Always a light sleeper, Lette—who was at that moment sandwiched between a gear the size of a wagon wheel and a chain thicker than her own waist—had rarely been pleased to hear the sound of snoring. Balur was a snorer. His mouth would flop open as he slept, and from the back of his throat would emerge a sound that she could only liken to two mountains making love. A guttural gasping rasp that sawed through her mind and erased sleep from the list of options that the night held for her. She had once trekked an additional mile through a kobold-infested forest just to escape the sound.
This snore was different, though. This was a deeper, rumbling sound, like fresh earth settling itself. It made the rock reverberate around her, deep and sonorous. It was the sound of a dragon snoring.
Mattrax was drugged up to his eyeballs.
Slowly, with exaggerated care, Lette began to move. She had spent the first hour of her seclusion learning how to navigate the portcullis lock in the dark, charting out crawl spaces, gaps in the pressure plate’s mechanics. The next hour she had spent firming up her understanding of the mechanism, its operation, its critical junctures, its weak points. Then she had waited. She had expected to have heard Quirk’s and Will’s voices. But there had been simply the sound of Mattrax moving around, huffing and grunting to himself in injured tones. What in Toil’s name a dragon rolling in gold and food had to complain about escaped her, but at least the fat sack of fire had shown no sign of suspicion. All the job had really required so far was flexibility and patience.
Neither was she worried about the blow Balur had taken in the earlier confrontation. She had seen him shake off worse. The Batarran giant they once fought had literally picked him up and used him as a club to try to smash her. Right up until Balur had gotten an arm free, torn off the giant’s thumbnail, and used it to slit the giant’s wrist. Sailing a hundred yards or so into some trees was eminently survivable.
No, what worried her was that Balur’s part of the plan had already gone awry and he was the one other member of their current team who had professional experience. Now she was relying on a university professor and an angry farmer to keep her safe from being roasted alive.
What if Mattrax was not drugged? What if he was simply asleep? Rumor had it that dragons could detect the removal of even a single coin from their stockpile. Lette had her doubts about that, but removing several sacks full of gold and jewels could definitely tip the balance against them.
So she moved slowly, soundlessly, letting one movement flow into another—a slow, sinuous unfurling of her body as she emerged into the cave and the night.
She stood stock still—a shadow among shadows—and took stock of the cave. She had only glimpsed its contours in the mad dash to hide. It was larger than she had expected, the floor smooth and sandy. The bulk of the cavern was curled away from the portcullis, so she could see neither Mattrax nor his pile of gold, only a faint red-yellow glow smudging through the deepening shadows.
She herself stood near the cave entrance, within arm’s reach of the portcullis. Moonlight spilled between the iron beams, painting a chessboard on the floor before her. There were only two guards. That was a stroke of luck, at least. There had been far more earlier. Two guards simplified things considerably.
Moving at an almost imperceptible pace, she crossed the mouth of the cave. Her feet were silent on the sandy floor. Her shadow fell away from the guards. The rumble of Mattrax’s snores stayed constant. Neither guard turned around.
She let a knife drop into each hand. She cocked one arm. She threw.
The blade whistled between the grille of the portcullis and landed with a solid thwack in the back of the first guard’s neck. He dropped with a slight gurgle, and the heavy thump of lifeless limbs.
The second knife was already in her hand. She cocked her arm once more.
“Cois’s cock!” The second guard shrieked, jumped almost half a yard. Lette tracked her with ease.
Her?
She hadn’t had much time to observe Mattrax’s forces, but he seemed as blinkeredly misogynistic as the armies belonging to most rulers she’d met.
And didn’t she recognize that voice?
“Quirk?” she whispered.
“Lette?”
It was Quirk. Lette could even make out the bloodstains she had made when stealing the woman’s armor. But…
“What in the name of the Hallows are you doing outside the cave?” she said. “Wasn’t the whole plan that you’d be hidden in here helping me move the gold until Firkin and Balur arrived with the wagon?”
Quirk hesitated. Lette gathered breath for a whispered harangue. Then she noticed the other woman’s shaking hands, her ragged breathing. Quirk kept looking over at the dead guard, kept opening and closing her fists.
“It’s okay,” Lette said. She needed Quirk calm and functional. This wasn’t the end of the world. She could get Quirk inside easily enough. Then another thought struck her. She looked over at the body.
“Wait…” she managed. “Will?”
Quirk shook her head vehemently. “No. No,” she said. “He’s trapped inside.”
“Trapped?” That was not the sort of word Lette liked to hear when in the middle of a job.
“That’s not what I meant.” Quirk shook her head with the sort of violence Lette usually reserved for jobs that required particular prejudice.
“Maybe,” she said, “you should start at the beginning.”
So Quirk did. Then she jumped to the end. Then to some point in the story halfway through, and from there leapt about like some deranged jackrabbit until finally Lette could piece the whole mosaic of disaster together.
“But is Mattrax actually drugged?” she asked finally. Quirk had proven elusive on this one point.
Quirk worried her hands several times. Lette cranked up the intensity of her glare several notches. If Quirk couldn’t manage calm, then cowed would be a close enough approximation.
“I don’t know,” Quirk said miserably.
“And is Will inside this cave?”
“I don’t know,” Quirk said again, equally miserably.
Lette clenched her jaw tight and did not say a number of things that she would have liked to.
“Right,” she said eventually. “Well, in that case, the first thing to do is to get this portcullis up. You’re sure there are no other soldiers about?”
Quirk shook her head. “They seemed stretched a bit thin after Mattrax killed off the previous guards. They just put the two of us down here.”
“Okay. Let me get back down in the mechanism so I can open up this portcullis. That way if everything goes to shit, at least I have a way out of here.” And without waiting for a response, she slipped down the hole back into the portcullis’s inner workings. She wriggled forward until she found the fist-size gear she had identified earlier. Five swift blows with the hilt of her dagger and it fell out of alignment.
She threw herself backward as, around her, the mechanism blazed to life. Cogs whirled, chains shrieked, and counterweights fell with a resounding crash. A moment after it was all over, Lette heard Quirk’s shriek as a brief punctuation to the whole event. Alone in the darkness, she permitted herself a roll of her eyes.
Then she waited. Waited for the roar. For the crash of Mattrax’s feet as he descended upon the gate. For the heat of his flames roasting the rock around her.
But all she heard was the slow, steady rumble of his snores.
She smiled. Despite it all, something had actually gone right.