The Gabriel Hounds by Mary Stewart

Author:Mary Stewart
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
Publisher: Hachette UK
Published: 2011-02-16T13:00:00+00:00

10

O softly tread, said Christabel.

S. T. Coleridge: Christabel

BUT they weren’t needed after all.

When we set out again the thin moon had drifted higher, clear of the island trees, and by her faint light we negotiated the bridge once more, and made our way up into the pavilion. The painted door swung out silently, and Charles wedged it open with a stone. Torchlight speared ahead of us into the black gap as we stepped delicately inside and started down the spiral stair.

The paintings slid past us, spectral in the moving light. Domes and minarets, cypresses like spear-heads, gazelles, hawks, Arabian stallions, fruit-trees and singing-birds … and at the bottom a door.

Shut, of course. It looked massive and impassable in that frail light, but to my surprise, when Charles put a hand to it and pulled cautiously, it came easily, and with the same well oiled silence as the one above. I saw then that the latch was gone, and where the original lock had been was a splintered panel of wood. Part of the palace’s history, no doubt, that smashed lock … The door had been secured again in more recent times – and by a stout hasp and staple and a padlock – but a lock is only as strong as its moorings, and these, like the rest of the palace appointments, were rotten. The padlock was still in place, and locked, but on one side the hasp had been pulled away from the crumbling jamb, and hung there with one socket still holding the useless screw, the other empty.

This, then, was how the dogs had got through. It seemed probable that they had broken the lock themselves, and tonight, since otherwise it would surely have been mended again. And the damage was obviously recent, for splinters and sawdust showed on the floor, and when Charles shone the torch down I caught the gleam of the fallen screw.

‘Luck,’ he said softly.

‘Good for the Gabriel Hounds,’ I breathed.

He smiled, and beckoned. I soft-shoed after him through the door.

It was very dark, a great arched passage with ribbed and vaulted ceiling where the torchlight seemed little more than an impertinent gleam. We were at the end of a sort of underground T-junction, under a vault made by crossed arches. Our door closed one end of the top shaft of the T. A few yards along from us on the left, an open archway led off into blackness, some sort of passageway down which came a draught of air. Straight ahead, and closing the top bar of the T, was another door. Like the main gate of the palace, this door was of bronze, its panels elaborately worked and its surface – in spite of age and damage – retaining the silky beauty of hand-hammered metal. To either side of it were ornate iron brackets which must once have held torches, and beneath these we saw recesses in the wall, man-high like sentry boxes. The archway itself was carved, and held traces of peeling paint.

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