We made our way slowly down to the lower dungeon, the dim light of our lanterns illuminating the dust and dried blood that snaked like veins of ore against the rocky surface of the twenty-seven stairs.
“The path becomes narrower as we go down,” Kest pointed out. “If an ambush awaits us, it will be difficult to evade it.”
I didn’t bother to respond; I was too busy trying to deal with the smell. You sometimes hear storytellers trying to frighten their audiences by talking about the scent of despair. They’re not being poetic. Fear really does have a smell. If you mix sweat and shit and blood with stale air and dank, musty walls, like magic! as a jongleur might say, you get the genuine scent of human despair. That’s what greeted us at the bottom of the stairs.
Dariana slid ahead of me and peered down one of the dark passageways that curved away from the stairwell. “What in all the hells is this place?”
“Hell is right fucking word, lady,” Ugh replied.
I tried for something clever, but nothing came. I’ve spent more than my share of time in dungeons, but this place . . . I couldn’t begin to imagine how I could ever escape from here.
Shiballe noticed my unease and smiled. “The passages split off in odd directions, like a garden maze,” he said proudly. “Even if a man were to escape his cell, he would have great difficulty finding his way back to the stairway. Many of the passageways lead to dead ends, and in some, just to keep things interesting, the shadows hide pits in the floor. When we put a man down here, Trattari, he never comes back up into the light.”
“Unless he just decides to take control of it instead,” Dariana said. “Then what do you do, you fat slug?”
I noted Duke Jillard’s wide-eyed gaze as he glanced about the endless dripping walls, as if he’d never seen the place where his orders were carried out. “It was not by my—”
“Shut up,” I whispered, trying to shake off my own fear. Damn. This all had to happen fast. We needed to figure out where Tommer and the assassin were before we ourselves were discovered. “We’re going to have to split up.” I turned to Duke Jillard. “You need to go back, your Grace. If the assassin sees you, he’ll try to kill you first, then, his mission complete, he’ll turn his blade on Tommer.”
Jillard, Duke of Rijou, cast a sideways glance at Ugh. “You think I will let this . . . this creature risk himself for my son while I hide upstairs in my room?”
“Fuck you,” Ugh said amiably.
“Foul dog!” Shiballe spat. “I’ll have your tongue torn from your mouth when this—”
Ugh reached out and put his hand on top of Shiballe’s fat head and he squeezed, very slowly. “I may be dog,” he said, “but I am fucking tough dog, eh? Fucking strong dog.” Shiballe’s eyes grew wide as the pressure from Ugh’s fingers began pressing hard into the flesh of his skull. “Maybe boy needs a tough guy right now, eh? Not fat worm that slinks along the ground.”
“Enough, all of you,” Valiana said. Her face was white as a sheet but her voice was firm. “Ugh, let go: Tommer is down here and he needs us to find him, not fight among ourselves.”
Ugh released Shiballe’s head and smiled. “Pretty girl—you whore? Whores nice to me.”
Saint Iphilia-who-cuts-her-own-heart, these are the heroes you send me to help save the boy?
“Let’s go,” I said. “Kest, you take Sir Istan and Ugh. Valiana, you take Parrick. I’ll take his Grace.”
“You’re leaving me with the slug?” Dariana said, eyeing Shiballe.
“He knows this level better than anyone else. If it helps, it’s only of nominal importance that he comes back alive.”
She grinned. Shiballe didn’t.
“What do we do if we find something?” Valiana asked.
“If you find Tommer, have one person free him while the other stands guard.”
“And if we find the assassin?” This time she didn’t quite manage to keep the tremor from her voice.
“Scream as loudly as you can. The rest of us will follow the sound. Do whatever you can to keep him at bay. If he’s Dashini, don’t try to engage him like you would a normal opponent because he’s not. It’ll be like trying to fight someone lashing at you using a snake with a three-foot steel tongue. Do anything you can to keep him away from you, and for the Saints’ sake, don’t breathe in any of the dust.”
“One more thing,” Kest said. “When we find the assassin, step back and let me through.”
“Why?” Sir Istan asked, unable to keep the look of relief from his young face.
“Because he is mine and no one else’s. Mine.” Kest looked at me. “I need this,” he said.
I could see the reddish glow just starting to push at the edges of his skin and I nodded. “All right. Somewhere in this hell is a man who lives his life in shadow and dances with death. He’s never known fear.” I drew my rapier from its sheath. “We’re going to teach him.”
I’ve tracked killers before. A verdict imposed after a murderer has fled his village doesn’t do much good for the family who’ve just lost a loved one and it does even less for the next family the killer finds. It’s not exactly my strong point—Brasti’s always been better, and is never slow to remind me of that. So were a few of the other Greatcoats—Quillata could track a man weeks after he’d left town.
But neither of them were here.
“Are you blind, Trattari?” Jillard asked, standing over me as I knelt down on the floor. “The tracks are everywhere!”
“Keep your voice down,” I whispered, hoping the others were doing a better job of moving silently through the dungeon. “The tracks are the problem.”
Normally the problem with following a man is that you’re doing it over many miles, searching desperately for the smallest sign of his passing. Here in the bowels of Jillard’s dungeon I had the opposite problem: there were tracks everywhere, imprinted into the filth that covered the uneven stone floors of the maze.
It didn’t help that we had to move so slowly. Sometimes the stone floors were rough and jagged, making it easy to trip, then they would become smooth and slippery—generally right before they gave way to a small man-sized pit with very pointy spikes in the bottom. Even with Jillard’s lantern, the shadows were eager to swallow us. In the end, all we could do was move cautiously and try not to circle around too many times.
We’re too slow, damn it. We’re going too slowly.
Had there been any prisoners alive on the second level we might have been able to trade information in exchange for leniency or even release, but bad luck for us—and them, I suppose, although maybe they saw it as a welcome release—because the only ones we saw were dead. Jillard didn’t appear to notice the bodies at all.
“Wait,” I said, and stopped to watch a pool of blood on the floor of one of the cells gradually seeping down the cracks in the uneven floor until it eventually met the blood coming from the cell across the way. “You have your men execute prisoners in their cells?” I asked Jillard.
“Do we have time to waste on this?” he asked. “My son is somewhere down here, and so is the assassin.”
“Humor me.”
Jillard stopped and leaned a hand against the uneven surface of the wall. He looked tired. “If your heart is breaking for the men in these cells, you should save it for someone more deserving. Those who occupy this level of the dungeon are creatures unworthy of pity.”
“Eventually we all find ourselves in need of a little pity,” I said. Great. Now I’m quoting Saint Birgid’s own admonishment to me. I set the thought aside. “But that’s not my point. How are the prisoners on this level executed?”
Jillard raised an eyebrow. “How many ways are there to die? My Magisters set the punishment to fit the crime. In Rijou a man pays his debts with the coin in which he traded.”
“Then we have a problem.” I pointed inside one of the cells.
Jillard peered through the iron bars. “The man certainly appears to be dead. What of it?”
“Look at all the blood on the floor. It’s hard to see without better light, but he’s had his throat slit.”
Jillard shrugged. “Then I imagine he—”
“It’s not just him. Every body I’ve seen since we got down here has been slit across the throat.”
Jillard’s eyes went wide. “But why would—?”
“Because dead men can’t reveal what they’ve seen,” a voice called out from further down the passageway. “Or perhaps more importantly, who they’ve seen.”
Out of reflex I raised my rapier into guard and took up position in front of the Duke. If I’d stopped to think about it I would have used him as a shield instead.
I peered into the darkness ahead of us, my eyes struggling to focus as I scanned the shadows for any signs of movement. There were none.
“Who is there? Who dares address the Duke—” Jillard started.
“Shut up, you idiot,” I hissed. “Don’t give anything away. Your Grace.”
“Sound advice,” the voice replied. “However, I doubt our Lord Duke pays much heed to the wisdom of others, given the situation he finds himself in today.”
I started walking forward, keeping my eyes focused on both the shadows in front of us and on the intersection ahead where an enemy might be standing in wait.
“Getting warmer,” the voice said.
The proximity of the sound jarred me. He’s here. I spun around: sitting cross-legged on the cold stone floor at the very back of the darkened chamber opposite me was a man—a naked man. Despite the lack of light I could tell that he was somewhere in his twenties, dark-haired and clean-shaven. His nakedness made it clear he was lean but well-muscled. He could have been anyone, except that everything about him was relaxed when it shouldn’t be. He looked to be completely unfazed by the madness around him, unafraid of what any sane man should fear. He held up a hand and waved at me, and the graceful way he made that gesture—so normal, so simple—told me who he was—or rather, what he was. Dashini.