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common stores. Kait turned into a dark corridor, then looked over her shoulder
at Ian. "Did you come this way?"
"I didn't personally, but someone else might have."
She looked at the floor. There was no dust on it. She frowned, realizing then
that she had seen no dust anywhere in the House, though it had been shut up
since the Dragons abandoned it for their
Citadel of the Gods. She considered that odd fact and couldn't decide on its
import. "Stay close to me, then," she said. "This becomes tricky. People have
gotten lost in these sublevels and never been found again."
She walked into a passageway, turned left at the first intersection, right at
the second, then right again into what looked like a little cul-de-sac with a
semicircular stone bench in it. The lanterns weren't lit, but Kait lit them,
and the dancing shadows showed familiar sights. The air smelled stale, but
here the House still felt civilized. Comprehensible. As though it were merely
a building. Deeper within the subterranean labyrinth, beyond the reach of the
sun and air, scents rolled past the nose that hinted of terror, and sounds
skittered and scritched and chittered just at the edge of hearing, and the
darkness held within it the feel of eyes that watched, of claws that waited.
Galweigh
House's surface friendliness covered a core of patient, watchful mystery.
Through those deeper, darker places, not even Kait had chosen to wander alone.
She knelt, reached under the bench, and slipped her finger against the back of
the bench's trestle leg. She found the pressure point hidden there and pushed.
The mechanism silently moved away from her finger, and with the faintest of
whispers, the bench and the wall behind it moved backward.
"This is a fairly obvious one," Kait said. "If it's empty, there are others
that are better hidden. We'll check them next."
She stepped into the gap that had opened in the wall to her left. The shelves
were bare.
She stepped back out, shrugging, knelt again, and pressed the mechanism that
closed the hidden passageway. She didn't feel much disappointment. "Downward,
then. Deeper in the House, the stores are better hidden."
The Sabirs or the Dragons or both had found most of what the Galweighs had put
by, though. After half the day and six more hidden rooms stripped to the
walls, she finally led them to a storeroom that had not been touched. It lay
well away from the main areas, in a corridor so utterly lightless that the
lanterns seemed only to move the darkness around, not dissipate it. The hidden
mechanism used two pressure points and a rhythmic pattern - Kait had to try
five times before the door would finally open for her. But when it did, she
was rewarded by the dark forms of lidded jars and wax-sealed amphorae, huge
barrels and smaller casks, crates and bags and boxes and trunks.
The air was thick with the scents of pepper and sage and cinnamon and a dozen
other spices.
Hooks hung empty from the ceiling, and a rack to the right held nothing but
shelves of crumpled cloth, but even without whatever was missing, that one
storeroom would feed the four of them for a year if necessary.
"I'd begun to fear you were wrong," Ry said. He moved up behind and slid his
arm around her waist.
"So had I. I never thought anyone could have uncovered the room just before
this one."
"The Dragons created these places."
"I thought of that. But I also thought that only the Dragon who created the
place would have been able to find them all - and if that Dragon had come
back, surely he would have reclaimed his house and stayed."
"It looks as if you were right."
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Kait studied the stores. "We have enough of what we need to survive on. Still,
I'd like to check on the other rooms I know of. It may be that we four will
not be the only ones who have to live off the stores. We can eat first, and
then you can carry up stores while I go through the rest of the House on my
own. Or we can put off the rest of the inventory until tomorrow."
Ian had been looking through the contents of the room. "We'd best keep
looking," he said. "This storeroom has no meat in it - I'm sure you'll want to
find some before we quit for the day."
Kait was startled. She sniffed the air - she could catch the scents of smoked
pig and jerked venison and beef and dried python. But she certainly didn't see
any wrapped hams hanging from hooks, and the jerky bags on the shelves looked
awfully flat.
"We made sure every storeroom had everything needed for survival. There's even
a fresh water source in the back of the room, and plumbing, and a way to lock [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]