“Who’s up for finding a back door?” Maldynado asked. “Maybe we’ll stumble across our gear on the way.”
“I just hope you don’t find that hat with the ludicrous feather.” Yara jogged into the courtyard before Maldynado could respond.
Bare feet slapping on the stone floor, Yara veered around benches and potted plants only slightly less densely placed than in the Grotto. Maldynado and Basilard raced after her. She headed for a back wall where a hallway, sets of stairs, and closed doors offered numerous options. She chose the hall, something that might lead to the kitchen perhaps. Kitchens had back doors, didn’t they? For throwing scraps out to dogs or man-eating mechanical alligators?
They found a swinging door at the end. Maldynado peeked inside. A trio of chefs and bakers gaped back at him.
“How do you get out?” Maldynado figured it couldn’t hurt to ask. Meanwhile his comrades checked other doors, only to find them locked.
“You don’t,” a man in a flour-dusted apron said. “You use the garbage chute. Otherwise the gators will—”
An older man shushed him and gave Maldynado a suspicious squint. “Who are you? You don’t look like guests.” He grabbed a butcher knife.
“Just visitors.” Maldynado smiled and shut the door. He looked at the others, hoping they’d found a way out, but Yara and Basilard merely shrugged. “We’ll try another way. I don’t want a fight with the kitchen staff.”
Someone thrust the door open behind him. A glimpse of that butcher knife convinced Maldynado to thrust the door back with enough force to send the chef staggering.
“This way,” Maldynado barked and ran back toward the courtyard. Those stairs ought to take them up to the parapets. If nothing else they could climb down an outside wall.
He lunged out of the hallway, ready to race for stairs to the right, but a man stood there, a forty-year-old flintlock musket pointed at Maldynado’s chest. It was the old fellow they’d seen in the towel. He was wearing clothes now, and an officer’s saber hung from his waist.
“Watch out,” Maldynado said, throwing an arm out to stop the others, even as he skittered back, intending to duck into the hallway.
Someone grabbed Maldynado’s shoulder. The musket fired, but he was too busy being pulled to the floor to worry about it. Basilard leaped over him and barreled into the old man. Maldynado rolled over and jumped to his feet. Basilard had already knocked the fellow down and taken his musket. He stopped at that. Good. They didn’t need to leave a pile of dead resort-goers behind.
“Thanks for the help,” Maldynado said, realizing Basilard had been the one to yank him down before the musket ball found his chest.
Basilard nodded once.
What do we do with him?
The white-haired man wasn’t done
doing
things himself. After a moment of lying quiescent, he tried to hook one of his own legs around Basilard’s to throw him off. In his younger days, he might have managed the move, but Basilard reacted quickly. He used the man’s momentum against him, flipping the old officer over and pinning him to the floor.
Maldynado pointed for Yara to lead the way up the stairs. “Let’s just—”
A bevy of footfalls pounded the hallway floor behind him. The chef with the butcher knife burst around the corner. He’d added a heavy copper skillet to his arsenal. The rest of the kitchen staff—no less than six men—crowded after him.
“There they are!” the chef cried.
“Run,” Maldynado blurted, finishing his sentence.
He used his rifle like a staff to block a surprisingly adroit skillet-knife combination attack. Maldynado stood his ground for a moment, giving Yara and Basilard time to race up the stairs without anyone throwing sharp kitchen utensils at their backs.
After blocking another attack, Maldynado teased out an opening and jammed his rifle butt into the chef’s stomach. As the man doubled over, Maldynado kicked a young dish boy trying to get at his side. Both attackers stumbled back, hindering the rest of the staff.
Maldynado wheeled about and sprinted up the stairs.
“Duck!” Yara yelled when he was halfway up.
No sooner had he obeyed than the butcher knife cracked against flagstones a few steps above him. Basilard fired from up top. Not to kill, Maldynado hoped, but he dared not pause to check. As soon as he burst onto the top, he, Basilard, and Yara took off, racing down a long landing that was—unfortunately—open to the courtyard below. More knives and sharp utensils clanged off the railing and the walls all about them.
“Unbelievable,” Maldynado muttered, pausing to try a door, one of many along the landing. “Only in the empire would the kitchen staff rally to chase off intruders instead of hiding in the pantry.”
Basilard ducked a hurled pan and gave Maldynado a quick nod as he tried another door. Both were locked.
“Here!” Yara flung open the last door.
Maldynado and Basilard ran to join her. The kitchen staff had taken to the stairs and the fastest were surging onto the landing.
Just as Maldynado reached the door and grabbed the jamb, intending to propel himself around the edge, something with the heft of a wrecking ball slammed into his back. He staggered forward, and his face smashed against the doorjamb.
“Cursed ancestors,” he growled.
A marble rolling pin clunked to the floor at his feet.
“Unbelievable,” Maldynado repeated as he darted through the doorway. “Why me? Nobody would throw rolling pins at
Sicarius
.” He was starting to rethink his decision not to shoot anyone on the kitchen staff.
The door lacked a security bar or a nearby armoire he could shove in front of it, but it did have a lock, albeit the flimsy type made only to keep an honest man honest, not deter a serious intruder. Or determined chefs. Maldynado thunked it into place, hoping it would slow the mob.
“Move! I see security coming!” someone yelled from the direction of the stairs. “They’ll have guns.”
Erg, repeating firearms would make short work of that lock. Maldynado spun, hoping Yara hadn’t led them into a walk-in closet.
A short hallway led away from the door. At first, all Maldynado could see was a chest of drawers against a wall, but a few steps took him into a bedroom brightened by candles. A man and woman were entangled amongst sheets. The candlelight was bright enough to give Maldynado a view of bare breasts; under normal circumstances, he would have stopped to gaze in admiration. As it was, he only noted that the naked couple had no weapons nearby, though with the night he’d had thus far, he wouldn’t be surprised if one of them yanked a dagger out from beneath a pillow. Or a rolling pin. At the moment, they were too busy staring at Basilard and Yara who had burst across the room to a window. Yara’s frustrated grunts and pulling motions suggested the wrought iron vines and leaves snaking across the panes were more than decorations.
Bangs sounded at the door.
“How do you unlock this slagging thing?” Yara thumped a fist against the window, sounding like a woman with her patience balanced on the edge of a precipice. She mustn’t have expected quite so much adventure when Amaranthe had recruited her to join them in Forkingrust.
“Easy, Yara, we’ll get out, and we’ll do it in time to help… people.” Maldynado glanced at the pair on the bed. The woman had yanked the sheet over her chest, and the man was eyeing a sword belt dangling on a chair near Basilard.
Yara glowered over her shoulder at Maldynado. “How can you be optimistic? Your plan has been a disaster.”
The thumps at the door intensified.
“That’s true,” Maldynado said. “When I imagined spending the night on Rabbit Island with my fiancée—” he winked at her, drawing a fresh lip curl, “—I was picturing us in something similar to
that
position.”
“You
were
?” Yara’s lip curl vanished, replaced by a gawk.
“Naturally,” Maldynado said, surprised by
her
surprise.
Focus
, Basilard signed.
We must open the window or find another way out.
A boom roared in the hallway. The door shuddered, though the thumps that followed didn’t hurl it open. Someone had bad aim, or the lock was stronger than it looked.
Maldynado stepped further into the room, wondering if there might be a secret passage—this
was
a castle after all. The pair in the bed were probably only guests, but maybe they’d know.
Maldynado smiled, pretended to remove a hat and press it to his chest, and bowed deeply toward the woman. “Pardon our intrusion, but are there any other exits from this room?”
The woman pointed toward a tapestry featuring a pair of randy elk. “There’s a—”
“Ssh, don’t help them.” Her partner covered her mouth with his hand and glanced toward his weapons belt again. “Who
are
you people?”
“Innocent guests who couldn’t quite cover the bill.” Maldynado jogged to the tapestry and lifted the edge, revealing a door. Excellent. “The prices are a little higher than listed in the brochure.”
Maldynado unlatched the door and waved for his comrades to join him. A dark, narrow stairwell led upward to another door. The last words he heard, as he headed up, came from the man. “Brochure? There’s no brochure for this place, is there? I thought it was
exclusive
.”
Someone shut the door, pitching the stairway into blackness. Maldynado fumbled his way to the top.
“That door better not be locked too,” Yara said.
“If it is, it’s not my fault,” Maldynado said. “You chose this room.”
“
You
chose this situation. Besides, someone had to get us off that landing. You were seconds away from being pummeled to death by flying rolling pins.”
Maldynado groaned as he groped for a latch. Why’d she have to witness all his embarrassing moments? At least the door was unlocked. Freedom at last. He opened the door to the crisp, cold air of late autumn—and a very small, round tower top that on one side overlooked the courtyard, on the other the castle wall and the cliff on the back side of the island. Basilard and Yara joined him, crowding the tiny space. There wouldn’t be anywhere to hide if someone started firing at them from the looming towers at the castle corners.
“If the brochure promised this room came with a balcony, those folks better ask for their money back. You’d be hard-pressed to fit a single lounge chair up here.” Maldynado searched for a ladder or way off. There wasn’t one. The three-story drop on the wall side led straight into the moat. Or, if one were terribly athletic and could leap past enough rocks, to the river, some seventy or eighty feet below.
“I see I can count on you to think of the important things in dire situations,” Yara said.
Basilard pointed at the head of the island. From the elevated perch, the docks and the steamboat were visible. The dinghy they’d arrived on was gone, and there was no sign of Books, Akstyr, or the emperor. The steamboat was belching smoke out of its stack and maneuvering away from the docks, the giant rear paddle turning slowly. In a minute or two, the
Glacial Empress
would be heading downriver at full speed.
“We going after that boat?” Maldynado asked. “Or staying here to look for the emperor?”
“Neither if we get shot.” Yara pointed to the courtyard at the same time as someone yelled, “Up there!”
“Fire!” came another cry.
Basilard dropped to a crouch. Maldynado, having already been hit by projectiles that night, took it further and flattened himself to his belly. It was perhaps a bit rude to take up so much of the limited floor space, for Yara tripped over him when she tried to crouch herself. Maldynado caught her as she fell, using his body to keep her from slamming into the unyielding stones.
“So,” he said, “we end up entangled after all.”
Yara was too busy elbowing him for Maldynado to savor the moment. She climbed past him to peer over the edge on the moat side. Basilard hunkered there too.
The women must have fled to the boat
, he signed.
The emperor wanted to follow them. If he and the others avoided capture, they will be there.
“We’ll never climb down and reach the docks in time.” Maldynado eyed the rocks and the moat. Maybe it was his imagination, but he thought he spotted a pair of crimson eyes floating by below.
If we jump, we might be able to swim around the island fast enough to catch up. They’re still maneuvering out of the docks.
“What are we discussing?” Yara asked.
“The plan.”
“Which is?”
Basilard made a jumping motion and pointed at the river.
“
Jump?
” Yara stared at Basilard and then at the meters of moat and rock between the edge of their perch and the start of the water. And the depth of the drop, too, perhaps. “Did someone kick your ore cart over?”
“If the emperor is alive, he’ll likely be on that boat,” Maldynado said. “We can’t abandon him.” Not if there was any chance Sicarius would learn about it anyway.
Basilard nodded firmly. Doubt filled Yara’s eyes as she studied the drop.
“If you don’t think you can make it,” Maldynado said, pushing thoughts of Sicarius’s threats out of his head, “I’ll stay here with you and fight.”
“I didn’t say I couldn’t
make
it.”
A steam whistle blew, its pitch low and eerie as it floated up to the castle. They had to decide quickly if they hoped to catch the boat, but Maldynado didn’t want to say anything else that might cause Yara to put pride ahead of wisdom. He wasn’t entirely sure
he
could make that leap without landing on the rocks.
Yara cursed, not a choice succinct word or phrase, but an entire stream that impressed him for its ecumenical vulgarity. She hiked up her dress, backed up, and took a running leap, her bare feet launching her from the low wall around the balcony. Maldynado gawked as she arced out over the moat and the rocky drop beyond it. He held his breath, his hands clenched into fists. If she didn’t make it…
Yara splashed into the river with a few feet to spare. Maldynado waited for her head to pop up, but it didn’t. What if she’d reached the goal only to plunge into water too shallow?
Basilard slapped his arm and pointed. They had to go as well. Maldynado nodded, though he couldn’t tear his gaze from the spot where Yara had gone in.