Bared Blade (34 page)

Nothing here and no signs of occupation. I’ll try the other side.

The thread contracted, and my familiar returned briefly before sticking his nose under the other door.

This is it. Noble’s suite. Audience chamber. Table with scattered cards and a few kips on it where someone’s been gambling. Two inner doors. One for the master, one for the servants. Two guards in front of the latter. It’s close enough that if I stretch myself thin I can slip past them to take a look.

That sounds pretty risky. I’m not sure it’s such a good idea.

No, it’s all right. As long as I stay behind and under the furniture and keep myself on the pale side, I should be—ooh nasty.

What have you got, Triss?

Tiny anteroom, basically a large closet with doors on all four walls. Crude peepholes mounted on three of the doors. Destruction wards on two of them and the guards literally a half step away. We’ll have to do this fast and clean.

Not to mention soon.

I’d been lucky so far, with no one coming to look down my hallway, but that wouldn’t last. Now I had even more reason to hurry. Destruction wards were ugly business and I didn’t know what orders the Elite lieutenant had given before heading out to the throne room. Not that I was particularly surprised to find them under the circumstances. I wished I could get a look at the wards through Triss’s eyes, but I can only borrow his senses when he surrounds me. Still, I didn’t dare move till I knew a bit more.

Tell me about the wards, Triss.

Drawn in blood. Fire, multiple triggers. Magic, breach, door, pull patches for the guards, maybe more.

I nodded though he couldn’t see the gesture. That much I’d expected. There weren’t a lot of ways to imprison a mage. If you had plenty of time and skill you could build a special cell with all kinds of passive wards that would cause the mage’s own magic to rebound on them. But that kind of thing took constant maintenance from specialists, and really worked best on the lesser sorts of mage.

For quick and dirty yet effective you’d do something like the destruction ward, where any breach of the cell, magical activity—keyed to the blood—or even an unauthorized opening of the door would rain major league destruction down on the inside. Some seriously overpowered version of magefire was the overwhelming favorite for stone rooms, the sort of thing that leaves a fine coating of glass on all the surfaces because the heat is so intense. Really, the only surprise was that they’d warded Fei’s room that way, too. It seemed like overkill if no one knew she was a mage, and if they did know, they’d have done something about binding her familiar. Someone was being awfully cautious.

Death-key? Or anything like it?

Hang on,
sent Triss.
I’ll look.

A lot depended on exactly how they’d drawn the things and what, if anything, would happen when we took out the guards. Worst case was a death-key or some other trick that would trigger the wards if the guards died. But that sort of
thing usually only happened in serious, cover of darkness, deny all knowledge, espionage kinds of situations. And, if they’d been going to use one, I’d have expected it to be keyed to the Elite lieutenant.

I’m not seeing anything too drastic, Aral. I think if we can just keep the guards away from the wards until we drop them, everything will be fine. Plan?

Can you keep that door closed? All I need is a few seconds.

Sure, but I’ll have to stay here and hold it.

Do it.

Sometimes subtle and complex is the answer, with all kinds of distractions and reconnaissance and careful efforts to not harm the innocent. Sometimes you just pop the damn door open and cut some heads off, because that’s the only choice you have. This was one of those latter times.

Though I generally preferred not to kill guards if I didn’t have to, it actually felt pretty good. Maybe because this pair was keeping people who mattered to me locked up. By the time I was opening the inner door to the improvised prison, Triss was sliding across my back trail to close the one that led into the hall.

Still no interest from the direction of the throne room,
he sent as he used a shadow claw to click the lock into place.
But that won’t last.

I’m working as fast as I can.

A double check of the wards reassured me that I wasn’t going to kill anyone by opening the doors. Scheroc blew out of the peephole on the right as I was making my check, and started tugging frantically at my clothes. So I opened that door first.

Fei was waiting on the other side, her face bruised and bloody, with a long slice across her right cheek mirroring the old scar on the left. “It’s about time you got here, Bl—Wait, who the hell are you?” The look of surprise on her face reminded me of the look of somebody else on mine.

“Aral.” I was already turning to the other door. “The new look is your fucking fault, and it nearly killed me, so I don’t
want to hear any shit from you on the subject. There are two dead Crown Guards out there.” I jerked a thumb over my shoulder as she came out. “Grab one of their swords and go keep an eye on the front door. We’re a long way from out of this. Oh, and you’re welcome.”

“Thanks, Aral.” She squeezed my shoulder. “I owe you big.” Then she went to do as I’d asked.

Stel and Vala were also waiting when I opened their cell—handy little messenger, the qamasiin. They both looked the worse for wear, though not nearly so much so as Fei had.

This time I spoke first, tapping my cheek. “Bonewright. We can talk about it later.”

Vala grinned and rose onto tippy-toes to give me a kiss on the cheek. “You look delicious.”

Stel kissed the other one. “Don’t know if I’d go that far, but I have to say that circumstances do make you look pretty damn fine. Thanks for the rescue, Aral.”

I followed them out into the audience chamber. “Don’t thank me too much just yet. We’re still way down deep under the palace, and the Durkoth who was supposed to be our ride out of here has gone missing.”

“
W
hat
do you mean, Qethar’s gone missing?” Fei growled the question from the position she’d taken up just to one side of the door.

“Come on, Fei, it’s not that hard a concept. Last I saw of Qethar he was vanishing up the exit passage on a stone wave. He spotted something he was more interested in and left us in the lurch.”

“Like what?” she demanded. “I thought I told you to offer him the Kothmerk. What’s more important to him than that?” The look she shot me lay somewhere on the edge between defeated and outraged.

“You offered him the Kothmerk!” said VoS, turning both Vala and Stel’s heads to glare at me. “Aral, how could you?”

I know you told them not to thank you, but I didn’t expect the turnaround to be quite this fast,
sent Triss.

Me either.
Then, aloud, “I didn’t promise Qethar anything other than mutual cooperation in locating the Kothmerk, and I’m pretty sure he understood that to mean that we’d probably end up at odds over what happened to it afterward.”

“That was stupid,” said Fei. “Why not just lie to him?”

“That’s not how I work, Fei, and you know it. So does every other shadow captain in Tien. My word is good. But even if I’d lied to him, I think going after the thief who stole the ring might have ranked higher on his list than getting our asses out of trouble. As far as I can tell, he doesn’t much like humans.”

“Wait, Reyna is here?” This from Vala.

“She was,” said Triss. “Very briefly before killing an Elite and bolting.”

“Little Reyna killed an Elite, and you saw it happen?” Stel sounded incredulous. “How’d she manage it?”

“Pretty much the same way she killed all those Durkoth, I imagine.” Then I held up both hands because I didn’t dare let myself think about the girl yet—I had to hold it in a little longer. “But I’m done answering Kothmerk questions for the moment. We have more important things to worry about, like how we’re going to get out of this hole.”

“And what to do about the soldiers I hear out in the passage right now?” asked Fei.

“Yeah that’d be right up there. Triss, take a peek, would you?” He snapped his shadow wings down, launching himself across the floor and slipping under the door. “Stel, Vala, why don’t you check the other chamber back beyond the anteroom there, see if maybe they were dumb enough to keep your gear close by.”

“They weren’t,” said Stel. “That’s where they conducted their interrogations. We got to see a lot of it in the last couple days.” Her expression didn’t invite further inquiries or discussion on the subject, so I just nodded.

“I guess we’ll have to do without your battle wands then.”

Vala scowled. “They broke them in front of me.”

Triss reappeared from the hallway. “They’re not coming down this way yet, but they’ve put two guards on the passage and there’s at least a score of Crown Guard milling around the throne room.”

“Elite?” I asked.

Triss shrugged his wings. “Probably, given where we are,
but there was too much light in the hallway. I didn’t dare try to slip past the guards to look.”

“So, basically, we’re screwed,” I said.

“Then it’s a good thing I came back for you when Fei’s familiar begged me to, isn’t it?” Qethar stood at the door to the inner suite. “Quite a surprise actually, since I hadn’t even known the good captain was a mage.” He directed a smile at Fei that made me want to smack him.

“The girl got away then?” I asked in my sweetest tone—I couldn’t help myself. Though I was using every trick I’d ever learned to keep my concerns for Reyna down below the level of conscious thought, she kept bubbling up to the surface of my mind, and Qethar was really starting to piss me off.

For just an instant, the Durkoth’s mask of perfection slipped, and his expression shifted from smilingly predatory to something twisted and ugly and utterly inhuman with startling swiftness. But then he got himself back under control and directed a too-serene look my way—the sculpture once more.

“Why yes, she did. Does that mean you
don’t
want me to make you a back door, Blade?”

Aral …
Triss sounded worried.

I’m fine, Triss.
“Not at all. I think we both saw what happened back there, and I wanted to establish just how much you need us before I let you carry me through any more walls. Lead the way.”

Fei shot me a “What the hell did I miss there?” look after Qethar had the floor turn his back to us. But I ignored her and followed the Durkoth. I would have loved to turn him down, if for no other reason than because I desperately wanted to have a go at following Reyna’s shadow trail. But there was no way I could get out past an even halfway serious opposition when I’d have to pass through a bottleneck like the long narrow passage to the surface.

The trip back through the stone to the place where we’d left our boat was every bit as unpleasant as the trip down had been, and the less I have to think about it the better.
Even the wet heat of summer slapping me in the face like a bucket of soup didn’t improve my memories of the trip, however cool and dark it might have been.

The boat was gone, of course. Tying it up would have risked drawing unwanted attention to the place of our entry. Not that I thought your average guardsman would have been able to make much of the newly aligned granular structure of the rock wall, if they even noticed the slight change in the dark. All of which meant that someone had to go and fetch us a new boat before the sun came up. One look at the various injuries of the women and the attitude of the Durkoth told me which someone got swimming duty.

As we were looking around the nearby palace docks for a boat to steal, Triss alerted me that we’d crossed Reyna’s shadow trail. Unfortunately, it led straight into the water, where it vanished. Given infinite time before sunrise and equally infinite stamina, I might have been able to pick it up again wherever she returned to shore, but with my comrades counting on my return and dozens of miles of shoreline to search just within the city, I had to let her go for now.

We’ll find her later, Aral.

I know. We have to.

So,
Reyna,
I sent Triss as I ducked into Fei’s privy.

This was the first chance I’d had to talk to him alone since we’d arrived at the captain’s fallback, a town house in the Spicemarket. Even now, we couldn’t talk out loud. Not with Fei’s qamasiin flitting about.

Scheroc had been very quiet since we got the wind spirit’s bond-mate free of the complex under the palace. But even without the odd little breezes that caught at my hair from time to time, I wouldn’t have forgotten it was around and no doubt monitoring everything we said and did. Because of that and because I had business to do I dropped my pants and took a seat.

Triss slid up the wall to face me.
Reyna’s not her real name.

Of course not. I don’t suppose you got enough of a fix on her Shade in the midst of the fight to identify her.

Afraid not. We did pass across her shadow trail long enough for me to get a good sense of her
—he mentally hissed an unfamiliar Shade word—
but I didn’t recognize the one it belonged to.