Rem, Torval, Djubal, and Klutch entered one of the secret passageways via a sliding panel in the first chamber at the head of the stairs. The narrow little corridor beyond was tight, the air close and stale. Torval had acquired one of their ubiquitous watchman’s lamps—the sort made of iron and tin that all the watchwardens carried on night patrol—and the little oiled wick within was all that lit their way. In single file—Torval, Rem, Djubal, and Klutch—they followed the twisting, turning passage built into the walls of the tavern.
After two or three bends in the passage, they reached a narrow stairwell and began their descent. The stairs were rickety and rotten, but the space seemed largely clear of cobwebs and dust, indicating regular foot traffic from top to bottom. Down and down they went, the stairs bending in a square spiral as they took them from the second floor of the tavern down past the ground floor, then into a vast cellar, probably cut right into the earth of the bluffs about the harbor. The stairs were separated from the cellar proper by a flimsy wooden door—access, along with secrecy—but continued downward beneath even the level of the cellar. The deeper they got, the more pronounced the smell of salt water and low tide became. The watchwardens continued, Rem sure that the others were just as edgy as he was. They were in a terribly vulnerable position. The stairway was too narrow to effectively defend themselves if they were beset from above or below—or, worse, from both directions at once.
Still, Torval seemed little concerned. He took the stairs two at a time, bounding down, down, down, lamp in one hand, maul in the other. A few times, Rem asked the dwarf if he saw anything, but Torval never answered. He would just grunt and keep moving.
“And here I thought you came to our fair city to escape the mines!” Djubal said.
“Keep your sauce boxes shut and be ready!” Torval barked in answer.
Rem shot a glance at Djubal. The ebon southlander’s face betrayed little worry, just quiet bemusement. “Right behind you, Old Stump!” he called.
Deeper. Deeper still. The smell of salt and rotting fish grew stronger.
Finally, they hit bottom. The stairs terminated in a cramped chamber with packed dirt walls shored up by wooden planks and struts. Beyond the little chamber lay a long, bending passageway, hewn out of the limestone of the bluffs and reinforced with skeletal wooden supports. Dim little miner’s lamps lined the passage, some still flickering, others extinguished. From the far end of the passage, Rem thought he heard voices and the hurried sough of boots, but he couldn’t be sure.
“Do you hear that?” he asked his companions. “It sounds like there’s someone up ahead.”
Torval huffed in the affirmative, then broke into a dead run down the passage.
“Is he mad?” Rem asked.
“Always,” Djubal said, and swept past him.
Rem set off at a trot, right on the southlander’s heels. Klutch brought up the rear.
After following the snaking passage for some distance, Rem finally saw a broad portal ahead of them that opened into a larger chamber beyond. Torval and Djubal hurried through, already shouting as they did.
“Blast!” Torval growled.
“Empty,” Djubal spat.
Rem burst out of the narrow passage into the vast chamber beyond. It was a cave of not-inconsiderable size, sporting a number of wooden piers and platforms, a wealth of shipping barrels, a few simply cobbled structures that probably acted as office, sleeping, or storage space, and, down in the little black lagoon that stretched into the cave, a single long, flat barge—the sort used to punt goods around the canals of the city and across the harbor to waiting ships. The place was in a state of disarray, clearly bespeaking a sudden and hastily undertaken migration. Rem guessed that, once upon a time, many boats had graced the little piers that stretched into the lagoon. Now, of course, all the men who toiled down here while life went on above had made their escape, unconcerned for what they left behind, intent only on flight before the wardwatch penetrated their secret passages.
Torval kicked an overturned barrel in fury. “Blast!” he shouted, his voice echoing in the vast, open space of the cave. “Just moments too late!”
“This must be where they brought them,” Rem said, studying a collection of barrels and coils of rope near the wall where he stood. “They brought the girls through the passages and down the stairs and then ferried them somewhere else from this cave. I’m assuming that lagoon gives out onto the harbor?”
“Appears so,” Djubal said.
“But where did they take them?” Klutch asked. “And how? Certainly the dockmasters would notice barges laden with unconscious young girls sliding back and forth across the harbor?”
As if in answer, a strange thumping began off to their right. Rem heard it first, but the other three followed suit soon enough. It was irregular, alternately weak and strong, coming at no set interval. It came from a convocation of barrels pressed into a storage alcove. It could only be made by something alive.
Rem moved nearer the alcove, readying his sword.
“Careful, lad,” Torval warned.
Rem moved slowly around the loose gathering of barrels. Even though the casks were piled three high in some places, their arrangement was haphazard and there were numerous empty spaces among them. He half expected to find some holdout hiding among them—some piratical knave, desperate and cornered, abandoned by his fleeing fellows, a dirk in his eager hands. But there was no one. Even as the thumping continued, he could see no one hiding among the barrels—no one cornered and waiting to make a valiant last stand.
Then he realized that the strange thumping was coming from within one of the barrels before him. Rem sheathed his sword, moved to the nearest barrel, and lifted off its unfixed lid. It was empty. The one next to it was the same, and the one after that.
Rem began tearing the lids off every barrel before him, sure that he would soon lift a lid and find some hapless, living soul crammed into one of the damned things, thumping hard on its inner skin, desperate to get out.
Twenty barrels in, he found the source of the thumping. It was a young girl, no more than fifteen summers old. She was crammed into the barrel in such a fashion that she could find no leverage to lift herself out. Her legs were bent up under her chin, her arms at her side. There was enough room for her to breathe, for some air to be left in the barrel when it was shut, but little more. Rem called for his companions. All four helped the girl out of the barrel.
She was groggy and panicked, half mad with fright and probably still high on witchweed. She was lovely and ragged and the thought of someone lifting her out of one of those rooms above when she was in a stupor, then stuffing her into one of these barrels, made Rem so furious that his whole body shook with the force of that fury. When he looked to Torval and saw that his partner was trembling in the same fashion and wearing the same stunned expression, Rem knew that he was not alone.
“Bastards and knaves,” Torval grumbled.
“Who would do this?” Rem kept asking. “Who could do this?”
They sent Klutch down to the lagoon to fetch some water. It was salty, true, but they could at least wet the girl’s face and try to bring her out of her stupor. While Torval and Djubal tended to her, Rem began climbing among the barrels remaining. Most were empty, but in two he found another young girl and a handsome boy, each packed just like the girl they had rescued. It was too late for these two, however: they were stone-dead, clearly having suffocated because they were packed too tightly into their barrels. Whatever precautions normally taken by their captors to keep their cargo alive had, in their sad cases, been overlooked.
“What did you find?” Torval called from his perch beside the groggy girl.
“You don’t want to know,” Rem said, completely at a loss. Could such things truly be? Could men be so fantastically cruel and careless?
A bauble’s glint caught Rem’s eye. He clambered over the barrels he’d been searching, thumped down onto the wooden floorboards on the far side, then swung around a corner into a shallow alcove. There were shelves and crates there, all overflowing with a wealth of sundry, mismatched knickknacks. There was jewelry of all sorts, from the finest to the most modest, items of clothing good for trade or resale such as silk scarves, beautiful shawls and wraps, one or two evening cloaks, even a pair of hastily folded silk gowns finely beaded and embroidered, no doubt stolen from a pair of the girls that passed through here on their way to the gods knew where. Clearly, this was where the kidnappers gathered every little thing of value they could filch from the victims they subdued, be it rings from their pale little fingers or the very clothes from their backs. All that seemed to matter was that the items were undamaged and that they might be worth a few silver andies in trade.
As Rem studied the cache of stolen goods—broaches, torques, fine leather slippers, combs of silver, gold, or tortoiseshell—a certain something suddenly caught his eye. His gaze almost swept right by it, but some dim, unbidden recognition rang a tiny little bell in his rage-fevered mind. For a moment, he stared at it. As he reached out and drew it from the shelf where it lay amid silks and lace and a storm of polished ivory bangles, he willed for it not to be what he suspected it was. But then, once it was in his hands and he stared at it long and hard, the memory of his market encounter with Indilen just a few days earlier returned to him with clarity and force. He was not wrong, and that realization made him vaguely sick to his stomach.
Torval appeared at his elbow.
“What’s all this, then?”
“Stolen goods,” Rem said, eyes never leaving the object in his hands. “From the victims, I’d assume. Anything the bastards could sell or trade.”
Torval nodded at the item Rem held. “And that?”
Rem’s hands gripped an oblong, finely tooled leather box. Upon the face of that box, amid delicate silver chasing, lay an ornate medallion, also of silver, emblazoned with a single letter of the old Horunic alphabet: the letter “I.”
“This is a secretary set, custom-made. Quills with finely wrought tips. Bottled ink. A phial of sand and a blotter. A few sheets of paper.”
“You look like you’ve seen it before,” Torval said.
Rem nodded. “I have, Torval. Remember the girl I was searching for? Indilen? This belonged to her. I remember it well because I commented upon what a handsome piece it was, and she opened it to show me all it contained.” Finally, Rem managed to stop staring at the secretary set and looked to his diminutive partner. “She’s passed through here, Torval. These bastards took her.”
Torval laid a rough hand on Rem’s shoulder. “Then hold on to that secretary set,” he said quietly, “and you can give it back to her when we find her.”
For just a moment, that thought gave Rem a deep and abiding satisfaction—a bright, warm hope in the center of him that he wanted—nay, needed—at that very moment. But only a moment later, another thought occurred to him, terrible and unsettling.
What if he held on to this small memento of that girl and never, ever saw her again?
A moment later he heard Ondego’s unmistakable rasp from one of the platforms above.
“Well?” the prefect demanded. “What have you lot got for me?”
“Slavers,” Torval shouted in reply. “And bodies.”
Those words froze Ondego and Hirk on the stairway. If the prefect had been silently celebrating their infiltration and raid on the Moon Under Water before that moment, all the bravado and exaltation left him. It was subtle—a squaring of the shoulders, a lift of the chin, the impression of a frown—but even at his present distance from the prefect, Rem noted the change.
“Did we nab any?” Ondego asked, then once more began his descent of the stairs.
“Not a one,” Djubal said bitterly. “They’d all fled before we reached the cavern.”
“Well, then,” Ondego grumbled, “it’s a good thing I’ve already dispersed the watchwardens upstairs to inform the city guard at the gates and wharves. Ten to one, our slavers will try to slip away quick and quiet-like with the warm bodies they already have. Let me see what you’ve found here.”
They walked him through. They showed him the barrels, the stolen merchandise, sorted for resale, the two dead prisoners in their casks. Finally, Ondego knelt and studied the half-conscious girl that Djubal and Klutch attended to. Rem was amazed to see true pity and sadness on the prefect’s normally inscrutable face.
“Who’s responsible for this?” Rem finally asked, not sure if he was addressing anyone. He bent to Ondego. “Did you get any of the men above to talk—”
“We caught two,” Ondego said grimly. “But they haven’t talked yet.”
“Then let us make them talk,” Torval growled.
Ondego studied Torval for a moment. He then looked to Rem. There was a strange sort of concern on his face. “Think you can handle it, Bonny Prince? Some up close and personal interrogation?”
Rem spat onto the salt-washed rocks of the cave floor. “Gladly, sir.”
Ondego nodded. “Then get back upstairs and get to work. Frennis could be here at any moment, and he’ll probably chase us out. I’ve already got an inkling that bastard is tied up in this somehow. If we can get one of those men upstairs to talk—”
Ondego didn’t have to finish. Hirk cocked his head—an indication to follow. Rem and Torval set out after him, hurrying back through the passages and up the stairs.
Hirk led them to one of the upstairs rooms, where two men of the Fifth—fat Demijon and the Tregga horseman Brogila—stood guarding one of the two prisoners. The fellow sat on a wooden chair, leaning casually, as though he were waiting for some friend to finish his tryst so the two could be on their way. He was a hard-looking fellow, probably past forty years but still well-muscled and fearless in aspect. When Hirk, Torval, and Rem entered the room, the prisoner smiled a toothless smile and barked harsh, grating laughter.
“Look here, now!” he said. “A pretty-faced lad and his half-pint fool! You are a motley band, aren’t ya?”
Rem almost lunged for the prisoner, but Torval beat him to it. The dwarf swept right past Hirk, and hove up to the hard-faced prisoner without a moment’s hesitation.
“Gonna dance for me, li’l fella?” the prisoner asked.
Torval brought one of his thick, oversized feet down on the prisoner’s left foot. Just before the fellow started screaming, Rem swore he heard bones crack. The prisoner drew his foot up off the floor and reached out for it with his hands. The sound he made was childish and hysterical and not at all what Rem would have expected from such an apparent roughneck.
Then Torval struck again. Before the fellow could even grasp his raised foot in pain, Torval drew back with one fist and punched him three times, hard, square in the face. The prisoner’s screams were swallowed in the rattle of breaking teeth and the gurgle of blood and saliva as he choked and snuffled. Down he went, toppling heavily out of his chair and onto the floor, where he curled up in a fetal ball, broken foot twitching, hands covering his now-ruined face and bleeding nose.
“You bastard!” he snuffled. “You bloody little stump!”
Torval stood over the prisoner. He was only four and a half feet tall, but from where that fellow lay, the dwarf probably looked like a giant. The fury on his face even put a knot in Rem’s belly. There was a great reserve of righteous indignation in Torval for those who were preyed upon. That reserve was now alight and burning in the center of him, red hot and approaching white.
“Do you have any idea what you’re mixed up in here?” Torval asked his prisoner. “Kidnapping free citizens of this city and shipping them out—in gods-damned barrels—for slave labor on some foul foreign shore? A public disemboweling and flaying is probably in your future, my friend.”
“What difference does it make?” the prisoner grated, still sobbing over the broken bones in his foot.
“Talk,” Torval said. “Tell us everything.”
The prisoner tried to prop himself up on one hand to better face Torval and defy him. The moment his hand touched the plank floor, Torval brought his maul’s hammerhead crashing down. Rem heard the suspect’s fingers crack like pine logs on a fire. The prisoner drew up his ruined hand and fell back hard, head thumping into the floor.
Torval loomed over him again. “Talk, or I’ll be here all night breaking bones, one after the other.”
The prisoner was not just screaming now, or snuffling and choking on his blood and snot. He was crying, sobbing like a switch-scolded child.
“Please,” he muttered. “Someone get him away from me …”
“Sorry, friend,” Hirk said. “Torval here’s the officer in charge at the moment.”
Torval kicked the prisoner’s ribs, hard. He doubled up where he lay on the floor.
“I can’t hear you,” Torval snarled.
“All right, gods, just stop!” the man bawled. “What do you want to know?”
Torval lowered his maul, brandishing the hammer and spike in the suspect’s face. “Keep talking,” he said. “Where are they bound for?”
“Aadendrath,” the bawling, bleeding villain said. “They sail before dawn, from North Harbor! That’s what we were told, at least … now, please …”
“Shut your gob!” Torval barked, then looked to Rem. His face was caught somewhere between anger and terror. “Aadendrath,” he whispered.
“The elf isle?” Rem asked, thoroughly confused.
“Yarma’s cunt,” Hirk sighed. “That is a bloody mess, and no mistake.”
Torval turned back to the sobbing prisoner. “That doesn’t make any bloody sense. Elves don’t keep slaves—everyone knows that.”
Rem had an unbidden memory of that handsome, muscular man on a leash in the Lady Ynevena’s pleasure garden.
Elves didn’t own slaves … everyone knew that. Just as everyone knew that dwarves never left their caves or undertook pursuits forbidden by their lawgivers. Just as everyone knew orcs were nothing more than pitiless, mindless, war-mongering beasts, or that children of power and privilege never ran away from that privilege in some blind, idiotic quest for independence or total reinvention. What was it that Torval himself had said to the elven ethnarch? There are wormy apples on every tree in the orchard. Maybe it was true that elves, by and large, weren’t the sorts to keep slaves. But there were those rare rotten apples, weren’t there?
Aemon’s bones, hadn’t they even met that rarest of rare birds, an elven merchant who lived and worked among men in a sprawling city with nary a forest or placid lake in sight? Where else but in Yenara—
And then, almost at once, Rem thought he understood. When Torval asked his next question, Rem suspected he knew the answer.
“Who runs this place?” Torval demanded.
The prisoner shook his head. “He’ll have my soul. I can’t—”
Torval bent down and snatched the man up by his tunic. “I’ll have your head!” Torval growled, “But not before I’ve taken you apart from the feet up! Who is he? Who’s the rotten son of a whore in charge around here?”
“It’s Masarda, isn’t it?” Rem asked. “Mykaas Masarda.”
Torval turned and stared at him, mouth agape.
So did the prisoner, as though Rem’s speaking aloud that name would doom them all.
“You know the fauneys practice black magic,” he whispered, his hysteria suddenly bound by pure terror. “When he finds out that I betrayed him …”
Rem turned to Torval, eyes wide. “Did you hear that? Almost exactly what Joss said to Frennis before he fed him to the sharks! ‘He’ll kill you for this, Frennis. He’ll not just have your skin, he’ll have your soul.’”
Torval stared at the prisoner, nodding. “Because everyone assumes those bloody tree huggers wield magic of some sort or another …”
“Who is this Masarda?” Hirk demanded.
Rem threw a glance at Hirk. “You know him,” Rem said. “We all know him.”
Torval dropped the man. He studied Rem. “He was the one who came to us with news of Telura Dall’s disappearance,” Torval said, “offering that reward. How did you come to that conclusion, Bonny Prince?”
Rem nodded to the man on the floor. “What he said about their ultimate destination is a good start. Could anyone but an elf peddle kidnapped slaves to other elves? And then there’s the presence of his bodyguard, downstairs. The same man that I just crossed swords with in the common room stood by Masarda’s side at the Dall wake, and tried to kill us while we slept earlier today. I saw the wound on his arm plainly.”
Torval’s eyes widened. “Did you now …?”
“Think of your own words to me, Torval: there are all sorts under the sun—and wormy apples on every tree. If his thorning scar is a sign that he was once a slave, wouldn’t enslaving the sons and daughters of the very people that stole his life and identity from him make for a fine revenge?”
Torval seemed to quietly consider all that for a moment. “Aye,” he finally whispered. “That would be a fine vengeance, indeed.”
“Care to place coin on the fact that he was Lugdum’s unnamed master? That that poor creature was only following us—and finally threatened us—because Masarda commanded him to?”
Torval nodded. “Makes sense …”
Hirk shook his head. “The sundry hells it does—”
Rem ignored their sergeant and knelt beside the prisoner. “Which wharf?” he asked.
The knave only bawled and bled. A rope of pink, bloody snot hung from one nostril. His probing tongue found a tooth rolling loosely around in his mouth and he spit it out.
“Which wharf?” Rem demanded.
The fellow had no words left.
And that’s when the door to their erstwhile interrogation room burst open. Standing outside was a familiar copper-haired fellow standing beside a scowling Ondego. Frennis had arrived. Rem said a tiny prayer that there were no sharks at hand for this suspect to be fed to.
“What the bloody hell is all this?” the prefect of the Fourth demanded.
Hirk looked to Ondego. Ondego shrugged.
“Interrogation,” Hirk said. “Sir.”
“Give us five more minutes, Frennis,” Ondego asked. “I’d give you the same, and you know it.”
Frennis’s glaring eyes locked on Rem and Torval. “These two again? Twice in one night?”
Torval scowled back at Frennis, never mind that the prefect of the Fourth was twice his height and twice his mass. “Perhaps if you’d helped us the first time …”
“Shut it,” Ondego said, but there was no urgency in the order, just a weary hope that Torval would not make things worse.
Frennis’s glare became a foul, cruel smile. He turned to Ondego. “I’ll be going to Black Mal with this, Ondego—you can count on it. If you’re lucky, he’ll only strip you of your badge and your command.”
That challenge didn’t sit well with Ondego. At first, Rem had clearly read the weary resignation on the prefect’s face—clearly saw that Ondego was not interested in challenging Frennis, but simply in controlling the amount of damage done by their interference with ward protocol. But that threat from Frennis had a different effect—an unexpected effect—than what Rem wagered Frennis intended.
On the floor, the suspect continued to cry and whimper. He displayed his hand for the two prefects and asked for the aid of a surgeon. Torval kicked him in the gut and stole his breath.
Rem, meanwhile, watched his commander closely. Ondego, though a good handbreadth shorter than Frennis, hove up nose to nose with his rival prefect and glared right back at him.
“Last time I checked, we had taken the same oaths and were fighting the same nightly war,” Ondego said through gnashed teeth. “I beg your sincere pardon for the suspension of protocol, but now that we know what we’re dealing with—”
“And just what is that?” Frennis pressed. “Do tell, Ondego.”
Ondego almost answered in full, then Rem saw the change come over him. The decision to challenge the burly prefect; the decision to interrogate him, right here in front of everyone.
“I think you know all too well,” Ondego said quietly. “And I swear to you, I will prove it.”
Rem studied Frennis carefully. The prefect’s face remained stony, cross, inscrutable, but Rem thought he saw the barest hint of something hitherto unseen. A frightened narrowing of the eyes. A twitch at the corner of Frennis’s wide mouth.
Finally, the big man turned and surveyed the interrogation room again. He spoke calmly, quietly. “Looks like you’ve overstayed your welcome. I want you and your men out of here, now.”
“Frennis, don’t you dare—”
“Take it up with Black Mal and come back to me with a mandate,” Frennis hissed. “Until then, get out of my ward and leave all your prisoners with my men.”
Ondego snapped his fingers. “Out. All of you. Leave him.”
Rem rose and followed his fellows out of the room. As he left, he heard the suspect mewling and trying to weakly hawk a ball of phlegm out of his throat.
As they approached the stairs, Torval hurried up abreast of Ondego.
“Mykaas Masarda,” he said flatly. “Sailing off with the dawn.”
“Then we’ll find him,” Ondego said quietly, “and we’ll burn his ship down around him.”