Mother looked at him quizzically. Rigg knew what she was wondering. Why does Rigg think he’s going to be alive to weep for me? And . . . why haven’t these iron rods yet collided with Param, or persuaded her to return to visibility?
“Is she there in that corner with you?” asked Mother.
Rigg nodded and truthfully said, “She’s right here.”
“She’s not—sharing space with you, is she?” asked Mother. “Because if I have these men ram these iron bars into your body, she’ll be forced into visibility and the two of you will make a nasty explosion. Are you thinking that will be your revenge? That the explosion will kill everyone in this room?”
Rigg did not have to pretend to feel wounded. “Don’t you know either of us, Mother? We love you. We would never do something that might hurt you.”
“Stop,” she said to the men. “No, keep moving the bars, you fools, just stop pressing forward.” The men obeyed her. “Rigg, you see there’s no escape. I know you know exactly where she is. Step away from her and allow your deaths to have dignity.”
“In other words, you have a use for our bodies.”
“Of course I do,” said Mother. “But I can make do without them. As I will. I will leave the room now. When the door closes behind me, they will pierce your body—and Param’s. It’s a shame I wasn’t able to say good-bye to her. But . . . no matter.”
Mother turned and headed for the door.
Rigg smiled at the soldiers. “You know that she’s just given orders for you to do something that will blow you all to bits, don’t you?”
But the soldiers seemed not to care. Rigg looked more closely—their eyes had a bit of a glazed-over look, and he realized now that they had been drugged. They could take brutal action, could follow orders—but could not recognize when those orders would lead directly to their deaths.
The door opened. The soldiers stopped waving the iron bars and prepared to thrust them like lances.
“Now would be a good time,” said Rigg.
He could hear a faint grinding of ancient machinery in the wall behind him. But nothing resulted from it.
We really should have tested the mechanism, thought Rigg. Just because it looks just like four other secret entrances to the passages doesn’t mean it’s in the same condition.
The soldiers leaned back, ready to make their lunges.
There was a metallic clang right behind him, and Rigg ducked. A section of floor, beginning right under his feet and extending along the outside wall, suddenly rose up as the wall behind him tipped back. For a moment the strip of floor and strip of wall made a V that swung from one side to the other. Then it was dark, Rigg was lying on his back, and there were half a dozen thunking sounds as the iron bars were bashed into the wall.
“Sorry,” said Param softly. “One of them was standing on the end of the floor section. The counterbalances couldn’t handle his weight and yours too. But when he shifted his weight to his back foot in order to lunge, then I could pop it up.”
“You heard everything?” asked Rigg.
“Yes,” said Param. But she added nothing, and her voice didn’t even sound upset. Was it possible she had known all along what a moral vacuum Mother was?
“I think we need to get out of here before they start throwing axes into all the walls to find the whole system.”
“Oh, most of the walls are stone.”
“But some of them aren’t,” said Rigg.
“They’ll put the soldiers in a line around the house,” said Param.
“At first.”
“And by the time they realize their mistake.”
“That’s the plan, yes,” said Rigg—recognizing his own explanations in the words she now said. “But General Citizen is smarter than most people.”
“I know,” said Param. “So he won’t count on his soldiers to catch you. He’s like Mother—he’ll have a plan that makes us come right to him, whether we want to or not.”
“You might have mentioned this before,” said Rigg.
“You didn’t tell me till now that it was General Citizen.”
By now Rigg was fully used to the near darkness of the corridor, and they had descended to the level of the lowest sewer that passed under the drainage ditch between the house and the library. Rigg’s scan of the house behind and above him revealed that the signal had been given, and there were hundreds of soldiers now surrounding the house and searching—destructively—throughout it. Only a matter of time before the passages were found.
Meanwhile, the soldiers were seen crossing the street and entering Flacommo’s house. Rigg could see the paths of citizens running thither and yon, no doubt spreading word of an assault on the royal family. Though it was early in the morning, the people would pour into the streets and soon a dozen mobs would form. It would only end when General Citizen could show the royals to the city—or declare his kingship. But he could do neither until he had Param and Rigg, alive or dead. He would not find them; he could not catch them; so he must have a plan to make them come to him.
It was not as if he could claim to be holding Mother hostage. Even if he did, were they likely to sacrifice their lives to save her, knowing what they now knew about her? What leverage did he think he had, to make them turn themselves in?
Param and Rigg came up out of the tunnel into a storage room in the Library of Nothing. The most exposed and dangerous part of the journey lay ahead of them—a hundred paces from the door of the storage room to the dumbwaiter used for lifting books from floor to floor. Anyone who happened to be looking through the shelves could see them, and for a brief time, so could people seated at the tables on the north-lit side of the room.
But no one so much as glanced at them. Apparently no warning had been issued to watch the library buildings.
That was actually a bad sign, Rigg realized. General Citizen would surely have extended his net as wide as this . . . if he were counting on a net to catch them.
They got to the dumbwaiter, opened it. The platform was, as always, kept on the ground floor, where they were. Both of them climbed onto it and shut the door behind them. Then Rigg set the levers for the right number of counterweights and pulled the rope down, raising the platform.
He had found this place by noticing that while some paths rode the dumbwaiter from floor to floor—apprentices, no doubt, playing with the most interesting piece of machinery in the library—others, more than a century ago, entered the dumbwaiter but took a completely different route that led down through the walls to a system of underground passages. It had taken a lot of experimentation to figure out how to get into the passages, but he had the paths to guide him. He could see where people had stopped before going through one corner of the vertical shaft, where there did not seem to be the slightest chance of a doorway.
Halfway between floors, he stopped the dumbwaiter by looping the pull rope around a double pin on the wall. Then he slid a barely visible lever on the opposite side. A small door opened behind him, revealing a very small hiding place about the size of a stack of books. It contained absolutely nothing of value or interest to them—it was a decoy, to provide a complete explanation for the existence of the lever if someone chanced to find it.
But with the cranny open, it was now possible to rotate the brace holding the pins that held the rope. It took a full revolution, but now one whole wall opened at the side, revealing a crack they could fit through.
Rigg closed the door to the cranny and untied the rope. The platform stayed in place—it would have been a poor design if it had plummeted back to the ground floor the moment the rope was untied. Rigg motioned for Param to pass through the gap in the corner. She did it readily enough.
But for a horrible moment Rigg wondered if she would turn out to be just as untrustworthy as Mother—he imagined her closing the gap on him before he could pass through.
But she didn’t. Rigg got through and found her already partway down the ladder that led to a couple of long, dry tunnels that were higher than, but connected to, the city sewers.