We emerged after what seemed like hours onto the surface of Ry"leh. The sight of the stars shining down on us cheered me up for a moment.
Through the translucent skin of the tunnel I could see that the peaks of the mountains erupted through the ice all around, giving the planet the air of a frightened hedgehog.
A group of large wooden caravans on skates were huddled together out on the ice. Gouges in the ice showed that this was the end of their journey, not the start. Mostly they were small, but one enormous one loomed over the rest, so big and so heavy that the ice seemed to bow slightly beneath it.
The pressurized tunnel, which I now realize was sewn together out of animal skins, led to another airlock, which was connected to a large wooden caravan on skates. This place was getting wilder and wilder. A raksha.s.sa at the end of the tunnel was throwing prisoners w.i.l.l.y-nilly into its dark interior. A queue had already formed. Every so often there would be a hold-up while the airlock was resealed and the caravan was towed away by teams of raksha.s.si pulling ropes, to be replaced with another one. The raksha.s.si outside the tunnel were all squeezed into impromptu s.p.a.cesuits.
They had to fold their wings up to fit in. I hoped it hurt.
I shuffled forward, a few steps at a time, trying to come up with some witty comment but failing miserably. Miserably, yes, that was the word. When I got to the end, the raksha.s.sa took a closer look at me, then pulled me roughly inside.
"You are special," it a.s.sured me.
"Tell me something I don"t know," I snapped, but it was already busy throwing more fakirs into the caravan.
I slumped against the wall of the corridor for a while, glad of the chance to rest. One by one, the fakirs filed past me.
"Mr Summerfield!"
I jerked out of my reverie to find the youthful figure of Tir Ram standing in the line. His fine robes were ruined, but the Indians around him still knelt in his presence. My brain floundered for a moment, then I remembered that I had attended his feast disguised as a man. I was still wearing the same formal attire, but it was just as ripped and stained as his was by now.
Considering the rips, I was surprised that he still referred to me as "Mr". He was either being polite or he"d led a sheltered life.
"Happy?" I asked.
"I do beg your pardon?"
"Are you happy? Have your plans worked out the way you thought?"
Sarcasm was wasted on him.
"I think that I was misled by the good Baron," he said without any trace of irony. "He promised me a new empire. He said that Jabalhabad would be a new port, a landbound harbour through which the trade of two worlds would flow."
He smiled, rather shamefacedly.
"I"m afraid I believed him," he continued. "I didn"t want Jabalhabad to remain a backwater province too small even for you British to bother about. Was I wrong?"
There was desperation in his voice.
"Ask them," I said, gesturing towards his subjects. He opened his mouth to reply, but the raksha.s.sa picked him up and threw him into the airlock.
I saw the Doctor"s hat bobbing in the distance, and called out to him. He was talking earnestly to one of the fakirs, but waved his hat in the air in reply. A few minutes later we were reunited as the raksha.s.sa pulled him out to stand beside me. We hugged in greeting. Holmes joined us shortly afterwards, but I didn"t hug him.
The next caravan to come along was for us and us alone.
"We"re honoured," I murmured as I climbed through a simple but effective wooden airlock arrangement into the dark interior.
"There are times," the Doctor said, joining me, "when it pays to be one of the crowd."
"You suspect that we have been singled out for something special?" Holmes asked.
I could just make out the Doctor"s sombre expression.
"It seems to be the story of my life."
Holmes laughed briefly.
"And mine as well. We make a fine pair, Doctor."
The heavy thud of the door cut off my retort. Darkness descended upon us.
And that"s where we are now. The caravan moved off shortly after that, but stopped a few minutes later. It looked like we were parking until all of the prisoners had been transferred from the tunnel. The Doctor lit a couple of his wonder-matches and stuck them into his hatband, so we could just about see what we were doing.
Which wasn"t much.
Holmes paced up and down, and the Doctor made gnomic little utterances from time to time. To keep myself amused I did my usual trick of going back over my diary entries for the past few days and sticking yellow labels over the pages, then writing an alternative, more dramatic version of events in which I played a much larger part. After a while, even that palled.
When we heard the outer airlock door chunk open, then shut, I was so glad to have my boredom relieved that I didn"t even feel scared. It was only when the inner door opened and a figure in a hooded white robe and white gloves stepped into the room, flanked by a ma.s.sive raksha.s.sa, that I felt a shiver run through me like a seam of silver through rock.
The figure stood silently for a moment. I could feel its gaze pa.s.s across me, although I couldn"t see any features within the hood. The light from the Doctor"s matches gleamed on the hard, chitinous skin of the raksha.s.sa.
Holmes gazed at the figure. He looked anguished.
"Why?" he whispered. "Why did you do it?"
Raising his gloved hands the newcomer threw back his hood. The sharp face and close-cropped grey hair were familiar. Very familiar.
Holmes"s lips tightened slightly. His body-language told me that he was not surprised.
"Professor Summerfield," he said quietly, "may I introduce my brother, Sherringford."
"Two meetings in a month," said Sherringford Holmes with a smile.
"Wouldn"t Mother have been pleased to see how well we"re getting along?"
A continuation of the reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D.
"Well?" Ace said, "what"s it to be?"
I looked across from our coign of vantage to the cl.u.s.ter of caravans.
"How much air have we got left?" I asked.
"Haven"t got a clue."
"What are the chances that Holmes, Bernice and the Doctor are held captive down there?"
"Don"t know."
"How do you see us proceeding, a.s.suming that we can get to those caravans undetected?"
"You"ve got me there, squire."
"It strikes me," I said, with some asperity, "that, as plans go, it leaves a lot to be desired."
"Listen, s.p.u.n.k-brain, if .you"ve got a better one. . ."
"Any alternative plans I might have rather depend on different things having occurred over the past few hours," I said placatingly. "Given the current situation. . ."
"I"ll let you into a secret," Ace said. "I"ve been in more sneaky situations than you"ve had hot dinners, and the best plan is usually not to have one. Any plan you can think up, the enemy can antic.i.p.ate, and the more complicated it is, the further away they can see it coming. Take it on the fly, and it confuses them."
"Do you always think in terms of enemies?"
A dark shadow pa.s.sed behind her eyes.
"Who else is there?" she murmured. Without waiting for an answer, she moved off down the slope. Reluctantly, I followed.
We moved carefully over the icy terrain, the more so because of our globular suits. I kept worrying that they would tear on sharp shards of ice, but they were remarkably resilient. The raksha.s.si were fussing around with ropes at the front of the caravans, obviously preparing to move, and so we crept around to the back where it was safer. We managed to sneak through the line of caravans to the huge central one without being detected. Close up it was even larger than I had thought. Sheltering beneath it, in the lee of one of is vast metal runners, standing beside one of the parallel gouges in the ice that marked its journey, we debated out next move.
"Whatever is in there is heavy," I pointed out, indicating the way the floor bowed towards us. "It might just be a storehouse."
"I"m going inside anyway," Ace insisted.
"Why? It"s obviously important to them, whatever it is."
"That"s exactly why."
"I"m not going to risk it!"
"I didn"t ask you to."
True to her word, Ace moved away from me towards the edge of the caravan, where the lip of one of the doors jutted out. Cursing, I followed.
She checked that the coast was clear, and then emerged into the open.
The spherical suit made it difficult for her to swing up to the door, and in the end she reluctantly let me help her up. Somehow I managed to scramble up beside her without bursting my own bubble. The incised sides of the caravan loomed above us. It must have been some ten or twelve yards high.
Ace examined the edges of the door.
"It"s an airlock," she announced.
"A what?"
"It keeps the air in. Look at the seals. There must be another one, just inside. Fair enough, unless they"ve got a pump or something they"ll lose whatever air is trapped between the doors, but I guess that doesn"t worry them. They can probably replenish it. Shall we go?"
"Are you sure about this?"
"Does the Pope wear a funny hat?"
"Not the last time I saw him," I replied. She grinned at me, shedding a lot of years as she did so. I smiled back.
She pushed at the door. It opened easily, giving us access to a chamber about the size of a large wardrobe. I closed it behind us, and noticed that it pressed against a door-seal which was made of some material like guttapercha. There was a door ahead. Judging by the hinges, it opened away from us. It too had a rubbery seal. Ace pushed against it, but it resisted her.
"Air pressure," she grunted. "Give us a hand."
I added my weight to hers. For a moment nothing happened, then a crack appeared between the door and the seal. A sudden hiss made me jump.
My bubble misted up and began to wrinkle.
"Pressure"s equalizing," Ace said. Her envelope was also sagging. She pushed the door fully open.
I did not know what to expect when I entered that foul, awful place. My mind could have conjured up a myriad possibilities, but never, never in a million years, could it have hit upon what I actually saw.
The interior of the caravan was one huge s.p.a.ce. Flying b.u.t.tresses braced the sides against the floor and the high ceiling. Windows of coloured gla.s.s, high up in the caravan"s sides, admitted the weak crimson light of the sun to cast illumination upon a creature that should have remained in darkness forever.
Extract from the diary of Bernice Summerfield As Sherringford Holmes stood over us, flanked by his gargoyle-like raksha.s.sa bodyguards, I felt a terrible sinking feeling in my stomach. Or "breadbasket", as Watson would have called it in his po-faced Victorian way.
The Doctor chuckled slightly, surprising me.
"You knew!" I accused him.
"I had my suspicions," he admitted. "So did Holmes, although he didn"t want to acknowledge it. Sherringford was so against us pursuing the Baron to India that I began to smell a rat."
"Hang on," I said, "it can"t be Sherringford. I mean, it is Sherringford, but it can"t be. Didn"t Holmes and Watson see this mysterious hooded man in Euston just before you all met Sherringford in Holborn?"
"Yes," the Doctor said earnestly, "but we were almost forced off the road by a carriage which raced past us. Sherringford must have been inside it, doing a quickchange act on his way back to the Library to meet Mycroft.
And then there"s those curious gloves..."
"The gloves? What about the gloves?"
"Well, that"s the curious thing. . ."
"The Doctor leaned back with a self-satisfied smile on his face, and looked up to where Sherlock Holmes was staring at the gaunt, greyhaired form of his brother.
"I had hoped that my reasoning was faulty..." Holmes said finally, and trailed off into silence. He looked pretty stunned. I guess I would to, if my brother turned up as the villain of the piece. Especially since I haven"t got a brother.
"I had hoped that you were in blissful ignorance, dear boy," Sherringford said. "Once Mr Ambrose in the Library told me of his intention to recommend you to the Pope, I sent Colonel Warburton out to Vienna to follow you, and then detailed K"tcar"ch to monitor your investigations in London, but they both reported that your suspicions were directed at Maupertuis. Out of interest, what gave me away?"
"A number of minor clues, most important of which was Father"s journal."
"What of it?"
Explaining his reasoning seemed to be helping Holmes calm down. He wasn"t quite as pale as he had been, and his eyes weren"t quite as glazed.
"I asked myself why only one of our party should be kidnapped from the hotel in Bombay. Why not take all of us? The only answer I could come up with was that the kidnapper wanted not the Doctor but the book that he carried, the book with the chant in it. Not only did you evince a strong desire to keep the book back in England, but you were also one of the few people to know that we were heading for Bombay."
"How careless of me," Sherringford sighed. "I needed the book in order to open the gateway, of course. When I knew that it was coming to India with the Doctor, I sent a message ahead to Maupertuis and followed on the next ship."