Balram smiled. “I wouldn’t have expected an animal to speak so boldly. Yes, I knew you’d try. Were your efforts rewarded?”
Talal shook his head. “She died during the first night. We didn’t want to waste our last healing draught on a lost cause.”
“Really?” Balram sounded impressed. “What little mercenaries you’ve become … that is, if you’re not little liars. Where is the body?” He raised his hand again, tracing the air alongside Talal’s head.
The boy refused to flinch. “Follow me,” he said. “I’ll take you to her.”
She awoke to a hand softly brushing her cheek. Meisha opened her eyes and saw Varan staring down at her.
Her hands were numb from being pressed against the cold floor. She clenched them into painful fists to keep from throwing herself away from Varan, but he merely sat before her, one hand endlessly shuffling his papers, the other resting on her skin, as if he had forgotten he’d laid it there.
Slowly, Meisha uncurled her body and slid out from under his hand. She came to an unsteady sitting position against the wall, still too close to the unstable wizard for comfort.
How long had she been meditating? No, that wasn’t true, she thought, berating herself savagely. Meditation had turned to sleep, and a deep one. That had never happened to her before, not unless she willed it. Had Varan used some magic to make her sleep? The thought was more than unsettling. Meisha knew what he could do to her when she was awake and aware. It was frightening to contemplate what he might have done to her while she was helpless in sleep.
Helpless in sleep.
Meisha stood up so quickly that Varan looked up from his reading. His smile struck her with a profound chill. “You’re dreaming, m’dear. Back to sleep now, child. There’s a good girl.” He resumed his shuffling.
Meisha slid back to the floor quietly, but her thoughts raced. Even in his current state, even asleep, Varan had sensed her presence in the chamber. He may have been confused about who she was or how old, but he knew someone was there with him. Of course—it should have dawned on her long before now.
Varan had known all along when the refugees were in his chamber. They shouldn’t have been able to take his discarded magics from him without his consent, not while he could still cast spells—and she’d had painful proof that he could capably defend himself. But according to Talal, he’d never attacked any of them, until Shirva Tarlarin and Meisha herself, after she’d picked up the banded sphere. Meisha looked around the room for the item, but it was gone, taken in the last delivery to the Shadow Thieves. Varan didn’t seem bothered by its absence.
Why, then, had he attacked her? Perhaps there had been another reason behind his violent outburst. Perhaps he’d killed Shirva Tarlarin for that same reason.
She watched Varan for a long time, but his face registered nothing and offered her no clues.
Meisha jumped at the sharp rap on the door.
“It’s just Talal,” Varan muttered without looking up from his papers.
Meisha’s mouth slid open and shut, but she had no time to marvel at Varan’s flashes of lucidity as the door opened a crack and Talal wiggled through.
“What happened to you?” Meisha demanded, seeing the dried blood on the boy’s neck and shirt.
“Lost some hair,” was all Talal would say. His hands shook slightly as he ran them through his dirty locks. His eyes were bright, hard chips of stone, but he smiled as he reached for her hand. “Still alive, I see. Good. Come with me. You’ll like this.”
Curious, Meisha followed him out into the corridor and down the passage he’d tried to take her through before. It arched away from the warrens and back up a tunnel in a rough horseshoe, emptying into a circular chamber bounded by steep flowstone sides. Scattered about the floor were piles of small- to mid-sized stones.
Meisha stepped around Talal to see at a better angle and realized the piles were arranged in tidy rows. A group of men with shovels scooped rocks onto a high mound at the back of the chamber.
“They’re graves,” Meisha said, counting the fallen and coming up with the exact number—plus one—of refugees Talal said had died in the Delve. Her gaze returned to the fresh stone pile.
Talal followed her eyes. “Like it? One of ’em’s yours. We dug it the night I brought you in,” he explained, and had the good grace to look sheepish. “You know—just in case. After you mended, we kept it for when they came back. Oh”—he kicked off her boots and held them out—“you can have these back. Don’t fit me anyway.”
“They believed I was dead?” Meisha asked, suspicious. “On sight of a grave alone?”
Talal exchanged grinning gazes with the circle of digging men. One of the men winked at Meisha. “Not at first,” the man replied. “But Talal told ’em we’d dig you up, ‘yes sir, right away sir—it’ll only take a few days with these little stick shovels you give us, sir.’ ” The digger laughed heartily.
“So we started in,” Talal said, frowning as he fingered the newly naked skin behind his ear. “We actually dug up Shirva. Aazen left with half the men and the latest shipment when we started digging, and Balram didn’t linger to look beyond that she was female and recently dead. It’s just like before,” he said, looking at Meisha. “Balram hates the Delve, everything about it makes him twitchy. It was all he could do to be down here smelling us.”
“Bloody cowards,” another man said. He spat on the ground.
Meisha smiled at Talal. “You have my thanks,” she said. “You’ve saved my life twice now.”
The boy jerked his shoulders, but he was blushing fiercely. “Nothing to it, Lady. You get us out of here, Tymora puts us in balance.” He added quickly, “The bitch.”
“We have to talk about that,” Meisha said, looking at the gathered men. “Get everyone together, if you will. We can’t wait for Kall to find the portal. We have to try to escape on our own, and the only way out is through the Shadow Thieves.” There was restless murmuring among the men, but Meisha ignored them. “According to Talal’s brother, at least one of them has the key to activate the portal. We’re going to take it from the next party that comes through the door.”
Eyebrows soared around the circle of diggers, but Talal grinned, slapping an arm around Meisha’s neck. “What’d I tell you, boys? She’s going death-seeking again. That’s our Meisha.”
When the diggers had dispersed back to the warrens, Meisha pulled Talal aside. “I need to know about Shirva Tarlarin,” she said.
Talal looked surprised. “What about her?”
“Do you know which of Varans items she touched that set him off? Was anything found near her body?”
Talal thought for a moment. His eyes clouded. “She had one of his strings,” he said finally. “From his neck sack.”
“His neck pouch?” Meisha asked. She hadn’t expected that. Then she remembered the rings. She’d put the apprentices’ rings back in Varan’s pouch at the same time she’d been handling the sphere, just before Varan attacked her. Had Shirva Tarlarin touched the pouch too? “Is that why he killed her?” she wondered aloud.
“Don’t know, but the string was wrapped around what was left of her fingers. I think he”—the boy swallowed—“near as we could tell, he bit some of her fingers off taking it back.”
A mental picture of Varan attacking a woman with only his teeth made Meisha light-headed. She felt Talal steady her with a hand to her waist. “Why would he do it?” she asked. “He keeps nothing of great magic in there. What is he hiding?”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Cesira stood in the ruined tower, watching through one of the arched windows as Dantane, Morgan, and Laerin rode toward the estate.