Mastiff (61 page)

“Tell me you killed him,” I said quietly. I knew him, knew what his answer would be, but a mot can dream.

“No,” Farmer said, shocked. I sighed and my soft-hearted man told me, “It is not my right to kill him. It’s the law’s right, and the king’s right as wielder of the law. I knocked him halfway to Midwinter and laid a sleep on him.”

“Faw,” Daeggan said with scorn, and spat on the floor. “All the slaps and pinches I’ve had from that one, and he only gets a nap?”

I glanced at the prince. Gareth had taken the thumb from his mouth. “The law?” whispered the lad. “You work for the law? The law belongs to my papa.”

“It’s your papa who sent us, and your mama,” I said. “I promised them we’d bring you home.”

“We all swore to serve the law and bring you home, and find out who took you,” Farmer added. “Come along, lad. We need to hurry.”

Gareth trotted down the steps and climbed onto my back.

“
That’s
better,” Daeggan said as Pounce leaped onto his shoulders. He flinched, but he accepted the cat’s weight and looked at Farmer.

“We need to go back a way,” Farmer told me. “There’s another tunnel. It looks better suited to us than the one you were aiming for.”

“Are you certain?” I asked quietly, following him back down the corridor. “I want to get the swive-all pus mouse out of this sarden castle.”

“Those are bad words,” Gareth said in my ear. “Lunedda spanked me when I said
swive
.” I waited for him to weep at the mention of his dead nursemaid, but he only buried his face in my shoulder.

“You have no idea of the bad words Beka knows, my lad,” Farmer murmured back. “Once she starts, she nearabout sets my ears on fire. We’re very, very lucky she’s no mage, or the power of her words would split every lawbreaker she arrests from top to toe.” He led us up a flight of stairs. The downward end was the way to the dungeons.

“Stop blathering,” I ordered Farmer, as if he’d listen. Truth to tell, I was grateful for his folly, as the boy seemed to take comfort from it. He was relaxing in my grip. His trembling eased until it was the slightest of quivers. I doubted that he’d stopped shaking since he was yanked from his home.

“You arrest people?” Gareth whispered.

“Farmer and me are Provost’s Guards,” I explained as we continued to climb. “There’s three of us and a lady knight who came here seeking you.”

“I want to be a Provost’s Guard when I grow up, before I’m … you know,” he said, stumbling to a halt before
king
, I was sure. “I thought you all had uniforms and batons and boots and badges.”

It was good to hear him so eager. “This is my uniform. It’s very dirty,” I explained. “One day you’ll see me properly kitted out.” Farmer was hand-signaling for silence. I put my finger on my lips so the boys would understand and the three of us ducked into a hall that opened onto the stair. Farmer did something to the nearest door that made it open partway. The room beyond was dark and smelled of lack of use. Silently we three moved out of the light that shone in through the opening.

Farmer bumped me with his hip and tugged Gareth. Gently he shifted the boy onto his own back. He
would
do so when I couldn’t object, not aloud, and not with hand signs that he would see. When I put my hand on Gareth’s side, though, he was trembling no more than he had on my own back. I relaxed. Seemingly the chatter between Farmer and me had made him feel better about my man, better enough that Gareth didn’t mind riding on Farmer’s back instead of mine.

I moved to the crack between the hinges on the door, where I could see the stair. I heard the approach of booted feet and voices. The folk were arguing softly and passionately. I took out two of the knives I’d stolen, just in case. Then I realized that one voice was Sabine’s. When they came in view, I nearly gasped. Nomalla of Halleburn walked with Sabine and Tunstall as if they were taking a stroll after supper. Only the fact that all three carried four heavy packs and the belt with my baton put the lie to their appearance. Tunstall was in uniform again, his baton hanging at his waist. He even had boots!

I clicked my tongue twice, in the way Tunstall had taught me, the way hillmen do it. He stopped the two mots. “Cooper, it’s all right, I think,” he said quietly, with a glare at Lady Nomalla. She’d put her hand on the hilt of her sword the moment he spoke. “The lady has rethought things.”

“Go,” Farmer’s voice whispered beside my ear. “We’ll wait.”

Pounce left Daeggan to join me. We went out onto the stair, keeping distance between us and the Halleburn knight. Sabine gripped me by the shoulders and looked me intently in the eyes. “We were coming to release you from the dungeon,” she explained. “Farmer’s gone somewhere—he locked Elyot into a substance like glass and tore the main hall apart.” She picked up Pounce and kissed him. He even let her. “Have you seen the boy?” she asked. “We got into Prince Baird’s rooms, but there’s no sign of him. We just found some of the kitchen servants. They told us they fled when the mage fight began upstairs. We have to find the boy and Farmer before we can get away.”

I pointed to Nomalla. “Why are you trusting
her
?”

“She freed us,” Tunstall said.

“You wouldn’t understand,” Nomalla told me. “You’re a Guard, you’re for sale to anyone with a sufficient bribe. A knight has her honor.”

“That’s
enough,
” Sabine barked, her eyes fiery. “Nomalla, if you speak so of
these
two Guards again, you’ll face my sword. Their honor is every bit as good as yours. Better. They’ve not turned on the Crown for so much as an hour.”

“May we brandish our shields at some better time?” Farmer asked wearily as he stepped from the darkened room with Gareth on his back and Daeggan at his heels. The prince whimpered and struggled to flee when he saw Nomalla, but Farmer hitched Gareth around to sit on his hip and bounced him as if he’d been a mother all his life. “Easy, lad. She’s on our side, for now.” He looked at Nomalla with eyes that had turned the color of ice. “If she isn’t, I’ll make her very sad.”

“Will you turn her to ice, too?” Daeggan asked. “She’s all right, you know, for one of
them
. She made her brother stop whippin’ me.”

Nomalla backed away from Farmer a step. She put both hands on her weapons, one on her dagger hilt, one on her sword. “You buried Elyot in stone, or ice, or something up to his neck,” she whispered, her voice shaking. “He’s screaming for someone to let him out.”

Farmer’s smile had no warmth in it. “Only Cassine Catfoot could free him. Let’s be on our way, shall we? You first.”

“One moment,” Tunstall said. He smiled at Daeggan. “Who’s this?”

“This is Daeggan. He’s a slave who wants to change his place in life,” I said. “He knows a way out.”

“So do we,” Sabine told us. “Nomalla and I played in the tunnels as girls. I know one that’s best for our purposes.”

Daeggan looked up at me. I nodded, knowing he was asking if my friend could be trusted.

“I think you’d best make your own way out of here,” Tunstall said, resting a hand on Daeggan’s shoulder. Gently he told the boy, “If not that, go back to your place and wait for us to return with soldiers to arrest the lord. We have a rough journey ahead. A deadly one. Too risky for a lad, even one as brave as you.”

Daeggan gave Tunstall his clenched fist of a scowl. “I’m stayin’ wiv
her
,” he said, pointing to me. “Her I know better’n you. I go wiv her or I tell my lord ye’re down here.”

“Clever lad,” Farmer remarked.

“Daeggan’s my friend,” Gareth said.

“That settles that, then,” Tunstall said, grouchy. “If we live, I’ll find him a good position scrubbing privies. Let’s move.” He passed my belt and pack to me while Sabine set Pounce down and gave Farmer’s shoulder pack to him. I took the kitchen knives from my makeshift belt and put them in my pack before I donned my true belt and felt for my own blades and my baton. Then I checked my pack and nearabout yelped with delight. My arm guards, each with ten thin knives as ribs, lay on top of my other belongings. Hurriedly I slid them on. Though I could manage the ties myself with one hand and my teeth, Farmer did them up for me. As I bent to close my pack, I saw light near the bottom. It was my stone lamp. I slid it into my pocket. A little light is always useful.

Once Farmer and I had our packs in place and Farmer had settled Gareth in his arms, Nomalla and Sabine led the way down the steps. Pounce walked between Tunstall and Farmer, whilst I brought up the rear. Daeggan trotted along with me. I started to feel uneasy as we went deeper. So did Farmer, from the looks he gave Tunstall, and so did the lad beside me.

Finally Daeggan halted. “She’s takin us t’ th’ cells, she’s gonna lock us up and turn us over!” he whispered, clutching my arm. We weren’t far from the guards’ station. He had a point. All we needed was a cove with a short run to an alarm bell.

Nomalla and Sabine halted on the last landing between us and the dungeons. They turned left and walked three yards down a small corridor there. Farmer followed while Tunstall put his finger to his lips and frowned at Daeggan. Into the hall we went. I paused on the landing, trying to hear any noise from either way on the stairs. All was silent. Wouldn’t they come to the dungeons to find me, knowing Farmer was out? Had they tried to find Gareth, or had they gone for Sabine and Tunstall, believing them to be more important just now? I rubbed the back of my neck and caught up with the others.

Sabine and Nomalla had turned to face the left-hand wall. Like the rest of this part of the castle, it was old stone. The rock was not all cut to the same shape, but the pieces were fitted together, round, square, and rectangular. The differences between them were filled in with mortar. Among them one small, reddish stone hardly stood out, though the other ones were gray. The red one was at chest height for Lady Sabine. She set a couple of fingers against it and pushed.

A section of the wall in front of the lady swung in like a door. Gareth, who seemed to know to be silent, gasped and almost clapped his hands with delight, stopping himself just in time. Beyond the door lay a dank tunnel, barely high enough to fit Tunstall and scarcely wide enough to fit him and Farmer walking abreast. It was veiled in cobwebs and thin roots. I checked the map in my head and found this place. The tunnel that opened into that corridor was one of those that led off the edge of the map.

Tunstall grabbed the nearest torch from its bracket.

“I can light the way,” Farmer protested. I reached in my pocket for my light stone.

Tunstall grinned and passed the torch around the opening, burning the cobwebs away. “Can your light do that?” he asked.

Farmer shrugged. “You know I can’t do fire, remember?” he asked. It was just as well. I had the firm opinion that Farmer should save his strength, physical and magical. We had a long road ahead, all of it on foot, with Farmer, the lads, and me barefoot at that.

Tunstall went first with Pounce beside him, then Nomalla and Sabine. Farmer put Gareth down and shooed him, Daeggan, and me ahead of him. Once we were inside, he shoved the stone door closed. Daeggan, for all his spirit, did not like the dark that filled the air around us. No more did Gareth.

“Keep to the main path,” Nomalla told us. “Don’t go into any of the side tunnels. It’s too easy to get lost down here.”

After that the two lads clutched each other tight and flinched at every side tunnel we passed. The torch did very little for those of us behind Tunstall and the ladies. I was taking my stone lamp from my pocket when a cool kind of moonlight filled the tunnel.

“There’s no need,” I said, showing Farmer my own lamp.

Farmer touched it with one of his glowing hands. The stone shone brighter than before. “Stop worrying,” he murmured. “Tunstall appears to have forgotten I do light, if not fire. Light’s the easiest thing I do. And it’s everywhere.”

I let Daeggan hold my stone. Once he realized it wasn’t hot, he clutched it like his life depended on it. I took the lads’ hands. We hurried on after the others, poor Farmer bending so he wouldn’t bump his head. Tunstall was in the same basket. I noticed that after a time he began to rub the back of his neck. The position and the tunnel’s chill damp were making his bones ache. There was a warm balm in his pack, but neither he nor Sabine would take the time to get it out. I think none of us believed that our captors would not discover our absence and work out that we had help from within.

“How many know of these tunnels?” I asked Lady Nomalla.

“My brother, who is not here,” she replied over her shoulder. “Perhaps my father and my aunt, who grew up in this place. The castellan, certainly. He is one of my father’s by-blows. That’s all.”

“I always preferred him to your brother,” Sabine remarked, as calmly as if we were on a daylight stroll. They talked quietly about relatives as we continued on through the depths under Halleburn’s causeway, where the tunnel grew wider and higher.

No such daylight walk I’d taken sported blind white lizards moving at the corner of my eye, or pale fish in the stream that ran alongside one section of the tunnel. The side tunnels sometimes showed bigger webs than either of the boys. At one turning some poor mumper had been chained to the rock and left to die, a skeleton in very old-fashioned rags.

Sabine halted and laid a gentle hand on the dead man’s skull. “I still say a prayer for you before each fight, Brother Bones,” she told him quietly. “I have kept my promise.” She noticed we all stared, and explained, “I was lost here when I was very young. I promised Brother Bones that I would pray for him if he would show me the way to the castle, and he did.”

“Do you know who he is?” Tunstall asked.

Lady Nomalla replied, “My father does not know and says his father did not know, so the poor man has been here nearly a century at least.”

The lads gave the skeleton a wide berth. I looked back as we hurried on. The dead man had naught to say to me. I thought my own prayer for him and sent it to the God, in case Brother Bones’s soul still wandered for lack of a pigeon to carry him.

It seemed as if we’d been treading the uneven ground forever when I felt a breeze coming from somewhere in front of me. A moment later Tunstall whispered loudly, “Douse the lights!”