Knife Edge

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Baron Maupertuis was, if possible, even more fragile than he had appeared the last time Sherlock had seen him. That had been two years before, when Maupertuis had been trying to destroy the British Army with killer bees. Then he had been strapped into an elaborate harness of ropes, cords and wires that had enabled his servants to move him around like a puppet. That, however, had been on his own ground, in his own manor house. Now, out in the open and surrounded by bodyguards, he looked like an animated skeleton dressed in military uniform. Sherlock could clearly see the joints of his fingers and his wrists — swellings where the stick-thin bones met and articulated. The gold braid on the front of his black uniform seemed thicker than his fingers. His face was a skull papered over with parchment. Prominent veins wormed their way across his scalp, startlingly purple against the white skin. His eyes were the only things about him that looked alive, and they had enough life for several men. They glared at Sherlock with a maniacal hatred that the boy could feel as a physical force pushing him backwards.

The men standing with him moved so that they were now surrounding Sherlock and Crowe. They were, with the exception of the giant who was standing directly behind Maupertuis, all armed. They held various medieval weapons — some had swords, some large axes, and some had pikes or halberds. It looked to Sherlock as if the thugs had scavenged the weapons from some storeroom in the cellars of the castle.

Maupertuis was clearly unable to stand unaided, but there he was, with no visible means of support. Sherlock tried to work out what it was that was keeping him up, and then realized with a shock that Maupertuis was held in some kind of complicated sling attached to the body of the man standing behind him. That man was tall, and wide, and heavily muscled, but he was wearing clothes that were a dull grey in colour, dappled in different shades, while the straps attaching Maupertuis to him were of the same colour as the Baron’s uniform. A hood made out of the same material covered the man’s head, peaking in two horn-like projections above his ears. Two slits had been cut for him to see through. The effect was to make him fade into the background, as if he wasn’t there at all. Maupertuis stood out in sharp relief, his head located at the level of his carrier’s chest.

Maupertuis’s arms and legs were attached to the arms and legs of the giant behind him. When the man stepped forward, at some hidden command, the Baron’s legs moved as though they were actually propelling him forward. When the man raised his arm it was as if the Baron were pointing at Sherlock.

‘You,’ the Baron announced, his voice barely louder than the wind but still coated with venom, ‘are not Ambrose Albano.’

Now that the trick had failed, Sherlock peeled off his disguise. ‘No,’ he said quietly, ‘but we have met before.’

‘Of course.’ Maupertuis’s features twisted in rage. ‘The boy, Sherlock Holmes. I knew you were at the castle, and I knew you had been interfering with Quintillan’s plans and exposing his stupid tricks, but I did not expect you to be here, replacing the psychic. I did not think you would be so foolish!’

‘Ah should have guessed that the Paradol Chamber was involved in this… farrago of nonsense,’ Crowe announced, trying to attract the Baron’s rage.

Maupertuis’s thin lips formed a sneer. He didn’t even glance at Crowe as he said: ‘You do not have the wit to understand anything. I know about you, Amyus Thaddeus Crowe. I have studied you, ever since you briefly crossed my path in Farnham two years ago. I always make a point of understanding my enemies. I know your secrets and I know your history, from when you were born to the moment you will die — which will be in a few minutes from now. Your life has not been one of great accomplishment. Few people will mourn your passing, and fewer still will remember it in fifty years, but the name of Baron Maupertuis will resound through the centuries! That is what happens when—’

Something about the shape that Baron Maupertuis made in conjunction with the giant standing behind him sparked a thought in Sherlock’s brain. He followed the glinting connection until it suddenly sparked against a set of other facts that had been lurking in Sherlock’s memory.

‘The Dark Beast!’ he announced, interrupting the Baron’s rant. ‘You are the Dark Beast!’

It seemed so obvious, now that he was staring at Maupertuis. The bulky, misshapen outline of the two attached men… Sherlock didn’t know what it was that people had reported seeing years ago, but he knew now as surely as he knew anything that the recent sightings of the Dark Beast had actually been sightings of Baron Maupertuis strapped to the chest of his massive carrier, glimpsed in darkness, or in mist, or in shadows, moving around the castle and its grounds.

‘A stupid legend,’ the Baron said, ‘but one that was useful to me. It kept the local peasants from investigating, and gave me free rein to move around.’

‘To what end?’ Crowe asked. ‘What exactly is it that you’ve been doin’ here, at Cloon Ard Castle?’

Maupertuis moved his fierce gaze from Sherlock to Amyus Crowe, and the big American took a small step back as he felt the force of Maupertuis’s fanatical willpower. That worried Sherlock. He’d once seen Crowe stare down an enraged bear just by the force of his own will.

‘You will die without knowing,’ the Baron said. ‘That is the smallest of the pleasures I will gain from your deaths.’

‘Actually,’ Sherlock said, ‘it’s obvious. It’s been obvious all along. The Paradol Chamber is the invisible sixth bidder. You have been in discussion with Sir Shadrach Quintillan. What happened? Was he too honourable, in his own way, or did he think that he would get a better price from an open competition?’

‘What Ah don’t understand,’ Crowe said conversationally, ‘is why you wanted him in the first place. Ah mean, the man is a fraud. Young Sherlock here proved that quite conclusively.’ He glanced at Sherlock. ‘Do you have any theories about that, son? ’Bout why the Paradol Chamber wanted Albano so badly despite the fact he is a fraud?’

For some reason the big American seemed to want to waste time, to keep Maupertuis talking. Actually, if that was the alternative to Maupertuis killing them both, then Sherlock was happy with it.

‘I think Albano and Quintillan fooled the Paradol Chamber just like they fooled Herr Holtzbrinck and von Webenau.’

‘So Count Shuvalov wasn’t fooled?’ Crowe nodded. ‘He’s a smart guy. An’ your brother too — he saw through it from the start.’

‘Herr Holtzbrinck and von Webenau wanted to believe,’ Sherlock pointed out. Fear made him want to talk faster, but he suppressed the impulse. Crowe wanted to slow things down for some reason, and he needed to go along with the plan. Whatever the plan was. ‘If I’ve learned one thing about confidence tricks it’s that people who already want to believe are the most easily fooled.’

‘Albano’s powers are real,’ Maupertuis hissed. ‘And they will be in the service of the Paradol Chamber when we finally take him! He will serve us, and the dead will tell us their secrets!’

Crowe laughed. ‘Now that’s just plain stupid. Young Sherlock here showed quite clearly that the séances were just flim-flam!’

‘The first two séances, yes.’ Maupertuis’s thin frame shook with the anger he constantly felt. ‘The psychic was weak, and his powers were unreliable. Stupidly, he and Quintillan faked the séances to keep interest going. But the tower and the paintings? How could that have been done, if not through communicating with the dead? How?’

Sherlock stared at Maupertuis for a moment, and what he saw wasn’t a psychotic criminal, but a painfully thin human being who, like any human, was capable of being fooled — if he wanted to be. In the same way a man could be fooled, then so could a country, if it took the advice of that man. Someone had once described the Paradol Chamber to him as a country without territory or borders, and it seemed they were just as capable of following bad advice as the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires.

‘Who did you lose,’ he asked softly, ‘that you so desperately want to believe is not dead?’

‘It’s not another person,’ Crowe pointed out softly. ‘Look at him. He’s hoverin’ close to death every moment of his existence. He desperately wants to believe that death ain’t the end; that it’s possible to survive it, an’ keep goin’.’

‘It is possible,’ Maupertuis shrieked, ‘and Ambrose Albano proves it!’

‘Then why did you kill Sir Shadrach?’ Sherlock stepped forward, towards Maupertuis. He really wanted to know the answer to the question.

‘We met with him, in his rooms.’ The shift in subject had caught Maupertuis off-guard. His trembling subsided somewhat, and his eyes, which had seemed violent enough to make dry twigs catch fire, became calmer. ‘We offered him money, for him and the psychic to work with us — willing volunteers are more use than forced slaves — but he argued. He wanted more money than we were prepared to pay. His death is an annoyance, but one we can live with. Albano is the one with the power.’

‘You lost your temper,’ Sherlock guessed. ‘He went against your will, so you had him killed.’ The casual brutality of it shouldn’t have surprised him — he knew exactly what the Paradol Chamber was capable of — but, he reminded himself, the Baron was clearly insane. If his desires were different from those of the Paradol Chamber then he would follow those personal desires, even if it put the organization’s goals in jeopardy.

‘Why hide the body on top of the tower?’ Crowe asked. Sherlock suspected that he had already worked the answer out himself, but he was still trying to delay events, to keep Maupertuis from acting. Waiting for something.

‘That’s easy.’ Sherlock shrugged. ‘It wasn’t Baron Maupertuis who had Sir Shadrach’s body displayed on top of the tower. It didn’t matter to him whether the body was found or not — he wanted Albano, and was determined to kidnap him when he couldn’t buy him.’

‘You’re not going to tell me it was the spirits of the dead?’ Crowe laughed, but it was a forced laugh. There was a lot of tension in it.

‘No,’ Sherlock confirmed. ‘It was the butler, Silman, along with Ambrose Albano. They knew the way the tower worked, so they hid the body on top with the help of the servants. Their aim was to keep the body from being found until they could run the auction themselves. They were probably worried that Niamh would search the castle for her father if he wasn’t in his rooms. Albano said as much this morning. He clearly knew something had happened — he was edgy and nervous. He just wanted to get the auction over and done with and get under the protection of whichever international power won. It was sheer bad luck for them that I stumbled across the body while I was exploring.’

‘That explains it.’ Crowe nodded. ‘An’ the servin’ girl you told me about? The one who was discovered dead, with an expression of terror on her face?’

‘She saw something in the castle cellars — probably the Baron, moving around. I presume she had a weak heart and died of fright, but her body had to be moved from the cellars because the Baron and his men were using them as a base. Of course, her shoes came off during the move, but nobody noticed.’

‘You did,’ Crowe observed.

The giant to whose chest and limbs Maupertuis was strapped shifted slightly, in response to some hidden command, and the Baron’s head appeared to tilt to one side, as if he were thinking. ‘You claim that the third demonstration was faked as well? Prove it! Tell me how it was done!’

‘And you will let us live?’ Sherlock asked quietly.

‘No,’ the Baron said, just as quietly, ‘but I will kill you quickly, rather than slowly. Your death has been on my mind for a long while now, and I will not be cheated of it.’

Sherlock briefly explained the way the tides had been used to raise the folly and allow one of the servants — or maybe, it occurred to him, Niamh Quintillan herself — to observe the inside of a castle room that no human being could apparently have seen into. Maupertuis was quiet for a minute or two afterwards, eyes closed. Sherlock was about to say something else when the Baron’s eyes snapped open again.

‘You are lying,’ he said. ‘You want the psychic for the British Empire. You cannot have him — he works for the Paradol Chamber now, whether he wants to or not.’ His arm, attached to the larger arm behind him, rose up, and his hand made a gesture to the men surrounding them. ‘Kill them both now. They have wasted enough of my time.’

‘Ah, but do you know why we’ve wasted it?’ Crowe asked.

‘To delay the inevitable, of course.’

‘No. To delay until this happened!’

Before Sherlock could react, a group of men burst out of the bushes and shrubs that surrounded them. They were dressed in rough jackets and trousers, and most of them were wearing cloth caps and scarves. They were carrying heavy sticks and pitchforks, and they fell on the Paradol Chamber’s men like wolves on lambs. Shouts rang out, some of anger and some of pain.

Sherlock was about to ask what the hell was going on, but then he saw Rufus Stone among the ruffians, raising a club and bringing it down hard on an arm that was holding a sword. A scream pierced the air, and the arm bent in a way that arms normally don’t.

‘How did they know we were here?’ Sherlock called to Crowe.

‘Ah saw Matty on the back of the other carriage,’ Crowe called back. ‘Stone must’ve got him to hide there when the carriage was on its way up to the castle. When he spotted us goin’ in the other direction, he must’ve hopped off to warn Stone, an’ the violinist got his bunch of heavies to come up here after us. Ah was holdin’ Maupertuis off until they got here.’

‘Good thinking!’

A halberd — an axe blade set on a shaft almost as long as Sherlock was tall and with a spear point on top — fell near him, dropped by one of Maupertuis’s thugs. He picked it up, ready to use it on anyone who came close. The fight seemed to be self-contained, though, and the Irish contingent was clearly winning.

But where was the Baron?

He had moved — or his giant carrier had moved him — away from the fight. Sherlock caught a glimpse of them heading off into the furze.

He chased after them.

‘Sherlock — come back!’ Crowe yelled. ‘He’s not worth it! Whatever plan he had, it’s all over now, an’ we know the Paradol Chamber killed Sir Shadrach!’

‘It’ll never be over until he’s dead or in custody!’ Sherlock shouted back. ‘He hates me, and he wants me dead.’

And, he thought, he’s insane.

Just beyond the nearest bushes, which were higher than Sherlock’s head, the undergrowth thinned out. Emerging at a run, Sherlock found himself at the edge of a cliff. He skidded to a halt before he could fall over. He could see the white-capped waves far below. In the distance, off to the left, the battlements of Cloon Ard Castle were visible.

There was no sign of Baron Maupertuis.

Sherlock glanced in all directions, frustrated. A narrow path led away along the edge of the cliff, but he could see for a few hundred yards in each direction before the cliff curved away and there was no sign of anyone. Had the Baron doubled back into the undergrowth? Was he creeping up on Sherlock from behind, even now?

He whirled around, but nobody was there. In the near distance he could still hear the sound of fighting.

Sherlock turned back to the cliff edge and, on instinct, walked right up to the edge. He gazed straight down.

A narrow ledge led downward, hard against the rock.

Sherlock glanced around one more time, trying to convince himself that this was the best thing to do, and then he followed, still holding the halberd.

Pebbles skittered away from his feet as he moved down the ledge. The wind alternately blew him against the face of the cliff and then tried to pull him away from it. The path was only just wide enough for him to go down; he wondered how Baron Maupertuis’s giant carrier could have managed it. If he had managed it. If he had gone this way at all.

A strong gust of wind nearly plucked him away. He flattened himself against the rock until it abated, the fingers of his free hand clutching at cracks, pebbly projections and tufts of grass. If he fell he would plummet hundreds of feet down to the sea. He would be lucky if he didn’t get smashed against the cliff by the wind as he fell. He would be even luckier if he didn’t hit a boulder in the sea, or smash himself to pulp on a stretch of sand. His heart raced, and he could feel the prickle of sweat breaking out down his back.

After a moment he forced himself to go on.

The ledge narrowed to a few inches just moments before he spotted the dark hole of a cave in the cliff face. That had to be where Maupertuis had gone. The Baron knew the area around here better than Sherlock — he had been there for longer.

Sherlock moved carefully along the narrowing ledge, chest flat against the rock. He could feel his heels hanging over the long drop down to the sea as he slowly slid one foot after the other: right then left, right then left.

The rock beneath his right foot began to give way.

Sherlock jumped awkwardly, flinging the halberd ahead of him and then landing in the cave mouth. His shoulder hit the floor, sending pain lancing up his arm, but he didn’t care. At least he was off the ledge, and safe.

Relatively safe.

He glanced back at the ledge. A stretch of six feet or more had vanished, falling into the sea. Maybe it had been weakened by the passage of the giant carrying Baron Maupertuis. Perhaps millennia of storms and wind had just eaten it away. Whatever the reason, there was no way back for him there.

He looked around warily. In the scant sunlight that penetrated the cave he could only see a few tens of feet inside. There were scuff marks in the dirt — made recently, which indicated that the Baron had indeed come this way — but they vanished into the darkness.

He had to follow. He knew he did.

Screwing his courage up and holding it close, he went deeper into the cave.

The darkness swallowed him. He moved carefully, testing each step before he put his full weight down in case there was a sudden drop, or a sharp section of rock. He trailed his fingers against the rough rock of the wall, making sure that he didn’t miss any openings, or turns.

A breeze gusted into his face, from deeper inside the cave. There must be a way back to the surface somewhere in there, he thought, otherwise there would be nowhere for it to blow from, but there was a smell of decay on the air. Something had died down here. Perhaps many things, over the years. Perhaps the bones of smugglers littered the floor, and he just couldn’t see them in the darkness.

Something thin and brittle crunched beneath his shoe, and he cursed his over-active imagination. It was probably just a twig, he told himself, or the skeleton of a seabird.

Somewhere ahead, the cave had to join up with the others that he had explored — the ones that joined up with the base of the folly and the cellars of the castle. All the caves in the cliff were probably connected, in some great warren of tunnels, like a huge anthill.

Which only meant, he thought, that he could wander down here for days, maybe weeks, before he died of starvation and dehydration.

No, this was stupid, he told himself. Where there was a breeze, there was a way out. He just had to follow the breeze.

And hope it wasn’t coming out of a crack no wider than his hand.

Up ahead, something made a sound.

Sherlock froze.

His heart hammered in his chest, and he could feel the breath rasping in his throat. Surely whoever was there could hear them too? If it was a person. His mind flashed back to the blind albino dogs that he had seen in the sewers beneath the streets of Moscow. What kinds of things might be in here? Wild boar that hadn’t seen the sun for generations, and had adapted to life in total darkness? Or perhaps something stranger, something that no human had ever seen and lived to tell about?

He took a deep breath. This was getting stupid. He was panicking over nothing. It was just a sound.

But something had to have made that sound.

After a few minutes of silence, and trying to keep his breath and his heartbeat under control, Sherlock started to move again. Whatever had made the sound was either an illusion, had gone, or was standing in the darkness waiting for him. Whatever the explanation, he couldn’t delay any longer. He had to move.

He inched forward as quietly as he could. Nothing leaped out at him from the darkness, and with each step he felt slightly more relieved.

His eyes had become completely accustomed to the dark now, so when a faint glow shone around a bend in the tunnel ahead it hit his eyes like a lantern pointed directly into them. He had to wait for a few minutes for his eyes to get used to the idea of light again before he could move towards it.

The light intensified as he went further. It was a warm, buttery illumination that caused the projections in the rocky walls to cast long shadows towards him, like clutching fingers. He moved cautiously towards the bend and poked his head around to see what was there.

It was, of course, another tunnel, but at least this one was illuminated by a lantern set on a wooden crate.

By the light of the lantern, Sherlock could see a body lying on the tunnel floor. It was thin, and twisted, and it looked like the skeleton of some long-ago smuggler who had died down there and been left to rot.

It was the body of Baron Maupertuis.

Cautiously, Sherlock moved closer, worried that it might be some kind of trick, but by the time he was staring down at the grotesque corpse it was obvious that the Baron was dead. The straps that had held him on to his giant carrier were draped over him like ribbons. His eyes were open, but the force of his maniacal willpower was gone. All the energy that had kept him alive had ebbed away now, leaving him looking like a bundle of sticks that had been carelessly dropped in a pile.

‘He died while I was carrying him,’ a deep voice said, echoing along the tunnel. ‘I didn’t even notice for a while. He always was just one step away from death, and it was only his willpower that kept him going. Maybe his heart gave out, or maybe I jogged him too much and his neck snapped. At least he’s at rest now, and at least that means I can finally take care of you, you interfering whelp!’

‘Mr Kyte,’ Sherlock said softly. ‘I rather thought it might be you under that hood.’