Brimstone

"There is a smell that every human being knows without ever being taught. It is the smell of the end of something."

It came first as a smell.

It was thin, and faint, and so much at odds with the warm oily gold of the crypt that Thalessa did not at once place it. It reminded her of something. A struck match. A rotten egg. A kitchen after the cook has dropped a lighted taper into the sulfur box. It crept in under the shutters and through the crevices in the stone, and rode on the warm air as a gray wisp rides on smoke.

Then she placed it.

"It's coming," she said.

Roderick lifted his head.

He had been working at the seam of the great iron door with a flat chisel made from the blade of his boot-knife, and a stone for a hammer, and he was gray with the grit of it. He stood very still. She saw him draw a slow deep breath through his nose, and his face changed.

"Brimstone."

"Yes."

"How long?"

"It's early. It has to fill the pipes first." She wiped her hands on her skirt. "Ten minutes before the vents begin to give. Twenty before we feel it. Thirty—"

"Before it's lethal."

"Before it begins to be dangerous." She tried to smile. "I am a scientist, Inspector. We do not say lethal. We say an unfavorable concentration."

"I hope you are a very good one."

"I am an adequate one."

"Adequate," said Roderick, "will do."

…

She sat down at the long table and began to make a list.

It was her habit. In the laboratory she had always done so, in moments of crisis: the contents of a poisoned stomach, the possible vectors of an infection, the instruments on a tray. A list was a way of holding the world still. She wrote it in her small clear hand, down the left side of the page, with a ruled line, and she wrote it in the order in which things came to hand.

SOLID. Salt (cave; walls; roof). Whitewash? (south wall, recess). Quicklime? Mortar. Stone.

LIQUID. Lamp oil (flask, one pint, three-quarters full). Brandy (two flasks: Roderick's, the Duke's, both half). Water: roof drip, condensation, sea-brine on cave side.

CLOTH. The tablecloth. Roderick's coat. Mine. Vespera's apron, shawl.

CHEMICAL. Ammonia?

She stopped, and looked up.

"Vespera."

The girl was standing where she had stood for the past ten minutes, by the great jar, with her arms wrapped around herself. She looked small and cold and terribly young. She did not seem to have moved.

"What is in your basket?"

"My basket?"

"The one you brought. For the lamps."

"Oil." She frowned, trying to think. "Wicks. Corks. A box of matches. A cloth for the glass."

"What do you clean the glass with?"

"Hartshorn." The word came out mechanically. "Spirits of hartshorn. The housekeeper's cure for everything. It takes the smoke off glass, and the grease off silver. I buy it by the pint from the chandler at the Reach."

Thalessa put down her pen.

"Show me," she said.

The basket lay on the flags beside the table. Vespera knelt and drew it toward her. She took out the flask of oil, a coil of black wick, a little heap of cork rafts, a box of matches, a folded cloth. And at the bottom, nestled in straw, a squat brown stoneware bottle with a cork stopper and a label in a clear hand.

Hartshorn. Strong.

Thalessa took it.

She drew the cork. The smell hit her like a blow. It was sharp, pungent, stinging, a smell that went straight up the nose and into the back of the eyes, and she turned her head, coughing, and held it at arm's length.

"Oh, God," she said. "Thank God."

"It's only for glass."

"It's only for everything." She was laughing, a little wildly. "Vespera. Do you know what ammonia does to sulfurous acid?"

"No."

"Nor did I, until I was twelve. My father kept it in the shop. He taught me." She held up the bottle. "They combine. The gas in the air is a kind of acid. The spirit of hartshorn is a kind of base. If we wet a cloth with it, and breathe through the cloth, the one eats the other. It makes a salt. It makes a white smoke, a little like steam, quite harmless." She laughed again. "It is the first lesson in the chemistry of the kitchen."

"It will work?"

"For a time." She sobered. "It is not enough. There's one pint here, and a dozen of us would need a gallon. But it will buy us minutes. And charcoal."

"Charcoal."

"The stuff of the drawing stick." She was digging in her chest. "I have two. And the burnt wicks. And I can char the cork rafts, over a flame, in a minute. Charcoal drinks gas as a sponge drinks water. It is slow, but it never stops."

"A mask."

"A mask," said Thalessa. "Of a sort."

She looked up. Her face was flushed, and her eyes were bright, and her hair had come out of its pins and hung in dark wisps about her cheeks. For the first time in many hours she looked like herself.

"Inspector," she said. "I need a great many handkerchiefs."

…

They tore up the tablecloth.

It was a fine heavy linen cloth, bleached white, hemmed with a neat hand, and it came apart in long satisfying rips under Roderick's grip. Thalessa cut it into squares with the scissors from her chest, and folded each into four. Vespera, kneeling on the flags, worked at the corks. She held each to a flame until it flared and blackened, and crushed it in her fingers, and dropped the charred crumbs into a glass dish. Her hands were quick and sure. They had done this before, Thalessa saw, for some other purpose: lighting, wicking, charring, in the nights of the years.

"A layer of cloth," said Thalessa. "Then a layer of charcoal. Then another of cloth. And over the whole, the ammonia. Not too much. Enough to dampen. Too much and it will burn the eyes."

"How long will they last?"

"Ten minutes. Perhaps twelve."

"That is not very long."

"No. It is twelve minutes longer than none."

She worked, and as she worked the smell in the crypt strengthened. It was no longer faint. It was sharp, and acrid, and it caught in the back of the throat with the first tickle of a cough. The lamps burned on, steady and gold. But the air above them had thickened to a thin trembling haze, and the farthest end of the vault, where the arch to the cave had been, was a blur of gray.

"Up," said Roderick suddenly. "Look up."

She looked.

High in the roof of the vault, among the hanging curtains of salt, a small round hole had opened in the basalt. A vent. A neat black circle, no more than a hand across, set into the stone as a bung is set in a barrel. A thread of pale yellow vapor was curling slowly out of it, and sinking, slow as a snake, toward the floor.

It was followed by another, and another. Along the whole length of the roof, at regular intervals, small black circles were opening. And from each there drifted down a thin gray plume, trailing, spreading, merging with its fellows into a slow rolling veil.

"It's heavy," said Thalessa. "It will pool."

"Where?"

"The low places. The floor. Under the table." She was already moving. "Everyone up. On the table. On the benches. Anything that lifts us off the ground."

"How high?"

"As high as we can get."

Roderick swung himself onto the table in one movement, wincing, and reached down a hand. She took it. He drew her up beside him, among the burning jars, and she found herself standing on the white cloth with her skirts about her ankles, the golden flames at her feet, and the roof of the crypt not eight feet above her head.

Vespera stood below, looking up.

"Come," said Thalessa.

"No."

"Come up, girl."

"I should rather—" Her voice was steady, very small. "I should rather stay where I am. I put it there. It is mine."

"It is nobody's. It's a chemical."

"It is mine," said Vespera. "I have thought of a hundred ways to die and I chose this one because it was gentle. Do you know why? Because I thought: he did not get a gentle one."

Thalessa looked down at her.

For a moment she thought she would shout. She thought she would say a number of things, none of them wise, none of them kind. She felt them rise in her throat. And then, quite suddenly, she understood that the girl was not being brave. She was being obstinate. She was being exactly what her brother had been when he stood in the water and said gentlemen. She was being the thing that cannot be argued with.

"Very well," said Thalessa.

She jumped.

She landed on the flags beside Vespera with a thump, and her skirts flew up, and her knees buckled. She caught herself on the edge of the table. "Roderick! Stay there!"

"Thalessa—"

"Stay there, and get the shawl." She turned to the girl. Her face was only a foot away. "I am not going to let you. I told you that. I am not going to argue about it. I am going to stand here until the gas comes, and I shall put a mask on my face, and one on yours, and you can fight me for it if you like."

"I won't fight you."

"Good."

"I'm not fond of the pain."

"You'd rather have the sleep."

"Yes."

"I know." She held out one of the folded cloths, wet and grey and pungent. "But I'd rather you had the trial."

Vespera looked at the cloth.

The gray plumes were thickening above them. The smell was a living thing, now, a stinging, choking, bitter presence that filled the whole low gold-lit cavern and shifted among the burning lamps. The first cough scratched in Thalessa's throat. Behind her, Roderick coughed, harshly, twice.

"I don't want it," said Vespera.

"Take it anyway."

"Why?"

"Because he asked you," said Thalessa. "Not to make a monster of yourself. And that is the only thing in all the world I have ever heard that is worth keeping."

The girl's face crumpled.

She put out her hand, slowly, as if toward a flame, and took the cloth.