“Exactly what did you mean earlier when you told this one to stop and—”
“Captain!”
Lúcan’s shout jarred Rodian’s concentration. His corporal came jogging across the courtyard from the door to one of the gatehouse’s inner towers. Lúcan halted with a curt nod to Rodian.
“Sir, one of the men on the wall is missing,”
“Missing?”
“Jonah reported when he came to the front on his last half circuit. He hadn’t seen Maolís anywhere along the rear wall.”
Rodian’s stomach felt as if he’d swallowed a rock, and he turned on Hawes. “Corporal, escort the premin to her study and see that she remains safe there.”
“Captain,” Hawes said, “I am perfectly safe on my—”
“I insist,” Rodian interrupted. “Your council called me to protect this place against intruders. One of mine is missing, leaving a breach in security.”
She breathed in quickly, as if about to argue further.
“For your own protection, Premin,” Rodian continued, “as now required of me. Corporal?”
Lúcan turned to Hawes and gestured toward the courtyard’s northwest side. Hawes hesitated a bit longer, as if uncertain what to say. But what could she say?
She finally gave Rodian a slight nod and turned to walk off ahead of Lúcan. Dorian backstepped after the pair, still watching Rodian.
“Return to your duty, Dorian,” Hawes ordered.
As soon as all three entered the northwest storage building, Rodian turned at a jog for the gatehouse tunnel. Upon reaching the portcullis, he looked out and up through its beams.
“Jonah, are you there?” he called out.
“Yes, sir,” his guardsman answered from above in the tower’s gear room.
“Rouse Angus and get down here—now!”
Rodian turned back up the tunnel. If there was an intruder, he would no longer be spotted from the walls. He was already inside.
“Hurry,” Brot’an whispered.
Leesil bit his lower lip against a retort. He was doing his best, and with this lock, Brot’an wasn’t going to do any better. Through the picks, Leesil felt something inside the lock that wasn’t normal. He should’ve expected that it wouldn’t be easy getting through a keep of sages so paranoid about secrets that they’d locked up Wynn. But that didn’t account for the poor latch on the library’s upper window.
He set upon the lock again, trying by feel to open it.
“Hold the light closer,” he said.
Brot’an did so, though the crystal was now dimmer than before.
“Rub it,” Leesil said. “That should fix its light.”
With a frown, Brot’an did so, and the crystal brightened a bit.
Through his picks, Leesil felt something give. “Got it,” he breathed.
Brot’an raised the eyebrow with the scars running through it, stepped back, and pocketed the crystal. Everything went dim but for light on the ceiling from some other faraway lamp in the library.
Leesil tucked away his tools and rose. He gripped the handle and looked to Brot’an, who nodded. He opened the door, prepared to step out into some passage through the keep. Well, there was a passage, but it was too dark to see anything beyond half a dozen yards.
This building built in the keep’s old inner bailey was flush against the keep wall. When he and Brot’an had surveyed it from outside the grounds, they knew somehow it had to have an entrance into the keep’s main building. They’d anticipated a locked or barred door in what they’d discovered was a library, but ...
“Give me the crystal,” Leesil said in a low voice, and held out his hand.
Even before Brot’an dropped it into his palm, the crystal’s light exposed the problem.
Leesil cursed softly under his breath.
Of course there would be a passage connecting this building through the keep’s old, massive wall. He had simply hoped that the sages, likely living on stipends from their local monarchy, wouldn’t waste money on a second door.
But there it was, another few yards down the dark, narrow passage.
Leesil strode to the second door, gripped its handle halfheartedly, and gently twisted. Of course it was locked. With a sigh, he handed the crystal back to Brot’an and crouched to pull out his tools once more.
Chane tried to listen at the door of the small room, hoping to hear whatever might be said outside. He was almost certain that the other voice out in the passage belonged to Captain Rodian. Then came the muted sound of the main doors opening, and perhaps a third voice outside before the door swung shut. It had all been too quick, too quiet, and nothing more reached him.
He stood there in indecision.
Hawes had told him to wait, but she had not returned. What had she been talking about with the captain? Who was that third voice out in the courtyard—where Ore-Locks and Wynn would have to come through? Had Hawes herself somehow run afoul of Rodian’s guards?
Chane had heard two sets of footsteps earlier, but they could have belonged to anyone. He had lost track of time amid all these mistakes and mishaps. Those steps could have even been Rodian and one of his guards searching the keep.
With the captain moving freely about, in and out of the courtyard, it seemed unlikely that Wynn and Ore-Locks had reached the main building. Perhaps they were still stuck in her room. If so, Wynn would be watching out her window, waiting for the courtyard to clear.
Chane needed a way to check and see, without having to step into the courtyard—or drop a glove outside the main doors. He could wait no longer for Hawes and cracked open the door, wincing as it creaked.
Inching it open, slowly broadening his view, he found the whole main passage empty for as far as he could see. He crept out, heading northward toward the kitchens.
There was one route to where Chane might view Wynn’s window across the courtyard: in the top of the storage building, well above Hawes’s study in the underground floors.
“Can you feel any vibrations?” Wynn whispered, huddling with Ore-Locks behind the door of the dark room.
“Nothing,” he answered.
A tentative hope rose in Wynn. She pulled her cold-lamp crystal from her pocket and rubbed it. Soft light illuminated Ore-Locks’s clean-shaven, broad face. His brow was furrowed in frustration.
“I’ll have a look,” she said.
“Do not—let me,” he said, and turned to the wall beside the door.
“What are you doing?”
“Having a look.”
Ore-Locks pressed his face against—into—the stone wall. The stone’s dark, mottled gray texture began to flow over him, as if he were becoming the stone itself.
Wynn grabbed the back of his cloak and heaved before his ears sank out of sight. Ore-Locks straightened up as his head came out of the wall.
“What is it now!” he whispered sharply.
“What if someone sees you like that?”
He leaned into her face. “Do you think you and your little crystal would attract less attention?”
“I was going to cover it,” she argued.
“You will still have to lean out in plain sight to look far enough up the passage.”
“At least I wouldn’t look like a gargoyle’s head sprouting from the wall!”
“You are a lot of—”
“Don’t ... you say it,” and Wynn leaned in to him this time. “I’m sick of people telling me I’m so much trouble.”
Ore-Locks’s mouth tightly closed in a flat line. One of his eyebrows rose higher than the other.
“Oh, fine!” she said, and he turned away, putting his head into the wall.
Even after the times Wynn had seen this before, it was still disturbing to see stone practically flow through and over him, as if it were turning him into a statue. It stopped halfway down his great bulk once he’d finished leaning out through the thick wall. Only from his waist down did he still stick out in the room, but he was taking too long.