Chapter 13 - The Fire and the Glass
The air inside the East Tower room turned heavy, sweet, and suffocating within forty seconds.
Julian Vance let out a weak cough from his hospital bed, his breath coming in ragged, shallow gasps as the invisible gas began to displace the oxygen in the room.
Daniel ran to the narrow lancet windows, but the iron bars embedded in the stone frames were five centuries old and three inches thick. His heavy leather shoes struck the iron bars uselessly, sending sparks flying into the dim light.
"Daniel... the air..." Clara gasped, clutching her throat, her knees buckling as dizziness washed over her brain. She collapsed onto the floor beside Julian’s bed, her green eyes fluttering as her vision began to blur into dark, swimming spots.
Daniel dropped to his knees beside her, pulling her into his arms. "Clara! Stay with me! Keep your head down near the floor!"
He looked up at the high stone ceiling, where thick, gray fumes were billowing out from the iron ventilation grates. There was no way out through the door, no way out through the bars, and the gas was filling the chamber at an alarming rate.
Then, Daniel’s eyes landed on the heavy, gold-gilded Victorian mirror standing open against the stone wall.
Behind the mirror, deep inside the recess where the strongbox had been hidden, was a narrow, vertical chimney shaft—an old ash-chute used in the eighteenth century to clear coal dust from the tower fireplace, leading down to the outer roof drainage gutters.
"Clara!" Daniel yelled, lifting her up off the floor and carrying her toward the mirror. "The ash chute! It leads to the roof!"
He shoved the heavy mirror aside, exposing the narrow, two-foot-wide stone shaft behind it. The chute was dark, coated in dry soot, but a faint, cool draft of fresh mountain air was blowing down from the top.
"Go first!" Daniel commanded, hoisting Clara up into the narrow opening. "Reach for the iron rungs inside!"
Clara reached up into the darkness, her fingers finding the cold, rusted iron ladder rungs built into the stone wall of the chute. She hauled her body upward with frantic, desperate energy, her new short copper hair covered in black soot, her lungs drinking in the faint traces of fresh air flowing down from the roof.
"I'm up!" she called down, her voice echoing in the stone shaft. "Daniel, get your father!"
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Daniel returned to the bed. With a burst of strength born of pure adrenaline, he scooped his seventy-year-old father’s frail body into his arms, lifting him over his shoulder like a fallen soldier. He carried him to the mirror recess, shoving the old man's upper body up into the chute where Clara was waiting to pull him from above.
Below them, in the room, the concentration of carbon monoxide reached lethal levels, the gas hissing like a horde of serpents from the ceiling grates.
