Outlander Novella [01] The Space Between by Diana Gabaldon Read Free Book Online Page B

was noticed at all. Though just in case … he opened the burlap bag, still redolent of rats, and fished out a bundle of pitchblende torches and the oiled-silk packet that held several lengths of cloth saturated with
salpêtre
, salts of potash, blue vitriol, verdigris, butter of antimony, and a few other interesting compounds from his laboratory.
    He found the blue vitriol by smell and wrapped the cloth tightly around the head of one torch, then—whistling under his breath—made three more torches, each impregnated with different salts. He loved this part. It was so simple, and so astonishingly beautiful.
    He paused for a minute to listen, but it was well past dark and the only sounds were those of the night itself—frogs chirping and bellowing in the distant marshes by the cemetery, wind stirring the leaves of spring. A few hovels sat a half mile away, only one with firelight glowing dully from a smoke hole in the roof.
Almost a pity there’s no one but me to see this
. He took the little clay firepot from its wrappings and touched a coal to the cloth-wrapped torch. A tiny green flame flickered like a serpent’s tongue, then burst into life in a brilliant globe of ghostly color.
    He grinned at the sight, but there was no time to lose; the torches wouldn’t last forever, and there was work to be done. He tied the bag to his belt and, with the green fire crackling softly in one hand, climbed down into darkness.
    He paused at the bottom, breathing deep. The air was clear, the dust long settled. No one had been down here recently. The dull white walls glowed soft, eerie under the green light, and the passage yawned before him, black as a murderer’s soul. Even knowing the place as well ashe did, and with light in his hand, it gave him a qualm to walk into it.
    Is that what death is like
? he wondered. A black void that you walked into with no more than a feeble glimmer of faith in your hand? His lips compressed. Well, he’d done
that
before, if less permanently. But he disliked the way that the notion of death seemed always to be lurking in the back of his mind these days.
    The main tunnel was large, big enough for two men to walk side by side, and the roof was high enough above him that the roughly excavated chalk lay in shadow, barely touched by his torch. The side tunnels were smaller, though. He counted the ones on the left and, despite himself, hurried his step a little as he passed the fourth. That was where
it
lay, down the side tunnel, a turn to the left, another to the left—was it “widdershins” the English called it, turning against the direction of the sun? He thought that was what Mélisande had called it when she’d brought him here.…
    The sixth. His torch had begun to gutter already, and he pulled another from the bag and lit it from the remains of the first, which he dropped on the floor at the entrance to the side tunnel, leaving it to flare and smolder behind him, the smoke catching at his throat. He knew his way, but even so, it was as well to leave landmarks, here in the realm of everlasting night. The mine had deep rooms, one far back that showed strange paintings on the wall, of animals that didn’t exist but had an astonishing vividness, as though they would leap from the wall and stampede down the passages. Sometimes—rarely—he went all the way down into the bowels of the earth, just to look at them.
    The fresh torch burned with the warm light of natural fire, and the white walls took on a rosy glow. So did the painting at the end of the corridor, this one different: a crude but effective rendering of the Annunciation. He didn’t know who had made the paintings that appeared unexpectedly here and there in the mines—most were of religious subjects, a few most emphatically
not—
but they were useful. There was an iron ring in the wall by the Annunciation, and he set his torch into it.
    Turn back at the Annunciation, then three paces … He stamped his foot, listening for the faint