Luck in the Shadows (65 page)

“How far down do you think we are?” asked Alec, pausing for a moment to catch his breath. They’d been going up and down stairs for hours, and his legs were feeling the strain.

“We must be past the second floor by now, maybe near the first,” replied Seregil, coming to yet another landing. “This is all taking a lot longer than I’d—”

Suddenly the landing floor seemed to fly up in Alec’s face. Frozen on the stairs, he watched in helpless amazement as the wooden platform pivoted on diagonally opposing corners, its underside now standing vertically in front of him to reveal a sheer-sided pit of some kind below. A loose board fell free, tumbling into the blackness without a sound.

O Illior, Seregil!
The words hammered in Alec’s throat as he stared, horrorstruck, into the gaping shaft at his feet. But no sound came out. It had all happened too quickly. His whole body went numb and cold.
First the avalanche and now—

“Alec!” The hoarse, panicky cry came from somewhere beyond the uptilted floor.

“Seregil! You didn’t fall!”

“But I’m about to. Do something, anything!
Hurry!”

A sickening sense of futility engulfed Alec. The upper corner of the platform was several feet beyond his reach. If he jumped at it, it would tilt back and crush him against the side of the shaft, probably shaking Seregil loose from whatever precarious hold he had managed on his side. If only he had a rope—something long enough to snag the upper corner and pull it down—

“Alec!”

Ripping off his cloak, Alec gathered the hem of it in one hand and tossed the other end at the upthrust corner, hoping to catch it with the hood. It fell mere inches short of the mark.

“Damn it to hell!” Alec could hear Seregil’s labored breathing a few short, impossible yards away. Looking wildly around, his eye fell on the rusty sconce set into the wall above the lowermost step.

Without a second thought he grasped it with his right hand and leaned as far out over the pit as his reach allowed, cloak ready in his left for another cast.

He was already overbalanced beyond recovery when the sconce gave beneath his hand. He heard the evil grate of metal against stone as he lurched forward a few inches more over the edge.

He hung a moment, breath dead in his throat, waiting for the final pin or screw or brace to pull free.

It didn’t.

It might, if he moved.

Or it might not. He wouldn’t know until he tried.

His choices were pretty limited; make a move now or wait to fall when his grip gave out.

“Alec—?”

With sweat pouring down his face and sides, he willed himself to make one last, crucial try with the cloak. Tossing it up with his left hand, he caught the upper corner of the platform with the edge of the hood and felt it hold. Miraculously, the iron sconce held, too, at least for the moment.

Pulling down on the cloak, he dragged the corner of the platform down with every ounce of strength he could muster. Its weight, together with Seregil’s—still clinging somehow to its other side—was almost more than he could manage, but slowly, slowly, it tilted back toward level. As it came down he managed to move his left hand up, gripping the fabric in his teeth as he
transferred his hold. This process gave him enough leverage to gradually pull himself backward and out of the way of the descending edge. At last he was able to grasp the platform and push.

As the upper side of it came into view, he found Seregil huddled there, grasping the handle of his dagger with both hands. Somehow, even as he’d felt the floor go out from under him, he’d managed to drive the tip of the blade in far enough between two of the floorboards to hold his slight weight as he hung from it.

“Throw me the end of your cloak,” he croaked, white and shaken. “It’s bound to tip down when I come your way. Can you hang on to me if I drop again?”

“Wait a second.” Holding the edge of the platform with one hand, Alec undid his belt with the other and worked the end of it back through the buckle. Securing the loop around his wrist, he flapped the loose end out to Seregil. “Get a good hold on this. I can manage this better than the cloak.”

Wedging the dagger more firmly, Seregil gripped the end of the belt and began inching his way toward Alec.

The platform tilted down ominously as he shifted his weight, but Alec hauled him quickly to safety on the stairs.

“Bilairy’s
Balls
!” Seregil gasped, collapsing at his feet.

“And Guts!” Alec leaned shakily against the wall. “This candle thing I had hold of nearly came loose! I can’t believe it didn’t.”

Upon closer inspection, however, he found that it hadn’t come loose at all. It was still fixed solidly to a rod that ran back into the wall. When he pushed up, it slid smoothly back into place.

“Look at this,” he exclaimed, perplexed.

Getting to his feet, Seregil examined the mechanism. Pushing the sconce upright, he drew his sword and pushed on the edge of the platform. It tilted with precipitous ease. When the sconce was pulled down, however, it remained solidly level. They soon discovered two heavy pins that slid in and out of the wall below the platform to hold it steady when the sconce was down.

“Ingenious,” Seregil said with genuine admiration. “When Kassarie comes down she pulls this and leaves it fixed. On the way back up she resets the trap. That loose board that fell out must have been some sort of brace that held it in place until I got halfway across. It’s more dangerous that way, since there was no chance to jump back.”

“How did you ever manage to get your knife set in time?” Alec asked wonderingly.

Seregil shook his head. “I don’t even remember doing it.”

Moving with redoubled care, they continued down. After a few more turns, the walls of the stairwell changed from masonry to solid stone and they knew they were below ground level. Reaching the bottom at last, they found a short, level corridor leading to a door.

Seregil bent to inspect the lock. “It looks safe enough. You better do it, though. My hands are still shaking!”

Alec knelt and took out his tools. Selecting a hook, he grinned up at Seregil. “After all this trouble, let’s hope this isn’t just the wine cellar!”

T
he door swung open with a protesting whine of hinges.

Thrusting in his lightstone, Alec tensed with a hiss of surprise.

“What is it?” whispered Seregil, grasping his sword hilt as he moved to look in.

The light was not bright enough to fully illuminate the room, but they could make out the figure of a person seated in an ornate chair against the far wall. There was no movement or outcry, and stepping closer, they saw that it was the withered corpse of a man.

He was nobly dressed in clothing of antique design. A heavy golden torque hung at his shrunken throat, and several rings glinted on the bony fingers resting on the arms of the chair. His thick, dark hair had retained its living gloss and hung in disconcerting contrast against the sunken cheeks.

“Uven ari nobis!”
Seregil exclaimed softly, bending close with his light.

Alec did not understand the words but recognized the reverent tone with which they were spoken. Fighting down his instinctive revulsion, he looked more closely at the corpse’s face, noting the fine bones of the skull beneath their thin covering of desiccated skin, the high, prominent cheekbones, the large, sunken sockets where eyes had been.

“Illior’s Light! Seregil, this can’t be—”

“It is,” Seregil replied grimly. “Or was. Lord Corruth, the lost consort of Idrilain the First. These rings prove it. See this?” He indicated the one on the corpse’s right hand; it was set with a lozenge of banded carnelian deeply incised with the Dragon of Skala. “It’s a Consort’s Seal. And this other, the silver with the red stone? Finest Aurënfaie work. This was Corruth í Glamien Yanari Meringil Bôkthersa.”

“Your kinsman.”

“I never knew him, though I’d often hoped—” Seregil touched one of the hands. “The skin’s hard and hollow as the shell of a dried gourd. Someone took great care to preserve him.”

“But why?” shuddered Alec.

Seregil shook his head angrily. “I suppose the bastards get some perverse pleasure out of having their enemy looking on as they plot to overthrow his descendants. Perhaps they swear oaths on him, I don’t know. Factions like the Lerans don’t persist for generations without a good leaven of fanaticism.”

The chamber was about the size of Nysander’s workroom, and the hand of a master mason was evident in every line; dry, sound, and square, its walls showed no moisture or moss. The ceiling overhead, though not high, was vaulted and ribbed to give the room a less oppressive feel. It was furnished with a round table, several chests, and a few cabinets against the walls. A low dais with a second thronelike chair stood against the left-hand wall. A broad shield hung on the wall behind it.

“Another sacred artifact,” Seregil noted grimly, examining the crowned dragon design painted on the shield. “Queen Lera’s, no doubt. I wonder who they’re grooming to carry it?”

“I thought she didn’t have any heirs?”

“She had no daughters, but there are always plenty of nieces and cousins in these Skalan families.”

Riffling through the chests and cabinets, they found a carefully organized collection of maps, correspondence, and documents.

“I’ll be damned!” Seregil spread a huge, yellowed parchment on the table. “Plans of the Rhíminee sewers. And see here, next to the draftsman’s mark?”

Alec recognized the tiny image of a coiled lizard. “Kassarie’s family must have built the sewers.”

“Parts of them, anyway. It was a huge undertaking. Imagine what this would be worth to enemy sappers!”

Resuming their search, they soon turned up enough damning correspondence to bring nobles of a dozen houses to Traitor’s Hill.

Opening a chest, Alec reached to push aside a rumpled swath of wool. Beneath it his fingers encountered cold, rounded metal.

“Seregil, look what I found!” At the bottom of the chest gleamed eight gold baps still bearing the Queen’s Treasury mark.

“The
White Hart
gold! Our lady’s been busy, though. These are shipped in lots of twenty-four. I tell you, Alec, if Kassarie isn’t the head of the Lerans herself, then she’s in it up to her ears!”

The gold was too heavy to carry away, so Seregil selected a few of the more incriminating letters and divided them with Alec. Turning to the corpse again, he gently removed the rings from the withered fingers, murmuring something in Aurënfaie as he did so.

He handed Alec the silver ring, and strung the seal around his own neck on a bit of string.

“We’re Watchers on this job, and this is Watcher business,” he said with uncommon earnestness. “If anything happens to one of us, the other goes on, no matter what. We’ve got to get at least one of these to Nysander. Do you understand?”

Alec slipped the ring onto his thumb with a grudging nod.

“Good. If we get separated, meet me at the tree we camped under.”

“The last time you carried something that way it got us into an awful mess!” Alec noted wryly, touching the seal ring where it hung against his friend’s breast.

Seregil dropped the ring down the front of his tunic with a grim smile. “
I’m
not the one this will harm.”

Putting the room back in order, they hurried back up to the open top of the tower. Seregil studied the sky with relief; the job had taken far longer than he’d anticipated, but it looked like they still had a little time to spare. As they came out from behind the tapestry into the corridor, however, some instinctive alarm went off in the back of his mind.

Something was different.

He grasped the hilt of his sword, belly tightening coldly again.

The light. Someone had turned up the wick on the night lamp.

Alec had spotted it, too, and was reaching for his own weapon.

They crept up to the intersection of the two corridors, bare
feet silent on the smooth floors. The hallways appeared deserted. Bearing right, they headed back toward the northeast tower. They’d nearly reached it when the door swung open and two men with swords stepped out.

There was no time to take cover. Not knowing how many more men might be behind the others, Seregil and Alec turned and bolted back the way they’d come.

“There he is!” a man yelled behind them. “And he’s got another with him! Here! He’s up here!”

At the juncture of the corridors they cut to the right and made a dash for the northwest tower. More shouts rang out behind them as they flung open the door and plunged inside.

“Go on, I’ll follow!” Seregil ordered, and was relieved when Alec didn’t stop to argue.

A sizable pack of armed men was coming on at a run. Grabbing the wooden bar from the corner by the door, he slammed the door and rammed the bar into its brackets. A heavy body hit the door from the other side, then another. Muffled curses followed him as he fled down after Alec.

He caught up with him just below the second-floor entrance to the tower. Rounding a corner, however, they saw torchlight coming from below.

“Second floor!” hissed Seregil, scrambling back up the stairs.

Footsteps pounded toward them from above and below as they reached the door. There was no time for caution. Swords at the ready, they threw it open and dashed out into the large chamber beyond.

Its sole occupant was an old woman with a lamp. At the sight of them, she dropped her light and ran off through the workshop beyond, shrieking for help at the top of her creaky voice. Ignoring the flames spreading out from the broken lamp, Seregil barred the door.

“This must be where all that snoring was coming from,” said Alec, looking around unhappily.

It was a barracks and there were more empty beds than Seregil wanted to count.

“Everybody’s awake now,” he noted grimly, heading for the southwest tower. “Come on, let’s try this one.”

“Up or down?” Alec demanded as they ducked in and barred the door.

“Down.”

But rounding the third turn, they ran headlong into another gang of Kassarie’s men.