Knight's Shadow (37 page)

Chapter Thirty-One

The Lower Dungeon

We made our way slowly down to the lower dungeon, the dim light of our lanterns illuminating the dust and dried blood that snaked like veins of ore against the rocky surface of the twenty-seven stairs.

‘The path becomes narrower as we go down,’ Kest pointed out. ‘If an ambush awaits us, it will be difficult to evade it.’

I didn’t bother to respond; I was too busy trying to deal with the smell. You sometimes hear storytellers trying to frighten their audiences by talking about the scent of despair. They’re not being poetic. Fear really does have a smell. If you mix sweat and shit and blood with stale air and dank, musty walls,
like magic!
as a jongleur might say, you get the genuine scent of human despair. That’s what greeted us at the bottom of the stairs.

Dariana slid ahead of me and peered down one of the dark passageways that curved away from the stairwell. ‘What in all the hells is this place?’

‘Hell is right fucking word, lady,’ Ugh replied.

I tried for something clever, but nothing came. I’ve spent more than my share of time in dungeons, but this place . . . I couldn’t begin to imagine how I could ever escape from here.

Shiballe noticed my unease and smiled. ‘The passages split off in odd directions, like a garden maze,’ he said proudly. ‘Even if a man were to escape his cell, he would have great difficulty finding his way back to the stairway. Many of the passageways lead to dead ends, and in some, just to keep things interesting, the shadows hide pits in the floor. When we put a man down here, Trattari, he
never
comes back up into the light.’

‘Unless he just decides to take control of it instead,’ Dariana said. ‘Then what do you do, you fat slug?’

I noted Duke Jillard’s wide-eyed gaze as he glanced about the endless dripping walls, as if he’d never seen the place where his orders were carried out. ‘It was not by my—’

‘Shut up,’ I whispered, trying to shake off my own fear. Damn. This all had to happen fast. We needed to figure out where Tommer and the assassin were before we ourselves were discovered. ‘We’re going to have to split up.’ I turned to Duke Jillard. ‘You need to go back, your Grace. If the assassin sees you, he’ll try to kill you first, then, his mission complete, he’ll turn his blade on Tommer.’

Jillard, Duke of Rijou, cast a sideways glance at Ugh. ‘You think I will let this . . . this
creature
risk himself for my son while I hide upstairs in my room?’

‘Fuck you,’ Ugh said amiably.

‘Foul dog!’ Shiballe spat. ‘I’ll have your tongue torn from your mouth when this—’

Ugh reached out and put his hand on top of Shiballe’s fat head and he squeezed, very slowly. ‘I may be dog,’ he said, ‘but I am fucking tough dog, eh? Fucking strong dog.’ Shiballe’s eyes grew wide as the pressure from Ugh’s fingers began pressing hard into the flesh of his skull. ‘Maybe boy needs a tough guy right now, eh? Not fat worm that slinks along the ground.’

‘Enough, all of you,’ Valiana said. Her face was white as a sheet but her voice was firm. ‘Ugh, let go: Tommer is down here and he needs us to find him, not fight amongst ourselves.’

Ugh released Shiballe’s head and smiled. ‘Pretty girl – you whore? Whores nice to me.’

Saint Iphilia-who-cuts-her-own-heart, these are the heroes you send me to help save the boy?

‘Let’s go,’ I said. ‘Kest, you take Sir Istan and Ugh. Valiana, you take Parrick. I’ll take his Grace.’

‘You’re leaving me with the slug?’ Dariana said, eyeing Shiballe.

‘He knows this level better than anyone else. If it helps, it’s only of nominal importance that he comes back alive.’

She grinned. Shiballe didn’t.

‘What do we do if we find something?’ Valiana asked.

‘If you find Tommer, have one person free him while the other stands guard.’

‘And if we find the assassin?’ This time she didn’t quite manage to keep the tremor from her voice.

‘Scream as loudly as you can. The rest of us will follow the sound. Do whatever you can to keep him at bay. If he’s Dashini, don’t try to engage him like you would a normal opponent because he’s not. It’ll be like trying to fight someone lashing at you using a snake with a three-foot steel tongue. Do anything you can to keep him away from you, and for the Saints’ sake, don’t breathe in any of the dust.’

‘One more thing,’ Kest said. ‘When we find the assassin, step back and let me through.’

‘Why?’ Sir Istan asked, unable to keep the look of relief from his young face.

‘Because he is mine and no one else’s.
Mine
.’ Kest looked at me. ‘I
need
this,’ he said.

I could see the reddish glow just starting to push at the edges of his skin and I nodded. ‘All right. Somewhere in this hell is a man who lives his life in shadow and dances with death. He’s never known fear.’ I drew my rapier from its sheath. ‘We’re going to teach him.’

*

I’ve tracked killers before. A verdict imposed after a murderer has fled his village doesn’t do much good for the family who’ve just lost a loved one and it does even less for the next family the killer finds. It’s not exactly my strong point – Brasti’s always been better, and is never slow to remind me of that. So were a few of the other Greatcoats – Quillata could track a man
weeks
after he’d left town.

But neither of them were here.

‘Are you blind, Trattari?’ Jillard asked, standing over me as I knelt down on the floor. ‘The tracks are everywhere!’

‘Keep your voice down,’ I whispered, hoping the others were doing a better job of moving silently through the dungeon. ‘The tracks are the problem.’

Normally the problem with following a man is that you’re doing it over many miles, searching desperately for the smallest sign of his passing. Here in the bowels of Jillard’s dungeon I had the opposite problem: there were tracks
everywhere
, imprinted into the filth that covered the uneven stone floors of the maze.

It didn’t help that we had to move so slowly. Sometimes the stone floors were rough and jagged, making it easy to trip, then they would become smooth and slippery – generally right before they gave way to a small man-sized pit with very pointy spikes at the bottom. Even with Jillard’s lantern, the shadows were eager to swallow us. In the end, all we could do was move cautiously and try not to circle around too many times.

We’re too slow, damn it. We’re going too slowly.

Had there been any prisoners alive on the second level we might have been able to trade information in exchange for leniency or even release, but bad luck for us – and them, I suppose, although maybe they saw it as a welcome release – because the only ones we saw were dead. Jillard didn’t appear to notice the bodies at all.

‘Wait,’ I said, and stopped to watch a pool of blood on the floor of one of the cells gradually seeping down the cracks in the uneven floor until it eventually met the blood coming from the cell across the way. ‘You have your men execute prisoners in their cells?’ I asked Jillard.

‘Do we have time to waste on this?’ he asked. ‘My son is somewhere down here, and so is the assassin.’

‘Humour me.’

Jillard stopped and leaned a hand against the uneven surface of the wall. He looked tired. ‘If your heart is breaking for the men in these cells, you should save it for someone more deserving. Those who occupy this level of the dungeon are creatures unworthy of pity.’

‘Eventually we all find ourselves in need of a little pity,’ I said.
Great. Now I’m quoting Saint Birgid’s own admonishment to me
. I set the thought aside. ‘But that’s not my point. How are the prisoners on this level executed?’

Jillard raised an eyebrow. ‘How many ways are there to die? My Magisters set the punishment to fit the crime. In Rijou a man pays his debts with the coin in which he traded.’

‘Then we have a problem.’ I pointed inside one of the cells.

Jillard peered through the iron bars. ‘The man certainly appears to be dead. What of it?’

‘Look at all the blood on the floor. It’s hard to see without better light, but he’s had his throat slit.’

Jillard shrugged. ‘Then I imagine he—’

‘It’s not just him. Every body I’ve seen since we got down here has been slit across the throat.’

Jillard’s eyes went wide. ‘But why would—?’

‘Because dead men can’t reveal what they’ve seen,’ a voice called out from further down the passageway. ‘Or perhaps more importantly,
who
they’ve seen.’

Out of reflex I raised my rapier into guard and took up position in front of the Duke. If I’d stopped to think about it I would have used him as a shield instead.

I peered into the darkness ahead of us, my eyes struggling to focus as I scanned the shadows for any signs of movement. There were none.

‘Who is there? Who dares address the Duke—’ Jillard started.

‘Shut up, you idiot,’ I hissed. ‘Don’t give anything away,
your Grace
.’

‘Sound advice,’ the voice replied. ‘However, I doubt our Lord Duke pays much heed to the wisdom of others, given the situation he finds himself in today.’

I started walking forward, keeping my eyes focused on both the shadows in front of us and on the intersection ahead where an enemy might be standing in wait.

‘Getting warmer,’ the voice said.

The proximity of the sound jarred me.
He’s here
. I spun around: sitting cross-legged on the cold stone floor at the very back of the darkened chamber opposite me was a man – a
naked
man. Despite the lack of light I could tell that he was somewhere in his twenties, dark-haired and clean-shaven. His nakedness made it clear he was lean but well-muscled. He could have been anyone, except that everything about him was relaxed when it shouldn’t be. He looked to be completely unfazed by the madness around him, unafraid of what any sane man should fear. He held up a hand and waved at me, and the graceful way he made that gesture – so
normal
, so simple – told me who he was – or rather,
what
he was.
Dashini
.

Chapter Thirty-Two

The Interrogation

‘Forgive me if I surprised you,’ the man sitting in the cell said without irony. ‘That was impolite of me.’

My eyes went to the iron door of the cell and I felt a brief surge of relief to see that it was locked. The internal bolt was pushed well into the iron fixtures welded into the bars.

Jillard caught up with me in front of the cell and saw the man inside. ‘Who are you?’ he demanded.

‘You don’t recognise me? But of course not – I was wearing my ceremonial garb when I came to see you. No matter. In my heart I am a man like you. Or no, perhaps not like you. Perhaps more like Falcio.’

‘You know me?’ I asked.

‘How could I not? You killed two of my brethren and no one has ever done that before. You’re a legend to us, Falcio: a story told over and over, like a waterfall pounding away at the rock beneath it.’

Hearing the Dashini say my name was just terrifying enough that I felt the need to cover my reaction with false bravado. ‘Let me know when you’ve finished erecting my statue, will you? Perhaps it could be a little taller?’

The man in the cell laughed. ‘I do appreciate your sense of humour – it brings light even to a dark place like this. But it’s not a statue they want to build for you, Falcio, it’s something much greater. Something the world will remember for a hundred years.’

‘You say
they
as if you were referring to someone else.’

The man’s expression didn’t change even a fraction, but I sensed something in his stillness, a hesitation. ‘I have come to question the wisdom of certain agreements that have been made.’

‘What agreements? With whom? Did you—?’

‘Enough!’ Jillard interrupted. ‘Who is this man? Why is he here?’

‘He’s the assassin,’ I said. ‘He’s the man who came to kill you.’

Jillard looked incredulously into the cell. He must not have had the chance to interrogate the assassin when Parrick and his Knights captured him. The Duke pulled on the door, testing it. ‘He’s locked in. How is this possible?’

‘Step back from the bars,’ I said, pulling Jillard back to the wall with me. ‘If you want to live, you’ll keep away from those bars. You’ve never been as close to death as you are right now.’

The Dashini spread his arms wide. ‘Such a cautious nature. Look at me. I am alone. My garb has been taken from me. My blades are gone. My dust is gone. I am naked.’ He leaned forward in his seated position just a hair. ‘Defenceless.’

‘On this we agree,’ Jillard said. He turned to me. ‘Kill him – stab him through the heart with your sword. Now!’

My eyes stayed on the Dashini. ‘He’s too far back in the cell for me to reach, and if I stick my arm inside the cell to try it, he’ll disarm me. Then he’ll have a sword.’

‘Then throw a knife at him, damn you!’

‘Then he’ll have a knife. He’s Dashini, your Grace: even if I hit him, he’ll just pull out the knife. It’ll be in your throat before a drop of his own blood has dripped from his wound.’

Jillard’s tone grew angrier. ‘Then we’ll go back up and bring crossbowmen back. They’ll—’

‘Shut up,’ I said.

The Dashini and I kept our eyes locked on each other, and though his expression was relaxed, almost indifferent, I knew he was running through the dozens of ways he could kill the Duke while trapped in his cell, even as I considered how I might stop him. He was locked behind strong iron bars, but I was the one who felt trapped and vulnerable.

After a few moments I sheathed both my rapiers.

‘What are you doing?’ the Duke asked.

‘Keeping my hands free,’ I said.

‘Are you mad? He is locked in a cell – even if he is hiding the key, it would take him time to reach around the bars to unlock the door.’

‘This Duke you guard is foolish as well as feckless,’ the Dashini said. ‘Are you sure he’s worth keeping alive? I wonder, is his son just as foolish?’

Jillard started towards the bars. ‘We’ll see who’s foolish when I have your—’

I reached out and grabbed the back of the Duke’s collar just as the Dashini leapt effortlessly from his sitting position. His right arm struck out from between the bars like an arrow, the fingers of his hand bunched together into a single point like a bird’s beak aimed right at Jillard’s throat.

I hauled the Duke back an instant before the Dashini could reach him and he fell back against the wall next to me. I struck out at the Dashini’s wrist with the knuckles of my left hand, but he turned his own hand palm up and slipped under my wrist to take hold of it. But before he could tighten his grip I jerked my arm back and then immediately struck out again with my fist – but his arm had already disappeared and he was standing in the centre of his cell looking at me as calmly as if he’d been standing there all day.

Duke Jillard recovered himself. This time he stayed close to the back wall.

The Dashini smiled. ‘Swiftly done, Falcio. I was expecting you to be slower, what with your recent health difficulties.’

‘You appear to know a lot about me,’ I said. ‘We’d make better friends if I knew your name.’

‘You know the things that matter: I am Dashini, of a sort, and I was sent here to give the final mercy to Jillard, Duke of Rijou.’

‘“Of a sort”?’ I asked. I looked closer at his face. His features were Tristian, and if I had to guess, he might even have come from Pertine, where I was born. But that wasn’t what struck me. I thought back to the faces of the two men I’d fought and killed in Rijou. ‘You have no markings,’ I said.

‘I am Unblooded. The Duke was to be my first kill.’ He favoured Jillard with a half-bow and a small smile. ‘It is considered a great honour.’

‘Why were there no other Dashini with you when you attacked the Duke?’ I asked. ‘Where’s your
azu
?’

‘He was . . . incapacitated by recent events.’

‘Then why are you in this cell?’ If he had a key, if he had a way out, he could have killed Jillard and me by now. So what was he playing at?

‘Like most things in this world, the answer is less intriguing than the question would suggest.’ He looked up at the ceiling and then around the cell. ‘I am here because I was captured. The Knights rushed me. I killed three of them too quickly, they fell forward and I was momentarily unbalanced.’

‘That must be embarrassing for you,’ I said.

‘Quite.’

Jillard, despite his fear, could hold back no longer. ‘Where is my son, damn you?’

‘Here,’ the Dashini replied, ‘somewhere. I hear him screaming sometimes. He cries too, mostly at night. It’s fascinating . . . he never calls out your name, Duke Jillard. He never screams, “Daddy, Daddy, come save me.” He calls out for someone named Bal Armidor, who never comes, and so after a while he stops shouting and instead he weeps. Is that the name of a man you’ve had killed down here in the darkness, your Grace? Oh, and sometimes he calls out for Falcio. Isn’t that odd?’

Jillard gave me a glance filled with hatred, but this time at least he wasn’t stupid enough to fall for the Dashini’s tactics. ‘Why have your fellow murderers left you in here? What do they hope to gain?’

The Dashini didn’t answer. He just looked to me, his smile intact, and yet once again his expression struck me as disquieted.

‘The other assassins aren’t Dashini,’ I said.

‘Then who?’ Jillard asked.

‘I don’t know – I don’t think he knows either.’

Jillard’s face was a mask of confusion and fear. ‘But Sir Toujean said the assassins were dosing Tommer with the Dashini dust to drive him mad.’

‘Your Knights were foolish to confiscate my belongings,’ the Dashini said. ‘They would have been safer if they’d left them here with me.’

‘If they’d done that,’ Jillard said, ‘you would have escaped already.’

‘You see?’ the Dashini said. ‘This is how simple creatures think. You see a man in a cell and you assume he is caged. Believe me, I can escape any time I choose.’ The Dashini looked again around the sparse cell. ‘Though I grant it will require a little more effort than I feel necessary to expend at this moment, and it is certainly easier to accomplish without the distraction of Falcio here trying to break my fingers.’

‘Then why didn’t you escape earlier?’ Jillard asked.

The Dashini smiled. ‘Because you are not yet dead, your Grace.’

Jillard’s sudden step back caused him to strike the back of his head against the wall.

‘Who sent you to kill the Duke?’ I asked.

The Dashini looked at me and tilted his head. ‘Why would I ever answer such a question? The Dashini have always been tasked with eliminating corruption. The time of the Dukes has passed. Surely you know this by now.’

‘You filthy—’

I looked at Jillard. ‘Your Grace,
shut up
. If you want to live, if you want Tommer to live, you need to keep your mouth shut. When he speaks to you, he does so only to make you reckless.’

I turned back to the Dashini. ‘Why are you killing boys and girls barely old enough to understand what it means to be the child of a Duke? Are they too so corrupt that you have to murder them in their beds under the cover of darkness?’

The Dashini stared back at me through the bars of his cell. Again his face was impassive, but there was tension there, and anger too. ‘We are Dashini. We kill those who must be killed.’ The next words came out slowly, one syllable at a time. ‘We do not kill children.’

‘And yet you murdered Duke Isault’s wife and you murdered his sons, Lucan and Patrin. You murdered his little girl. She was named Avette.’

She likes to paint pictures of dogs
, Shuran had said.
She hopes if she can make one pleasing enough her father will give her a puppy for her birthday.

‘We were sent to kill Duke Isault,’ the Dashini said, ‘not the woman. Not her children.’

‘So what happened? An accident? One of your brothers slipped and accidentally murdered an entire family?’

The Dashini grimaced. ‘We are the sharpest of blades, not blunted wooden cudgels.’ His voice had genuine anger in it now. ‘
We
did not kill Duke Isault’s family.’

‘Then who?’

‘Perhaps it was one of you,’ he suggested. ‘The Trattari have great cause to hate the nobility.’

He wanted to distract me, play on my uncertainties, and that told me something. ‘I think you already know it wasn’t.’

‘More’s the pity,’ the Dashini said. ‘Perhaps your King would still be alive today if he’d had better instincts. Regardless, the death of those in power always brings chaos, Falcio. You above all should know that. And when chaos comes, there are many who would take advantage of it, while laying the blame at the feet of another.’

Saint Dheneph-who-tricks-the-Gods!
That’s
why the Dashini was still here, alive, when other prisoners who were still sane had been butchered. ‘Hells upon hells,’ I said.

‘What is it?’ Jillard asked. ‘What’s going on?’

That’s what they did to Winnow
. She’d got the wound in her thigh fighting off a Dashini sent to kill Isault, but someone else had killed her and the Duke’s family and then made it look as if Winnow was responsible. One conspirator was sending the Dashini to kill the Dukes, and another was taking advantage of the chaos to kill their families. But they’re not working together, which means we have two players manipulating events from the shadows: one seeking to weaken the Ducal power and the other bent on destroying it entirely.

‘Tell me what’s going on!’ Jillard demanded frantically. ‘Please! Tell me what’s happening to my son.’

I hesitated before saying my next words, if only because until that day I could never have imagined in my entire life that I would hear myself saying them. ‘The damned Dashini are being framed.’

The men holding Tommer were going to use him to draw in Jillard and kill both of them. Then they were going to kill off the Dashini; they’d make it look as if he were responsible, but that he’d died from a wound before he could escape.

I stared at the man standing in the shadows of his cell.
I see you now. I know what troubles you, no matter how hard you try to hide it. You don’t know who’s killing these children. You’re being played for a fool, you and all your fellow Dashini, and you don’t care for it.

The Dashini nodded, even though I hadn’t spoken. Then he said, with words devoid of inflection, ‘We are lost.’ I had the strangest sensation he was pleading with me.

‘Where are they?’ I asked. ‘Where are they holding the boy? If you and your fellow Dashini aren’t the ones killing the Ducal heirs, then you have no need to protect those who are.’

‘I do not know,’ he replied, ‘but I don’t think you’ll have much trouble finding him now.’

‘Now? Why now?’ Jillard asked.

The only answer that came to my mind was to pray that Kest and the others had already found him.

A strange, high-pitched whine filled the air; at first I thought it might be some kind of flying insect frighteningly close to my ear, but the sound quickly changed, echoing off the walls and down the passageways throughout the dungeon. It became louder, an eerie moan that finally resolved into a scream of such pure terror that I felt as if I might go mad from the sound.

There was the faintest hint of sympathy in the Dashini’s eyes when he said, ‘Because it is morning, and this is the time when they hurt the boy.’

*

The Duke of Rijou ran through his own dungeon shouting and screaming and sounding very much like one of its prisoners. He raced up and down the maze of twisting passageways like a bat who’d lost its sense of direction, trying desperately to navigate by the echoes of his son’s cries for help.

‘Stop!’ I said at last and grabbed him by the shoulder. I pushed him back against the wall, holding him fast even as he struggled against my grip.

‘Let me go, damn you! They’re torturing my son! They’re—’

‘Look!’ I said, pointing up ahead. The shadows were obscuring the gap in the floor and the deadly spikes waiting below. A guard with experience in these passages, even someone who was just moving carefully, would spot the danger before it was too late – but an escapee running for his life would likely fall in before even realising the trap was there. ‘You will not do Tommer any good if you’re dead.’