‘Duster’ grumbled, staring into his nest of a beard. Calder thought he saw the man’s cheeks color. “If I say my name’s Duster, it’s Duster!”
Andel nodded to him, conceding a point. “Well, Mr. Duster, we’ve given you our professions.”
“Don’t tell me you’re a valet,” Calder said. “I won’t be able to resist making a joke about dusting furniture.”
Duster shot Calder a look, and addressed his response to Andel. “I used to be a gunsmith.”
A light came on in Andel’s eyes, and he stared at Duster’s face as though he’d figured something out. Calder inspected the old man too, hoping to learn something. As far as he could tell, Duster was the same as every other man over seventy years old: craggy face, gray hair, scowl for anyone under thirty. Only his untamed hair and his two pairs of glasses set him apart.
But whatever Andel had figured out, Calder couldn’t worry about it. He was too busy figuring out a way to escape.
“Were you any good?” Andel asked, his voice layered with implication.
Duster met his eyes. “Some would say so.”
Calder jumped in before they could bore him with pointless reminiscing. “You don’t have a gun, do you?”
From the way Andel and Duster looked at him, you would have thought it was the dumbest thing that had ever come out of his mouth. It was an honest question.
“Were you armed before you came in?” Duster asked, a little more harshly than Calder felt he deserved. “Are you armed now? What kind of kidnappers would they be if they let us keep our guns?”
“Not very good ones,” Andel said, holding up a gun.
This time, the ensuing silence was shock, as everyone conscious in the room had their attention stolen by the sudden presence of a pistol.
Calder kept his voice calm. “Andel. Where did you get that?”
Andel gestured down to his white belt. “I tucked it into my pants while no one was looking. After they found my spare, they stopped searching. But don’t get too excited. It’s the one I fired earlier, so I have neither shot nor powder.”
“Still, it’s something. Good work, Andel.” Calder’s mind kept moving, piecing together a plan. They could at least threaten the guards with their weapon. That would be better than nothing, and it might slow the cultists down. First, they only had to get out of the room.
“All right, we can do this,” he said at last. “It will only take me a day or two to Invest the latch enough that we can escape. Once we do, Andel—”
Duster snorted. “I’m a Reader, boy. Can’t be done.”
Calder stopped, a little stunned from the sudden interruption to his flow of thought. Before he’d collected himself, a question came out of his mouth. “You’re a Reader, and you decided to be a gunsmith?”
He’d seen bad liars before, and ‘Duster’ was one of them. “Readers make good craftsmen! Anyway, if you are a Reader, why are you…” The old man hesitated, trailing off as he realized what he was about to say.
Calder finished for him. “…a high-ranking Guild member? Because it pays well, it’s among the most respected positions in the Empire, and because it’s what every Reader aspires to be. Not a gunsmith.”
“Technically, it’s because you were conscripted to pay off an enormous debt to the crown in reparation for your numerous, irresponsible, and destructive crimes.” Andel’s voice was as bland as his face.
“Thank you for volunteering, Andel. We needed to feed someone to the Elderspawn on the way out.”
Duster must have been lost, because he returned the conversation to the previous track. “Anyway, I’ve only been in here three days. When it started, there were forty of us.”
Calder looked at the room’s eight total inhabitants: four unconscious or debilitated men, one little boy huddling in the corner, and the three of them. “Ah.”
“Yeah. Those spiders pull a handful of us out at a time, and I’m not expecting any of them back, if you follow me.”
Still, Calder couldn’t imagine that a Reader had sat idly in a room for three full days. “You had to have found something.”
By way of demonstration, Duster pinched the cord between his wrists and pulled it apart. It tore like spun sugar. “Been working on this the whole time. Not that it will do me any good. First thing I did was try the door, and guess what? Too much Elder Intent. I barely Read it once without trying to swallow my toes. I do it again, or you do, and we’ll likely kill everyone else in here.”
The old man leaned back against the wall, eyes shut. His resignation frustrated Calder, but it seemed to intrigue Andel, who said, “You seem awfully cavalier for a man about to meet the Elders.”
A smile touched the corner of Duster’s mouth. “Nothing I can do about it, is there? Might as well wait my turn. And some things…well, not everybody fears dying quite so much as they maybe should.”
Calder dismissed the gunsmith and his fatalism, chewing on their problem once again. They had two Readers and a gun; there had to be something they could do with those. And if the Inquisitors really took away groups of prisoners each day, then Jerri was in as much danger as they were. He needed to get everybody to safety, and he needed to do it immediately.
Andel only watched him think. At any second, Calder expected a sarcastic comment, and he was prepared to respond in kind. But Andel stayed silent, watching.
For the better part of the next two hours, Calder considered and rejected plan after plan. They didn’t have enough time to invest anything substantial, and it would be foolish to rely too much on the gun. What if the cultists were willing to take a pistol round?
What it came down to, as always, was a lack of information. When did the Elderspawn Inquisitors come to take their prisoners? What would happen to them afterwards—might there be a chance to escape en route? Calder posed several small questions to Duster, but either the man didn’t have the answers, or the answers were useless.
After two hours of collecting and sorting information, Calder finally asked, “Are you certain you have no idea where our other weapons are?”
“I was sure the last time, and I haven’t come across any new information in the past ten minutes.”
“Not a hint? Not a clue?”
Duster peered around, his eyes mockingly wide. “I can be fairly certain they’re not in this room.”
This time, Calder let himself be deterred. “We’re going to have to fight someone or something, and we can’t do that with an empty pistol. If we at least had some powder and ammunition, that would be something.”
Absently, Duster pointed straight to the corner of the room.
Calder followed the end of his finger, but saw nothing there. “Are you trying to send me to sit in the corner, or…”
“My tools are in that direction. No weapons, but I could build a whole gun with the spare parts and tools I keep in there. Load it and fire it, too. We get to those, we could load the gun.”
It was hard not to snatch the pistol from Andel and club Duster over the head with it. “You said you didn’t know where the weapons are!”
“I don’t. I know where my tools are. I always know.”
Andel and Calder exchanged a look. “You’re a Soulbound? And you’re still in here?”
Duster let out a deep breath, ruffling the edge of his beard. “Not the kind of Soulbound you’re thinking of, son. If you need somebody to assemble a working pistol in two hours, I’m your man. You want a musket that will strike in the damp and never jam, no problem. Can’t throw much of a fireball, though.”