‘Step back from the bars,’ I said, pulling Jillard back to the wall with me. ‘If you want to live, you’ll keep away from those bars. You’ve never been as close to death as you are right now.’
The Dashini spread his arms wide. ‘Such a cautious nature. Look at me. I am alone. My garb has been taken from me. My blades are gone. My dust is gone. I am naked.’ He leaned forward in his seated position just a hair. ‘Defenceless.’
‘On this we agree,’ Jillard said. He turned to me. ‘Kill him – stab him through the heart with your sword. Now!’
My eyes stayed on the Dashini. ‘He’s too far back in the cell for me to reach, and if I stick my arm inside the cell to try it, he’ll disarm me. Then he’ll have a sword.’
‘Then throw a knife at him, damn you!’
‘Then he’ll have a knife. He’s Dashini, your Grace: even if I hit him, he’ll just pull out the knife. It’ll be in your throat before a drop of his own blood has dripped from his wound.’
Jillard’s tone grew angrier. ‘Then we’ll go back up and bring crossbowmen back. They’ll—’
‘Shut up,’ I said.
The Dashini and I kept our eyes locked on each other, and though his expression was relaxed, almost indifferent, I knew he was running through the dozens of ways he could kill the Duke while trapped in his cell, even as I considered how I might stop him. He was locked behind strong iron bars, but I was the one who felt trapped and vulnerable.
After a few moments I sheathed both my rapiers.
‘What are you doing?’ the Duke asked.
‘Keeping my hands free,’ I said.
‘Are you mad? He is locked in a cell – even if he is hiding the key, it would take him time to reach around the bars to unlock the door.’
‘This Duke you guard is foolish as well as feckless,’ the Dashini said. ‘Are you sure he’s worth keeping alive? I wonder, is his son just as foolish?’
Jillard started towards the bars. ‘We’ll see who’s foolish when I have your—’
I reached out and grabbed the back of the Duke’s collar just as the Dashini leapt effortlessly from his sitting position. His right arm struck out from between the bars like an arrow, the fingers of his hand bunched together into a single point like a bird’s beak aimed right at Jillard’s throat.
I hauled the Duke back an instant before the Dashini could reach him and he fell back against the wall next to me. I struck out at the Dashini’s wrist with the knuckles of my left hand, but he turned his own hand palm up and slipped under my wrist to take hold of it. But before he could tighten his grip I jerked my arm back and then immediately struck out again with my fist – but his arm had already disappeared and he was standing in the centre of his cell looking at me as calmly as if he’d been standing there all day.
Duke Jillard recovered himself. This time he stayed close to the back wall.
The Dashini smiled. ‘Swiftly done, Falcio. I was expecting you to be slower, what with your recent health difficulties.’
‘You appear to know a lot about me,’ I said. ‘We’d make better friends if I knew your name.’
‘You know the things that matter: I am Dashini, of a sort, and I was sent here to give the final mercy to Jillard, Duke of Rijou.’
‘“Of a sort”?’ I asked. I looked closer at his face. His features were Tristian, and if I had to guess, he might even have come from Pertine, where I was born. But that wasn’t what struck me. I thought back to the faces of the two men I’d fought and killed in Rijou. ‘You have no markings,’ I said.
‘I am Unblooded. The Duke was to be my first kill.’ He favoured Jillard with a half-bow and a small smile. ‘It is considered a great honour.’
‘Why were there no other Dashini with you when you attacked the Duke?’ I asked. ‘Where’s your azu?’
‘He was . . . incapacitated by recent events.’
‘Then why are you in this cell?’ If he had a key, if he had a way out, he could have killed Jillard and me by now. So what was he playing at?
‘Like most things in this world, the answer is less intriguing than the question would suggest.’ He looked up at the ceiling and then around the cell. ‘I am here because I was captured. The Knights rushed me. I killed three of them too quickly, they fell forward and I was momentarily unbalanced.’
‘That must be embarrassing for you,’ I said.
‘Quite.’
Jillard, despite his fear, could hold back no longer. ‘Where is my son, damn you?’
‘Here,’ the Dashini replied, ‘somewhere. I hear him screaming sometimes. He cries too, mostly at night. It’s fascinating . . . he never calls out your name, Duke Jillard. He never screams, “Daddy, Daddy, come save me.” He calls out for someone named Bal Armidor, who never comes, and so after a while he stops shouting and instead he weeps. Is that the name of a man you’ve had killed down here in the darkness, your Grace? Oh, and sometimes he calls out for Falcio. Isn’t that odd?’
Jillard gave me a glance filled with hatred, but this time at least he wasn’t stupid enough to fall for the Dashini’s tactics. ‘Why have your fellow murderers left you in here? What do they hope to gain?’
The Dashini didn’t answer. He just looked to me, his smile intact, and yet once again his expression struck me as disquieted.
‘The other assassins aren’t Dashini,’ I said.
‘Then who?’ Jillard asked.
‘I don’t know – I don’t think he knows either.’
Jillard’s face was a mask of confusion and fear. ‘But Sir Toujean said the assassins were dosing Tommer with the Dashini dust to drive him mad.’
‘Your Knights were foolish to confiscate my belongings,’ the Dashini said. ‘They would have been safer if they’d left them here with me.’
‘If they’d done that,’ Jillard said, ‘you would have escaped already.’
‘You see?’ the Dashini said. ‘This is how simple creatures think. You see a man in a cell and you assume he is caged. Believe me, I can escape any time I choose.’ The Dashini looked again around the sparse cell. ‘Though I grant it will require a little more effort than I feel necessary to expend at this moment, and it is certainly easier to accomplish without the distraction of Falcio here trying to break my fingers.’
‘Then why didn’t you escape earlier?’ Jillard asked.
The Dashini smiled. ‘Because you are not yet dead, your Grace.’
Jillard’s sudden step back caused him to strike the back of his head against the wall.
‘Who sent you to kill the Duke?’ I asked.
The Dashini looked at me and tilted his head. ‘Why would I ever answer such a question? The Dashini have always been tasked with eliminating corruption. The time of the Dukes has passed. Surely you know this by now.’
‘You filthy—’
I looked at Jillard. ‘Your Grace, shut up. If you want to live, if you want Tommer to live, you need to keep your mouth shut. When he speaks to you, he does so only to make you reckless.’
I turned back to the Dashini. ‘Why are you killing boys and girls barely old enough to understand what it means to be the child of a Duke? Are they too so corrupt that you have to murder them in their beds under the cover of darkness?’
The Dashini stared back at me through the bars of his cell. Again his face was impassive, but there was tension there, and anger too. ‘We are Dashini. We kill those who must be killed.’ The next words came out slowly, one syllable at a time. ‘We do not kill children.’
‘And yet you murdered Duke Isault’s wife and you murdered his sons, Lucan and Patrin. You murdered his little girl. She was named Avette.’
She likes to paint pictures of dogs, Shuran had said. She hopes if she can make one pleasing enough her father will give her a puppy for her birthday.
‘We were sent to kill Duke Isault,’ the Dashini said, ‘not the woman. Not her children.’
‘So what happened? An accident? One of your brothers slipped and accidentally murdered an entire family?�
�
The Dashini grimaced. ‘We are the sharpest of blades, not blunted wooden cudgels.’ His voice had genuine anger in it now. ‘We did not kill Duke Isault’s family.’
‘Then who?’
‘Perhaps it was one of you,’ he suggested. ‘The Trattari have great cause to hate the nobility.’
He wanted to distract me, play on my uncertainties, and that told me something. ‘I think you already know it wasn’t.’
‘More’s the pity,’ the Dashini said. ‘Perhaps your King would still be alive today if he’d had better instincts. Regardless, the death of those in power always brings chaos, Falcio. You above all should know that. And when chaos comes, there are many who would take advantage of it, while laying the blame at the feet of another.’
Saint Dheneph-who-tricks-the-Gods! That’s why the Dashini was still here, alive, when other prisoners who were still sane had been butchered. ‘Hells upon hells,’ I said.
‘What is it?’ Jillard asked. ‘What’s going on?’
That’s what they did to Winnow. She’d got the wound in her thigh fighting off a Dashini sent to kill Isault, but someone else had killed her and the Duke’s family and then made it look as if Winnow was responsible. One conspirator was sending the Dashini to kill the Dukes, and another was taking advantage of the chaos to kill their families. But they’re not working together, which means we have two players manipulating events from the shadows: one seeking to weaken the Ducal power and the other bent on destroying it entirely.
‘Tell me what’s going on!’ Jillard demanded frantically. ‘Please! Tell me what’s happening to my son.’
I hesitated before saying my next words, if only because until that day I could never have imagined in my entire life that I would hear myself saying them. ‘The damned Dashini are being framed.’
The men holding Tommer were going to use him to draw in Jillard and kill both of them. Then they were going to kill off the Dashini; they’d make it look as if he were responsible, but that he’d died from a wound before he could escape.
I stared at the man standing in the shadows of his cell. I see you now. I know what troubles you, no matter how hard you try to hide it. You don’t know who’s killing these children. You’re being played for a fool, you and all your fellow Dashini, and you don’t care for it.
The Dashini nodded, even though I hadn’t spoken. Then he said, with words devoid of inflection, ‘We are lost.’ I had the strangest sensation he was pleading with me.
‘Where are they?’ I asked. ‘Where are they holding the boy? If you and your fellow Dashini aren’t the ones killing the Ducal heirs, then you have no need to protect those who are.’
‘I do not know,’ he replied, ‘but I don’t think you’ll have much trouble finding him now.’
‘Now? Why now?’ Jillard asked.
The only answer that came to my mind was to pray that Kest and the others had already found him.
A strange, high-pitched whine filled the air; at first I thought it might be some kind of flying insect frighteningly close to my ear, but the sound quickly changed, echoing off the walls and down the passageways throughout the dungeon. It became louder, an eerie moan that finally resolved into a scream of such pure terror that I felt as if I might go mad from the sound.
There was the faintest hint of sympathy in the Dashini’s eyes when he said, ‘Because it is morning, and this is the time when they hurt the boy.’
*
The Duke of Rijou ran through his own dungeon shouting and screaming and sounding very much like one of its prisoners. He raced up and down the maze of twisting passageways like a bat who’d lost its sense of direction, trying desperately to navigate by the echoes of his son’s cries for help.
‘Stop!’ I said at last and grabbed him by the shoulder. I pushed him back against the wall, holding him fast even as he struggled against my grip.
‘Let me go, damn you! They’re torturing my son! They’re—’
‘Look!’ I said, pointing up ahead. The shadows were obscuring the gap in the floor and the deadly spikes waiting below. A guard with experience in these passages, even someone who was just moving carefully, would spot the danger before it was too late – but an escapee running for his life would likely fall in before even realising the trap was there. ‘You will not do Tommer any good if you’re dead.’
The Duke looked around and spotted a side passage to our right. ‘There!’ he said, pointing. ‘Look! We have to go that way.’
‘Stop,’ I said. ‘Think. Look at the ground: those are our tracks. We’re just going around in circles.’
‘Saints . . . we’re . . .’ He twisted his head left and right. ‘This passage – we were here before, just a few minutes ago . . . But I—’ He stopped abruptly and his face turned into a mummer’s mask, so full of despair it looked as if it had been shaped that way by a mad sculptor.
‘Come on,’ I said gently. ‘I know how to find him now.’
I pulled the Duke along the passageway and this time I followed a new one: the virtue of having gone in circles so many times was that I now knew which ways not to go. More importantly, I was also getting a sense of how sound travelled in the dungeon and now I stopped concentrating on the loudest echo and instead followed the one that was repeating less than the others. I hoped against hope that Kest or one of the others had figured it out before I had.
As we approached the next intersection a shadow flickered on one of the walls and I held my hand up for the Duke to stop.
‘Why are—?’
I put a hand over his mouth again. ‘Quiet,’ I whispered. ‘Look.’ I pointed down the passageway. There was light there, more than we’d seen before. We had found them.
Now I just need the assassins to suffer from sudden blindness so they don’t see me coming—
But before I could even begin to formulate a decent plan, Tommer started screaming again, Jillard broke free of my grip and barrelled down the passage where we’d seen the light shouting his son’s name at the top of his lungs, and any possibility of a sneak attack vanished into thin air.
Damn your foolishness, Jillard, and damn my own for not knocking you out when I had the chance.
I ran behind him, both rapiers out, trying my best not to let them catch against the walls of the narrow passageway. We turned a final corner and entered a larger open area, with new passages running left and right off it. At the other end was another cell, larger than the others, but instead of vertical bars it was separated from the corridor by a solid iron wall. The large door in the middle was open and inside on the floor I saw three men – Tommer’s Knights, I assumed – all covered with blood. I recognised Sir Toujean, who was awkwardly trying to get to his feet; I didn’t know the Knight next to him; the third was lying dead in a pool of blood near the door. In the centre of the cell, lying on his back and looking almost as if he were asleep, was Tommer, Jillard’s son.
‘Tommer!’ the Duke screamed as he ran down the passage and into the cell.
‘Your Grace,’ Sir Toujean moaned, ‘Sir Odiard and I heard footsteps and we prayed to Guereste, God of War that it was you.’
‘The assassins,’ I said urgently, ‘where are they?’
The Knight pointed down one of the smaller passageways. ‘When the Dashini heard the Duke coming they ran down that way.’
‘How many?’
‘Five?’
‘Five Dashini?’
Now Toujean looked uncertain. ‘Not . . . I’m not sure exactly, maybe . . . But no, they were wearing masks – they must have been Dashini.’
Hells. Even if the assassins weren’t Dashini – and I was becoming more and more certain that they weren’t – I wouldn’t be able to stop five of them by myself, especially when they’d had days to learn these passageways.
The problem solved itself as Kest and Sir Istan arrived. ‘We followed the Duke’s shouts,’ Kest said in answer to my unspoken question. ‘How is the boy?’
‘I don’t know yet. Kest, Toujean s
ays there are five of them.’
Kest looked at the dust on the floor. ‘Too many sets of tracks, going in all directions. How long ago did they leave?’
‘Just moments ago,’ Toujean said, his voice weak and fearful. ‘They fled as soon as they heard the Duke coming.’
‘Why would that send them running?’ Kest asked, but before Toujean could answer, more heavy footsteps thudded towards us from another passage and Ugh emerged from the passageway with Valiana, Parrick, Dariana and Shiballe in tow. ‘Fucking stupid people. Get lost easy,’ Ugh said. ‘Fat man so smart, eh?’ Ugh pointed his finger towards the ground and circled it around and around.
‘Shiballe had us going around in circles,’ Dariana explained.
Valiana rushed past the others, asking, ‘Where is Tommer?’ and when I pointed, she ran in and knelt down by him. She reached out a hand, but Jillard slapped it away. ‘Don’t touch him!’ he said. ‘No one touches him but me!’
Tommer’s eyes blinked open and closed very quickly, like a butterfly’s wings flapping against a strong wind. He looked up at his father, and then at Valiana. ‘Sister?’ he asked. ‘You’re wearing a Greatcoat . . . did you come to save me?’
It struck me as odd that Tommer still called Valiana his sister. Apparently Jillard also found the idea discomforting.
‘Tommer!’ the Duke said, tears streaming down his face, ‘I’m here – your father’s here. I’ve got you. I’ve got you.’
Tommer looked to his father. ‘Yes . . . Father,’ he murmured, I’m very sorry, Father . . .’
Jillard cradled Tommer’s head. ‘You stole my key, you silly, silly boy.’
‘I . . . I didn’t—’
‘Your Grace,’ Sir Toujean said weakly, ‘the assassins . . . they said they had another way into and out of the dungeons – that they could escape and come back to kill you and your son whenever they wanted.’ He pushed himself awkwardly to his knees, and then clambered to his feet and stood there swaying. ‘Give me a sword, your Grace, and I will hunt them to the ends of the earth.’
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