogs, barking in frustration.
“This is just like old times,” I gasped in encouragement, fighting the cold and my own fear of the dark. “We’ve done this before.”
“That pyramid path was engineered. This is a drowned mine. We’ve no idea how long this river goes. And Horus can’t hold his breath very long.”
“Somewhere this river will emerge.”
“Miles from here.”
“You’re scaring Harry.”
“I don’t like the dogs!” he shouted, the sound bouncing.
“We don’t have a choice,” I insisted. “It ends here, or life has a purpose for us. Do you have the cauldron?”
“It’s an anchor, filled with water.”
“Empty it.”
I could hear the pour as she did so, holding it against the low rock ceiling.
“I’m going to take Harry with me, using the cauldron like the diving bell in the Caribbean. If we invert it, we trap air and give him a little to breathe.”
She moaned. “My Goddess, why are you testing me so cruelly?”
“You go first, and we’ll follow.”
“No,” she pleaded, her strength exhausted. “I can’t do this to Harry. What if he drowns? We go back and beg for mercy. Beg for him. Our lives for his.”
“Don’t be foolish, Astiza. There is no mercy. You know that.”
“Ethan, I can’t . . .”
“Follow your son.” And I grabbed the cauldron, took a huge breath, put the cauldron over my little boy’s head before he could even ask what I was doing, let go the rock wall, and let us be swept into oblivion.
I had to hope, and dread, that she trusted me enough to follow.
Harry squirmed like a terrier as we rushed, but I held him with one arm and the cauldron with the other, listening to him cough and scream as he choked on the air. I held my breath, silently ticking off seconds as we traveled. I wanted to know, just before we drowned, how long I’d made it.
Thirty seconds. We caromed off a rock wall, I almost sucked in water, and then we were swirling along again, the walls slick as ice. I kicked to hurry us.
A minute. The pressure to breathe was building now, Harry alarmingly slack. Had he fainted? I had no idea if my wife had followed.
Ninety seconds. My chest was a slow burn.
Two minutes. I banged my head against a rock, but the agony in my body worked to keep me from blacking out. Pain arced from skull to heart to lungs.
Eternity ticked on. My body seemed to swell, my nerves crying not so much for air to be sucked in but for what I’d consumed to be released. I let out a train of bubbles.
Two minutes twenty, and I couldn’t do it more. I hadn’t trained for this.
Two-thirty, then, and I’d agree to be dead. I counted, endlessly.
Two-forty, every fiber screaming, floating upward . . .
My head broke clear and my lungs exploded in release, and then I sucked in another breath, went down, fought up, shoved Harry toward the ceiling so the cauldron clanged but the air was refreshed, then down again in eerie blackness, gulping in a pocket of air. I floated on my back and the cauldron rolled off us and was lost in an instant, my boy frighteningly still, as if dead. I felt the worse but could see nothing in the dark.
Surely my wife couldn’t have lasted that long.
“Ethan!” It was almost a scream, and then a cough.
“Here! With Harry!”
By thunder, we’d done it.
And then the ceiling dipped and we were under again, hurled along in a nightmare, but this one was shorter, the length of a room, and with joy I felt Harry tighten against me with a fearful clutch like a cat’s. He was alive!
We came out in the dark again, gasping, but suddenly there was a feeling of space above the water, as if we’d slid from old mine tunnel to broader cave. The current slackened.
“Astiza, where are you?”
“Here.” She was splashing, trying to find us.
Harry was hacking, proof of life that made me weep.
Far, far away—as far as the stars—I saw a glimmer of light. I thought I was hallucinating for a moment, but the illumination slowly grew. Escape!
We drifted out the cave exit to a forested ravine, branches bare and snow drifting down. Too exhausted to do anything but stare at the cloudy daylight—we’d no idea what time it was—we drifted in a pool for a moment, numb and reprieved, nearly frozen, until our leaden legs grounded in shallows. We numbly stood, shaking with exhaustion and cold. Had we escaped Astiza’s prison, only to freeze to death?
“Ethan!”
A miracle appeared. It was Gideon, rising from winter underbrush and stumbling across a rocky bar to help us stagger to shore. He hadn’t deserted me after all! Somehow he’d even anticipated our emergence and waited for us.
“How, how . . .” I couldn’t even make a coherent sentence. But maybe he could get my boy to a fire. I was weeping with gratitude, so grateful for this second reprieve. Astiza and I dripped, teetering from shock, amazed we were all still in this world. The three of us held one another.
Then other figures emerged from the brush and joined Gideon, pistols and muskets aimed. One was gigantic, another blond, and several looked like French secret police.
“Hello, Ethan,” said Catherine Marceau. “At last we are reunited.”