"A secret door?" the sergeant asked. "Are you sure?"
Regdar thought of Naull's spellcasting the day before and nodded.
"One of my men's a half-elf," the sergeant said. "He's got an eye for that sort of thing."
Regdar nodded and the sergeant slipped away to give the order.
"Nice work, anyway," one of the watchmen called up.
"What was that?" Regdar asked.
"The carving," a watchman in the room below replied, pointing at the holes in the marble floors. "It was expertly done, I can tell you that."
Regdar crouched and ran a fingertip along the smooth, rounded edge of the hole. The floors were solid marble. The place was more regally built than Regdar imagined. It must have taken magic to lay those slabs and probably to cut them so perfectly in the first place.
"I used to work with my uncle," the watchman continued from below, "carving headstones. Depressing work, and I didn't have a talent for it like he did."
"This would take time, wouldn't it?" Regdar said. "Work like this through, what, six inches or more of solid marble?"
The watchman nodded and said, "My uncle could have done it, when he was alive. It would take him the better part of a month, and you'd sure as mages mumble have been able to hear him working at it."
The floors were kept polished by the Thrush and the Jay's dedicated cleaning staff. As Regdar felt the edge of the hole, he thought he felt ripples, like ridges or depressions.
"Fingers," he said aloud.
"Sorry, lord?" the watchman below asked.
"Nothing," Regdar said. "Best get you two out of there and seal the room. I want you four to guard those rooms, two on each door. No one goes in without my orders."
The watchmen in the rooms below made various signals and grunts of understanding, and disappeared from Regdar's view.
Regdar stood but his eyes roamed the edges of the hole. He couldn't shake the feeling that he'd seen something like that edge before, and his mind wandered to his mother's pottery wheel. He hadn't thought about that in a long time, but he could see her fingers press gently into the wet, turning clay.
With a sigh, Regdar drew the jagged piece of steel from his pocket and eyed it.
"Who are you?" he whispered, "and how did you work solid marble like it was soft clay?"
And why, he asked silently, were you trying to kill the duke's daughter?
16
"Damn it!" Vargussel swore. "Damn it all to the Hubs of Hell!"
He picked up a chair, one of the few functional pieces of furniture in the room, and did his best to hurl it at the wall. The chair clattered to the floor, splashing into a puddle of fetid muck.
Vargussel put his hands to his temples and pressed. His head throbbed, his jaw was taut, and he thought his eyes might pop out of his head. He heard the shield guardian stomp into the confines of his secret laboratory but Vargussel didn't turn around to look at it.
Opening his eyes, he crossed to the elaborate stand on which rested a crystal ball. He touched the medallion that hung around his neck and silently commanded the shield guardian to take its usual place against the far wall. The construct complied without question.
"Damn you," Vargussel spat into the crystal ball.
Floating in the clear, colorless glass was an image of the basement of the Thrush and the Jay. light spilled into the room from above where the shield guardian had shaped a hole in the ceiling. Vargussel had spent most of the night patting himself on the back for his genius. The shield guardian had the power to store a single spell and use it at Vargussel's command. The spell he'd equipped the construct with that night allowed it to work the solid marble of the inn's floors as if it was soft butter. The shield guardian tunneled its way straight up to the new Lord Constable's bedchamber, the element of surprise intact. The construct had been in the room for only seconds before Vargussel had stopped patting himself on the back.
How could Vargussel have known the Lord Constable wouldn't be alone?
Vargussel rested his hands on the cool surface of the crystal ball and sighed, trying to calm himself.
"You nearly killed her," he muttered to the construct standing silently behind him.
Vargussel took his hands away from the crystal when he saw two men dressed in the tabards of the city watch cautiously step into view. Their swords were drawn, and their eyes were wide with fearful expectation.
"It's long gone, you fools," the mage said to the gently glowing image.
The watchmen had no reaction. They couldn't hear him. Vargussel could see into the inn's basement from the safety of the abandoned slaughterhouse but the soldiers would never know they were being watched. Vargussel didn't bother noting details about the two watchmen. They would either find the secret door or not.
"Try to find me from there," the mage mumbled, confident that the maze of sewer tunnels between the inn and the slaughterhouse would provide adequate protection from simple city watchmen.
One of the watchmen searched the wall dangerously close to the secret door, but still he hadn't see it.
"Oh, you're good," the mage grumbled.
Vargussel noted the gently rounded point at the top of the watchman's ears, the fair complexion, the pale green eyes…a half-elf.
"Well," Vargussel said with a wry laugh, "here they co-"
The crystal ball shattered in his face. It exploded into a cloud of razor-sharp shards so quickly and abruptly, the mage only barely had time to shield his eyes.
Vargussel threw himself back and landed hard on a pile of rotting lumber. A big, mangy rat squealed loudly and scurried from the pile, jumping over one of Vargussel's legs in its hurry to get away. The mage flinched away from the rat, then kicked at it. The rodent was long gone through a hole in the tumble-down walls.
"A new pet, Vargussel?" a familiar voice rumbled through the laboratory.
With a gasp, Vargussel whirled at the sound. In the air above him the shards of crystal had coalesced into a floating cloud of glittering slivers. The cloud took the shape of a man's face, its features smooth and ill-defined, though Vargussel knew exactly who it was. The floating image turned its attention on the cowering mage, who scrambled into a deep, groveling bow.
"Great One!" the mage simpered.
"Silence, servant," the image boomed. "Listen and learn."
Vargussel clenched his teeth to keep from talking or babbling in the face of the crystal image.
"Your progress is slow," the image said.
There was a pause and Vargussel looked up, still clenching his teeth, and raised an eyebrow for some sign as to whether the image required an answer.
"I believed in you," the image said, and Vargussel bent his neck again, scraping his forehead on the ground. "You persuaded me."
There was another pause, but Vargussel didn't look up.
"Speak!" the image roared, sending a tinkling spray of broken glass showering harmlessly over the groveling mage.
"The plan is moving forward, O Great One!" Vargussel shouted back. "Trust in me. I will not fail you. The girl will be mine, then the city, then the duchy will be yours. This I swear by the Many-Headed Hydra in the Center of the-"
"Enough!"
Vargussel wrapped his arms over his head and pressed his face into the rotting floorboards.
"Time passes, Vargussel," the image said. "Time passes quickly."
Vargussel held his breath and pressed his eyes closed at the sound of the thousands of shards of crystal raining down around him. He felt nothing, though, and after a few heartbeats had passed without another word from the image, he dared open one eye and look up.
The crystal ball sat on the pedestal again, intact and unmarred. In it was an image of the half-elf watchman waving his friend forward. The watchman said something to his companion that Vargussel couldn't hear, and the other man ran back up the basement stairs.