Khelben continued to look doubtful.
"What if I were lying?" Vala asked. "Would you leave me here to fall with the city?"
"Of course not," Alustriel said. "We promised Aris we wouldn't."
"Then why should I lie?"
Finally, Khelben smiled and said, "I suppose you're right at that, aren't you?"
Khelben dragged the unconscious guard over to Vala and laid him at her feet. While she used the heel of her foot to make it look as though she had knocked him unconscious, Khelben removed the keys from his belt and undid her manacles. Once she was free, Vala wrapped the chain around his throat and began to choke him. None of the Chosen watched this part. They clearly wished there had been another way.
Not Vala. She had only to think of the beatings she had suffered at Feslath's hands for this small vengeance to seem not nearly enough. The thought sent a chill down her spine, and she found herself wondering if it was only magic-users who could let their shadows inside.
Once the guard was dead, Vala took his equipment and dressed herself in his clothes, and Khelben shrank himself back to the size of the others. She stuffed all five of the Chosen into her pockets, and aided by spells of invisibility and silence, crept down the stairs to the base of the confinement tower. Here, she had to kill two more guards, the first when he turned toward the opening door, the second while he was struggling with the dying body she had shoved into his arms. Leaving the bodies inside the stairwell behind the locked iron door, she used the second one's cloak to wipe the blood off the floor, then tossed it into a garderobe and left the area.
From there, it would have been a simple matter to descend the back stairs and vanish into the city. Instead, Vala entered a servant's passage and traversed the back of the great palace. Though she passed a constant stream of maids, pages, and butlers, she remained concealed from both eye and ear, for the magic of the Chosen was powerful enough to remain effective even after combat had been joined.
A quarter hour later, Vala emerged from the servant's passage into the dusky lobby outside the prince's private wing. The great anteroom doors were closed and guarded, as they had been since his return from the battle on the High Ice, and for a moment she despaired of making her plan work. There was no other way into the wing-at least that she had ever seen-and even invisible, she could not best a dozen of Escanor's shadow lords.
But, as Vala had hoped, the prince's duties could not be ignored even when he lay half-dead in his bed. It was not long before a courier approached the great doors bearing a shadow-filled message bottle. Vala fell in on his heels, following so closely that when a guard ordered him to stop three paces from the doors, she had to dodge around his side to keep from running into him. The guard took the message bottle and dismissed the courier, waiting until he had vanished down the corridor before he turned and knocked softly on the door.
Vala stood at the guard's side for a seeming eternity, barely daring to exhale lest her breath tickle the hair on his arms. Finally, a steward opened the door just far enough to lean out and take the message bottle. It would probably have been wise to wait for a serving maid or some other domestic whose duties would require opening the door more than a shoulder's width, but there was precious little time to make the decision, and Vala knew that the deaths in the confinement tower would not go unnoticed for long. She dropped to her haunches, pivoting around in front of the guard, and duck-walked sideways through the narrow opening, trying so hard not to step on his heels that the closing door caught her foot.
The guard called something to the chamberlain, who was already a step away, then shoved with his shoulder. Vala's foot seemed to fold along the length, but the heavy door bounced back enough for her to pull her foot into the room after her.
The door clicked shut, and Vala dropped to her seat, at once sighing in relief and opening her mouth in an unvoiced scream of pain. It would have been nice to set aside one of the weapons in her hand and check for broken bones, but such indulgences killed more warriors than they saved. She rolled to her knees and came up facing the interior of Escanor's large anteroom, where half a dozen clerks sat attending to the prince's private business.
Vala started across the chamber on her hands and knees, angling for the dark corridor that led deeper into the prince's inner sanctum. There, she had to slip under the crossed glaives of another set of guards.
Once inside the murky passage, she rose and put some weight on her foot. The pain was dull and general, more like a bad bruise than a break. She took a few steps. Finding the foot would support her, she continued through Escanor's private study into his dressing room, and passing another pair of guards and a small clique of servants at each stage, from his dressing room into his large and opulent bedchamber.
Escanor lay alone in his bed, little more than a man-shaped shadow cleaving to a cage of black ribs. His beating heart was visible inside, still glowing faintly with the light of the Weave flames that had nearly consumed him. He was attended on one side of the bed by a servant and on the other by a black-robed priestess wearing the purple mask of Shar. Two of Escanor's battle lords were standing at the foot of the bed. Vala's darksword was on display in a rack above the prince's headboard, locked behind a pair of crystal doors.
Vala! Khelben's voice came to her inside her head. In the name of the Weave, what are you doing?
Vala did not answer. She had not told the Chosen about this part of her plan, but it was as necessary to their success as finding the mythallar. She stepped over to the foot of the bed, and in a single spinning stroke, slashed the throats of both guards.
The men had barely fallen before the priestess raised her hands and began a wispy prayer to her hidden goddess. Vala cut this short by lashing out with the whip in her other hand. The cord wrapped itself tightly around the woman's throat, and the prayer ended in a strangled gasp as Vala jerked the priestess off her feet. The servant started for the door, his jaw working in shock, but emitting only strangled gasps. She spun past the end of the bed, bringing her sore foot up in a hook kick that caught him square in the nose with the hardest part of her heel. He flew off his feet so hard that the back of his head hit first and made a sickening crack on the stone floor.
Giving up on her spell, the priestess charged blindly forward, using one hand to pull against the whip around her throat and the other to slash her dagger blindly through the air. Vala waited for the next stroke to sweep past then she stepped forward and snapped the outside of her hand into the hinge of the woman's jaw. The priestess went instantly limp, her eyes rolling back in her head and the dagger slipping from her hand.
Vala dropped the whip and turned back to the bed. In Escanor's shadowy eye sockets were a pair of copper flames, faint and flickering as he struggled back to consciousness.
Vala! If you're counting on us to help you kill-
"Quiet."
Though Vala spoke the word aloud, she heard the word only in her mind. She started forward toward the display case. The flames in Escanor's eyes brightened, and she knew the prince was returning to his senses. She hurled her sword, reached for her dagger, and leaped onto the bed.
A wisp of shadowy arm rose through the covers. Her tumbling sword ricocheted upward and smashed a crystal door, and something hit her in the chest like one of Aris's hammers. She fell off the bed backward and landed facedown on the floor.
"Guards!" Escanor's voice was barely a croak, but a croak loud enough to cause a stir out in the dressing room. "Help!"
Vala raised her hand and called silently to her darksword. She heard the tinkling of shattered crystal, and the weapon came sailing over the foot of the bed. The hilt slipped into her palm like the hand of an old friend. The blade was trailing a wisp of shadow where it had brushed Escanor's body.