Jade looked at Flower, who shrugged, then at Rift. She asked him, “Is that true?”
Rift seemed startled to be consulted. He said, “I don’t know.” Moon watched Esom, who looked tired and earnest. He could be lying but… But it would be stupid to lie about this, Moon thought. And he had never had the image of Esom as a very good liar, despite the fact that he had concealed his abilities from Ardan. He exchanged a look with Jade, who hissed out a breath. She said, “Then we’ll go to the tower.”
They traveled through the dimly-lit underground, back to the well in the city foundations that led up into the lower level of Ardan’s tower. Moon led them up through the lichen-illuminated passage, back to the panel that opened into the first floor of the exhibit hall. It had been sealed again, and Esom stepped forward to whisper, “Wait, let me make sure…”
“I thought he said the magics would all be gone,” Root muttered in the back.
Moon snarled absently. If Esom was wrong about the tower being undefended, he didn’t know how they were going to free Negal and the other groundlings. Esom frowned, touched the door lightly, then ran his hand over it. Relieved, he said, “There was something here, I can feel the resonance, but it’s gone now.” He turned to Moon. “Ardan must have been hoping to catch us if we tried to come back this way.”
“Good.” Moon stepped past him to push on the door and felt it move just a little, enough to tell him there had been no attempt made to block it off from the other side.
“Wait.” Jade turned to face the others. Stone had had to shift back to groundling to fit through the last part of the passage. Everyone looked exhausted, wet, and worried, including the groundlings. She said, “Don’t kill anyone. We don’t want a war with these people.”
“They keep trying to kill us,” Drift protested.
“Because Ardan ordered them to,” Moon said impatiently. “He’s dead, and we can’t fight every groundling in this city. If they think we’re out to slaughter them, they’ll all band together against us.”
“And because I said so,” Jade added, and cuffed Drift in the head. She clearly wasn’t in any mood to put up with an argument. She nodded to Moon, and he and Vine pushed the panel out and lifted it away, letting in a spill of brighter light from the corridor. Moon was the first one out.
Moon took a deep breath of air only lightly tinged with the leviathan’s stench. After the underground and the mortuary, the polished floors and bright vapor-lights were a relief.
He led the way around and out from under the stairwell, to the main room. It seemed even bigger without the giant waterling, with the chains that had supported it hanging empty. The outer door was securely locked and barred, but there were no guards and no sound of movement anywhere. Most if not all of them must have gone with Ardan. Presumably the survivors would be looking for new jobs and wouldn’t be returning here.
“It feels empty,” Rift said, his voice hushed. “But the servants must still be here.”
Moon tasted the air. He caught only the scents of decay from the upper exhibit hall and the traces left behind of the giant waterling. “Somebody would have had to open the doors for Ardan and the others when they came back.”
Jade ordered, “Search the place, chase out any of Ardan’s people left behind, and find the prisoners.”
Leaving Jade and Chime behind to guard Flower and the seed, and Stone to watch the outside door, they all spread out to search the place floor by floor.
Moon followed the stairs up through the tower and opened every door he came to, breaking the locks if necessary. Vine flushed out the first frightened servant, and they quickly organized a system for chasing them out to the stairwell where Song or Root waited to make sure they ran all the way down and out the front door, where Stone made certain they left. They didn’t run into anyone who was armed; Ardan must have taken all his guards with him to the mortuary.
They were all hungry and drooping with exhaustion. The younger warriors were having difficulty keeping up, and Karsis had to tow Esom up the stairs. On the third floor above the exhibit halls they passed a foyer with a running fountain. Moon stepped into it just long enough to put his head under the spray and wash the last residue of the leviathan off his scales. It helped revive him a little. It had been a long time without sleep or real food, and he didn’t know how much longer he and the others could last.
They were in the upper levels of the tower, where the public rooms were, exploring a servants’ area near a second set of kitchens, when Balm stumbled on a heavily locked door that seemed to lead to a separate section of the level. They forced open the door to find a corridor with doors not unlike the guest quarters—except these doors had no open transoms to allow in light and air, and all had locks on the outside. “This could be it,” Esom breathed. He ran to the first door and pounded on it, shouting, “Negal? Orlis?”
Karsis took the other side of the corridor, pounding on each door. Midway down, someone inside shouted an incomprehensible answer and pounded back.
“It’s them!” Karsis fumbled at the lock as Esom ran to join her.
Balm glanced at Moon, got a nod, and went to help them. She broke the lock off the handle and ripped the door open.
Negal stepped out first, then stopped, astonished. He stared from Esom to Balm, Moon, and past them at Vine, who looked in from the foyer. Orlis and six other men crowded behind him. They were all a similar type of groundling, with dark hair and brown skin, dressed in worn clothes, with the thin, pinched look of people who had been away from the sun and fresh air for a long time. Smiling with relief, Negal said to Esom, “I take it the situation has changed drastically?”
Esom explained, “Ardan is dead, and we have an alliance with them, now.” He gestured vaguely toward Moon and the others. “Of course, most of the population of the island probably wants to kill us—”
Karsis cried, “But we’re alive and finally free!” She hugged Negal, overcome with emotion, and Moon and Balm hastily withdrew to the foyer. “Stay with them. Keep an eye on them,” Moon told Balm, speaking in Raksuran to avoid any awkwardness. “Make sure the others are as willing to be friendly as Karsis and Esom. And keep Rift away from them.”
Balm nodded understanding, and glanced back at the groundlings. “I will. Especially the part about Rift.”
Moon left her with them, took Vine, and continued the search.
In a stairwell foyer two levels up, they ran back into Floret and Song.
“I found some groundlings hiding in these rooms,” Floret said. “A woman, and some baby groundlings. The babies screamed when they saw me. When I shifted, they just screamed again.” Looking embarrassed, she admitted, “It’s a little upsetting. I don’t want to scare them anymore.”
She, Song, and Vine all stared expectantly at Moon. Song said, encouragingly, “You know how to talk to groundlings.”
Moon sighed. Warriors weren’t fertile and presumably had little experience with children. Except to play with them occasionally, and hand them back to the teachers when the babies got tired or hungry. “Wait out here. Stay back away from the door.”
Moon went into the anteroom. The statues carved into the walls were female, the first ones he could remember seeing here, draped with graceful swaths of fabric and, unlike the male statues, smiling faintly. He shifted to groundling, and staggered, nearly going to his knees. Every cut and bruise, every sore and strained muscle, was suddenly magnified a hundredfold. He groaned, managed to straighten up, and walked into the suite.
It was furnished even more finely than the other private rooms Moon had seen, with thick carpets and heavy hangings on the walls in patterns of soft colors. The wooden furniture was elegantly carved and set with polished mother-of-pearl, the vapor-lamps shaped into fanciful fish and seabirds. It smelled of the perfumes the wealthy groundlings here wore, cloying false-flowery scents, combined with a musk of fear. Moon heard muffled weeping and followed it back through the rooms to a bedchamber. A young blue-pearl woman wrapped in a rich robe was huddled on the floor between the heavily draped bed and a carved chest, with four blue-pearl children of varying ages, all sniffling in terror. There was an elderly blue-pearl man and a woman huddled in with them, both dressed like servants.