“Chastor?” someone called from the hall around the corner, the hall with all the guards locked in cells. “Ponst?”
“Better hurry,” Cas murmured.
“The wall is thick. This will take a minute.”
Cas fingered the rifle, then decided on the throwing star. She bent her knees, readying herself in case a guard ran around the corner.
An acrid scent lit the air. She had been too busy running out to grab that first guard’s weapon to notice it before, but she knew it was the goop burning. When she glanced back, the wall was charred and smoking, but it was intact. Brown Goo Number Three might not be strong enough to help them escape again this time.
The guard in the other hall didn’t call out again, but his footsteps echoed ahead of him. He was walking their way.
A grinding came from behind Cas, followed by a couple of grunts, then a crash as loud as a rifle shot. So much for not warning the whole fortress.
She started to cuss at Tolemek, but the guard ran around the corner. He halted so quickly he skidded as he gaped at the end of the hall. That didn’t keep him from whipping his rifle butt to his shoulder. Cas was already hurling the throwing star. She trusted her aim and knew it would hit, but ducked anyway—she was the closest to the intersection, and that rifle had been pointing toward her.
It never went off. The throwing star lodged in his throat, slicing into his jugular. Blood spurted from the severed artery, and the rifle tumbled from his fingers, clacking onto the floor. He crumpled soon after.
Aware that beige stone dust had flooded the hall, Cas faced her pirate again. He had to have seen her take down the guard—so much for not showing him she was dangerous—but he didn’t say a word. He stood by a circular hole in the wall, the gaping orifice opening into utter blackness, and extended a hand toward it, like a man holding the door open for a woman at a café. So much for her hope that they weren’t going anywhere dark.
“No, no, you go first.” Cas batted at the dust in the air, almost coughing when she spoke.
Tolemek slipped through the hole and disappeared. He looked like he had dropped down. She supposed it was too much to hope that he was simply leading her into some nice forgotten tunnels that would deposit them on a beach below the fortress.
Wishing she had kept the lantern that had been in their cell, Cas walked to the lip of the hole and peered inside. Her estimate of a six-inch wall had been off; it was more like a foot thick. That goo was powerful. The edges of the hole still smoked, and she wouldn’t have touched them if she hadn’t already seen Tolemek do so.
“How far of a drop is it?” she whispered.
She didn’t want to stall—someone would have heard that noise, and the dead guard would soon be missed, too—but she couldn’t see more than two feet into the gap. She had the sense of a vertical shaft dropping away and didn’t see any stairs.
Tolemek didn’t respond. He hadn’t done something stupid like falling to his death, had he? For a moment, she thought she would have to go back the other way and hope she could avoid notice, but his voice finally drifted up from below.
“Fifteen feet to a landing. Then there are stairs. Sort of.”
Well, didn’t that sound promising?
He didn’t sound farther down than his estimate, so Cas took his word. She ought to be able to land from that height without breaking anything. She stuck her feet through the hole and slithered over the edge. For a silly moment, she wondered what the view looked like from below. She might be an expert marksman, but nobody had ever accused her of amazing athleticism.
She lowered herself down, probing with her feet, though logically, she knew she would never reach the floor without letting go. Also, her boots pressed against some squishy substance growing on the wall. Maybe it was better without the lantern.
“You out of the way?” she asked before letting go.
“Does that mean you don’t want me to catch you?”
“It means I don’t want to kick your ear off as my legs flail around on the way down.”
“Thoughtful.” His voice had shifted—he’d moved to the side.
He hadn’t truly been thinking of catching her, had he? Having the Deathmaker’s hands wrapped around her waist sounded a lot more creepy than it did thoughtful or pleasant.
A gong reverberated somewhere in the distance. Alarm. No more dawdling.
Cas released her grip and fell into the darkness, her heart in her throat. Without any light, she couldn’t gauge the distance to the bottom, and could only guess when she needed to soften her knees for impact. The landing jarred her nonetheless, though a hand caught her arm, steadying her. Tolemek released her almost as soon as he touched her.
“Thanks,” she said grudgingly.
The air was warm and close, smelling of the jungle, of plants and decaying matter. The gong was barely audible from down in the well, but she heard it nonetheless.
“You’re welcome,” Tolemek said. “The stairs are behind you. I’ll lead.”
“Good, because I wasn’t going to volunteer.”
He didn’t light a match. She supposed his stash would burn out quickly if he did. She found a wall with her palm, grimacing at the bumpy algae—or whatever it was—growing on the old stone. It was on the stairs too. Her boots squished with each step. At least they were going down. Down was good. There should be a way out to the beach or the jungle from below the main fortress.
The stairs, beneath the inch of algae, felt old and worn. More than that, in several spots, the edge crumbled beneath her boot.
“What is this place?” she whispered as they continued to descend. Their cell had been on the second story of the three-story fortress. Though there were no landings to help judge it, Cas already felt as if they had descended three or four floors.
“Long ago, there was a dragon rider outpost in the base of this cliff,” Tolemek said. “Real dragons, not little mechanical fliers designed to look vaguely like dragons.”
“Should you be insulting my people’s aircraft when I’m walking behind you with a gun?” She said it lightly, though his tone had miffed her.
She expected some dismissive comeback, but he descended a few more steps before responding with, “Probably not. Are you as deadly with a rifle as you are with a throwing star?”
“I’ve had more practice with firearms.”
“I thought you were too young to be what the commandant claimed, but I’m beginning to believe that Zirkander would have recruited you.”
His tone didn’t drip malice when he said the colonel’s name, but the alarm gongs that went off in Cas’s head rang far more clearly than those in the fortress above. She didn’t want to discuss Zirkander with him, or her work at all. The last thing she wanted was to slip up and give away some useful intelligence, especially to someone who could make explosive goop and only the gods knew what else.
“Were you with the squadron last summer?” Tolemek asked in the same conversational tone, but there might have been the faintest edge to it. A were-you-among-those-who-fired-on-our-dirigibles-and-nearly-killed-the-captain-and-me-last-summer edge.
“Where I am is watching your back until you get me out of this dungeon, and I think we can leave it at that.” Another throwing star had found its way into Cas’s hand. The cold steel was reassuring against her thumb. Maybe she would leave it there until the fresh jungle air was upon her face and Tolemek had taken off in his ship.
Chapter 3
The stairs ended at a wide corridor with the stone floors pockmarked with age. Some of the holes were deep enough to be considered craters, sizable obstacles in the darkness. Tolemek walked near the edge, fingers following the wall, taking care to test each step before he committed to it. He wasn’t expecting booby traps in the centuries-abandoned fortress, but crumbling floors could drop him into a pit as easily as an ancient architect’s whims. And then there was the woman walking behind him, making his shoulder blades itch. Thus far, she had been helpful, but it didn’t take some telepath o
f yore to sense that she believed she would be doing the world a favor by getting rid of him.
They came to the first intersection, the wall disappearing and his fingers brushing air, so Tolemek concentrated on the route. He had memorized the old map he’d found before coming, but it would be easy to grow disoriented down here in the dark. The few matches he had wouldn’t do any good without a lamp to light, and he doubted he would find one down here that still had oil in it. Or whatever they had used back then. There were tales that said the halls in the sorcerers’ homes were simply alight with their magic.
Something rustled through the algae on the floor, whispering past his boot. Not magic, but a snake. Whatever sorcerous power had once imbued this place was gone, leaving nothing but ruins. He wondered if he was a fool to believe he would find anything here.
At the third intersection, Tolemek said, “Left,” and turned down it.
Lieutenant Ahn grumbled something under her breath, but kept following.
“I do have a couple of likely escape routes in mind,” he said. “After I find what I’m looking for, I believe I can get us to the jungle.”
She didn’t answer promptly. He admitted likely and believe weren’t the most encouraging words he could have used. Since he had only studied the fortress from a distance, he was reluctant to promise more. He feared that at any moment, the route would be blocked by rubble from some hundred-year-old cave-in. He had memorized a couple of routes to the library, just in case, but so far the only obstacle was the musty air. Possibly the snakes.
“How does this stuff grow down here without light?” Ahn mused.
“I’ve wondered that. Perhaps some residual energy left in the walls from those ancient sorcerers. Plants are highly adaptable, and most ecological niches get filled, given enough time.”
Her grunt suggested she wasn’t that interested in his theories. Or that discussions of sorcerers made her uneasy. Or maybe she was imagining sinking her throwing stars into his back again.
Tolemek was counting doors, or rather doorways since the wood had long since rotted away, and didn’t speak again. He wondered if the books and scrolls he hoped to find had rotted with age too. He hoped the ancient scribes had used their magic to preserve some of them.
“This is it,” he whispered when they reached the fifth doorway.
“The treasure room?” Ahn guessed.
Was that what she thought this was? Some quest for gold? He supposed it was as plausible a theory as any. “In a manner of speaking. This was their library.”
He slipped inside, forgetting some of his caution. He almost didn’t notice the long pause before she asked, “You planning to study some ancient magics?” She had stopped at the doorway. “To help you make better... goo?”
Her tone was full of wariness. She knew his name, the rumors surrounding him. She had to be uneasy down here with him, understandably so. He wasn’t sure how to settle that unease. He also hadn’t figured out how he was going to get her to his ship, short of overpowering her and knocking her out. As long as they were close, and she didn’t have the range to throw something sharp at him, he figured he could overpower her, but that seemed a poor reward for the help she had provided so far. If she hadn’t been there when that guard had rounded the corner, he would have aimed at Tolemek instead of her. Waiting for his goo to work at the end of the hall, he had been too far away to do a thing about it. But simply letting her escape into the jungle? He didn’t know if he could do that either.
“I prefer science to magic when it comes to my goos,” he said. “Not that I know enough about magic to know if it has any useful applications, regardless, but this—what I seek here—is to help another, not myself.”
“Some lover or relative sick?”
“What?” he blurted, almost tripping into one of the pockmarks in the floor.
In the darkness, he couldn’t see the shrug, but he heard it in her voice. “They say some of those old sorcerers were healers.”
Tolemek’s first reaction was to stop talking or to brush her off. Her guess had been a little too close—not even the captain knew what exactly he was searching for and why. But maybe he could lessen her wariness by talking about his family, making her believe that no matter what she had heard, he was simply a person.
A person who wanted to entrap her for his own gains. He grimaced at himself. Why was he even worrying about her when he had reached the room he had been scheming and planning to reach for the last three months?
“Not a lover,” he said by way of completing the conversation. “My little sister.”
“Oh.”
Tolemek fished out a match from his pouch and found a wall to scrape it on. The flame flared to life, revealing walls full of stone bookcases, empty stone bookcases. A few old tables had been pushed to the sides of the big room, and an expanse of mostly bare floor lay before him. The mold wasn’t growing on it, but piles of fine gray dust undulated across it. Rat and snake tracks disturbed it in places, but there was so much that it hadn’t been scattered completely by time or visitors.
Frowning, he crept forward and crouched, touching his finger to one of the piles. His match burned down, searing his flesh and going out, at the same time as he realized what he was looking at. Not dust. Ashes.
He snarled and slammed his hand into the hard floor. He couldn’t see them now in the darkness, but he felt the ashes stirring and rising into the air, tickling his nostrils with the scent of ancient books and scrolls long destroyed. Oh, he didn’t know how long it had truly been, but it didn’t matter if it had been a year or hundreds of years. He was too late.
• • • • •
Cas waited in the darkness beside the doorway. She wanted to get going—this far under the main fortress, she couldn’t heard the alarm anymore, but she wagered it was still going on, and it wouldn’t take long for guards to find that huge hole in the wall. Still, she suspected Tolemek would want to search further, if he had made the journey here specifically for this. Whatever this was. That room hadn’t looked promising from what she had seen in the handful of seconds the match had been lit, but maybe there was more to it.
“We can go,” he said scarce seconds later. He hadn’t even bothered to light another match.
Cas thought about telling him she was sorry he hadn’t found what he was looking for, but she wasn’t sure she believed his story about wanting to help his sister. For all she knew, he was looking for something to turn into a weapon. “I’m ready.”
He took the lead again, and she followed him through the dark passages, using a hand on the wall to feel her way along. She tried not to feel uneasy about the fact that she would be lost down here without him. Usually, she had a good sense of direction, but they had taken a few turns, and the darkness made it hard to note landmarks.
“Right turn,” Tolemek said, “and a tight squeeze.”
She found the gap in the wall, using both hands to get a feel for the opening. It wasn’t tight by her standards, more like the width of a closet door rather than a wide corridor. But as soon as she turned after him and bumped into his back, she understood what he meant. Maybe it was a closet.
“You can pick your hole,” Tolemek said, shifting to the side, “though my understanding from the blueprint I studied is that they all come together into a single vertical shaft that drops eighty feet before joining with the current sewage removal system.”
Cas stuck her foot forward, trying to find whatever hole—or holes—he was talking about. But she smacked her toe on a wall. No, the base of a shelf or bench. It took a moment for her to realize where they were. Not quite a closet. “Is this a latrine?”
“Yes. A centuries-old one. There shouldn’t be any biological contaminants left, if you’re concerned about cleanliness.”
Cleanliness? Please. “The eighty-foot-drop you mentioned is more problematic for me. Unless you’ve got a coil of rope hidden in that little pouch of yours.” She was beginning to see why he’d arranged to have himself captured i
nstead of simply using his concoctions to infiltrate the ruins from below.
“Rope would have been impractical for someone to throw across the courtyard to my window.”
“Maybe so, but it would have made a much bigger target to aim at with a rock.”
He snorted. “The walls are somewhat slippery, making climbing up the shaft difficult, but I think we’ll be able to slow ourselves down enough to land on the bottom at a reasonable, unlikely-to-break-bones speed.”
How comforting. “I’m going to refrain from making sarcastic comments or telling you to stuff your head in a latrine, but only because I could be stuck back in that cell and waiting for my next beating right now.”
“And because I will be stuffing my head in a latrine?”
Huh, her pirate had a sense of humor. How odd for someone named Deathmaker. “Yeah, that too.”
Tolemek lit a match. “So we can see what we’re getting into.”
Between his description and her time feeling around, Cas already had an image of the place in her head, and it proved fairly accurate. Three holes in a sandstone shelf were all that remained of the latrine. The rims of the openings had crumbled away, so they were larger than they would have originally been. She could squeeze through one, yes, and he probably could, too, though it would be a tight fit.
When he held the match over one of the holes, she peered inside. If there was an opening at the bottom, it was too far down to see. He dropped the match inside, and for a moment, she had a good view of those walls before the flame went out, long before it got close to the bottom. The important thing was that the shaft appeared narrow enough for her to climb slowly down, bracing herself with her arms and legs. The stone was stained with time—or something more visceral—but wasn’t cloaked in algae and hadn’t appeared that slick in the light.
“I’ll go first,” Tolemek said.
“All right, but do me a favor, will you?”
“Such as?”