The marketplaces around the palaces were busy, crowded with festival goers, and to Radek’s surprise no one paid them much attention. There were variously dressed shoppers, presumably travelers from many different lands who had come to the Holy Island for the games, and perhaps everyone assumed they were from some place on the edges of their known world. Or maybe they thought that they were just odd. In any event, they moved freely through the crowds, and a few judicious questions about the upcoming games gathered some useful information.
Radek excused himself from a conversation with a potter selling his wares in an open stall and made his way back to Ronon. “I have found where the contestants come out of the labyrinth,” Radek said in a low voice. “Down the other side of the hill from the port, behind the palaces, there is a rough gully. There is a place down there where select spectators and the High King go to watch the end of the course. Other than the King’s guests, the others are chosen by lot and there are people who resell their chits for huge amounts. Very expensive tickets to scalp!”
“That sounds about normal,” Ronon said.
“Yes, it does.” Reassuringly normal, in fact. “There is a path that goes to it. It is not secret at all.”
“Which means it’s guarded,” Ronon said thoughtfully. “Probably not as much as it will be once the games start, but they’ve probably got some guys down there to keep people from going in and hiding stuff that will give contestants an edge.”
Radek nodded. “That is what I would do. I would hide things already inside to make sure my contestant won.” He looked at Ronon, the beginning of an idea forming. “So we go in?”
“It’s the place we know Sheppard and Teyla will be,” Ronon said. “Could work. But I’d rather get them out of someplace less guarded. Once the games start, every guard in town will be around making sure nobody interferes. I’ve done security for big festivals before.”
Radek looked at him sideways. One more snippet, he thought. One more hint of who Ronon had been before Sateda fell. He could see that Ronon had been the kind of young man put on crowd control at festivals, flexible and with good judgment. “It is a thought,” Radek said. “The contestants are in the palace now, going through some kind of dedication ceremony.” He shrugged. “That would be hard to get them out of.”
“Yeah.” Ronon scratched his beard absently. “Let’s work our way over to the palace and get as close as we can. See how many entrances and guards. Tell you what. You stay here, talk to people and find out as much as you can about the opening of the games and where the contestants are kept tonight. I’ll take a look around. Meet you back in an hour.”
“That works well enough for me,” Radek said.
John looked down from the sparse shelter of a twisted cedar tree on the hillside, squinting into the gathering dark. By dint of a laborious climb, he and Teyla had worked their way to the top of the hill behind the palaces, slipping through alleys and yards, climbing over walls and refuse heaps. They didn’t smell very good, but they had at last gained the top slopes, left devoid of buildings for obvious reasons. It was too steep to build, and the rocky, precipitous slope had nothing to recommend it except the view it gave of the city and sea below. If this island were on Earth it would probably be a scenic overlook, but here it was nothing. A few struggling trees clung between rocks, stunted by the continual winds off the sea.
Dusk was falling early. Massive cumulous clouds piled up to the west, hiding the sunset and flashing with lightning in their purple depths. This would not be a very nice place to be in the coming thunder storm. They were going to have to come down before it broke. Too many of the trees bore the marks of being struck by lightning, hardly a surprise considering this was the highest point for miles around.
John wished he still had his binoculars, but he didn’t need them to see what he’d come to see. “There it is,” he said with satisfaction. “Tucked in nice and neat. They are pretty ships, aren’t they?”
Teyla nodded.
The wedge shape of the Wraith cruiser was unmistakable, parked in one of the colonnaded courtyards of the palace below. It wasn’t the largest he’d seen, but it very nearly filled the courtyard, a nice job of flying to land it without clipping the buildings around it. Which meant it would be a nice job to take off without hitting them either. John had spent too many years as a helicopter pilot not to appreciate the difficulty of that.
The ramp was lowered and the cruiser seemed to be powered down, resting on its landing gear with its running lights dark. There were no signs of crew about it.
“Standing down,” John said. “Must be feeling pretty secure.”
“If one of the inhabitants of this world did get aboard they could not fly it,” Teyla said. She looked at him, a wrinkle between her brows. “Are you sure you can?”
“No.” John didn’t particularly like the idea of taking a ship out of that kind of tight parking the first time in the cockpit of a new class. For that matter, the first time in the cockpit of a Wraith ship at all. He’d seen the bits and pieces Zelenka had been putting together of the downed Wraith Dart, and a lot of it was totally unfamiliar. Of course it wasn’t, really. There are only so many ways to put things together so they’ll fly, but it was possible for the interfaces to be so different that it took even a good pilot months to adapt. He’d learned to fly an Osprey, once, but he’d never gotten used to it. And if he’d tried to take off like this the first time in the seat, even without the approaching storm, John knew he’d have bought the farm. “But we can get to the communications gear. If we can send a signal to our folks, we’re good.”
Teyla looked like she liked that idea a little better. “At least we can warn them the Wraith are here,” she said. Her face looked faintly strained.
“Are they?” he asked.
“Oh yes.” Teyla nodded without hesitation. “There are Wraith here, in the palace below. I do not know how many. More than one, less than a hundred. I feel many minds, but not a full ship’s compliment.” Her eyes unfocused, as though looking at something beyond the immediate.
“Don’t,” John said, and grabbed her wrist. He’d seen her try this before, with results both good and bad. “There’s nobody to snap you out of it, and you might give us away.”
Teyla let out a deep breath and looked at him sideways. “You are right,” she said with a relieved expression. “I would not get anything very useful, and they might sense me.”
“Let’s save it,” John said. “And concentrate on getting to the communications gear.”
In the distance there was the first faint rumble of thunder.
“I do not think I can climb down this side of the hill,” Teyla said. “Not with my shoulder useless. We will have to go around.”
John had already figured that. It was way too steep. Teyla couldn’t do it with one hand. “We’ll go down the way we got up and then go around the side. It looks like there’s some kind of garden there. I can’t tell from here how high that wall is, but with trees on both sides we can probably get over there. They build everything in this rough stone with lots of footholds.”
Together they climbed down the hill in the gathering dark. For a moment, as distant lightning flashed and they scrambled around a large boulder, John felt the world shift in a moment of vertigo. Perfect, he thought. That was all he needed. Between his head and Teyla’s messed up shoulder, they weren’t up to their usual standards at all.
“Are you all right?” Teyla asked, her hand to his shoulder.