The Sword-Edged blonde

EIGHT

The tombs for Arentia’s royal family were in a crypt deep beneath the castle. We waited until night to make our descent, when theoretically no one would notice that the king was up to anything so screwy. The air grew cooler and damper as we wound our way down the spiral stone steps, and my nascent discomfort at closed spaces began to flare. Despite the chill air, I was sweating like a pig.

Phil noticed and grinned at me. “Not scared of the dark, are you?” he teased, using any excuse to avoid expressing the feelings I knew churned within him.

“No, scared this half-assed castle might fall on my head,” I said. “Some kings build brand new ones, you know.”

“Hey, remember when you snuck down here thinking Tasha Ghent was waiting for you?”

“Oh, yeah, I remember. I still owe you for that one.” Phil had told me Tasha, a buxom young brunette who worked in the kingdom’s taxation office, had developed a crush on me even though I was six years younger. I received a note telling me she’d wait for me in the catacombs, along with a map showing me exactly where. At the time, my little head exerted more influence than my big one, so I followed the map and ended up in a disused, dead-end corridor; when I tried to backtrack my way out, I discovered that Phil had blocked me in with a fake wall. I didn’t know it was fake, of course, and to this day I swear I got my first gray hair screaming like a girl until he let me out.

We reached the final door. It was a huge iron-barred affair, ten feet high and locked at the center. Beyond it, our torches illuminated the first of many rows of sealed royal crypts.

Phil slipped the key into the lock, but paused a minute before he turned it. “You have any kids, Eddie?” he asked softly.

“No.”

“It changes the way you look at things. You completely stop living for yourself; you live for them.” He took a deep breath. “I can’t tell this to anybody else. I don’t know how to be a father who’s outlived his son. Not like this.”

“I wish I could help,” I mumbled. I didn’t want to let on what I suspected; even though it might have eased his mind a bit for the moment, it would be even worse if I turned out to be wrong.

“I completely trusted my wife,” he continued. “With everything-state secrets, personal secrets, even things I’ve never told anyone else. She was the mother of my child. If I could be that wrong about her… how can I ever trust my judgment again? How can I expect anyone else to trust it?”

“Things aren’t always what they seem,” I said as reassuringly as I dared. “C’mon, let’s go do this and then we can go get drunk.”

The gate creaked the way a mausoleum door should. I followed him past the bones of his ancestors, until we reached the most recent additions. He stopped before one whose capstone was still white with its newness. It bore his son’s name, and the beginning and end dates of a criminally short life. We placed our torches in holders on the wall behind us.

I opened the canvas bag and pulled out a hammer and chisel. Phil ran his finger down the line of fresh cement that sealed the tomb.

“Really have to do this?” he asked one last time.

“Really do.”

“I’m sorry, P.D.,” he said softly, and stepped back.

Removing the seal was a one-person job, so I didn’t begrudge Phil not helping. It took awhile to chip the cement away; it was still fresh and solid, unlike the crumbly stuff around older tombs. By the time I finished, my shoulders were in knots and I was drenched with sweat.

I dropped the tools back in the bag and pulled out two crowbars. We wedged them on either side of the stone and, accompanied by a great grinding sound, pulled it out and carefully lowered it to the floor.

Phil drew out the heartbreakingly tiny coffin. He placed it on the floor, took a deep breath and then lifted the lid. I leaned down to examine the contents.

I knew within moments that I’d been right. “I’ve got good news and bad news,” I said as I scrutinized the scattered, fleshless bones retrieved from the cauldron. “The good news is, this ain’t your boy.”

Instantly Phil was on his knees next to me. “What are you talking about?” he demanded.

I picked up one of the skeletal arms, intact from the elbow down. “Look at the hand bones. Baby bones are short and round, because they’re not fully formed yet. These are the finger bones of an adult. But here’s the clincher.” I picked up the skull, which was conveniently missing its lower jaw. “Look. Somebody was in a hurry, and they got a little sloppy. That look like a baby tooth to you?” I pointed at the single molar at the back of the jaw that had been missed when the gum was altered to look more infant-like.

“What is this?” Phil whispered, astounded.

“It might be a dwarf, but I’m betting it’s a monkey. Changed around a little so it would pass the kind of inspection it would get in a crisis. It wouldn’t occur to anyone that these bones wouldn’t be your son, especially since he was gone.” I dropped the skull into the coffin, where it landed with a dry clatter.

Phil sat heavily against the wall. “My God. I don’t understand all this…”

I scooted the coffin aside and sat beside him. “It’s a setup. I suspected it when I realized how long it took your wife to get from the banquet to the nursery; no way it should take thirty minutes. Something happened to her.”

“But… what? And why?”

“Only she can answer that.”

He turned to me. “If this counts as good news, what’s the bad?”

“The bad news is that someone wanted it to look like your wife killed your son so badly that they’d go to all this trouble. They were able to get into and out of this castle with no one noticing it. Even if he’s not dead, your boy’s still gone. Somewhere out there, you’ve got one hell of an enemy.”

“ Who? Arentia hasn’t been at war for nearly fifty years. The crime rate’s lower than it ever has been. We don’t even have a death penalty anymore. And I don’t mean to sound egomaniacal, but everybody seems pretty happy with the job I’ve been doing.”

“Maybe it’s not you, then. Maybe it’s her.”

He nodded; I’d expected him to resist the idea. “That’s the only possible explanation. Like you said, that’s the picture inside the frame.”

We replaced the coffin and the cover, then resealed it with some cement from my bag. I stood and stretched my back, then put my hand on the wall for balance while I pulled on my hamstring. My eyes fell on the name chiseled into the capstone next to Pridiri’s, and suddenly a razor sliced out my heart. “Shit,” I whispered.

Phil turned. “What? Oh… damn, Eddie, I’m sorry. I didn’t think about it. I was so far into my own problems, I didn’t-”

“It’s all right.” I turned away, shaking like I’d been drunk for weeks, and seriously considered smashing my head into the other wall just to banish the unbidden images of her laugh, her touch and, worst of all, her screams.

Phil didn’t say anything for a long moment. Finally he said, “It’s weird to think she’d be thirty-five now.”

“Yeah.” He was her brother, after all, he had the right to talk about her.

He put a strong hand on my shoulder. It reminded me of the way my dad’s hand had felt there. “If you need to-”

I cut him off. “Can we go now? I need to talk to your wife.”

He tilted his head back against the wall and let out a long breath. “Okay, but… I don’t know how much help she’ll be.”

“Why not?”

“There’s something about her that isn’t widely known.”

“What’s that?”

“She doesn’t- claims she doesn’t-remember anything from before the day we met.”