Ariana Franklin - Mistress of the Art of Death

She shifted in order to let Veronica lift the hen crate from under her legs. “I shall wait here,” she said.

The nun looked at her doubtfully, and then at the baskets still in the punt needing to be carried to the unseen anchorages.

Adelia said, “Would you leave the lantern with me?”

Sister Veronica cocked her head. “Feared of the dark?”

Adelia considered the question. “Yes.”

“Keep it then, and the Lord take care of you. I’ll be back in a while.” The nun hefted a sack over her shoulder and, gripping the crate in her other hand, set off up a moonlit track leading into trees.

Adelia waited until she’d gone, then lifted Safeguard onto the bank, picked up the lantern, raised it to see that its candle was good and stout, and began walking.

For a while, the river and its accompanying path meandered in the general direction in which she headed, but, after perhaps a mile, she saw that it would take her too far to the south. She left it to keep due east as the crow flew-except that a crow wouldn’t have been impeded by the obstacles that now met Adelia: great stretches of brambles, hillocks, and dips made slippery by the recent rain, hurdle fences that sometimes could be climbed or crawled through and sometimes couldn’t.

If human eyes watched from Wandlebury Hill, they saw a tiny, errant light straying across the dark country, going this way and that with apparent aimlessness as Adelia circumambulated one obstruction, then another. Sometimes the light paused because she fell, and fell awkwardly in an attempt to keep the lantern from hitting the ground and going out, Safeguard standing by until she got up.

Occasionally, not having heard it, she was startled by a deer or fox fleeing across her path-her own sobbing breath being too loud to hear anything else, though she sobbed not from grief nor exhaustion but from effort.

However, the watcher on Wandlebury Hill, if there were a watcher, could have seen that for all its vagaries, the little light was coming closer.

And Adelia, struggling through her valley of shadows, saw the hill slowly swell until it dominated everything else ahead. The star that had gotten entangled on its brow was no longer intermittent but sent out a steady glow.

She nearly retched as she went, sick with her own stupidity. Why didn’t I go here straight away? The bodies of the children told me, told me. Chalk, they said. We were killed on chalk. The river fixated me. But the river leads to Wandlebury Hill. I should have known.

Scratched and bleeding, limping, yet with the lantern still lit, she heaved herself up onto a flat surface and found it to be the spot on the Roman road where Prior Geoffrey had once screamed to anyone who would listen that he could not piss.

There was nobody about; indeed, it was late now and the moon was high, but Adelia was encapsulated away from time; there was no past where people lived; there wasn’t a child called Ulf, she had stopped hearing or seeing him; there was a hill, and she must reach its top. Followed by the dog, she took the steep track without recalling the occasion on which she had first taken it, merely knowing that it was the way to go.

When she gained the top, she had to look for the twinkling light, bewildered that it had led her from a distance but was no longer apparent. Oh, God, don’t let it be put out. In darkness and among this vast expanse of hummocks, she’d never find the place.

She saw it, a glow through some bushes ahead, and ran, forgetting the depressions in the ground. This time, when she fell, the lantern went out. No matter. She began to crawl.

It was a strange light, neither a fire nor the diffusion of candles-more like a beam directed upward. Scrabbling toward it, her hands touched nothing and she was jerked forward so that she was humped over a slope. Safeguard was looking straight ahead, and there it was, three yards away from her in the center of the bowl-like depression. It wasn’t a fire or lanterns. There was nobody there. The light came from a hole in the ground. It was the gaping mouth of hell lit by the flames below.

All Adelia’s training had to come to her aid then, every nut of natural philosophy, every hypothesis proved, every yardstick of common sense had to be set against unreason in order to fight the howling panic that sent her scrabbling away from the hole, wailing. She prayed for deliverance: From terror by night, Almighty God defend me.

“It’s not the Pit,” a voice said, primly, in her head, “It’s a pit.”

Of course it was. A pit. Just a pit. And Ulf was in it.

She started to crawl forward and struck her knee against something that lay in the grass and had seemed merely part of the ground but which, after a minute, her exploring hands discovered to be manufactured-a huge and solid wheel. She crawled over it, finding it covered with turf.

She put out her hand to stop Safeguard from coming too close, then, with the slowness of a turtle, extended her neck to look over the pit’s edge.

Not a pit. A shaft, some six feet across and the Lord only knew how deep-the light rising from its bottom confused distance-but deep. A ladder led down into whiteness-white, all white, as far as she could see.

Chalk. Of course it was chalk, the chalk on the dead children.

Rakshasa hadn’t dug it; excavation such as this had involved the labor of hundreds. He’d found it and used it; how he’d used it.

Is that what all the depressions on the hill were? The filled-in entrances to mines? But who had needed chalk on such a scale?

It doesn’t matter; their purpose doesn’t matter now. Ulf is down there.

So is the killer. He’s lit the place-those are flambeaux down there; this is the light the shepherd saw. Dear Lord, we should have found it; we walked this stinking hill, skirting every depression to look into it; how did we miss this open invitation to the underworld?

Because it wasn’t open, she thought. The turfed wheel she’d crawled across wasn’t a wheel at all, it was a cover, a lid, a wellhead. When it was in place, it made this dip in the ground look like any other.

Such a clever fellow, Rakshasa.

But some of Adelia’s skin-crawling horror of the killer left her because she knew that when Simon’s cart had carried Prior Geoffrey up the track to Wandlebury Hill, Rakshasa had panicked. Like the guilty thing he was, he had taken the bodies from the shaft by night and carried them down the hill, so that his lair would be kept secret.

This shaft is your place, she thought, so precious it makes you vulnerable. It glares for you as it does for me now, even when the lid is on; it is the tunnel into your body, the entrance to your rotting soul, your doom to be discovered. For you, its existence cries to God, whom it outrages.

And I’ve found it.

She listened. The hill around her rustled with life, but the shaft delivered no sound. She should not have come alone, oh, mercy, she should not. What service was she providing that little boy by bringing no reinforcement and in telling nobody where she had gone?

Yet the moment had demanded it; she could not think of what else she might have done. Anyway, it was done, the milk was spilt and, somehow, she had to mop it up.

If Ulf were dead, she could pull out the ladder and push the wheel into place, entombing the living killer, and walk away while Rakshasa thrashed around in his own sepulchre.

But she had followed the belief that Ulf wasn’t dead, that the other children had been kept alive in Rakshasa’s larder until he was ready for them-a hypothesis based on what the body of a dead boy had once told her. Such frail evidence, such a gossamer of belief, yet it had pulled her into the nuns’ punt and marched her across country to this hellhole so that…