Saer could barely speak. He gestured wildly to the hall. “They are in there!”
Mathias grabbed the man. He seemed nearly crazed with horror. “Whois in there?”
Saer was crazed. He was nearly incoherent. “My family,” he gasped. “My… my wife. My girls. They are all in there!”
Mathias looked at the great hall, a great charred wreckage that was still smoldering and flaming. “Your… your wife?” he repeated, sickened as he looked at the structure. “My lord, if they are in there, they….”
“Cathlina is in there, you fool!” he screamed. “Your wife is in there, too!”
Mathias nearly fell over from the shock and grief of the harshly slung words. He stared at the hall, hardly able to comprehend what he was being told. His exhausted mind was wracked with disbelief and horror.
“Cathlina?” he repeated, hearing her name spoken in his shaken voice. His knees threatened to buckle but he fought it. “MyCathlina?”
“Aye!”
“But… but she was at Carlisle!”
“She came to Kirklinton a few weeks ago. We have no time to waste if we are to save them!”
That was all Mathias needed to hear. His training kicked in, his innate ability to deal calmly with any given situation. Panic would not do Cathlina any good. Only calm heads would be able to save her if, indeed, she was salvageable. Brutally, he grabbed Saer by the arm and began yanking him towards the building.
“Where, for God’s sake?” he demanded. “Where are they?”
Saer began to run, trying to enter the building at the main door but being sent back because of the heat and smoke.
“They are in the storage vault, down below the hall,” Saer said, running to the west side of the structure with Mathias on his heels. “We must get them out!”
Mathias bellowed to the nearest soldiers, who came on the run. They all rounded the corner to the west side of the structure, which wasn’t nearly as destroyed as the main entry. They raced inside the smoky servant’s entrance to see that the roof had collapsed on the very doorway they needed to get to. Saer pointed at it furiously.
“There!” he screamed. “That is the door to the vaults! They are down there!”
Mathias rushed forward, shoving aside heavy beams and pieces of roof that were still smoldering. His soldiers followed him and quickly, they began to tear away at the debris that had fallen down against the old iron grate. In fact, the grate itself was twisted and soft from the extreme heat that had been burned against it. As a smithy, Mathias knew the heat factor well. It must have been intense. He struggled and coughed as he fought to clear the debris field near the vault entry.
“Cathlina!” Saer screamed as dozens of Englishmen tried to remove the carnage. “Cathlina, can you hear me? The key, daughter, we need thekey!”
Mathias, fighting through a piece of roof that was still burning, looked at him curiously. “What key?” he asked, coughing as smoke billowed up in his face.
Saer pointed to the giant lock on the iron grate. “We need the key,” he repeated breathlessly. “I gave it to Cathlina.”
Mathias could see what he was referring to. The iron grate was heavy and old, and the key was needed for the massive lock. He gave a big shove to the burning debris so he could peer down the dark, steep stairwell into the vault. At the bottom, all he could see was more debris and darkness.
“Cathlina!” he roared.
There was no answer and his anxiety surged. Burning debris had toppled down the stairs through the iron grate and thesteps were littered with it. Smoke was thick. In fact, it filled the stairwell and the blackness at the bottom. He turned to Saer.
“We must get in there now,” he said, a panicked edge to his voice. “Do you have any smithy tools?”
Saer’s mind was nearly gone, overwhelmed with what had happened to his castle and to his family, but he managed to nod to Mathias’ question.
“We did,” he said, lifting his shoulders helplessly. “I do not know what has become of it in the battle. It could be lost.”
“Show me where it was. Mayhap there is something left I can use.”
As the soldiers continued to frantically remove the debris, Saer and Mathias raced out to the bailey to what was left of the trade shacks near the stables. They had all been burned. The place where the smithy and the tanner’s sheds once stood was now a heap of rubble. Saer began plowing through it.
“In here, somewhere,” he said as he threw aside charred wreckage. “This is where the smithy and the tanner were. Any tools will be under this mess.”
Mathias just kept digging through it, tossing wreckage aside as he tried very hard not to think of Cathlina. To do so would threaten his control and he needed that very badly if he had any chance of getting into the vault. As he dug through the burnt timber and thatch, he saw Sebastian approach, covered with gore. The man was looking at him very curiously. Mathias waved him over.
