The LED’s beam didn’t penetrate any deeper than ten steps.

CHAPTER 32

Following the blue-white beams of their LEDs, they picked their way down the steps to the next landing. As above, they found a wooden door set into the wall, and beside it another Do Not Enter placard. Expecting the shriek of ancient hinges, Sam was surprised when the door swung noiselessly open. They stepped through.

Another tunnel, this one barely four feet wide and five feet tall, forcing Sam and Remi to duck. Spaced at four-foot intervals along each wall was a rectangular cell door, but unlike their counterparts on the upper level, these were equipped with what Sam and Remi assumed were the original vertically barred doors, each one standing open and tethered to an eyelet in the stone with a length of twine. Sam examined the nearest door under the glow of the LED and found the lock and latch were still present.

“Just when you thought it couldn’t get any more depressing,” Remi whispered.

Scanning the walls as they went, they started down the tunnel. After sixty or seventy feet they found a ten-foot-deep side tunnel set into the left-hand wall. At the end was a waist-high rectangular opening. They knelt down and Sam leaned into the opening. A few feet inside, a hatch was set into the floor; Sam shined his light into it. “Another ladder,” he whispered. “It goes down about six feet. I think we’ve found the place.”

“I’ll go first,” Remi said, then slipped feet first into the hatch and started down. “Okay,” she called. “The ladder seems sturdy.”

Sam climbed down and crouched beside her. This tunnel was narrower still: three feet wide and four feet tall. Stretching down the centerline was hatch after hatch after hatch, each one a steel-barred black square that seemed to swallow their flashlight beams.

“God almighty,” Sam whispered.

“How many, do you think?” Remi asked.

“If this tunnel is as long as the ones above . . . Forty or fifty.”

Remi was silent for a long ten seconds. “I wonder how long it took for someone to go insane down here.”

“Depends on the person, but after a day or two your mind would start feeding on itself. No sense of time, no points of reference, no outside stimulus. . . . Come on, let’s get this over with. What was the last line of the riddle . . . ?”

“ ‘From the third realm of the forgotten . . .’ ”

Careful of their footing, they walked down the wall to the third hatch. Under the beam of Remi’s LED, Sam examined the grate. The hinges and latch had been removed and the bars were scabrous with corrosion. He touched one; flakes sloughed off and floated down into the oubliette. He gripped the bars, lifted the grate free, and set it aside.

The oubliette lay at the bottom of a narrow six-foot long shaft, while the cell itself was four feet to a side and three feet deep—neither wide enough for a prisoner to lie fully prone, nor tall enough to stand without being bent at the waist. “I better go,” Remi said. “I’m smaller and I couldn’t pull you back up.”

Sam frowned, but nodded. “Okay.” From his waistband he pulled the miniature crowbar. She took off her coat and laid it aside, then tucked the crowbar into her belt and let Sam lower her into the shaft, dropping the last couple feet on her own. On hands and knees she clicked on her light, stuck it between her teeth, and began examining the stone walls and floor. After two minutes of crawling around she suddenly murmured, “There you are. . . .”

“Spittlebug?”

“Yep, in all its glory. It’s carved into the corner of this block. There’s a good-sized gap here. . . . Hang on.”

Remi worked the pry bar first into one gap, then the other, inching the block away from the wall. With a grunt, she pulled it free and shoved it aside, then dropped to her belly and shined the light into the hollow. “It goes back a couple feet. . . . Damn.”

“What?”

Remi got to her knees and looked up the shaft at him. “It’s bedrock. There are no other openings, no gaps. . . . There’s nothing here, Sam.”

Remi took another two minutes to make sure she hadn’t missed anything, then pushed the block back into place. Sam reached down and lifted her up. She pursed her lips and puffed a strand of hair from her eyebrow. “I was afraid of that. Karl Müller found three bottles here. Something told me we weren’t going to find the rest.”

Sam nodded. “Whatever Laurent was up to, it doesn’t seem likely he’d stash them all together.”

“Well, it was worth a try. We know one thing for sure: Laurent did in fact use his cicada stamp.”

“Come on, time to leave the party and find a way out.”

They replaced the grate and walked down the tunnel away from the door, Remi pressed against one wall, Sam the other. Ten feet from the end, Sam suddenly stumbled backward into an alcove and landed on his butt with an umph.

“Sam?” Remi called.

“Looks like I found something.”

He looked around. Only three feet deep, the rear half of the alcove’s floor was taken up by a hatch, this one unbarred.

Remi walked around the oubliette between them and ducked into the alcove with Sam, who shined his light into the hatch, then dropped through, followed by Remi. Sam clicked on his LED for a moment. Running perpendicular to the tunnel above, a crawl space stretched into the darkness.

On hands and knees they started crawling, Remi in the lead and Sam bringing up the rear. Not wanting to miss any side branches, every few feet they reached out and touched each wall.

After a full minute of crawling, Sam tapped Remi on the butt to call a halt, then clicked on the LED again. Ahead the tunnel stretched on.

“Did you notice the walls?” Remi whispered.

“Yes.”

The crawl space’s walls were not constructed of stone block but had rather been carved from the bedrock. Crawling as they were in a dark and cramped space, inches of travel felt like many feet.

After thirty more seconds of moving, Remi stopped. “Wall,” she whispered. “Branch to the right.”

They made the turn, then crawled another twenty feet to another turn, this one to the left. After another short straightaway and another two right and left turns, they found themselves at a ceiling hatch tall enough for Remi to stand in. She ducked back down and said, “There’s a ledge, then a drop-off into some kind of room.”

“Can you make it?”

“I think so.” She boosted herself up and disappeared. Ten seconds later she called, “Okay.”

Sam stood up, crawled over the ledge, and dropped down beside Remi, who was already surveying the room, which measured ten by ten feet. Like the crawl space, the walls and floor and ceiling were bedrock. Mounted on three walls were what looked like wooden gun cases, each one divided into vertical slots meant for, they assumed, either muskets or swords. In the wall to their left was a truncated arch.

“This must be original to the fort,” Sam whispered. “Probably a last-ditch bolt-hole and armory for defenders.”

“Which means there has to be another way out or in.”

“Unless it got closed up when the château was converted to a prison.”

“Don’t even joke about that.”

“One way to find out.”

They ducked through the arch and into the tunnel beyond.

It was labyrinth. For the next hour they picked their way along the tunnel, into dead ends, through horseshoe hallways, and up and down stairs until Sam finally called a halt. Ahead the tunnel split yet again into three branches like spokes on a wagon wheel.