Dry laughter then, and something pulled at Chase’s mind. That was a familiar laugh, but she couldn’t place where she’d heard it before. She filed it away for later reference, as she put her ear closer, trying to hear despite the alarms.
“My air elemental is fighting something!” Renny tugged at her skirt. Chase lifted a finger, waggling it as the harsh woman— Zenobia— continued.
“We both know you’re still behind twenty tons of stone, dear. There are no masons among the guards here, I made sure of that personally. You’re sealed away and there you’ll stay. I’ll kill your slaves and let this prison be your tomb until you die of starvation.”
“Please,” Speranza said, her tone pure scorn. “You know what will happen if you kill me.”
“Then why are you still alive?” Zenobia laughed again, and again it itched at Chase’s mind. “No. This will be the end of you, I’m certain. Or else you’d have killed yourself by now.”
And then, Speranza sang.
Three notes. Three notes, that seemed to stroke through Chase’s head like gentle fingers, three notes that hinted at the most beautiful song that the halven had ever heard...
WILL+1
...and Chase sobbed as she pulled her ear back and slammed the speaking tube shut. The bread she’d been holding fell limp from her hands, as she put her palms up to her eyes.
“My elemental’s dead!” Renny told her.
“It was almost worth it,” Chase whispered.
“What?”
“To keep listening. It was almost worth it. I almost did,” she said, “even knowing what would happen, what she was trying to do.”
Pounding on the door behind them, and both the halven and the golem turned to look at it, then glanced to each other.
“Run now?” Renny asked.
“Run now!” Chase confirmed, picking up her skirts. For a second she wondered why they were wet. Then she realized just how much blood she’d lost, but she put it from her mind and ran. Healing replenished blood, everybody knew that. Then her traitor mind tried to veer into memories of how she’d lost that blood in the first place, but Chase pushed it back into the dark halls of her memory, along with all the other trauma that she’d hit today. I’m going to have nightmares for a few weeks after this is done, she knew. Hopefully just a few weeks. Please only be a few weeks.
The halls stretched back, back into the mountain, lit by lanterns, but they were few and far apart now. Several times the corridors split, and without a map or frame of reference they had to trust to luck. Twice Chase slammed into unexpected corners, gasping when she did so. After the second one Renny took the lead, glancing back at her as he went, green eyes catching the lantern light...
...up until light glinted off metal blades, and the patrol of guards in the corridor ahead skidded to a stop, staring in surprise at the oncoming figures.
“Through them!” Chase shouted, then added, “Foresight!”
Your Foresight skill is now level 14!
Without breaking momentum, Chase and Renny charged through the loose, surprised group. Chase lost some skin on her knees as she dropped and slid under a slicing saber, but it was better than what had happened in her vision.
Your Dodge skill is now level 10!
“Phantasm behind us!” Chase yelled to Renny, and he obliged. She didn’t see what he did, but there was quite a lot of yelling, and nobody shot at her as she scrambled back to her feet and ran faster.
“That door has a bar!” Renny said, pointing left, and the two of them fled into the room beyond, lifting the bar with a strength born of desperation and sliding it into place. Muscles screamed, and a pain erupted in Chase’s belly, but she grunted “Lesser Healing” and the hernia sorted itself out.
Your Lesser Healing skill is now level 8!
The bar in place, she turned...
...and her heart sank, as she saw rows of bunkbeds, a few footlockers, a table, and absolutely no other exits out of the place.
“Oh. Oh no,” Chase gasped. She sat down on a bed with a soft ‘thump’ and let the adrenaline rush from her. There was angry pounding on the door, and shouting beyond, but she ignored it. Tried to, anyway. Some of the threats were too horrible to ignore.
One thing could go, at least. She jerked the guard’s uniform off, tossed its blood-soaked jacket to the bed. The disguise had only helped her once. That jerk Dijornos had been mostly right, as galling as it was to admit.
“What should we do?” Renny asked.
“I’m open to suggestions.” More pounding on the door, and she winced as she saw it shudder, and the bar rattle in its brackets. “Actually, help me push this bunk in front of the door and then I’ll be open to suggestions.”
After it was done, and Chase had sweated more trails in her bloody dress, she sunk to the ground again and stared at her fingers. Great. Now I can die tired.
Renny hadn’t given up, though. “Maybe there’s a secret door. I’ll check.” He took his own advice and started hunting along the walls, sniffing and tapping. Chase watched the incongruity of something that didn’t need to breathe snuffling along, and almost giggled. Then she shook her head.
“I’ve got to get it together. I’ve got to think.”
The door shuddered again, harder this time. But the bunk was in front of it and solid.
“We might be able to take them,” Renny said. “With fortifications, and your crossbow... oh.”
“Oh,” Chase said, patting the empty quiver at her side. “The last of them fell out back when I was skinning my knees on the floor. Which doesn’t matter because I forgot the crossbow back in the confiscation room. Which I’m kind of okay with because I’m pretty sure some of those guards have them too, and I’m very sure that they’re better shots than I am.”
Renny’s tail drooped as he kept on searching, and Chase absurdly felt horrible about that.
“If it comes to a fight, we’re in trouble.” she said, trying to focus. “I knew that coming in here. And it came to a fight, and we got in trouble. So, I was right. We have to make it... not a fight.”
“How?”
“Keep searching. Maybe there’s something, some way to flee. But even fleeing is putting it off. We don’t know our way around here, and luck’s not enough. Not enough to save your friends. Not enough to save my Dad. Not enough to save the village. We need more than twenty percent of a plan.”
“We need a good plan.”
“We need a plan, and that’s that! Even eighty percent of a bad plan is better than twenty percent of a good plan!” She was shouting now, and she tried to lower her voice. But she did notice that the thumping on the door had ceased. “You’re totally listening in, aren’t you?”
Someone shuffled their feet in the hall outside and coughed.
“Right.” Chase lowered her voice. “Renny, if you find anything come and get me. I need to think on how to do this.”
“All right. Um... would you like me to do something about the blood?”
“Please.”
One clean and press later, and for the moment, Chase was free of gore. She put her head between her hands and wracked her brain.
What do I know? What have we learned?
Speranza is sealed away behind stone. No masons among the guards. Nobody to remove it. She wants to be free.
Zenobia is in the prison with her guards, who are stronger than Speranza’s charmed guards. She is hunting Speranza or at least trying to kill all her minions.
Which is a problem because Speranza’s got Renny’s friends. Who are stronger than the prison guards were when they were uncharmed.
Are Renny’s friends stronger than Zenobia’s escort? I don’t know.
And then we’ve got Dijornos who wants out but doesn’t care about keeping any bargains with me. And he would have casually killed Renny if I’d let him free.
Just like Vaffanculo wanted to kill me. They don’t care. They don’t care whether I live or die...
...but Thomasi did. Thomasi cared.
Did Thomasi care about Speranza? More importantly, did SHE care about HIM?
“I found something. But... well,” Renny said, coming over and tugging on her skirt. She followed him wordlessly, and stared at the tiny hole in the wall, covered by a metal grille. “I think it’s to let air in,” Renny said.
“It’ll fit you. Good,” Chase said, her thoughts settling into patterns. If it comes to a fight then we lose, but there are so, so many things I can try before it comes to a fight. I just have to change what’s happening here. “Can you do your magnifying glass trick? And then a few catalogues?” She pulled out the torn pages of Thomasi’s journal. “I’m up to about forty percent of a plan, and I think we can get it to sixty if we’re lucky.”
And to Chase’s vast and mind-numbing relief, they were. And after that, and some quick discussion, they had ninety percent of a plan.
By this time the guards had resumed pounding the door. The alarm had stopped, thankfully. Chase took a second, scrawled on some of the empty pages with a pen she’d found sitting on one of the footlockers, and dumped the whole mess back inside her pack. “There. That’s all the names. Are you ready?”
“No. Yes. I mean...” Renny shuffled his paws on the floor. “This is really risky for you.”
“Yes,” Chase said, simply. Then she took the circus wagons from her pack and handed the much-abused leather accessory over to the fox. “Good luck.”
“To you as well,” he said, simply. Then he pulled the grille aside and moved into the vent. Chase replaced it, twisting the metal tabs to fasten the metal back in place as best she could.
A final slam against the door, and wood splintered. Chase straightened up and eyed the metal edge of an axe, as it wiggled and withdrew back through the hole in the door. It was replaced by a suspicious looking eye, set in a withered face.
“I surrender,” Chase said, putting down the circus wagons and raising her hands high into the air.
CHAPTER 13: THE WOMAN IN THE WELL
Chains rattled as Chase walked. She had expected something like this. This place was a prison, after all.
What she hadn’t expected was to be trussed up to the point where she had trouble walking. She didn’t quite have any balance anymore, so much as she had momentum. And more than once she’d failed to take a corner and fallen over, at which point the guards had taken out their frustrations on her with kicks and angry shouts.
She’d cried back in obvious pain, faking every second of it. The chains were so thick and numerous that she barely felt their blows, and if she’d dared to call up her status screen, she was halfway convinced that she’d find her armor had risen to triple digits.
But she didn’t speak. She kept her eyes and ears open and watched and listened. Not to the scowling guards, who were silent or screaming without any in-between. But to the sounds of distant fighting, of gates opening and shutting, and alarms starting up in the distance. The noises were sometimes interrupted by closed doors, only to resound once more when she passed by frantically rattling mechanical chimes.
Up stairs, down stairs, over long chasms in the rock... she lost track of her placement in short order. It was amazing, in its own way, and if she weren’t fighting every step to avoid rolling down the stairs or focusing on staying in the exact center of the too-narrow bridges over those deep, deep gorges, Chase would have appreciated it more. As it was, all she could wonder about was why nobody had thought to include railings.
Finally, they brought her sweating, exhausted body through a set of iron double doors four times her height. They entered into a high-ceilinged room, vaulted, with columns and something like an altar on the far end of it. Tubes lined the walls, spiraling in all directions, overlapping each other until they culminated in a stand next to the ‘altar’.
A single guard, the oldest Chase had seen stood stooped, whispering into one of the tubes. He straightened up as they dragged Chase to him and gestured her over. Before she could try to change course, her escorts picked her up bodily and deposited her next to the tubes, being none too gentle about the whole affair.
“Our Lady, in her mercy, has decided to speak unto you.” The older guard intoned, his fierce eyes never leaving hers. “If you attempt trickery or disrespect we shall kill you. We have little time for fools or foes. Do you understand me?”
“I understand,” Chase said. “Is there anything else I should know?”
Instead of replying the old man simply turned his back and marched off, waving her escort away as he did so.
And the second eyes were off her, Chase scrunched her neck down, pushing her mouth below the highest ring of chains. Then she mouthed “Silent Activation, Diagnose.”
Your Silent Activation skill is now level 4!
Staring at the guard, she got one of the answers she was looking for... but not the one she was hoping for.
Speranza’s pet – Warden Grimaldi
DEBUFFS: None
CONDITIONS: None
Her singing doesn’t just charm them, Chase thought, feeling her gorge rise in her throat. It makes them her pets.
She’d talked with Renny about trapping his friends, tricking them into a cell of the prison and using absorb condition to peel the charm off them one by one. It would take a day per person to purge it from her, but once the crisis was over it could be done. But now, given what she’d just learned, this solution wouldn’t work. Absorb Condition only worked on debuffs or conditions. This was something more fundamental, she thought. The skill wouldn’t work.
That’s fine, Chase thought to herself. That’s a later part of a fall-back plan anyway. I just need to use a different plan, here.
“Girl?” A familiar, melodious voice asked from the open speaking tube. “Girl, are you there?”
“I am,” Chase said, turning to more properly face it. “Are you Thomasi’s friend?”
An intake of breath, then. Subtle and fast, but Chase had good ears. “I am,” Speranza said.
“Good. I’m sorry about the fuss, but I didn’t have any time to waste. I had to get here before she did. Are you safe?”
“Safe is such a relative word. I’m afraid you’re too late... the—” Speranza used some very unflattering curses that indicated a very bad woman, then continued. “—she is already in the prison. I’m going to need all the help I can get stopping her. So how strong are you, dear?”
“Not very,” Chase said. “I’m a newly-trained Oracle.”
“An Oracle? Hm... What’s your level?”
“Four.”
“Tch. That’s too low. No, no, you’d barely be a speedbump to her. I don’t think I’ll be borrowing you, not while I’ve got guards still uncharmed.”
Chase sagged in her chains, relieved beyond measure. This had been the diciest part of the plan. She’d hoped that if she appeared too weak, that Speranza wouldn’t want to waste energy to enslave her. It seemed that she had figured correctly, there.
INT+1
But the relief froze in Chase’s veins as Speranza continued, her voice sharpening. “And yet, two of my guards are dead. Seemingly from running into you. Now how did that come to be, dear?”
Time to start up the half-truths, Chase knew. Again, she dipped her mouth into the loops of the chains and formed the words “Silent Activation, Silver Tongue.”
Your Silver Tongue skill is now level 2!
“I had to seek help from an adventurer to get in here,” Chase said, bending the truth. “He agreed to help me, so long as I helped him save his friends. When the guards showed up, he used his air powers to toss everything around and kill them. I couldn’t stop him, I’m sorry. I never wanted to fight them!”
“I see. And where is the fox now?”
I didn’t tell her he was a fox. But it’s possible the mob of guards noticed him when we went through. “I don’t know. He escaped through a hole in the wall. But he can’t save his friends, can he? So, it’s kind of a moot point.”
“No. He can’t. Not until this is all over.
I’ll happily let his friends go once we’re done. I’m no monster. All this is temporary.”
“Thomasi certainly hopes you will,” Chase said and let the bait hang in the air, even though she wanted to say more. This was the sticking point, this was the crux. Everything hinged on Speranza’s reaction, here...
...and she did not disappoint.
“Did he? Did... Thomasi tell you anything? About me?”
And there it was.
That tone, that little hitch in her voice, that Chase knew by heart. The hitch that happened when someone desperately, woefully, loved someone else. Or thought they did, anyway, and that was pretty much the same thing.
Speranza was a dangerous and mysterious creature... an entity of blatant and horrible power, but she wore the body and had at least part of the soul of a hopeful woman. And everything Chase had found in Thomasi’s journal indicated that Speranza had a crush on Thomasi that he quite frankly found uncomfortable.
That made her easy prey for the halven girl. Chase had been trading in romantic hopes and dreams for years, in one of the most unforgiving and hazardous environments possible; the hormone-laden teenage courts of a small, isolated village.
“Yes.” She said, grinning and not bothering to hide it. “He regrets that he could never truly tell you how he felt. But he couldn’t! Not with them listening in like that. You understand, of course.”
“Ah!” Speranza gasped. “Of course.”
The raw relief in her tone was everything Chase had hoped for and more. “At any rate, he’ll do what he can from outside. But he sent me to help on the inside. I can’t really do that while I’m chained up like this, though. May I trouble you for release, here?”
“Yes, yes. Though I’m not certain how you can help. Oracles can heal, right? I don’t recall reading much about them on the forums. Of course, it’s been a while...” her voice turned melancholy. “No matter. Warden? Free her. She’s a guest, not a prisoner.”
Big Trouble Page 17