Part 37 (1/2)

She gazed uncertainly into the hole. 'You want me to go in there?'

'It's not as bad as it looks. I'm Leon, by the way.' He stuck out his hand and Ellie shook it. He was older than she'd expected, probably in his fifties, but thin and wiry. With his thinning hair and his rimless spectacles, he reminded her of her fifth-form geography teacher.

'You've done an extraordinary job. We're almost there now.'

Following his instructions, Ellie knelt down on the rock and slid her legs backwards until they dangled into the hole. A weathered groove gave her a handhold in the rock she wondered if it was natural. Her legs hung in the void. Icy water spattered her calves where the waterfall roared down inches behind her.

'Let go.'

She stared up at him, his anxious face staring down against the dark sky. He gave a worn smile. 'Trust me.'

She dropped but not as far as she'd expected. A couple of feet, no more, landing on a ledge invisible in the darkness. Through her shoes she could feel criss-crossed lines hatched into the rock, giving her grip.

A red-hooded head appeared above her. 'If you shuffle in, you should find a tunnel.'

Ellie crouched and stretched a hand in front of her. She touched nothing but air. She crawled forwards, sweeping her arm in broad arcs to check the way. She heard a thud and a splash; the dim light at the opening disappeared completely as Leon dropped in after her, then came back artificially bright as he switched on a torch.

'You can stand up now.'

She did, feeling gingerly for the roof. She walked on; she counted thirty paces, then felt a change. The air was colder and somehow clearer. She could sense s.p.a.ce around her.

Leon came out beside her. The head-torch strapped to his forehead played over the s.p.a.ce as he looked around, showing flashes of carefully mortared stone walls, fragmentary images of knights and damsels rendered in plaster, lancet windows filled in with earth, fan vaults spreading into the inky darkness above.

Ellie gasped. 'Where are we?'

'The Chateau de Loqmenez.'

The torchbeam came down again, crossed a flagstone floor and came to rest on a s.h.i.+ny petrol generator sitting in an alcove. Leon bent over it and yanked back a cord. It coughed three times, roared into motion, then settled into a regular hum.

The room came to life. Bare bulbs strung between the walls filled the s.p.a.ce with light. They seemed to be in some sort of great hall, with a fireplace at one end and a carved stone doorway opening on to the tunnel they'd come through. The only sign of modernity was the lights, and the tangle of cables around the generator. Further back, she could see a tower of stainless-steel scaffolding on wheels. She wondered how they'd got that in.

'Is this a castle?'

'It was buried in a landslide two hundred years ago. Even then, it was already derelict; afterwards, people forgot it completely. But credit to the builders, they built to last.'

Ellie nodded, though she wasn't looking at the architecture, or the fragments of plaster murals still clinging to the walls. She was staring at the far end of the room. A black spear hung in mid air, floating weightless above a stone table.

'Is that ... the lance?' Her voice trailed off. She felt giddy, as if she were suspended in s.p.a.ce. The world seemed to have been pulled inside out, a mirror-realm of strange enchantments.

An unreadable look crossed Leon's face. 'Chretien used poetic licence. The blood that flows from the tip I don't know where he got that from.'

Captivated, Ellie reached to touch the lance. Leon's sharp voice drew her back.

'Don't touch!'

Ellie stepped away and gazed around the empty hall. 'I thought there'd be more of you.'

'We haven't used this place in years. It was only after we heard about what happened at Mirabeau that we guessed you might make your way here. We've been scouring half of Europe for you.

'I'm glad you found me,' she said. She wasn't sure she meant it. Leon's manner unnerved her, so breezy and offhand. He didn't seem to have any idea what she'd been through. And there were too many things that didn't make sense. She felt like the victim of some monstrous hoax, that if she shone a bright light on this castle she might find it was all made of cardboard. She looked at the floating lance again. Now that her eyes were used to the gloom, she thought she could make out thin wires holding it in the darkness.

'What about the poem? The pattern in the chapel?'

'The poem's a feint a ploy. When Chretien published Le Conte du Graal, we needed something to distract Saint-Lazare's people while we worked out what it all meant. It was only a stopgap we never imagined that it would obsess him so long. Or, eight centuries later, that you'd be using it to try and find us.'

He offered her an admiring look. 'You're the first person ever to solve that particular riddle.'

I didn't do it alone. She wished Doug was there. She could feel his absence, a pain in her chest.

He's safer out of this.

Leon looked at her backpack. 'What about the other thing? Did you bring it?'

Ever since she'd crawled out of the Monsalvat vault with the box in her hands she'd been desperate to get rid of it. Every minute since, she'd felt the burden of it dragging her down. Yet now, she was surprised to feel a pang of loss as she unzipped the bag and handed over the ebony-black box. The red symbols glowed into life as Leon's hand touched the surface.

'Can you open it?' she asked. Suddenly she was bursting to know what was inside.

Leon shrugged. 'We've been waiting almost nine centuries to get it back. We can afford to be patient.'

She tried not to let her disappointment show. 'What's inside is it ...?' Even now, she struggled to say it out loud. '... the Holy Grail?'

'It isn't holy not in the Christian sense and it isn't a grail. But it's what Chretien was writing about.'

'Was Chretien de Troyes part of your brotherhood?'

A dark look, impossible to read. 'He was like you. He was never one of us, but he got ... mixed up. I don't know if he ever saw the Grail, or just glimpsed it, but it obsessed him for the rest of his life.'

A flash of insight. 'That's why the poems don't finish. That's why his symbols have driven readers crazy for centuries. He didn't know himself what the Grail was.'

'He invented it,' said Leon. 'And ever since, it's been like a game of Chinese whispers down the generations. From a serving dish to a cup, a cup to a stone tarot cards, esoteric wisdom, everlasting life ...'

He carried the box to the head of the room. Ellie expected him to put it on the stone table, but instead he stepped around and laid the box in the fireplace. The hovering spear swayed as he went past.

Ellie s.h.i.+fted on her feet. She was freezing.

'So is that just a legend too? Everlasting life and all that?'

Give me something, she thought. Anything. A reason for what I've done for you.

His face twitched. 'It has certain powers.'

'What powers? What does it do?'

'More than you can comprehend.' Standing behind the stone table, the spear hovering in front of his eyes, he looked like a priest at an altar. 'There are two principles in this world: life and death, creation and destruction, whatever you want to call them. There are certain objects which govern them, like a magnet moving iron filings on the table. There aren't instructions, no b.u.t.tons to push or triggers to pull but by G.o.d they're real.'

Creation and destruction. 'So the lance destroys ...?'

'Think of it like an atom bomb. A chain reaction ripping through the fabric of the world.'

'... and the Grail ...?'