“Sure you want me to stay behind?” Fira asked, looking past Nesaea into the waiting darkness.
“No,” Nesaea admitted, drawing the Eye of Nami-Ja from its leather pouch. “But it’s better for you to guard my escape, than to allow someone to bar my way.”
Fira glanced round the graveyard, then to the top of the hill they had descended. “Very well,” she said reluctantly.
“Just keep your head down,” Nesaea said with more confidence than she felt. “And make sure you close the door after me. If you have to hide, I don’t want anyone to think grave robbers are about.”
She entered the mausoleum before Fira could give a reason not to. The glowing orb lit the way down a set of narrow stone steps. Behind her, the door shut with a low boom, severing the daylight.
Chapter 11
At the bottom of the steps, Nesaea found dust coating everything except an iron sepulcher centered in the small chamber. It looked to have been swept clean, and shone dull gray. Nesaea ran her hand over its cool, pitted surface, seeking the head of a graven lion. There were many, but according to Lynira, the one she sought should be loose.
She had circled the sepulcher twice before her fingers chanced upon the right lion. She gave it a wiggle, then pushed hard. A low clunk sounded, followed by a grinding noise. The lid began to clank and shudder open.
Nesaea held the Eye of Nami-Ja high, and drew her belt knife, the little girl she had once been certain some walking horror was about to creep out. Nothing escaped, save a strong boggy odor, and the faint wail of wind.
She edged closer, peeked inside. Instead of a cobwebbed corpse wrapped in grave clothes, she saw another set of stone steps leading down into darkness so thick that even the Eye of Nami-Ja could not penetrate it. She took a fearful step back before halting herself.
Instead of abandoning the quest, Nesaea visualized her father, a man she had not seen in two decades. She remembered his laughter, always quick and easy, even when things went wrong for him, which they almost always did. For the first time in all her travels, there was a better than good chance he waited just ahead. And if he was locked in some musty dungeon, no matter what he might have done to earn imprisonment, he needed her help.
She took a deep breath, climbed onto the edge of the sepulcher, and started down. The deeper she went into the earth, the cooler and damper the air became. Where the walls started off as dressed stone, they soon became roughhewn rock, slicked by dripping moisture, and knobby with pale fungus.
At the bottom, she came to a wide cave with a low ceiling. Mud squished under her riding boots. In places where her light did not shine, vermin chattered. When she raised the orb overhead, stealthy shapes slithered out of sight. Here and there, small eyes reflected light, blinking with more curiosity than fear.
After casting about and finding nothing of interest beyond a rotten barrel and a yellowed skeleton that might have belonged to a cat, Nesaea struck off at a quick clip.
The passage ran straight and true for a long time. With each step, the sound of wind grew louder. A little farther on, she discovered not wind, but a stream rushing through a crack in one wall, and vanishing into another crack in the opposite wall.
After leaping across it, she pressed on until coming to a door of iron bars. When she brushed a finger against one, rust flaked off, but the remaining iron was thick as her wrist. A lock and a coil of heavy chain secured the door.
Nesaea tried to get at the lock with her picks, but it was on the wrong side of the bars. She withdrew a small vial from a pocket sewn inside her cloak. The fluid within the container was not magical, but to anyone unlearned in alchemy, the results would appear so.
With the utmost care, she pried off the cork stopper, dribbled a few drops into the lock’s keyhole. Her elbow struck an iron bar, jostling a few more drops in. Nesaea caught her breath. Too much of any good thing could go bad in a hurry. With a sharp hiss, tendrils of smoke began drifting out of the aperture. As an acrid stench filled the cave, the round body of the iron lock started glowing, as if heated in a forge fire. A few seconds more, and it began to deform, slowly elongating and stretching to the floor. More smoke billowed, and glowing drops of molten iron began dripping to sizzle and hiss in the mud.
Nesaea backed away, trying to remember if the alchemist she had bought the concoction from had mentioned anything to be wary of. Nothing came to mind, but that did not mean much, as many practitioners of the arcane were never exactly sure how their creations worked. Other than the pungent smoke, which burned her eyes and throat, the fluid was working as presented. In short order, she would be able to knock the lock loose and—
The explosion came without warning, hurling her back the way she had come. Twisted iron bars rained down around her, and she wrapped her arms around her head. The smell of scorched metal filled her nostrils.
After a few seconds, Nesaea sat up and wiped the mud off her face. A terrible ringing filled her ears. When she blinked, she saw the blinding white afterimage of the eruption.
In the glow of the Eye of Nami-Ja, she quickly checked herself for wounds, but only found tender spots on her forehead and chest. By the following dawn, she expected numerous bruises.
If I live so long
, she thought, peering down the rocky passage. It seemed impossible that anyone could have missed hearing the blast.
Water sprinkled down on her head from spidery cracks radiating out from the point where the iron-barred door had been anchored. There was no telling how deep she was, but the river flowed somewhere overhead. She swallowed, wondering if the bedrock had been weakened enough to collapse.
Fearing the worst, Nesaea plucked the glowing orb out of the mud, and ran. She did not slow until coming to a short set of steps leading up to a thick oaken door. She listened for any sounds behind her. Between her gasps, and the fading ring in her ears, she heard nothing.
Taking that as a promising sign, she covered the light of the orb beneath her cloak, dropped to her knees, and searched the gap under the door. Nothing moved, and no light shone.
If no one is here, then no one would have heard the explosion
, she thought, with a thread of hope.
Freeing the Eye of Nami-Ja from her cloak, she picked the lock, pulled the door open wide enough to slip through, closed it behind her. She raised the orb to get her bearings, and discovered that she stood on a landing at the base of another set of steps carved into the rock.
She climbed until her calves burned from the effort, but did not slow. The stair came to a narrow hallway lit by smoky torches. The smell of overflowing chamber pots and the sour reek of soiled flesh invaded her nostrils. Doubtless, the dungeon lay close by. A moment later, a man’s distant howl of pain confirmed her assumption.
Nesaea drew her short sword and set out again over uneven floor tiles. Lynira had told that unless Lord Arthard’s torturer was needed, no one but a lone gaoler ever ventured beyond the keep’s lower basements. She was counting on the word of her mentor, and more, on the word of those who had given Lynira the secrets of Dionis Keep. If Lynira was wrong, then Nesaea’s entire plan would fall apart.
She swept by storerooms, some with doors, most without. Other than a few barrels, most of the rooms waited dark and empty. Rats and spiders skittered in profusion along the corridor. Threadbare tapestries hung on the walls. She passed an arched stairwell leading up into darkness, doubtless to the keep’s storage basements. Before her, the hallway sloped down to a landing, where the gaoler, clad in leather and mail, reclined in a chair. His mouth hung slack, his bottom lip wet with drool.
Nesaea drew another of her vials, tiptoed next to him. When close enough, she drew in a deep breath and held it, popped the cork stopper, and waved the vial under his nose. The gaoler bolted upright, and Nesaea scrambled back. Before he could utter a word, his eyes rolled up, and he slumped off the chair to crash against the floor. Putting away the vial, Nesaea smiled to herself. The man would sleep for a day, and wake with no memory of her.
The howling man she had heard earlier screamed again. Nesaea’s nose wrinkled against the scent of charred flesh. The torturer was hard at his labors. She steeled herself for what she might find.
Dark and dank, the passage coiled down into the foundations of Dionis Keep. The farther she went, the worse the smells became, and the louder the man’s cries grew. She heard a phlegmy chuckle that raised the hair on her scalp. Then came a sizzling sound, followed by a scream of agony. Nesaea clutched the leather-wrapped hilt of her sword.
The winding corridor ended, and the floor widened into a stone ramp that let out on the floor of the dungeon. A few torches guttered, but a sinister light poured from a wide opening in one wall, giving the hanging smoke a reddish cast. The walls wept in the cool damp, as if flowing with blood. Indifferent rats slunk about, nosed through the clumps of moldy straw pilled in the corners.
Beyond what Nesaea guessed was the torture room, a vaulted passage, with barred doors on either side, ran into thick darkness. If her father was indeed a prisoner here, she had to somehow get past the opening of the torture room to find him.
“Believe me,” a breathless man begged, “I stole nothing. The steward’s mistaken.”
“You mean to say, he’s a liar?” came a man’s phlegmy reply, his voice oddly cultured for one with such a monstrous trade.
“No! Mistaken. Only that.”
“I must say, the steward names
you
the liar. That puts us in a quandary. I dare say, if you seek to counter the steward’s claim, Lord Arthard would be more than willing to hear you out. Of course, to accuse any in his lordship’s household of such deception requires evidence. If such evidence exists, beyond your word, you must reveal it.”
“N-no,” the first man gibbered. “There’s no evidence, as I took nothing.”
A heavy pause filled the air with portent. “It strikes me, Palto, that I’ve never actually accused you of taking anything, nor have I named the steward as your accuser. For all you know, Lord Arthard conceived that I needed to hone my skills, and you were simply chosen out by ill fortune.”
“What … what do you mean?”
“What I mean, is that out of all the crimes for which you could have been sent to me, you chose to deny thievery. As it happens, that is the very crime leveled against you. So, either you are a thief who has never been caught, and so suffers a pained conscious … or you are guilty, just as the steward claimed.”
The pause came again, gaining weight, until Palto blubbered, “’Twas just bread, Odran! A loaf, only that!”
“Ah, now we come to it,” Odran the torturer said, sounding reasonable, sympathetic. Under his voice, Nesaea heard the sounds of iron scraping against iron, the pumping of a bellows. The red light oozing out of the torture room grew brighter.
“Alas, it always begins so,” Odran said. “First a hungry belly compels the fool to steal a bite of bread. Nothing more, mind you, nothing anyone would miss, and surely not the fat cook, who doubtless pilfers more than her share. Otherwise, why is she so fat? Am I correct?” Odran did not wait for an answer.
“But the unpunished hand soon grows bolder, yes? Yesterday a heel of bread, today a loaf. On the morrow, mayhap the shameless mind seeks something precious.” The rough sound of iron scraping over iron came again. “Tell me, dear Palto, how brazen is the thief who would steal from his lord’s own table? How much more would such a base creature take, if given half a chance?”
“Just the bread,” Palto wailed. “Nothing more. Never was more than that—”
A spitting sizzle cut him off, and he began to scream. Nesaea heard the violent rattling of chains, and Odran’s clotted laughter.
She slid along the wall, peeked round the corner. The torturer’s back was to her, a slender man clad in leather trousers and a bloodstained tunic. He danced around Palto with a light-footed grace. The thrashing naked prisoner dangled by shackled wrists from a chain running through a pulley bolted to the ceiling. With an elaborate flourish, Odran swept a sharp, glowing iron across Palto’s chest, much the same as a painter working brushes over taut canvas. Each enthusiastic stroke swayed the wispy fringe of white hair hanging from Odran’s head. Where that molten-red tip touched bare flesh, it left smoking lines and charred blisters, and set Palto to shrieking anew.
Nesaea strode forward and cracked the flat of her blade across the back of Odran’s skull. The torturer hissed and spun away, one hand at the bloody knot she had given him, the other brandishing his cruel instrument.
“Mathun!” he cried. “We are beset!”
“If Mathun is the gaoler,” Nesaea said, “he will not be coming.”
“You killed him?” Odran said in disbelief, the poker falling from his hand.
Palto, face drenched in sweat, eyes huge with pain, looked between them, then slumped in his bindings, chin dropping to his chest in exhaustion.
“I merely put Mathun to sleep, which is fairer treatment than you will receive, if you do not tell me where to find Sytheus Vonterel.”
“Who?” Odran asked unconvincingly.
Nesaea stepped closer, ready to swat the torturer another blow. “The court magician. Take me to his cell.”
“He’s not here,” Odran quailed, dropping his hand from his head to risk a look. A small crimson smear adorned his palm. By his mewling squeak and the horrified look on his face, Nesaea could almost believe he was not a merchant of pain.