I looked at Ugh, chained to the wall. Now he was focusing: his tiny eyes in his wide face were staring at me. ‘I’ll be back,’ I said. ‘I’m getting you out of here. I swear it.’
‘Swear? Fucking Greatcoat. You make promises. Shit . . . all shit. Come back, don’t come back, is all same. Just . . .’
‘What is it?’
‘Tell me King’s Fifth Law. I forget. Every time, I forget.’
I wrapped my hands around the bars of his cell. Ugh had heard me repeating those laws over and over during my captivity here; the King’s Laws had held my mind together during my torment – and those same laws had somehow, against all possible reason, changed his heart. ‘The Fifth Law is that no man shall be punished unjustly without first being proven guilty of a crime sufficient to warrant such punishment,’ I said softly, and then, louder, ‘No man shall be tortured.’
Ugh grinned. ‘Ah, yes. Fifth Law: no torture. Now I remember. Funny, this one I forget all the time, eh?’
‘I’ll come back,’ I promised.
‘Fine, fine, you come back. Stupid fucking tough guy Greatcoats. Probably back in chains, yes?’
*
Kest and I ran back and found the others waiting at the end of the large hallway. ‘See anyone you know?’ Shiballe asked with a smirk.
I badly wanted to beat him senseless, but his cruelty was just another useless distraction – one of dozens that stood between me and whoever was engineering all this chaos.
‘Just take us to the door,’ I said.
Shiballe ushered us down a smaller corridor that went on for nearly a hundred feet until it ended at the black-iron door. It might be two feet thick but it was less than six feet high; someone as tall as Parrick would need to stoop to pass through. The door must have weighed at least a ton. It had a row of three slits, each about six inches high and two inches wide, set about a foot from the top. Looking through one, I could see a roughly hewn stairway that I guessed must lead down into the depths of the second level. I could also see the remarkable thickness of the door itself; it was clear I’d have as much luck levitating the palace from the ground as I would breaking through that door.
Sir Istan pressed his face to the slits. ‘It’s like . . . it’s like the throat of some ancient creature beyond. The rock of the passage is black and red like the inside of—’
‘That will suffice, Sir Istan,’ the Duke said. He turned to me. ‘Well, we are here and now you have seen the door. Do you have a plan?’
I looked carefully at every single part of the door, from its front face to the edges where it met the stone walls. ‘There are no hinges,’ I said. ‘How does it open?’
‘There is a rod, six inches wide, that passes vertically through the left side of the door and into the rock, ceiling and floor, and acts as the hinge. When the door is unlocked, it swivels around that rod.’
I looked for the place where the rod passed through the door, but couldn’t see any signs of it, and in any case, I doubted it would be a weakness. The stone above the door was rough and jutted out in places, forming tiny little ledges, but the rock was carved, not made from individual pieces that might be worked loose.
‘Why not just use a battering ram?’ Dariana asked. ‘They can bring down castle walls.’
‘That’s precisely the point,’ Jillard said. ‘The door itself is stronger than the rock – even if we had a ram strong enough, and we could get it down this passageway, and fit in the men needed to lift it, it would take days to even begin to damage the door. But what it would do is destroy the rock, and in the process the ceiling would disintegrate, and it wouldn’t be too long before it started to fall and bury everyone, sealing the passageway for ever and leaving my son trapped below.’
‘Pick the lock,’ I said. ‘There are specialists with the skills to break into even the most secure of locks, and I imagine there is no shortage of such skilled masters in Rijou.’
‘This lock is exceedingly complex. If we had one of the keys, it might well be possible for one of those “specialists” to devise a way of picking the lock – but we don’t.’
I stared at the lock. It didn’t look much different to others I’d seen.
‘If you don’t believe me, feel free to consult with one of these “specialists” – we passed a number of them on the way here.’
‘You locked them up?’ Kest asked.
‘They failed me – besides, if they really are such “skilled masters” then I imagine they’ll find their own way out.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Valiana said. ‘What happens if the guard of the watch loses the key? Do they just come and wake you up so they can borrow your key to attend to the prisoners?’
‘If a guard loses the key,’ Jillard replied, ‘he loses his life along with it. We hang him here by the door for several weeks; it encourages those who follow him to be more mindful.’
‘You certainly know how to inspire loyalty,’ I said.
‘I know how to ensure discipline.’
‘Wait a minute,’ Dariana interrupted, ignoring his glower. ‘If you’ve punished a guard for losing a key, wouldn’t that mean there’s another key out there somewhere?’
‘No,’ Jillard replied, ‘both times the key was lost the other guards were ordered to find it or share their comrade’s fate. Funnily enough, both times it was soon recovered.’
Saints! How does a man like Jillard stay in power, even in a place as corrupt as Rijou?
‘Hard to imagine why your Knight-Commander and two hundred other Knights just abandoned you,’ I said, wondering how his guards dealt with the constant possibility that a single small mistake – even a tiny misfortune like a broken link on the chain that holds their keys – would likely result in not only their own death, but the deaths of those who worked with them?
‘What about some kind of acid?’ Valiana asked. ‘Duchess Patriana knew of many—’
Jillard held up a hand. ‘I am aware of Patriana’s experiments in this area, and you’re right, such a technique might well work – but it would take acid weeks, even months, to get through the outer shell of the door, let alone the bolts set in the stone surrounds.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘that just leaves one way in.’
Jillard locked eyes with me.
Glare all you want, you miserable bastard, I thought. You’re the one who let your son get kidnapped.
The Duke finally dropped his gaze and stepped aside from the door. ‘Very well. Do it.’
I stepped up to the iron door, extended my hand towards it and knocked.
The sound reverberated throughout the passageway and down the stairs beyond the door. After a few moments, I knocked again, and then again.
The eight of us stood in that narrow stone corridor and waited. With each minute that passed I could see Jillard’s face turn paler and paler. He truly loves Tommer, I thought. He’s a monster and a tyrant, and yet his heart is trembling in fear at the thought of losing his child. He is oblivious to the fact that he’s destroyed the lives of hundreds – maybe even thousands – of other parents and children. What strange creatures this world creates.
Dariana looked at the door and gave a smirk. ‘Looks like no one’s ho—’
Kest held up a hand to silence her.
‘I hear it too,’ Valiana said.
I put my ear to the slits in the door. A soft shuffling sound was just about discernible, gradually growing louder, and soon I could hear footsteps on the stairs. There was another sound as well: crying. I turned my head and peered through the slits in time to see a man coming up the stairs, apparently struggling with each step. He was naked to the waist and covered in so much blood that he looked as if someone had tried to drown him in a vat of it. From the pained expression on his face and the terror in his eyes it was likely the blood was his own, covering up painful cuts from which it seeped.
As he came up the final step, his head jerked for just an instant, nearly sending him back down the stairs, and that’s when I saw the ro
pe tied around his neck. It extended all the way back into the darkness.
Duke Jillard pulled me back so that he could look through the slit himself. ‘Sir Toujean,’ he called.
‘Your Grace,’ he started, ‘forgive me! Forgive me!’
The rope pulled taught again and from the depths of the darkness I heard the faintest whisper. It was too soft for me to make out individual words, but Sir Toujean could obviously hear.
‘He asks if you have considered his invitation. He says’ – more whispering, then – ‘he says that he begins to worry that Tommer . . . ah, Gods forgive me, your Grace . . .’ The rope pulled taught again and Sir Toujean gave a strangled cough and grabbed at his neck. He pulled himself together and managed, ‘He says that Tommer fares poorly. They use— They use a kind of dust, your Grace. They blow it in his face and the boy . . . he—’
Sir Toujean began to wail wordlessly.
‘Dust?’ Sir Istan asked, looking bemused.
‘Dashini dust,’ I said. ‘They blow it into the faces of their victims. It drives you mad from fear if you’re not used to it – even a strong fighter loses his bearings, and that makes it easier for the Dashini to kill.’
‘He keeps using it on Tommer, sir,’ Toujean said to me. ‘He blows it into his face, morning and night. Tommer . . . Sir, I don’t think he can take much more—’
Saints. An eleven-year-old boy and he’s being exposed to the Dashini dust, over and over again? He’s being killed through fear alone.
‘Sir Toujean, tell him that I will give him anything,’ the Duke started, ‘anything, if he—’
Toujean’s voice became louder, almost annoyed. ‘He doesn’t want anything, your Grace! He just wants you!’
‘How?’ I asked.
The Knight’s eyes suddenly focused on me through the slit. ‘What?’
‘How? How is the Duke supposed to go to him?’ If the assassin wanted Jillard, then he’d have to open the door at some point – that could be our opening.
‘He says the Duke is to stand where he is, on the other side of this door, with two men supporting him. Then . . .’ A pause. ‘Then the duke must take a knife and slit his own throat and let the blood fall down through the gap below the door. There are twenty-seven stairs. When the blood has run down to the bottom, the boy will be freed.’
Twenty-seven steps, each one a foot deep. How much blood can a man lose and still survive? I glanced at Kest. He shook his head.
‘How then does the assassin hope to escape?’ Kest asked.
Sir Toujean’s eyes flitted back and forth at us through the narrow slit in the door. ‘I don’t think he does. He says he has one mission – to kill the Duke of Rijou – and that he doesn’t need to escape to complete this mission.’
There is no more perfect trap for your enemy than the one in which you yourself are willing to die. There was no way to win this without the missing key.
I turned to Jillard. ‘Beg,’ I whispered.
‘What?’
‘Beg,’ I said. ‘Scream for mercy, as loud as you can, like a man going mad with grief. Beg for mercy for Tommer. Now.’
Jillard looked at me, his mouth tightening, but after a moment he opened his mouth and began to shout, ‘Mercy! Mercy for my son – please, I beg you, he is just a boy, an innocent – and he is innocent of my crimes. I will give you anything – anything you ask, if only you will let me hold him in my arms again!’
As the Duke shouted and screamed and wailed, I stuck my face against the slit. ‘Sir Toujean,’ I whispered fiercely, ‘there are two keys. Two. One that Tommer stole, and the one that was held by the watch-guard.’
‘The watch-guard is dead,’ he said. ‘I think . . . I think the assassin has both keys.’
‘Then you must find a way to steal one from him.’
‘But I can’t,’ Sir Toujean moaned. ‘He— Don’t you understand? He isn’t human, he’s—’
‘Listen to me, Sir Toujean: when you were a boy, you dreamed of being a hero, did you not?’ I waited but there was no answer, only Jillard shouting his pleas and Sir Toujean’s moaning. ‘Answer me! Did you not dream of being a hero?’
‘I . . . I did, sir . . . I wanted to be a Knight like those—’
‘That wasn’t real, Sir Toujean. That was just a story. But this is real. This is where the hero is called. This is when the heart of the warrior pumps blood and iron and unrelenting, mad belligerence through his veins. You are the steel, Sir Toujean, not your armour or your sword, but you. Your hour is called. The boy you were commands you to be the hero you must become. Get me one of those keys!’
The Knight cried out, a sound half wail, half strangled laugh, then the rope tautened and, as I watched, Sir Toujean was pulled back, one step at a time, into the darkness below.
Duke Jillard began to sway and Parrick reached out a hand and steadied him. ‘Your Grace?’
‘I’m . . . I’m all right,’ he said. ‘It was just the shouting, that’s all.’ He turned to me. ‘This dust . . . I know a little about it. What does it feel like? What is my son going through?’
What does it feel like to a boy who’s trapped and alone? Like a hundred hells, I thought. Tommer is living through a hundred different hells.
Chapter Thirty
The Depths
Hours later I was still sitting on the dusty stone floor in front of the black door that stood between me and Tommer. I knew little of the boy except that he had loved the troubadour Bal Armidor, as I had, and that when I called for Jurors at the Rock of Rijou, he had picked up a coin, and in doing so he had saved not just my life but Aline’s too.
I can’t break you, I said silently to the door. I can’t melt you or drill through you or knock you down. How can something as small as a key be your undoing?
Duke Jillard sat a few feet away watching me. The others had gone back into one of the wider hallways to discuss ever more elaborate and unlikely means to save Tommer.
‘It’s hopeless, isn’t it?’ Jillard asked. ‘I have built an inescapable prison for my enemies and now they have trapped my very soul inside it.’
There’s a way. There has to be a way.
The watch bell echoed through the dungeon, its pitch shifting slightly with each reverberation until the sound became an eerie chorus.
‘Four o’clock in the morning,’ Jillard said. ‘How long, do you suppose, before the assassin torments Tommer again with that infernal dust?’ His eyes were full of anguish, mixed with the realisation that he himself was responsible for everything that now transpired. He looked up at the narrow slits in the iron door. ‘I brought in a mage on the first day of Tommer’s capture, an expensive one. Rumour has it he was the one who cast the spell that tore down the castle walls at Neville.’
‘And what did he say?’ I asked.
Jillard gave a hoarse laugh. ‘He said if I wanted him to tear down the walls of the palace he could, for a fee, do that.’
‘But not this door?’
‘Iron,’ the Duke said. ‘Iron is the problem. It weakens the forces the mage draws on and makes them split apart.’
‘How does that work?’ I asked, not really expecting an answer. I hate magic.
‘Who knows?’ Jillard said. ‘They speak in riddles and poems, these mages and wizards. There are times when I find myself quite hating magic and those who wield it. I should have imprisoned the smug bastard, but cross one mage and you’ve crossed them all.’
It made sense, I supposed. There were few men who could work real magic in Tristia. Those who did had no doubt learned long ago the necessity of looking out for one another. Too bad the guards in the dungeon weren’t smart enough to do the same.
Wait . . . What if they were smart enough? I turned to Jillard. ‘The other watch-guards – how many are there?’
‘Four in total,’ he replied.
‘One down in the dungeon – presumably dead?’
‘Sir Toujean said so, yes.’
I got to my feet. ‘I need to see those re
maining three watch-guards!’
‘Why?’ Jillard asked, rising as well. ‘I already told you—’
‘Because you said you killed any guard who lost the key, and that you threatened to kill the others unless it was found.’
‘I don’t see how that—’
‘You said they found the key both times after it was lost. What are the odds that on two separate occasions something as small as a key was lost and then found again so quickly?’
Jillard looked at me as if I’d just failed to calculate the sum of two and two. ‘Since the guards did, in fact, find the key, then I suppose the odds are reasonably good.’
‘That’s the point – they didn’t find it. Your watch-guards knew they would face death if a key was lost and not recovered, so they took steps to protect each other.’
Jillard’s eyes narrowed. ‘How?’
He still couldn’t see it. For all his cruel and cunning brilliance, the obvious answer had completely escaped him. ‘They had another key made.’
*
Shiballe’s cheeks jiggled as he shook his head. ‘Your Grace, I regret . . . I cannot bring you the watch-guards – they fled the city two days ago when they learned that Tommer had been taken.’
‘Impossible! I’ll have them flayed alive for this – I’ll see their families—’
‘You threaten too many people,’ I said. ‘Death for this and death for that – your watch-guards played the odds.’
Jillard’s expression was defiant for a moment, then he crumbled. ‘Then that avenue is closed to us and my son will suffer and die for the shortsightedness of his father.’
I shared the Duke’s despair. If there was a third key, only the watch-guards would likely know about it. Damn the Dashini to a hundred hells for being willing to torture and kill a child. Fourth Law is child not being hurt. Ugh’s clumsy rendition of the Law echoed in my head.
I grabbed Shiballe by the arm. ‘Give me the key for the cells on this floor – now.’
‘I will do no such thing!’ Shiballe said, doing his best to pull away from me.
‘If you’re thinking it might be used on this lock somehow, then you’re wasting—’ Jillard started, but I held up a hand to stop him.
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