Broken Blade (22 page)
Authors: Kelly McCullough
I would kill the king or die trying.
12
Even
though I’d managed to successfully slip into the Grand Tower previously, this trip felt different. Every noise was louder, every check and pause longer, every surprise more startling. Various techniques I’d learned to slow my heart and quiet my breathing helped. So did a carefully gauged series of efik beans chewed on the run. But I still felt as tight as an overdrawn bowstring by the time I reached the little council chamber.
though I’d managed to successfully slip into the Grand Tower previously, this trip felt different. Every noise was louder, every check and pause longer, every surprise more startling. Various techniques I’d learned to slow my heart and quiet my breathing helped. So did a carefully gauged series of efik beans chewed on the run. But I still felt as tight as an overdrawn bowstring by the time I reached the little council chamber.
After I’d shut the outer door, I laid my length on the floor and pressed my tiny ear trumpet against the crack of the inner door. I stayed there for nearly half an hour listening to the patrolling Elite, making sure the routine remained unchanged and working myself up to the next step. Once I felt sure of both the guard and the steadiness of my hands, I slipped the cornerbright under the door and did a final check on the hall and the door wards.
Everything looked the same, so I quickly fixed a pair of long leather straps across the width of the door and slid two thin wedges underneath it. The straps had been prepared using a simple spell of binding and stiffening that would keep them in place and rigid for some hours. One went just above the floor, and the other about a foot above that and an inch or so below the bottommost of the heavy iron bands that bound the thick oak planks together.
Next I drew a slim dagger and gestured Triss to action—unless something went wrong, there would be no speech between us until the end of the mission. At my sign, Triss slid down my arm and enveloped my hand and the dagger in a dense layer of shadow. Concentrating his presence most heavily along the blade’s leading edge, he exerted himself and created a knife-thin gate into the everdark—not that I realized it at the time.
Placing the shadowed edge against the wood of the door a hairsbreadth below that bottommost iron band, I began to saw silently away at the planks. I had to stop and wait out the passing of the guard twice in that time. The seam, lying in the shadow of the iron band, was nearly invisible, but the knife’s tip was another story. When I was done, I had converted the bottom foot of the door into a free-floating horizontal plank held tightly in place by the wedges. Next, I reattached it to the main body of the door with a second pair of leather straps mounted vertically. These were shorter and more flexible, serving as hinges.
When the guard next went down the stairs, I quickly pulled out the wedges, flipped my impromptu trapdoor open, and slid most of my body out into the narrow hallway. Above me, the door ward glowed peacefully away, untriggered because the door itself remained shut. I was really working against time now; the pass-through I’d just cut simply couldn’t be repaired without leaving traces any mage could see.
Cracking the door across the way took much longer because I had to duck back into the council room every time the guard came back, and I couldn’t rig it with straps until I was inside the second room, out of sight of the guard. But eventually I had a second pass-through rigged. This one opened into the sitting room of a large and apparently vacant suite, probably belonging to the recently executed crown prince.
Using my dim red thieveslamp, I quietly explored the apartment. Beyond the sitting room lay a withdrawing room and a sleeping chamber, all beginning to develop the empty smell that even the best-kept vacant rooms start to acquire after a while. Most importantly, I found the garderobe. It was hidden behind a small door off the withdrawing room.
In a less secure castle, such a privy would have been situated on an outside wall and simply voided its contents into empty space. Not in Tien Palace. Here, the broad ceramic pipe that angled back from the hole in the marble bench disgorged itself into a central shaft that led down through the building into the sewers below the castle. For ease of cleaning—it wouldn’t do to stink up the royal quarters—the central shaft was big enough to easily accommodate a man.
Were that shaft less carefully secured, it would have provided a perfect route into the royal apartments. But it was simply too heavily guarded down in the deeps at the sewer level. Master Urayal had demonstrated that by his death, and I had further verified it with my own extensive explorations of Tien’s undercity. But it wasn’t the shaft or the sewers I was interested in.
Working quickly, I levered up the marble bench with its central hole and set it aside. Then, more tricky and more messy, I pulled out the pipe. The former I left leaning against the garderobe wall. The latter I tucked into the late prince’s wardrobe. That opened a path to the central shaft that a fleeing assassin could quickly and easily take.
Next, I opened my trick bag and pulled out a good-sized smudge candle, attaching it to the wall of the shaft as far down as I could reach. Looking at it from above, I could just see the faint glow of the spells that had been cooked into the wax and its half dozen wicks. I was just pulling back when the glow was partially occluded as a ragged and rotting hand reached up from below to catch at my wrist.
That momentary silhouette gave me a critical instant to set the grip of my other hand on the lip of the privy above. Without that, the sharp yank the reaching hand delivered would have tipped me over the edge and sent me plunging headfirst down the long stone shaft. Even so, it was a close-run thing. Pain hammered up my arm as the bones of my wrist ground together in the inhumanly strong grip of the thing lurking below. Then it started pulling.
I had to clench my jaw to keep from screaming as my right shoulder tried to come out of its socket. It hurt even more when I twisted my hand, grabbed its wrist in turn, and started to pull back.
“Triss!” I hissed. “Help me with this thing!”
Shadow surged down along my right arm to enclose both my wrist and the hand gripping it in liquid night. Immediately, there was an easing of the pressure. At the same time, tendrils of darkness wrapped themselves around my upper back and shoulders, adding Triss’s strength to my own as I fought to bring the thing up into the garderobe. It fought back hard though it made no sound other than a sort of dreadful scrabbling and scratching on the stones of the shaft as I dragged it slowly up into the light.
“Ware!” said Triss, his voice soft but urgent. “It’s going to—”
The thing suddenly stopped resisting, somehow managing to launch itself up out of the throat of the garderobe, lunging for my neck with its free hand. It met a shield of night and slid off without finding its target and together we fell back against the door of the garderobe and on out into the room beyond, knocking over my thieveslight in the process. That caused the shutter to snap shut—it was designed to do so at the slightest impact—and plunged the room into complete darkness.
We landed hard with my attacker on top, its bony knees pressing into my ribs as it started to squeeze with its legs, but I was ready. Even as we’d gone through the door I had flicked my left arm, sending the knife in my wrist sheath sliding into my hand. Now I drove the slender blade up into the soft flesh in the hollow of the monster’s right armpit.
It didn’t even flinch as the steel went in to the hilt. Instead, it brought that hand back around for another grab at my throat. This time Triss couldn’t keep it off, though he did manage to form a thick layer of himself into a sort of shadow gorget that kept the thing from crushing my throat outright. Between that and the band that was protecting my right wrist, there wasn’t much Triss left to do anything else.
If the thing had been one-tenth as smart as it was strong, Ashvik’s defenses would have accounted for their fourth Blade that night. But once it had a grip on my throat, it seemed to forget entirely that that left me a free arm. Reaching back over my shoulder, I drew one of my swords—the guard dragged along the floor as I did so, making a grating noise that seemed horribly loud by comparison to the near silence of our fight so far.
With purple starting to flash around the edges of my vision as its scissoring legs slowly squeezed my lungs empty, I brought the sword around and lopped its head off. For three long beats of my heart, I thought it was going to keep right on squeezing, but then the pressure eased, and it slumped forward onto my chest. Whether it was the beheading or the virtue of the goddess’s sword that did for it, I couldn’t say.
What I really wanted to do just then, more than anything, was collapse in a heap for a few minutes and then go home to the temple. Instead, I put an arm on a dead shoulder and shoved. The thing came apart like a child’s straw doll gone rotten.
“Triss, light,” I husked.
A moment later, I had the thieveslight in my hand. I flicked it briefly over the corpse of my attacker—some variety of restless dead by the look of it. The people of the Kvanas dispose of their fallen by exposing them on tall platforms. What the crows don’t take quickly stiffens and dries into the consistency of jerky.
This thing looked liked six months on the drying rack. The general state of decay marked it as one of the risen—mistakenly called zombies by some—and a devilishly clever move on Ashvik’s part. Not only dangerous on its own, but also for the curse it carried. Without the protections the goddess wove around her Blades, I might already be on my way to becoming this thing’s replacement. I shuddered and said a quick prayer of thanks to Namara.
I still see it in my nightmares occasionally, but at the time I put the horror aside in a little box, as I had been taught.
It is acceptable to feel fear, it is folly to hold on to it.
Then I went to listen at the door to the withdrawing room to see whether the fight had attracted the attention of the patrolling Elite. But it had been fast and it had been quiet and I got lucky. No one came.
It is acceptable to feel fear, it is folly to hold on to it.
Then I went to listen at the door to the withdrawing room to see whether the fight had attracted the attention of the patrolling Elite. But it had been fast and it had been quiet and I got lucky. No one came.
I looked back over at the corpse and noticed that it now looked like ten months a-drying. I put a heel on the exposed end of a thighbone and started to shift my weight. It gave off a distinct sewer smell as it powdered, and I decided that maybe I’d leave the shit-soaked risen out of the story if I ever got to tell it to anyone. Class it with magical defenses and call it an animate ward maybe.
But that was getting ahead of myself. I had a job to do, so five minutes later I was back in the damn garderobe. After making sure the smudge candle remained in place—thank Namara for small favors, it did—I made quick use of the hole. The encounter had rather forcefully reminded me of my bladder—fear will do that. Then I stepped up onto the lip of the privy. That put me high enough to rub a potion into the plaster of the ceiling over an area a couple of feet across.
It made more noise than I’d have liked as it liquefied and slowly dropped onto the rug, but there was no avoiding it, and at least it was quieter than the damned risen had been. When enough plaster had dissolved away, I attached another set of trapdoor straps to the planks of the floor above, this time making sure to set a latch.
Time pressed ever more heavily on my shoulders. Like the pass-throughs I’d cut into the outer doors, the dissolved plaster left a trail that couldn’t be erased. Still, I listened carefully for several minutes before I started cutting into the planks above. This time I used one of my swords so I could cut faster. As soon as I had a big enough opening, I blacked out my thieveslamp and unspelled the latch, easing the trapdoor open. There was a gentle fluttering noise and a light thud as the rug dropped through from above. I was in.
Thankfully, it was as dark above as below. I reopened my lamp then and affixed a sheet of paper with a ward of fire to the hanging edge of the trapdoor. Then I leaped and caught the lip, pulling myself up into the king’s garderobe. Even with the hole in the floor, the space felt stuffy because of the tightness of the door’s seal. That was one of the many reasons I’d taken the risk with the pass-throughs rather than just cutting through the ceiling of the council room.
Garderobes had thick, well-set doors intended to spare noble noses. Those same features meant they also spared noble ears from the noises of my entry. They also stacked. There was no way of knowing what lay above the council room, but because of the placement of that central sewer shaft, the garderobes had to be built one above the other, and the suite above my original entry point belonged to King Ashvik.
With my feet straddling the hole in the floor, I pressed my ear trumpet against the door. I wanted nothing more than to act fast, but I had to know if there was an Elite bodyguard stationed in the withdrawing room. I thought the sitting room a much more likely choice, and a niche in the hall just outside the royal suite most likely of all, but I wasn’t going to let incaution ruin me at this point. Only after I felt sure of the room beyond did I ease the door open.
Other books
She Drives Me Crazy by Leslie Kelly
Untamed (A Bad Boy Secret Baby Romance) by Emilia Kincade
Always a Scoundrel by Suzanne Enoch
Bone Deep by Webb, Debra
A Baby Under the Tree by Duarte, Judy
A Semi-Precious Christmas by Jan Elder
Love and Gravity by Connery, Olivia
Friend Or Fiend? by Blume, Judy
Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman
B00CLEM7J0 EBOK by Worre, Eric