“Yes, I will wait for him,” Ragh said. “Hurry and finish your spell. I grow tired of this. I want his help in slaying the naga. He is surprisingly formidable for a human.”
He felt about on the wall. “Finish the spell, will you?”
“It is almost finished. A few minutes more, and he will be free of all of the scales—even the large one. For sorceresses of my sister’s and my ability, the dragon-magic was not so difficult to counter after all.”
“You can send him out into the hall when it is through.” The draconian’s fingers found a seam.
“I said you’re not going anywhere, beast.”
The sivak turned. Maab was only a few feet away, one bony hand set against her hip, the other gesturing in the air. The nails of two of her fingers glowed a pale green.
“I’ve decided on a price for curing the human—and that price is you. Creature, you’ll make a fine servant. Better than the ones who scurry around my castle. Strong. Smart, judging by the way you talk. The human must relinquish his well-trained pet. My sister likes you—she just told me so. We’ve decided that you are my price for curing Dhamon.”
The glow spread to her other fingers, then her entire hand picked up a sickly green hue that edged up her arm and disappeared into her sleeve.
“I’ll be no one’s slave ever again,” the sivak hissed.
“Sorry, creature. You’ll be mine. It will not be so bad. You can catch my sister big, plump rats.”
Ragh moved so quickly he caught the sorceress off guard, bringing the sword up and around with all of his strength behind it. The sword bit into her neck at the same time the green glow spread from her fingers and toward the sivak. Ragh dropped to a crouch, the blade slicing all the way through and lopping her head from her shoulders. A green haze hung suspended just above his own head and he crawled out from under it.
“I hate sorcerers,” he muttered, as he wiped the blade off on her moth-eaten cloak. “So much so that I won’t take on your form, old woman. Old dead woman. You were not so powerful after all. Just mad.”
The sivak moved to the sea chest and opened it, finding it empty. He stuffed the body and head inside and put the jade frog around his own neck. Hurriedly he cleaned “up the blood, then remembered the shield.
“Dear sister, you might as well keep her company.”
He laid the shield on top of the body and slid the chest beneath Dhamon’s table, then returned to the wall. He was careful not to touch the green haze but tried to find the mechanism that might open the hidden door.
“It feels as if an elephant stepped on my head.”
Ragh whirled to see Dhamon sitting up on the table, clothes and skin streaked with a rainbow of colors from Maab’s mixtures. His face was flushed and shiny, a reminder of his fever, and he looked gaunt from his ordeal. He took a few deep breaths and shook his head, his tangled hair flying away from his face.
“How are you feeling?”
“Like that same elephant also sat on my chest. I’d feel better if you returned my sword.”
He gingerly swung his legs over the edge of the table, knocking a few of Maab’s bowls off and wincing as they crashed loudly on the stone floor. “Still hear better than I should,” he mumbled.
“About the scale…”
Dhamon closed his eyes and let out a deep breath. When he opened them he looked at his leg and began brushing at the colorful powders and sand. They were wet and gritty, and it took some work to remove them.
There was one large scale beneath. The smattering of smaller scales were gone. Dhamon stared at his skin and choked back a sob. “I should have known there is no cure,” he said.
“I should have known.”
“That is why she left… with her sister,” the sivak said. “She feared you would be angry that she could not help you. She said she was hungry for her rats.”
Dhamon prodded his leg. It was tender where the smaller scales had been. “At least she managed something,” he muttered. His breath caught in his throat, and he tipped his head back. “I should have known not to have hoped. This was all wasted. I should have—”
“I am still hoping,” the sivak interrupted, “that as long as we are here in town, we can find and slay Nura Bint-Drax.”
Dhamon slid off the table and strode toward the sivak, hand outstretched. “I want her dead as much as you, but I’m not going after her. I need to find Mal. First we both need to get out of here.”
It was with some reluctance that Ragh relinquished the sword. Dhamon was quick to sheathe it.
“Let’s see if we can find our way up to the street. I wonder how late it is?”
Dhamon looked around the room, noting a fading green haze and the globe of light on the ceiling that was becoming dimmer and freeing the shadows from their corners. Dhamon walked past the sivak and to a gap between bookcases. His fingers prodded the bricks until he found one that moved. The wall swung open, and he stepped into the narrow corridor beyond. He glanced back at Ragh. “Coming?”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Twists and Turns
Dhamon stared down the corridor. It looked different somehow than when they’d followed it to the laboratory, not curved, but angular and narrower in places. The air smelled different, too. There was no trace of the wildflowers as there had been when the old woman was present. Instead, the air was heavy and damp.
Perhaps they’d exited through a different spot than they’d entered the laboratory. He turned to find the wall had closed shut behind him. Fingers working across the stone, neither he nor the sivak could locate a way to reopen the section.
“You should have made the sorceress wait until I woke up,” he told the sivak.
“She would not listen to me,” the sivak said sullenly.
Dhamon let out a deep sigh and started down the corridor. They passed torch after torch, each held by a different wall-sculpture: one an elephant, the torch serving as a trunk, another a baboon. There were several creatures to which they could not put names. They walked for several hundred yards without speaking a word. Dhamon briefly wondered if each sconce was linked to a secret door that led to chambers filled with Maab’s treasures or Sable’s minions. In another lifetime he might have wanted to explore, especially if Mal had been with him. Now all he wanted was to find a way out.
“Should’ve had Mal come in here with us,” he said to the sivak. They traveled, Dhamon suspected, half a mile, but did not come to any other corridor. Nor did they find a stairway that would take them back into Maab’s tower. Dhamon’s ire at the situation was growing, but he did his best to keep it in check—it wasn’t the sivak’s fault they were lost or that the old, mad woman had disappeared.
“Here,” the sivak stated several minutes later. He stopped in front of a sconce that looked like the head of a snub-nosed alligator. “I feel air coming from a crack here.”
Dhamon stared at the sculpture, then at the wall on either side of it. He spotted cracks around two of the bricks, flaws he wouldn’t have noticed before his senses became unnaturally acute. Concentrating, he felt the play of air across his skin. The scent was still oppressive but different. He picked up a faint odor of blood and of human waste. They’d not smelled this on their way down.
“We can’t still be under her tower,” Dhamon mused to himself.
“No,” the sivak answered. “We’ve traveled too far. In what direction?” He shrugged his wide shoulders.
“West, I think,” Dhamon said, stepping forward and pressing on the bricks, watching as a narrow section of wall slid away to reveal a corridor partially filled with stagnant water. “Let’s just get out of here.”
There were no torches in this corridor, though Dhamon suspected that at one time there had been. Elaborate sconces lined the wall, all bearing the visages of dwarves of various nationalities. He tugged the torch out of the alligator’s snout and curiously passed his hand near the flame. As he suspected, it did not give off heat. He brushed by the draconian and edged his foot forward. There were stairs beneath the water. He followed them until he found the corridor floor, the cool, foul water rising to his waist.