No, she decided. Can't give away my presence even with a whisper.
Emriana bolstered her courage with a single deep breath and proceeded. The noises from the next room continued, and it sounded to Emriana as though someone were shifting crates around. She used the wall to guide herself, and when she found the frame of the door, she stopped, listening again.
Someone was definitely on the other side of the door. She felt for the handle and pulled the slightest bit, hoping to get a peek inside before anyone noticed she was there. It was dark in the room, but the sounds continued. Emriana listened for a moment longer, keeping the door open only a crack. It still sounded as if someone were stacking crates.
How odd, she thought, preparing to swing the door wide and toss the coin inside for a better view. Then she grew suspicious. Can wizards make magic that sounds like someone moving around? she wondered. Probably, she decided. Wants me to just walk in.
Instead, she took a length of rope that she carried-in case we need to do any serious climbing or tie someone up, she had told Xaphira-and very carefully tied one end of it to the pull handle of the door. She uncoiled the rope as she walked backward, away from the portal, perhaps ten paces. Then she yanked the door open.
An audible click sounded in the hall and a whoosh of air was released from inside the room. A blink of an eye later, something loud popped on the far side of the hall.
Despite her preparations, Emriana jumped at the sound. Then she stood stark still, waiting to see if anything else happened. When it did not, she carefully moved back to the wide-open door and listened. The sound of crates being stacked was still in evidence, and in fact, hadn't changed at all.
Knowing that such noises couldn't be natural, Emriana pulled her coin out of her pocket, blinking in its brightness. The room was no more than a storage closet, but mounted on a stand in the center, aimed right for the door, was a small ballista. A bit of twine ran from the trigger mechanism to the door. Turning, Emriana found the remains of the large bolt that had been fired. It was as long as her leg and as thick as her thumb.
It would have skewered me, she thought unhappily.
The sounds of crate-stacking continued, but Emriana realized they were merely a trick of magic, some sort of prestidigitation Bartimus likely conjured to draw her or her aunt into opening the door.
Aunt Xaphira!
Emriana turned around, ready to grab her pendant and call to her aunt when a face loomed into view just inside the girl's circle of light.
It was Denrick, smiling at her.
CHAPTER 15
Vambran moved down the smoky, torchlit hallway, sword in hand. The stink of sweat and fear clung to everything so many levels below the surface. The lieutenant knew he was near the dungeons of the Palace of the Seven, but his magic seemed to be leading him in a different direction. He had not encountered any guards, no one to stand in his way, though that was not a surprise. The city is in chaos, he thought. Why stay here and protect empty corridors?
The mercenary was close to the source of the malignancy, and he knew it. Malevolence radiated through the place, oozed from the walls, hung on him like a funereal shroud. It was a sense of evil so pervasive that he no longer needed divine guidance to track it. Whatever was causing the plague was in the bowels of the keep, and he was closing in on it.
He had to fight the urge to leap ahead, to charge forward and find that source. Whatever was down there was strong, and he could not afford to underestimate it. But he craved the hunt. He needed it the way he needed air. After everything he had endured over the last three days, the urge to vent his frustrations on the source of it all was like a bad taste in his mouth.
The pulsating evil led Vambran to a door at the end of the passage. The force he sought lay beyond that portal. It beckoned to him, taunting. He hesitated, listening. No sounds arose from the other side, but some presence lay beyond. Something that hated him. Adjusting his grip on his sword, he shoved the door open and peered inside.
The chamber beyond was out of a nightmare. Implements of torture filled much of the room, and the lieutenant could see a laboratory along one wall, jammed with alembics and decanters containing all sorts of vile things. Half of them turned his stomach when he recognized them and the other half-well, he didn't even want to guess at those.
A cloaked figure stood at a table in the laboratory, its back to Vambran, apparently working. Even when the door slammed open, the figure barely twitched. It wore a brown robe with a hood pulled up, completely hiding its head. It didn't stop in its work as it said in a masculine voice, "I wondered when you would get here."
Vambran paused with one foot inside the room. He stared at the figure, unsure what sort of trap he might be falling into. "How did you know I would come?" he said, hoping to draw the man out, get him to turn around. He looked around the room as he spoke, searching for other threats. He saw nothing, but there were so many items filling the chamber, so many places to hide, that it seemed ridiculous not to have allies hiding among it all. The lieutenant sensed death everywhere, and not all of that palpable hatred emanated from his counterpart. The whole chamber was filled with it.
"I know a great many things," the figure said, moving from a small apparatus over to a flask resting atop a ring stand and heated by a candle. "For example, I know that you are here to stop me from completing my quest, and that you have brought great magic with you to do so."
Vambran swallowed, circling wide of the figure, wary of having some caustic substance hurled in his direction. "Then you must also know that I'm set on staying around until I finish the job."
"Finish the job?" the figure in the brown robes said with a hearty chuckle. "You aren't serious, are you?" And he began to turn around, spinning slowly to face Vambran. "After all," he said as his face came into view, "you couldn't finish the job twelve years ago."
Vambran stared at the man whose features remained partially hidden within the hood of the robe. The cryptic comment baffled him. But when his enemy reached up and pulled his hood back, fully revealing his face, a memory came flooding back to the mercenary. A memory of a man lying near a pond, with a crossbow bolt protruding from his chest. A dead man.
"You!" Vambran said, stunned. He reached out to grab hold of a table to keep his balance. "But you're dead! I saw your body!"
"As I said," Rodolpho Wianar replied, "you couldn't finish the job then, so how do you expect to do so now?"
Vambran reeled at the revelation. Still alive! How was it possible? Then another thought struck him. No, he realized, dismissing it. Xaphira would not have made such a mistake. He was dead, and brought back from the dead. But why?
Vambran's eyes narrowed. "Your death was a screen, a cover-up, wasn't it? Everyone was supposed to assume you had died, and I was set up for it."
"Right you are," Rodolpho Wianar said, looking pleased. "They said you were bright," he added, chuckling. "I just didn't believe them, seeing how you kept dragging your family into the middle of all this."
Vambran shook off the backhanded compliment. "But I wasn't the one who killed you before," he said. "And you know that."
"Too true."
"I bet you know who did, too."
"Yes, he does," came another voice from a corner of the room, one that Vambran recognized. He shot a glance over to confirm that Junce Roundface was standing there. "He knows very well I was the one who punctured his heart with one of your own bolts that night."