Bared Blade (33 page)

Scheroc’s years with Fei had long since taught it the subtle art of communicating without betraying its presence. And now I better understood the captain’s frequent habit of sniffing the air. Her bond with the qamasiin had probably given her a nose like a bloodhound’s—the nature of the familiar always shaped the power of the mage—and the sniffing was a way of communicating with her invisible companion.

That’s when things had taken a disturbing turn. Qethar had reached out and touched the rock wall a few yards to the left of the shaft. In response, a narrow tongue of stone had extended itself down to the nearer thwart of the rowboat we’d rented, like a sort of limestone gangplank. Qethar had gestured for me to precede him, so I stepped onto the projection and moved up as close to the cliff as I could get. Or I thought I had, at least.

But then Qethar stepped up behind me, saying something about the durathian road. I felt the stone moving beneath my feet as it slid back to once more become part of the wall and took me with it. Instinctively, I threw up my hands to protect my face when the hard surface came toward my eyes. It’s difficult to describe the sensation as my palms touched the stone and moved through and into it. And I don’t even like to
think
about the way it felt as the skin of my face sank into the stone.

Imagine a giant vat of rendered pork that’s congealed. Thick, viscous, cold, filled with bits and pieces that you’d rather not know any more about. Now dump in some sand to give it grain, as though you wanted to make a scouring soap. Push your hands into the mess, your face, your whole body. Then, just as you realize that you really don’t want to have anything to do with the stuff and start to pull away, it comes to life and pulls you under.

Every tiniest particle of this slurry has suddenly developed the power to grab and hold and push, and now it’s moving you along through itself wholly against your will. You shouldn’t be able to breathe, and yet you can. There is a sort of void around your mouth and nose that gives you a pocket of cold, dank, earth-smelling air to breathe.

In the first instants, Triss wrapped himself around me, providing a sort of silken armor that insulated me from the worst of it. But in my sudden panic at the situation I foolishly reached out and borrowed his senses, giving me something of a view into the matrix that held and moved me. Though mostly what surrounded me was solid rock—or as solid as could be, given the circumstances—here and there were veins of thinner stuff, sheets of aggregate and earth where water worked its way through from higher ground.

And these were filled with life. Worms and slinks and worse. Things of flesh and things of magic, the blind crawling creatures of the deep places. Through Triss I could feel them pass, and though I shall never forget them, I will not speak of them more. Eventually, after what felt like years, we arrived at the far end of the air shaft and Qethar opened a broader space for us to stand in while we watched and listened. Several minutes on and my heart was only just slowing back down to something like its normal rate.

“Come,” Qethar breathed into my ear, “we need to find your friends and they’re not here. The excavation moves away both to right and left. Let’s move on.”

I really really wanted to say, “Let’s not.” Instead, I chewed on my tongue and nodded.

We didn’t have nearly so far to go this time, and a few
awful moments later we were peering out through another ventilation slit. Three or four inches tall and a little over a foot wide, it offered a good view into a large domed chamber with two passages and several doorways leading off in various directions. It held a surprisingly opulent sort of miniature throne room, complete with dais, tapestries, and several large and expensive magelight chandeliers. The only current occupants were a pair of Crown Guards standing watch at the largest of the doors with bared woldos.

“Where are the cells?” I asked Qethar.

“There aren’t any. This place was built as a refuge for the king and his closest advisors in the event of a major magical attack on the palace or a coup, not as a dungeon. Ashvik ordered it excavated, and hired my people to do all the work at great expense. I supervised the project.”

“So where are the prisoners kept?” asked Triss.

“I don’t know,” replied Qethar. “There are many small chambers that could be hiding them. Guestrooms, storerooms, closets …Can’t you use the same method that led you here in the first place to find them now?”

I shrugged. We’d lost Scheroc when we entered Qethar’s durathian road. The air spirit was either unable or unwilling to ride along with me. I couldn’t blame it. If I’d known what I was getting into, I wouldn’t have been willing or able to ride with me. I’d hoped that it would follow us down the air shaft, but so far we’d had no such luck.

“I seem to have lost my fix on their location,” I said. “Can’t you just persuade the earth to tell us where they are?”

“My sister doesn’t pay all that much attention to the quicklife that lives upon her surface and burrows into the shallowest layers of her skin. All she can tell me is that there are perhaps a hundred of your kind scattered throughout the complex. If I could point to one and ask her to keep track of that one, then for a time she would hold them in her attention and I might follow in their footsteps. But without me or one of my people to point up the scent in advance, I’m afraid we’re out of luck.”

Just then, there came a booming knock on the door where
the guards stood. One of them looked through a slit in the thick bronze and then waved at the other while she went to work on the bolts. The second guard pulled out a small silver whistle and gave it a good hard blow. By the time the first guard had the door open, the Durkoth, Elite, and Crown Guards we’d seen in the kitchen earlier had spilled out of one of the open hallways.

As the door slid open, another Durkoth stepped through, this one wearing Tienese garb. She was followed by a lieutenant of the Elite and her stone dog. The latter had a limp human form tied facedown across its back, long dark hair a-drag on the ground. Though I couldn’t tell for sure from there, the shape of the unconscious figure’s shoulders and hips suggested a young woman.

“Is that her?” asked the Elite from the guardroom, a male captain.

“I certainly hope so,” responded the lieutenant. “But we won’t know for sure until Roketh here makes an identification.” He jerked his chin at the foreign dressed Durkoth who stepped in close to the unconscious girl now.

While the Durkoth was looking the prisoner over, another door opened, this one off to our left. A third Elite peered into the room—another lieutenant, this one male. “Have you got her, finally?” He started across to join the others, his huge stone dog trailing behind.

“That’s definitely the girl who killed Merqa and Thelat,” said Roketh. “I recognize her shekat. I presume that she didn’t have the Kothmerk on her when you took her.”

So that was our Reyna. Beside me, Qethar made a low hissing noise, but otherwise remained still and quiet.

“Of course not,” said the other Durkoth. “Do you think we’d have bothered to keep her alive if we’d gotten what we needed from her? After all the lives she’s cost us?”

A faint breeze cooled the back of my neck and tugged my hair in the direction of the door the male lieutenant had emerged from. Scheroc had returned to point the way to Captain Fei.

“That’s it then,” said the captain. “We’ve no need of the
other prisoners anymore.” He made a throat cutting gesture toward the male lieutenant. “Time to clean up loose ends.”

The lieutenant drew his sword, half turned toward the door he’d entered by and then stabbed Roketh as neatly as could be. At the same time, the two woldo-carrying guards brought the heavy blades of their sword-spears down on the shoulders and neck of the other Durkoth, and kept hacking away as she collapsed to the floor.

Several things happened all at once then: The three stone dogs threw their heads back and howled like demented wolves. Qethar snarled something unintelligible and reached out to open the stone in front of us, parting it like a curtain. Reyna, apparently having returned to consciousness at some point, lifted her head ever so slightly from where it lay against the side of the dog she’d been tied to and looked around. Roketh wrenched himself free of the sword that had skewered him and fell to the ground, crying out something in the Durkoth language.

“Tell Fei we’re on our way,” I said to Scheroc, and felt the little qamasiin dart away from me.

Triss was swearing at Qethar in Shade as he enclosed me with a skin of shadow once again. I couldn’t blame him. This was
not
the way I’d have chosen to go about things if I’d been asked. But I’d been trained to work with what I had and not what I wished I had, and I was drawing my swords as I stepped out into the room on Qethar’s heels.

Leave me a view, Triss.

Done.

As he expanded into a cloud of shadow, he left a thin slit open in front of my eyes. Functionally invisible, I started forward. I identified the Elite lieutenant with his drawn sword as my first target and aimed myself that way, though I tried to keep an eye on everyone in the milling chaos that had exploded in the wake of the murder of the two Durkoth. I would have liked to go straight for Fei and the Dyad, but leaving live Elite at your back was a mistake I would never make again. I’d learned my lesson on the day I killed Zhan’s king.

But before I’d gone a dozen feet, the floor underneath my chosen target rose up on either side of him like great stone jaws and smashed him to pulp. And there they froze as Roketh finally died. None of the others had yet noticed us, and I shifted direction slightly to angle toward the captain. Meanwhile, Qethar was riding a moving section of the stone floor toward the remaining lieutenant.

That’s when I saw something that sent my heart into my throat. The ropes that bound Reyna’s hands to her feet under the belly of the still howling stone dog fell away as if they’d been neatly cut. Then she slid forward, touching down with her palms and cartwheeling to her feet, before vanishing as a cloud of shadow exploded outward from her skin. A moment later, a lacuna of darkness flowed briefly between me and the captain. Then the Elite was clutching at his freshly opened throat as the life gushed down his chest.

It was beautifully done, a perfect realization of one of Master Kelos’s favorite moves, and I froze as everything I’d heard about Reyna the thief suddenly rearranged itself in my head. Suddenly everything she’d done made perfect sense. She wasn’t working with a Blade as I’d once thought was a possibility. She was one of our lost apprentices, the last children of the house of Namara. That made her my responsibility as surely as if she were my own daughter. I started to move forward again, only then noticing that I’d stopped.

Triss!

I know, I saw. Blade trained and Shade companioned. We’ve got to catch her, find out who she is, where she’s been.…

I reached the remaining group of Crown Guards just as Qethar dropped a foot-thick pillar of stone from the ceiling and crushed the last of the Elite. Within seconds, the fight was over and all of the enemy lay dead.

“Reyna!” I yelled, though I didn’t think that was her real name. “Where are you? We need to talk.”

Faint and far up the hall I thought I heard, “I’ll find you, Kingslayer, someday. I promise.”

Closer, Qethar said, “The little witch has vanished, and she knows to mask her feet from the earth, so I can’t tell exactly where she went. I’m going to try to cut her off!” A low stone wave rose from the floor and Qethar surfed it toward the door.

“Qethar!” I yelled after him. “That girl’s important to me. If you harm her, I’ll cut your heart out and feed it to you.”

I didn’t know what her name really was, or had been, but I damn sure intended to find out. I just hoped she wasn’t one of Devin’s traitors. More than anything I wanted to follow Qethar and find those answers right now. But I didn’t know who or what else might be left down here with me—Qethar had said there were a hundred or so humans in the area, and if I abandoned Fei and the Dyad now, they’d probably die.

Duty before desire.

Swearing bitterly, I put aside thoughts of the girl and turned to run for the door the qamasiin had indicated earlier. As I went, I forced myself to let go of my awareness of the girl, to put those worries and concerns in a box and lock it away deep in my mind. I was on a mission now. Letting myself get distracted could easily kill me. That wouldn’t do her any good at all.

As I passed through the doorway, I heard shouts behind me and glanced over my shoulder to see more Crown Guards rushing into the room from the other passage. I kept going. Hopefully, Qethar’s presence in the entrance passage would prevent them getting a message to the surface and the palace any time soon, but I wasn’t going to bet on it. Time was about to get very short and unless Qethar came back, my exit strategy was well and truly fucked. In light of which, yelling a death threat after him might not have been the best of tactics, but too late to worry about that now.

The throne room door opened into a broad open hallway with heavy wooden doors facing each other every twenty feet or so, all of them closed—quarters for personages of importance not directly related to the king at a guess. The Elite who’d come out of here couldn’t have been too far away
or he wouldn’t have heard the whistle, which meant what I was looking for had to be close. I scanned for signs of occupation and noticed that the corridor got a lot cleaner about three doors down, which suggested not much traffic beyond that point.

Triss, check under those two doors.
I pointed as I passed them.

Done.

While Triss collapsed back down into dragon state, I turned and put my back against the wall just beyond the doors. I wanted to keep watch both ways while simultaneously remaining as inconspicuous as possible. It wouldn’t be long before the Crown Guard and their inevitable Elite officers got around to looking in on the prisoners. Triss slid his dragon’s nose under the door now on my right, then vanished completely, leaving only a slender thread of shadow back to me.