There was nowhere in her body that didn’t hurt. To collapse would be nice, but she dare not do it yet. It wasn’t over-the knife had gone.

And so had Veronica and the child.

Rowley came rushing out of the tunnel, kicking the shield out of the way so that it skidded and hit the anvil. He grabbed a flambeau from the wall and disappeared with it into the tunnel again.

She was in darkness; the other torch was gone. A flicker of light showed her a puff of chalk dust and the hem of a black habit disappearing into the tunnel Ulf had come out of.

Adelia crawled after it. No. No, not now. We’re rescued. Give him to me.

It was a wormhole, an exploratory dig that had not been worked because the flare of Veronica’s torch when it came showed a gnarled, glistening line of flint running along it like a dado. The tunnel turned with the seam, cutting her off from the light ahead, and she was in a blackness so deep she might have gone blind. She went on.

No. Not now. Now we’re rescued.

It was lopsided crawling; her left arm was weakening where Rakshasa had stabbed it. Tired, so tired. Tired of being frightened. No time to be tired, no. Not now. Nodules of chalk crumbled under her right hand as her palm pressed her forward. I shall have him from you. Give him to me.

She came on them in a tiny chamber, huddled together like a couple of rabbits, Ulf limp in the nun’s grasp, his eyes closed. Sister Veronica held the torch high in one hand; the other, around the child, had the knife.

The nun’s lovely eyes were thoughtful. She was reasonable, though dribble emerged from the corner of her mouth. “We must protect him,” she told Adelia. “The Beast shall not have this one.”

“He won’t,” Adelia said, carefully. “He’s gone, Sister. He will be hunted down. Give me the knife now.”

Some rags lay next to an iron post planted deep in the ground with a dog lead trailing from it, the collar just big enough for a child’s neck. They were in Rakshasa’s larder.

Circular walls were turned red by the flickering torchlight. The drawings on them wriggled. Adelia, who daren’t take her eyes away from those of the nun, would not have looked at them in any case; in this obscenity of a womb, the embryos had waited not to be born but to die.

Veronica said, “Whoso shall offend one of these little ones, it were better for him that a millstone be hanged about his neck.”

“Yes, Sister,” Adelia said, “it would be.” She crawled forward and took the knife out of the nun’s hand.

Between them, they dragged Ulf through the wormhole. As they came out, they saw Hugh the hunter looking around him like a dazed thing with a lantern in his hand. Rowley emerged from the other tunnel. He was swearing and frantic. “I lost him; there’s dozens of bloody tunnels along there, and my bloody torch went out. The bastard knows his way, I don’t.” He turned on Adelia as if he was furious with her-he was furious with her. “Is there another shaft somewhere?” As an afterthought, he asked, “Are you women hurt? How’s the boy?”

He urged them up the ladder, tucking Ulf under his arm.

For Adelia the climb was interminable, each rung an achievement gained through pain and a faintness that would have toppled her to the bottom again if she’d not had Hugh’s hand supporting her back. Her arm stung where the creature had stabbed it, and she became concerned that it might be poisoned. How ridiculous to die now. Put brandy on it, she kept thinking, or sphagnum moss would do; mustn’t die now, not when we’ve won.

And as her head reached above the shaft and air touched it…We have won. Simon, Simon, we’ve won.

Clinging to the top rung, she looked down toward Rowley. “Now they’ll know the Jews didn’t do it.”

“They will,” he said. “Get on.” Veronica was clinging to him, crying and gabbling. Adelia, struggling to get off the ladder, was nosed by hounds, their tails in frantic motion as if with pleasure at a job well done. Hugh called to them, and they backed away. When Rowley emerged, Adelia said, “You tell them. Tell them the Jews didn’t do it.”

Two horses were grazing nearby.

Hugh said, “That where our Mary died? Down there? Who done it?”

She told him.

He stood still for a moment, the lantern lighting his face from below so that terrible shadows distorted it.

Teetering with frustration and indecision, Rowley shoved Ulf into Adelia’s arms. He needed men to hunt the tunnels below, but neither of the two women was in a condition to fetch them, and he dared not go himself or send Hugh.

“Somebody’s got to guard this shaft. He’s under this bloody hill, and sooner or later he’ll pop out like a bloody rabbit, but there’s maybe another exit somewhere.” He snatched Hugh’s lantern and set off across the hilltop in what he knew, they all knew, was a hopeless attempt to find it.

Adelia laid Ulf on the grass above the edge of the depression, taking off her cloak to pillow it under his head. Then she sat down beside him and breathed in the smell of the night-how could it still be night? She caught the scent of hawthorn and juniper. Sweet grass reminded her that she was filthy with sweat and blood and urine, probably her own, and the stink of Rakshasa’s body, which, she knew, if she spent her life in a bath, would never again quite leave her nostrils.

She felt expended, as if everything had gone from her and left just a trembling slough of skin.

Beside her, Ulf jerked into a sitting position, gasping at the reviving air, his fists clenched. He looked around, at the landscape, the sky, Hugh, the dogs, Adelia. He had trouble enunciating. “Where’s…this at? Am I out?”

“Out and safe,” she told him.

“They…got un?”

“They will.” God send they would.

“He never…scared me,” Ulf said, beginning to shake. “I fought the bugger…shouted…kept fighting.”

“I know,” Adelia told him. “They had to quiet you with poppy juice. You were too brave for them.” She put her arm round his shoulders as his tears began. “No need to be brave anymore.”

They waited.

A suspicion of gray in the sky to the east suggested that the night would actually have an end. Across the other side of the depression, Sister Veronica was on her knees, her whispered prayers like the rustle of leaves.

Hugh was keeping one foot on the top of the shaft’s ladder so that he might feel any movement on it, one hand on the hunting knife at his belt. He soothed his dogs, murmuring their names and telling them they were brave.

He glanced at Adelia. “Followed the scent of that old mongrel of yourn all the way, my lads did,” he said.

The hounds looked up as if they knew they’d been mentioned. “Sir Rowley, he were in rare old taking. ‘She’s gone after the boy,’ he said, ‘and very like got herself killed doing it.’ Called you a fair few names in his temper, like. But I told un. ‘That’s a fine old stinker, that ol’ dog of hers. My lads’ll track un,’ I said. Was that the old boy down there?”

Adelia roused herself. “Yes,” she said.

“I’m right sorry for that. Did his job, though.”

The hunter’s voice was controlled, dull. Somewhere in the tunnels below their feet ran the creature that had slaughtered his niece.

A rustle that caused Hugh to take the knife from his belt was the launch of a long-eared owl on its last foray of the night. There was sleepy twittering as small birds woke up. Rowley himself, and not just his lantern, could be seen now, a big, busy shape using its sword as a stick to prod the ground. But every bush on the studded, uneven ground flaked the moonlight with a shadow that could conceal a more sinuous darkness wriggling away.

The sky to the east became extraordinary, a lowering, threatening red band with streaks of jagged black.

“Shepherd’s warning,” Hugh said, “devil’s dawn.”