The Wheel of Osheim (The Red Queen's War 3)

“How on earth can you say there’s a trapdoor?” I squinted through a gap in the crossed roof beams. Even with Snorri holding the light up I could see nothing but dust, wheat grain, and broken roof tiles. “I can barely even see the floor.”

Kara looked around to meet my question, her eyes with that unfocused, “witchy” look to them.

“Oh,” I said.

Hennan took hold of a beam and started to heave. An ant would have more luck trying to drag a tree. Snorri bent to help him.

“Is this a good idea?” By which I meant of course that it was a terrible idea. “Apart from whatever bad thing might be lurking down there, this place looks ready to finish falling down any moment.” From what I could see several dozen sacks of grain formed the main structural support in lieu of the stone and timber now piled on the floor. Apparently Grandmother’s men had agreed with me and decided to leave the sacks in place. “I said,” I repeated myself more loudly. “The whole place could collapse any moment.”

“All the more reason to work quickly and keep our voices down then.” Snorri flashed me a look. He bent and, gritting his teeth, wrapped his enormous arms around a fallen roof beam, straining to move it. For a moment the thing held as Snorri passed from red through several shades of scarlet. Veins pulsed along the bulging muscles of his arms—I later described it to a young woman who seemed overly interested in the Northman as being like ugly worms mating—his legs trembled and straightened, and in a cloud of dust the beam gave up the fight.

I tried to retain a logistical role, explaining that such dangerous labour required coordination and oversight, but in the end the ignorant savages had me put my back into the effort. I set the ghost-box down in a corner and rolled up both sleeves. It took forever, possibly an hour, but eventually I stood sweaty, dirty, with my hands aching and torn, staring at six square yards of blank floor.

“There’s no trapdoor.” It had to be said. It’s not my fault if I took a certain pleasure in saying it.

Kara knelt in the cleared space and started to tap the floor with a piece of broken tile. She moved methodically, checking the whole area, then returned to a patch to the left. “There, do you hear it?”

“I hear you making a racket,” I said.

“It sounds hollow here.”

“It sounds the same as the other two hundred places you whacked.”

She shook her head. “It’s here . . . but I can’t see the trapdoor.”

“There?” Snorri asked.

Kara nodded. The Viking handed her the orichalcum and stepped out over the splintered door into the night.

Hennan watched him go. “Where’s he—”

Snorri came back almost immediately, a chunk of rock in his hands that clearly weighed considerably more than me. It looked as though it might have been blasted from the main walls. I recalled some debris up against the side of the granary.

Kara needed no warning to get out of the way. Snorri approached the spot, making the slow and deliberate steps of a man near the limits of his strength. With a grunt he hefted the rock up to nearly chest height, and dropped it. It hit the floor and kept on going. When the dust cleared I could see a dark and perfectly round hole where Kara had been knocking with her tile.

“I hope Dr. Taproot wasn’t standing underneath that trapdoor waiting to be rescued . . .” I gestured for Kara to take a look.

“It goes down a long way.” She knelt to take a closer look. “There are handholds built into the wall of the shaft.” Without further discussion she swung her legs into the hole and started to climb down.

Snorri followed, then Hennan, shooting a glance back at me. He probably couldn’t see much since our only light was vanishing down the shaft.

“Go on.” I waved him forward. “I’ll bring up the rear. Just don’t want any of you lot falling on me.”

I planned to find a comfortable grain sack and sit this one out. The thing about the stink of rotting corpse though is that you can never truly acclimatize to it. I’d blocked out the box’s beeping almost immediately but drawing in a deep sigh of relief as Hennan vanished into the hole was all it took to remind me that I wasn’t quite as alone as I might have hoped. The scuttling noise was almost certainly a rat: the place must be full of them. Corpse and grain—a rat feast! Even so, the possibility that it might be a dead hand suddenly twitching into action proved enough to make me a man of my word and six seconds later I was clambering down after the boy.

The descent put me in mind of our visit to Kelem in his mines, another ill-advised climb down into the dark unknown. The handholds in the poured-stone wall seemed to have been made when the shaft was lined, being moulded into the stone rather than hacked out, and proved considerably more trustworthy than Kelem’s rickety ladders. And thankfully the bottom took less time to reach. I estimated we’d descended thirty yards, certainly not more than fifty.